Although he was always shy, in his youth the 5th Duke of Portland had not been the eccentric recluse that he was to become in later years. Known to his friends and family as Lord John, he joined the army in 1818 to serve a relatively undistinguished career, becoming lieutenant and captain in the Grenadier Guards in 1830. On the death of his elder brother in 1824, he succeeded him as heir-apparent to the dukedom, taking the title of Marquess of Titchfield. He also – reluctantly – replaced his brother as Tory MP for King’s Lynn. On the day he was elected, he did not even attend the hustings: his uncle, Lord William Bentinck, filled his place. Sir William Folkes (who lost to the marquess by 177 to 89 votes) remarked, somewhat caustically:
To the present Marquess I feel not the slightest hostility. He is, however, a perfect stranger to you; you have never seen him – perhaps you never will see him; and I must say that had it not been for that most useful work ‘The Peerage’ I should never have known that such a person existed.
In the event, the marquess served as MP for only two years, gladly giving up the seat to his uncle Lord William, having little taste for active politics. He even delegated the writing of his farewell speech to his father, the 4th Duke.
Timid and endlessly plagued by mysterious ailments, Lord John never matched up to his brilliant younger brother. On the face of it, Lord George seemed a much better embodiment of the Cavendish-Bentinck tradition of political and public service, begun by the original Hans-Willem Bentinck, and epitomized by the 3rd Duke of Portland, who had twice been prime minister of Great Britain. The old 4th Duke was not slow to express his impatience at the shortcomings of his heir as compared to his younger son, and rumour had it that relations between the marquess and his father were less than cordial. It was an odd circumstance that, when the old duke died in 1854, Lord John was absent from the funeral. A contemporary newspaper report stated simply that ‘the present Duke of Portland was prevented by illness from attending’. Nor was the new heir to the dukedom a favourite of his mother: the old duchess never forgave Lord John for surviving her favourite eldest son, and the marquess was noticeably absent from her funeral as well.
As far as the female sex was concerned, there was only one woman whose name was publicly linked to the 5th Duke. This was the opera singer Adelaide Kemble, with whom the duke fell in love when he was Marquess of Titchfield. Adelaide was the strikingly handsome younger daughter of the actor Charles Kemble. Her aunt, Sarah Siddons, was the most famous stage actress of the age. So intense were the marquess’ feelings that he would haunt the Opera House at Covent Garden when Adelaide was performing, sending her gifts and passionate letters. He commissioned the fashionable society portraitist, John Hayter, to reproduce Adelaide’s likeness from every angle, lending the artist his private box at the Opera House to enable him the better to study his subject. Unfortunately, the marquess’ passion for the stately diva was unreturned. When he did, finally, pluck up the courage to offer her his hand, he was rejected. This was probably for the very good reason that Adelaide was, at that point, engaged to another man: she married the businessman Edward John Sartoris in 1843, whereupon she retired from her brief, but brilliant, stage career. Called to Cavendish Square by urgent dispatch one windy evening, the portraitist Hayter found the marquess icily alone in the gloom of the drawing room at Harcourt House. Every one of the dozens of portraits of Adelaide that hung in the room had been turned to face the wall. ‘Take them, Hayter,’ said the marquess, with a grandly desolate sweep of the arm. The artist duly took away the offending paintings, which remained with him long after the 5th Duke’s death and until his own, whereupon they reverted to Welbeck Abbey. There they hang to this day, a melancholy testimony to the 5th Duke’s unrequited passion.
After the Adelaide affair, the 5th Duke seemed – at least, to the outside world – to take no further interest in women. This led to a certain amount of speculation. ‘None of the three Bentinck brothers was married, and none of them was likely to marry,’ wrote Lady Londonderry, a family friend, without further comment. It was rumoured that there was some mysterious physical or psychological reason why the 5th Duke could not marry or have children. In recent years, it has been mooted that he was a repressed homosexual.
In the winter of 1851–2, the duke was involved in a serious accident, in which the wheel of a horse-drawn cab actually passed over his head, injuring him severely. From that moment on, he could no longer bear to sit on a horse or listen to music. Already fragile in health, he became a veritable hypochondriac. In the view of his closest friends, this was the point at which his eccentricity started to increase.
