Dukes and Princes

Savoy and Dauphiné Driving Tour: The Ancient Trans-Rhodanian Principalities

In the early Middle Ages, if you traveled from Paris to Rome, once you crossed the Rhône River at Lyon, you were no longer in France, but in French-speaking principalities that were component parts of the Holy Roman Empire. After 1349, the first of these you’d encounter on crossing the river, the Dauphiné, was property of the kings of France—though arguably not fully a part of France, legally, until much later. After about a day’s travel, the next principality you would pass through, Savoy, remained part of the Empire until the end of Ancien Régime, and even beyond, not becoming part of France until 1860. This drive, which I did about four years ago, will circle through these two fascinating formerly independent principalities, and also takes a quick look in at a third principality, the curious micro-state of Dombes that remained legally independent of France well into the 18^th century. I will also pay a visit to one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe, the Abbey of Brou, in the alliteratively named town of Bourg-en-Bresse.

All of these regions had once been part of an ancient kingdom created by the Burgundians, a Germanic tribe who settled the region in the 5^th century. This once encompassed what is now western Switzerland, the Burgundy you’ve heard of, and the Burgundy you haven’t, today’s regions of Dauphiné, Savoy and Provence. These two Burgundies became divided into Transjurane and Cisjurane Burgundy in the 9^th century, the former meaning ‘across the Jura Mountains’ and the latter ‘on this side’ (looking at it from the perspective of Lyon or the lower Rhône Valley, so sometimes called Upper and Lower Burgundy, respectively). Both were at various times blended with the kingdoms of Arles and Provence, which expanded and contracted over the centuries, until disintegrating in the middle of the 11^th century. The Holy Roman Emperor, suzerain of this whole area at the time, granted lands in the former kingdom to local lords as fiefs, Savoy emerging from part of Transjurane Burgundy and its neighbour to the south, Dauphiné evolving from parts of Cisjurane Burgundy. It’s very confusing, and in fact remained confusing for a long time, with the borders ill defined and the rulers of Savoy and Dauphiné continually fighting over them. To add to the confusion, several of the ancient towns in the region remained outside the jurisdiction of either prince, as autonomous territories ruled by bishops, like Geneva, and it is here where this driving tour begins.

I landed at the airport in Geneva and rented a car on the French side (an interesting enclave of car rental desks), then drove along an eerie fenced corridor from the airport to the town of Ferney in France, so as not to have to go through Swiss territory and pay the exorbitant rate to drive through (well, mostly under) the city of Geneva. I went all the way around the bowl in which Geneva sits—with lovely views of the city, the lake and the surrounding mountains—till I arrived at a cheap hotel I’d booked in Archamps. The car park had a sign at the end of it saying ‘Frontière’, so I naturally jumped back and forth across, in and out of Switzerland, without impunity. The next morning I drove the short way over a low pass to the town of Annecy. It’s not a long drive, and it is interesting to come to it from the direction of Geneva, as it can put in mind the distance (physical and mental) between that city and the seat of its Catholic bishops after 1535—the year they were sent away from a now Calvinist city.

Annecy is a beautiful small town, kept small as it is hemmed in by the waters of Lake Annecy and the surrounding mountains. A short river, the Thiou, flows out of the lake and into the river Fier which soon joins the Rhône a few miles to the west. The Thiou bisects the town, also criss-crossed by canals. The streets are lined with shops and restaurants, and the day I was there, absolute hordes of tourists. Picturesque bridges cross the waterways, jammed with those making photos, especially in favour of the town’s most famous landmark, the Palais de l’Isle, a 12^th-century fortified building on an island in the centre of town that has served as Annecy’s prison and courthouse.

I made a quick exit from the town centre and headed up a small hill towards the Château d’Annecy. The oldest part of this complex of buildings, built at various times and in various styles, was the residence of the counts of Geneva—forced to leave the city of Geneva itself by its prince-bishops in the early 13^th century (rather ironically, eh?)—until their extinction in 1394. Their castle and their county (the Genevois) were then sold to the counts of Savoy in 1401. These counts emerged in the mid-11^th century as loyal agents of Imperial power in the strategic valleys leading up to the key Alpine passes between France and Italy. By the 1100s, they owned lands on both sides of Alps: Savoy, Maurienne, Chablais on one side, and Aosta and Torino on the other, in the Italian Piedmont. In the 14^th century, the Savoyard counts expanded their rule southwards, acquiring the county of Nice and thus an outlet to the Mediterranean, and with this addition of Annecy and the Genevois, their power stretched from Lake Geneva to the sea.

The counts of Savoy were based in Chambéry (see below), so they therefore left younger brothers or cousins in charge in Annecy and created the apanage of Genevois (an apanage is a segment of a kingdom or noble territory sectioned off for use by a younger brother, but still remaining part of the family patrimony). First counts, then (from 1564) dukes, these apanagistes rebuilt parts of the Château of Annecy in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, notably in the 1570s when the castle provided a refuge from French court politics for Jacques de Savoie, the Duke of Genevois (aka the Duke of Nemours, his title in France), and his powerful Italian-born wife, Anne d’Este, formerly Duchess of Guise. One of the main wings of the castle today bears the name Nemours and tells their story, with contemporary objects, artworks and furnishing. When the line of dukes of Savoy-Nemours became extinct in 1659, the castle at Annecy fell out of favour, and was used as a barracks for the next centuries until it was turned into the city museum after the Second World War. Today it houses various galleries about history, local artists and the natural world.

Annecy Castle, old *donjon* at right, newer Renaissance buildings to the left

I left Annecy after lunch and drove south, skirting the main mountain range of the pre-Alps which towered over the lake to the east—Albertville, for example, is not far, and the land of winter sports and site of the 1992 Winter Olympics. I soon arrived at another lake, Lac du Bourget, and the resort town of Aix-les-Bains. At the southern end of the lake is the city of Chambéry, the capital of the counts of Savoy from the 1280s, improved by them once their status was raised to dukes by Emperor Sigismund in 1416, then mostly abandoned once their court moved across the Alps to Turin in 1563. The court stayed at Chambéry only occasionally after that—sometimes when hosting visiting French royal relatives—or its castle housed unwanted dowagers or abdicated dukes. I parked my car in the centre of town and noticed the castle wasn’t open till later in the afternoon—and it was boiling hot—so I went into the local art museum and discovered with great luck that it currently was hosting an exhibition about the court of Turin as patrons of the arts! A lovely centrepiece was a lovely red baroque wagon for the royal children of the House of Savoy.

Later I went on a guided tour of the castle of Chambéry, which is monumental in scale but a bit of a hodge-podge of architectural styles, including a gorgeous Gothic chapel with a distinctly Jesuit façade slapped onto it. One detail you can see all over buildings such as this is the ‘Savoy Knot’, a symbol of the dynasty also used as an emblem for their chivalric Order of the Annunciation, founded in 1362 by Count Amadeus VI.

This order of knighthood became a royal order after 1713 when the dukes of Savoy were promoted to kings of Sardinia (and later the royal house of Italy). One of these kings, Victor Amadeus III, returned to Chambéry and tried to make it look more appropriately regal by adding a new wing, which today is the seat of the government of the Département de Savoie. After 1860, Savoy was ceded to France, and rather than being the second city of a trans-Alpine monarchy, Chambéry settled into life as a quiet provincial town. I enjoyed a meal that included some regional specialisms like the of tartiflette, made from potatoes, bacon (lardons), onions, and local reblochon—the famously stinky Savoyard cheese. My stay overnight here was not very memorable…but the real star of the show was revealed the next day!

I got up early as I knew I had a lot of driving to do. Heading back north, this time I went to the west of the lake and turned off the main road onto a tiny mountain road. For the next hour I climbed and climbed, twisted and turned round sharp hairpins, then rapidly descended back down to the edge of the lake.

Here on the lake’s edge was the Abbey of Hautecombe, founded for the Cistercian Order by Count Amadeus III of Savoy in the early 12^th century, and resting place of counts and dukes of his dynasty ever since. A place of real beauty in the most wonderful location on this lake surrounded by steep mountains, it had fallen into disrepair during the French occupation of the 1790s, but was rebuilt by King Charles Felix of Sardinia in the 1820s, and his tomb forms one of the Abbey’s centrepieces. The most recent royal burials were of former King Umberto II of Italy in 1983, and his wife Queen Marie José at his side in 2001. Since the 1990s, the Abbey has been owned and run by an ecumenical Catholic regeneration group known as Le Chemin Neuf. Imagine my surprise when I listened to the English audio guide and immediately recognised the voice of an old friend who had lived in this community a few years before!

Luckily the road back out of Hautecombe was less harrowing, and I drove around rather than over the ridge of the Mont du Chat then joined the road that accompanies the mighty Rhône river as its squeezes through some pretty dramatic gaps in the southernmost Jura mountains (roughly where transjurane and cisjurane were demarcated). I paused for lunch and a bit of a nose round in the town of Belley, which was once the capital of a small province known as Bugey, sold to France by the Duke of Savoy in 1601. Not a large town, it was nevertheless the seat of a bishop, so had its own small cathedral, mostly rebuilt in the 19^th-century neo-gothic style, in front of which I sat and munched my favourite mid-afternoon snack, coffee-flavoured éclair. Now you know what to bring when I host a dinner party.

I continued to follow the road alongside the Rhône—with water still that curious light blue-green colour you see when the river leaves Lake Geneva to start its long journey to the Mediterranean—and crossed the ancient frontier between Savoy and the Dauphiné at the river Guiers. I took a short detour up this river valley to twin towns both named Le Pont-de-Beauvoisin (‘the bridge of good neighbours’). This was the ancient crossing point of the river, where, at certain points in the past, royal brides were exchanged between France and Savoy, for example, Marie-Adélaïde de Savoie, married to the grandson of Louis XIV in 1696. Her wedding turned out not to be the cement for eternal friendship between the two states, and the girl’s father, Duke Victor Amadeus II, changed sides soon after when the next war started. Perhaps not a very good neighbour after all.

From Beauvoisin I left the Rhône valley and entered ‘France’ as it was until 1860, and the province of Dauphiné. I drove a short distance to the town of La Tour du Pin, where I stayed the next night. This town and its château, long since destroyed, was the centre of a large autonomous barony in the Middle Ages. The barons were at times completely independent of the Dauphins or else dominated the region as their most prominent vassals, until they themselves took over as Dauphin in 1282. The main line of the family became extinct only a few generations later, and sold the Dauphiné itself to the King of France in 1349, but various cadet lines continued into the modern era, and include one of the famous memoirists of the Revolutionary period, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin, born Henriette-Lucy Dillon, from a family of Irish Jacobites who had settled in France in the 1690s. This part of the Dauphiné, the Turripinois, took its name from the former barony, and is only one of several distinct regions that formed this territory, another former sovereign principality, like Savoy, that spanned from the Alps to the Rhône valley. Today it is divided into several modern départements, but in the past it was composed of regions, including those in the Rhône valley (Viennois, Valentinois), areas further inland (Diois, Grésivaudan), and fully Alpine territories further to the east (Gapençais, Embrunais, Briançonnais).

A map showing the different parts of the Dauphiné, and also the linguistic divide between northern and southern parts of the principality

From La Tour du Pin, I continued the next day across the high arid plains (known as the ‘Terres Froides’) to the ancient Roman city of Vienne. This city gave its name to its surrounding countryside, the Viennois, and ultimately the full name of the medieval principality, the Dauphiné de Viennois. So what is the Dauphiné? Like Savoy, it was formed from the feudal possessions of one of the counts placed in charge by the Holy Roman Emperor when the Kingdom of Burgundy disintegrated in the 11^th century. Originally titled counts of Albon, their citadel dominates a hill overlooking the Rhône valley a little bit to the south, about halfway between Vienne and Valence (the climb up to the ruins is worthwhile, but not on this trip). One of these at the start of the 12^th century, Guigues, took the additional name ‘Dauphin’—the reasons for this are varied, complicated, and entirely conjectural—possibly, for example, because his mother came from the city of Taranto in southern Italy whose symbol was a dolphin. His successors were called ‘count-dauphin’ or simply ‘dauphin’. They soon shifted their base of operations from the area around Vienne further to the east, to the valley of the Grésivaudan, a much morphed form of ‘the valley of Gratianopolis’, the Roman city that became known as Grenoble. With Grenoble as their capital, the dauphins soon dropped the name ‘de Viennois’, and slowly expanded their control over the lands of Imperial bishops ruling in the deep Alpine valleys: Gap, Embrun, Briançon—as above.

I didn’t visit Grenoble on this trip, but it is certainly worth seeing in its dramatic mountain setting alongside the swift-flowing River Isère, and does complete the story of the Dauphiné, as its capital up until the division of the province into départements during the French Revolution. But today I was in the earlier capital, Vienne. Much remains to see of Roman ‘Vienna’, one of the most important of their outposts in Gaul, formerly the capital of the local Allobroges people. The city is built on several hills that slope down to the Rhône—a major river by this point, much larger than when I last saw it when leaving Savoy. One of the hills supports the ruins of a Roman theatre, and is now crowned by a massive 19^th-century statue of the Virgin; the other dominant hill is topped by the medieval fortress that housed the archbishops of Vienne if politics got touchy in the town.

the castle of Vienne, from the Rhône waterfront

the view from the castle of the Roman theatre and statue of the Virgin

The archbishops of Vienne were powerful rulers in this region. Vienne has been one of the earliest centres of Christianity in Roman Gaul, and its bishops were elevated to archbishops as early as 450, giving them a claim to the title ‘Primate of the Gauls’, disputed with Lyon. As with most Imperial bishops, they maintained jurisdiction over their town and its surroundings that was quite separate from the rural feudal lords around them, in this case, the count-dauphins. And indeed, when the last dauphin, Humbert II, heavily indebted, sold the Dauphiné to the King of France in 1349, the archbishops of Vienne refused to give up their autonomy, not becoming fully part of France until the middle of the 15^th century. The agreement between Humbert and King Philip VI stipulated that the territory should be ruled by the King’s son and heir, who was thereafter called ‘the Dauphin’, a tradition that persisted for the rest of the history of the French monarchy.

The next day, I drove north, skirting around the very large city of Lyon—itself attached formally to the Kingdom of France only a few years before the Dauphiné—and followed a bit further north the major tributary of the Rhône, the river Saône (they meet in the centre of Lyon).I stopped for lunch in a small town perched high on a hillside overlooking the Saône Valley: Trévoux.This town, with picturesque steep streets, and a crumbling ruined château, was once capital of a small micro-principality known as Les Dombes. In the Middle Ages it was the part of the lands held by the Lords of Beaujolais that were on the far side, that is, the Imperial side, of the river. These lords made the most of this sliver of land not under the jurisdiction of the king of France to exercise sovereign justice and mint their own coins. But it was never worth very much more than that, being a sandy, marshy terrain, a moraine filled with potholes which the locals filled with water to create a ‘pisciculture’, that is, raising fish (and frogs) to sell mostly to the citizens of the nearby big city of Lyon.

