The Dukes

by Brian Masters

  His namesake, Hastings 12th Duke of Bedford, once again repre­sents the extreme point to which this obsession with disease may lead. Woburn Abbey was permanently sprayed with a germ-killer during his dukedom, so that it smelled antiseptic. His fear of contamination by germs had some risible results. He changed his underclothes three times a day, and carried a huge bottle of T.C.P. tablets in his pocket; whenever anyone coughed or sneezed he immediately sucked a lozenge.23 His mother, Mary Duchess of Bedford, was so fascinated by disease that she became nurse and surgeon, and founded a hospital at Woburn, where she spent most of her waking hours. She would eagerly take visitors to see her latest "case".

  So withdrawn have the Russells been from affectionate human contact that they have tended to look to animals for a more trust­worthy response. Animals do not let you down, they do not betray or use you, they are not responsible for the evil which pervades the world, they will not tell you your faults or find you wanting; in short, they are safer. Duke Hastings was constantly writing letters to news­papers on such abstruse subjects as the house fly, the caterpillar, moles, or pigeons; he collected spiders; he was said to recognise by sight every one of the 300 deer at Woburn with whom he communed on long solitary walks, and he formed close ties with the golden carp whom he amused regularly.24 When disgusted with human treachery, or what he saw as blind human adhesion to mistaken concepts, Hastings would repair to his animals; he would trust any creature more readily than he would a man. Nor was this a mere dilettante interest; he was an accomplished writer in the fields of animal and insect welfare. His father, Duke Herbrand, loved and cherished his herd of rare deer at Woburn, and was President of the Royal Zoo­logical Society. Meetings of the Society were the only events which would tempt him to leave Woburn, where he, too, lived secluded and remote from the hustle and danger of human contact. The present Duke has made Woburn into one of the country's most famous safari parks, in which he shows an interest which cannot be merely commercial. He, too, is a Russell.

  After the war, Hastings the 12th Duke withdrew more and more from the public eye, whose gaze he never enjoyed anyway, and betook himself to his lonely retreat at Endsleigh, the family property in Devon. There he communed with his animals and insects, and occasionally went for an early-morning shoot. "Spinach" had been fond from childhood of shooting, as had all his ancestors, and the paradox of killing creatures whom he professed to love did not appear to trouble him. He was an expert shot. One autumn morning in 1953 he went for his usual shoot and did not return. The next day he was found dead, lying in thick undergrowth with a 12-bore shotgun across his chest. The safety-catch was in the firing position, and the right barrel had been fired. At the inquest, the family solicitor, Connolly Gage, suggested that the Duke must have been sitting cross-legged waiting for something, have pulled the gun towards him, caught the trigger on some branches and been unable to prevent its firing. This hypothesis was heard, and a verdict of acci­dental death was returned. It is, to say the very least, improbable, and few people would now accept it.

  The Duke was known to be depressed. The few friends in whom he had placed his trust, against the vociferous advice of everyone else, were revealed to be unworthy. His life had been a succession of disillusionments, as the fundamental duplicity of human kind impressed itself upon his sensitive soul. His marriage had been a disaster, his son a disappointment. In true Russell style, he had severed all connection with this son, save for the occasional distant letter. Even his religion ceased to be a solace. He was not the sort of man to shoot himself by accident, even supposing he could have done so in a sitting position. Suicide must remain the most logical and likely verdict.

  Had he lived another eleven weeks, the seven-year term necessary to prevent prohibitive death duties devolving upon his unfortunate son would have expired. He cannot have been ignorant of this important fact, though his son thinks he simply miscalculated and got his dates wrong; he killed himself thinking that all arrangements were in order. He was vague about such matters anyway. On the other hand, I have heard it said in other ducal families that he left a note indicating spite as his motive.

