The Dukes

by Brian Masters

  The 4th Duke of Marlborough (1739-1817), born in the midst of squabbles, was a nervous, highly strung man. Self-consciousness made him shy, an embarrassment which he covered by a sullen over­bearing manner. He was ill-at-ease, and made others feel so in his company, though they knew him to be a decent, hospitable man. His marriage to a daughter of the Duke of Bedford was extremely happy. Like his contemporary, the Duke of Queensberry (Old Q), Marlborough indulged the fashionable habit of employing a running footman. These men could run comfortably at about seven miles an hour, sometimes more, sustained by white wine and eggs. An amusing pastime was to stage a race between horse and carriage, and a running footman - it was something else to bet on in the eighteenth century. The last such race on record was between the Duke of Marlborough and his footman. The Duke was in a carriage and four, and started from Windsor at the same time as the footman, with London as their goal. The Duke won, but only just, and the footman died from the effects of overstrain."

  By one account, this duke did not pronounce a single word for three years, and was about to enter the fourth year of silence when it was announced that Madame de Stael, the French intellectual, was about to pay him a visit. "Take me away! Take me away!" he roared.36

  His son the 5th Duke (1766-1840), who changed the family name from Spencer to Spencer-Churchill by royal licence, dated 26th May 1817, and who was the first man in England to abandon the foreign spelling of Marquess (Marquis), spent a fortune on books. He it was who bought the 1471 edition of Boccaccio from the Duke of Roxburghe's library in 1812, and founded the Roxburghe Club the same day. "He lived in utter retirement at one corner of his magnificent palace, a melancholy instance of the results of extra­vagance."37

  The 6th Duke of Marlborough (1793-1857) was an entirely different proposition. In him seem to have fused the tough indepen­dent spirit of the Churchills and the intolerable amoral egoism of the Spencers. He had some of the qualities of a leader, and used them to base ends. Even as a boy he was first brought to notice for trouble- making. At Eton there was a headmaster called Keate, who took an inordinate pleasure in flogging boys. He boasted having flogged 200 in one day, and regretted not having flogged more. At last the boys rose in rebellion against the authoritarian rule, and ran amok in the "Keate riots"; one of the ringleaders was young Spencer-Churchill.

  Lord Monson said that the boy was "one of the handsomest lads I ever saw". In later years he was to turn his good looks to full advantage in a disreputable escapade. In 1817, while he was still styled Lord Blandford, he began a liaison with a seventeen-year-old girl, Susan Adelaide Law, who lived with her parents in Seymour Place, Bryanston Square. She quite obviously was infatuated with him. Before long, he had made her pregnant, and she bore him a daughter. She must have begged to be made a respectable woman (and a Marchioness), for though they were living together as Captain and Mrs Lawson and she received an allowance from Marl­borough funds, she was still only Miss Law. Blandford then staged a bogus marriage to satisfy her. The marriage took place in her father's house, with Blandford's brother as witness, and an officer in the army dressed up as a clergyman. Little Miss Law was completely deceived. She travelled with her "husband" to Scotland, where she said she was presented as the Marchioness of Blandford (though, predictably, neither of the lords she met on this occasion would corroborate her). She must have been the only person to be taken in by the farce, since it seems hardly likely her parents did not know the truth. However, the matter became public knowledge when, years later, the Satirist newspaper stated that Lord Blandford's subsequent marriage to Lord Galloway's daughter was bigamous, and that their children were bastards. The Blandfords had to take the matter to court, where the mock marriage was revealed, and it was also discovered the Duchess of Marlborough had been paying £400 a year to Miss Law (later reduced to £200), which went some way to redeem the Marl­borough name. For Blandford, the judge had some harsh words to say.38

  With his son, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, we come close to the present day. The 7th Duke (1822-1883) married Fanny, daughter of Lord Londonderry, and their youngest son was Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Sir Winston. In fact, Winston Churchill was heir presumptive to the dukedom of Marlborough until he was eighteen; if his uncle had not had a son, Winston could have been a duke.

  In the lifetime of the 7th Duke there erupted another family scandal, in which all the Spencer-Churchill foibles of arrogance, quarrelsomeness, pig-headedness, and tempestuous obstinacy were brought into play. It revolved around the Marquess of Blandford, the eldest son, Randolph's brother and Winston's uncle. He had mar­ried Bertha Hamilton, daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, a good- hearted but rather silly girl, known to her family as "Goosie". In an age which delighted in practical jokes, Goosie was the worst offender; she amused herself putting inkpots over the door when her husband walked in, placing a celluloid baby on his breakfast tray instead of a poached egg, as well as the full gamut of apple-pie beds and tied pyjamas. Aristocratic ladies were bored to death in the nineteenth century not knowing what to do with themselves between meals and decorous gossip. The mania for practical jokes sprang from that boredom (and persists to this day in some aristocratic descendants). Bertha Blandford drove her husband mad with her insufferable tricks and it is no wonder that he looked elsewhere for affection.