In 1400, the lordship of Dombes passed to the House of Bourbon-Montpensier, who continued to rule it as petty princes until the death of the last one, the duchess of Montpensier, better known as La Grande Mademoiselle, whose memoirs tell us of her thrill in visiting this small town where she, a junior member of the royal family, could act truly as a sovereign. As a sign of her grand benevolence—she was always quite the drama queen—she founded a hospital. But late in life she was forced to cede it to Louis XIV’s bastard son, the Duc du Maine. Although Maine spent most of his time at court in Versailles, he too enjoyed flexing his muscle as a sovereign, and constructed a parliament building, and most famously, a printing press, on which books could be printed outside the jurisdiction of the royal censors of France. The most famous series of books, the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, became famous as one of the major outlets for Enlightenment thought, disseminating views that might otherwise have been censored by the Crown. This came to an end in 1762, when Louis XV convinced his cousin, Maine’s son, the Comte d’Eu, to sell it, and the Dombes was finally integrated into the Kingdom of France

(north is to the left, Lyon at lower right)

To end this drive, I started to head back east, vaguely towards Geneva. But I made one more overnight stop, in Bourg-en-Bresse. Driving diagonally right across the odd landscape of the Dombes, with its thousand small lakes, I arrived in this cute town, now considered part of Burgundy, but once the capital of another small semi-autonomous region, Bresse. Bresse was ruled by the dukes of Savoy from the 1270s, often given as the apanage to their heirs. In 1601, the Duke of Savoy ceded Bresse and Bugey (to the east, see above), to King Henry IV of France. Bourg as a town is nice to visit, with several streets lined with old houses belonging to merchants who thrived here, at an important crossroads between France and Italy. But the real treasure lies just outside the town, the Royal Monastery of Brou.

Brou had been the site of a monastery for many years, but in the early 16^th century was re-founded as a royal necropolis for the House of Savoy by Margaret of Austria, widow of Duke Philibert II. Only Margaret, her husband, and his mother, are buried there—for as we have seen, the House of Savoy shifted its operations across the Alps into the Italian Piedmont in the next generation—but these tombs, and the building in which they are placed, are truly amongst the greatest artistic gems from this period of European history. The building is in stunning white, Flamboyant Gothic mixed with some newer Renaissance classical elements, and with a distinctive coloured glazed tiles, like those on the roof of the family Hospital in Beaune, in Burgundy, or even the cathedrals in Vienna and Budapest, a clear artistic link between the various outposts of the House of Burgundy and its successors, the House of Habsburg. Margaret herself was a link, as daughter of Emperor Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy, and successor to the dukes of Burgundy as governor of the Low Countries (she also left behind a wonderful palace in Mechelen, near Brussels). Margaret’s court in the Netherlands was famed as a place of patronage of writers, composers and painters, and she employed the finest craftsmen to construct her tomb here—both she and her husband are depicted twice, above and below, in effigies of marble and alabaster—and she hoped to retire here as abbess, in the tradition of Habsburg royal women. It was not to be however, and her nephew, Emperor Charles V would not let her leave her post as governor in the Low Countries, where she died in 1530.

From Brou I drove east on a twisting road across several low ridges and across the gorges of the River Ain, until I approached the gates of Geneva, at Bellegarde-sur-Valserine. Rather than using the motorway (something I have avoided this entire drive), you approach the Swiss border through a really dramatic gap in the Jura mountains, the Défilé de l’Ecluse, where the Rhône pushes its way through the mountains. I was still a bit early for my evening flight, so for one last oddity, I visited the small hillside town of Gex, once the capital of the smallest province of France, the Gexois, which was, like Bresse and Bugey, ceded to France by the duke of Savoy in 1601. There’s not a lot to see here—a supermarket where Genevans shop because the prices are much lower in France; and the heraldic oddity of a coat-of-arms that reflects that once upon a time, a long time ago, the barony of Gex was held by the lords of Joinville in far-off Champagne—so I headed towards the airport, noting that the next time I visited here I should tour the facilities of CERN, the nuclear research centre, and visit the château of Ferney, once home to the philosopher and playwright Voltaire. Border zones between kingdoms and empires are fascinating places to explore, zones of influence of different cuisines and artistic styles, good places to bring together international minds for scientific collaboration, and also good places to hide from the censors of 18^th-century French theatre!

The Défilé de l’Ecluse, where the Rhône pushes through the Jura

(images my own or from Wikimedia Commons)

Dukes of Hamilton

The name Hamilton is currently very much in the air, as music and theatre fans all over the world learn about this Founding Father of the great experiment in a republican form of government established in North America in the late 18^th century. But Alexander Hamilton has always been around, as someone you study in American History courses as that guy who helped define the legalistic and financial framework of the new nation, or more simply, as that guy on the ten-dollar bill.

Few people are aware, however, that he was part of a grand and ancient ducal, almost royal, dynasty from Scotland. Even the famous biography by Ron Chernow on which the musical Hamilton is based only alludes to this ancestry vaguely, though he does comment that the social climbing New Yorker did sometimes boast about his blue-blood ancestors. The musical downplays this somewhat, and with reason, since any connection Alexander Hamilton had to this family of grandees, with multiple branches and a string of titles including four dukedoms and numerous marquisates and earldoms, was fairly limited, having been abandoned by his father (who may not have even been his father, notes Chernow, pp. 27-28) at a young age, penniless, on an island in the West Indies. But the family’s wider story is worth knowing, as significant players in the struggles of the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, the Civil Wars of the 1640s; and interacting with various intriguing figures of history, from Admiral Nelson’s beloved Emma, to the Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess.

Alexander Hamilton’s father, James Hamilton of Grange, came from a junior branch of a junior branch of a junior branch of the House of Hamilton…most genealogical sources are even unsure how exactly this line is connected, with some crucial details missing in the early 17^th century. It seems likely, they conclude, that these lords of a patch of land in the west of Scotland, near Kilmarnock (in Ayrshire), were a continuation of the line of Cambuskeith, which branched off from the main line as early as the late 14^th century. It is interesting to learn that Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, decided to memorialise this connection in the naming of his own mansion in upper Manhattan The Grange, which still stands, in a neighbourhood fittingly called Hamilton Heights.

This persistence of a family name is certainly evident across the Atlantic in Scotland, where there is a town called Hamilton and numerous houses, castles, streets and shopping malls with the name. At one point, Hamilton Palace, about 15 miles southeast of Glasgow, was considered the largest non-royal residence in Europe. It was torn down in the 1920s and today is the rather unlovely site of a sports complex, a supermarket, and a McDonalds. But other monuments to the family remain, across Scotland, which this blog post will explore.

The significant size of Hamilton Palace was no accident, and for several centuries the family acted as a sort of second royal family for Scotland, ready to take over in place of the Stuarts. This was no empty pretension—for much of the 16^th century they were indeed next in line to the throne, sometimes with only a tiny infant standing in their way. As such they needed to be respected, so were given high positions of leadership in the Kingdom, and in 1643 created the first (with one brief exception) non-royal dukes in Scotland. They had already been created Dukes of Châtellerault (in Poitou, France) by King Henri II in thanks for efforts maintaining the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland in 1548. After the union of Scotland and England in 1707, a new dukedom was created, Brandon, based in England (1711). Over a century later, the junior branch, established in Ireland since the 17^th century, was elevated to its own dukedom, Abercorn (1868). Both branches continue to use the title Duc de Châtellerault (and Napoleon III even confirmed it for the Duke of Hamilton, his distant kinsman, in 1864). Four dukedoms in one family is pretty impressive, and as one begins to contemplate how to write a short overview of this family, the sheer length of the histories of multiple branches (literally dozens, though most become fairly minor nobles), involvement in the histories of not just Scotland and England, but also Ireland, France and even Sweden, and numerous castles and residences, it is a little overwhelming.

To add one further twist to this complex history—the main line of the Dukes of Hamilton are not actually Hamiltons at all, strictly speaking, but Douglases. As the second great rival of the Stuarts for power in the late Middle Ages, the Douglas lords were sometimes enemies, sometimes allies of the House of Hamilton. But in 1656, Anne, 3^rd Duchess of Hamilton, married Lord William Douglas and they formed a new dynasty, Douglas-Hamilton, which continues to the present. They are considered by most to be Hamiltons, but by strict patrilineal descent, the chief of Clan Hamilton is the Duke of Abercorn, while, ironically, the Duke of Hamilton is regarded by most as the head of Clan Douglas.

But it seems a little artificial to me to refer to this House as a ‘clan’, as their story has little to do with Gaelic culture or life in the Scottish Highlands. They are a lowland family, with power bases—lands and castles—in both the west (chiefly Lanarkshire) and the east (in both West Lothian and East Lothian) of what is known as the Central Belt. As hinted at by the name Hamilton itself, they are of ‘foreign’ origin. Their origins are obscure and there are a variety of stories that appear in the genealogies. Most agree that the first historically documented member, Walter FitzGilbert ‘de Hameldone’, who was active in the 1290s to 1320s, came from England. Some say he might have been a member of the family of the Earls of Leicester, or the Umfraville family of Northumberland—both of these families used a Cinquefoil (a heraldic representation of a five-petal rose) in their coats of arms, and there are likely candidate place-names in both locations (for example Hameldon or Hambledon in Leicestershire; or Humbleton in Northumberland). One account says his father Gilbert married a sister of a nephew of Robert the Bruce, so was drawn into Scottish service during the Scottish wars of independence; while another suggests that either this Gilbert, or his son Walter, praised the valour of The Bruce in the court of Edward II, was attacked for it by the King’s favourite Despencer, and fled north of the border. Historical record seems to suggest that Walter was indeed a soldier in service of the English Crown in its struggle to achieve overlordship over Scotland in the early 1300s, captain of Bothwell Castle in the valley of the Clyde, until he switched sides and joined the cause of Robert the Bruce, for which he was rewarded with lands nearby, Dalserf and Cadzow, in about 1315, and later given more lands in West Lothian, including Kinneil. Cadzow and Kinneil would form the twin power bases for the family, west and east, for the next two centuries.

Cadzow Castle (pronounced ‘cadyou’, as the z is in fact a different letter, a yogh, in old Scots) was a fortified tower possibly built as early as the 12^th century, overlooking the gorge of the Avon (or Aven), a tributary of the Clyde. It was rebuilt in the 16^th century, utterly destroyed in the civil wars of the 1570s, and later redeveloped as a Romantic ruin in the 18^th and 19^th century to provide ‘scenery’ for hunting parties. It’s worth a hike up from the large country park called Chatelherault (as it is spelled in Scotland, more on that later), but mostly inaccessible to explore close up.

The lands in this area of the Clyde Valley, Lanarkshire, and the neighbouring county of Ayrshire, were divided and sub-divided into the numerous sub-branches of the family, including Cambuskeith, Dalserf, Udston, Wishaw, Orbiston, Silvertonhill, Bothwellhaugh, etc. An important split occurred in the very first generation after Walter, his second son John FiztWalter de Hamilton being given lands in Haddingtonshire (the old name of East Lothian), at Innerwick, near Dunbar, which formed a major cadet branch, later the earls of Haddington (created 1627), which continues to the present. The earls maintained two wonderful country seats: one in the area of Haddington, Tyninghame House, and one in the Borders, Mellerstain, near Kelso, though the former was sold in 1987.

Mellerstain, seat of the Hamiltons of Haddington

Returning to Lanarkshire and the lands to the south of Glasgow, the lairds of Cadzow were given a great social boost when they aligned with the powerful Black Douglas family in the 1450s, linked through marriage to the widowed Countess Douglas, then even further by switching sides mid-rebellion, to become one of the chief supporters of King James II in the west of Scotland, rewarded with some of the lands of the now crushed Douglases (notably Craignethan, a bit further up the Clydesdale), and the tremendous honour of marriage of the King’s daughter, Princess Mary, the widowed Countess of Arran. Through the first alliance, they had been summoned to Parliament as ‘Lord Hamilton’ (1445), and their holdings in the valley below Cadzow were renamed Hamilton. Through the second, they were given large estates on the island of Arran, in the Firth of Clyde, and their son was created Earl of Arran in 1503. Their seat on the island was the ancient fortress of Brodick, with roots as far back as the Gaelic chieftains who came across the water from Ireland in the 5^th century, and the Norse sea lords in the 10^th century who gave it its name, Breiðvik (‘broad bay’). Granted to the first Lord Hamilton by his brother-in-law, James III, in about 1470, this castle became a very useful place of security in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when politics got too hot on the mainland.

From this point, the Hamiltons of Arran quartered their arms (the cinquefoil) with a galley or ‘lymphad’ (another heraldic word, derived for the Gaelic word for longship, long fhada). This had long been a symbol of power in the western isles, and features in other coats of arms of insular noble houses such as the Macleans or MacDonnells, or even the Prince of Wales in his capacity as Lord of the Isles.

The other key benefit from marriage to a royal Stewart princess of course was that her son the Earl of Arran was, for much of his life, quite close to the royal succession. As one of the most prominent figures at the court of King James IV, he was involved in negotiations for the King’s marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503, and commanded the Scottish fleet in engagements in Scandinavia, the Western Isles and off the coast of France. During the minority of James V, he was President of the Regency Council, but struggled for power once the Douglases again rose to prominence through marriage to the widowed Queen Mother. He also had to defend himself against the Stuarts of Lennox who saw themselves as next in line for the throne should the King fail to produce heirs. He himself felt some dynastic urgency, as he too had no heirs, causing him to press the King to legitimise one of his many bastard sons (James Hamilton of Finnart, later famous as the King’s chief builder of palaces), and even two bastard uncles, in 1512-13. From a second marriage, he finally produced James, 2^nd Earl of Arran, heir presumptive to Mary, Queen of Scots from 1542, and probably the most famous member of the family, as Regent of Scotland from 1542 to 1554.

James, 2nd Earl of Arran, Regent of Scotland

The Regent Arran, James Hamilton, attempted to navigate the difficult path between great rivals France and England, and at the same time keep a handle on the bubbling religious reform movement then taking hold in Scotland. At first pro-English and pro-Protestant, he soon reversed position, re-embracing the Catholic faith and the alliance with France. He negotiated the marriage of the young Queen Mary with the Dauphin of France and was rewarded with a French duchy, Châtellerault. It is unusual for a king to grant a duchy to a foreign nobleman, but not the first time this had happened in the history of the Auld Alliance: a century before, Archibald Douglas had been created Duke of Touraine by King Charles VII during the Hundred Years War.

While he was regent, the new Duke of Châtellerault expanded the family’s principal residence in the east, Kinneil House, about 20 miles west of Edinburgh on the road to Falkirk. Today, it is a poorly preserved example of a tower house, at least on the outside—but on the inside are to be found genuine treasures, in the painted walls and ceilings commissioned by the Duke and his wife, Margaret Douglas. The paintings include numerous Biblical and Classical scenes, many having to do with the power of women, such as Bathsheba, Delilah, Lucretia and Mary Magdalen. Ceiling paintings and an elaborate wall carving clearly demonstrate the Hamiltons’ new ducal status (with a coronet of strawberry leaves) and the alliance with France (the Order of St. Michael). It is emblematic display of the highest order.

In later times, Kinneil House (sometimes called Arran House) acted sometimes as a fortress, sometimes a prison for the family, and was used on occasion as a setting for the court of James VI. It was largely rebuilt in the late 17^th century, but was mostly abandoned by the family in the 18^th, often being let out to people employed in their service, for example, James Watt who developed his steam engine in a cottage on the estate. Kinneil was nearly a ruin by the 20^th century, but was saved from demolition by the Director of the National Galleries of Scotland who had heard about its unique 16^th-century painted walls and ceilings. Today it is looked after by Historic Environment Scotland.

Back in 1543, the renewal of the alliance with France brought on war with England, reaching its low point for Scotland at the Battle of Pinkie, outside Edinburgh, in 1547. The Duke of Châtellerault held on to the regency for a few more years then was forced to relinquish power to the Queen’s mother, Mary of Guise, in 1554. By the terms of the agreement, he was re-confirmed as heir to the throne, but later discovered he had been betrayed and the Scottish throne had been promised to France. Pretty miffed, in 1559, he switched sides again, joined the Protestant rebellion, lost his French dukedom, and attempted to forge an alliance with Queen Elizabeth by offering his son (and thus potentially the Scottish throne) as her groom. By 1566, he withdrew to France, to try to recover his duchy; failing in this he returned to Scotland, was imprisoned by the new Regent, the Earl of Moray, and possibly had a hand in the latter’s murder (at the hands of another Hamilton, James, of Bothwellhaugh; along with Arran’s illegitimate half-brother, John, Archbishop of St. Andrews). By now he became a strong supporter of the Queen of Scots, until he once again switched sides and supported the reign of her infant son James VI in 1573, and died two years later.