  The 12th Duke of Bedford was the last in the family to meet with a violent end, although the family history is not wanting in prece­dents. His daughter-in-law, the Marchioness of Tavistock (first wife of the present Duke before he succeeded to the dukedom), died as the result of an overdose of sodium amatol tablets, self-administered, in 1945. Her husband testified that she had not slept properly for ten days. An open verdict was recorded.25

  The 12th Duke's mother, Mary Duchess of Bedford, also died in mysterious circumstances. She was an unconventional duchess, dis­carding the family jewels early in her married life to plunge into a life of active nursing. She established, staffed and ran a cottage hospital at Woburn, and turned it into a war hospital in 1914, with the grudging financial support of her strange and brooding husband. She became a skilled radiologist and sometimes surgeon as well as nurse, noting with satisfaction in her diary: "I here place on record that I today amputated a toe and excised a painful scar in the sole of the foot for Leslie Coop, of Handsworth, Birmingham."28 The present Duchess is quoted on the subject of her pioneering predeces­sor - "Anyone 'ave a leetle pain, she open 'im up and 'ave a leetle look. Very medical."27

  The Duchess suffered from the most appalling buzzing in the ears which rendered her almost totally deaf. She attributed this affliction to a youthful attack of typhoid fever in India. Whatever the cause, her deafness accounted for her loud, clear and commanding voice, which made her lonely son tremble so, and for her apparent indif­ference to his existence; what he thought was remoteness derived simply from her inability to hear him when he spoke to her. It was not until her husband told their son that he never wanted to see him again that she showed him how much she loved him by bursting into tears; he was shocked and dismayed, having thought such emotion utterly foreign to her.28

  One day, the Duchess discovered that high altitudes in aeroplanes brought relief to the buzzing pain in her head which she described as "like railway trains rushing through stations";29 that was the beginning of a new passion which was to make her famous through­out the land. Already in her sixties, the Duchess of Bedford became, of all things, a pilot. Duke Herbrand did not approve; this was worse, if possible, than cutting people up in hospital. But he acquiesced under protest, reserving the right to cut out every account of an air disaster from his newspaper, which he would place silently on her desk. His gentle remonstrance was not effective, however, and she flung herself with joy into her new pursuit. She built runways at Woburn, she flew with a co-pilot to South Africa and back, her adventures were avidly collected by the newspapers. She was some­thing of a folk-heroine. She belonged to the British public, while her isolated son grew further and further away.

  In 1937 Duke Herbrand told her that he could no longer afford to finance the hospital which was so dear to her heart. (He could, of course, have afforded a hundred hospitals, with wealth which would now appear fabulous.) The news depressed her terribly. It is not known what conversations passed between them, but she was seen to be unhappy for days afterwards. She was seventy-one years old, and still deaf. Her only son was a stranger to her, and an enemy to his father. When she took off in her de Havilland Gipsy from the hangar at Woburn on 22nd March she waved goodbye to her flight lieutenant and to her rigger, a gesture she had never before made, and which was not customary among flyers. She was not seen again.

  The Duchess was no amateur pilot. She had experience of flying in all kinds of weathers, and had completed almost 200 hours of solo flying. There was no reason why an accident should occur. There had been an occasion three years earlier when she and her flight lieutenant had come close to death in Morocco. She afterwards recorded in her diary: "I am persuaded that, when faced with apparently certain death in this way, one does not experience the terror which those who do not live to tell are supposed to feel ... I thought it quite an agreeable way of finishing up compared
with most ends which are the lot of man, and certainly the one I had most desired; for, with not a boat in sight and a very rough sea, the process could not have lasted long."50

  The Duchess's suicide is by no means unlikely. Four days later parts of the aircraft were washed up, but her body was never found. A Captain Riley sighted the decomposed remains of an airwoman floating in the sea eleven miles off Gromer on 28th June; this was more than three months after her disappearance. He thought she was dressed in khaki flying kit, but since the family said she was not wearing khaki that day, it was concluded that the body could not have been that of the Duchess.31

