The city of Manchester was a rough city in the industrial age. The history of the dukes of Manchester shares some of the underworld aspects of the great northern powerhouse, but in fact has nothing to do with the city—like most British dukedoms, the title does not align with the geography. Three modern dukes of Manchester have spent time behind bars—but the long history of their family is much more interesting than that.

The Montagus were known in the Middle Ages as the earls of Salisbury, powerful magnates in the west of England and often very close to the Crown. A secondary branch of Montagus—perhaps not related at all, but certainly claiming to be (as we shall see)—built up their powerbase not in Somerset but in Northamptonshire, in the Midlands. At the start of the eighteenth century, the senior line obtained the first family dukedom, Montagu (1705), while the junior lines had already established themselves as earls of Manchester (1626), earls of Sandwich (1660), and eventually earls of Halifax (1714). The dukedom carried on, but passed into an allied family, the Brudenells, then went extinct in 1770. Meanwhile, the earls of Manchester were given the family’s second dukedom, of Manchester (1719), which continues to this day. Other interesting side-branches of the House of Montagu are the Wortley-Montagus, famous for its Enlightened women in the eighteenth century, and the Montagus of Beaulieu, famous for the National Motor Museum and a gay sex scandal of the 1950s—though their story belongs more to the story of the dukes of Buccleuch, whose surname is Montagu-Douglas-Scott; these became Montagus only by marriage so will have their own blog, under Scott.

As with many families, the Montagu family in all its branches is held together by a shared heraldry: the three distinctive red diamonds are known as ‘fusils’. This was later quartered with the arms of Monthermer, a very distinctive green eagle, and junior branches added small symbols as they became established: a red crescent, a red star, and so on. The name, initially spelled Montaigu, Montague or Montacute, is from the Latin monte acuto, or ‘pointed hill’.

Some have tried to trace the surname to the Norman village of Montaigu-les-Bois in Coutances—and there was a French noble family with this name, which died out in 1715—and that a companion of William the Conqueror, Drogo, came from there and gave his name to estates he was granted in Somerset after the Conquest. Others, however, suggest the opposite, that he took his surname from these estates, for a priory dedicated to Saint Michael on a ‘pointed hill’ (Mont Agud), near Yeovil in eastern Somerset. Historical records show that this area of the county had initially been granted to the Count of Mortain, half-brother of the Conqueror, and that the Norman nobleman named Drogo was in his suite and became his vassal for about twenty fiefs in Somerset and Devon. Two of the key estates he was given in Somerset were at Tintinhull and Wincanton, near Bruton, a bit to the northeast. The latter included Knowle Park, held directly from the King. Also nearby was Shepton Montague. These all passed to the Neville family in the 1420s.

Montacute Priory was founded in about 1080, a dependency of the Abbey of Cluny in France, and Montacute House was built nearby. The Priory was dissolved in 1539 and became a farmhouse on the Phelips estate: Sir Edward Phelips, a yeoman farmer who became Speaker of the Commons, rebuilt the house in the 1590s—one of the finest examples of the Elizabethan country house. But his family soon faded back into the rural gentry and found it hard to maintain such a grand house. Their distant descendants ultimately sold it in 1931, becoming one of the first properties acquired by the National Trust.

Meanwhile, the descendants of Drogo were summoned to Parliament as Lord Montagu or Montacute in 1299. Simon, the first baron, fought with Edward I and Edward II in Wales, Aquitaine and Scotland, and was named Admiral of the Fleet in 1310. His son William was Steward of the Household of Edward II in 1316 and Seneschal of Gascony in 1318. He thus established great intimacy with the Plantagenet kings, and propelled his three sons to the highest social, political and ecclesiastical positions in the land. William, 3^rd Baron Montagu, was created Earl of Salisbury in 1337 and Marshal of England in 1338. His brother Simon was Bishop of Worcester, then of Ely; while Edward was also summoned to Parliament as Baron Montagu, 1348, having married Alice of Norfolk, a granddaughter of Edward I. They had only daughters, so a junior line was not established at this point.

The earldom of Salisbury had first been created in 1145 by Lady Matilda, at a time when she held power, as a reward to an ally for watching over the western parts of England, notably the Salisbury plain. The original line soon died out and the title passed through three heiresses until re-granted to William de Montacute in 1337. He had grown up as a close companion of Edward III, and solidified his position as a royal favourite when he helped the young king overthrow his mother and her lover Mortimer in 1330. Salisbury served with Edward in Scotland and in France, and frequently served as his representative in diplomatic activity. The King also recognised him as King of Mann, supporting his claim to rule that island due to a supposed grant given to his grandfather Simon by Aufrica de Connoght, whose identity is unclear, but may have been heiress of the last Norse king of Mann, Magnus Olafsson. But first the Earl had to conquer the island from the King of Scots, which he did in 1343, and he and his son were recognised as sovereign lords until they sold these rights to the Le Scrope family in 1392. Closer to home, the Countess of Salisbury is remembered in myth or anecdote as the woman whose honour was defended by Edward III when she dropped her garter at a ball (and thus the source of the name for his order of chivalry).

The main seat for the family at this point, to be closer to court in London or Winchester, was Bisham Manor, in Berkshire. A manor house was built here in the 1260s by the Knights Templar, whose properties were confiscated by the Crown in 1307; Bisham was then sold to the 1^st Earl of Salisbury in 1335, who founded a priory next door to serve as the Montagu mausoleum. When the Salisbury dynasty ended, Bisham returned to the Crown under Henry VIII, who also dissolved and pulled down the priory in the 1540s. The manor was acquired by the Hoby family who held it for the next two centuries.

When the 1^st Earl of Salisbury died in 1344, he was one of the wealthiest men in the Kingdom. His son William Montagu, 2^nd Earl of Salisbury, was one of the first knights of the Order of the Garter, in 1348, and a military commander in the war in France. He married Joan of Kent, the King’s first cousin, though this was declared invalid; and his title passed to his nephew. John, 3^rd Earl of Salisbury, was also heir to his mother, Margaret de Monthermer, heiress of the 2^nd Baron Monthermer, whose father was the Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, and mother was Joan of England, daughter of Edward I. The origins of the Monthermer family are unknown and it is unclear where the name comes from (though likely Norman). As close kin and friend of King Richard II, the 3^rd Earl fell from power with him in 1397, then was executed in 1400 for plotting against the new king, Henry IV. Thomas, 4^th Earl of Salisbury, recovered the lands and titles in 1409, and swiftly gained the favour of Henry V, fighting alongside him in France in 1419 and given the County of Perche as one of the spoils of war. In 1423 he was named Governor of Champagne, as part of the English occupation of northern France, then was killed as one of the English commanders in the siege of Orléans, 1428.

Alice Montagu was left as her father’s heir—medieval earldoms could be inherited through women, so she was the 5^th Countess of Salisbury in her own right, as well as Baroness Montagu and Baroness Monthermer. She had married Richard Neville in 1420 and they had several children: the elder sons were the earls of Warwick and Salisbury, while the 4^th son, John, a Yorkist commander, was created Baron Montagu, 1461, then Earl of Northumberland in 1464 and Marquess of Montagu in 1470 (in exchange for giving up the Northumberland earldom)—only to lose all of this on the execution block in 1471. The earldom of Salisbury passed from the Nevilles to George, Duke of Clarence (brother of Edward IV), then to his son Edward, though only nominally since he was a prisoner in the Tower after the Battle of Bosworth Field. His sister, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, is remembered as the cousin of Henry VIII that was dragged to the Tower as an old woman, and executed for simply having too much Plantagenet blood in 1541. Eventually, the earldom of Salisbury was recreated for the Cecil family (1605), and they hold it still today.

The medieval Montagu family was gone. But another emerged at about the same time, claiming that their branch’s founder, Richard Ladde, who took the name Montagu in 1447, was a son or grandson of John or James Montagu, an illegitimate son of the 4^th Earl of Salisbury. Richard’s family certainly used the same coat of arms, so either this is true, or they assumed the name and arms due to a gift in the last Earl’s will. But the family has few connections to Somerset or Wiltshire: Richard was a yeoman from Hanging Houghton, and his son Thomas Montagu was of Hemington, both villages in Northamptonshire. Hanging Houghton, in the centre of the County, was a great country house, owned by the family since about 1470, with great gardens and terraces, though eventually abandoned by them in 1665. It was in ruins by the eighteenth century, and now just a footprint remains.

It was Thomas’s son, Sir Edward Montagu, who brought this family back to the top ranks of English aristocratic society. A lawyer, he became Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and of the Common Pleas (1530s-50), a member of the Privy Council, and in 1547 was named one of the sixteen executors of Henry VIII’s will and governor of the child-king Edward VI. He narrowly avoided execution in 1553 for having drafted Edward VI’s will naming Lady Jane Grey as heir instead of Princess Mary.

Sir Edward had moved his chief residence to Boughton, also in Northamptonshire, in 1528. There was a de Boughton family in this county since the early Middle Ages, with a manor house just north of the town of Northampton. The estate of Boughton, however, was further north, near the town of Kettering. Buildings here were part of a monastic complex that, when shut down by Henry VIII, was sold to Montagu. The grand country house we see there now was built by his great-grandson, Ralph Montagu, in the 1680s, inspired by his periods of residence in France and the newly built château of Versailles. John, 2^nd Duke of Montagu, developed extensive gardens, again in a French style influenced by his Grand Tour (and giving him the nickname ‘John the Planter’). In the eighteenth century, however, Boughton House lost prominence, designated as a residence for dowagers or younger siblings, and, because it was not the family’s main residence, it was not renovated to keep up with the latest styles and therefore remains almost completely untouched in its original seventeenth-century form—a rarity amongst the English country houses. After 1790, Boughton was part of the inheritance of the dukes of Buccleuch, but continued to fade (since they resided primarily in Scotland), but since the 1990s, new life has been breathed into Boughton, particularly its gardens, and re-oriented towards tourism.