The other Hamilton residence that features in this period, the Marian Civil Wars, is the castle of Craignethan, further up the Clyde valley from Cadzow and Hamilton. Built as a model of innovative fortification by the King’s chief builder, Hamilton of Finnart in the 1530s, after his fall in 1540, his half-brother the Regent used it as his stronghold in the west. It was rendered defenceless by James VI in the 1580s, and was mostly a ruin when it was sold by the family in the 1650s.

The Regent Arran’s eldest son John had become mentally ill, so although he succeeded as 3^rd Earl, he was governed by his younger brothers John and Claud. Both were accused of participation in the murders of the regents Moray and then Lennox, and were exiled to England (and the title of Arran temporarily taken away from the family). Lord John was restored at the point of a sword (and with the backing of Elizabeth I) in 1585, and by 1599 had regained favour with the King so much that he was created Marquess of Hamilton (thus outranking his older brother) in 1599. This new title, between dukes and earls, was recently imported from France; Hamilton’s was one of the first and there would be very few others like it in the peerage of Scotland.

The youngest son of the Regent Arran, Claud, had been created Lord Paisley (an important ecclesiastical and market town southwest of Glasgow) by James VI in 1587—in spite of his plotting with Spain on behalf of the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. Lord Paisley founded the branch of the Hamiltons, earls (1606), later dukes, of Abercorn, who were part of the great expansion of Scots into Ulster in the 17^th century. While Abercorn itself is an estate (with an already long ruined castle) in West Lothian, their power base soon became the barony of Strabane, in County Tyrone, and they would remain a force in the history and politics of this part of Ireland for the next three centuries. In the 1740s, they built a large mansion at Baronscourt, which remains the seat of the Duke of Abercorn today (I will do a separate post about these dukes). Unlike their cousins in Scotland, this branch remained Catholic, and some of their cadet lines emigrated to Continental Europe to serve in Imperial or French (Catholic) armies. Four brothers, George, Anthony, Richard and John, all became officers in the armies of Louis XIV, and their sister, Elizabeth, Comtesse de Gramont, became one of the celebrated beauties of the French court, and Dame du Palais of the Queen. Anthony (or Antoine), Comte Hamilton, wrote a memoir about the court which is probably mostly fiction, but is full of gossipy stories and quite fun to read.

“La Belle Hamilton” (Elizabeth, Countess of Gramont), by Lely (Hampton Court Palace)

Meanwhile, a Protestant branch, from the line of Hamilton of Dalserf (branched off in the early 15^th century), also emigrated to Ireland in the early 17^th century, establishing themselves in County Fermanagh. They too sought employment in the wars raging on the Continent, this time the Protestant armies of the King of Sweden. They were created Friherre (or baron) of Dalserf in the 1650s, and a line was established permanently in Sweden, with two prominent members in the later 18^th century: Count Gustav David Hamilton, of Barsebäck, a field marshal and commander of Swedish forces in Pomerania in the Seven Years War; and his son Count Adolf Ludvig, one of the leaders of the opposition against the absolutism of King Gustav III in the 1780s. There are still Counts Hamilton in Sweden today.

Count Gustav David Hamilton, Swedish Field Marshal

Other branches of the House of Hamilton established in Ireland in the 17^th century include the Viscounts Boyne (1717, in Leinster, which continue to present); and the Earls of Clanbrassil (1647, in Armagh, extinct 1798), whose seat of Killyleagh in County Down (about 20 miles southeast of Belfast) is still a mighty fortress that dominates its town, and is still lived in by Hamilton descendants.

Killyleagh, seat of the Hamiltons of Clanbrassil

Coming back to the main line and the history of Scotland, the 1^st Marquess of Hamilton’s son James succeeded as 2^nd Marquess in 1604, and was a favourite of James VI, newly crowned as James I of England. He was involved in early colonial ambitions, investing in the expeditions to Virginia (and for whom Hamilton Parish in Bermuda is named; though not the capital city, Hamilton, which is named for a later royal governor, from the Abercorn branch). As part of King James’s efforts to integrate his two kingdoms, Hamilton was created Earl of Cambridge in the English peerage, in 1619, so he could attend the English Parliament. The Marquess was important dynastically as he remained in the line of succession to the throne of Scotland, after the King’s three children, and was given offices in both realms: in 1621, he was named Lord High Commissioner, the King’s representative in the Scottish Parliament; and in 1623 he was appointed Lord Steward of the Household in England. James VI and I died in March 1625, as did the 2^nd Marquess only a few weeks before.

The 3^rd Marquess of Hamilton would be one of the major players of the next reign, and in the Civil Wars that destroyed it. Loaded with court offices by Charles I, notably Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Master of the Horse, in 1638 he was sent to Scotland to quell the rebellion of the Convenanters who did not wish to see English-style episcopacy re-imposed by an increasingly absolutist king. Hamilton failed in his various attempts, notably being stood down by his own mother, a colonel in the Covenanter army, who threatened to shoot him with her own pistol if he disembarked in Edinburgh. He continued to try to mediate between the King and the Scots, and was shown royal favour by the promotion of his marquisate to a dukedom in 1643, along with a second marquisate, of Clydesdale (to be used as the courtesy title for his heir). But he vacillated in his loyalty to the King, and was arrested in 1644 and imprisoned on St. Michael’s Mount until he was freed by Parliamentary Forces two years later. Still the King wished to secure his loyalty, so he created him Hereditary Keeper of Holyroodhouse, the seat of the monarch in Scotland, a position which the dukes of Hamilton continue to hold today. This worked, and the new Duke led a Scottish army into England in support of Charles in 1648, but was defeated at Preston in August and executed in March 1649, a few weeks after the King’s own execution. March was turning out to be an ill-favoured month for the Hamiltons.

The 1^st Duke of Hamilton’s brother William had also been honoured by Charles, as Earl of Lanark, 1639, and Secretary of State for Scotland in 1641. He succeeded as 2^nd Duke while in exile in Holland, then joined the Scottish army trying to re-establish Charles II in England, and was killed at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651.

The main line of the Hamilton family suddenly found itself consisting of six unwed young women. In normal circumstances, heiresses would take lands and minor titles into another family by marriage, or perhaps be married to another person from the same dynasty. In this case, the creation of the Dukedom of Hamilton was generous—more than almost any other dukedom—in that it specified female succession in default of male heirs. The eldest daughter of the first Duke, Lady Anne, therefore succeeded her uncle as the 3^rd Duchess, and a few years later married Lord William Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, a younger son of the Marquess of Douglas.

Together Anne and William started a new dynasty, the Douglas-Hamiltons, and of their thirteen children, four sons bore separate titles (the ‘Marquess of Clydesdale’ as heir, plus the earls of Selkirk, Ruglen and Orkney), and three daughters made prestigious titled marriages (the Duchess of Atholl, the Marchioness of Tweeddale, and the Countess of Panmure). Some of these bore the surname Hamilton and some Douglas, and some established new cadet branches of their own. The fourth son, Orkney, was Governor of Virginia for nearly forty years in the early 18^th century—though he probably never visited—while the youngest son, Archibald, was a naval commander and Governor of Jamaica. The main line of the House of Douglas continued for a few more generations (also elevated to a dukedom, 1703), but when they became extinct in 1761, many of their titles were added to those of the Dukes of Hamilton, notably the marquessate of Douglas, the earldom of Angus, and the lordship of Abernethy, an ancient royal and ecclesiastical site in Perthshire, which brought with it the hereditary title Bearer of the Crown of Scotland—this title is still in use today, for example in the formal opening of the new Scottish Parliament in 1999.

A new coat-of-arms, Hamilton quartered with Douglas

As premier peer of Scotland (and still maintaining claims of her own to the Scottish throne), Duchess Anne decided to rebuild their residence at Hamilton in Lanarkshire to suit her exalted rank. Hamilton Palace was built by the architect James Smith in the 1680s in the style of a Palladian Villa. It was surrounded by Lanarkshire coalfields, which brought in lots of money, and by the 19^th century, the house was further expanded, in part to house the huge collections of art and furniture of the 10^th Duke. But the coal mining was too enticing, and led to mining under the house itself—by the 1920s, subsidence was so bad, and the family’s debts substantial, that the Palace was torn down. Little remains of the interiors except a preserved and re-assembled dining room in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and nothing of the estate buildings save the Mausoleum built by the 10^th Duke (below), a coach house and a riding school.

James Douglas-Hamilton was granted his mother’s titles in 1698 to become 4^th Duke of Hamilton. He invested heavily in the Darien Scheme in Panama, a Scottish attempt to circumvent the English stranglehold on colonial trade, which failed utterly by 1700, bankrupting many Scots and leading in great part to the forging of the Union of the Crowns in 1707. Hamilton wasn’t in favour of the union (perhaps he continued to harbour some hopes that the Scottish Parliament would choose him to succeed Queen Anne, not her cousins the Hanoverians), yet he benefited through the creation of another dukedom, of Brandon, in Suffolk, to allow him to sit in Parliament in his own right not as a representative peer from Scotland. Shortly after this great honour (thus far, the only people who had multiple dukedoms in more than one peerage were royal), this was followed by an appointment as Master General of Ordinance and Ambassador to France—it looked like a glittering military and diplomatic career would follow. But in November 1712, he was killed in a famous duel in Hyde Park by a rival for a disputed inheritance, Lord Mohun.

James, 4th Duke of Hamilton, 1st Duke of Brandon

With the 4^th duke’s passing, the history of the dukes of Hamilton goes into slumber for a century. There is nothing very much to say about the 5^th Duke, the 6^th Duke or even the 7^th, 8^th or 9^th dukes… They lived well, they loved well. Like many Georgian aristocrats, they drank to excess and conducted scandalous affairs. The 5^th Duke did add to the cultural landscape of greater Glasgow by commissioning William Adam in 1734 to build a hunting lodge in the hillside above Hamilton Palace, which they named ‘Chatelherault’ in memory of their lost French dukedom. It houses kennels, stables and accommodation for guests partaking in the hunt. It was given to the nation in lieu of death duties in 1973 and opened as a country park in 1987. I am sure the name continues to bewilder even locals to this day.

The 6^th Duke of Hamilton married the society beauty Elizabeth Gunning (famous as a ‘double duchess’ for later marrying the Duke of Argyle); the 7^th Duke died as a teenager. The 8^th Duke had no legitimate children, so the title passed to his uncle, the 9^th Duke. His daughter Anne was known as one of the few loyal supporters of Queen Caroline of Brunswick, and was an unmarried grand dame in her own right. One of the cousins of these 18^th-century dukes was Sir William Hamilton, ambassador to Naples from 1764 to 1800, one of the most interesting people in the period, as a connoisseur and collector, whose youthful second wife, the former actress Emma Hart, became world famous as the lover of Admiral Nelson.

With the 10^th Duke of Hamilton (and 7^th Duke of Brandon) the main line starts to get more interesting again. Alexander Douglas-Hamilton succeeded his father in 1819. He had already served as Ambassador to Imperial Russia (as ‘Marquess of Douglas and Clydesdale’, the courtesy title) in 1806, and in 1810 married Susan Beckford, the heiress of one of Britain’s richest men and grandest art collectors. Contemporaries said he was a very proud aristocrat, “with a great predisposition to over-estimate the importance of ancient birth”.

Alexander, 10th Duke of Hamilton (Brodick Castle)

He was passionate about Egyptology, and went a bit further than most in his interests, acquiring a Ptolmaic sepulchre for himself and constructing a giant Mausoleum in Egyptian-Classical style in the 1840s in which to bury himself, and indeed to re-bury his ‘pharaoh-like’ ancestors. The Mausoleum, by the architect David Hamilton, at over 120 feet tall, and, it has to be said, with its rather phallic appearance, is one of the more extraordinary buildings in Britain.

This sense of exalted lineage and princely status was raised even higher in the next generation, as the 11^th Duke, William, married a German princess, Maria Amalia of Baden, daughter of the Grand Duke and maternal cousin of the Bonapartes. Through her he became related to a number of royal houses of Europe. Their daughter Mary Victoria married the heir to the Principality of Monaco and became ancestress of the current House of Grimaldi. The Hamiltons spent most of their time living abroad, in Paris or Germany, but unfortunately they also spent like princes, purchasing a grand house in London, enlarging Brodick Castle on the Island of Arran (to resemble a German hunting schloss), and debts began to accumulate.

Their son, the 12^th Duke of Hamilton, succeeded in 1863. The next year, his cousin Emperor Napoleon III confirmed (or re-created) his Duchy of Châtellerault in the French Empire, but also confirmed it for the Duke of Abercorn (the actual heir male), and it is the latter who added ‘France en surtout’ to his coat of arms (ironically the old royal arms, in a new Imperial France). The façade began to crumble when the Duke was forced to sell much of his grand-father’s huge collection of art and furniture, in 1882. And worse, from a strictly dynastic perspective, he had only a single daughter, who couldn’t succeed to the dukedom(s) and other titles, because, unlike her ancestor Duchess Anne, there were other male heirs. Nevertheless, she inherited much of the fortune and the lands, including Brodick Castle, and these passed through marriage to the dukes of Montrose.

The Dukedom and most other titles passed to a distant cousin, Alfred, who had a naval career, oversaw the demolition of Hamilton Palace in 1921, and moved his family to a nearby estate, Dungavel, originally one of the family’s hunting lodges and summer retreats in the hills of South Lanarkshire. He also bought an English country house, Ferne House, in Wiltshire, in which he and his wife set up an animal sanctuary, which it remains.

The 14^th Duke, Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, succeeded his father in 1940, and a year later had an interesting guest ‘drop in’ (literally), when the Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess parachuted onto his estates near Dungavel, hoping to establish contact with someone he had (most likely) met when the British lord had visited Berlin in 1936, in order to forge a deal for peace between the United Kingdom and Germany. The Duke immediately turned Hess over to authorities, and no peace deal emerged. Watching the skies was not unusual for the Duke, as he had been an early aviator, and was appointed Air Commodore responsible for air defence for Scotland during the war.

In 1947, the Duke sold Dungavel (it became a prison), and purchased an ancient castle on the other side of Scotland, in East Lothian: Lennoxlove. Built way back in the 14^th century, it had been the seat of the Maitland family for centuries, reaching their peak in the person of the Duke of Lauderdale, virtual viceroy of Scotland for Charles II in the 1670s. At the time, however, it was known as Lethington Castle, and received its new name after the death of Lauderdale in 1682, when its new owner, the Countess of Lennox, gifted it in her will to one of her kinsman, as ‘Lennox’s Love’. When the last Stuart of Blantyre died in 1900, the castle passed through a number of hands before it was purchased as the new ducal seat for the House of Hamilton. I visited Lennoxlove just last summer, and can highly recommend it, as a genuine ancient fortress, only moderately impacted by developments of the 18^th or 19^th centuries. It is not very easy to get to, and is only open to tours on certain days, so I was pleased, and a bit embarrassed, to have my very own private tour by an extremely knowledgeable guide who was also comfortable in making it more conversational once she found out I was a historian specialist on the aristocracy.

The 14^th Duke died in 1973, and his son the 15^th Duke inherited the titles, the house and its contents (much moved from Hamilton Palace), as well as his interests in aviation: he too had a career in the Air Force, then worked as a test pilot. The 15^th Duke also played his part in the ceremonial life of Scotland, continuing to act in his capacity as Hereditary Keeper of Holyroodhouse on the Queen’s behalf, and Bearer of the Crown of Scotland at state ceremonies. He died in 2010, and was succeeded by his son, Alexander (b. 1978). The current Duke is married and has children, and it is his uncle who is more in the spotlight, as a prominent Conservative politician (a Minster of State in the 1990s), now seated in the House of Lords as Baron Selkirk of Douglas (life peerage, 1997).

the current Duke of Hamilton & Brandon, Bearer of the Crown of Scotland, opening of Scottish Parliament, 2011

With branches still extant in Scotland, England, Ireland, Sweden, and the United States, the Hamiltons can be described as one of the most widespread ducal families in the history of the nobility. I wonder how many of them have managed to obtain tickets to see the show on Broadway?

