The Dukes
Page 27
- Have you any objection to showing it to the magistrate ?
The witness then stood up for the magistrate, and eventually took
it off for him to see.
- Did he give you a ring ?
- Yes.
- You will not trust my friend with the brooch ?
- No {Laughter).
- Will you let Mr Avory see it ? I will be surety for him.52
The ring and the brooch were discovered to be cheap rubbish that one might find at a fairground, and Miss Robinson further admitted under cross-examination that she had been paid £250 to give her evidence. One of the biggest laughs of the trial occurred when another witness recalled having seen Miss Robinson's famous diary; she had shown it to her on the boat coming from New Zealand. Witness said that it was odd-looking, and that it looked as if it had come out of the Ark. "That would account for the watermark," ventured the judge.5'
On 30th December 1907 the coffin was eventually opened, and T. C. Druce's remains found to be in it. Thus eleven years of legal wrestling and speculation collapsed like a broken biscuit. Several of the witnesses (we have only mentioned the two principal here) were subsequently tried for perjury, and imprisoned. The 6th Duke of Portland continued to live at Welbeck, and the Druce descendants in Baker Street. The judge in his summing-up commented, "Sufficient to say that this case is an illustration of that love of the marvellous which is so deeply ingrained in human nature, and is likely to be remembered in legal annals as affording one more striking proof of the unfathomable depths of human credulity."51
Nevertheless, one mystery remained, and was the subject of some correspondence in The Times. In 1864, when T. C. Druce died, he was alleged to be seventy-one years old, and such is the record on the tombstone. The Duke of Portland was then sixty-four. According to the census returns, T. C. Druce in 1861 was sixty-two years old, which would make him sixty-four or sixty-five at death, not seventy- one.
The eccentric invisible old Duke died in 1879, and was buried, according to his wish, in Kensal Green Cemetery in North London, as anonymously as possible. No fuss, no parade, no crowds. Now, the tomb is completely obliterated by shrubs which he ordered to be planted there. He is as mysterious in death as he was in life. As he died childless, the London properties of Marylebone (Harley Street, Welbeck Street, etc.) devolved upon his sisters, one of whom married the Baron Howard de Walden, whose descendant is the present owner.
The 6th Duke of Portland (1857-1943) was a cousin of his predecessor, whom he had never met. He distinguished himself in politics, in literature, and in the army. One of his books, Men, Women and Things, though lacking the discipline of selection, is written in a chaste pleasing style. He had a firmly sensible attitude towards the changing times; he decided to move out of Welbeck Abbey long before many of his ducal cousins had abandoned their albatrosses, and built for himself a smaller comfortable house on the estate. The subterranean palace did not appeal to him anyway. His attitude towards his tenants, kindly and charming, was however feudal in its condescension. His duchess, who had been a real beauty and who survived until 1954, once lost her way in London and had to ask a policeman where she was. When he told her, she said, "The City? I have only been here in processions."55
Rather better known than the Duke, and quite a different character, was his bizarre, flamboyant sister, born Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck but always known as Lady Ottoline Morrell, the feathered centre of the Bloomsbury set.
The Duke died in 1943 and was succeeded by his son, the 7th Duke of Portland, whom the Duke of Bedford has described as "a pompous-looking man with a moustache".56 He sat in the House of Commons for twenty years as Lord Titchfield, and was twice a junior minister. He was a Knight of the Garter, Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham, and Chairman of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. His brother, Lord Morven Cavendish- Bentinck, was quite a well-known concert pianist.'Chopper' Portland died in 1978. His widow, nee Ivy Gordon- Lennox, is descended from Charles II through three different lines, by Nell Gwynn, by Louis de Keroualle, and by Barbara Villiers (see Chapter 2). The Portlands had two daughters, but no sons, which meant that the dukedom passed to a kinsman who traced his descent from the 3rd Duke. Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck, 8th Duke of Portland, lived in East Africa from 1925 and was Speaker of the Legislative Assembly in Kenya before Independence. When Member for Agriculture in the Legislative Council he was responsible for the establishment of the glorious game parks there.