  So started the Aylesford scandal, the details of which have often been related in print. Essentially, Blandford and Lady Aylesford decided to elope. That alone in mid-Victorian society was an incon­ceivable scandal, sinning against the law of do-as-you-will-so-long-as- you-do-not-admit-it. It was made worse by the involvement of the Prince of Wales. The Marlborough family and Lord and Lady Ayles­ford were in the Prince's "set", and Aylesford himself was with the Prince in India when the scandal broke. H.R.H. called Blandford a blackguard, whereupon Blandford's brother, irascible Lord Randolph, called upon the Princess of Wales and told her that the Prince him­self had known Lady Aylesford well, and had addressed compromis­ing letters to her, which he, Randolph, would publish so that the Prince would never sit on the throne of England. It was bald black­mail. In the turmoil which followed, the Prince escaped unscathed, the Aylesfords were ruined, and the Marlborough family was tem­porarily banished from the best circles. The old Duke was made bitterly unhappy, although it must be said he showed precious little understanding of his son's dilemma. Tempers were raw, no one stopped to reason calmly (except Blandford, who wrote his father some cogent literate letters which did no good at all but which revealed some of the Churchill power for expression in prose).

  From this date, too, appears an unbreachable gulf between fathers and sons in the Marlborough sequence, reminiscent of the Russells, and most vividly' shown in Winston's relations with his father. Bertha Blandford was herself the daughter of a Russell, the Duchess of Abercorn.

  Bertha divorced her husband shortly before he became Duke, on the grounds of proven adultery with the Countess of Aylesford. The new Duke of Marlborough (1844-1892) married again, this time an American; the ceremony was performed by the Mayor of New York at the Tabernacle Baptists Church on 2 nd Avenue.

  We know something of the 9th Duke (1871-1934) through the memoirs of his wife, Consuelo Vanderbilt. Her story is particularly interesting because it represents one of the last instances of a purely arranged marriage, in which love played no part. English ducal families had taken such marriages in their stride as a necessary con­tribution towards maintaining rank, in itself far more important than happiness, and few women sacrificed in this way ever saw fit to com­plain. Consuelo was different. From sturdy independent American stock, she had no worship for the idea of family.

  Consuelo Vanderbilt was the daughter of one of the handful of truly wealthy Americans. The Vanderbilt millions were legendary when the Duke of Marlborough began looking around. Consuelo's mother had everything that money could buy, ten times over, but one thing eluded her - status. Mrs Vanderbilt determined that her daughter would marry into the English aristocracy. Consuelo was a vic
tim of material ambition, and of dwindling funds in ducal pockets. She lived at a time when it was more and more common for British dukes to protect their assets by marrying American heiresses - May Goelet married the Duke of Roxburghe in 1903 and Helena Zimmerman became Duchess of Manchester in 1900. Both women were friends of the Vanderbilts; indeed, Consuelo was named after a previous American Duchess of Manchester, her godmother - Consuelo Iznaga del Valle.

  Mrs Vanderbilt was quite merciless in the pursuit of her aims. Once she had the Duke of Marlborough in her sights, no amount of tears or protests from her daughter would shift her. Consuelo was already in love with someone else, so she had to be imprisoned in her own house to make sure she would never meet him. She was not allowed out, her letters were intercepted and read, and her outgoing mail was censored. Cunningly, Mrs Vanderbilt let it be known that her daughter would consider an approach from the Duke. A meeting was arranged. They did not like each other at all, but that was not the point. He, too, was in love with someone else, who was not suit­able. He was not slow to see the advantage, financially speaking, of such a union. For the sake of the continued wealth of the Marl- boroughs, he was prepared to sacrifice himself. We do not know if he considered the sacrifice she was making; perhaps there was none, in his eyes. He was giving her the rank of a duchess and the privilege of belonging to the Churchill family. "When I broke the news of our engagement to my brothers," wrote Consuelo, "Harold observed, 'He is only marrying you for your money', and with this last slap to my pride I burst into tears.'"9

  And so they were wed, in 1896. There was not the merest surge of love between the two from the beginning. They remained strangers to each other. They had children, including the 10th Duke, but their characters were irreconcilable. The Duchess tells how their meals together at Blenheim would be painfully silent, the Duke staring into space and she bored to desperation; mealtimes with Herbrand, nth Duke of Bedford, and his wife were exactly the same.

