The Dukes (41 page)

The 4th Duke of Portland (1768-1854), who secretly bought Hughenden for Disraeli in 1847 so that the politician should have a house commensurate with his ambitions, had four sons. The heir died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving three confirmed bachelors. "None of the three Bentinck brothers was married, and none of them was likely to marry", wrote Lady Londonderry, without further comment. The three were Lord George Bentinck, Lord Henry Bentinck, and the strange man who was to succeed as 5th Duke of Portland.

Apart from a hopelessly romantic adoration conceived by Lord George Bentinck for the Duchess of Richmond, the three brothers showed themselves indifferent to marriage. The oddest of the three was the 5th Duke of Portland, who succeeded to the title at the age of fifty-four, by which time he was clearly established as a wild eccentric.

To begin with, the 5th Duke of Portland (1800-1879) dressed in a peculiar fashion. Whatever the weather, his trousers were secured a few inches above the ankle by a piece of old string, tied tight. In every season he carried an old umbrella, and a coat was always slung over his arm. The umbrella and coat were not intended to protect him from rain, but from the gaze of curious people. If anyone looked at him, he hid himself beneath the umbrella, and wrapped the huge coat around him. He was seen in sweltering summer wearing a heavy sable coat which touched the ground.
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He bought three frock-coats at a time, of different sizes, so that he could wear one over the other. He habitually wore an old-fashioned wig. One of his rooms at Welbeck Abbey was lined with cupboards reaching floor to ceiling, and packed with green boxes, each containing a dark brown wig.
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On top of the long wig he wore a hat, two feet high.

Thus attired, he would walk on his estates, avoiding everyone. He was never seen at Court, and never mingled in society. He appears to have been entirely friendless. Even his solicitors were not permitted an interview with him. None of his tenants, labourers, or servants was allowed to speak to him or acknowledge his presence in any way. The man who dared to touch his hat would be dismissed immediately. The same orders applied to the parson. Everyone at Welbeck had instructions that, if they chanced upon the Duke, they were to pass him by "as they would a tree".
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He inherited from his mother this peculiarity that he would not be seen by anyone. If he gave permission for anyone to visit Welbeck, he would always make a condition that "Mr So-and-So will be good enough not to
see
me". When he drove out, it was alone, in a black carriage, like a hearse, drawn by black horses, with all the blinds down. He had another carriage drawn by ponies, and driven by boys, but it also was draped in thick curtains. When he went to London, he did not leave his carriage; it was placed, with him inside, on a railway truck, unloaded at the London terminus, and driven to his house in Cavendish Square. The servants were naturally ordered out of the way, so that nobody saw him arrive or leave, and no one saw him while he was there. If he needed a doctor, the man would not be allowed to come any nearer than the door, where he could ask whatever questions he needed to ask of the valet, who then reported them to the Duke, and reported the Duke's answers to the doctor. Only the valet was allowed to feel the ducal pulse. If he went walking at night at Welbeck, it was with a woman companion, who had instructions never to speak to him, and to walk exactly forty yards ahead of him, carrying a lantern. The Duke spent a great deal of money making Welbeck a splen­did palace in which to entertain on a grand scale, but never invited anyone. He lived in a small suite of rooms tucked away in a corner of the vast house, and had a letter-box put in his bedroom door, so that he need never be disturbed. His daily meal was a chicken, killed in the morning. He ate half of it for lunch, and the other half for dinner. In the kitchen there was a chicken perpetually on a roasting- spit, day after day for years, so that one would be ready for him when­ever he rang for it.
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The roast chicken would then be placed in a lift, transported in a heated truck on rails along a tunnel 150 yards to his rooms.