The present Duke is his brother, William Cavendish-Bentinck, who joined the Foreign Service in 1919. After serving in various posts, he was Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee of the Chiefs of Staff and Foreign Office Adviser to the Directors of Plans from 1939 to 1945, and then Ambassador to Poland in the difficult years after 1945. Since 1947 he has been Director of various companies in the U.K. and abroad and is now Chairman of Bayer UK Limited, also President of the British Nuclear Forum.
By the financial arrangements which 'Chopper' Portland made he stripped the title of all assets, and specifically excluded the present Duke and his brother from all benefit; they did not receive, and can never receive, a penny from the ducal estates, nor enjoy any of the heirlooms which have passed down from their common ancestor.
As the Duke's son predeceased him, the dukedom will end with the present generation. The Portland title, however, can continue under a different rank. The 1st Duke was the son of Hans Bentinck, created Earl of Portland by his friend, William of Orange. By his second marriage, Hans Bentinck had another son, whose direct descendant is Count Henry Bentinck, a Count of the Holy Roman Empire who was wounded and taken prisoner in the Second World War. Count Henry Bentinck now lives quietly in Devon. His son is an actor. The day will come when he can claim the earldom of Portland.
references
1. Complete Peerage.
2. White Kennet, Sermon at the Funeral of William Duke of
Devonshire (1707), p. 47.
3. Walpole, XX, 66.
4. John Timbs, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (1866), Vol.
I, p. 142
5. Brougham, Lives of Philosophers of the Time of George III
(1846).
6. Timbs, p. 143.
7. ibid., p. 146.
8. Dorothy Stuart, Dearest Bess, p. 143.
9. Elizabeth Jenkins, Lady Caroline Lamb.
10. Wraxall, Posthumous Memoirs, Vol. i, p. 9.
11. Walpole, XXV, 411.
12. Wraxall, op. cit., p. 7.
13. Jenkins, op. cit., p. 12.
14. ed. The Earl of Ilchester, Georgiana, p. 23.
15. ibid., p. 97.
16. W. M. Thackeray, The Four Georges, p. 60.
17. Georgiana, p. 120. 18. ibid., p. 189, 196.
19. D.N.B.
20. Dearest Bess, pp. 32-3. 21. ibid., p. 44.
22. Greville, V, 308.
23. Georgiana, pp. 59,63,69, 77.
24. Dearest Bess, p. 12.
25. Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland, Vol. I, p. 244.
26. Georgiana, p. 281. 27. ibid., p. 10.
28. Dearest Bess, p. 169.
29. Lady Holland to Her Son, p. 18.
30. Devonshire Collections, Paxton Letters, 5, 19.
31. E. F. Benson, As We Were, p. 177. 32. ibid., p. 176.
33. Margaret Asquith, Autobiography, p. 94.
34. Duke of Portland, Men, Women and Things, p. 187.
35. Anita Leslie, Edwardians in Love, p. 314.
36. E. F- Benson, op. cit., pp. 174, 175.
37. Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold, p. 107.
38. E. F. Benson, op. cit., p. 177.
39. Countess of Warwick, Afterthoughts, p. 77.
40. Margot Asquith, Autobiography, p. 93.
41. Chips Channon, Diaries, p. 450.
42. Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels, p. 104.
43. Lord Hervey and His Friends, p. 216.
44. Walpole (ed. Cunningham), Vol. VIII, p. 253.
; 45. Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland, Vol. I, p. 182.
46. William Day, Reminiscences of the Turf, p. 136.
47. Duke of Portland, Men, Women and Things, p. 36.
48. Daily Chronicle, 15 March 1898; The Times, 8 December 1879.
49. Duke of Portland, op. cit., p. 34.
50. Augustus Hare, In My Solitary Life, p. 178.
51. Theodore Besterman, The Druce-Portland Case, pp. 78-9, 204,
216, 272.
52. ibid., 133. 53. ibid., 100. 54. ibid., 268.
55. Chips Channon, Diaries, p. 468.Duke of Bedford, A Silver-plated Spoon, p. 119.
5. The Master
Duke of Beaufort
"I say that if these Bills are passed and the sound of the horn and the cry of the hounds are not again to be heard, it will be the worst thing ever to happen in this country." So spoke the distinctive hyperbolic voice of Sir Henry FitzRoy Somerset, ioth Duke of Beaufort, k.g., p.c., G.C.V.O., Master of the Queen's Horse, and the greatest fox- hunter of the twentieth century.
