The Dukes (2 page)
The twenty-six non-royal dukes are still working, ruminating,
managing estates and avoiding attention much as before. They
share, for the most part, an ineradicable shyness, of which there are
many extravagant examples in the pages that follow, and prefer not
to be noticed by any save their family, and dependants. Some succeed better than others. The Duke of Devonshire is constantly in
the news, much to his chagrin, not only because he has embraced
the responsibilities attendant upon his station by accepting
onerous public duties, but because the Duchess's formidable
family (the Mitfords) has been the subject of half a dozen books in
the last twelve years as well as a musical stage version of their early
years together. There is, of course, nothing a Duchess can do to
deflect fame of this sort; it is the penalty of having a clutch of
uncommon sisters. She has herself written a history of Chatsworth,
called
The House,
which is quite the most entertaining account so far
written, and incidentally has revealed her to be as gifted with words
as her sisters Nancy, Jessica and Diana. For his part, the duke has
achieved the impossible by securing the future of Chatsworth for
generations to come in the face of mountains of legislation
designed to prevent landowners passing on anything at all. That
will be his enduring accomplishment, and one of which he will have
every right to be proud.
The Duke of Rutland has won a long battle to deter prospectors
from undermining Belvoir Castle and destroying one of the last oases
of pristine beauty in the country, earning the gratitude of people
who live there if not that of people who think progress a virtue
whatever the cost. The Duke of St Albans, living in the south of
France, has been gratified to watch his grandson Lord Vere, a
student at Hertford College, Oxford, grow towards a sharing of his
own conviction (supported by some academics) that the family is
descended from the man who
really
wrote Shakespeare's plays - the
last de Vere Earl of Oxford. We may expect to see a resurrection of
this literary mystery when he eventually becomes Duke.
The heir to the Duke of Fife, Lord Macduff, has adopted the
ducal style well ahead of time. Working in the City of London, he
has been known to strike an assembled company of stockbrokers
with awe at his approach. There is something still to be said for the
view I first promulgated twelve years ago, that when one is in the
presence of a duke one is aware that he is set apart from other
members of the nobility - a giant in the magnificence of his ancestry,
in the splendour of his genetic luggage, in the distinction of his
manner. It is no accident that dukes take precedence over government ministers, envoys and bishops.
Brian Masters
London,1988
Introduction
The title of duke is the rarest honour which the Crown may bestow
on a person not of royal blood. It is next to the Crown itself in degree,
[1]
above every other subject in the realm, including those who hold
dignities of much greater antiquity in the peerage, such as earls and
barons, in existence long before the first duke was created 651 years
ago. They are addressed officially by the monarch as "right trusty
and entirely beloved cousins", and by everyone else as "Your Grace".
They are the only peers whose title cannot be disguised by a generic
style of address; whereas the Marquess of Anglesey, the Earl of Lichfield, Viscount Cowdray and Baron Teviot are levelled to the same
degree in conversation as "Lord Anglesey", "Lord Lichfield", "Lord
Cowdray", and "Lord Teviot", a duke is never a lord, always the
"Duke of Such-and-such", and they would address each other, unless
they were related or close, as "Duke". Their special status has
allowed them to preserve an aura which even today can make the
rest of us if not tremble at least defer with some inherited sense of
hierarchy. The aura is now all that is left of the privileges attached to
a dukedom, once so extensive as to paralyse the imagination. They are
not even all aristocrats any more. None, it is true, can claim to have
emerged from the working class; there have been no trade-union
dukedoms created in the twentieth century, nor even any granted to
the get-rich-quick boys in the property world. Some of the dukes,
however, have a trickle of workmen's blood in their veins, due to
some bizarre marriages in the past, and of the twenty-six still going,
half a dozen are invincibly middle-class.
In common with other peers until the reforms of the nineteenth
century, the dukes enjoyed privileges which seem scarcely credible.
They were above the law. They could commit crime and escape the
jurisdiction of the courts; no one could arrest them; they could run
up debts to infinity without punishment; they had control of
Parliament, many seats in the House of Commons being within the
gift of a handful of noblemen, especially the dukes; they were the
government of the land, in fact if not in appearance; they were
England. "Flattered, adulated, deferred to, with incomes enormously
increased by the Industrial Revolution, and as yet untaxed, all-
powerful over a tenantry as yet unenfranchised, subject to no ordinary
laws, holding the government of the country firmly in their hands and
wielding through their closely-knit connections an unchallengeable
social power, the milords of England were the astonishment and
admiration of Europe."