  The country mourned a colourful extravagant character. She must have been one of the first women to motor alone along the roads of Bedfordshire, an outrageous display of non-comformity in the early part of this century, and she was quite capable of carrying out her own repairs to motor-car or aircraft. Her starchy husband, whose feet were still held fast in the nineteenth century, pretended not to notice his wife's antics. She was adventurous and courageous, and possessed the blissful resources of a sense of humour, so helpful in her dealings with the dour family into which she had married. Here is her quiet diary entry for 8th August 1929, when she and her co-pilot were offered some unappetising food in a dingy dismal room in Aleppo. "He broke open a roll and I saw him looking very closely at his plate, and to my horror discovered that all the rolls were swarming with black ants inside. However, though I cannot say I felt 'none the worse', the black ants did not actively disagree with our digestion, and I only suffered mentally."32

  We have already seen that the 9th Duke of Bedford (1819-1891) took his own life in a fit of depression arising from ill-health. Briefly to trace his progress from enthusiastic childhood to miserable old age is to see how each Russell generation smothers and stifles the bright­ness and gaiety of the one that follows. The 9th Duke was born Hastings Russell, first son of Lord and Lady William Russell. He was called Hastings after the Marquess of Hastings, a relation on his mother's side. (He must not be confused with the other Hastings in the family, the pacifist and enigmatic 12th Duke, about whom we have already said much.) His grandfather was the 6th Duke, his uncle became the 7th Duke, and his cousin was the 8th.

  Young Hastings was something of a prodigy - intelligent, enter­taining, as bright as a button. When he was seven years old, Lady Holland wrote: "As to Hastings he is without exception the most pleasing, promising child I ever saw, full of sense beside his acquire­ments, with all his father's courage, manliness and gentleness; not in the least spoiled, well-behaved and tractable." His father wrote proudly of him, "Lord Holland will not be able to say (as he does of the Russells) that he is like an otter, or that he never speaks, for he is handsome and jabbers like a magpie - he has all the quickness & esprit of his mother, & is quite a little prodigy ... he is master of little Lieven & thumps him till he cries." His mother was no less lyrical in describing the charms of her first-born: "he speaks French like d'Alembert & English like Johnson - neither lisps, stammers, nor mispronounces, is quick, gay, passionate, good-hearted, gentle, ingeni­ous, ruddy, bright-eyed, blue-eyed - fat, strong & healthy ... if Lord Chesterfield had had such a son he need not have written his book."

  Hastings grew up on the continent, with his mother and two brothers, to whom he was very close, and where he was very popular. He became in his adolescence an unusually good shot. He was liked and admired. What, then, went wrong? His parents grew apart from each other and quarrelled frequently by letter. All their own failings were heaped on to the young man's shoulders in their arguments — each parent saw him as living proof of the shortcomings of the other. His mother, Lady William, wrote to her brother-in-law Lord John, when Hastings was twenty-seven years old: "You must repress his excessive arrogance . . . He has erroneous notions of being heir apparent and is overbearing to a degree quite painful . . . He is quite altered, exceedingly insolent . . . compromised both by ill-temper and covetousness." The young man received letters in this vein from his mother, which quite dismayed and bewildered him. He wrote to his father: "I want encouragement & not rebuffs. Without a little vanity [self-esteem] nothing would be done in this world and to be constantly told by one's own Mother that one is an Idiot, a coward & liar is very disheartening."33 One hundred years later, Mary Duchess of Bedford was writing of her pacifist son, the other Hastings : "I never thought I should be the mother of a coward."34

  Discouraged and rejected by his mother, whom he adored, Has­tings's naturally affectionate and bubbling personality withered and withdrew. He was no longer talkative in adulthood, but uncomfort­ably shy and retiring. He settled into the Russell mould of an obstinate, self-protecting recluse, obsessed by health. On 14th January 1891 he shot himself through the heart in an access of bad temper, delirium or insanity (no one is sure which) in his house at 81 Eaton Square; he was suffering from pneumonia at the time. Hastings had married Lady Elizabeth Sackville-West, daughter of Lord de la Warr, and was father of both the 10th and .11 th Dukes of Bedford, and grandfather of Hastings 12th Duke. One of his daughters, Lady Ela Russell, who died in 1936, was apt to talk to herself. Guests who overstayed their welcome at her house would hear her exclaim, in a loud whisper, "I wish they'd go! I wish they'd go!"35