(images from Wikimedia Commons or my own photos)

dukes-of-hamilton-simplified-genealogyDownload

Dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Saxe-Gotha, families of two British consorts

Anyone who is interested in the history of the British monarchy is familiar with the names Saxe-Coburg and Saxe-Gotha: Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria is certainly a well-known figure; Princess Augusta, the mother of George III, probably less so. Those who have read about monarchies in the 19^th century more generally are also aware that the House of Saxe-Coburg extended its reach from a tiny principality in the centre of Germany to the thrones of Belgium, Portugal, Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. A pretty amazing dynastic success story. But who were these Coburgs? Like many consorts in British history, popular history generally recalls their names, but not much more about them.

Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Princess of Wales, and her growing family, 1739, Van Loo

Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort of the United Kingdom, by Winterhalter

In the middle of the first World War, King George V wanted to change the name of the royal dynasty of the United Kingdom from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to something much more English-sounding. Before they settled on Windsor, his advisors looked to ancient history for ideas: much like the House of Hanover had sometimes been referred to by the much older dynastic name of Guelph, the Saxe-Coburgs thought perhaps they could use the name Wettin. Wettin Castle was built by Saxon lords in the 10^th or 11^th century as Germans began to spread eastward into the Ostmark, fortifying lands they took over from the Slavs. Legend says they descended from the Saxon warrior-king Widukind himself (d. 785), but they were undoubtedly kin to the Saxon dynasty that controlled much of this region now known as Saxony, the Ascanians. Gradually the family took over a larger territory, again on the frontier, and were called the Margraves of Meissen (a castle further to the east, and closer to the border with Bohemia), and later added the title Landgrave of Thuringia. Thuringia, to the west and south of Saxony, was a land much more central to the core of medieval Germany, and its towns were important centres of trade between east and west. But until the 1920s when the name re-appeared as a political unit, Thuringia became subsumed within the territories of the Saxon princes.

location of Thuringia within modern Germany

The House of Wettin ruled here from the 1240s, but acquired the much greater prize, the title Duke of Saxony, in the 1380s, followed by their elevation to the position of one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire in 1423. Being German princes, however, they adhered to a traditional inheritance practice whereby each son was entitled to a share in the patrimony, and the territory was divided and re-divided it into smaller and smaller units: Gotha, Weimar, Eisenach, Meiningen, etc. This post will focus only on the first of these, Gotha (plus a territory acquired a little later, Coburg), rather than attempt to cover the entire history of all the various Saxon duchies.

The largest part of these Wettin territories, the old Margraviate of Meissen, was held more or less together by one branch of the family, known as the Albertines (named for the founder Duke Albert) and ultimately became the Electorate of Saxony with its capital at Dresden. Its dukes were propelled into the highest ranks of the European princely society through election to the throne of Poland-Lithuania in the late 17^th century, and a century later, in 1806, Saxony itself was elevated to the status of a kingdom. The other branch of the family, the Ernestines (named for Duke Ernest), was actually senior and was initially given the richer lands (Thuringia) and the electoral title, but lost it in 1556, thanks to their support for Martin Luther and their leadership of the revolt against the Emperor Charles V. The sons of the last of the Ernestine elector retained the title ‘Duke of Saxony’, but were restricted to governing much smaller territories named for their chief residences. Technically, their titles should be ‘Duke of Saxony in Gotha’ or ‘Duke of Saxony in Weimar’, but English usage over the centuries has adopted the French system of shortening this to ‘Saxe’ (French for the German word Sachsen), followed by the relevant subdivision: Gotha, Weimar, etc. This is essentially where our story begins.

The Ernestine duchies in the 19th century (the ‘Grand Duchy’, dark green, is Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach)

One of these smaller Saxon duchies in the later 16^th century was actually not in Thuringia, but across the forested ridge in the region directly to the south, Franconia. This was based in the town of Coburg, inherited by the Wettins in the 15^th century, but transformed into a real princely capital in the 16^th. Over the years, the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg became affiliated with Thuringia and the other Saxon states, but it reverted to its earlier status after the fall of the German monarchies in 1918, and today is part of Franconia within the larger state of Bavaria. Its grand fortress, known as Veste Coburg, guarded ancient roads that crossed the Thuringian Forest, the low mountain range that divides Thuringia from Franconia (and once divided East and West Germany). But these roads also connected the rulers of Coburg with one of their territories on the other side of the ridge, the Abbey of Saalfeld. The abbey, founded in the 11^th century on the River Saale (hence the name), was secularised in the Reformation, and acquired by the first prince to settle in Coburg, Duke Johann Ernst (1521-1553), a younger brother of the Elector of Saxony. Saalfeld and Coburg would be tied to each other for several centuries, as we will see again below.

Johann Ernst also sheltered Luther for a time in his castle at Coburg, for his safety, during the negotiations taking place in 1530 at the Diet of Augsburg to decide the fate of the Church in Germany. In the 1540s, the Duke moved his household out of the old fortress and into the town, constructing a grand Renaissance palace, Ehrenburg, on the site of a former Franciscan monastery. The Ehrenburg Palace would remain the primary residence of the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg until 1918. Much of it was burned in 1690, so it was rebuilt in the newer baroque style, and a chapel added. In the early 19^th century it was remodelled again, in the style of the English Gothic Revival, by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, with a new sandstone façade which is still a notable feature today.

Duke Johann Casimir (1564-1633) completed the construction of the palace, and developed many of the institutions of the fledgling state in Coburg. For his court, he built up a library and patronised artists and a composer; for the state, he formally established the Lutheran Church, reformed the judiciary system, and, most famously, encouraged higher education for his subjects, constructing the Casimirianum in 1605, which remains in use to this day as a specialist high school.

Johann Casimir had his cruel side too, avidly supporting the persecution of witches in his territories, and keeping his wife prisoner for her lifetime after divorcing her for adultery. When he died with no children, in 1633, Coburg passed to a brother, then a nephew, before passing by marriage to the youngest son of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Ernst of Saxe-Gotha.

Ernst der Fromme (‘the Pious’) (1601-1675) is one of the most important figures in the history of this family, and indeed in the history of baroque Germany. Ruler of the town of Gotha after a partition with his brothers in 1640, like Johann Casimir, he is considered the father of his small state, and a model of good governance for German princes. The town was very old, named ‘Gotoha’ or ‘good waters’ by early Thuringian settlers in the 8^th century. Unlike Coburg, it is located in a flatter terrain, and developed in the middle ages as a cloth town, on one of the main east-west roads across this region. Ernst brought back prosperity after the devastations of the Thirty Years War, and was noted for his piety and fairness, keeping taxes low and rooting out corruption. He also built schools, even for peasants, namely the Ernestium, which became a model for Germany. His most enduring legacy is a new ducal palace at Gotha, built on the site of a destroyed medieval fortress, which he named Friedenstein, or ‘peace rock’.

the garden front of the Friedenstein Palace

Completed in the 1650s, the Friedenstein was the first, and remained one of the largest, palaces in the new baroque style in the Europe, designed to house not just the ducal family, but the government administration as well (an idea later adopted by Louis XIV at Versailles). It also housed the Duke’s growing art collection and his library, one of the largest in Germany, and a theatre, one of the only baroque theatres that survives today, even with its original machinery for moving scenery intact.

Unlike the other residences of the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in the 19^th century this palace was mostly ignored, so it retains its 17^th-century flavour, though in the parks surrounding the palace, later dukes did construct a pleasure palace, Friedrichsthal, c1715, and a fashionable orangerie and English garden in the 1770s. They also constructed a porcelain factory, and a large ducal museum in the town for the edification of its citizens. Ever interested in progressive ideas like literacy and education, the 18^th-century dukes established a printing press within the Friedenstein. The world-famous Almanach de Gotha was printed here from 1763 until 1944, the indispensable handbook for anyone wishing to know who formally was or was not accepted as a ruling prince or upper nobility, how to rank them, how to address them, etc.

Despite the name Gotha’s reputation as the supreme arbiter of the high aristocracy, Gotha itself remained a centre of the Liberal movement in the 19^th century—supported by its dukes—and was the birthplace of the German Socialist Party in 1875. Today the palace is cared for by the Thuringian association of castles and gardens, and still houses an important library for historians and the state archives for Thuringia.

Ernst der Fromme had a wider vision for his ideas: he wanted to evangelise, and supported Lutheran missions in Russia and in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). When he died, much of this died with him, and of his 18 children, 9 survived to adulthood, and they continued the traditional practice of subdivision of lands. Ernst’s reasonably large state was divided into Gotha & Altenburg for the eldest son, Coburg for the second, Meiningen for the third, and on—seven in total. None of these sons really distinguished themselves. The eldest, Friedrich I (1646-1691) ruined the Duchy’s finances with extravagant expenses for the court, but also in maintaining a standing army which he contributed to the Emperor’s ongoing wars against the Turks and against Louis XIV. On the plus side, he was one of the first to implement primogeniture in Saxe-Gotha, in 1685, ending the centuries old practice of division and subdivision. Several of Friedrich’s younger brothers died without heirs, and those who remained squabbled over the pieces until a family agreement was laid down in 1735, after arbitration by the Emperor. From this point there were four ducal lines established for the 18^th century: Gotha-Altenburg, Meiningen, Hildburghausen, and Coburg-Saalfeld. In totality for the Wettin dynasty, there also remained the two more senior Ernestine ducal lines of Saxe-Weimer and Saxe-Eisenach (which merged in the 1740s), plus the more distant electoral (Albertine) line of Saxony, based in Dresden.

In Gotha, Friedrich I was succeeded by Friedrich II (1676-1732), who continued to spend a good deal of money on improving the ducal residences, supporting the composer Stölzel, maintaining an army, and supporting an overly large family. There is certainly something about these north German Protestant dynasties—they really loved breeding. Friedrich and his wife, his first cousin, Magdalena Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst (a cousin of the father of Catherine the Great, future Empress of Russia), had 19 children! Nine of these survived, including the youngest daughter, Augusta (1719-1772), who in 1736 married Frederick, Prince of Wales. Augusta had been chosen in part as a compromise in the growing rift between the Houses of Hanover (in Great Britain) and Hohenzollern (in Prussia). The daughters of good Lutheran Saxon dukes were seen as good marriage material, of ancient lineage, mostly neutral in diplomatic alliances, from states too small to threaten the balance of power, and demonstrably of fertile stock. They also provided useful family conduits for informal diplomacy: one of Augusta’s brothers commanded in the Imperial army in Austria, and one went to serve his cousin Catherine as a general in Russia. Yet another brother spent time studying in England and maintained a presence at the court of his sister the Princess of Wales. What could be said to be the ‘Coburg system’ of spreading its influence around and punching above its weight in the 19^th century, perhaps had as its model the ‘Gotha system’ in the century before.

Friedrich II, father of Princess Augusta

Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha did not fail to deliver, literally, delivering nine children for the royal house of Great Britain between 1737 and 1751. Her husband the Prince of Wales died in the Spring of 1751, however, so Augusta never became queen. Like many royal mothers, she tried to influence the next reign, that of George III (from 1760), but was seen as too overbearing, too foreign, and too much under the influence of her friend (and suspected lover), John Stuart, Earl of Bute, and was sidelined. She is remembered, at least, in the names of the town of Augusta, Georgia, and Augusta County, Virginia.

Princess Augusta as Dowager Princess of Wales

Augusta’s eldest brother, Duke Friedrich III, had a long reign, 1732-1772, but doesn’t stand out much in history. Far more well known are his son and grandson, Ernst II and Augustus. The second Duke Ernst of Saxe-Gotha seems to have finally taken up the mantle of his famous ancestor, and was a strong advocate of education and learning, rebuilding Gotha’s collections and libraries and constructing an observatory in 1787 that was in its day the most advanced in Europe. He was a supporter of the Enlightenment, even joining the movements of the Freemasons and the Illuminati, groups often seen as antithetical to the rule of hereditary princes. He generally supported the changes taking place in France, and died at the height of the Napoleonic wars in 1804.

Ernst II’s son, Augustus (1772-1822), went even further, and became a bit obsessed with Napoleon, redecorating some of his residences in ‘Empire’ style, and enthusiastically joining the pro-French Confederation of the Rhine in 1806. Gotha was, as a result, not occupied by French armies as some of its neighbours were, but this enthusiasm did mean the Duke was pretty unpopular after Waterloo. Augustus was also considered a bit extravagant, enjoying some eccentric cross-dressing at court (and hints of homosexuality). He married twice, but only produced one daughter, Louise (see below), and when he died he was succeeded by his brother, Frederick IV, whose death in 1825 led to a great re-distribution of the states of the Ernestine branch of the House of Saxony.

Backing up a bit, we can examine the line of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in the 18^th century. The Youngest son of Duke Ernst the Pious, Johann Ernst IV, was given Coburg as his share in 1680, but wanted more, so gradually took over other parts of the inheritance, including Saalfeld (with its residence, built on the old Benedictine abbey noted above) in 1699.

Johann Ernst’s two sons ruled together, until the elder, Christian Ernst, adopted a different lifestyle and settled in Saalfeld where he wrote Pietist hymns and hosted the religious reformer Count Zinzendorf. He married unequally, so when he died in 1745, the succession passed smoothly to his brother, Franz Josias (1697-1764), who lived in Coburg. One of the first acts of Duke Franz Josias was to secure approval of his legislation bringing primogeniture to his duchy, as Gotha had done more than half a century before.

The next dukes of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Ernst Friedrich and his son Franz, lived relatively quietly, and completed the transferral of the court from Saalfeld back to Coburg. Unlike his cousin in Gotha, Franz opposed the advances of Napoleon into Germany, and joined his forces to those of Britain and Hanover, which resulted in Coburg’s occupation in 1806.

Duke Franz of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, maternal grandfather of Queen Victoria

He married a princess from the House of Reuss, another small princely state in Thuringia, but not one of the Wettin duchies. Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf (who would become the grandmother of Queen Victoria) came from a family who are mostly remembered today for their eccentric tradition of naming all their sons Heinrich—all of them, and not just one per generation…so Augusta’s father, for example, was Count Heinrich XXIV. Franz and Augusta had 10 children, of whom seven survived and mostly did very well on the marriage market. One of the daughters, Juliane, became a Russian grand duchess, but the 4^th daughter, Victoria, is more famous, as the Duchess of Kent, mother to Queen Victoria.

Victoria, Duchess of Kent, with Princess Victoria

Of the sons, Ernst succeeded as Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in 1806. The second son, Ferdinand, joined the Imperial army in Austria, married a Hungarian countess and founded the Catholic branch of the family, kings of Portugal from 1837 to 1910, and the kings of Bulgaria from 1887 to 1946 (and include the family in exile today, headed by Simeon Sakskoburggotski, who was briefly ‘restored’ to power as prime minister, 2001-2005). The youngest son, Leopold, at first had the brightest future, as consort to the future Queen of England, Charlotte, who died in 1817, thus paving the way for the accession of Princess Victoria of Kent. ‘Uncle Leopold’ instead was invited to become the first king of a newly independent Belgium, in 1831. The House of Saxe-Coburg still reigns in Belgium today. The distinctive heraldic emblem of the House of Saxony, the green band of trefoil leaves known formally as a crancelin, spread across Europe. Legend has it that an early ruler of Saxony was appointed by means of the Holy Roman Emperor placing a coronet of rue across the Duke’s shield of gold and black bars.