Whether because of his rejection by Adelaide Kemble, the strange circumstances of his younger brother’s sudden death, the physical or psychological consequences of his carriage accident or some other unknown cause, the marquess began progressively to withdraw into his own, private phantasmagoria of shadows. Until 1864, he was most often to be found at Harcourt House rather than Welbeck Abbey. (The fact that the duke resided mainly in London until 1864, the year of T. C. Druce’s supposed death, was cited in support of the double-identity theory.) A tall, spare figure, a good five feet nine inches in height,* his Grace was notorious for his sallow complexion, said to be a side-effect of his skin complaint.
That the 5th Duke suffered from some form of skin disease is certain, but the precise nature of the ailment remains a mystery. References to the duke’s ‘unhealthy pallor’ are numerous, and he appears from his behaviour – including his preference for darkened rooms, blinded carriages and underground tunnels – to have been extremely chary of daylight. There was speculation in the newspapers that he suffered from smallpox, and his wig-maker believed that he had a form of eczema. In one of his letters the duke referred to an ‘intense irritation of the skin’, incurable by medication, relief from which could only be obtained by bathing in scalding then cold water, bleeding with a lancet, or sleeping between wet sheets. One of his valets, Henry Powell, recollected that the eruptions – which took place very frequently, especially in the springtime – caused the duke great inconvenience. At such times, ‘he could not bear to have his clothes on, and would wear loose flannel trousers and a jacket’.
Long averse to red meat, the duke in later years took to dining on chicken alone – in the morning and evening only, and never at lunchtime. This was, of course, exactly the reverse of Druce, who ate only at lunchtime (and also disliked red meat), and it therefore became another argument to support the idea that the two men were one and the same person. Like Druce, the 5th Duke was abstemious in the extreme: he was a non-smoker, and had a marked dislike of alcohol, save for the occasional glass of champagne. His dress, always eccentric, became increasingly peculiar. Already famed for his tall silk hat and stiff, upturned collars, he took to carrying around with him the umbrella for which he became notorious. He started to tie his trousers up around his ankles in the fashion of a navvy, no doubt inspired by the habit of the workmen toiling in the mud at Welbeck Abbey.
All of the 5th Duke’s clothes were supplied by Messrs Batt & Co. of Lower Seymour Street, Portman Square. He was the best customer they ever had. Years later, the son of the firm, Mr Charles Batt, recalled how the duke always bought his clothes in sets: three sets of overcoats and frock coats, twelve pairs of trousers, thirty night-caps, and sixty pieces of under-linen at a time. The peculiarity of the sets of coats was that the second had to be a trifle larger than the first, and the third a trifle larger than the second. This enabled the duke to put on and take off extra coats, according to the weather. If it froze, the duke would wear all six coats at once – the overcoats on top of the frock coats. They were distinguished by tabs of different colours for each set of coats (green for the first set, blue for the second and red for the third). Within each set, they were identified by the number of tabs (one tab for the first coat, two for the second and three for the third). In his Reminiscences of the Turf, the trainer and jockey William Day recalled of the 5th Duke:
He once came to Da
nesbury in the height of summer, dressed in a long, heavy sable fur coat, that nearly touched the ground when he stood erect – a garment I should have thought more calculated to resist the inclemency of a Siberian winter than the overpowering heat of a midsummer day.
The duke’s trousers were always made of the same grey fabric, of different thicknesses for summer and winter. Once, he returned twelve pairs of trousers because they weighed an ounce and a half more than those of the year before. After this, Messrs Batt & Co. bought a pair of scales, and made the clothes to weight, as well as measure. His under-linen was made of silk, embroidered with the ducal coronet, the initials ‘S.P.’ (for ‘Scott-Portland’), the number of the set, and the year of delivery. Occasionally, sets with other, unexplained initials were ordered – as when the duke asked for a new ‘L.S.’ set to be delivered with the ‘coronet’ set, to weigh in at 3 ounces heavier than the previous set.