  Consuelo's first meeting with the Dowager Duchess, Fanny, was frightening. She was told she must keep up the prestige of the family at all costs, and she uttered a command which must serve as one of the highest ironies in British history. "Your first duty is to have a child," she said, "and it must be a son, because it would be intoler­able to have that little upstart Winston become Duke. Are you in the family way?"40

  The marriage settlement gave the Duke £20,000 a year out of the Vanderbilt wealth, and income from a £500,000 fund. In the present generation this has been augmented by the millions she in herited from her father, and some of which she passed to her Marl­borough heirs. From that point of view, the marriage was a success. From the human view, however, it was disaster. From 1907, they lived apart, finally divorcing in 1921. She then married Jacques Balsan, and died in 1964. His second marriage was to another Ameri­can, Gladys Deacon, who knew Marcel Proust for years. She used to tell how Proust was fascinated by the sound of aristocratic names. He was most excited by the name Duchess of Northumberland. "Je vais l'annoncer," he said, got out of bed, opened wide the door, and yelled, "Madame la Duchesse de Northumberland,"41

  From Consuelo we also learn something of the Churchill character, which we can recognise in the Duke's antecedents and kinsmen. He had a passion for pageantry and magnificent spectacle (which Win­ston shared), but was otherwise a silent brooder. Many of the dukes have had a morbid, pessimistic dark nature.

  The 10th Duke of Marlborough (1897-1972), Consuelo's son, did his best to retrieve Blenheim from the gloom in which his unhappy father had plunged it. A great deal was spent on restoration in 1966 (the Ministry of Works contributing £55,000), and those great unwelcoming rooms, built to impress rather than to be comfortable, heard some laughter. He continued to live, however, in nineteenth- century fashion, choosing to ignore the changing times around him. He had wit, but a forbidding presence and gruff manner made those who came into contact with him uncomfortable. On one occasion, an American guest asked politely if he might try one of the Duke's excellent cigars, and received the abrupt reply, "They don't grow on trees, y'know." The 1st Duke would have understood. After a row with Randolph Churchill he is supposed to have shouted, "Never darken the doorstep of my palace again !"

  The Duke died only two months after his second marriage, to Laura Canfield, grand-daughter of the Earl of Wemyss, and was suc­ceeded in the honours by his son, the present Duke of Marlborough, born in 1926.

  And what honours! Apart from being Marquess of Blandford, Earl of Sunderland, Baron Spencer and Baron Churchill in this country, he is a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and Prince of Mindelheim, in Swabia, dignities which he holds by virtue of his descent from the 1st Duke of Marlborough. More impressive than any title is the sur­name he bears, for his ancestors and his kinsmen have elevated the name of Churchill above any peerage degree. From Sir Winston Churchill (1620-1688) to Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), the family strengths and weaknesses have produced with consistency either spectacular or lamentable personalities, but rarely an indifferent one. They are not the kind of people that can be ignored. Egotistical and explosive, they are fighters, who rise to a challenge and thrive on argument. They are not noted for their kindness. From the Sunderlands they inherit a passion for publicity, from Duchess Sarah a per­verse delight in confrontation, and from the 1st Duke a warmth of heart which has made them time and again an easy prey to love. One feels that the Churchills long to be sweet and gentle, but cannot help being harsh and forbidding.

  The 11th Duke of Marlborough was a captain in the Life Guards, then studied at an agricultural college. He has married three times, always with the din of public interest around his ears. At his first marriage, to Susan Hornby in 1951, the Queen (now Queen Mother), Queen Mary, and Princess Margaret were all present. The marriage was dissolved in 1960 on the grounds of his wife's adultery. A year later, in a chaotic Greek ceremony in Paris where newsgatherers were in greater number than guests, he married Athina Livanos, known to the world as "Tina" Onassis, as she had previously been married to Aristotle Onassis, the Greek ship­owner. Tina's life was a pathetic study in malignant fate. Though beautiful, and enclosed on all sides by millionaires, tragedy stalked her. By her marriage to Onassis, she had two children, a boy and a girl. Their son died in an air-crash at the age of twenty-four, and the daughter, Christina, has attempted suicide. Tina's sister twice married another millionaire Greek, Stavros Niarchos, before she, too, killed herself. Tina herself divorced Lord Blandford (he was not yet Duke) in 1971, and married her brother-in-law, the same Niarchos. Within two years, Tina was dead.