The Coburg coast-of-arms as seen on the town hall of Coburg

Duke Ernst I (1784-1844) served in the Prussian army against Napoleon, then was restored in 1815, and given a small augmentation to his territory with the addition of the Principality of Lichtenberg—though its location in the Palatinate, west of the Rhine, made integration difficult with the lands in Thuringia, so it was sold to Prussia in 1834. The Duke’s status was augmented in 1826, after the senior line of Gotha died out and he was given that dukedom, though he had to give up Saalfeld in exchange. The new Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha maintained his family’s tradition of liberal values, and he granted a constitution to Coburg (though oddly, not to Gotha, which continued to be governed as a separate duchy). He established a house order of chivalry in 1833, the Ernestine Order, jointly with the dukes of Altenburg and Meiningen. He also redesigned Ehrenburg Palace in Coburg, as well as two other important family residences nearby, Schloss Callenberg and Schloss Rosenau.

The castle at Callenberg was originally a hunting lodge, about 4 miles from Coburg, purchased by Duke Johann Casimir in the 1580s and used as a summer residence. It was re-acquired by the Coburg line in 1825, remodelled by Ernst, then remodelled again in the 1850s. It was lost in 1945, but re-acquired at the end of the 20^th century, and is now the current residence of the family, and its chief dynastic burial place.

Rosenau is perhaps the most famous Coburg residence to an English readership, as the birthplace of Duke Ernst I’s second son, Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, in 1819. It was originally the residence of the Rosenau family, then sold to the line of Saxe-Altenburg, and purchased by Duke Franz of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in 1805, as a summer house and a residence for his heir, Ernst. Ernst then gave it a full renovation, in fashionable Gothic style, starting in 1808, using the same architect as at Ehrenburg, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Known almost as a physical embodiment of the German Romantic movement, its most famous features include the Marble Hall and its Englischer Garten. Rosenau became the preferred residence of the ducal family at the end of the 19^th century; it was taken over by the state in 1918, but leased to the family until 1938.

The image of the ideal family life projected at Rosenau for Duke Ernst and his two sons, Ernst and Albert, and very much carried on by Prince Albert for his own family in England, was in fact far from reality. Neither the Duke nor his wife, his cousin Louise of Saxe-Gotha, were particularly interested in each other, and they separated after less than ten years of marriage and formally divorced in 1826. She was sent to live in the part of Saxe-Coburg that was most remote, Lichtenberg, where she had a secret re-marriage, then died at only 30 years of age.

Duchess Luise with her sons, Ernst and Albert

Ernst II succeeded his father as Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1844, and was also never particularly interested in his own marriage, to Princess Alexandrine of Baden. He was passionate about painting, music and natural history, in restoring an ancient abbey acquired by his father, Reinhardsbrunn, and remodelling the ancient fortress of Coburg in the Gothic Revival style. A typical Coburg, he was a supporter of Liberalism, and in the national unification of Germany. He confirmed the written constitution for Coburg, granted one finally to Gotha, then unified the two into one state in 1852. His popularity meant he weathered the storms of the 1848 revolutions easily. But after this, he began to shift his politics, still in favour of unification, but now under the heavier hand of Prussia, which led to alienation from his British family, particularly as it became clear from the 1860s that one of Prince Albert’s sons needed to be groomed for the Saxe-Coburg succession, as Ernst had no children.

The unification of the United Kingdom and the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was seen as undesirable, so Albert’s eldest son, the future King Edward VII, renounced his rights in favour of his younger brother, Prince Alfred. Alfred was torn between his British and his German futures, but ultimately did rule in Coburg and in Gotha from 1893 to 1900.

young Prince Alfred–to me looks much more like a Coburg than his elder brother Albert

Duke Alfred’s son pre-deceased him, and the next two British princes (the Duke of Connaught and his son) renounced the succession, so the throne passed to another nephew, Prince Charles Edward of Albany, who became Duke Carl Eduard. He was a young man when he succeeded in 1900, only able to rule on his own from 1905, then threw himself into renovation projects of the various Coburg residences, notably Veste Coburg, trying to undo some of the Romanticism of the 19^th century to restore a more ‘authentic’ medieval look. After the first World War the castle was taken over by the State of Bavaria, but he was allowed to continue living there until his death.

The war also caused Carl Eduard to lose his status as a Prince of Great Britain, and he abdicated as Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in November 1918. Abandoned by his British family, he avidly supported the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s, and encouraged his sons to serve in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Imprisoned for a year by the Americans, fined for his war crimes, and having lost half of his estates to the Soviets—Gotha lay within the Soviet Zone of occupation, while Coburg was in the American Zone—he died penniless in a flat in Coburg in 1954.

The recent history of the House of Saxe-Coburg has seen a slow restoration of their reputation, aided by having close relatives on the thrones of Britain and Sweden (Carl Eduard’s grandson is the current King of Sweden). The Duke’s eldest son married unequally and renounced the succession, and his second son was killed in the war, so the third son, Friedrich Josias became titular duke, until 1998, when he was succeeded by his son, Andreas (b. 1943). Duke Andreas was born and raised in New Orleans (by his mother and American step-father), but now lives in the old family residence at Callenberg and at Greinburg Castle in Austria. He has been unsuccessful in reclaiming properties in Thuringia, but remains a patron of art and history institutions in the town of Gotha, and manages the remaining family estates in Bavaria and Austria, including farms and forests, and in 2006 re-created a House Order of knighthood as a charity foundation. [update: Duke Andreas died in 2025 and was succeeded by his son Hubertus (b. 1975)]

From a purely dynastic, genealogical perspective, the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha can be said to have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of any small princely state, with sovereigns in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Bulgaria and Portugal (all four at once between 1901 and 1910). Queen Elizabeth II will be the last Coburg monarch in the United Kingdom, but even if the throne itself will soon pass to the House of Oldenburg (aka Greece & Denmark), there remain nevertheless several junior lines ion the UK who descend in the male line directly (or so the myth goes) from Widukind: the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent and Prince Michael of Kent and their numerous heirs.

(images from Wikimedia Commons)

Dukes and Abbeys in the Midi: A Circular Drive around the Centre of France

Driving tours in France often include visits to the country’s periphery, the seacoast, the Alps, the Pyrenees. This long circular drive I did in the summer of 2000, to allow me to dig in to some regional archives for my dissertation about the Lorraine-Guise family, instead took me deep into France’s interior. Aside from exploring territories and residences associated with the Guise, this trip also included stop-offs connected to other dukes like Sully, Aubigny and Joyeuse (and briefly noting castles of ducal families Bellegarde, Polignac and Ventadour), as well as visits to two of the most spectacular abbeys in France, Saint-Benoît and La Chaise-Dieu. It was one of my first super road-trips in Europe, and as before, I’m pleased I still have the old atlas in which I traced the journey.

Being a poor student at the end of a year abroad, I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to afford renting a car to enable me to get to the various archives in some of the more isolated departments of France, notably the Ardèche and the Gers in the deep southern interior. I have, I must admit, often been fortunate to meet the right people at the right time, and during the previous winter one of my Parisian friends had introduced me to her mother who was passionate about French history, fascinated by the fact that this crazy American was just as obsessed by her country’s history, and happened to have a car which she rarely used. A bit stunned by her generosity, I nevertheless leapt at the chance, and took off early one morning in June. I headed out of the city via the Porte d’Italie—this was indeed once the route to Italy, National road 7, and I wanted to stick to non-motorway driving as much as I could, a much better way to see a country. This road follows the Seine upriver, through the Forest of Fontainebleau and the town of Nemours onto a flat plain known as the Gâtinais. At Montargis, I paused to look at a ruined château that once belonged to Philippe d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIV, though its restoration projects had not yet begun, so there wasn’t much to see. I turned off the main road and headed west, passed through the town of Bellegarde (with a historic château, at different times property of the dukes of Bellegarde and dukes of Antin), and reached the Loire near my first destination: the Abbey of St-Benoît-sur-Loire.

St-Benoît was once one of the richest abbeys in France, and one of the oldest, originally built in the 7^th century to house the bones of Saint Benedict (Benoît in French), and rebuilt in the 11^th century, famous especially for its distinctive porch. Also known as Fleury, it is monumental in scale, and at its height housed over a hundred monks and a large library. It was one of the great centres of learning of the High Middle Ages, and parent to numerous priories all over western Europe. From the 16^th century onwards, the abbey was held, as many were, in commendam, which means in the trust of a great churchman or secular noble who looked after the abbey’s welfare (and enjoyed its significant revenues), but had little to do with its day-to-day running. One of these in the later 17^th century was Philippe, Chevalier de Lorraine, one of the subjects of my research. The disinclination towards religion by this Versailles courtier, lover of the King’s brother, was offensive to many, as indeed was the entire commendam system of benefice holding, and was one of the more corrupt practices of the Catholic Church that reformers desired to abolish. At the Revolution, the monks were chased away entirely, its famous library dispersed. It took some time to re-establish a Benedictine community here, but since World War II it has once again become a flourishing abbey.

After lunch I drove just across the river Loire and visited one of France’s finest medieval châteaux: Sully. The current building was constructed mostly in the 14^th century, with some modifications in the 17^th. The medieval lords of Sully controlled the crossing point of the river and much of this region of the Loire as it transitions from the uplands of central France into the wide Loire valley, the more well-known part of the river, home to Blois, Chambord, Amboise, etc. The original Sully castle passed to the family La Trémoïlle in the 14^th century, who rebuilt it in its present form, then sold it in 1602 to Maximilien de Béthune, premier minister of King Henry IV and one of the builders of the modern French state. The barony of Sully was erected into a duchy for him, in 1606, and he set about converting it into a worthy ducal seat, especially after he was pushed out of government by the Regent Maria de Medici after 1611. The château stayed in the family for the next 300 years, until it was sold to the local council in the 1960s.

I stayed overnight in Sully-sur-Loire, then spent the next day crossing the wide plain of the Sancerrois on surely one of the straightest roads I have ever been on—probably built by those single-minded Romans who never let a simple hill get in their way.

This road passes through the town of Aubigny-sur-Nère, of interest to lovers of Scottish history and the Auld Alliance, as belonging to a branch of the Stuarts since the early 15^th century, and given by Charles II to his French mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, then raised into a duchy for her by Louis XIV, and held by her descendants the Dukes of Richmond until the Revolution. They still use the title Duc d’Aubigny today, but the ‘Château des Stuarts’ belongs to the community and serves as the town hall. It was built in its present form by Robert Stuart d’Aubigny, Marshal of France, in the early 16^th century. There’s not a lot to see as a tourist, but there is a small museum dedicated to the history of the Auld Alliance that connected France and Scotland for centuries.

In the afternoon, I carried on due south, through the town of Bourges, capital of the province of Berry, and then on to another completely straight road until I joined the Cher river valley and the terrain became more hilly. Driving across some hillside passes and through the deep gorges of the river Sioule, I arrived in the Auvergne, the heart of what’s known as the Midi, and found, quite late, an overnight stay in the town of Riom near Clermont-Ferrand. How I managed finding accommodation on the fly before having the internet on my phone amazes me now, and I sometimes left it until dinnertime to start looking for hotels with signs that read vacancy. Watching the sunset was a real treat as it went down behind the ancient volcanic peaks of the Auvergne—my hotel was quite close to the town of Volvic in fact, and the well-known logo of the mineral water from there displays the iconic peaks.

In the morning I headed east for a short way, before turning south once more, on another very straight road, this time straight through some hills—very determined people were these Roman road builders!—and listening to one of the CDs I had brought along, of Dawn Upshaw singing the ‘Songs of the Auvergne’ by Joseph Canteloube, a set of local folksongs arranged for soprano in the late 1920s. This is lushly orchestrated, evocative music, sung in the local Auvergnat dialect, with fun titles such as ‘La pastrouletta e lou chibalié’ (the shepherdess and the chevalier), ‘Quan z’eyro petitoune’ (when I was small), and ‘Tè, l’co tè’ (go away doggie).

The gorgeous lullaby, ‘Baïlèro’, Dawn Upshaw, Kent Nagano and the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon

The Auvergne has an interesting history derived from its isolation and rugged terrain. It was one of the last strongholds of the Gauls against the Romans, its local tribe the Arverni being led by the famous Vercingetorix, defeating Caesar here in 52 BCE before being crushed a few months later at Alesia. This was later a place of refuge for Huguenots, for the disgraced ‘Reine Margot’, and even the French Vichy government during the Second World War. I enjoyed driving along this fairly isolated road early in the morning, and as the road continued ever southward, I eventually reached a major watershed, and another huge abbey: La Chaise-Dieu.

The name seems quite appropriate, as ‘the seat of God’, sitting here at the very top of a mountain ridge, with the rugged hills of the Auvergne to the north and Languedoc spreading away to the south, all the way to the sea. The name does not mean that exactly, however, as chaise in this case is a modification of the local Occitan word chasa, or ‘house’. Occitan is the local language of the south of France, its name coined to distinguish the pronunciation of the word for ‘yes’ in the north ‘oui’ from the southern ‘oc’, hence langue d’oc (Languedoc). I heard the language spoken for this first time on this trip as I tuned into one of the local radio stations which broadcast in Occitan.

A far too cute video of children speaking in Occitan

An older man telling a story in Auvergnat Occitan

The Abbey of La Chaise-Dieu was, like St-Benoît, a Benedictine monastery, founded in the 11^th century as part of the Cluniac movement to reform the medieval church. The monumental buildings were constructed in the 14^th century by Clement VI, one of the Avignon popes, who had been a monk here and who suitable buildings for his tomb. Inside is a well-preserved example of a ‘danse-macabre’ from the 15^th century, painted to keep plague away from the faithful. Also put into commende in the 16^th century, the abbots of La Chaise-Dieu were always very high profile courtiers, cardinals and minsters, including both Richelieu and Mazarin, and much later the Cardinal de Rohan who was exiled here after the Affair of the Diamond Necklace which embarrassed Queen Marie-Antoinette in 1785. It was also held for a time by another of my Lorraine princes, Anne-Marie, one of the many sons of the Comte d’Armagnac, a favourite of Louis XIV who was pushing for this son (known as the ‘Abbé d’Armagnac’) to become a cardinal—but he died before this could be accomplished. The monks were driven out here too during the French Revolution, and did not return until towards the end of the 20^th century. Meanwhile, a famous music festival has been held here each summer since the 1960s.

From this mountaintop experience, I drove down into a province known before the Revolution as the Velay, like Auvergne also named for its ancient Gaulish inhabitants, the Vellavi. I arrived mid-morning at its capital, Le Puy-en-Velay, after passing by the château of the dukes of Polignac—at which I did not stop, and have been meaning to return ever since. The Polignacs were one of the most ancient and most prominent noble house in this part of France, though they did not manage to scale the heights and acquire a dukedom until the very final hours of the Ancien Régime, mostly through the intense friendship of the first duchess with Marie-Antoinette (as portrayed vivaciously by Rose Byrne in the 2006 Sophia Coppola film). The castle, still owned by the family, is today mostly a ruin, but incredibly dramatic as I drove past, dominating the landscape atop a rocky outcropping, in fact the plug of an ancient volcano. This area is home to hundreds of these plugs (the remains of volcanic cores that have worn away) known locally as puys, or little mountains (similar to puig in Catalan or poggio in Italian), and the town of Le Puy (also known for its lentils) gets its distinctive look from them—it looks almost otherworldy, with castles and churches perched atop these pointy peaks.

It is hard to believe that the river valley meandering nearby is once again the Loire, so very far from what we normally think of as the Loire Valley—the river in fact originates deep in the mountains of the south, one province over from here, formerly known as the Vivarais, now the department of the Ardèche.