The 5th Duke was also very fond of wigs: bouffant creations that made his long, lean face more cadaverous still. Thomas Keetley, his coachman, recalled that one day he was riding with him in the park at Welbeck during the fawning season when a fawn suddenly sprang out of the bracken and frightened the duke’s pony, which bolted off under a tree. A branch knocked off both the duke’s hat and wig – revealing that his Grace was quite bald underneath. The duke’s chosen wig-maker was none other than Messrs Truefitt & Co. of Bond Street, who also numbered T. C. Druce among their clients. The foreman of the firm had a vivid recollection of his first wig-fitting visit to Harcourt House in the 1850s. On arriving at the forbidding front door of the duke’s London residence at eight o’clock in the morning, the wig-maker spied an ancient butler peering at him through the glass. After a tremendous amount of unbolting of rusty locks, the door was opened, and he was escorted upstairs to a room honeycombed with pigeonholes. Each pigeonhole contained a wig – no fewer than five or six hundred of them in all. In the half-lit chamber sat the duke, face muffled, waiting to be fitted. Every six months or so, the wig-maker would be summoned. The ritual was always the same: an appointment at eight o’clock sharp in the morning, the same ancient butler, the same journey to the wig-lined room, and the duke waiting alone in the darkened room. There was never any conversation, save for instructions relating to the fitting of the wig.
The extreme fastidiousness manifested by the 5th Duke in his dress was reflected in his personal habits. His Grace’s servants were frequently called upon on Sundays to help him arrange and rearrange his books, of which he had a vast number. He would file great quantities of newspapers, carefully marked and arranged in bundles. His papers were always ironed before they were handed to him. If the 5th Duke wanted money – whether silver or coppers – every coin had to be carefully washed before he would touch it. (Cab drivers frequently thought the sparkling coppers too good to be true.) Perhaps with the memory of his terrible accident all too fresh in his mind, his Grace would refuse to step into a new carriage until the carriage-maker had taken a turn in it first, to demonstrate that it was safe.
After 1864, the duke spent more and more time at Welbeck Abbey. It was at this time that he embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious programme of building works: new lodges, workmen’s dwellings, a new riding school, a glass-covered exercise ground (known as ‘the Gallop’, over a quarter of a mile long), stables, dairies, workshops, a church, museum and picture gallery – to say nothing of the labyrinth of passages underground, in which his Grace might be found wandering at any hour of day or night. The duke, in fact, appeared to be withdrawing gradually from all human contact.
Communication with staff was conducted via written notes placed in heavy brass letter boxes outside the ducal suite – the very boxes which were later to be noted by the sharp-eyed, six-year-old Ottoline, on her first visit to Welbeck. When the duke wished to converse with a servant, he would place a note in the letter box and ring his bell. In the room he usually occupied was a large trapdoor, set in the floor. If his Grace wanted the suite to be cleaned, he would place a memorandum to this effect in his letter box, pull the bell and disappear through the trapdoor, until the work was completed. The duke’s bedroom, moreover, was most curiously arranged: the bed was large, square and shut in with doors, so that when they were closed, it was impossible to tell if the bed were occupied or not. As his own valet conceded, ‘He might have been in the house for weeks at a time without my being aware of it. I only knew he was there by getting written orders, either to provide his meals or other attentions.’
Whether the 5th Duke faked his death as T. C. Druce in 1864 or not, there is no doubt that he left Welbeck Abbey for the last time on Sunday, 1 September 1878. For a year he lay ailing at Harcourt House, and finally died there on 6 December 1879. On his own instructions, the 5th Duke’s funeral was an understated affair. He had asked in his will that the burial expenses ‘be as small as possible consistently with decency’, that the funeral take place early in the morning, and that the usual attendance of family be dispensed with. Accordingly, he was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, with minimal ceremony.
Withdrawn from the world in his secret ducal suite and underground passages, shut up in his darkened carriage, possessed of a multitude of wigs, tall hats and muffling collars, the movements of the 5th Duke had been a mystery even to his closest aides. If he had chosen, like so many of his neighbours, to adopt a secret identity, would anyone have been any the wiser?
In any event, a certain determined lady from Marylebone had been doing some digging of her own.
* The average height of the Victorian male was about five feet six inches.
