Far more dangerous was the epidemic of smallpox which carried off many members of the family in 1750, almost threatening to wipe them out entirely. "Lord Dalkeith is dead of the smallpox in three days", wrote Walpole to Horace Mann. "It is so dreadfully fatal in his family, that besides several uncles and aunts, his eldest boy died of it last year; and his other brother, who was ill but two days, putrified so fast, that his limbs fell off, as they lifted the body into the coffin."61 The title had to pass to a grandson.
The. 3rd Duke of Buccleuch (1746-1812) consolidated the family fortune in three ways: he inherited from his mother, a daughter and heiress of the Duke of Argyll, lands in Scotland; he inherited the Queensberry lands in 1810 on the death of his cousin the 4th Duke of Queensberry, with considerable estates in Dumfriesshire (including Drumlanrig Castle); he also, incidentally, became 5th Duke of Queensberry at the same time; and finally he married a daughter of the Duke of Montagu, through whom his family inherited Montagu lands, including the sumptuous Boughton House.
So, the estates of three different families have become united in the family of Buccleuch, namely those of Scott, Dukes of Buccleuch, Douglas, Dukes of Queensberry, and Montagu, Dukes of Montagu. This triple inheritance is reflected in the family surname of Montagu- Douglas-Scott.
His predecessor in the dukedom of Queensberry was the notorious old lecher the 4th Duke, known as "Old Q" (1724-1810). He was a famous figure in Regency London by virtue of his easily observable libido where young ladies were concerned. His house stood at the top of Piccadilly, Nos. 138 and 139, between Hamilton Place and Park Lane, sadly demolished in 1973. In sunny weather, Old Q would sit on his first-floor balcony, perched on a little cane chair and dressed in a blue coat and yellow breeches, a parasol over his head, ogling the ladies who walked beneath. He was a familiar sight to passers- by. He built an exterior flight of stairs from the balcony to street level, so that when he gave the nod to his messenger at the door below, a man called Jack Radford, Jack could fetch the pretty victims to the Duke's company without their having to pass through the house. Stories were told of orgies going on inside the house, and he is known, on one occasion, to have re-enacted in his drawing-room, with three beautiful London girls, the scene in Homer where the goddesses revealed themselves to Paris and desired him to choose which was the most beautiful.
Old Q pursued pleasure under every shape, "and with as much ardour at fourscore as he had done at twenty", wrote Wraxall. It was said that the old roue took a prominent part in the orgies, and went to extraordinary lengths to stimulate his flagging sexual powers.62 Love seems to have but rarely entered his life. He had as a young man a passion for Pelham's daughter, but they did not marry, perhaps because his dissipated habits made him an unsuitable match. In fact, neither Old Q nor Miss Pelham ever married. He fathered a natural daughter, to whom he showed little affection. "I wish I could make him feel as he ought, but one may as well wash a brick", wrote Warner to Selwyn. Lady Louisa Stuart was yet harsher. "What or whom did he ever love ?" she asked.
When age had made a ruin of his body, with sight in only one eye, hearing in only one ear, practically toothless and full of aches and pains, a man whom Thackerary called "a wrinkled, palsied, toothless old Don Juan",63 his mind remained alert, his memory clear, his judgement sound. Wraxall averred that Old Q had more common sense than anybody he knew. Raikes described him as a "little, sharp- looking man, very irritable, and swore like ten thousand troopers".64 He also said he was mean, which does discredit to Raikes, for Old Q was always generous to his friends, to a degree rare in any age.
One instance of craftiness rather than meanness was the terms on which he paid his doctor, who slept at his bedside every night for the last six years of the Duke's life. He was paid a handsome daily rate while he lived, on the understanding that the doctor would receive not a penny when he died; Old Q loved life so much, he thought this a sensible insurance to prolong it. He also bathed in milk.