Chief Justice Sir Edward Montagu’s son Edward was an MP for Northamptonshire and held several posts in the county (including county sheriff four times). He expanded the family’s landholdings in this county even more, notably acquiring Barnwell Castle in the 1540s, to which he added a manor house—the Tudor house (and older castle ruins) passed to the dukes of Buccleuch in the early nineteenth century; they sold it in 1913, but it was purchased in 1938 by the 6^th Duke’s grand-daughter and her husband the Duke of Gloucester. The Gloucesters—cousins of Elizabeth II—lived here until the 1990s and it was sold in 2024.

The second Edward Montagu died in 1602, leaving behind a set of sons who each rose to prominence in different ways. Three of them, Edward, Henry and Sidney, spawned the separate lines of Montagu of Boughton, Montagu of Manchester and Montagu of Sandwich. Of the others, Walter and Charles gained knighthoods and served in Parliament, while James entered the church and served the Crown as Dean of the Chapel Royal from 1603. He had Calvinist leanings and a scholarly reputation, so was close to King James, whose works he edited, and who promoted him to Bishop of Bath & Wells in 1608 then of Winchester in 1616. A Privy Councillor and first Master of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge University, he died relatively young only two years later in 1618.

The eldest brother, Edward, an MP for Northamptonshire since the 1580s, was promoted to the House of Lords by the King in 1621, as Baron Montagu of Boughton. He remained a loyal servant of the Stuarts and when tensions arose between Parliament and Charles I, he backed the King and was arrested, 1642. The damp of the Tower of London made him ill and though he was transferred to a hospital, he died in 1644.

Meanwhile, his brother Henry had become a lawyer like their grandfather, and Chief Justice of the King’s Bench by 1616. King James named him Lord High Treasurer in 1620, and created him Viscount Mandeville and Baron Montagu of Kimbolton, then the next year raised him to the post of Lord President of the Council. King Charles continued his father’s favour and raised him in rank to Earl of Manchester, 1626, and Lord Privy Seal, 1628. Like his elder brother, he remained one of the most trusted counsellors of Charles I, but when he died in 1642, his son was already known as a leader of the Parliamentarian opposition, and a commander of their army. The youngest brother, Sidney, of Hinchingbrooke, was also a judge, serving as a Master of Requests, part of a lawcourt closely attached to the Crown through the Privy Council. He remained a loyalist, and like his brother Edward was arrested in 1642; and though he was released, he too died in 1644, leaving a son, Edward, who became 1^st Earl of Sandwich—his story will be picked up again towards the very end of this post.

Of the senior line, of Boughton, there were two brothers: Edward, 2^nd Baron Montagu, who sided with Parliament in the Civil War, and Sir William, another lawyer and a member of the House of Commons for fifty years. Charles II favoured the latter with the office of Chief Baron of the Exchequer (a judge), 1676, but he was removed by James II in 1686. We thus see this family continually balancing between military and judicial service, and between loyalty and opposition. The 2^nd Baron’s heir, another Edward, reversed his father’s position and helped bring about the restoration of the monarchy in 1660; he was rewarded with the office of Master of the Horse for Queen Catherine of Braganza, but was killed in 1665 in the Anglo-Dutch War before he could succeed to his father’s title, which thus passed in 1684 to his brother Ralph, who had already taken over the post of the Queen’s Master of the Horse.

Ralph Montagu was a court gallant in the Restoration. He served as a diplomat in France in 1669-70 (when Charles II and Louis XIV were trying to form an unwieldy alliance), then was given a prominent court position, Master of the Great Wardrobe, 1671, but fell from favour for trying to bring down the Earl of Danby as first minister along with his chief supporter the Duchess of Cleveland, and for supporting the Exclusion Party in Parliament (the faction trying to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York from succeeding to the Crown). Charles II thus removed Montagu from his court posts in 1678.

Succeeding to the peerage as 3^rd Baron Montagu in 1684, he focused on rebuilding Boughton House as we’ve seen above, recalling the grand French châteaux he’d seen when he was ambassador. He also built a grand London mansion, Montagu House, situated on the northern edge of the old city, next to open fields in a district known as Bloomsbury. The house was built starting in 1675, with French and Dutch influences, and murals by renowned Italian painter Antonio Verrio, but in 1686 it burned down, and Montagu had to start again. The second Montagu House was grander and more clearly influenced by French classicism. In the 1750s, thinking the Bloomsbury area becoming too ‘middle class’, Montagu’s son sold the house to the newly founded British Museum. The site remains the home of this classic British institution, though Montagu House itself was torn down in the 1840s and rebuilt as a much more imposing Greek Revival building.

Ralph, Baron Montagu of Boughton, returned to royal favour after he backed William III in 1689, and was restored to his post as Master of the Great Wardrobe. He was also created Earl of Montagu and Viscount Monthermer—the latter title a formal recognition by the Crown that his family was indeed descended from the ancient House of Montagu. The Earl had married a very wealthy heiress, Elizabeth Wriothesley, heiress of the earls of Southampton, and potentially heiress of her first husband the Earl of Northumberland. She died in 1690, and two years later Montagu married again, another rich widow: Elizabeth Cavendish, heiress of her father the Duke of Newcastle and of her first husband, the Duke of Albemarle (Christopher Monck). It was said at the time that the Dowager Duchess of Albemarle was ‘mad’ (and some joked she was the ‘Monkey Duchess’ punning on her first husband’s surname) because she was convinced that, as the greatest heiress in England, she could only remarry a crowned head, and somehow thought this must be the Emperor of China. And so (as the story goes), Ralph Montagu dressed up in Chinese robes, proposed, and she accepted.

One of the properties Elizabeth Cavendish brought into the Montagu portfolio from Albemarle was the Lordship of Bowland, a vast wilderness of hills and dales in Lancashire. Its extent was enormous, covering about 800 km² with ten manors and four parishes. It had been designated the ‘Forest and Liberty of Bowland’ by the Normans, and was held with the Honor of Clitheroe by the de Lacy family, then passed to the earls of Lancaster in the fourteenth century. It thus became part of the Duchy of Lancaster, which was held directly by the Crown, until the Restoration when Bowland was granted to General Monck as part of his new dukedom of Albemarle. Along with most of the Montagu of Boughton branch properties, the Lordship of Bowland passed to the dukes of Buccleuch at the start of the nineteenth century, and from them to the local Lancashire Towneley family. The title was disused by the end of the century, but was revived in 2008 when it was sold to a private (and secret) person at Cambridge University.

After such a long career, and now with a fantastic fortune, Ralph, Earl of Montagu, was promoted by Queen Anne in 1705 to Duke of Montagu and Marquess of Monthermer. This promotion was also thanks to the favour Montagu had with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, whose daughter Mary his son married that same year. The 1^st Duke died a wealthy and powerful man in 1709. His Duchess—the ‘Empress of China’—survived for another twenty-five years in the halls of what is now the site of the British Museum. Maybe she haunts it still?

Their son John, 2^nd Duke of Montagu, was active in both government and society. He was interested in science and medicine, as a founding governor of the Foundling Hospital in London in 1739, and a Grand Master of the first Masonic Lodge in England in 1725. He was named governor of the islands of St Lucia and St Vincent in the West Indies in 1722, but the British were soon chased off these islands. In 1740, Montagu’s political career was crowned with the office of Master-General of the Ordnance, a post responsible for organising military supplies, hospitals, transportation etc…and thus often one of the most lucrative positions in government, as each commission always came with a ‘fee’.

The 2nd Duke moved his chief London residence away from Bloomsbury in the 1730s and built another Montagu House in the more aristocratic district closer to Westminster on Whitehall Street. The site had been the location of the London residence of the medieval archbishops of York, and later part of the Whitehall Palace complex itself (before it mostly burned down in the 1690s). This second Montagu House was relatively modest, with a front on the Thames. Like Boughton, it passed to the dukes of Buccleuch in the nineteenth century, who replaced it with a much grander building. This was demolished in 1949 and the site is today part of the Ministry of Defence buildings.

There was even a third Montagu House, built by the 1^st Duke at Blackheath Common, overlooking Greenwich Park and the Thames valley in southeast London. Eighteenth-century Montagus used this house as a retreat from the smells of urban London, but it is best known for housing a royal tenant, Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, estranged from her husband and thus from court, who lived here with her daughter, Princess Charlotte, between 1799 and 1812. It was the scene of Caroline’s alleged love affairs and gained lots of bad press, so in 1815 it was torn down. All that remains today are tennis courts on the site.

John and Mary Montagu had a son, John, who died when he was five, and two daughters. The first, Lady Isabella, married the 2^nd Duke of Manchester (below), then Edward Hussey, an MP from an old Anglo-Irish family, who legally took the name Hussey-Montagu, and when he retired from Parliament in 1762 was created Baron Beaulieu, of Beaulieu (Hampshire), then in 1784, advanced to Earl of Beaulieu. They had a son, John, Lord Montagu, another MP, but he died before his father, and when the latter died in 1802, these titles went extinct.

The younger daughter, Lady Mary, married George Brudenell, 4^th Earl of Cardigan, who also took the name and arms of Montagu. The Brudenell family were, like the Montagus, a landowning family from Northamptonshire, based at Deene Park; and like the Montagus they also rose to prominence through the career of a sixteenth century high court judge. Made barons in 1628, then earls in 1661, they only renounced Catholicism in 1709. The 3^rd Earl had married Lady Elizabeth Bruce, heiress of the Earl of Ailesbury and Elgin, so while the eldest son George was set up with the earldom of Cardigan, and later the Montagu succession, the younger son Thomas took the name Bruce and was re-created Earl of Ailesbury in 1776. This was a family on the rise, and the 4^th Earl was swiftly named Justice in Eyre North of the Trent, 1742, Governor of Windsor Castle, 1752, and re-created Duke of Montagu in 1766. He was later given a seat on the Privy Council and finally named Master of the Horse, 1780. In London, the Brudenell-Montagus lived at Montagu House on Whitehall and at Cardigan House. In the countryside, they inhabited Boughton House or Deene Park, and further afield enjoyed the revenues of the Forest of Bowland, which the Duke inherited from his sister-in-law Isabella in 1786 (his Duchess, Mary, had died in 1775).