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Sermon by JOHN BALL,
a leader of the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Revolt
August 1898, in the south of England, was sunny, warm and unusually dry. In the long, sultry afternoons that blended imperceptibly into twilight, there was one subject alone that – more than the Dreyfus affair or the Fashoda incident – animated the conversation of bowler-hatted commuters in the packed carriages of suburban trains; one subject that was sure to spark off a lively discussion over the dinner table; one subject that was eagerly debated over cigars in the overstuffed armchairs of private members’ clubs. That subject was, naturally, the Druce case. Everybody agreed that it was quite the best ‘rummy go’ since the Tichborne case, over twenty years before.
The Tichborne case had been the legal cause célèbre of the 1870s. The baronetcy dated from 1601, when Sir Benjamin Tichborne was knighted by Elizabeth I. His descendants inherited great wealth, together with the position of one of the leading titled families in England. In 1854, Roger Tichborne, heir to the baronetcy, disappeared in a shipwreck off the coast of South America. He was widely accepted to have drowned, the insurance was paid, and his will proved. The only person who refused to accept his death was his mother, the Dowager Lady Tichborne. Clinging to the belief that her son was still alive, Lady Tichborne advertised extensively in newspapers the world over for anybody with information to come forward. A butcher calling himself Thomas Castro, from Wagga Wagga, Australia, duly presented himself in 1866, claiming to be the missing heir.
Despite his unrefined manners and coarse appearance, Lady Tichborne embraced the claimant as her son. She gave him an allowance of £1000 a year, accepted his illiterate wife as her daughter-in-law, and handed over to him the letters and diaries of her missing son. He gained an enormous following, with hundreds of people signing a petition for his claim to be recognized. Other Tichborne relatives, however, were convinced that the would-be claimant to the Tichborne title was one Arthur Orton from Wapping, who had sailed for Chile in the early 1850s and ended up in Australia. At a civil trial that lasted from 1871 to 1872, over a hundred people swore that Castro was indeed the missing baronet. However, a very strong point against him was the absence of certain tattoo marks borne by the original Roger Tichborne. In the event, he lost the civil case and was subsequently tried for perjury in 187
3, found guilty, and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.
For a time, the man from Wagga Wagga was a popular hero. When, in 1875, Parliament unanimously rejected a motion by his counsel, Dr Kenealy, to refer the case to a Royal Commission, there were threats of a riot in London, and the military had to be held in readiness. He was finally released in 1884, by which time the fickle public had lost interest in him. He died, destitute and in oblivion in 1898 – the year Mrs Druce first brought her claim before Chancellor Tristram. The Tichborne mystery was a legal and factual puzzle that was never resolved. Everybody had a theory as to the truth of the matter. Chancellor Tristram himself had been one of the lawyers involved in the case, and had his own views on the affair. His suspicion, he told his colleagues, was that the claimant was an illegitimate brother of the lost baronet.
The Druce–Portland affair differed from the Tichborne case in many respects, but they did both tap into issues of pressing concern to the late Victorian public: social anxiety about an increasing class fluidity, coupled with resentment at a society which, still rigidly organized according to class divisions, refused to grant due recognition to those who had climbed the ladder on merit. In the eighteenth century, there had been little doubt as to who could claim the status of a ‘gentleman’. The term defined a specific class of people, essentially the landed gentry, about whose membership there was little dispute. During the course of the nineteenth century, that situation was to be revolutionized. The increasing impact of industrialization, the advent of ‘new money’ in the form of fortunes coming from far-flung regions previously considered off the social map – the industrial north, the countries of the New World – all made the definition of the term ‘gentleman’ increasingly open to debate. ‘New money’ was making wealthy men of businessmen as opposed to the traditional, landowning classes. A new, more flexible definition of the word ‘gentleman’ was therefore required. In Dickens’ novel Great Expectations (1861), set in the late Georgian period, the hero Pip, an orphan who inherits a fortune from a secret bene-factor, starts life aspiring to be a ‘gentleman’ in the wrong sense: not someone to be distinguished for his chivalry, self-sacrifice and heroic conduct, but rather a swell or a dandy, idling away his time on gambling and drinking with the rowdy group of young men who form the fast set of ‘The Finches of the Grove’. This is the image of the ‘gentleman’ represented by Regency dandies, the most prominent of which was ‘Beau’ Brummel. Generally, they were middle-class men trying to ape aristocratic manners, like the dissolute chancer Dazzle in Boucicault’s comedy of 1841, London Assurance:
The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse Page 5