  Two members of the family have been murdered, one judicially and the other for money, and both were called William Russell. Lord William Russell (1767-1840) will have to be called "old" Lord William to avoid confusion with the other Lord William who was father to Hastings the 9th Duke. He was a son of the 4th Duke, and both the 5th and 6th Dukes were his brothers. "Old" Lord William was murdered by his Swiss valet, Francois Courvoisier, on 5th May 1840. The murder caused a commotion among the aristocracy. Greville wrote : "The extraordinary murder of Lord Wm. Russell . . . has excited a prodigious interest, and frightened all London out of its wits . . . half the world go to sleep expecting to have their throats cut before morning."38 Greville doubted that the evidence was con­clusive, but Courvoisier was found guilty on 20th June and two days later confessed to the crime. At his execution on 6th July there was a crowd of over 20,000 people.

  On 21 st July 1683 there took place the public execution at Lincoln's Inn Fields of William, Lord Russell, son of the 5th Earl of Bedford. His name was William Russell, but being the son of an earl and not of a duke (the dukedom was not created until later), he had no right to the appellation "Lord William". He did, however, inherit the courtesy title of "Lord Russell" on the death of his brother Francis (yet another hypochondriac) in 1678. Hence he is known to history as "William, Lord Russell" and must not be mistaken for the two "Lord William Russells" that we have so far considered. William, Lord Russell, was one of the most illustrious members of the family. He lived at a time when the Russells were closely involved in the political destiny of the country, and had been so for 150 years. He is commonly known to posterity as "the patriot", yet it was for high treason that he was executed.

  William was a nonconformist in the Russell tradition. A fervent Protestant, he feared most that the King, Charles II, would fall under the influence of the "papists"; the King's brother and heir, the Duke of York, was openly suspected of being a Roman Catholic, which, to a Russell, meant that he had just stepped up from Hell. Something of a Puritan, Russell was also disgusted with the dissoluteness and extravagance of the Court. He proposed in the House of Commons that there should be a committee to consider "the sad and deplorable condition we are in, and the apprehensions we are under of popery and a standing army". He later proposed that the House should pass legislation to prevent a popish successor, and was the loudest supporter of the Exclusion Bill, which sought to disable the Duke of York from inheriting the crown. Lord Russell and the Duke of York were hence­forth locked in a bitter fight, which had perforce to end with the downfall of one of them.

  Lord Russell was supported by his intelligent and beautiful wife Rachel, one of the most engaging and important of the Russell wives, and as anti-papist as her husband. It was one of the few
Russell marriages which worked. She had been born Rachel Wriothesley, daughter of the 4th Earl of Southampton, and therefore grand­daughter of the Earl of Southampton who was Shakespeare's patron. (It is interesting to reflect that the present Duke of Bedford is des­cended in part from the friend to whom Shakespeare addressed most of his sonnets.) Rachel and her sisters were co-heirs to the South­ampton estates, and Rachel received as her portion the lucrative Bloomsbury property which she had brought into the Bedford family. It is often said that all Bedfords are ruled by their wives, and this wife was certainly the driving-force behind William, who had integrity rather than initiative.

  William and Rachel Russell held political meetings at Southampton House in London (later called Bedford House and now demolished) at which the early Whigs devised their strategy. The Russells earned a reputation for political extremism, which prejudiced the public against them when the time came for William's integrity to be tested.

  Some of his political allies were responsible for a plan to assassinate the King and his brother the Duke of York as they drove past the Rye House on their way from Newmarket to Westminster. This became known as the "Rye House Plot", and the name of William, Lord Russell, was implicated by an informer. As a result, he was arrested (on 26th June 1683) and sent to the Tower pending his trial for high treason, although according to Macaulay the plot had been carefully kept from him. The trial took place on 13th July at the Old Bailey. That same morning one of Russell's most intimate friends and a political ally, the Earl of Essex, was found dead in the Tower. The suspicion of suicide did nothing to help the tense, sus- spenseful atmosphere in court, at what has since become one of the most famous trials ever to be held at the Old Bailey. There were nine judges, and amongst the counsel for the Crown was the up-and- coming, notorious Jeffries.