The Dukes (71 page)
The Fifes continued afterwards to Egypt to resume their holiday, but tragedy struck belatedly when the Duke contracted pleurisy and pneumonia, as a result of which he died, on 29th January 1912. His daughter maintained that the illness had nothing to do with the shipwreck, but medical opinion was not quick to agree with her.
In accordance with the terms of the fresh patent of 1900, the Duke was succeeded by his elder daughter as Duchess of Fife.* She married Prince Arthur of Connaught, which had the effect of submerging the Fife dukedom in her other, royal, honours; she was known to the world as H.R.H. Princess Arthur of Connaught. She was the first member of the Royal Family to be matron of a nursing-home, before which she had worked incognito as a nurse and a sister at both University College Hospital and Queen Charlotte's Hospital. Her one son predeceased her, thus spelling the end of the Connaught title, while the Fife dukedom passed on her death in 1959 to the son of her sister, Princess Maud, then Lord Carnegie, now the 3rd Duke of Fife.
The Duke, born in 1929, chairman of the Amateur Boxing Association, was pursued by newspapers in his twenties as one of the most likely husbands for Princess Margaret, whom he had known since childhood. (Another was Lord Dalkeith, now Duke of Buccleuch.) He, however, spent more time with a ballet dancer called Mary Drage, whose Catholic religion prevented any permanent alliance. As a descendant of George II he was subject to the Royal Marriages Act, which requires the Sovereign's consent to any engagement. In 1956 he married the Hon. Caroline Dewar, daughter of Lord Forteviot, who owned the Dewar Scotch whisky firm. Ten years later they were divorced, on grounds of her adultery. There are two children of the marriage, a boy and a girl. The son, Lord Macduff, born in 1961, is the solitary heir to this last of the dukedoms. He married in 1987.
*Only two other women have
inherited
a dukedom - the Duchess of Marlborough in 1722, and the Duchess of Hamilton in 1651.
references
1.
Devonshire Collections, 28. 102.
2.
Hist. MSS. Comm.,
Rutland MSS, Vol. II, pp. 168-75.
3.
Nicholas Pevsner,
Derbyshire,
p. 141.
4.
Duchess of Rutland,
Haddon Hall
(pamphlet, 1890), p. 18.
5.
Letters and Papers Henry VIII,
Vol. IV, Part iii, p. 2929.
6.
Greville, IV, 9.
7.
Benjamin Disraeli,
Coningsby,
Book IX, Ch. 1.
8.
D.N.B.
9.
Wraxall,
Posthumous Memoirs,
Vol. II, p. 365.
10.
William Pitt,
Correspondence,
Vol. Ill, p. 477.
11.
Wraxall,
Historical Memoirs,
p. 367.
12.
ibid.,
p. 543.
13.
London Chronicle,
24th October 1787.
14.
Wraxall,
Hist. Mem.,
370.
15.
Town and Country,
Vol. II, p. 401 (1770).
16.
Chips Channon,
Diaries,
p. 142.
17.
Greville, III, 1.
18.
Augustus Hare,
In My Solitary Life
, p. 252.
19.
Clark E. Bleibtreu,
Der Wahre Shakespeare
(Munich, 1907).
20.
Cal.S.P.Dom.,
1611-18, p. 143.
21.
Eller, pp. 62-6.
22.
Walpole,
Memoirs of the Reign of George II,
Vol. II, p. 2.
23.
Letters of Queen Victoria,
quoted in
Complete Peerage.
24.
Moneypenny,
Life of Disraeli,
Vol. II, p. 163.
25.
The Stanleys of Alderley,
ed. Nancy Mitford.
26.
Greville, VII, 94.
27.
Lord Hervey and His Friends,
p. 171.
28.
ibid.,
p. ,140.
29.
Walpole, XXII, p. 102.
30.
R. A. Kelch,
Newcastle: A Duke without Money.
31.
L. B. Namier,
England in the Age of the American Revolution.
32.
Kelch,
op. cit.,
pp. 183-4.
33.
Walpole, XVII, 210.
34.
Sir Charles Hanbury Williams,
Works
(1822), Vol. II, p. 33.
35.
Walpole, XVIII, 167.
36.
Sanford and Townsend,
Great Governing Families of England,
Vol. I, p. 211.
37.
Lady Paget, quoted in
Complete Peerage.
38.
