The Dukes (68 page)

Quite apart from her work as an artist, she was a considerable figure in Edwardian England, and into the 1920s and 1930s. She had limitless energy, and astonishing beauty. While she reigned at Belvoir, the castle, unknown to most of England, became famous. She was one of "The Souls", an intellectual group at the turn of the century which prided itself on unconventional behaviour and discus­sion long before the Bloomsbury set of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey began to shock polite society. "The Souls", so called because that was one of their perennial subjects of conversation, were revo­lutionary in so far as they talked about matters which were sup­posed to be taboo for nice well-bred ladies. They were led by the Tennant sisters from Scotland, who had no time for such nonsense, and who virtually changed the tone of London society within a few years. One of them, Margot, married Prime Minister Asquith. Another Soul was the last of the great rakes, Harry Cust (of Lord

Brownlow's family), who appears to have gone to bed with every beautiful woman in London. One of his
amours
was Violet, Duchess of Rutland. She died in 1937, leaving "many devoted descen­dants".
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Her husband, the 8th Duke (11852-1925), was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, and was known by the sobriquet "Salisbury's Manners", a nice
double entendre.

Belvoir Castle, with its terraces and towers, its boundless prospect, and its exterior "so grand as to sink criticism in admiration",
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is heavy with historical associations, and knew its days of glitter and fame long before Duchess Violet made its name well-known in this century. James I was entertained there six times by Francis, 6th Earl of Rutland (1578-1632), whose daughter Catherine Manners mar­ried the King's lover George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in 1620. During the Civil War, Belvoir was first taken by the Royalists, then stormed by the Parliamentary party, who afterwards dismantled it brick by brick. The reigning Earl rebuilt it after the Restoration, com­pleting the work in 1668. In the time of the 4th Duke, the chaplain of Belvoir was the poet George Crabbe. Then, in 1816, a second catastrophe befell the castle - a fire which caused £120,000 worth of damage. Over 200 paintings were lost that day, including twenty portraits by Reynolds, some Rubens, some Van Dycks. It was quickly rebuilt, and the old medieval ways re-established. Until comparatively recent times, into the twentieth century, the style of living at Belvoir was romantically archaic, with trumpeters in bright livery and powered wigs marching up and down the corridors and sounding a great blast when it was time for guests to get up; the watchman, who throughout the night shouted the time at each hour; the ballroom always ready for dancing; a private orchestra playing soft music in a room adjoining the dining-room - background noise from musicians who were never seen.
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Haddon Hall has had a quieter history. The last Duke to live there was the 3rd, in the eighteenth century, and he only sporadically. In 1700, more or less, it ceased to be inhabited, and remained so for more than 200 years. Until, that is, the 9th Duke of Rutland (1886-1940) achieved his childhood ambition and took up residence there in 1927, two years after he came to the title. This duke was a very learned man, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a considerable historian, who cherished the Manners family archives when so many other great families were throwing them into an attic room (or the "muni­ment" room) and forgetting them. In 1939, the Duke offered Belvoir and Haddon as a wartime refuge for many of the Public Records which, if they remained in Chancery Lane, stood risk of des­truction by bombing. (Actually the Public Record Office suffered only superficial damage.) The offer was gladly accepted, and the Duke was made an (unpaid) Assistant Keeper in order that he could legally have custody of the records. He became quite an expert at making seals. He married a daughter of Frank Tennant, one of his mother's "Souls", and died in 1940. His son the present Duke continued his father's custodianship of the Public Records until the end of the war.

Though Belvoir and Haddon still belong to the Duke, much of the estates of both have been sold in this century to meet the costs of taxation. After World War I it has been estimated that a quarter of England changed hands as the great landowners off-loaded thousands of acres. Rutland was no exception. Some 14,000 acres of Haddon were sold in 1920 for £355,458, and another sale of 28,000 acres of Belvoir followed shortly afterwards for £1 million. There are 18,000 acres left, managed by the present Duke, who also has business interests in the Midlands; the Rutland Development Com­pany is concerned with hotels.