Foxhunting is not to the dukes of Beaufort a hobby, a pastime, a sport; it is a way of life, it is the very colour and sound of life itself. For more than 200 years successive dukes of Beaufort have hunted six days a week during the season. They have established the hunt which bears their name, the Beaufort Hunt, as the best, with the best pack of hounds in the world. It is an achievement of which they can with just cause be proud, an achievement symbolised by the registration number on the late Duke's car - MFH 1; he was beyond question the foremost Master of Fox Hounds in the country. In Gloucestershire, where his estate, Badminton, dominates the surrounding country, the Duke was known to everyone, family, friends, tenants, and strangers, not as "Your Grace" or "Duke", but as "Master". Even Queen Mary would call him nothing else. So one can well understand that the sound of the horn was music to his ears, and the excitement of the chase food for his blood; a life without foxhunting would not have been an unimaginable catastrophe to him; it did not bear contemplation.
The Duke of Beaufort was known also to the public as a close friend of the Royal Family. The Queen and other members of the Royal Family habitually stay at Badminton for the world-famous three-day event, the Badminton Horse Trials, initiated by the late Duke in 1949, and since risen to become the most highly esteemed horse event of the calendar. The Queen is known to have said that she is never happier than when she can stay at Badminton, and Queen Mary stayed there for the whole of World War II, descending upon the house in full convoy in 1939, and living there for the next five years. Queen Mary was the Duchess of Beaufort's aunt who was therefore descended directly from George III, and a member of the "old" Royal Family, as opposed to the "new" Royal Family represented by Queen Victoria, from whom Elizabeth II is descended.
Byt Beaufort's connection with royalty goes back much farther than that, as he represents the only direct Plantagenet line left today, though from illegitimate stock. (The last legitimate Plantagenet was the Earl of Warwick who was executed in 1499.) The Duke's ancestor is John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III, the same John of Gaunt to whom Shakespeare gave one of his most rousing patriotic orations, in Richard II.2 What Shakespeare's play does not tell us is that John of Gaunt had four illegitimate children by Katherine Swynford, his mistress for twenty years, and to all four he gave the surname "Beaufort", after a castle which his family had owned in the Champagne region of France for generations. One of these, John Beaufort, born in 1372 or 1373, is the founder of the Beaufort family we know. By the time he was twenty-four years old, his father had finally taken Katherine Swynford as his third wife, and in 1396 Pope Boniface IX ratified the marriage retroactively, in order to legitimise the offspring. Parliament assented to the legitimising of the four Beaufort children on the strict condition that none of them or their descendants should ever lay claim to the throne; they were, of course, perilously close to it. The usurper King Henry IV (Bolingbroke), another son of John of Gaunt, was their half-brother. With this parliamentary caution in mind one writer has pointed out the irony that obtained in 1914, when all the crowned heads in Europe, with the exception of the King of Spain, were descended from John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford.3
John Beaufort was soon afterwards created Earl of Somerset, in which title he was succeeded by his brother Henry, who died at seventeen. A third brother assumed the mantle, and was advanced to the rank of Duke of Somerset in 1443, with precedence above the Duke of Norfolk (of the Mowbray family; the first Howard Duke of Norfolk was not for another forty years).
That a man with the surname of Somerset and the title of Beaufort may be descended from men with the surname of Beaufort and the title of Somerset obviously requires explanation, especially since the dukedom of Somerset is now held by a man with the surname of Seymour, who is no relation whatever to the present David Somerset, Duke of Beaufort. The answer lies in another illegitimacy and yet another invented surname.
The third Duke of Somerset, grandson of John of Gaunt, was attainted and beheaded in 1464. That was the end of the dukedom of Somerset in the Beaufort family; the title was recreated in 1547 for Edward Seymour, and it has stayed with the Seymours ever since. Meanwhile, the last Beaufort Duke of Somerset had fathered a bastard son called Charles, who adopted his father's title as a surname, and is therefore the founder of the Somerset family; when his uncle Edmund Beaufort died in 1471 the Beaufort family as such was extinct, and the new Somerset family began. Charles Somerset was a 2nd cousin of Henry VII, which may account for his being advanced in rank, in spite of his bastardy, to the title of Earl of Worcester. He married Elizabeth Herbert, daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon, by which he acquired Raglan Castle in Monmouthshire, still in the possession of his descendants.