Sunday Express,
15th December 1957.
39.
Daily Sketch,
14th March 1970.
40.
Londonderry Papers, D/Lo/C 234, Duke of Newcastle to Lady
Londonderry, 13th July 1858.
41.
ibid..,
8th September 1858.
42.
Edith Marchioness of Londonderry,
Frances Anne,
pp. 291-4.
43.
Illustrated London News,
18th January 1851, p. 37.
44.
Greville, III, 231.
45.
Greville, IV, 156.
46.
Hansard, House of Lords, 3rd December 1830.
47.
James Pope-Hennessey,
Queen Mary,
pp. 180-1.
48.
Annual Register,
1889.
49.
Genealogist Magazine,
1886.
50.
Old and New London,
Vol. Ill, p. 335.
51.
Pope-Hennessey, op. cit., pp. 259-60.
52.
ibid.,
pp. 462-3.
The Times,
14th December 1911.
The Legacy of Mary Davies
Duke of Westminster
It is commonly supposed that Queen Victoria felt obliged to make Hugh Lupus Grosvenor a duke in 1874, because he was more wealthy than she was. With an income exceeding a £¼ million a year and the most desirable piece of real estate in London, extending over Belgravia and Mayfair, wealth was, for better or worse, the singular most noticeable thing about him. Granville was the first to suggest the elevation. "Has it ever crossed you to make your Cheshire neighbour a Duke?" he wrote to Gladstone on 8th February 1874. "Your suggestion about Westminster has often crossed my mind," Gladstone replied, "and I have every disposition to recommend it."
1
Accordingly, he took the opportunity to include Grosvenor's name on the list for dissolution honours occasioned by his resignation. On 17th February he wrote: "My dear Westminster [he was then Marquess of Westminster], I have received authority from the Queen to place a Dukedom at your disposal and I hope you may accept it, for both you and Lady Westminster will wear it right nobly. With my dying breath, Yours sincerely, W. E. Gladstone." The Marquess replied next day with his acceptance, adding a postscript: "May I venture to say that if we have any option in the matter we should like to retain the title of 'Westminster' and that of 'Earl Grosvenor' for the eldest son as at present."
2
Barely 100 years old, the dukedom of Westminster is therefore a fledgling title; only that of Fife is more recent. Paradoxically, however, the family of Grosvenor in whom it is vested has ancestry stretching back in unbroken male line to the time of the Conqueror, with an authenticity that many a longer-established ducal house might envy. Gilbert le Gros Veneur, Chief Huntsman to William the Conqueror and nephew to Hugh Lupus, William's nephew, gave the family its surname. In 1160 Robert le Grosvenor received a grant of land from the Earl of Chester at Budworth, Co. Chester, where the family settled and has remained ever since. Familiar names in their early history presage a future which they could not have suspected; Sir Robert Grosvenor, who died in 1396, married the widow of one Thomas
Belgrave,
and in 1450 Raufe Grosvenor married the heiress Joan Eton (or
Eaton)
of Eaton, Co. Chester. By the late seventeenth century the Grosvenors were a family of great antiquity and considerable, though not ostentatious, fortune. They lacked one advantage - a London base. Their property was entirely provincial and they were not well-placed or well-known in the south. A suitable remedy was found in the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet, Member of Parliament for Chester and Mayor of Chester, with the twelve-year-old heiress Mary Davies, of Ebury, Middlesex, whose marriage portion included the manor of Ebury, comfortably close to London. The Ebury property was not particularly remarkable, being largely swamp and lagoon in the south, and poor pasture in the north. Indeed, it was Mary Davies who gained most by the marriage, since the Grosvenors were then far the richer family of the two. And they were shrewd. Sir Thomas knew that the Ebury lands, unexciting as they were, were well-situated and would be ripe for development one day. The date of the marriage was 8th October 1677. The Ebury property is now Belgravia and Mayfair, and it still belongs to Sir Thomas's descendants.