The Vivarais was ultimately my destination for this trip. It was never really a fully fledged province of France, but a sub-province of Languedoc, though, being so far from the provincial capital, Toulouse, and separated by some pretty rugged terrain, it enjoyed quite a bit of autonomy. It had originally been the territory governed by the Bishop of Viviers, which gave it its name, and retained its own local governing body, known as the estates, up to the Revolution. The estates included representatives of the towns, the local clergy, and of course the local nobility, and it was these nobles that fascinated me, as they had a system of rotating membership drawn from the barons of the Vivarais. Twelve of these barons took turns in rotation acting as hosts for the annual meeting in their château, a position of honour and an expression of their local authority. In the later 17^th century, the Lorraine-Guise family held three of these rotating baronies. As my research was developing, I thought it pretty extraordinary that such a small region so far from either the court at Versailles or the normal Guise power bases in Champagne or Normandy could draw their attention, so I came here to poke around in the archives, held in the town of Privas, the capital of the Department of Ardèche, as the Vivarais was renamed during the Revolution for the river that drains most of the area, flowing down from the rocky hills known as the Cévennes through narrow gorges into the Rhône River and from there down to the Mediterranean.

the Vivarais is the area within the circle just to the right of the orange

As I drove across these ridges into the Ardèche I could immediately sense I was in a different ecosystem—a lot more pine trees, much less undergrowth, a brighter, more yellow light, and certainly a different smell. I return to the south of France most every year now, and always immediately know I have arrived from this smell: a mix of pine, lavender and the sea. As the afternoon progressed, I drove down along a road high above the deep Ardèche river valley and passed by the castle of Montlaur, one of the places I was here to study, as it was one of the baronies owned by the Guise. The 12^th-century castle, already a ruin by the 18^th century, is still inspiring, perched on top of a ridge dominating its surroundings.

The Montlaur family controlled this valley for centuries, before they died out and passed their extensive properties to the princes of Harcourt, a branch of the Guise family. This road also passes by the equally impressive ruins of the château de Ventadour, though the main castle (with the same name) of this ducal family is further away in the Limousin. I arrived late in the day in Privas, set myself up in a hotel—thank goodness my French was getting pretty good by this point, since English was not a working language in these parts—and got ready for a week in the archives. The town is small and built on many levels which allows for lots of picturesque vistas, restaurants on terraces, and small squares with fountains. The town also has loads of shops selling the local specialty, crème de marrons, made from chestnuts. I highly recommend it. Yum.

With Privas as a base, I took several short (and one very long) driving trips in the afternoons or long evenings (one of the pleasures of travelling in mid-June) after working in the mornings in the archives. One day I drove to the nearby town of Aubenas, a bit larger than Privas, and dominated by a large castle in the centre of town, which also passed from the Montlaur family to the Harcourts. It too originated in the 11^th or 12^th century, but was mostly built in the 14^th century—unlike the others, it is not a ruin, and you can still see how it has been modified in multiple styles over the centuries, from the medieval round towers, to a Burgundian style coloured tile roof from the Renaissance, to neo-Classical elements added later in the doorframes and windows. Today it is the town hall of Aubenas and houses a collection of portraits, including some of my Harcourt princes and princesses.

From here I took a tiny road that followed the Ardèche river, on which was set the castle of the Vogüé family, down in the valley rather than perched up on a hill. This family of local nobles originally held none of the baronies of the Vivarais, but by the end of the 18^th century, through inheritance or purchase, they acquired four of them, and probably were on the road to becoming a ducal family themselves when the Revolution broke out. They remain in existence and are still a presence in the region, and open their château to tourism.

I then completed that day’s drive by doing a circle, along small roads, taking in the small town of St-Remèze—another of the rotating baronies held by the Harcourts—then down into the gorges of the Ardèche, today an extremely popular holiday destination for adventurous boaters, mostly Dutch.

Another day, I decided I wanted to see the other half of the Montlaur inheritance which lay across the Rhône, in the former province of the Dauphiné. This was a long drive, crossing the huge, broad, very blue-green-grey river at Tournon, then cross-country to the tiny village of Maubec, high up on a plateau above the river Bourbre which flows northwest towards Lyon. This plateau is called the ‘Terres Froides’ and it does seem it would be pretty chilly and quite arid. It’s primarily cattle country, and the dairy and wheat products produced here made the marquisate of Maubec a good acquisition for the Harcourts (in contrast to the dry and rocky unproductive lands back across the Rhône). The remains of the château of Maubec were hard to find, and I had to walk through a playground and people’s yards, dogs barking, just to find barely a wall standing.

It was starting to get late, so I hopped back into the car and down into the valley floor where I got on the motorway and headed south. It was a Sunday evening, and the gate was up as I drove in, so I assumed that maybe you don’t pay tolls on Sundays. I drove for hours and hours, deep into the night, till I left the motorway at Valence only to discover from the attendant in the toll booth that it was my fault (naturally) that the other end of the motorway hadn’t had a barrier from which to take a ticket. How to explain this in broken French to a man at about midnight? I had to pay a huge sum, a ‘full fare’ since I couldn’t prove where I had entered the motorway. Sheesh.

The next day I had another argument in bad French with the woman (who I remember wore a white vest, what you might call a ‘wife-beater’) at the hotel in Privas. She had promised I could pay with a credit card when I checked in, but then said I couldn’t when I tried to leave. Her answer to my pleas was simply to do the French shrug, lower lip extended, and walk away. I was so angry, and now seriously short of cash (for complicated reasons I won’t bore you with, I had no bank account in France, and cash machines back then wouldn’t let you use a foreign bank card). It was very hot. Before I left the Vivarais, I wanted to stop and see two more of the rotating baronies: firstly, the absolutely cute village of Largentière, which was the barony held by the bishop of Viviers himself, built on several layers, and with tiny alleyways—much of the village centre is inaccessible except on foot, which made it quite pleasant. The second, further along the road, was Joyeuse. This was the seat of an ancient regional noble house with that same name, who rose swiftly to the very heights of the aristocracy in the late 16^th century, as favourites of King Henry III, and were created dukes, in 1581. Their success was brief, however, and only lasted a generation—the lands passed to Henriette-Catherine de Joyeuse who married the Duke of Guise. Her daughter, Marie, was the last of the family, and though I do not think she ever came this far south, she certainly was interested in the town. Although the château is nothing to write home about (odd and blocky), the new church she had built in 1675 is quite lovely. Together, château and church dominate the high part of the town, which, like so many towns across the south of France is built on a hilltop. Marie de Guise’s investment in a new church partly helped me see why her family was so interested in this region—for a long time it had been a haven, due to its rugged isolation, for Huguenots, and Marie was certainly keen to perform her family’s main role in the history of France in stamping out heresy.

That afternoon I set out for a long and a bit arduous cross-country drive, up a long windy river valley deep into the Cévennes, into the next province over from the Vivarais, the Gévaudan, and found a place to stay overnight in its chief town, Mende. Mende was historically the seat of another powerful local bishop, so prevalent across southern France in the absence of a strong monarchical government. That evening I witnessed the oddity of a parade featuring an ‘American style’ marching band, and decided to sample the cuisine I had heard about from French foodies: gésiers, or gizzards. Sliced very thin and served on a salad, my tongue said very nice, but my stomach almost immediately rejected it. This is unheard of for me; I generally like everything. But the meal came back up almost as soon as I returned to my hotel room—from the balcony of which I could still watch the marching band. My lasting memory of Mende is thus, unfortunately, a little weird.

The next morning I continued westward, following the River Lot for a stretch, then crossing over a causse, a high arid plateau, to come to Rodez, the capital of the region that used to be called the Rouergue. Like the Vivarais, this province also had twelve baronies that together administered the region. One of these baronies was Panat, and I headed there for a lunch date on a sunny terrace in an ancient house just below the château (in which the count still lives). It was great to see people socially again, after so many days on the road solo—this was the summer home of an eminent professor of history, Orest Ranum, and his amazing wife, Pat. He had written about 17^th-century France for many decades while at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, but it was actually she I wanted to talk more with, since she had done extensive research on the Guise family, as a musicologist specialising on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the composer who worked for many years for Marie de Guise. I had sent them some of my writing in advance, and was thrilled then immediately dispirited when Orest praised my work as exceptional, then predicted I would struggle to land an academic job since I had chosen such an unfashionable topic as the French nobility. Pffft!

The afternoon was golden, and I drove south and west, past Albi and into the broad central plain of western Languedoc. I remember it was vividly blanketed in yellow—sunflowers. I drove around the perimeter of Toulouse and stayed overnight in an unmemorable roadside hotel (often on this, and subsequent, trips, I stayed in one of those wonderful French hotels, like Formule Un, that cost almost nothing, and deliver almost nothing in terms of comfort, but are always reliable and clean).

In the morning I headed due west to my next destination, Auch, the capital of the Department of Gers which includes the ancient County of Armagnac, and whose archives I next wanted to peer into. Armagnac is more than just the name of a local brandy, it is also the name of a dynasty that dominated politics in the southwestern corner of France—Gascony—for much of the middle ages. They gave their name to one of the factions that tore the Kingdom apart in the early decades of the 15^th century (and they often allied with the English king against the French king to do so); but by the end of the century, it was they, not the French monarchy that disappeared from the corridors of power, and their lands were redistributed to more loyal French nobles. My interest in the region comes in two centuries later, when the title Count of Armagnac was conferred upon the Count of Harcourt (one of my Lorraine-Guise princes), but all the standard sources indicated that it was merely an honorific title, not having much if anything to do with the old Gascon county itself. So I spent a morning in the archives in Auch—such a different experience to the very modern regional archives I had worked in in Paris, Rouen or the previous week in Privas: these were located in the back room of an old church, and the two ancient curators seemed extremely surprised to see anyone at all, much less an American phd student. Instead of insisting I wear white cotton gloves, they brought tea and even a piece of cake to the desk where I was working. I didn’t find much in the archives here, except that southern French hospitality was very different to what I had experienced in the north, but I did find clear evidence that the Count of Harcourt had very real rights and revenues from his new southern county.

Feeling pleased, I splurged for a nice lunch on a terrace in the centre of town. Gascony is known for its culinary richness, and Auch in particular is known as a real centre of gastronomy. I don’t recall precisely what I ate that day, but all these years later, I can still recall the absolute lusciousness of the rabbit dish. I have been a convert to southern cooking ever since. I got back in the car and headed north through Armagnac country, stopping briefly in the town of Condom, which, not only being a funny name for English-speakers, was also the site of a bishopric held by one of my Lorraine princes (every stop has a purpose). Condom was the site of one of those ancient fortified abbeys repeatedly attacked and pillaged by Vikings and Saracens in the 9^th and 10^th centuries. In the 14^th century the abbot was raised to the status of a bishop by one of the Avignon popes and it remained a powerful Catholic presence in a region often dominated by Huguenots, but it disappeared as a separate diocese during the Revolution.

Continuing north, I passed Agen and Bergerac where I crossed the Dordogne and stopped for my last overnight stay in Périgueux, the capital of the province of Périgord, part of Aquitaine. Driving through this territory, the margins between the coastal plain to the west and the more hilly Massif Central of the Midi to the east you note the presence of numerous castles, logically, since this borderland was fought over for so long between the kings of England and France in the Hundred Years War. This route was also one of the key pilgrimage pathways from northwest Europe towards Santiago in Spain. The next day I continued up this route across the Limousin (and its capital Limoges), then joined the motorway for my final long trek back up to Paris. In a subsequent driving tour I explored more of Aquitaine and the west of France—the subject of a future blog post—but my time for this trip was up. My last stop was a lunch break in Orléans, where I re-crossed the Loire. I went into the centre of town and had a look at the cathedral which dominates one end of its central broad avenue, named for Jeanne d’Arc, whose heroics at the siege of Orléans in April 1429, helped to turn the tide of the Hundred Years War in France’s favour, a fact the tourist stands, t-shirts and snack shops never let you forget.

Jeanne d’Arc at the siege of Orleans, by Lenepveu (1880s)

The final stretch was over the very flat and wheat-filled plain north of Orléans known as the Beauce. The modern N 20 highway follows the path of the ancient route to Paris, that passes between the narrow gap—well-fortified—at Montlhéry, and eventually back up to the Porte d’Orléans, one of the major gateways into the city.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons, my own, or other open source sites)

Dukes of Westminster

What do rural Cheshire and the most fashionable neighbourhoods in West London have in common? Both have been part of the extensive portfolio of the Grosvenor family for centuries. The dukedom of Westminster may be relatively new (1874), but their development of Mayfair and Belgravia stretches back to the early 18^th century, and their control of extensive estates in Cheshire much, much further, to the 12^th century or before. As a dynastic history, their story is a good example of the enduring marriage between the English provincial gentry and the economic and political power of London. For centuries, the Grosvenors were not that different to the hundreds of county families who dominated the shires of England for most of its history; but due to a fortunate marriage in the late 17^th century, and savvy business planning in the century that followed, they were drawn into the first rank of Britain’s power elite, so much so that—according to the legend—Queen Victoria felt compelled to make her richest subject a duke so that she would not be embarrassed sitting down with him for tea.

the tomb of the 1st Duke of Westminster in Eccleston, Cheshire, with his Garter banner that nicely illustrates the union of Cheshire (the golden wheatsheaf) and London (the arms of the city of Westminster)

The connections between London and Cheshire are evident in the street names of Mayfair and Belgravia: Eaton Street in particular is named for the manor that has been the seat of the family since the middle of the 15^th century. But the Grosvenors are not ‘native’ to Cheshire: the family name is unmistakably of Norman origin as descendants of the great (or fat) hunter, probably a master of the hunt in the service of the dukes of Normandy. But the precise details of their early years in Cheshire are hard to pin down. The great flat plain south of the River Mersey that had been dominated by the Roman military camp, or castrum, which gradually became the city of Chester was a key area the Normans wanted to control after their conquest in 1066. The earlier full name of the city, Castrum Deva, reflects the importance of the River Dee as a border between English and Welsh territories, and one of William the Conqueror’s chief lieutenants (and probable kinsmen), Hugh ‘Lupus’ (the wolf, or ‘le Gros’ the fat) was named Earl of Chester, with extensive military and administrative powers. According to tradition, the first Grosvenors descended from a nephew of this Hugh Lupus, and were given lands along the banks of the Dee to help keep it secure for Anglo-Norman rule, though the first records indicate their lands were at Little Budworth, a short distance to the east. It wasn’t until 1450 when Ralph Grosvenor married Joan Eaton and established his base at her estates at Eaton, on the west bank of the Dee a few miles south of Chester. Over the next century, the family married, as expected, with the major county families of Cheshire—Fitton, Stanley, Legh, Norris, Venables—but also across the Welsh border into Flintshire. They frequently acted as mayors of Chester, sheriffs of Cheshire, or members of Parliament for the county.

One of these, Richard Grosvenor, married three times within this social set; his wives had names familiar to those who live in the northwest: Cholmondeley, Wilbraham and Warbuton. His prominence in the House of Commons as MP for Chester earned him a baronetcy in 1622. He was a supporter of the Crown in the Northwest, and served as both Sheriff of Cheshire and Sheriff of Denbighshire, in Wales. His son continued the family’s royalist support when many others of the county were turning against Charles I, and he extended his influence westward into Wales through marriage to a Mosytn heiress, with lands in Flintshire. This was important, as the mineral resources (coal, lead, stone) in the mountains of North Wales became a great source of revenue for the Grosvenors in the later 17^th century. This wealth allowed the 3^rd Baronet, Thomas, to rebuild Eaton Hall in the 1670s, the first in a series of great houses built on the site.