The 3rd Earl of Worcester, William Somerset, played a key role in events which form the substance of another chapter, for he was present at the trials of both Protector Somerset and the 4th Duke of Norfolk, those implacable rivals, and one of the small ironies which delight the amateur historian is that he was the first peer to cast his vote in 1551 for the condemnation of the Protector, who had usurped a title which had previously belonged to his family. He also founded the family tradition of unswerving loyalty to the Crown, which has been observed with more or less fidelity by his descendants. He had his own company of actors, but there is no evidence that this taste has been inherited by subsequent generations. (The late Duke of Beaufort celebrated his fortieth wedding anniversary in 1964 by taking a coach-load to a Whitehall farce.)
The 4th Earl of Worcester (1553-1628), Edward Somerset, consolidated the tradition of loyalty to the Crown with astonishing success. Though a Catholic, he was an especial favourite with Elizabeth I, who trusted him above many others, and with James I and Charles I. His other contribution to family traditions was his love for horses. He was the best horseman and tilter of his generation,4 and his supremacy was recognised by the Queen when she made him Master of the Horse, a post previously held by her two loves, Lord Leicester and Lord Essex. The Master of the Horse is one of the oldest offices under the Crown, and its holder is required to ride in attendance at every state procession. He is in charge of the royal stables and kennels, and has the privilege of borrowing any of the monarch's horses, grooms, or footmen, at his desire. The late Duke of Beaufort, like his ancestor 400 years ago, was Master of the Horse, and no more appropriate person could there have been for this office. It was his love for horses that endeared Worcester to the new King, James I, who loved hunting, and who took Worcester with him on his expeditions. The King's reward for his companionship was to grant him in 1607 ferry rights over the River Severn from Aust to Chepstow, a right still possessed by his descendant. Until 1964, the Duke leased this right to a ferry company, for a handsome fee. There was some fuss about compensation to the Duke when the Severn Bridge was opened, making his ferry rights obsolete, which is worth mentioning only to correct a misapprehension held at the time. Leo Abse, m.p., objected to the principle of paying any compensation, on the gro
unds that "the country paid a heavy enough price at the time to James I for the favours he lavished on a series of handsome male favourites".5 This, of course, is crass nonsense. Worcester was no "handsome male favourite". He was fifty years old when James came to the throne, and the king a mere twenty-seven. It is hardly likely that he took a fancy to old Worcester. Their relationship was professional and friendly; Worcester acted as the King's private secretary, and hunted with him regularly. The famous lovers, Robert Carr and George Villiers, came later.
The Earl was in favour with Charles I, who pushed him a step further up the ladder by making him Marquess of Worcester for having contributed a considerable sum of money to the royal purse. With his son, Edward Somerset, 2nd Marquess of Worcester (1601- 1667), the dukedoms of Somerset and Beaufort collide for the last time, to be sorted out and sent their separate ways once and for all.
In 1644 Charles I sent to Worcester a remarkable document purporting to create him Duke of Somerset (the title had lain in abeyance since the death of Protector Somerset), with power to create his own peerages, from a baronet to a marquess, and confer them upon persons of his choice. He was to be Generalissimo of three armies, and Admiral of the Fleet at sea, and he was promised the hand of the King's daughter in marriage. The full text of this document, now at Badminton, can be read in Collins's Peerage of England, Vol. I, pages 206-7. It is now recognised to be a forgery, but in the seventeenth century it was taken seriously enough for a Committee of the House of Lords to be convened to consider the matter. In 1660 both Edward Somerset and William Seymour laid claim to the dukedom of Somerset, held by ancestors of them both at different times. Edward Somerset's claim was based on this irregular patent, which had never received the seal, and was little more than a private promise of the King's which was never ratified. The House of Lords decided against Edward Somerset for this reason, and also because he was a Papist, and obnoxious to the people by virtue of that alone. It was concluded that a far better claim to the title was possessed by William Seymour, who was thereupon recognised as 2nd Duke of Somerset, while Edward Somerset, Marquess of Worcester, withdrew his claim. Twenty-two years later, his son would be created Duke of Beaufort, and the dispute would not again be revived.