Ebury was bounded in the south by the river Thames, in the north by the Roman road from London to Bath (now Oxford Street and Bayswater Road), in the east by the Tybourne, and in the west by a stream called the Westbourne. In all, it covered 1090 acres, formerly belonging to the Abbey of Westminster, confiscated and redistributed in the time of Henry VIII. The King took what he thought was the best part of it for himself, in 1540, enclosed it and stocked it with deer; this is now Hyde Park. The southern part, sometimes submerged at high tide, with islands rising above the highwater mark (the isle of Chesil — Chels-ea; the isle of Bermond = Bermond's-ea; Battersea was another), is now Pimlico and Belgravia. Between 1300 and 1700 the land underwent practically no change at all, being too clayey and waterlogged to permit building. As recently as the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was still meadow, an open and rural spot known as "Five Fields" and infested with robbers and footpads (highwaymen). All that had happened in 400 years was that the property had changed hands by purchase, gift and inheritance.
In 1626 the land was sold to Hugh Awdeley, or Audley (1577- 1662) for £9400. Audley had a reputation for usury and double- dealing, which modern research has gone some way to redress. He was "careful, capable, covetous, but not corrupt".
8
Certain it is that he knew how to make money, having increased his own capital some 2000 per cent in his lifetime. He lived so long that he became a legendary figure, pointed at in public; he also succumbed to the whims of old age, changing his will and settlements several times a year. By the terms of the last settlement, dated 1st November 1662, he bequeathed his Middlesex property to his business clerk and nephew, Alexander Davies, and his brother Thomas Davies. Audley died that year, and Alexander bought out his brother's portion of the estate, leaving the whole, some 430 acres, to his infant daughter Mary, who married Sir Thomas Grosvenor. Alexander may have had plans for the land. He was, after all, an ambitious and clever young man, with ideas of his own. But the plague struck him down at the age of thirty, in July 1665, when little Mary was but five months old (she was bom on 17th January 1665).
As visible proof that she was an heiress to be taken seriously, Mary was able to ride out in her own private coach, drawn by six horses, when she was still a child, and roughly contemporary with that other child heiress, Lady Elizabeth Percy, the last of the Percys, who took her estate into the Seymour family, whence some of it passed to the Smithsons. Little Mary Davies had nothing to compare with such an inheritance. There were problems from the beginning. The estate of Alexander Davies, her father, was weighed down in debt. An Act of Parliament was passed in 1675 to enable some of the estate to be sold on Mary's behalf to settle these debts. The part chosen for selling was Goring House and its grounds. This went to the Earl of Arlington, who left it to his daughter, the Duchess of Grafton, who sold it to the Duke of Buckingham, who demolished it and built a new house on the site in 1702, calling it Buckingham House, and then sold it to George III. It is now Buckingham Palace and has been Crown property ever since. In the grounds of the palace is a mulberry tree which traditionally dates from the time when this land belonged to Mary Davies.
4
Mary was known as the "Maid of Ebury" because she was a mere twelve years old when she married Sir Thomas Grosvenor at St Clement Dane's, her grandfather the Reverend Richard Dukeson officiating. From this nickname has sprung the erroneous story that Grosvenor married a milkmaid. She bore Sir Thomas five sons and three daughters, before she showed the first signs of losing her sanity. He died in 1700, at the age of forty-four, unable to make adequate provision for her protection in time. After her husband's death, Mary Davies nearly lost the entire Ebury property to an unscrupulous pair of brothers called Fenwick, who, had they succeeded, would have cast the Grosvenors forever into obscurity. One Lodowick Fenwick, a Jesuit priest, took advantage of her fragility of mind to gain control of her movements and her decisions. She had become absurdly religious and quite unpredictably crazy, locking people in cupboards and wearing feathers on her sleeves to help her fly. In this condition, she became a virtual prisoner of Fenwick when they went to the continent. The priest's brother, Edward Fenwick, later claimed that he had married Mary in France, and that consequently he was the legal owner of her property. He gave notice to all the Grosvenor tenants that rents should henceforth be paid to
him.
Mary's cause was taken up by her guardian, Charles Gholmondeley, and the resulting trial was a constant source of interest in the capital. Mary's defence rested on six points:
(1)
that she had been disturbed in her mind since 1696
(2)
that Father Fenwick had acquired complete mastery over her,
on occasion by force
(3)
that he sent home from France all her personal staff, and
replaced them with his own relatives or appointees
(4)
that she had been weakened by drugs and bleeding
(5)
that she had no knowledge of any marriage with Edward
Fenwick
(6)
that if such a ceremony had taken place, it would be null and
void in the eyes of the law
Amongst the body of evidence given as to her being drugged, there was testimony that opium had been placed in her poached eggs, and that she would throw hysterical scenes, hurling food at Fenwick and screaming that she was being poisoned.