1
All this has thankfully gone. There is not a duke alive today who
would wish for a return of such subservience or would attempt to
justify such power. Gone, too, are some of the more absurd accoutrements of a ducal life - the personal trumpeter to announce one's
presence, the retinue of personal servants, sometimes well over a
hundred individuals, the pomposity of privilege. The modern dukes
would not dare indulge in the antics of their forbears - requiring
other people to wind their watches for them, or to hand them their
dinner-plates wearing white kid gloves - for fear of being laughed to
scorn. Yet some such habits have continued until within the last
twenty years. The late Duke of Portland could talk of having bought
a Rolls-Royce "off the peg" in Newcastle without the consciousness
of humour. Many of the houses in which dukes live still have a
personal staff of up to twenty persons, including cooks, butler, valet,
"nanny", and chars, although such a staff no longer makes them
singular - foreign ambassadors from communist countries can employ
more.
Twenty of the dukes live in beautiful houses built at a time when
the English aesthetic sense was at its most developed, houses far too
big for them, in parks and grounds of ravishing beauty. One has
chosen a nomadic life - the Duke of Bedford; two have exiled themselves to Africa - Manchester and Montrose; one lives in a flat in
Monte Carlo - Duke of St Albans, and another in a house in
Lymington - Duke of Newcastle; the late Duke of Leinster used to
rent a room in Hove. Of the others, nine own more land than the
Queen. The Crown estates have about 1,800,000 acres, which
the Queen surrenders to the State in return for the Civil List, money
she needs to run the royal households. As a private landowner, the
Queen has only 40,000 acres at Balmoral and 7000 acres at
Sandringham. In contrast, the Duke of Buccleuch has 250,000
acres, the Duke of Atholl 120,000, the Dukes of Northumberland
and Argyll 80,000 each, and the Duke of Westminster owns a quarter
of central London. The dukes have off-loaded thousands of acres
since World War I, but what they have left is worth as much as it
ever was, with the rise in agricultural land values. On paper at least,
nearly all of them are millionaires in terms of their assets. As for
cash in hand it is quite another story.
Before the beginning of the twentieth century the cost of being a
duke, of maintaining the estate to the benefit of all tenants, of living
in the lavish style which was expected of a duke, was prohibitive. The
Marquess of Worcester, grandfather to the 1st Duke of Beaufort,
wrote : "Since I was a Marquess I am worse by one hundred thousand
pounds, and if I should be a duke, I should be an arrant beggar."
2
To obviate such noble penury, it was customary when creating a duke
to give him money enough to live like one; the honour was hollow
without the cash. Nowadays the running of an estate is so complex
an affair, with farm economics and legislation, that it is above the
heads of most dukes, who have therefore handed over the management
of their affairs to a Board of Trustees, with expert advice from
businessmen, and accept in return an allowance from the estate. The
landowning duke can no longer afford to be a dilettante; he must be
professional or sink. The most successful estates are those wherein the
Duke has accepted his new role as Chairman of the Trustees. In the
case of Bedford, the Duke made a success of the Woburn estates
in
spite of
advice from the trustees; he proved himself, in effect, a better
manager than they, though at the cost of methods not universally
applauded.
Other shadows of privileges which they still retain include the
likelihood of being considered for one of the great Offices of State.
The Earl Marshalship has been hereditary in the House of Howard
since 1672, but the office of Lord Steward, merged with the Crown
since Henry IV, is appointed
pro hac vice
by the Sovereign. The
current Steward is the Duke of Northumberland. The office originally
consisted in placing the dishes on the lord's table at solemn feasts
("and cleaning out the fireplace, I think," said the Duke), but now it
consists in announcing the Queen's guests on Great State Occasions.
The Royal House of Stuart derived its name from the hereditary
tenure of this office in Scotland, as the Butlers (Earls and Marquesses
of Ormonde) were originally butlers to the monarch of Ireland.
8
Dukes have always been high in the list of Knights of the Garter,
the family of the Duke of Norfolk providing no less than twenty-four
members (or thirty-five if you count the allied branches of Mowbray
and Fitzalan as well as the Howards), closely followed by the family
of Cavendish. Of the eleven Dukes of Devonshire in this family, the