The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (3 page)

After a few minutes the coach party was abruptly catapulted into daylight as the tunnel opened onto a gravelled driveway leading to the abbey. The great house itself was imposing enough: a Palladian-style building with turrets and an elaborate façade that seemed to yearn for a clear blue Italian sky, rather than the leaden English cloudscape that weighed upon it. The mansion was perched on the edge of a huge ornamental lake that stretched to the horizon. As the carriage drew closer, however, it was clear that the place was deserted and unkempt. The driveway at the entrance was covered in wild grass and builders’ rubble, and temporary planks had been placed to enable the carriage to reach the front door. The hall inside had no floor, and again temporary boards had been laid to allow the new residents to walk on it. The new duke and his party were met at the door by anxious estate staff: the agent, house steward, clerk of works and some others.

Upon closer inspection, it seemed that the only habitable part of Welbeck Abbey was the suite of rooms in the west wing of the house. These were the rooms that had lately been occupied by the bachelor 5th Duke. They were sparsely furnished: each room had double sets of brass letter boxes on the doors, one for letters in, and one for letters out. It was
explained to the puzzled visitors that this was how the late duke preferred to communicate with his staff, choosing to send and receive written messages, rather than speak directly to his servants. It was this obsessive need for privacy, and a desire not to be seen about his daily movements, that had led the 5th Duke to dig the underground roadway from the lodge to the abbey; and when he travelled in his carriage, it was always with the green silk blind tightly drawn. The duke’s carriage was unmarked, with no coat of arms or ducal coronet. Even when he arrived at the station to travel to and from London, he never left his own carriage, but had it lifted directly onto the goods wagon. The secrecy of the duke’s presence in the carriage was so complete that one day his coachman offloaded the coach from the train at the station in London and, thinking it empty, stopped at a local inn for a drink. He was startled out of his senses to hear his Grace’s impatient voice from inside the carriage, asking him if he did not think it time to drive on.

Scandalous rumours circulated about the 5th Duke of Portland. It was said, for instance, that his Grace had a dead body housed in a box on the roof of his flat at Hyde Park Gardens. The rumours were so persistent that the local health-and-safety officials actually came to inspect the flat. In the event, they found nothing but a great glass enclosure on the roof, apparently built for the purposes of enjoying the view. If he went out at all, the duke mainly travelled at night, a lantern strapped to his belt; and when he did venture forth during the daytime, he usually wore two or even three overcoats (whatever the weather), a very tall hat and high collar, and carried a vast umbrella, behind which he would attempt to
hide if addressed by anyone (the duke was extremely attached to umbrellas, and never travelled without one under his arm, rain or shine). Staff at Welbeck were ordered not to greet the duke personally if they encountered him on the estate, or even acknowledge his presence unless spoken to first, on pain of immediate dismissal. They were to pay no more attention to him than as if ‘he were a tree’.

And yet, despite such eccentricities, the 5th Duke was known as a kindly and generous employer, always willing to assist any of the many workmen on his premises. He provided them with donkeys to carry them to and from work, and umbrellas to take shelter from the rain. He also had a large skating rink built in the pleasure garden, and encouraged the housemaids to skate. If he encountered one of them sweeping the rooms or the stairs, he would send the terrified girl out to skate – whether she wanted to or not. An elderly worker on the Welbeck estate recalled how, if the men worked overtime after 5.20 p.m., the duke would give them bread, cheese and beer, tobacco and cigars. Sometimes his Grace would bring the tobacco out himself. Sometimes he would stop a little way off, quietly listening to the men singing. It was said that he preferred the company of servants to his social equals.

Thoroughly exhausted by their long journey, the members of the new duke’s party retired to bed, Charlie, the sickly half-brother, being accommodated as best he could in the chilly rooms. When the party embarked on a full exploration of the house the next day, they found that – apart from the ducal suite – it was entirely empty. All the rooms were painted pink, with parquet floors, bare of any furniture save that each had a ‘convenience’ in the corner – completely exposed to public view. In one room lay a huge stack of paintings: Old Masters, and other priceless treasures. Many were cut out of their frames, and all were dusty and neglected. In the great kitchen there was a large cooking spit, where a chicken used to be kept permanently roasting for the 5th Duke. He would eat one half in the morning, and the other in the evening. Rare Gobelins tapestries tumbled out of long tin boxes, preserved with peppercorns. One room was lined with stacks of green boxes, in each of which was a dark brown wig. In other cupboards were boxes of cream Balbriggan socks and white silk handkerchiefs. Some of the handkerchiefs were embroidered with the initials ‘SP’ for ‘Scott Portland’, others with the ducal coronet. Yet others carried mysterious initials, such as ‘LL’, ‘HH’ or ‘T’. These were thought, at the time, to be the locations in which they were kept.