As with his first cousin John Hussey-Montagu, John Brudenell-Montagu was set up as a politician and an heir: in Parliament he was moved to the House of Lords as Baron Montagu of Boughton in 1762 (as a Tory supporter), then became Marquess of Monthermer as courtesy title when the dukedom was re-created for his father and mother. But he too died before his father; so in 1786, the Crown re-created the barony of Montagu once more, this time with special remainder for his father and then for his nephew. In 1767, his sister Lady Elizabeth had married Henry Scott, 3^rd Duke of Buccleuch, a descendant of King Charles II, and their second son, Henry, took the name Montagu-Scott and 2^nd Baron Montagu of Boughton on his grandfather’s death in 1790. He was also Lord of Bowland. He died in 1845 with only daughters, so the barony went extinct, while the Lordship of Bowland went to his older brother’s descendants, who now took the triple-barrelled surname Montagu-Douglas-Scott. This offshoot of the Montagus—who also inherited the house at Boughton and several other properties noted here—will have their own separate blog post as dukes of Buccleuch.

This is one of the more complicated arranging and re-arranging of surnames and titles that seems to have been commonplace amongst the British aristocracy of the eighteenth century. In the end, the headship of the house of Montagu passed to the next line, Manchester, while the junior line of the house of Brudenell reclaimed its earldom of Cardigan, and its seat, Deene Park, where they still live today, having merged with the earldom of Ailesbury (one of the Bruce titles), raised to a marquessate in 1821.

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We pick up the Manchester line again with the 2^nd Earl who succeeded his father at the start of the English Civil War. Edward Montagu had already been advanced to the House of Lords in 1626 as Viscount Mandeville (also known as Baron Kimbolton), and unlike his father was a vocal opponent of royal absolutism. As 2^nd Earl from 1642, he became a Parliamentarian general, in command of the eastern counties in 1643, and leading the forces to victory at the Battle of Marston Moor. In subsequent years, Oliver Cromwell challenged his commitment to the cause and he resigned. The Earl of Manchester took up his seat in the House of Lords where he tried to reconcile the Parliamentarians with the Royalists, and tried to avoid bringing the King to trial. Having failed at these goals, he retired from public life during the Commonwealth, and was ultimately rewarded by Charles II in the Restoration with the post of one of the commissioners for the Great Seal of England and the Order of the Garter.

The seat of this branch of the Montagus was Kimbolton Castle in Huntingdonshire (today part of Cambridgeshire). A castle was built here in the twelfth century by the 1^st Earl of Essex, Geoffrey FitzPeter, whose sons adopted the name Mandeville, after one of their maternal ancestors (Geoffrey de Mandeville had been one of the companions of William the Conqueror a century before), and this name will re-appear frequently in the history of the House of Montagu. In 1522, the medieval castle was acquired by Richard Wingfield, a Tudor courtier and diplomat, who rebuilt it as a Tudor manor house, with a moat. Because it was secure with a moat, and relatively far from London and the court, Kimbolton was offered by Wingfield as a residence for the disgraced Queen Katherine of Aragon (now recognised officially only as the Dowager Princess of Wales). Wingfield was a well-connected host, as a cousin of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (Henry VIII’s best friend and brother-in-law), and also a diplomat who had earned the favour of Emperor Charles V, Katherine’s nephew. She lived at Kimbolton in total isolation, seeing almost no one and only leaving her rooms to attend mass in the castle’s chapel, from May 1534 until her death in January 1536. The Wingfields organised her funeral at nearby Peterborough Cathedral. In 1615, Kimbolton Castle was purchased by the future 1^st Earl of Manchester; it was then rebuilt by the 1^st Duke of Manchester in about 1700, in a classical style but with battlements to give it more of a ‘castle’ feel. Over the next two centuries, most of the Manchester family would be buried in St Andrew’s church in the village, but the house itself slowly fell into disrepair, only to be overhauled, with indoor plumbing and electric lights, in the 1930s, but at far too much cost, forcing the sale first of the contents in 1949, then of the castle itself in 1950. It now houses the Kimbolton School, and is only open for tourists on certain open days each year.

The 2^nd Earl of Manchester died in 1667, and although he married five times, he had only one son, Robert, the 3^rd Earl, who did not live long as earl, and died in 1683, having served as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber for Charles II and Lord Lieutenant of Huntingdonshire. His son Charles would become the 1^st Duke of Manchester, but before we move to him, the 2^nd Earl’s younger brothers and nephews should be mentioned.

Walter Montagu is one of the most fascinating members of the family—and certainly for me as a historian of the court of Louis XIV. He was sent several times as a diplomat from Charles I to France in the 1620s-30s (often with secret instructions). In 1634, he converted to Catholicism and was given a place in the household of the French-born (and Catholic) Queen Henrietta Maria. In the Civil War Montagu left with the Queen for France, and joined a monastic community, becoming abbot of a Benedictine monastery in Nanteuil and also abbot of St-Martin of Pontoise (with its generous revenues) through the intercession of the Queen and her sister-in-law, the Regent of France, Anne of Austria (on whose behalf he continued to run secret missions to England in the 1640s). In 1647, Abbé Walter was named Chaplain to the British queen, and her almoner (her court at this point was based in the Palais Royal in Paris). During the Restoration Abbé Montagu lived at the Queen Mother’s court at Somerset House in London, then returned with her again to France in 1665, and officiated at her funeral at St-Denis in 1669. He then joined the household of Henrietta Maria’s daughter, Henriette, Duchess of Orléans, but she died the following year, so he retired from court and died in 1677.

A younger half-brother, George, of Horton Hall, was an MP for Huntingdonshire in the 1640s, then for Dover in the 1660s-70s. Horton Hall was also in Northamptonshire, but on the opposite side from other Montagu properties, close to the border with Buckinghamshire. It was an old estate owned in the sixteenth century by the Parr family (relatives of Queen Katherine Parr); Baron Parr of Horton built a Tudor mansion. Acquired by the 1^st Earl of Manchester then held by this younger branch of the Montagu family—and rebuilt in the 1740s in a palladian style—it was later sold in the 1780s to diplomat Robert Gunning. Horton passed through other hands in the nineteenth century, then was demolished in 1936.

Hon. George Montagu of Horton had two sons: James was a judge and Whig politician, rising to the post of Attorney General in 1708 and Chief Baron of the Exchequer in 1722; Charles was also a Whig politician, but rose more prominently as part of the ‘Whig Junto’ who often ran the government in the reigns of William III and Anne. In 1694 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Bank of England. King William created him Baron Halifax (of Halifax in Yorkshire). He later was a major supporter of the Act of Union (1707, joining England and Scotland), and of the Hanoverian Succession, so in 1714 was rewarded by George I with the post of First Lord of the Treasury and the earldom of Halifax. He died the following year, so the barony passed to his nephew George, who was re-created Earl of Halifax that same year. He was appointed Ranger of Bushy Park in west London and built the ‘Upper Lodge’ in 1714/15, which today is known as Bushy House (and was for a time the residence of King William IV and his wife Adelaide).

George, 2^nd Earl of Halifax is known most for his role in developing trade with the North American colonies in his capacity as President of the Board of Trade from 1749—and in that same year founding a new city, Halifax, in the colony of Nova Scotia. There are also counties in Virginia and North Carolina named for him (in fact quite close to each other, on the border between the two states). As a leading Tory politician of the 1760s, he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, First Lord of the Admiralty, and a Secretary of State. Unlike others of his party, he was a supporter of the rights of the colonists and opposed to slavery. He returned to government in 1770 as Lord Privy Seal in the new administration of his nephew and protégé, Lord North, but died a year later, his titles extinct.

Charles Montagu, 4^th Earl of Manchester from 1683, was a supporter of the accession of William and Mary in 1689, and fought under William in Ireland. He was appointed Ambassador to France, 1699-1701, and to Venice, 1707-08, then under George I was given a post in the Household as Lord of the Bedchamber and finally elevated to a dukedom in 1719. This meant there were now two Montagu dukedoms, Montagu and Manchester, a rare honour for a single family. He died three years later and the title passed to his heir, known as Viscount Mandeville.

William, 2^nd Duke of Manchester, was, like many of his family, Lord Lieutenant of Huntingdonshire. He was also, like the Duke of Montagu, one of the founders of the Foundling Hospital in London. As we’ve seen, he married his cousin Lady Isabella Montagu, but they had no children, so when he died in 1739, the titles passed to his brother Robert.

The 3^rd Duke of Manchester was a Whig politician (unlike his cousin the Earl of Halifax), and Lord of the Bedchamber for George II from 1739, then Lord Chamberlain for Queen Charlotte form 1761 until his death a year later. He had two sons: the younger, Lord Charles Montagu, was one of the last royal governors of South Carolina (off and on three times between 1766 and 1773), and commander of a regiment of redcoats in the War of American Independence. He did not make it back to Britain and died in 1784 in Nova Scotia, appropriately in Halifax, where he is buried.

George, 4^th Duke of Manchester, took over from his father as Lord of the Bedchamber in 1762, and set about remodelling Kimbolton Castle and developing properties in central London. In the ministry of his cousin Lord North, he was appointed Lord Chamberlain of the Household, 1782, and a member of the Privy Council, but was removed when the North government fell a year later. Instead, he was sent as Ambassador to France (by now a familiar posting for his family) where he helped settle the details of the Treaty of Paris, 1783, that ended the war in North America.

The Manchester properties in London were part of the Portman estate in Marylebone, across Oxford Street from Mayfair. In the 1770s, the 4^th Duke developed Manchester Square, and on one side built Manchester House. This name did not remain very long however: after a short stint as the Embassy of Spain in the 1790s, the house was sold to the 2^nd Marquess of Hertford (of the Seymour family) in 1797. Again used as an embassy, this time for France (1836-51), the house, now called Hertford House, eventually passed—along with one of the greatest art collections of the age—to an illegitimate son of the 4^th Marquess, Richard Wallace, who bequeathed it to the nation in 1890. The Wallace Collection in Hertford House still presides gracefully over Manchester Square.

William, 5^th Duke of Manchester, succeeded his father in 1788. He had led a fairly quiet life as Lord Mandeville, but made an impact later on, notably as Governor of Jamaica, 1808 to 1827, during which time he oversaw the abolition of slavery in that colony. He had married a daughter and co-heiress of the Duke of Gordon, but she ran off with a footman in 1812 and they legally separated.