They are a pious family. One of them, Charles Manners-Sutton (1755-1828), who was a grandson of the 3rd Duke of Rutland, became Archibishop of Canterbury and baptised Queen Victoria. A number of the Manners have tried their hand at poetry, but usually with less happy results. The only one to achieve a measure of decency in the literary field was Lord John Manners (7th Duke of Rutland), Disraeli's friend and the "Young England" enthusiast, later to be Postmaster-General; he published several volumes of poetry. On the other hand, it has been seriously suggested that Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (1576-1612) was William Shakespeare. There is a heavy nineteenth-century German thesis, by one Carl E. Bleibtreu, which seeks to prove this identity.
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Other foreign academics held the same conviction, though it has never been entertained in this country. Were it true, then
Venus and Adonis
was written while its author was barely fifteen years old, and half a dozen of his plays before he was twenty.

This same earl was involved in the Essex plot against Elizabeth I, and was imprisoned in the Tower with his brothers in 1600. His lands were restored by James I in 1603, so his disgrace did not last long.

One curious feature of the Rutland story is the number of early deaths they have suffered. Of course, familes were decimated by plague and epidemics in Elizabethan times, and the state of medical knowledge was so rudimentary that no one could reasonably expect to live long. But the Rutlands were exceptionally prone to short lives. The 2nd Earl was thirty-seven when he died, the 3rd Earl was thirty- eight: the 4th Earl died at thirty-six and the 5th Earl at thirty- five. (His wife, a daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, was so distraught that she died a few weeks later, using pills provided by Sir Walter Raleigh.)
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The 6th Earl lived to fifty-four, but his sons died in infancy (about which more later). The 2nd Duke of Rutland was forty-five when he died, and the soldier Marquess of Granby forty- nine. His son the 4th Duke was only thirty-three. Catherine, daughter of the 2nd Duke, lost both her sons by an epidemic sore throat, then miscarried of twins. "It looks as if it was a plague fixed on the walls of their house", wrote Walpole.

The rest lived to a decent old age, it is true, but there have been tragedies in more recent times. The son and heir of the 8th Duke of Rutland and Violet died at the age of nine, in 1894, and the present Duke's second son, Lord Robert Manners, died of leukaemia at the age of two in 1964.

It would be natural to assign all this to coincidence, or even to point out that there are marginally more Manners who lived long than died young. This would be to ignore an interesting circum­stance. In 1620 two servant-girls were executed at Lincoln for witch­craft; they had placed a curse on the Manners heirs.

The bald facts of the case are these: the 6th Earl and Countess of Rutland took pity upon a very poor foul-mouthed woman called Joan Flower. Gossips said she was a witch, because her eyes were "fiery and hollow, her speech fell and envious, her demeanour strange and exotic". She was heard to curse and swear on the slightest pre­text. The Rutlands, decent folk, took no notice of such rumours, and employed Joan's two daughters at Belvoir Castle. They were Margaret and Philippa Flower. They were first engaged as occasional charwomen, and Margaret was later promoted as a permanent servant, in the wash-house.

The gossips got to work again when the other daughter, Philippa, took a local boy, Thomas Simpson, for her lover. He claimed that he was so besotted with her that he could not leave her, even when he wanted to. A common enough feeling, one would have thought, but Philippa was said to have bewitched him. She was "lewdly transpor­ted with the love of one Thomas Simpson".

Certain other indecencies, not specified, were imputed to Margaret Flower, upon which the Countess sacked her. Mother Joan was so furious that she placed a curse upon the whole Manners family. The Earl and Countess forthwith fell violently ill, vomiting abominably.

Their two sons, Henry and Francis, were also attacked, and suc­cumbed. They died mere infants, depriving their bereaved parents of a direct heir (the earldom passed to a brother).