Most extraordinary of all, however, was the vast network of underground tunnels, passages and rooms that the 5th Duke had constructed. These criss-crossed beneath the abbey in a vast labyrinth, like a Nottinghamshire Palace of Knossos. The 5th Duke seemed to have inherited more than a share of the mania for building that characterized his distant ancestor, Bess of Hardwick. In his case, however, the results were below, rather than above, ground. There was a tunnel over one thousand yards in length, leading from the house to the colossal riding school that the duke had built. This was wide enough for several people to walk side by side. A longer and more elaborate tunnel, one and a half miles long and intended as a carriage drive broad enough for two carriages to pass, led towards Worksop, although this had been abandoned a few years before. Railway lines ran along some of the tunnels
between the kitchen and dining rooms, so that food could be conveyed in heated trucks.

Radiating out from the tunnels was a network of underground rooms. Three of these were very large and the third was truly immense, being a hundred and sixty feet long and sixty feet wide. The underground rooms were painted pink like the rooms above them, with skylights in the roof to let in the daylight. These skylights could be seen above ground, where they appeared as circular glass windows set at the edge of the paths that tracked over the estate. The skylights had been installed, at intervals of twenty feet, to light and ventilate the underground rooms and tunnels. Even today, both tunnels and skylights are marked on Ordnance Survey maps of the area.

The largest underground room, which had been intended originally as a church, was later used as a ballroom. And yet the 5th Duke never entertained. The whole place was a construction site: shovels, wheelbarrows and builders’ rubble lay everywhere. For the child Ottoline, there was ‘no beauty in these rooms – they were just vast, rather bare, empty rooms, and except for the top lighting, one would not have been aware that they were sunk into the earth.’ The only relief from the endless miles of pink walls was the ceiling of the old riding school, which the 5th Duke – in what must have been an unaccustomed fit of gaiety – had painted in soft and rosy sunset hues, before lining the walls with mirrors, ‘leaving the mock sunset to shine on the lonely figure reflected a hundred times in the mirrors around him’.

The new duke shuddered at the chilly emptiness of the cavernous space that he had inherited, and was minded simply to shut it up and leave. However, his stepmother – a kindly but formidable lady – persuaded him to stay and do his duty. She then set about making something approaching a normal home out of the vast mausoleum of Welbeck Abbey, ordering furniture from London, trawling through attic rooms and chests, beginning the immense task of cataloguing the abandoned treasures of the neglected mansion.

Nobody knew why the 5th Duke had lived the extraordinary life that he had led, or the cause of his extreme shyness and withdrawal from the world. It was known for him to disappear, for months at a time, in his network of underground warrens. It was true that he did suffer from a mysterious skin complaint, a disfiguring condition that was possibly one reason for his retirement from public view. Some spoke of madness inherited from his mother Henrietta (modern psychological analysis might point to a form of autism). Others said his desire to hide away was in some way connected with the sudden death of his younger brother, Lord George Bentinck.

A marked contrast to his introverted elder brother, Lord George had been a flamboyant figure in public life and politics. He had been both a notable racehorse owner, and prominent supporter of the Conservative politician, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli had been engaged, during the 1840s, in a battle with the then prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, over the controversial proposed repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws. It was due to the campaigning of Lord George that a large number of peers were persuaded to oppose Peel, winning the support of country gentlemen who would otherwise have been deeply suspicious of Disraeli – an Anglicized Sephardic Jew and novelist-turned-politician. Lord George’s untimely
death at the age of forty-six in September 1848 – officially from a heart attack in a field near Welbeck on his way to a dinner at a neighbouring estate – had long been the subject of colourful rumour. There were those who speculated that his involvement in horseracing had led to a quarrel with William Palmer, also known as the ‘Rugeley Poisoner’, and that he was poisoned by Palmer as a result. Palmer was a doctor who poisoned a number of victims with strychnine in the 1840s and 1850s, for their insurance policies and to feed his gambling habit. The idea that he had murdered Lord George was fanciful to say the least, but the whispers circulated even among the highest circles.