Their son, George, 6^th Duke of Manchester, was known for most of his life as Viscount Mandeville (and gave this name to a parish in Jamaica while his father was governor) since he only held the ducal title from 1843 to 1855. At this time there was a neogothic revival in Britain, and a passion for all things medieval; the Montagus joined in the fun by reviving the name Drogo, which appeared somewhere in the list of names of sons in every generation from here on. The Duke also married an heiress, Millicent Bernard-Sparrow, daughter of a general and heiress of Brampton Park in Huntingdonshire, and large estates in Ireland.

Brampton Park had a red brick house from the sixteenth century, built by the Throckmortons. It was then owned by the Bernard family (baronets) and was rebuilt by the last heiress, Olivia Bernard, Lady Sparrow, a prominent philanthropist, in the 1820s. Much of the house was destroyed by fire in 1907; it was restored and lived in by the Manchester family in the 1920s-30s, then housed German prisoners of war in World War II. It became the officers’ mess building for the Royal Air Force at Brampton, 1955 to 2013, and is now being developed into residential units.

The heir to the Montagu and Bernard fortunes, William Drogo, 7^th Duke, was thus a very wealthy landowner, with 13,000 acres in Huntingdonshire and 12,000 in County Armagh, Ireland. He was passionate about religion, and was active in the Canterbury Association, set up in 1848 to colonise New Zealand—he bought land there and was encouraged to emigrate and lead the new colony, but he didn’t—then from 1861 to 1888, he was Grand Prior of the Order of St John (the Protestant charity set up to replace the old Order of St John, aka Malta).

In 1852, the future duke married the intriguing German countess from Hanover, Luise von Alten, a courtier who became Mistress of the Robes to Queen Victoria, 1858-59, and a noted political hostess and friend of the Prime Minister, Lord Derby (whose grandson later married her daughter Lady Alice Montagu). Widowed in 1890, Duchess Louise soon married the Duke of Devonshire, gaining her nickname the ‘Double Duchess’. She was known as a great beauty and a member of the Prince of Wales Set (the friends of the future King Edward VII).

Her son, George, 8^th Duke of Manchester, also made an interesting marriage, in 1876, to Consuelo Yznaga, daughter of a Cuban plantation owner and niece of a New York banker. She came with a six million dollar dowry, then inherited further millions from her brother in 1901; she was one of the inspirations for characters in Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers—Wharton had known the Duchess personally, but the book didn’t come out until 1938, long after her death. Consuelo commissioned the famous Manchester Tiara from Cartier in 1903, which kept the family afloat even in its darkest moments, then was given to the nation in 2007 to cover death duties (now housed in the Victoria & Albert in London).

But such extraordinary wealth also seems to have brought on the downturn in fortunes of the House of Montagu, from which it is still reeling. Part of the problem was the collapse in the 1880s of the land rental market in Britain, resulting in a drop in income for the Manchester landed estates from £90,000 to £25,000. But the 8^th Duke also made matters worse through poor financial decisions. As Viscount Mandeville, George Montagu had a modest career as an MP and soldier, but became better known as a drunk and a social outcast. He spent most of his wife’s dowry on gambling and women (notably a mistress, music-hall singer Bessie Bellwood), so was exiled by his father to Tandragee Castle in Armagh. His wife remained in London. The same year he succeeded to the dukedom, 1890, he was declared bankrupt, and died just two years later of cirrhosis, only 39. His widow lived on until 1909.

Tandragee was originally the seat of the O’Hanlon family. Confiscated after Ireland’s Nine Years War in 1603, the estate and its castle were given to the St John family, then destroyed in the rebellion of 1641 when the O’Hanlons tried to take it back. The Sparrow family acquired the estate in the eighteenth century and it thus passed by marriage to the dukes of Manchester. The 6^th Duke rebuilt the castle, and it became the secondary residence of the family after Kimbolton. In 1956, his impoverished descendants sold it to a local man who installed a business he had created: the very glamourous sounding Tayto Potato Crisp Company.

The teenaged William (Lord Kimbolton while his grandfather was alive and known as ‘Kim’ by his friends for the rest of his life) became 9^th Duke of Manchester in 1892. He was able to avoid some of the worst of his father’s bankruptcy by relying on his mother’s sizeable American estate, wisely kept separate. But like his predecessors, he spent a lot of money, entertaining, travelling, collecting, and gambling. As a young peer he joined the Liberals in Parliament and was appointed Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard in 1905 by the government of Campbell-Bannerman. Five years earlier, he had married another American, Helena Zimmerman of Cincinnati, another heiress as daughter of a railroad president and major stockholder in Standard Oil. The marriage was in secret since his mother did not approve of the match—was this New York money looking down on Ohio money?

Eugene Zimmerman paid off many of Kim’s debts, and bought the couple an estate in County Galway, Kylemore Castle, 1903—a grand former abbey, which they had to sell not long after. Still the Duke’s debts grew and grew and he spent much of his time abroad evading creditors. His wife divorced him in 1931, and he immediately married the West End actress Kathleen Dawes. Soon after he was convicted of making false financial statements to a pawnbroker and sentenced to nine months in Wormwood Scrubs Prison in west London (his brother, Lord Edward, also spent time here in 1935, then died mysteriously in a Mexican jungle). The 9^th Duke of Manchester died in disgrace in 1947.

Alexander, Viscount Mandeville (known as ‘Mandy’), now became the 10^th Duke of Manchester. He had started a career in the Royal Navy in the 1930s, then moved to British East Africa (now Kenya) in 1946 to farm a huge estate—10,000 acres, where he could live like a duke, with 14 houseboys and 20 gardeners—and try to undo generations of profligate spending. He had spent a lot on Kimbolton Castle in the 1930s, bringing in modern plumbing and electricity, but by the 1950s, he sold it, and Tandragee Castle as well; as his businesses continued to fail in the 1960s, he sold of the rest of the family’s interests in the United Kingdom. He was succeeded in 1977 by his elder son, Sidney (also known as ‘Kim’), who continued to develop the family interests in Kenya and South Africa but only held the ducal title for eight years before his own death in 1985.

The new 12^th Duke of Manchester seems to have inherited his grandfather’s propensity for double dealing and evading the law. As a young man, Lord Angus Montagu (or ‘Aggi’) had moved to Australia where he worked as a salesman, a cattle wrangler, a barman and a crocodile wrestler. Much of his history is colourful and difficult to substantiate for certain, but he seems also to have worked in Texas oil fields and sold trousers in a Melbourne department store. By the 1980s Angus was living in a modest flat in Bedford, a short drive north of London, but also not too far from Kimbolton where he could maintain at least some family ties as ‘lord of the manor’. In 1985, on succeeding to his lofty titles (but inheriting next to nothing), he was charged with conspiracy to fraud a British bank, but was acquitted by a judge who deemed him too ‘absurdly stupid’ to be guilty, and duped instead by a cleverer con-man. Rather than retreat from this brush with the law, the new duke only increased his activities with associates often connected with the London criminal underground. And his debts continued to increase. Over the next decade he used his title to try to start up fundraising schemes, but was convicted of fraud in 1996 in the United States, where he spent two years in prison then was deported to the UK. He did set up a moderately successful tourism business in later years, offering Americans a chance to tour England in the company of a ‘real duke’. He married four times and died in his flat in Bedford in 2002.

Since 2002, the 13^th Duke of Manchester has been Alexander Montagu, born in Australia in 1962, but living in the US since the 1980s. As a duke with no fortune he has also struggled to find his place, like his father spending time in prison (in Australia), and as recently as 2013 was charged with fraud for a bad cheque in Las Vegas, Nevada, and soon after that served time for burglary and making a false police report (for which he served several years in prison after 2017). But he has also been dogged by lawsuits and scandals involving his marriages. There are reports of a first brief marriage in Australia to a woman (who claims he tried to kill her), and legal protests from him that he does not owe child support for offspring from a marriage he says never existed. He had a second wife in the US for several years, whom he divorced, and although it seems he considers their son Alexander (b. 1993) to be his heir, it will be interesting to see how the British peerage regulators will consider him since (if the claims are correct) the Duke was still married to wife number one when he married wife number two. The heir himself, Viscount Mandeville, has himself already featured in the US press when he was a child as one of the many purported ‘special friends’ of Michael Jackson, then as an aristocrat working in fast-food in southern California to put himself through college. The online social media profiles of both the 13^th Duke and his Duchess (a third wife, a real estate professional in Las Vegas) are a bit nutty, but I’ll leave this there, since I’m a historian, so will retreat to safer ground…!

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Before wrapping up, there is one final line of the House of Montagu that reached prominence, and another earldom, that of Sandwich. Sir Sidney Montagu, youngest brother of the 1^st Earl of Manchester, acquired another estate in Huntingdonshire: Hinchingbrooke. Like so many country houses in the history of the English aristocracy, this one began its life as a monastic building, a Benedictine nunnery from the eleventh century. It was secularised and acquired by none other than a nephew of Thomas Cromwell (the man conveniently behind the dissolution of the monasteries), in 1538. The Cromwells rebuilt it as an Elizabethan manor house in the 1560s, and held on to it until Sir Oliver (uncle of the more famous Oliver) got into financial difficulties and sold it in 1627 to Sidney Montagu. The Montagus of Hinchingbrooke were based here for the next three centuries, rebuilding the house after a major fire in 1830, then selling it in 1962 to Huntingdonshire County Council. In 1970 it became the main building of the Hinchingbrooke School.

Sidney of Hinchingbrooke’s son Edward was an MP in the 1640s-50s and a soldier in the Parliamentarian army. During the English Commonwealth he sat on the Council of State (1653-59) and was appointed General at Sea in 1656. He remained involved in naval affairs in the Restoration, benefitting from his familial link with naval administrator Samuel Pepys who was his mother’s great-nephew. The King created him Earl of Sandwich (in Kent) in May 1660 in recognition for his part in ensuring the Restoration earlier that year (with subsidiary titles Viscount Hinchingbrooke and Baron Montagu of St Neots, both in Huntingdonshire). He was entrusted with important diplomatic roles: Ambassador to Portugal, 1661-62 (to settle the King’s marriage with Catherine of Braganza), and Ambassador to Spain, 1666-68 (to negotiate the Treaty of Madrid, 1667, which aimed to block French advances in the Low Countries and to mediate between Spain and Portugal). Lord Sandwich continued his naval career and was killed at the Battle of Solebay in 1672—such was his reputation in England that he was given a state funeral.