The 1670s Eaton Hall and its gardens, c1708

His increased wealth and stature may also have encouraged him to pursue a marriage outside the normal spheres of the Cheshire gentry. Mary Davies was the daughter of a scrivener (scribe) and lawyer of London, who, at a young age, was already heiress to the Manor of Ebury, in Middlesex. Ebury was an ancient manor formerly held by the Abbey of Westminster; confiscated by the Crown in 1530s, it was given to various people in succession, including the Earl of Middlesex, who sold it to Hugh Audley, one of the richest men in England, who then passed it to his great-great-niece, Mary Davies. She married Sir Thomas Grosvenor in 1677, when she was only 12 (and he 21). The Ebury estate consisted of about 500 acres on the north bank of the Thames in what was then mostly undrained, swampy land west of the town of Westminster, through which ran the lower courses of the River Tyburn.

the Thames valley in London in physical contours: Pimlico is clearly labelled

Mary Davies, Lady Grosvenor, is only normally noted in two other contexts in the histories of the family: one that she converted to Catholicism in about 1695, and the other, that she went mad about the same time—I suspect these are just two ways of telling the same story according to the biases of the time… In any case, she lived a long life, until 1730, by which time her three sons, Richard, Thomas and Robert (the 4^th, 5^th and 6^th baronets in succession) had begun developing the northern parts of Ebury Manor into a new area of fashionable residence they called Mayfair, centred around Grosvenor Square. Several streets were laid out on what had been the site of the annual May Fair, and were given royal approval by the creation of a new parish and a new parish church, St. George’s Hanover Square, which became one of the most fashionable places to have a society wedding in the 18^th century. Grosvenor Square was the site of many of London’s most prestigious mansions, and would be the home of the embassy of the United States from 1960 to 2018.

The son of the 6^th Baronet, Richard Grosvenor, naturally became increasingly involved in politics as his interests in the affairs of London grew. The family MPs had traditionally been Tories, and Sir Richard was for the most part a supporter of the Tory ministries of the 1750s, though he supported the Whigs in their ambitious pursuit of a conclusion to the Seven Years War under Pitt the Elder, and was moved into the House of Lords as Baron Grosvenor of Eaton in 1761. Twenty years later, he again supported a Pitt (this time the Younger) and was again rewarded, now with an earldom, in 1784. The 1^st Earl Grosvenor did not neglect his northern duties, however, and married a Vernon from Staffordshire, served as Mayor of Chester in 1759, and in the late 1760s acquired the manors of Belgrave and Eccleston which bordered his Eaton estate. The marriage was not long a happy one, and within five years Henrietta, Lady Grosvenor, was embroiled in a scandalous affair with the King’s younger brother, the Duke of Cumberland. Her husband sued the Duke and was given significant damages; the couple separated and she remained in London as part of the fashionable set while he returned to Cheshire to develop his estates, and in particular his passion for horses.

Their son, the 2^nd Earl Grosvenor, would turn his attention once again to London, and develop the area a bit further to the west, named Belgravia in honour of the family’s newer property in Cheshire. As was seen in the recent television drama of the same name, this residential area designed by Thomas Cubitt became the centre of aristocratic life in the Regency period of the early 19^th century. The new royal residence, Buckingham Palace, lay between Mayfair and Belgravia, and formed an effective beating heart of the new aristocratic quarter of west London. Further south, nearer the river, was Pimlico, developed as a residential area a bit later. The Earl moved his own London residence from Millbank House (on the Thames) in 1805 to Mayfair, to a house he purchased from the Duke of Gloucester which he renamed Grosvenor House. This is on Park Lane, the road bordering Hyde Park, one of the best addresses in the city. A massive colonnade was added later in the century, and in 1889 Grosvenor House became one of the first electrified buildings in the country. It was sold in the 1920s and mostly demolished, to be reborn as the Grosvenor House Hotel which remains today in all its splendour.

the colonnaded entrance to Grosvenor House, Park Lane

The 2^nd Earl also turned to rebuilding Eaton Hall in Cheshire from about 1803, engaging one of the Prince of Wales’s favourite architects (notably in Brighton), William Porden, to build a neo-Gothic mansion of princely proportions—described by contemporaries as either epic and wondrous or in monstrously bad taste.

As a politician, the 2^nd Earl also started out as a Tory then shifted towards the more reform-minded parties, supporting Catholic Emancipation and laws to benefit the poor, and as part of the coronation honours for William IV in 1831, was created Marquess of Westminster, recognising that his family was now a major player in London. The arms of the city of Westminster were added to his ancient coat-of-arms (a golden portcullis, the golden cross of St. Edward, and two Tudor roses). Nevertheless, the Marquess continued the family tradition of serving as Mayor of Chester, and for many years Lord Lieutenant of Flintshire. In 1794, he had married the heiress of one of the other leading aristocratic clans in the northwest, Lady Eleanor Egerton of Wilton, and their second son would later adopt the Egerton surname, and inherit the title Earl of Wilton and the estates centred on Heaton Park (now in Greater Manchester—see Dukes of Bridgewater).

The 1^st Marquess of Westminster died in 1845 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Richard (who had been known for most of his life by the courtesy title ‘Viscount Belgrave’). He completed the family’s political transition to the Whig party and served in the government of Lord John Russell as Lord Steward of the Household in 1850. His younger brothers were also political, though divided: Thomas Egerton, Earl of Wilton as a Tory, and Lord Robert, a Whig who was passionate about solidifying the Church of England through reform (and consequently opposed Irish home rule). Lord Robert served different administrations in the 1830s-40s, as Comptroller then Treasurer of the Household, and was awarded his own barony in 1857, named for the family’s original London property, Ebury. The Ebury barons, with their seat at Moor Park in Hertfordshire, would continue into the 20^th century, and inherited the Wilton earldom in 1999 (though today they live in Australia). Continuing the family’s spread of properties across England, the 2^nd Marquess acquired and rebuilt Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, and he built schools in Cheshire and donated land in the city of Chester to form Grosvenor Park.

The 3^rd Marquis of Westminster succeeded his father in 1869, and was soon after raised once more in the peerage, to the top rank, a dukedom, in the resignation honours requested by Gladstone in 1874. The 1^st Duke of Westminster continued to develop his London properties and acquired a new rural residence to escape the filthy city—one of the most splendid of all, Cliveden, in Buckinghamshire, purchased from his mother-in-law (who was also his aunt), the widow of the 2^nd Duke of Sutherland. Cliveden would become more famous in the 20^th century as the country house of the Astors (and the setting for the Profumo Scandal in the 1960s). The marriage of Hugh Lupus Grosvenor—taking his name from the ancient family founder—to Lady Constance Leveson-Gower, his mother’s niece, is illustrative of the closing of ranks in the Victorian era—in fact the second son of the Leveson-Gower family had also inherited large estates from the Egerton family and taken the name. The powerful ducal families of northwest England wanted to ensure their wealth and power stayed within the extended family circle, which also included the Cavendishes in Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and the Percys further north. It thus seemed to make sense to move the Grosvenors up into this world of dukes, and it didn’t hurt that the 1^st Duke of Westminster’s annual income had reached about £200,000 (about 25 million today).

the 1st Duke of Westminster, by Walker, Chester Town Hall

Aside from his palatial residences at Grosvenor House in Mayfair and Cliveden, the 1^st Duke yet again decided to rebuilt Eaton Hall in Cheshire. He employed a man locally grown and educated, Alfred Waterhouse, whose fame was established through his designs for the Manchester Town Hall, the Natural History Museum in London, and various university buildings in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. His designs were also inspired by the Gothic, but much more restrained than the previous building at Eaton, and were seen by most as a lot more tasteful, and certainly more austere (described in once source as ‘Wagnerian’). The buildings included a formal wing, a private wing, a clock tower, a private chapel, and stables that would rival those of any European monarch.

The Duke also built numerous smaller buildings on the estate—lodges, offices, a garden house, a riding school—and even a small railway line to transport supplies from the main line into Chester. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire and Lord Lieutenant of the newly formed County of London, from 1888. He supported government reforms and the movement for temperance (shutting down several of the pubs on his own estate), which may seem unusual considering that his other great passion was horse-racing (or maybe I am being judgy?). The 1^st Duke of Westminster is known for his horses (and his only formal government appointment was in fact Master of the Horse, in 1880, though this was by now just a ceremonial role). His celebrated champion thoroughbreds won the Derby four times, including the most famous horse of the 19^th century, ‘Bend Or’, who won in 1880.

Bend Or, in the Westminster racing colours

This horse’s curious name recalls the most infamous lawsuit in the history of heraldry, from 1389, when two families, Grosvenor and Scrope (of Bolton Castle in West Yorkshire), both claimed the same simple coat-of-arms, a gold diagonal strip (a bend or) on a blue (or azure) field. The Scrope family won the lawsuit, forcing the Grosvenors to adopt their golden wheatsheaf (a ‘garb’ in heraldic language, an ancient symbol of Cheshire), but had fallen into obscurity, so in a way, this reclaiming of the bend or symbolism was a victory long in coming. The 1^st Duke’s grandson, born the year before the Derby win, was always known by his nickname ‘Bendor’, and in recent years, another member of the family (from the Ebury line) who has moved into prominence is the presenter and art historian Bendor Grosvenor.

By the turn of the 20^th century, the Westminster family was enormous—the 1^st Duke had married twice and sired twelve children, and three of his sons had sons of their own. The heir, ‘Earl Grosvenor’, predeceased his father, so young ‘Bendor’ took over as 2^nd Duke and ruled over the Grosvenor estates (estimated in 1900 at about 6 million pounds, or over 700 million in today’s money) for the next half-century. As a young man, he served in the Boer War and World War I, and was active in sport, notably competing in the 1908 Olympics in motorboat racing. In the 1920s, he had a highly visible ten-year affair with Coco Chanel, which took on a darker shade in the 1930s as his interests were increasingly drawn to the far right and anti-Semitism, and there were rumours of his attempts to use Chanel’s connections with the Nazis to broker a deal with Hitler in the midst of World War II.

The 2^nd Duke died in 1953. Despite having married four times, he sired only one son who lived for five years, and two daughters. The elder, Lady Ursula, married twice and had children, but the younger, Lady Mary, never married, and despite the lack of a ducal title, managed to keep up the princely lifestyle of her forebears, as manager of large estates in Kenya, South Africa and the Scottish Highlands, until her death in 2000. She was like her father in her passion for sport, and was known as an accomplished racecar driver.

In 1953, the ducal title and the bulk of the estate therefore passed to William Grosvenor, already a man in his late fifties, who had lived with a caretaker all of his life due to brain damage incurred at birth. When he died in 1963, the title moved to still another branch of cousins, two brothers, Gerald and Robert, the 4^th and 5^th dukes. Gerald had had a long military career, as lieutenant-colonel, then a Yeoman of the Guard from 1952. Once he became duke he set about bringing the Grosvenor Estate more up to date—expanding holdings into North America and Australia and focusing attention on the decaying Waterhouse buildings at Eaton. It was decided to demolish most of the grand old buildings, leaving the clock tower, the chapel and the stables (which today houses the Grosvenor museum and a carriage museum), and building in its place a more modest house, though this was not built until the early 1970s, once the baton had passed from the 4^th Duke to the 5^th. This house, what I reckon is the fifth house on the site, was designed by the architect John Dennys, and was not seen as a success by those who viewed it, though I’d say credit should be given for trying to forge a new modern style for the English country house.

Waterhouse fans were outraged. This look did not last long, and the house would later be clad in a new pink façade in the 1980s, in what is described as ‘French château’ style (hmmm). The result is only a little better, especially with the stark contrast of the towering chapel and stable buildings. On its own, I suspect the current house would look cute, sort of bijou, but the juxtaposition of old and new struck me as quite incongruous when I visited on one of the rare open days (even then, only the gardens and the stable block are open).

The earlier life of the 5^th Duke of Westminster gives a slightly different twist to this story so far: born in 1910, he was quite far down the line of succession, and concentrated his political interests on his mother’s estates in Northern Ireland, living at Ely Lodge on Lough Erne and serving as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, 1955-64, and High Sheriff of County Fermanagh. As a result, his son spoke with a Northern Irish accent which certainly made him stand out in Westminster. Nevertheless, the young 6^th Duke, who took over from his father in 1979, firmly established himself in London and in the Northwest—in fact more so than most of his predecessors, acting as chairman of a number of local charities in Cheshire and Liverpool, and chancellor of two of the newest universities in the country, first of Manchester Metropolitan (where I work) from its inception as a full-fledged university in 1992, then of Chester University when it too attained university status in 2005. He also headed up the committee that organised the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, and presided over a number of organisations concerned with regulating the hunt and preserving the environment. He also added to the family’s landholdings in the north by acquiring the Abbeystead estate, near Lancaster, with 18,000 acres bordering on the Forest of Bowland. It was quite unexpected when he died suddenly there in August 2016.

The 6^th Duke had reconnected the Grosvenor family with the Northwest of England, but he and his two sisters also connected their family more closely with the higher aristocracy (since several of his predecessors had married young when they were still mere ‘gentlemen’, the now numerous dowager duchesses—there were three in 1979—came from more modest backgrounds; the 2^nd Duke’s widow Anne outlasted them all, passing away in 2003!). One sister married the Duke of Roxburghe, and the other married the Queen’s first cousin, the Earl of Lichfield, the photographer. The Duke’s own wife, Natalia Phillips, while herself untitled, is a close relative of the Mountbattens, through their shared Romanov descent. The children of the 6^th Duke and Duchess were therefore raised in close proximity the royal family, and there are various godparentages in both directions. One of the families brought into close contact this way are the Van Cutsems, one of whom married the Duke’s eldest child, Tamara, in 2004. The second daughter married media royalty, history presenter Dan Snow, while the much younger two children, Hugh and Viola remain unmarried. It was Hugh who at the tender young age of 25 suddenly became the 7^th Duke of Westminster, and one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at about 10 billion pounds. Much of this fortune is still based in London and Cheshire properties, but the Grosvenor Group has expanded globally, and includes a surprising number of office towers in San Francisco and Vancouver, and shopping malls in Sweden, France, Shanghai and Liverpool. The blending of aristocracy and commerce continues.

the gates of St. Mary’s, Eccleston, burial place for most of the Grosvenors

(images from Wikimedia Commons or my own photos)

grosvenor-family-simplified-chart Download

Dukes of Cadaval

Dukes can be dangerous. Most European monarchies have suffered at one point or another from over-powerful uncles with ducal titles: Bedford and Gloucester for Henry VI of England, Burgundy and Anjou for Charles VI of France, or those more distantly related to the king, usually known as the princes of the blood. In some cases, these are the strongest supporters of the monarchy, but in others they can be its fiercest challengers. In the case of Portugal in the 17^th century, the dukes of Cadaval were able to help make a king, João IV, but also to unmake one, João’s son Afonso VI. Yet riding high can also mean having a great fall, and after having been the largest landowners and most powerful aristocrats in the 18^th century, the dukes of Cadaval backed the wrong horse in the civil war of the 1820s and spent much of the rest of the century in exile.

Nuno Álvares Pereira de Melo, first Duke of Cadaval

The dukes of Cadaval, or the House of Melo (more fully Álvares Pereira de Melo), were a junior branch of the House of Bragança, which was itself an illegitimate cadet branch of the royal dynasty of Portugal, the House of Avis. Afonso de Portugal, natural son of King João I, was created Duke of Bragança in 1442 by his half-brother, the Duke of Coimbra acting as regent for the young King Afonso V. He was already a wealthy man, having married the heiress Brites Álvares Pereira, daughter of the Constable of Portugal, the famous Nuno Álvares Pereira, a general in the Portuguese wars of independence of the 1380s and ultimately canonised by the Catholic Church (the ‘Santo Condestável’).