So obsessive did his need for privacy become that the Duke spent the last years of his life, and a considerable part of his fortune, in converting Welbeck Abbey in such a way that all rooms would be underground. Like a shy mole, he burrowed deeper and deeper to avoid the daylight. The subterranean rooms are still there. They were approached by a single flight of stairs from the long tunnel which formed part of fifteen miles of tunnelling. There was a huge library, a billiard-room capable of holding half a dozen billiard tables, and the largest ballroom in the country, capable of holding 2000 people comfortably. This was approached from above, as a great lift descended from the ceiling, and twenty people at a time could be thus lowered into the ballroom (though one can hardly imagine anyone
wanting
to be). Through a staircase in the ceiling of another room was the riding-school, the second largest in the world, lit by 8000 jets of gas, an exercising ground under glass, and a gallop of straw a quarter of a mile long. Another tunnel, 200 yards long, led to a suite of rooms covering four acres, and another to the stables, cow-houses and dairies. The garden covered thirty acres, and required fifty-three gardeners. There were eighty keepers in the dairies, and forty-five grooms in the stables. When the Duke died, ninety-four horses were in the underground stables.

There was even a private tunnel from the house to Worksop, one and a quarter miles long, wide enough for two carriages. In short, there was really no need for the Duke to be seen by anyone at any time, and he succeeded in his passion for anonymity better than any other ducal recluse.

For all this, however eccentric his behaviour, the 5th Duke of Portland was one of the better landlords. He was generous to his tenants and staff, providing always they took care
not
to treat him with respect, and gave an enormous amount of his money to charity. He built a skating-rink for the staff, and the poor maids were obliged to skate from time to time whether they wanted to or not. His one reprehensible act was to make a bonfire of some of his pictures, worth several thousand pounds, because he deemed them inadequate to the grandeur of the underground palace he was build­ing. But he was clearly mentally unbalanced.

The work kept over 500 masons busy for years, and the end result was quirky, dismal, impressive and cold. Augustus Hare wrote: "All is vast, splendid and utterly comfortless: one could imagine no more awful and ghastly fate than waking up one day and finding oneself Duke of Portland and master of Welbeck."
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Unfortunately for the Portland family, there was one woman in England who dreamed precisely of waking up and finding herself mistress of Welbeck, and so powerful did her fantasy become that she grew to believe in it. Her persistence led to one of the most curious cases in the history of litigation, in which her family attempted to prove that the Duke of Portland had been leading a double life, that he had managed a shop in Baker Street for years, and that he had a son and heir living in Baker Street who should succeed to the dukedom. The lady who initiated this extravagant farce was a Mrs Druce.

In 1896 the Home Secretary received a curious application from one Mrs Anna Maria Druce, of 68 Baker Street, London, asking for permission to open a coffin at Highgate Cemetery. Mrs Druce claimed that the coffin, which was supposed to contain the body of her husband, T. C. Druce, was in fact empty, that the funeral of T. C. Druce in 1864 had been an elaborate pretence, and that her husband had continued to live until 1879 in his "other role" as the Duke of Portland. Consequently, she was in truth the Duchess of Portland, and her son should now be restored to his rightful inheri­tance as the Duke. The revelation of the empty coffin would show that T. C. Druce and the Duke of Portland were one and the same man.

More than ten years were to elapse before Mrs Druce's wish was granted, by which time she had been swept off the stage by the rush of events, and her place taken by more resourceful men. At the begin­ning, she was a lone crusader, appealing to the House of Lords, battling resolutely against all the obstacles which bureaucracy could hurl in her path. Her case was given impetus by the discovery that, when another member of the Druce family had been buried in 1893 in the family vault, the coffin containing T. C. Druce was seen to have caved in under the weight of the coffin above it, strongly sug­gesting that it might be empty. The newspapers relished the chance to celebrate the lonely fight of a poor downtrodden old woman against the mighty millions of a landed aristocrat, and the case was discussed for so many years before it reached the courts that there was barely a literate person in the country who did not know about the Druce-Portland case. By constant repetition, the lady's claims gathered support, while the 6th Duke kept a careful silence.

The case would never have gone so far were it not for the fact that the 5th Duke of Portland's habits were so odd, his secrecy so total.