He could not bear to be bored. "What is there to make so much of in the Thames," he said, "I am quite tired of it. There it goes, flow, flow, flow, always the same."65
As his end approached in 1810 (an end which he unwittingly hastened by eating too much fruit), letters flooded in from women of every class and description, begging his favour. At least seventy letters littered his bed, unopened. Everyone panted to know how he would distribute his fortune. With little strength remaining, he muttered that he wanted to alter his will, since he decided it was foolish to leave legacies; everything belonged to Bonaparte, he rambled on, and therefore all distribution was idle. He died before he was able to put this intention into effect. The will gave away most of his fortune of £900,000 in twenty-five codicils leaving specific bequests, including £600 a year to the cashier at his bank. The male servants were provided for, but not one of the female, not even his housekeeper. And the doctor, Mr Fuller, was omitted according to the bargain.66
Old Q was one of the last aristocrats to keep up the practice of having a running footman beside his coach. Any candidate for the post would be made to dress up in full livery, then run up and down Piccadilly, while the Duke observed and timed him from his balcony. One such man, after his trial run, came before the balcony, panting. "You will do very well for me," said Old Q from above, imperiously. "And your livery will do very well for me," replied the man, who promptly ran off with it.67
The other Buccleuch ancestor, the Duke of Montagu, was eccentric in quite a different way. He was given to excesses of generosity. He once met an unkempt man on a walk in the Mall, dressed in rags, and invited him to dine the following Sunday. He learnt that the man's wife and family lived in penury in Yorkshire. When the man arrived for dinner, the Duke told him he had some pleasant people for him to meet, opened the door of the dining-room, and there revealed wife and children brought down by the Duke from Yorkshire. He called his lawyer, and there and then settled an annuity of £200 upon the astonished man.68By the time the 5th Duke of Buccleuch (1806-1884) came into his titles at the age of thirteen, nine years after Queensberry's death, his various estates had swollen to a phenomenal size, and the self-assured youth was accounted important enough to be able to entertain George IV at Dalkeith House in Edinburgh for two weeks, when he was only sixteen years old. In adult life he was Lord Privy Seal and Lord President of the Council, but his brief foray into politics was not successful. Greville unkindly called him "worse than useless" in Peel's government, though he acknowledged that Buccleuch was good- humoured. Like all his family he was most successful as a landowner, wearing his shepherd's trousers and his peaked cap.60 He was immensely popular with his tenants, and easy to get on with, equally at home with the peasant as with the prince, and had only one form of address for both. (One of his descendants is Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, whose surname is Douglas-Scott-Montagu.)
This duke, obviously an endearing character, kept all his houses ready for occupation by their owner at any moment (and there were nine of them, plus three others which he did not use). But he and his duchess felt very keenly that it was a matter of social duty to share these vast inheritances. So they literally kept open house. For three months every year Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland was a home for anyone who wanted to invite himself. He could bring his entire family, and retinue if he had one, and stay as long as he wanted. No one was ever refused or turned away as long as there was an empty bedroom in the house. This custom naturally encouraged an army of opportunists, but the family rule was to welcome everyone, notwithstanding their motives or the degree of their acquaintance with the Duke. All you had to do was write to him and tell him you were coming.70
The ease of manner, so characteristic of the Buccleuchs, survives into the twentieth century. The 8th Duke, who died in 1973, found it peculiarly distasteful to be treated according to rank. He was happiest entertaining people on any one of his huge estates, managing his farms, or hunting. The expertly bred Buccleuch hounds are one of the few remaining family packs, founded by the 5th Duke. He was
one of the country's experts on forestry, and planted more than a million trees every year on his own lands. But his real genius lay in preserving his family possessions. Other twentieth-century dukes have been forced by overwhelming death duties and other burdensome taxes which come with the egalitarian age to sell much of their land, in some cases all of it, or to open their homes to the public. Buccleuch never had to sell an acre, and still managed to run three vast private homes, with a considerable domestic staff. In 1923 he formed a private company. Buccleuch Estates Ltd, which owns and runs all his property, and in the early 1950s he settled the major part of his personal shareholding on his son the Earl of Dalkeith (the present Duke), in consideration of his marriage, thus neatly avoiding an estimated £10,000,000 in death duties. Whenever he did sell, it was a painting or two, never land, and there is still an art collection left in his private hands worth millions. This is perhaps why the Duke of Buccleuch's wealth continued while other ducal houses were handed over to trustees and their owners struggled to keep going. A senior member of the Royal Household once observed that if the possessions of the Queen and the Duke of Buccleuch were offered to auction he would not care to say which would fetch the higher price.71 And the Director of the Louvre Museum in Paris was heard to apologise to the Duke that the French furniture on display could not hope to match the Duke's private collection.