The Flower girls were arrested and tried at Lincoln. The accusa­tion was that they were the instruments of their mother's sorcery, and that the devil worked through them. Joan made a melodramatic gesture at the trial, which sealed her fate. She took some bread and some butter, and declaimed "If I am guilty of witchcraft, may this bread and butter never go through me." She ate it, and died immedi­ately in terrible agony, confirming to the assembled judges that she was indeed the devil's mistress. Her daughters then confessed, were convicted of murder, and executed.
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At Bottesford Church there is a monument to the dead children, erected by their father the Earl, on which is written the fact that they died of sorcery. There was, then, in 1620 no doubt about the matter. With hindsight and better knowledge, we can see how the mistake could be made in an hysterical age, when the distinction between religion and superstition was not understood, least of all by the Church, and when incomprehensible disasters, like plagues, needed to be answered for. The truth is quite likely that the girls were guilty of murder, but that their powers were merely human. They probably poisoned the children, goaded by the malicious revenge of their unpopular mother, and attempted the same on the parents, whose constitutions were better able to tolerate the attack. Also, they were undoubted whores. It is possible that they were convinced themselves that they must be witches to be capable of such evil intent. Still, the case is on record for what it is worth. And it must not go unsaid that many of the earls who died young existed up to a century before Joan Flower uttered her supposed curse. The Manners family have continued their little kingdom based on benevolent paternalism for centuries, without looking over their shoulder at any imprecations from witches. They have not made any cymbals crash, they have not been Prime Ministers, but they have one great soldier and one Postmaster-General. More than this, they can comfortably congratulate themselves on having been decent men who disarm enemies. Even Walpole, who was not really happy unless he could bring the great down to a level where they could be scrutinised to their detriment, could not be unkind to the 3rd Duke, "a nobleman of great worth and goodness", he said.
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The same was true of the 4th, 5th and 6th Dukes. The 7th Duke (Lord John Manners) was lamented even by Queen Victoria, who said she would miss him very much ;
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he was, says the biographer of Disraeli, "of a loyalty, purity, and kindness of nature, that amounted almost to genius"."

The 10th Duke of Rutland,
c.b.e.,
was born in 1919. He was chairman of Leicester County Council 1974-77. He has been married twice. The first wife was a model, Anne Cumming-Bell, and the present Duchess is Frances Sweeney, daughter of Mr Sweeney, an American businessman, and Margaret Whigham (formerly Duchess of Argyll). The heir, Marquess of Granby, was born in 1959, and the Duchess Dowager lives in a small house on the Belvoir estate.

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The dukes of Newcastle might have been invented as a sharp contrast to the dukes of Rutland, for their qualities could not be less alike. The Newcastle character has throughout been fickle, feckless, restless and irresolute, and in consequence their fortunes have been unstable. When the 6th Duke married Henrietta Adela Hope in the nineteenth century the foundations of the Newcastle estate were already showing cracks. He had been before the bankruptcy courts in 1870. Hence Miss Hope, though illegitimate and a
nouveau riche
(with the Hope Diamond in her pocket), and not therefore the most suitable duchess material, was welcomed as a salvation. "Lord Lincoln is to marry Miss Hope," wrote a contemporary (Lincoln is the courtesy title), "the daughter of ugly little Henry Hope with the big house in Piccadilly. She is illegitimate, but pretty. Her mother is a Frenchwoman. She will have all Hope's fortune, £50,000 a year. It is a great thing for the dukedom of Newcastle and will put it on its legs again."
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Alas, not for long. The Hope collection of pictures, which included one of the most famous Vermeers in the world, plus thirty tons of sculpture and nine tons of books, were all disposed of by auction in various sales before 1917. The notorious 44-carat blue diamond was sold for £120,000. All that remains of the Hope connection is its addition to Pelham and Clinton in the family surname. The Hope diamond was said to bring bad luck to whomever owned it.

It is not just bad luck. The Newcastles have suffered from an inability to make a decision and stick to it. Sometimes the results have been serious. The 5th Duke (1811-1864) was in charge of the War Office at the time of the Crimean campaign. Such a man in such a place at such a time could hardly have been more inopportune. He stayed up all night trying to grapple with the problem, and reached no conclusions at all. He lacked the resource necessary to deal with an emergency. He was slow, vacillating, and knew nothing of military affairs. He insisted on doing everything himself, caused himself much anxiety of mind by dwelling upon the Crimean catastrophe over which he presided, and died at fifty-three, a broken man. "I hear Newcastle is very low," wrote Greville, "as well he may be, for no man was ever placed in so painful a position, and it is one from which it is impossible for him to extricate himself."
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