The Dukes (36 page)
59.
Walpole, ed. Cunningham, IX, 2332.
60.
Walpole, XXIII, 344.
61.
Walpole, ed. Cunningham, III, 438.
62.
Greville, IV, 209.
63.
ibid.,
VIII, 26.
64.
The Stanleys of Alderley,
p. 303.
65.
Buckle,
Life of Disraeli,
VI, p. 385.
66.
Walpole, ed. Cunningham, IV, 203.
67.
R. G. G. Price,
Mr Punch's History of Modern England,
pp.182-5.
68.
E. F. Benson,
As We Were,
p. 96.
69.
Survey of London,
Vol. XXXV, pp. 77, 84.
70.
Christopher Trent,
The Russells,
pp. 163-7, 173-4, 294.
71.
Daily Express,
13th October 1961.
72.
Daily Mail,
28th May 1962.
73.
Daily Express,
31st July 1962.
The Sun,
16th April 1968.
Duke of Devonshire; Duke of Portland
A Cavendish should always be pictured in his library. He is essentially a bookworm, studious, calm, cool, unflustered. His judgement is reflective, his actions well considered. The Cavendishes have a long and glorious tradition of political service, second to none, but they have tended to guide events from behind; the shouting and the banner-waving they have left to others. They have always been marked by an acute literary intelligence. Not that they have produced anyone as remarkable as Bertrand Russell in the Bedford family, but they share with the Russells this distinguishing feature of intelligence, and have occasionally produced playwrights, essayists, memoirists, and at least one original scientist. On the whole, however, their intelligence does not publicise itself, because a Cavendish does not have much energy. He likes to be left in peace. Also like the Russells, the Cavendishes boast a whole gallery of eccentrics, but on the other hand, they have a strong strain of earthiness. In common with the Russells and the Seymours, this family laid the foundation of its immense wealth on their share of confiscated monastery lands; they were advanced by Henry VIII and eventually spawned two separate dukedoms. The dukedom of Devonshire continues in unbroken line to the present day; the dukedom of Newcastle became extinct (and has nothing whatever to do with the present Duke of Newcastle), but the Cavendish family hopped by a series of marriages into the dukedom of Portland. So it is that Andrew Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, and Sir William Cavendish-Bentinck, Duke of Portland, represent different branches of the same family, though in the latter's case the Bentinck connection is dominant.
The common ancestress of both Devonshire and Portland is that greatest of all Elizabethan women, making exception only for Queen Elizabeth herself - Bess of Hardwick. Elizabeth Hardwick, of Hardwick in Derbyshire, married four times, and was four times a widow. All her husbands were rich, they all adored her, and they all left her every penny they had. The last of the quartet was the Earl of Shrewsbury, and it was as Countess of Shrewsbury that Bess held Mary Queen of Scots prisoner in her house for seventeen years, on command of the Queen. It was only when Bess grew jealous of her husband's too-solicitous attentions to the Queen of Scots that she asked Elizabeth to remove her. It is also as Countess of Shrewsbury that Bess should be remembered by posterity, but history persists in calling her 'Bess of Hardwick', the familiar term by which she was known to her contemporaries, and which has remained her sobriquet for 400 years.
The second of Bess's husbands was Sir William Cavendish, close adviser to Henry VIII, and one of the architects of the dissolution of the monasteries. Fortunately for the subsequent comfort of the Cavendishes, this was the only marriage of the four which produced any children, so that all the booty which Bess had accumulated from four widowhoods went to the children of Sir William Cavendish.
Bess had a passion for building. It amounted almost to an illness. All her life she was surrounded by masons, carpenters, brick-dust. She coiild not cease building, and her workmen were still busy when she died. It was said that she believed a prediction that she could not die as long as she was building. We have reason to be grateful to the rogue who made such a promise, for Bess built three of the finest houses in the country, including Hardwick Hall, the most elegant of all surviving Elizabethan houses. To her second son, who became the 1st Earl of Devonshire and is the ancestor of the dukes of Devonshire, she left Hardwick, Chatsworth, and Oldcotes. To her third son, father of the Duke of Newcastle in the Cavendish line, and ancestor of the Duke of Portland she left Welbeck Abbey. Today the Duke of Devonshire still lives at Chatsworth, and the Duke of Portland at Welbeck, while the passionate woman who built their houses lies buried at All Hallows Church in Derby.