  Meanwhile, Blandford took as his third wife a Swedish countess, Rosita Douglas, who is the present Duchess of Marlborough. They have a son, born in 1974. Meanwhile, the heir, born in 1955, son of the first marriage to Susan Hornby, has had his indiscretions subjected to intense public scrutiny while his qualities go largely unnoticed. The Churchill saga seems likely to continue as colourfully as ever.

  The renown of the Duke of Wellington has been like a heavy hand clapped over the mouth of his descendants. So powerful is his legend, so brilliant his reputation, that they have remained forever in his shadow, borrowing their existence from him, speaking only to pay tribute to him. Until very recently, successive Dukes of Wellington were virtually unnoticeable. The life of the Iron Duke's son, who suc­ceeded as 2nd Duke (1807-1884), illustrates very clearly the emascu­lating effect of a father only one step short of a deity. He tried to enter public life, was Master of the Horse, a Knight of the Garter, and a Privy Councillor, but he did not make his mark. As he could not be as great as his father (who could?) he devoted himself to trying to please him. This was not so easy either. He was once asked whether his father had shown him any kindness, to which he replied, "No, he never even so much as patted me on the shoulder when I was a boy, but it was because he hated my mother."42 In adult life, too, Douro was always endeavouring to merit the love of his eminent father. On another occasion, when the great Duke was at Walmer Castle, the officers of a neighbouri
ng garrison called to pay their respects. The major at this garrison was Lord Douro, who thought it would be absurd to take part in the visit, as he saw his father every day in the normal course. Consequently, the Duke invited all the officers to dinner, except his own son, and during the meal said to the Colonel, "By the way, who is your major? for he has not called on me."48

  In the end, the 2nd Duke of Wellington dedicated his life in the service of his father. He edited the Iron Duke's correspendence in twenty-three volumes, an undertaking of such immensity that it can only have been a labour of love. "No son ever erected a finer monu­ment."44 Augustus Hare met the Duke when he was aged, "dressed like a poor pensioner", living at Stratfield Saye amongst the relics of his father. This was in 1875. "It was touching to see the old man, who for the greater part of his lifetime existed in unloving awe of a father he had always feared and been little noticed by, now, in the evening of life, treasuring up every reminiscence of him and con­sidering every memorial as sacred. In his close stuffy little room were the last pheasants the Duke had shot, the miniatures of his mother and aunt and of himself and his brother as children, his grand­father's portrait, a good one of Marshal Saxe, and the picture of the horse Copenhagen."46 He died, without fanfare, at Brighton railway station. The next two dukes were both his nephews, and the 5th Duke was his great-nephew. All three were inconspicuous, led military careers, and married modestly. In 1941 the 6th Duke of Wellington suc­ceeded (1912-1943); he was killed in action in the landing at Salerno, and is buried in Italy. His death at the age of thirty-one unexpectedly diverted the dukedom to his uncle, a clever diplomat and architect called Lord Gerald Wellesley (1885-1972), who was a son of the 4th Duke. Wellesley was well known before he came to the title, more so than the nephew whom he succeeded, for he and his wife, Dorothy Wellesley, were near the centre of literary and artistic life in London. Dorothy Wellesley was herself a distinguished poet, much admired by W. B. Yeats, with many volumes of verse to her credit. They were at home with the Bells, Vanessa and Clive, or the Nicolsons, Harold and Vita, more than in society drawing-rooms. Dorothy was a close friend of Vita Sackville-West (who, of course, was a fellow poet) and it was she who first saw Sissinghurst Castle and brought it to Vita and Harold's attention; then they bought it and made it the famous romantic house and garden it is today. Wellesley served in the diplomatic service in Petrograd, spoke fluent Russian, and revisited Russia in later years. He served in World War II. The restoration of Castle Hill in North Devonshire was the best known of his architectural projects. In later years he earned much admiration as an historian; it is not generally acknowledged that the keepers of museums and archives throughout the country held the Duke in very high regard, for he was a gentleman intellectual, informed in all branches of the arts and accomplished in many of them. He wrote five books, four of which were on the subject of his illustrious ancestor. His most precious inheritance was the great archive at Apsley House and Stratfield Saye which he and his librarian Francis Needham both skilfully arranged and preserved. His wife died in 1956, after a lifetime's suffering from neuritis of the extremities, which made the tips of her fingers permanently tense. The Duke spent the rest of his life bringing to public attention more and more information about the 1st Duke of Wellington.