Even more persistent, however, was the rumour that the 5th Duke, then the Marquess of Titchfield, was somehow involved in his younger brother’s death. The rumour was fuelled by whispers that the Marquess of Titchfield had been at or near the scene of Lord George’s collapse. The exact whereabouts of the marquess at the time of his brother’s death was never definitively established, and several eye-witnesses at the inquest testified that he might have been present at the time and place where Lord George died. A labourer named John Evans, his son and a woodman named John Mee, all said that they saw someone at the spot, and that they thought it was the Marquess of Titchfield.

Madness, guilt, eccentricity, subterfuge: whatever lay behind the 5th Duke’s peculiar behaviour, the person least likely to know the truth of the matter was his successor William, the 6th Duke. William had never met his eccentric forebear in life, and only set eyes on him when he was called to see the 5th Duke’s body laid out after his death. The new duke was perfectly content to accept his distant cousin’s behaviour as a harmless, if expensive, eccentricity: a peculiar fetish for burrowing which any Englishman was entitled to indulge in his own home, if he had the means and inclination to do so. The 6th Duke had the reputation, among his contemporaries, of being a ‘good fellow’ – a phrase that, at the time, carried with it a specific set of connotations. Like most men of his class and generation, he asked few questions and simply got on with the job of settling into his strange new home, transforming its echoing underground vaults into buzzing reception rooms and ballrooms to entertain the highest of high society. Under William’s regime, the old house crept out of the shadows: Welbeck Abbey began to look less like a building site and more like a stately home.

In 1889 – at the age of thirty-two, ten years after he inherited the dukedom – the 6th Duke married Winifred Dallas-Yorke. Although she came from an ancient Lincolnshire family, Winifred was not among the obvious, titled candidates for the 6th Duke’s hand. ‘Willy and Winnie’, as they were known to their friends, entertained in lavish style at Welbeck, which was now to play host to some of the most famous people of the age. Both Queen Victoria and Edward, Prince of Wales, were guests there, as were the Duke and Duchess of Sparta, the Crown Prince and Princess of Greece and – a quarter-century later – the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, shortly before his assassination in Sarajevo in 1914. As Master of the Horse under Lord Salisbury’s government, William was an important member of the Royal household staff. He masterminded, among other great ceremonial events, the arrangements for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

Winifred, the new Duchess of Portland, was nearly six feet in height and considered one of the great beauties of her generation. The artist John Singer Sargent memorably captured her in a portrait of 1902 – a full-length canvas in which Winnie is revealed standing against a Corinthian column. The scale of the painting emphasizes her statuesque height, and the evening light heightens the dramatic contrast of her black hair against her crimson cloak and white gown. Winnie concentrated on supporting her husband in his role as a great landowner, throwing herself into charitable work and the life of the estate. It was a time of glittering balls, weekend parties and rifle shoots, the heyday of the English country house. Exchanges were organized between the house parties at Welbeck and the neighbouring ‘Dukeries’ estate of Clumber, owned by the Duke of Newcastle. Autumn and winter were the seasons for fox-hunting and shooting, when the valley echoed with gunshots and the abbey dining tables were loaded with pheasants, partridges, hare and rabbit. Summer was the season for lawn tennis and croquet, when gentlemen in boaters and ladies with parasols idled the hours away to the lazy strains of a gramophone. They were waited on by the abbey servants at picnic tables spread with a delicious array of exotic delicacies such as caviar, truffles and foie gras. Winnie herself presided over her guests with dignity, ignoring the fickleness of fashion by choosing to stick to her favourite fan-shaped Medici lace collar, paired with a spray of Malmaison carnations. She had an innate sense of the grandeur of her position. Once, when lost in London, she was obliged to ask her way of a policeman. On being given directions, she said: ‘The City? I have only been here in processions.’ Willy and Winnie’s first child, Lady Victoria, was followed by a son, William Arthur Henry, who became the new Marquess of Titchfield. The future of the Portland dukedom seemed to be assured.