The first master of Chatsworth was William Cavendish, (1552- 1625), son of Sir William and Bess, and nephew of George Cavendish, who wrote the
Life of Wolsey.
He was uncle to the 1st Duke of Newcastle of Welbeck Abbey (grandson of Sir William), and to Lady Arabella Stuart (grand-daughter of Sir William), whose romantic story is part of the history of the dukedom of Somerset. Thomas Cavendish, the navigator, was also distantly related.
Chatsworth had been built by Sir William at a cost of £80,000 and, with Hardwick Hall, it established William Cavendish as a person of consequence in the country. His importance was recognised by his elevation to the peerage as Earl of Devonshire, a title for which he is said to have paid £ 10,000.
All the Cavendish lands being in Derbyshire, and not an acre in Devonshire, the story got about that a scribe had made a mistake, and that "Devonshire" was written on the patent in error. In fact, the patent of 1618 quite clearly says "
Comes Devon" (comes
means "earl") and that of 1694 equally clearly says "
Dux Devon"-,
the "shire" was added to the end by common consent to avoid confusion with the other earldom of Devon.
His son the 2nd Earl (1590-1628) was educated by Thomas Hobbes, who later became his secretary. Hobbes paid tribute to the Cavendish brilliance of intellect and incorruptible integrity, characteristics which recur often over the centuries, in a long eulogy of praise which he appended to his translation of Thucydides. Hobbes dedicated the book to his former pupil, "whom no man was able either to draw or jostle out of the straight path of justice". However bright he was, financial acumen was not among his attributes. He lived so well that he was obliged to sell some of the estates, and eventually died of over-indulgence at the age of thirty-eight. His son the 3rd Earl of Devonshire (1617-1684) continued the intellectual traditions of the family by being one of the first Fellows of the Royal Society in 1663. He also introduced the Cedar of Lebanon to England.
1
It is with the next Earl (1640-1707) that the dukedom of Devonshire begins. Cavendish was one of the first Whigs, a close friend of the martyred William, Lord Russell, and a member of the exclusive radical set which hatched the Whig party at Southampton House. He tried to secure Russell's escape by proposing that they should change clothes when Cavendish was visiting him in his cell. Russell declined, and they parted company with embraces and floods of tears.
2
He supported the Exclusion Bill, which sought to deny the crown to James II, and was one of the seven signatories inviting the Prince of Orange to assume the crown of England. At the coronation of William and Mary in 1689, Cavendish was Lord High Steward, bearing the crown, while his daughter bore the Queen's train. Furthermore, it was he who had argued against Clarendon and Rochester in favour of James's deposition, saying that the country wanted a king, not merely a regent. No wonder, then, that King William III bestowed grateful favours upon Cavendish, one of his staunchest supporters, culminating in his highest honours as Marquess of Hartington and Duke of Devonshire in 1694, on the same day that his colleague and political ally Russell's father was made Duke of Bedford.
The Duke was not, however, bought by these favours. Unlike some ducal families, the Cavendishes may with justice claim to be above bribery. When the King showed signs of an immoderate religious bias, the Duke reminded him that he had come to England to protect Protestants, not to persecute Papists. He also made it quite clear that he thought the Sovereign should be subordinate to the will of the people.
If the Duke in political life was a man of sense, his private life was rather less well controlled. He had a reputation for lewdness, and an insatiable desire for the company of pretty women. Such amorousness has remained a characteristic of his descendants, hand in hand with their probity and their intelligence. When he died, an anonymous admirer recorded his charms in verse :
"Whose awful sweetness challenged our esteem,
Our sex's wonder and our sex's theme;
Whose soft commanding looks our breasts assailed;
He came and saw and at first sight prevailed."
The Duke of Devonshire was a bookworm. A student of Homer, Horace and Plutarch, he was extremely well-read, and even wrote an ode himself, on the death of Queen Mary, which received exaggerated praise from the flatterer John Dryden.
His son the 2nd Duke (1673-1729), who held many great offices in his career, married Rachel, the daughter of William, Lord Russell, and sister of the 2nd Duke of Bedford. Their son, 3rd Duke of Devonshire (1698-1755), gained his Oxford degree at the age of sixteen, married, and disappeared to the country, "for the unaccountable reason and unenvied pleasure of shutting himself up at Chats- worth with his ugly mad Duchess".