As this branch were not dukes or princes, we shouldn’t follow its path entirely, but several names jump out as prominent members of eighteenth-century British society. John, 4^th Earl of Sandwich, was a prominent politician and supporter of the expansion of Britain’s overseas empire. He was Secretary of State in the governments of George Grenville and Lord North in the 1660s-70s (the ‘Patriot Whigs’), and First Lord of the Admiralty off and on between the 1740s and 1780s; as such he sponsored the journeys of Captain Cook in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and had two distinct island chains named for him in the 1770s: the Sandwich Islands (aka the Kingdom of Hawai‘i) in the Pacific, and the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic (near Antarctica). There’s also Montague Island off the coast of Alaska and Hinchinbrook Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. We remember him most, however, for being too busy at work on naval affairs to stop for lunch (or to stop at the gambling tables, depending on which tale you believe), so asking for meat to be placed between two slices of bread: a sandwich.

The earldom of Sandwich continues today with Luke Montagu (b. 1969), 12^th Earl since February 2025. Since 1955 they have lived at Mapperton in Dorset, an ancient manor house rebuilt by the Morgan family in the Tudor era. Mapperton House has been voted one of England’s finest country houses, and its gardens regularly win heritage prizes—both are used frequently as sets for film and television.

Back in the eighteenth century, the younger son of the 1^st Earl of Sandwich, Sidney, became very wealthy, having married his father’s ward, the heiress of the Wortley baronets of Wortley Hall, nearly Barnsley in Yorkshire. Under the ground at Wortley was black gold, coal, which Sidney developed with great financial success. His son Sir Edward Wortley Montagu was Ambassador to Constantinople, 1716-18, but it is his wife Lady Mary (daughter of the Duke of Kingston), who is more famous today, as a writer of letters and travel diaries, and in particular reporting on her experiences inside the Ottoman harem in Constantinople, where she learned of a technique for preventing smallpox, which she used on her own children and even convinced her friend back in London, Caroline, Princess of Wales, to use on the royal children. Her son Edward was also known as a traveller and a student of languages—going so far as to abandon English culture altogether and living ‘as a Turk’ in Venice in the 1750s-60s.

Another prominent member of the fashionable intellectual set of London society in this period was Elizabeth Montagu, wife of another Montagu cousin, who was known as one of the leaders of the ‘bluestockings’, educated women either admired or reviled for their learning and independence of spirit. This branch of the Montagus owned yet another ‘Montagu House’ in London, this one on Portman Square, in Marylebone—built about 1780, it survived until the area was bombed in the Second World War. There is also a Montagu Square nearby, developed in 1810 and named for the famous Salon hostess.

There is yet another peerage title ‘Baron Montagu’, this one of Beaulieu, created in 1885, famous for its beautiful Beaulieu Palace House in Hampshire (home to the National Motor Museum since 1952), and for the 3^rd Baron’s imprisonment for homosexuality in 1954. But this branch more properly belongs to the Montagu-Douglas-Scott line, dukes of Buccleuch, so will be covered there.

One other claimed branch—distant, and of an unsure connection—is Montague of Boveney (in Buckinghamshire), which contributed one prominent churchman (Bishop of Chichester, 1628-38, then Norwich, 1638-41), and a colonist who migrated to Jamestown, Virginia in 1621. His family set up a plantation on the Charles River (now the York River), and left descendants, including Andrew Jackson Montague, the 44^th Governor of Virginia, 1902-06.

From one of the richest and most powerful families in eighteenth-century Britain, the House of Montagu is today living under the shadow of the criminally indebted twentieth-century dukes of Manchester.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

Kent is one of the most familiar names for an English county—but also unique in that it is one of the few that are never appended ‘-shire’ when giving historic names. It is also said to be one of the oldest place names still in use in England, named by the Greeks as Kantion in the fourth century BC, probably from a Celtic word for ‘land on the edge’ or ‘coast’, which certainly applies to this land famous for its white cliffs. When Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC he called this area Cantia and its people the Cantiaci or the Cantii. Their capital eventually became known as Canterbury—bury being a Germanic toponym for a town.

So by the fifth century, it was a Germanic place, settled by Jutes and Saxons who formed a Kingdom of Cantware (‘Kentish people’). The first reliably recorded king was Aethelberht, who converted to Christianity in 597 and set up the first two episcopal seats in England, at Canterbury and Rochester. After 764, his descendants weakened and Kent was often a client kingdom of Mercia, and after 825 was absorbed by Wessex.

The first time Kent was referred to as an earldom was in 1020 when King Cnut gave it to Godwin, already Earl of Wessex (another source says it wasn’t until Edward the Confessor’s reign started in 1042). Godwin died in 1053 and his lands were divided, with Kent going to his fifth son Leofwine (along with Essex, Middlesex and other earldoms in the southeast). Earl Leofwine was killed alongside his brother King Harold at Hastings in 1066 (shown in the Bayeux Tapestry as ‘Lewine’). It’s too bad Leofwine was erased from existence in recent BBC television dramatization of the Norman Conquest.

Kent was one of the few places that really resisted the Normans, so in 1067 it was given the status of a county palatine, and its new earl, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (William the Conqueror’s half-brother), more extensive powers. He later betrayed his family and forfeited his lands, including the earldom of Kent.

In the next three centuries, the earldom of Kent was re-created several times for key supporters of the English Crown. In 1141, it was for William of Ypres, a lieutenant of King Stephen; in 1227 it was for Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciar of England and Regent for the young King Henry III; then in 1321, for Edmund of Woodstock, sixth son of King Edward I. The earldom passed to his two sons, then after 1352 to their sister Joan, the ‘Fair Maid of Kent’. She could pass on the lands to her children, but not the earldom, so her husband, Thomas Holland, was re-created earl of Kent in 1360.

The Holland family held the earldom of Kent for the rest of the fourteenth century, with Thomas and Joan’s grandson Thomas (the 3^rd Earl) being elevated to Duke of Surrey in 1397, though quickly brought down again in 1399 and executed in 1400. His brother the 4^th Earl died in 1408, meaning their sister, another Joan, Countess of Kent, could transmit it to her husbands, one of them being Edmund, Duke of York (though in the end she had no children).

Another very brief creation was for William Neville (younger son of the Earl of Westmoreland), an ally of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, and Steward of his Household. He was named Earl of Kent in 1461, then died in 1463.

Immediately, the earldom was given again in 1465 to another Yorkist supporter, Edmund Grey, Lord Grey of Ruthin, Lord Treasurer of England. His son solidified the Grey family’s place at the top of the English aristocracy by marriage to the Queen’s sister, Anne Woodville (in 1480). So their descendants would be cousins of the Tudors in the century to come. The House of Grey is itself vast, with roots stretching back to the Conquest, and including the powerful Tudor magnate, the Duke of Suffolk, and his daughter, Lady Jane, several earldoms (including that for Prime Minister Earl Grey), and numerous baronies. The multiple branches of this family will have its own blog post in due course, but for now, we can focus on the last of the Grey earls of Kent, who became the one and only non-royal Duke of Kent, in 1710.

Henry Grey, 12^th Earl of Kent, was a moderate politician and courtier, who served in the Household as Lord Chamberlain for Queen Anne, 1704-10, and was created Marquess of Kent in 1706. He agreed to give up his post in exchange for a dukedom, which he got in 1710, with subsidiary titles Earl of Harold and Viscount Goderich. The latter title comes from a castle held by the Greys since the 1610s, Goodrich, a mighty Norman fortress in Herefordshire. I suspect the earldom was also an allusion to Norman ancestry and Harold Godwinson (though it was his brother who was Earl of Kent, as we’ve seen). The Duke of Kent later returned to the Household under the Hanoverians, as Gentleman of the Bedchamber and as Lord Steward, 1716-18, and in the government at Lord Privy Seal, 1719-20. He lived at Wrest Park, in Bedfordshire, which today is the site of a magnificent, very French, country house—but it was a later reconstruction, not the house as the Duke of Kent knew it. Some of the earlier buildings remain, notably the lovely banqueting pavilion.By 1733, all of the Duke’s sons had died, so the King agreed to create a new title for him, Marquess Grey, with a special remainder to his grand-daughter, Lady Jemima Campbell. The Duke died in 1740, and his titles with him, except the marquisate—Lady Jemima married Philip Yorke, 2^nd Earl of Hardwicke, that same year and the history of Wrest Park lies with her family.

And so we come to the first royal dukedom bearing the name Kent. The Hanoverians continued a Stuart practice of pairing together an English and a Scottish dukedom for royal princes, and this was done for the older sons of King George III as they came of age (but curiously not for the youngest two sons, whose dukedoms are English only). Prince Edward, the fourth son, was created Duke of Kent and Strathearn, in 1799. He had made a name for himself as Commander-in-Chief in British North America, 1791-1802 (and was an early advocate of the creation of Canada), then as Governor of Gibraltar, 1802-20. But he is mostly remembered today as the father of Queen Victoria, born when he was already in his fifties.

The Duke of Kent lived at Castle Hill Lodge in Ealing, west of London—he had bought the house from his brother’s secret former wife Mrs Fitzherbert in 1801, but left it in 1812, and it was eventually rebuilt, remodelled, and now serves as a home for wounded soldiers. When he died in 1820, his double dukedom reverted to the Crown.

The title was given out again for Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria, but not as a dukedom. When he was created Duke of Edinburgh in 1866, his subsidiary titles were Earl of Kent and Earl of Ulster. By the 1880s the Duke of Edinburgh was an admiral, and was named Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, and Admiral of the Fleet in 1893. That same year he inherited the title Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha and moved to Germany. He died in 1900 with no sons, so these titles returned to the Crown.