It was perfectly possible that he had been leading a double life. He had no friends, so there was no one to say exactly what he looked like. He was not seen, so there were few to say exactly where he was. When his carriage was taken off the train in London and driven, with blinds drawn, to his London house, no one actually saw him get in it, travel in it, or get out of it. What was there to prevent his sneaking out of the railway station and walking down to Baker Street to assume his other identity as a shop-owner? If anyone wanted to lead a double life, nobody was better placed to achieve it than the 5th Duke of Portland. And the Duke was precisely that kind of eccentric to whom such an idea might appeal. Rumours had been flying around London for years that the Duke had something to hide, and it was common gossip in Baker Street that Mr Druce's funeral in 1864 had been false, long before Mrs Druce thought she was the Duchess of Portland. She merely gathered the rumours together and made use of them, not without a touch of genius.

The mass of circumstantial evidence which strongly suggested that the Duke and the shopkeeper were the same person was set out in a pamphlet called
Claim to the Portland Millions: Was Druce the Duke?
In it, the list of similarities of habit which linked the two men was striking. They were both secretive, both travelled in a closed carriage, and both made their coachman swear not to reveal where they went. They both had a passion for building underground. They both wore a great variety of wigs. They were both profoundly anti­social. They were fastidious, methodical, cautious and suspicious. They both had a skin complaint, and avoided the sunlight as a result. (This was another reason for the Duke's perpetual umbrella.) They both loathed to be acknowledged or saluted.

Furthermore, there were astonishing coincidences of timing in the events of their lives. In the first place, the Duke had not been present at the funeral of his father, the 4th Duke, in 1854; every male relation had been present but his successor. Was he in Baker Street at the time? Between 1816 and 1820 there were no records of the activities of the Duke, but plenty of evidence relating to T. C. Druce. Between 1820 and 1835, T. C. Druce disappears from view, but the Duke's activities are recorded. From 1835 to 1864 the process is again reversed, with the Duke in oblivion, and T. C. Druce on record. T. C. Druce was alleged to have died in 1864; from 1864 to 1879 there is the frantic building at Welbeck for which the Duke is famous, and everyone knows where he is.

With these subtle coincidences, Mrs Druce had nothing to do. She knew only that she was the Duchess, and that no one would believe her. Under the strain of constant complicated litigation over a num­ber of years, her mind lost its balance. She would go to Highgate Cemetery every day, accompanied by a mining engineer, because she suspected that one of her opponents was about to remove the coffin surreptitiously. Her delusions multiplied, until she was removed, in 1903, to a mental home, after which nothing more is heard of her. There was now someone else to take control of the torrent she had unleashed.

Mr G. H. Druce came to London from Australia (where news of the fascinating case had filled pages of newsprint, as it had in all parts of the world) to reveal that he was the son of T. C. Druce by an earlier marriage, and that he was therefore the rightful Duke of Portland. He went into the fray with style; he formed companies, including G. H. Druce Ltd, the Druce-Portland Company and the New Druce-Portland Company, in which he invited the public to buy shares, pointing out that each investor would receive a profit of 6,400 per cent when Druce came into the Portland fortune. Sub­scriptions flowed in daily. Eventually, G. H. Druce brought a charge of perjury against another member of the Druce family (who stead­fastly maintained that his father
had
died in 1864, and
was
buried at Highgate, and who objected to all the fuss), and the whole matter finally reached trial in the autumn of 1907.

The trial was a compulsive drug. Half the aristocratic ladies of London were present, and the Duke of Portland sat silently through­out. The public wanted the "underdog" to win, and the evidence clearly implied that he might.

His chief witness was a Mr Caldwell, who came from the United States to testify. Mr Caldwell had suffered from a skin disease, and had come to London to be treated by the late Sir Morell Mackenzie, who had introduced him to the Duke of Portland. The Duke suffered from a similar complaint, which Caldwell was able to cure for him. In consequence of this, an intimacy grew between them, and the Duke had confided to Caldwell that he led a dual existence. Caldwell had accompanied him to the Baker Street Bazaar, where he assumed his Druce identity, and had also seen him frequently at Welbeck. In 1864 the Duke had said that he was tired of the game, and wanted to devote himself full-time to his building at Welbeck. He therefore determined that T. C. Druce should "die", and asked Caldwell to help him stage a mock funeral. Caldwell had helped weigh the coffin down with lead. Afterwards the Duke returned to Welbeck, and T. C. Druce was forgotten (though some people claimed to have seen "T. C. Druce" in London after 1864).