The most famous of the Buccleuch houses is Boughton House, near Kettering in Northamptonshire, with its seventy miles of avenues, and 100 acres of garden, modelled after Versailles. The estate covers 11,000 acres. When Chips Channon saw it in 1945 he was aghast with wonder; he wrote in his diary :
"It is a dream house with a strange, sleepy quality, but its richness, its beauty and possessions are stupefying. Everything belonged to Charles I, or Marie de Medici, or was given by Louis XIV to the Duke of Monmouth. Every 'enfilade' is elegantly arranged with Buhl chests, important pictures, Caffieri clocks, and the whole house is crammed with tapestries and marvellous objects ... It has hardly been lived in for 200 years. There is a writing-table which belonged to Cardinal Mazarin and 14 small Van Dyks in Walter Buccleuch's 'loo'. Over all this splendour Mollie reigns delightfully and effortlessly."72
Mollie was the Duchess, mother of the present Duke; elsewhere Channon says she has difficulty deciding which of her five tiaras to wear. Her predecessor was the Duchess of Buccleuch, whom the Duchess of Marlborough shocked by seating her housekeeper next to her in the pew of Westminster Abbey. Lady Warwick said that "Society for her consisted only of those upon whom she permitted herself to smile. The unfavoured were all of the outer darkness."7'Boughton House came to the Buccleuchs through the Duke of Montagu, who built it. Through the Duke of Queensberry came the other impressive property, already mentioned, Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire. If Boughton is the most beautiful house in England, then Drumlanrig is the most romantic in Scotland. It stands on a lofty hill, alone and dominant, and is built in local pink sandstone which glows in the sunset. Above the main entrance, clustered with turrets and towers, is a huge ducal coronet in stone. It is a breathtaking sight. It has been described as standing on a teacup inverted in a washbasin, the rim of which is the ring of mountains which the 5th Duke told Miss Gladstone were his park walls.
Then there is Eildon Hall in Roxburghshire, and Bowhill in Selkirk. Dalkeith House in Edinburgh is let to International Computers. The other houses are lived in.
The man who has recently succeeded to this daunting inheritance, currently amounting to a quarter of a million acres, is the 9th Duke of Buccleuch (born 1923), an unassuming cheerful former M.P. known to the House of Commons as "Johnny Dalkeith". While styled as the Earl of Dalkeith during his father's lifetime, he represented Edinburgh North in the Commons, where he was warmly regarded. He was the first of his family for generations to marry outside the aristocracy, choosing a pretty and enchanting model then known as Miss Jane McNeil. (His aunt Alice, daughter of the 7th Duke, married into the Royal Family, and is now H.R.H. Princess Alice, Dowager Duchess of Gloucester.)
Dalkeith's political career was interrupted by a serious riding accident which occurred in 1971, and which left him completely paralysed from the chest down. The horse fell on him and broke his spine. He did not lose consciousness, and remembers clearly his immediate thoughts. "The moment the horse fell on me, I knew my back was broken. I realised quite clearly that I was paralysed from the chest down and that I would have to learn to adjust to a completely new way of life. It was five minutes before anyone reached me. By this time I had weighed up the situation and was ready to start the process of recovery."74 After convalescence, Dalkeith returned to the House of Commons in a wheelchair.
He might well have been able to continue service in the House for many years, but the decision not to was made for him by his father's death in 1973, when he became 9th Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry, as well as succeeding to ten other titles, with such romantic Scottish names as Earl of Drumlanrig and Sanquhar, Viscount of Nith, Torthorwald and Ross, and Lord Douglas of Kinmount, Middlebie and Dornock. His English titles are Earl of Doncaster and Baron Scott of Tindal. There is no reason in law or logic why he should not also be Duke of Monmouth, but only the 1st Duke held that title. When he was beheaded for high treason in 1685 Monmouth's English titles were forfeited. His grandson, the 2nd Duke of Buccleuch, was restored by Act of Parliament in 1742 to the English peerages of Doncaster and Tindal, but not to the dukedom of Monmouth. The reason was presumably that there was already then living an Earl of Monmouth; this earldom became extinct in 1814, since when the way has been open for the Duke of Buccleuch to be restored as Duke of Monmouth. It is still within the Queen's power to reverse the attainder and resurrect this historic title.