In spite of all this, and allowing for the fact that the Fenwicks were unprincipled rogues, the jury of the Queen's Bench found that the marriage, though forced, was valid, and they declared in favour of Fenwick.
If we do not now refer to the Fenwick estates in Belgravia and Mayfair, it is because the matter was subsequently placed before the Court of Delegates of Sergeants Inn, who overturned the verdict. They found in favour of Lady Grosvenor, on the grounds that she was not
compos mentis
at the time of the alleged marriage, and imposed silence on Edward Fenwick for ever more. The Grosvenors were secure.
5
Mary lived until 1730, a complete lunatic for the last few years. Exactly one year later her grandson was born, Richard Grosvenor, the first in the family to be raised to the peerage, on the recommendation of Pitt, as Earl Grosvenor (1731-1802). He and his descendants continued to add to the family property buying the manor of Eccleston and the hamlet of Belgrave, and to maintain their close connections with Chester, as mayors and Members of Parliament. His son, Robert Grosvenor (1767-1845), turned his attentions to the dreary tract of land inherited from Mary Davies, an area still unprepossessing, where clothes were hung out, bulls were baited, and dog-fights encouraged. Then, nearby Buckingham House was rebuilt as a royal palace in 1825, and Grosvenor saw his chance. To investigate what could be done to develop the site, he employed Thomas Cubitt who discovered that beneath the soggy clay was a stratum of gravel of some depth, which would support building. Grosvenor obtained an Act of Parliament in 1826 to permit him to drain the land and remove the topsoil of clay, which was burned into bricks, and Cubitt planned his elegant suburb to be built on the substratum of gravel. Five years later, "Belgravia" came into existence, while beneath its handsome exterior at high water in spring tides, the River Thames still flowed only a few feet below. Grosvenor was advanced one step further in the peerage as Marquess of Westminster.
The wealth of the Grosvenors was now approaching vast proportions. Grosvenor's son had married Lady Elizabeth Leveson-Gower in 1819; a dynastic merging without precedent, for the bride was the daughter of the Duke of Sutherland and the Duchess-Countess of Sutherland, reputed to be the richest couple in Europe. (Lady Elizabeth, by the way, lived to the age of ninety-four, almost elbowing her way into the twentieth century.) It was their son, Hugh Lupus Grosvenor (1825-1899), who was made 1st Duke of Westminster in 1874, having become so rich that he could not be ignored. He consolidated his status by marrying his daughter Margaret to Prince Adolphus of Teck, the future Queen Mary's brother. Queen Victoria, with her keen eye for a bargain, wrote, "It is a vy
good
connection - ... & she will doubtless be well off.'"
The Duke further consolidated his wealth, by taking as his first wife his own cousin, a daughter of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. His second wife, Catherine Cavendish, lived until 1941. We are brought closer to the modern age by the 2nd Duke, his grandson, who lived from 1879 to 1953, and was always known as "Bend Or". He presided over the diversification of the Grosvenor estates and its growth into an international business, with interests on four continents, superbly well managed, and large enough to compete with many a public corporation. "Bend Or" used to send back his shirts and linen from all over the world to his private laundry at Eaton Hall.
7
The Duke's hydra-headed business was still a private family concern, the various companies subordinate, in the end, to the efficient running of his personal estate.
Of course, the jewel in the crown is those 300 acres in London, 100 in Mayfair, and 200 in Belgravia. This was all Bend Or's personal property, with which he could do as he pleased. One other man was involved in policy decisions, the agent, Mr George Ridley. It was a nineteenth-century system operating in the middle of the twentieth, but it worked because Ridley's vision and sound good sense inspired it. He had been with the family virtually all his life, his only qualifications for his huge responsibilities being those of experience and loyalty. Under Ridley's guidance, the Duke turned his attention to the Reay estate in the extreme north-west of Scotland. This, which had been adjacent to the Sutherland property and had been absorbed by the Duke of Sutherland, was bought from him by the Duke of Westminster in 1870 (at the same time as he bought Cliveden from the same man). Since then, the Grosvenors had kept the estate together, supported it and maintained it, but done little to change the prospects of the 100,000 acres. Consequently, the area was gradually being deserted by its inhabitants, searching farther afield for fruitful employment and abandoning their unproductive land.