3
The next Duke (1720-1764) was Prime Minister for six months in 1756-7, but only in a caretaker capacity, because Pitt refused to serve under the outgoing Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle; Devonshire went into the job without much enthusiasm. He married one of the daughters of the Earl of Burlington, sister of that pathetic Dorothy Boyle who married Lord Euston, the Duke of Grafton's son, and who died after seven months of his ill-treatment. She brought yet more property to the Cavendish list, including Burlington House in Piccadilly (now the Royal Academy), Chiswick House, and lands in Yorkshire and Derbyshire.
Successive Dukes of Devonshire have never been particularly impressed with the extent of their property. One nineteenth-century duke was unaware that a certain grand house belonged to him, until someone told him. The 4th Duke was no exception. A Knight of the Garter, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, he was happiest in his library, and content to leave politics to his brother Lord John Cavendish (Chancellor of the Exchequer 1782 and 1783). He began a Devonshire habit which perplexes historians, and can appear endearing to some, or stupid to others, of calling his offspring exclusively by nickname. His children were known as "Mrs Tiddle, Mrs Hopeful, Puss, Cat and Toe". The next generation was to immortalise the nicknames of that peculiar trio "Canis", "the Rat" and "Racky".
A contemporary of both the 4th and 5th Dukes of Devonshire, but unknown to either of them, was that odd and brilliant character Henry Cavendish (1731-11810), a grandson of the 2nd Duke. He brought much glory to the Cavendish name by his work in natural philosophy, and it was the sort of intellectual accomplishment which the Cavendishes revered above more worldly success. His demonstration of the composition of water in 1781 earned him a permanent place in the history of scientific discovery, in addition to which he was an excellent mathematician, astronomer, and geologist. Had Cavendish been a more normal man, more interested in self-advertisement, no doubt his discoveries would have been known beyond the confines of the Royal Society. But his blazing intelligence was yoked to a furtive, secretive, mistrustful nature, which kept him apart from the world, and gave rise to many eccentricities of behaviour.
Henry Cavendish lived alone in a villa overlooking Clapham Common. He ordered his dinner by leaving a note for his cook on the hall table. (It was the same every day - a leg of mutton.) An incorrigible misogynist, he never saw any of his servants, and was never seen by them. If any unlucky maid showed herself, she was instantly dismissed. To prevent accidents of this sort he had a second staircase built in his home. He abhorred all human contact, venturing out of his laboratories only to visit the Royal Society, and even there he barely uttered a word. If he saw anyone approach to talk to him, he would slink away in fear. To be looked at or addressed by a stranger seemed to give him positive pain, when he would dart away as if hurt.
4
Lord Brougham wrote that "he uttered fewer words in the course of his life than any man who ever lived to fourscore years, not at all excepting the monks of La Trappe".
5
Any attempt to draw him into conversation was almost certain to fail. Dr Wollaston said, "The way to talk to Cavendish is, never to look at him, but to talk as if it were into a vacancy, and then it is not unlikely you may set him going."
6
Then, when he did speak, it was with a frail, high-pitched squeak, which made it more understandable why he should avoid conversation. He was never known to express an opinion on matters of the day, being completely indifferent to all but scientific knowledge. He went to the Royal Society with only money enough to pay for his dinner, and not a penny more. He picked his teeth with a fork, invariably hung his hat upon the same peg, and stuck his cane in his right boot. He never changed the cut of his clothes, so that when he died in 181 o he was still wearing the fashion of half a century earlier, thereby attracting the very attention which gave him so much distress.
Cavendish was one of the richest men of his day, but could not be bothered to do anything about it. He behaved as if he were a pauper, not through meanness, but indifference to the subject. The income was allowed to accumulate without attention. The bankers, discovering one day that they held £80,000 of his money, sent a messenger to apprise him of the fact. "What do you come here for? What do you want with me?" squeaked the nervous philosopher to a probably terrified bank clerk.
"Sir, I thought it proper to wait upon you," he said, "as we have a very large balance in hand of yours, and we wish your orders respecting it."
"If it is any trouble to you, I will take it out of your hands. Don't come here to plague me."
"Not the least trouble to us, sir, not the least. But we thought you might like some of it to be invested."
'Do so, do so, and don't come here to trouble me, or I'll remove it." And he showed the poor man the door.