One other distinction the Duke enjoys is Lord of the Manor of the Hundred of Knightlow in Warwickshire. In this capacity he is entitled to claim payment of the "Wroth Silver" on nth November (Martinmas Day) every year. The ceremony has been faithfully conducted for about 1000 years. There are twenty-eight parishes involved, and each one sends a representative to drop his contribution to the silver in the hollow of Knightlow Cross. They usually drop mere pennies. But the whole procedure becomes potentially interesting if anyone defaults in payment. He then has to pay £1 for every penny that his contribution is short, or provide and give to the Duke a white bull with a red nose and red ears. When the ceremony is completed, they all repair to the Dun Cow at Stretton to celebrate with hot rum and milk.
* * *
The descendants of the Duke of Grafton have been chiefly remarkable for their indolence and their longevity. The 2nd Duke was "almost a slobberer, without one good quality" according to Dean Swift,75 while Lord Waldegrave said he was "totally illiterate; yet from long observation and great natural sagacity he became the courtier of his time. . . . He was a great teazer; had an established right of saying whatever he pleased."76 Lord Hervey thought him a "booby" and wrote an unkind verse about him :
"So your friend, booby Grafton, I'll e'en let you keep, Awake he can't hurt, and he's still half asleep. Nor ever was dangerous but to womankind, And his body's as impotent now as his mind." However, he was Lord Chamberlain to George II, and an influential man. And he built Euston Road. Walpole tells an amusing story about Grafton when he was old and ill, covered in sores. The Duke of Newcastle was forever "popping in", and had a disconcerting habit of throwing his arms around men and kissing them repeatedly and passionately. Grafton's doctors thought Newcastle a nuisance and a pest, and ordered that he should not be allowed in the house. But he forced his way in, and
"The Duke's gentleman would not admit him to the bedchamber, saying His Grace was asleep. Newcastle protested he would go in on tiptoe and only look at him - he rushed in, clattered his heels to waken him, then fell upon the bed, kissing and hugging him. Grafton waked; 'God, what's here?' 'Only I, my dear Lord' - Buss, buss, buss, buss.! - 'God! How can you be such a beast to kiss such a creature as I am, all over plasters! Get along, g
et along!' and turned about and went to sleep."77
Grafton and Newcastle had both been, at various times, lovers of George II's daughter, the Princess Amelia. According to some sources, Grafton had spent time with another royal daughter, Princess Caroline.
The real torment of the 2nd Duke's life was his son and heir Lord Euston, who by every account was a wicked and repellent creature. The facts are few, and his contemporaries seem too horrified to enter into details when they refer to him, but his evil reputation rests upon his disgraceful treatment of his wife. Lord Euston married Lady Dorothy Boyle on ioth October, 1741. Within seven months, she was dead, and everyone appeared to be glad for her. Lady Dorothy was the daughter of the Earl of Burlington (whose house was where the Royal Academy now stands in Piccadilly, and after whom Burlington Arcade is named). She was pretty, good-natured, gentle and quiet, and she had the misfortune when only sixteen to fall in love with Lord Euston. She adored him, fawned upon him, worshipped his every word. She seemed blind to what everyone else knew, which was that he was boorish and cruel, with a fearful temper, inherited no doubt from his great-grandmother Barbara Villiers. At a ball at the Duke of Norfolk's in October 1740 (a year before they married) Euston was seen to treat his fiancée with public contempt. On another occasion, at dinner, in front of assembled guests, he shouted at her across the table, "Lady Dorothy, how greedily you eat! It is no wonder that you are so fat." The poor girl blushed and began to cry. Her mother, Lady Burlington, came to her defence. "It is true, my lord, that she is fat, and I hope she will always be so, for it is her constitution, and she will never be lean until she is less happy than we have always tried to make her, which I shall endeavour to prevent her being." It is not recorded how the bullish Earl reacted to that humiliating riposte, but he was too insensitive for it to affect him. Lady Hertford, who was present, said that were the young lady her daughter, she would sooner prepare for her funeral than for such a marriage.78
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