The Duke of Edinburgh did actually own property in Kent: a house at Eastwell Park near Ashford. There had been a house here since Tudor times, rebuilt in neo-Elizabethan style at the end of the eighteenth century, and occupied by Prince Alfred and his family in the 1870s and 80s. It was mostly destroyed by a fire in the 1920s.

Finally, we come to the present creation of the Dukedom of Kent. The title was raised once more into a dukedom in 1934 for Prince George, fourth son of George V. The new Duke of Kent, the most dashing and sociable brother of George VI, was meant to act as Governor-General of Australia in 1938, but was prevented by the outbreak of war. He was an RAF officer and died in an air crash in Caithness in August 1942. He had married in 1934 the glamourous Princess Marina of Greece, whose mother was a Russian grand duchess, which brought Romanov blood into this branch of the British royal family. Her first cousin Philip of Greece later married Elizabeth II. Princess Marina continued to be an active member of the House of Windsor for another twenty-five years.

From 1935, the Duke and Duchess of Kent lived at Coppins in Buckinghamshire, a nineteenth-century house first acquired by Princess Victoria, daughter of Edward VII. It would remain the family seat for the 2^nd Duke of Kent and his family, until he sold it in 1972, and moved to Amner Hall, a Georgian House that became part of the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk at the end of the nineteenth century (later the residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales), and from 1990, Crocker End in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, until recently. Since 1978, the Kents also resided at Wren Cottage, within the grounds of Kensington Palace.

The 2^nd Duke of Kent, Prince Edward of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is the oldest living member of the British royal family (since September 2025). Born in 1935, he was only six when his father died and he succeeded to his titles. He followed a military career in the 1950s-70s, serving in Hong Kong, Cyprus and Northern Ireland. He became an honorary Field Marshal in 1993, and was colonel of the Scots Guards from 1974 to 2024. He has been very active in carrying out royal duties, often representing his cousin the late Queen overseas (such as independence ceremonies in Uganda and Barbados), and acting as chairman or president for a number of charities relating to sports, business or technology. He shares a passion for tennis for his wife, the now late Katharine Worsley. The daughter of a baronet from North Yorkshire, based at Holvingham Hall, she married the Duke in 1961, and like him became known for her connection to Wimbledon.  The Duchess of Kent converted to Catholicism in 1994, and retreated from many of her royal duties, dropping the HRH styling from 2002 and focusing instead on her support for music, both performance and teaching (as simply ‘Katherine Kent’).

The Duke and his siblings (Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Alexandra, Lady Ogilvy) all retain the style HRH, as grandchildren of a sovereign. Their children are not, however, so when George, Earl of St Andrews (b. 1962) succeeds his father he will be the 3^rd Duke of Kent, but not royal. His son, Edward, Lord Downpatrick (b. 1988) became a Catholic, so while he is in line for the dukedom, is not in line for the throne, nor is his uncle, Lord Nicholas Windsor. The Duke of Kent’s brother, Prince Michael, married a Catholic, as did the Earl of St Andrews, so both lost their place in the line of succession, but were both restored to it by Elizabeth II in 2015. The last in the line of succession to the dukedom is Prince Michael’s son, Lord Frederick Windsor. There are of course Kent daughters and granddaughters as well, but although they are in line for the throne, they are not in line for the dukedom.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

One of the least known dukedoms in the peerages of Great Britain is that of Cleveland. After starting off as a title for one of the most famous duchesses in Europe, Barbara Villiers, the second and third dukes, Charles and William FitzRoy, were very rich but unremarkable. Their successors in the Vane family managed to revive the dukedom in the nineteenth century, and although they maintained one of the greatest estates in England, Raby in County Durham, they too did little to make themselves memorable in the history of the British aristocracy and left little trace when they died out in 1891.

As with many of the great houses of Europe, much of the fame, and the reason for their elevation to the most exalted title, came from whom they descended: in the case of the first dukes, they were the son and grandson of the King of England, Charles II. For the Vanes, the illustrious ancestors were a bit further back, leaders of the Parliamentary party of the seventeenth century, and solid members of the subsequent Whig Party in the eighteenth. So it is interesting to pair them together considering the first were naturally supporters of the Crown, while the latter did much to limit its power. The Vanes are also a good example of the enduring power of a county family in Britain, as one of the largest landowners in County Durham and lords lieutenant there off and on for over two centuries (1753 to 1988).

Where is Cleveland? Aside from the US city in Ohio (named for General Moses Cleaveland), and the ‘Cleveland Street Scandal’ of 1889 (for afficionados of Victorian London), which took place in Fitzrovia, once part of the 2^nd Duke of Cleveland’s estate, the name does not conjure up a specific place. But there is a Cleveland, named for the cliffs that overlook the North Sea in the area just south of the mouth of the River Tees and north of the North York Moors. There was once a County of Cleveland, from 1974 to 1996, with its county town of Middlesbrough. Most of the area is in Yorkshire, but part of the short-lived county was across the Tees in Durham, which is more connected historically to the title of the dukedom that bears its name.

The first bearer of the title was not a duke but a duchess: Barbara Palmer, née Villiers, the most influential of all of Charles II’s mistresses, who was Lady Castlemaine (an Irish title) by marriage, then was elevated to the peerage on her own in 1670 as Baroness Nonsuch, Countess of Southampton and Duchess of Cleveland. She was given Nonsuch Palace, in Surrey, which she had torn down in the 1680s to cover her great debts. Her story is more fully told in the blog about the dukes of Buckingham and the rest of the Villiers family. The letters patent for the duchy specified that it was created for Barbara, and not her husband, and her eldest son by the King, Charles FitzRoy, born in 1662.

At first, the boy, Lady Castlemaine’s second child with the King, was formally recognised by her husband, and baptised a Catholic as Charles Palmer, Lord Limerick (the Castlemaine courtesy title); but only a few days later the King insisted on another Protestant baptism, and the name FitzRoy (‘son of the king’), though this wasn’t formally acknowledged until the creation of the titles in 1670 when the boy was eight. By this point he had two brothers, Henry FitzRoy, soon to be created Earl of Euston then Duke of Grafton; and George FitzRoy, Earl of Northumberland (later also a dukedom). While Henry was soon well set up with the succession of his wife (the Euston estate), and his heirs continue today, George and his potential heirs were named in the remainder for the dukedom of Cleveland after his oldest brother, but did not have any heirs. All three boys were given the coat of arms of the royal Stuarts with a band sinister denoting illegitimacy: a simple band of ermine (a fur symbolising princely rank) for the eldest, a band of silver and blue for Henry and ermine and blue for George. Some of their estate was developed into an urban district north of the City of Westminster and named ‘Fitzrovia’. Most of the subsequent FitzRoy story will be told in a post about the dukes of Grafton.

In 1675, Charles was given a peerage of his own: Duke of Southampton, with subsidiary titles Earl of Chichester and Baron Newbury. The Southampton title, an elevation of his mother’s earldom from 1670, had been an earldom before, notably for the Wriothesley family who rose to such prominence in the Tudor era after the fall of Thomas Cromwell (as depicted so well in the novels by Hilary Mantel). The 4^th Earl was also 2^nd Earl of Chichester (which he inherited from his father-in-law, Francis Leigh), so these titles were already linked when that family went extinct in 1667. Different heiresses took the Wriothesley estates into the Russell and Montagu families (both who grew rich by developing the Bloomsbury estate in London, notably abutting Fitzrovia). Perhaps the King hoped to pick up one of these heiresses to establish his son, as he would do for several of the others (and named Henry ‘earl of Euston’ in anticipation, even before he was engaged). I don’t know why Baron Newbury was chosen—it doesn’t have a history of being a title, and is mostly known as a market town in Berkshire where two significant battles had been fought in the English Civil War (I thought for a moment it might have been named for the King’s favourite country hangout spot, the races, but that’s Newmarket, not Newbury).

In any case, by 1670, Charles FitzRoy was betrothed to Mary Wood, whose family was not eminent, but whose father, Sir Henry Wood, Bt., was a lifelong supporter of the Stuart dynasty and a very rich man. Wood had been Treasurer of the Household of Queen Henrietta Maria, then Clerk of Green Cloth, and he had estates in Suffolk (notably at Ufford, near the coast, and the lands of the former Priory of Campsey), as well as estates closer to London such as Clapton in Hackney Downs in Middlesex. When Henry Wood died, his family, notably brother Thomas, Bishop of Lichfield, tried to take Mary into custody, but Barbara basically kidnapped her, to raise her as her future daughter-in-law. The children were married in 1679, but the new Duchess of Southampton died in 1680, still only seventeen.

The Wood family challenged the Duke of Southampton’s claims to his late wife’s inheritance, and lost. So by 1692, the Duke could establish himself in a country seat in Suffolk, at Loudham Hall. This was an old manor house owned by the de Loudham family from the 1200s, rebuilt in the sixteenth century by the Blannerhasset family, then sold in 1627 to Henry Wood, who enlarged the house. After the Duke of Southampton’s death in 1730, the Wood succession did not pass to his son by a second marriage, but back to the Wood family, who refaced Loudham in Classical style, then sold it in 1792 to the Whitbread family, known for their beer, who owned it until 1919. It was held by the Adeane family for much of the twentieth century, but has since been sold several times and remains private. It was recently in the hands of Mike Lynch, technology entrepreneur whose name was in the papers due to a trial for fraud in the UK in 2019 and in the US in 2023, of which he was acquitted, then his sudden death in a boat accident in the Mediterranean in August 2024 (within a day of his co-defendant, hit by a car while jogging).

Meanwhile, the Duke was married again, in 1694, to another potential heiress, Anne Pulteney, whose family were minor landowners in Leicestershire. At the time, Anne was not an heiress, with two older brothers who produced heirs, but the Pulteney Estate succession will come up again later, with significant lands in Somerset and in Shropshire.

In 1709, the 1^st Duke of Southampton became the 2^nd Duke of Cleveland when his mother died. In 1720, he bought a London townhouse on St. James’s Square—the most fashionable address in London (ultimately housing seven dukes). Built for the Earl of Essex in 1674, this was not the house a few streets away known as Cleveland House, where his mother lived from 1670—that was an older house built by the Howard family in the 1620s, and since the eighteenth century known as Bridgewater House (behind Clarence House and overlooking Green Park). This new Cleveland House was located on the west side of St. James’s Square, No. 19, though in the nineteenth century, its main entrance was re-orientated and became No. 33 King Street. It was completely demolished in 1895 and rebuilt as offices and flats, and again in 1999 (today it notably houses the Rolex headquarters).

As for the Duke himself, Charles FitzRoy left very little tales of political or social life. Though he ranked high, as third English duke in precedence (behind Norfolk and Somerset), he rarely sat in the House of Lords and was considered by many to be ‘not very bright’. He didn’t need to get involved in financial schemes, since his income was already valued around £100,000 a year. At court he inherited the office of Chief Butler of the Household from his brother the Duke of Northumberland in 1716. This at least could have brought him some prominence in his chief duty of organising and hosting the coronation banquet, but more research needs to be done to see what if any tasks he undertook in this guise for the coronation of George II in 1727. He died in 1730.

Charles and Anne had six children: Lady Grace, who will link the FitzRoys to the Vanes; then three sons, William, Charles and Henry. William succeeded as 2^nd Duke of Southampton and 3^rd Duke of Cleveland in 1730. Lord Charles had died in 1723 aged 25, and Lord Henry in 1709, only 8. There were also two sisters, Lady Barbara—finally, some recognition for the former Barbara Palmer!—who did not marry; and Lady Anne, who married John Paddey, Esq., a member of London’s judiciary set (who is sometimes listed as ‘Francis Paddy’, as he appears in some of the printed peerages of the era).

Like his father, William, the 3^rd Duke of Cleveland and 2^nd Duke of Southampton, was said to be ‘not very bright’, and also rarely sat in the House of Lords, spending most of his time, it seems, at the races. Known as the Earl of Chichester as heir, he was rarely seen at court either. Lord William did inherit his father’s court office of Chief Butler, and again it would be interesting to see what role exactly he performed at the coronation of George III in 1760. The Duke was given some political offices, but these were mainly to generate an income and had really interesting names, like Comptroller of the Seal and Green Wax Offices. In 1731, he married Lady Henrietta Finch, daughter of Daniel, 2^nd Earl of Nottingham and 7^th Earl of Winchilsea, a prominent Tory politician in the late seventeenth century, now long retired—so if anything, the Duke of Cleveland supported Tory interests (and he was noted as an ‘opponent’ to the ministry of the Whig Duke of Newcastle in the early 1760s). Henrietta was not an heiress at all, as sixth daughter, but her brother’s political career does link this story again to the Pulteney family, as an ally of the Earl of Bath.

The Duke did not inherit the Wood estate, notably Loudham Hall, and he is noted as early as the 1740s as spending much of his time at his brother-in-law’s estate, Raby Castle, in County Durham. He lived at Cleveland House when in London, and rented out houses in the countryside for short periods. A printed peerage from 1766 lists his residences as ‘Bayles, near Windsor’ (Baylis House in Berkshire, owned by the Osborne family, dukes of Leeds), and ‘Combe-park, Surrey’ (probably Coombe House, near Croydon). Further afield, we see that he rented Rushbrooke Hall, but only for a few years in the 1760s. Like Loudham, Rushbrooke is located in Suffolk, but on the western side of the county, closer to Bury St Edmunds. This moated manor house had been in the Jermyn family since the 1230s. The 2^nd Baron Jermyn died in 1703 and his daughter took the house by marriage into the Davers family (baronets) who rented it out to the Duke of Cleveland, but only for a few years in the 1760s. In the nineteenth century, Rushbrooke was rented out to a family of that name. By the mid-twentieth century it fell into disrepair and was demolished.

Towards the end of his life, the Duke of Cleveland and Southampton was living full time at his nephew’s estate, Raby Castle, where he died in 1774. His titles all went extinct. There was never again a dukedom or even earldom of Southampton—though a few years later, in 1780, a younger son of the Duke of Grafton, another Charles FitzRoy, was created Baron Southampton, a title that continues today.

And so, on to the Vanes and Raby Castle!

The Vane family were originally from Kent, from the area of the upper Medway valley near Tonbridge. They are part of a wider family who spelled their name either Vane or Fane. One branch, the Fanes of Badsell, became earls of Westmorland in 1626, and also inherited the ancient baronies of Bergavenny (from the Nevilles) and Le Despencer. Their seats were Mereworth Castle in Kent and Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire. This line continues to the present with the 16^th Earl, Anthony Fane, born in 1951. The ancestor that links these to the Vane family of Cleveland is Sir John Fane, or Ivon Vane, whose name suggests he was from Wales. He made his fortune by capturing King Jean II of France on the battlefield at Poitiers, 1356, and received a large ransom for him. Later genealogists, however, say the common ancestor is the less exciting Henry Vane from Tonbridge in Kent who died a century later. Regardless, both branches of the family bear a golden gauntlet on their coat-of-arms referring back to the Ivon Vane story. They differ in that the Fanes show the back side of the gauntlet and the Vanes use the palm side.

Sir Henry Vane the Elder came from out relative obscurity in the reign of Charles I to become one of the richest men in England. He had served in the King’s household from the time he was Prince of Wales, and became one of the King’s closest financial advisors in the 1630s—rising to Treasurer of the Household in 1639, and Secretary of State in 1640. He sold his ancestral home of Hadlow, Kent, and purchased Fairlawne in Kent, and the huge estates of Barnard Castle, Raby Castle and Long Newton, all in the County of Durham, in the far north of England. Here he was appointed Warden of the Teesside Forests. In May 1641, Vane got caught up in the King’s dismissal and execution of the Earl of Strafford, and was himself dismissed from office. He defected to the Parliamentarian side to oppose royal tyranny and was appointed by them to the post of Lord Lieutenant of Durham—the first of many of his line to hold this position. He died in 1655, a very large landowner.

In Kent, Fairlawne was a large manor in Shipbourne near Tonbridge. Sir Henry the Elder had the house rebuilt in the 1630s, and it was upgraded again in the 1720s. It was given to a younger branch (viscounts Vane) in the eighteenth century, then passed to another family after 1789. Many Vanes are buried in the local church of St Giles’. The Cazalet family, wealthy merchants, took over as lords of the manor in the 1870s, and today it is owned by a Saudi prince. It is still a large estate, with over 1000 acres.

Up in County Durham, Barnard Castle is a Norman castle built to watch over the river Tees as it passes through a gap of the eastern foothills of the Pennines on its way down towards the larger towns of Darlington and Stockton. For centuries the river was the border between Yorkshire and the County Palatine of Durham, so called as its bishop enjoyed ‘palatine’ (or ‘palace-like’) powers, for practical reasons since this area was so far from London. Being so far north, its noble families usually had some connections to Scotland as well, and the family who owned the castle from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries were the Balliols, who even claimed the Scottish throne briefly in the 1290s. Guy de Balliol built the first castle here in about 1095 to protect the first Norman bishop of Durham. His nephew and successor Bernard gave the castle its name. Once the Balliols became too caught up in the Scottish Wars of Independence against King Edward I, the Bishop of Durham confiscated Barnard Castle; a few years later the King granted it to the Earl of Warwick, whose descendant Anne Neville married Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who made the castle one of his preferred seats in the North. He of course became King Richard III and the estate was merged with the Crown until it was sold to Sir Henry Vane. Vane used much of the stone and roof of the already crumbling Barnard Castle to fix up nearby Raby, and it remains a ruin, today in the care of English Heritage. It is still an impressive fortress, and a fun visit alongside the nearby market town of the same name—made famous in the British media in May 2020 by the rather strange drive by Dominic Cummings to ‘check his eyesight’ during lockdown.

It was Raby Castle, a few miles to the northeast, that became the real jewel in the Vane family crown. The castle today is a major attraction in Teesdale and the large estate includes the High Force Waterfall further up the Tees in the North Pennines. The moated castle was built in the 1370s by John Neville, 3^rd Baron Neville of Raby, whose family had owned the site since the thirteenth century, and were called to Parliament as barons of Raby from 1295. The Neville family is one of England’s greatest aristocratic clans, and will receive their own blog post, though they only held a dukedom (Bedford) briefly in the 1470s. John Neville’s son Ralph was created Earl of Westmorland in 1397 and the family held this title until 1571 (after which, as we’ve seen, it passed to the Fane family). There is a link here in that the uppermost reaches of the river Tees forms the boundary between County Durham and County Westmorland. Junior branches of the House of Neville became earls of Salisbury and earls of Warwick, leading to Anne, queen-consort of Richard III as we’ve seen; but there was another Neville queen, Cecile Neville of Raby, daughter of the 1^st Earl of Westmorland, who married the Duke of York and was mother to both Edward IV and Richard III. Raby Castle remained the Neville seat throughout the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudor period. In 1569, the 6^th Earl took part in the Northern Rising in support of Mary, Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne, and Elizabeth I confiscated his lands and titles. The Crown now held Raby Castle until it was sold to Sir Henry Vane in 1626. It has stayed in this family ever since. Since the 1960s it has been spruced up and opened to the public, and is also often used for television and film crews, for example in 1998’s blockbuster Elizabeth.

The third property purchased by Henry Vane in County Durham was Long Newton, a manor located on the road between Darlington and Stockton. It passed to his younger son, Sir George Vane, who started a separate line that was equally prominent in its own way: Vane-Tempest. The baronetcy of Vane of Long Newton was created in 1782, due to the merger of this family with the Tempests of nearby Wynyard Hall. The Vane-Tempest family made its fortune from shipping coal, which then passed via marriage to the Stewart family of County Down in Ireland. These became the Vane-Tempest-Stewarts, who bore the titles Marquess of Londonderry (1796, peerage of Ireland), and Earl Vane (1823, UK peerage), and continue to the present. The current Marquis of Londonderry, the 10^th (Frederick Vane-Temple-Stewart), was born in 1972; his heir is Viscount Castlereagh of County Down.

The senior branch of the House of Vane, of Raby, was founded by Sir Henry the Elder’s son, Sir Henry, the Younger. His father tried to promote his career at court in the 1630s, but the younger Henry was more passionate about his Puritan beliefs and left for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. A year later he was elected governor of that colony, but only served one year, poorly handling both religious controversy in the colony and military action against the nearby Pequot tribe. He returned to England and championed the Parliamentarian cause against the Crown far more than his father, and during the Commonwealth he served on the Council of State, 1649-53 (and briefly as its president, May to June 1652). In the Restoration he was initially granted clemency by Charles II, but was nevertheless condemned by a government commission and executed in June 1662.

Henry Vane’s son Christopher continued to support the Parliamentary cause, which morphed into the Whig Party by the 1670s. As a supporter of the reign of William and Mary, he was named to the Privy Council, 1688, and later elevated to the peerage by King William in 1698 as Baron Barnard of Barnard Castle. He married Elizabeth Holles, which tied him to one of the premier Whig families (her brother was created Duke of Newcastle in 1694; and her two Pelham nephews would both be Whig prime ministers in the eighteenth century).

Christopher and Elizabeth had three sons. The youngest, William, another Whig politician, was created Viscount Vane in 1720 (of Dungannon, County Tyrone), and was based at Fairlawne in Kent. His line died out in 1789. The second son, Morgan, founded a cadet line who would resurface in the peerage after the senior line died out in the 1890s. The eldest, Gilbert, was 2^nd Baron Barnard. His son Henry was a solidly reliable Whig politician, but never a leader. He was given the very lucrative post of Paymaster General of Ireland and sat on the Irish Privy Council, 1742-44, then became a Lord of the Treasury in 1749, as a client of his cousin the Duke of Newcastle (one of the Pelham brothers). He was also appointed to his great-great-grandfather’s post of Lord Lieutenant of Durham in 1753, starting the long family tradition as the ceremonial representative of the monarchy in the county. That year he succeeded his father as 3^rd Baron Barnard, and the following year the King made his position as royal representative easier by raising him in rank, to Earl of Darlington (after the largest town in the southern part of the county). He died in 1758, a few years before his wife, Lady Grace FitzRoy, daughter of the 2^nd Duke of Cleveland.

Lord Darlington’s sister, Hon. Anne Vane, also had an interesting, if brief, career at court, as ‘the Beautiful Vanella’ (as she was dubbed in the press), the mistress of Frederick, Prince of Wales. She was appointed as a maid of honour to Queen Caroline, Frederick’s mother, and by 1730 was linked to the Prince, by whom she had a son in 1732, the unrecognised child Cornwall FitzFrederick Vane, who died four years later, followed soon after by his mother, aged only 26.

The 2^nd Earl of Darlington, as Viscount Barnard sat in Parliament as a Whig MP, and later held the mid-level posts of Governor of Carlisle, 1763, and Master of the Jewel Office, 1763 to 1782 (who oversaw the safety of the Crown Jewels). His chief interest was in modernising and improving Raby Castle, and carrying on his father’s role as Lord Lieutenant of Durham. He died in 1792 and was succeeded by William, 3^rd Earl of Darlington.

Like his ancestors, William Vane sat in Parliament as a Whig, then took over as Lord Lieutenant of County Durham in 1792. He raised a regiment of cavalry to serve in the wars against France, but did little else to distinguish himself. He did, however, increase his family’s prestige as landowners, however, in positioning himself as heir to the name (if not the titles or lands) of his FitzRoy grandmother, but also as heir to the Pulteney Estate, as distant heir of his great-grandmother, Anne Pulteney, Duchess of Cleveland.

Anne’s nephew, William Pulteney was a significant politician (as Earl of Bath from 1742, and briefly Prime Minister for two days in February 1746), and a great acquirer of lands. In 1726 he purchased the Bathwick estate in Somerset, directly across the Avon from the City of Bath (connected today by the Pulteney Bridge). He also developed real estate in London (like Great Pulteney Street in Soho) and made himself guardian and then heir to the last member of the Newport family (earls of Bradbury) of Shropshire. He had aspirational family interests himself in that West Midlands county, by descent from the Corbets, important medieval marcher lords. In the early 1760s, the Earl of Bath had plans to transform the Newport family seat of Eyton, on the river Severn east of the town of Shrewsbury, but he died before anything could be completed. His heirs instead focused on Shrewsbury Castle, an ancient Norman fortress transformed into a residence in the sixteenth century, owned by the earls of Bradbury since 1666. It was further modernised by the Pulteney family in the 1780s, a notable early project for Thomas Telford. These Shropshire lands (which include the famous landmark, the Wrekin) did pass to the Vane family of Durham when the last Pulteney heiress (Laura, Countess of Bath) died in 1808; they maintained Shrewsbury Castle as a second seat until it was sold in 1924 to the local borough council.

By the start of the nineteenth century, William Vane, 3^rd Earl of Darlington, began to quarter his family arms with the FitzRoy arms, added the Somerset and Shropshire estates of the Pulteneys, and pressed the inheritance claims of his wife, Lady Catherine Powlett, as daughter and co-heir of the last Duke of Bolton who died in 1794 (though most of the Powlett estates went to an illegitimate niece, and the Bolton baronial title passed to a cousin). In 1826, he ‘reminded’ high society of his connection to the last Duke of Cleveland by naming a new bridge over the Avon in Bath after him. So in 1827, King George IV recognised this kinship link by raising Darlington to the rank of Marquess of Cleveland, and then in 1833, Duke of Cleveland. The first Duke was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1839 by Queen Victoria, then died in 1842.

It seemed the Vanes had finally reached the top of the aristocracy and Raby Castle was once again a princely seat in the North. But none of the 1^st Duke’s three sons had male heirs and the dynasty’s senior line died out in 1891. Moreover, the family was outshone in political and social prestige by the junior line of the Marquess of Londonderry, first by Lord Castlereagh (later 2^nd Marquess) one of the leading diplomats at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, then by the 3^rd Marquess, a prominent soldier and diplomat, who took over as Lord Lieutenant of Durham when the 1^st Duke of Cleveland died in 1842 (and the Londonderry branch would keep this office off and on until 1949).

Henry, 2^nd Duke of Cleveland, was himself a soldier, attaining the rank of major-general in 1851 and retiring as a full general in 1863. He had a long career as a Whig MP in the House of Commons, from 1812 to 1842 when he moved into the House of Lords. He was mostly an absentee landlord in Bath, but focused on improvements to Raby Castle, where he built a neo-gothic entrance hall. He continued to gather the family’s great art collection here, refashioned one of its salons as a Jacobean gallery, and played host to visiting royalty (notably the Prince of Orange who became King William III of the Netherlands while at Raby in March 1849). He died in January 1864 and was succeeded by his brother William.

William, 3^rd Duke of Cleveland, had also spent over forty years as an MP, using the name and arms of Powlett, setting himself up as heir of his mother. As heir, he lived at Harewood House (or Harewood Park), an eighteenth-century house on the edge of Windsor Great Park in Berkshire (still standing today, but privately owned). William Powlett (then briefly Vane again) reigned as duke for only eight months and died in September 1864.

His brother, Lord Harry Powlett (or Powlett-Vane), became the 4^th Duke of Cleveland. He had been a diplomat in the 1830s, and in 1854 married Wilhelmina Stanhope, daughter of Earl Stanhope (Lady Dalmeny by her first marriage). Although they had no children, the Duke raised his step-son, Archibald Primrose, who later became famous as the Earl of Rosebery, Prime Minister in 1894-95. In London, the Duke and Duchess resided at Cleveland House on St James’s Square. In the countryside, the Duke owned over 100,000 acres: 55,000 in County Durham and 25,000 in Shropshire. Wilhelmina, Duchess of Cleveland, had been prominent at the early court of Queen Victoria, having served as a maid of honour at the coronation of 1838, then a bridesmaid in 1840. She later was a bit of a historian, delving into the history of her home at Battle Abbey near Hastings, writing a guidebook for visitors there, and an account of noble families whose ancestors were inscribed in the ‘Battle Abbey Roll’, a list of those who fought at Hastings in 1066.

Lord Harry and Lady Wilhelmina had acquired Battle Abbey in 1857 as a country seat, on the south coast in Sussex. This was the abbey commissioned by William the Conqueror to be built on the site of the Battle of Hastings to atone for all those killed that day. It was constructed in the 1070s and then dissolved as a monastery in 1538 on orders of Henry VIII who gave it to his faithful servant Sir Anthony Browne. Browne demolished most of the abbey and used its materials to reconstruct the abbot’s residence as a country house. In 1721, the Browne family sold the house now known as Battle Abbey to the Webster family, who held it for over a century, selling it to Lord Harry Vane. It became a favoured residence of the last Duke and Duchess of Cleveland, and the Duchess remained here as a widow until she died in 1901. It returned to ownership of the Websters, who converted it into a school in 1923. In 1976 it was finally sold to the state to be maintained by English Heritage, though the school still remains on the site.

When the 4^th Duke of Cleveland died at Cleveland House in London in 1891, the Pulteney Estate in Somerset passed to a nephew, while the Vane estates in County Durham—Barnard Castle and Raby Castle—and in Shropshire passed to the next male heir, Henry Vane, who became 9^th Baron Barnard. Interestingly, his eldest son Henry reunited the distant branches of the Vane/Fane family through his marriage in 1914 to Lady Enid Fane, daughter of the 13^th Earl of Westmorland. Hon. Henry Vane also became Master of Foxhounds for one of the premier hunts in England, the Zetland, formerly known as the Raby, which covered huge amounts of County Durham and North Yorkshire. He died shortly before his father, meaning the barony, and the post of Master of Foxhounds, passed to his brother Christopher, who, as 10^th Baron Barnard, picked up once more the old family post of Lord Lieutenant of County Durham in 1958. He died in 1964, and his son, John, the 11^th Baron, was appointed to this post again in 1970 and held it until 1988. When he died in 2016, the Vane estates were valued at £94 million, currently managed by another Harry Vane, 12^th Baron Barnard (b. 1959).

(images Wikimedia Commons)

I am grateful to the History of Parliament Trust, London, for allowing me to see the unpublished articles in draft on Charles and William FitzRoy, 2^nd and 3^rd dukes of Cleveland, for the 1660-1832 section, by Dr Robin Eagles.