The second Duke of Bragança added to this by marrying Joana de Castro, heiress of Cadaval, a large estate in the hills to the north of Lisbon. They had four sons who dominated the court and administration of Afonso V in the 1470s. The youngest of these, Álvaro, made yet another great marriage to an heiress, Filipa de Melo, Lady of Ferreira de Aves. He founded a new lineage who took a new compound name, Álvares Pereira de Melo, lords of Ferreira, Cadaval, Melo, Tentúgal and so on. These lands extended the reach of the family up into the more northerly parts of the Kingdom, mostly in the province of Beira, from the highlands (Melo and Ferreira) to the lowlands nearer the coast (Tentúgal). Álvaro had been head of the judiciary in Portugal, as Grand Chancellor, but fell from favour—along with most of the great magnates—in the new reign of King João II (r. 1481-95), went into exile in Castile, and became one of the chief counsellors of Queen Isabella, who compensated him for his lost estates in Portugal with large estates newly conquered in the south of Spain. He also increased his family’s riches significantly by backing Christopher Columbus in his dispute with the Crown over his rights to revenues from new discoveries, in exchange for a grant of 10% of the profits from the New World. At the start of the new century, he was recalled to Portugal by King Manuel and restored to his lands and offices. Having two sons, he was able to divide his patrimony and his interests, between Portugal and Castile, with the latter branch becoming even closer to Columbus by marriage to his grand-daughter, and starting a new dynasty in Spain, Colón de Portugal, dukes of Veragua—a topic for another blog post.

The elder son, Rodrigo, remained in Portugal and was created Conde de Tentúgal in 1504 (with the right to be addressed by the king as ‘nephew’), then Marquês de Ferreira in 1533. Like most Portuguese noblemen, he took part in the great overseas expansion of the 16^th century, acting as governor of Tangier. This interest in North African affairs eventually led to disaster, however, with the battle of Alcácer-Quibir (al Quasr al-kibr) in 1578, in which King Sebastião, intervening in a Moroccan succession dispute, lost his life, along with much of the high Portuguese nobility. His death ultimately ushered in the long period of Habsburg rule in Portugal, from 1580 to 1640.

It is in 1640 where the story of the dukes of Cadaval really takes off. The Portuguese nobility and urban elites had been bristling under the rule of the Habsburgs from Madrid for a while, and looked to the extant branches of the former ruling house for leadership: the senior-most of these, headed by the Duke of Bragança, was encouraged by the next in line, the Marquis of Ferreira, to proclaim himself king. And in 1640, while the armies of Philip IV of Spain were otherwise occupied with fighting in the Thirty Years War in the Rhineland and the Low Countries, and simultaneously facing a serious rebellion in Catalonia, they made their move, led by a group of forty noblemen in Lisbon known as the ‘Conjurados’. In early December, Bragança was proclaimed king as João IV in Lisbon, followed soon after by a similar proclamation by Ferreira in his family’s regional power base of Évora, the chief city of the Alentejo Province, an important region to secure, as the borderlands facing Castile. At the formal coronation of the new king, Ferreira bore the Sword of State as Constable of Portugal.

the coronation of King João IV–the Marquis of Ferreira holds the sword of state

The next two decades were a struggle to maintain this new independence; Francisco de Melo, Marquis of Ferreira was an important part of this, making use of his international standing to act as ambassador to France in 1641 to secure crucial French support against Spain, while at home he helped run the new court as Grand Master of the Household, and in the field he commanded the cavalry in battles along the eastern frontier. It is interesting to note—though not that unusual in the history of grandee families, especially those with properties on or near border zones—that there were two men of roughly the same age, cousins, who were both called Francisco de Melo, and while the Marquis of Ferreira is remembered as one of the chief supporters of the Portuguese Restoration, the other, the Count of Assumar, was one of the leading generals and statesmen in Spain, commanding armies in Flanders, then serving in succession as viceroy of Sicily, the Low Countries, and Catalonia, and representative of the King of Spain at the peace talks in Westphalia in 1648. By this date, the year of the end of the Thirty Years War, Ferreira was dead, but King João wished to honour him, and named his son, Nuno Álvares Pereira de Melo, first Duke of Cadaval, in April 1648, as part of the celebrations of the birth of a second royal son, Dom Pedro.

the Marquis of Ferreira, father of the 1st Duke of Cadaval

The new dukedom gave this family a rank enjoyed by no other in Portugal, and was accompanied by recognition that they were in line of succession to the throne, should the line of Bragança fail. Cadaval was a large territory, consisting of about twenty villages, and the Duke set about constructing new residences to match his status. One of these was the Palace of Muge, on the Tejo northeast of Lisbon (originally a royal residence, it was a property acquired by his marriage to Maria de Portugal-Faro, Condessa de Odemira, from another branch of the House of Portugal). This estate, its palace destroyed by the great earthquake of 1755, is still run by the family, now as a major Portuguese winery, the Casa Cadaval.

The first Duke also enlarged a house nearer to Lisbon, known as Pedrouços, in the area of suburban villas along the Tejo waterfront west of Belém, which later became a sometime royal residence, and a fashionable seafront retreat in the early 19^th century. Part of the estate rising on the hillside above retains a hint of the former association with the dukes of Cadaval, the fort of Alto do Duque, one of the western defences of the city of Lisbon built in the 19^th century. Mostly a ruin by the late 20^th century, it has recently undergone renovation as part of the urban regeneration of this section of Lisbon.

But the real symbol of the new ducal family’s power and prestige was in Évora, the Palácio Cadaval, which remains the primary ducal seat today. Located in the heart of the city, near the Cathedral and the ancient ruins of a Roman temple, it was originally a Moorish then Visigothic fortress—with even older Roman foundations—rebuilt as a castle in the 14^th century by the de Melo family, renovated in the early 16^th century in what is called ‘Manueline’ style (after King Manuel I—the style of the famous Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, Lisbon), and then given a new façade in the 17^th century. It still retains its most notable feature, the medieval five-sided tower. It was restored in the 1990s, and today hosts concerts and cultural events.

The 1^st Duke of Cadaval was only ten when the dukedom was created, but he became one of the most important men of the reign of the second Bragança king, Afonso VI, whose reign began in 1656 when he was still a child. Cadaval served the Queen Regent, Luisa de Guzmán, as a general and a councillor of state, but when her son came of age in 1662 he was pushed out, along with the pro-English faction at court. In 1667, he returned to power, with the help of the French-born queen, Marie-Françoise of Savoy-Nemours, and the King’s younger brother, Dom Pedro. In a rather scandalous turn of events, the Queen and her brother-in-law deposed the King (on grounds of mental health), she acquired an annulment (claiming non-consummation), and within a year had married Pedro, who was proclaimed Prince Regent and later succeeded as King Pedro II. Cadaval was named Constable of Portugal and Mordomo-mor (Head of the Household) of the Queen, and retook his seat on the Council of State and the Council of War. He was now (and would remain) very pro-French, and solidified this stance through a second marriage, in 1671, to Marie-Angélique de Lorraine, daughter of the Comte d’Harcourt; then after her death in 1674, to her cousin, Marguerite de Lorraine, daughter of Louis, Comte d’Armagnac. As a historical phenomenon, it is fascinating to note that there are several other marriages between the high aristocracies of France and Portugal in the reign of Louis XIV, which is what drew me to the history of the Cadaval family to begin with while I was researching the Lorraine princes for my doctorate. I think there is more to this story—was Louis trying to wrench Portugal away from its traditional alliance with England?—and it would make for a good Phd dissertation—contact me if you are interested!

As a sign of his heightened international prestige, the Duke of Cadaval was sent to Spain in 1681 to negotiate peace, and to Nice in 1682 to pick up a groom, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, for his marriage to the heiress to the Portuguese throne, Infanta Isabel Luísa, Princess of Beira, and to deliver him safely back to Lisbon. This marriage had been arranged by the couple’s mothers, who were sisters, but had been rejected from the start by the Savoyard prince, and he refused to board the boat commanded by Cadaval, who therefore returned home groomless. The unfortunate Infanta—known as Sempre-noiva, ‘always-engaged’—died in 1690, but Cadaval’s fortunes continued to rise: although Pedro II now had a male heir, he was only an infant, and the only other Bragança offspring was an illegitimate daughter, Luisa, sometimes known as the Princess of Carnide, who was married in 1695 to the heir to the Duke of Cadaval, Luis Ambrosio (known as the 2^nd Duke since his father resigned his titles to him in 1682). She then remarried his brother, Jaime, after her first husband’s death from smallpox in 1700 (and Jaime became the 3^rd Duke of Cadaval). It isn’t hard to see that the Portuguese royal family was closing ranks and preparing for a Cadaval succession should the senior line die out; alternatively, we can see this as an emulation of Louis XIV’s policy of marrying illegitimate royal offspring to the first prince of the blood (as indeed Louis had done with the grandson of the Prince of Condé and his daughter Mlle de Nantes in 1685). There were no offspring from either of these marriages, however, and by 1697, Pedro II had four healthy sons.

The new reign of King João V began in 1707, and the 1^st Duke of Cadaval, was still one of the leading men at court, in the government and in the army. In 1707, he was named Governor of the Army in its on-going war with Bourbon Spain, though actual command in the field was given to younger men, and he finally died, nearly 90, in 1725. His son, the 3^rd Duke, had taken over his seat on the Council of State, and acted as Estribeiro-mor (Grand Equerry) of the King. He too married a princess from the House of Lorraine, Henriette, daughter of Louis, Prince de Lambesc, in 1739. Portugal was now, however, even more firmly pro-British—was this another Cadaval attempt to forge an alternative pro-French policy?

The 3^rd Duke died in 1749 and was succeeded by his son, Nuno Caetano, the 4^th Duke, who doesn’t seem to have left much of an impression on history. More impressive is the 3^rd Duke’s brother’s widow (who was also his niece), Ana Maria de Lorena de Sá e Meneses, who was honoured with her own title, Duchess of Abrantes when she became Camareira-Mor of the Queen, the highest position for a woman at the Portuguese court, in 1753. The high office and the ducal title were re-granted to her daughter, Maria Margarida de Lorena. The name Lorraine thus persisted through several generations of female succession, a fascinating cultural difference in naming practices from most of the other aristocracies of Europe that were much more strictly patrilineal. The second Duchess of Abrantes (a town in the very centre of Portugal) had no children, so the estates and titles passed to a cousin from the Sá e Meneses family on her death in 1780.

allegorical portrait of Ana Maria, Duchess of Abrantes (identifiable through the coat-of-arms on her shield) as Athena

Portugal, like much of Europe, then entered the revolutionary era, and the Cadaval family would not emerge from it unscathed. Shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the 5^th Duke of Cadaval, Miguel Caetano, married yet another French woman of the highest rank, Marie-Madeleine de Montmorency-Luxembourg, daughter of the Duke of Luxembourg who had emigrated to Portugal. The 5^th Duke and Duchess themselves fled the Revolutionary wars when they reached Portugal in 1807, and departed with the royal family for Brazil, where the 5^th Duke died. In the period following the restoration of Portugal’s independence, the 6^th Duke, Nuno Caetano, sided with the uncle of the new queen, Maria II, and with others who wished to suppress the liberal constitution and restore absolutism. The Duke was already a member of the Regency Council (the Queen was only 7 years old), and when her uncle, Miguel, seized the reins of government as King Miguel in 1828, the Duke of Cadaval served as his prime minister, and was recognised once more as first prince of the blood and cousin of the King. The Duke and his brother, Segismondo, had solidified their position further by marriage to the two daughters and heiresses of the senior-most illegitimate branch of the royal house of Bragança, the Duke of Lafões, a leading political figure in the later 18^th century. The ensuing civil wars known as the ‘Guerras Liberais’ (Liberal Wars) were fought between those who supported Queen Maria and a liberal constitution, and those who supported King Miguel (the ‘Miguelists’), until the later were defeated in the Spring of 1834 (it is notable that their last stand was in Évora, Cadaval territory). Miguel and his followers were all banished from the Kingdom. Cadaval left for France, never to return.

According to official sources, the title Duke of Cadaval then became extinct on his death in 1837, because, according to Portuguese custom, most titles were not legally hereditary, but had to be re-confirmed for each holder, and since the Duke’s heiress, Maria de Piedade, did not recognise the Constitutional regime, she was never confirmed as 7^th Duchess. Of course, in 1837, she was only 10, so she was looked after by her uncles, the Duke of Lafões and his younger brother, Jaime, who married her a few years later. They soon had twin sons, Nuno and Jaime, and settled in a villa they purchased on the outskirts of the town of Pau, in the far southwestern corner of France. This building, still known as the Villa Cadaval, remained the family seat until the 1930s, then served as the refuge of the deposed Bey of Tunis in the 1940s, and was sold to the French state in 1955.

The 8^th Duke of Cadaval, Jaime II, was recognised only by the Miguelists who remained in exile in various parts of Europe, as was his son Nuno, the 9^th Duke, who joined the Portuguese Expeditionary Force fighting with the Allies in northern France during World War I. He and his brother Dom Antonio were allowed to return to Portugal when the ban was lifted in 1930—by this time Portugal was no longer a monarchy, and the senior line of the House of Bragança was extinct, leaving only the descendants of King Miguel, who took over the responsibility of unofficially regulating the Portuguese nobility as the Crown would normally do, and thus formally recognised the 10^th Duke of Cadaval, Jaime III, when he succeeded his father in 1935. The Duke, along with his cousins (his uncle’s two daughters), set about restoring the estates in Évora and Muge and the forests and parkland at Mata do Duque, and lived a long life until 2001.

His succession was complicated: the Duke had married twice, but the first marriage was civil only, not religious, as the bride was a divorcée. The two daughters from his second marriage therefore did not recognise the two daughters from the first, and were supported by much of the traditional aristocracy. The Duke of Bragança, as head of the royal house of Portugal and head of the Council of Nobility stepped in to broker a deal by which the elder daughter of the second marriage, Diana, became the 11^th Duchess of Cadaval, and her much older half-sister, Rosalinda, was given the titles Marquesa of Ferreira and Condessa of Tentúgal, the traditional titles borne by the heir to the dukedom, and in the meantime he created a new title for her, Duchess of Cadaval-Hermès, in recognition of her marriage to Hubert Guerrand-Hermès, heir to the Hermès fashion dynasty. Diana de Cadaval has raised her family’s profile, as an author and as organiser of cultural festivals at the Cadaval Palace in Évora, and also due to her high-profile marriage in 2008 to Prince Charles-Philippe de Bourbon-Orléans, Duc d’Anjou, first cousin of the current Orléanist pretender to the French throne. Genealogy geeks like me find this marriage particularly interesting as both of them are descended in direct male line from Hugh Capet, the founder of the Capetian Dynasty in the 10^th century. The Cadavals have always wanted to be recognised for their royal blood, and now, to royal watchers and French royalists at least, she is styled HRH Princess of Bourbon-Orléans. Both France and Portugal are republics today, nevertheless in certain circles these titles bring a high level of social caché.

the Duchess of Cadaval and Prince Charles-Philippe d’Orleans, in front of a wall hanging with the Cadaval coat-of-arms

(images from Wikimedia Commons and other open-source websites)

My sincere thanks go to Hélder Carvalhal for reading over this text to ensure I haven’t said anything completely daft about Portuguese history!

A link to the gorgeous website for the Palace of the Dukes of Cadaval in Évora:

https://www.palaciocadaval.com/en/

dukes-of-cadaval-family-tree-simplified Download

Dukes of Saint-Simon

The Duke of Saint-Simon is one of the most famous memoirists of all time, and the most meticulous and detailed account available to us for the court of Louis XIV of France. He’s not always the most reliable source, as he particularly enjoys boasting, about his powerful friends, about his own intellect, and so on. One of his most persistent boasts in his memoirs is that his lineage is impeccable, in ancientness and nobility, and that he therefore deserved to be treated with the utmost of deference (which he rarely got), and deserved a seat at the table of royal government. Yet how much do most people interested in the history of Versailles know about this lineage? Who were these exalted ancestors of the Duke of Saint-Simon? Most specialists of the history of the French court or of French literature of the 18^th century probably could not tell you.

the Duke of Saint-Simon, by van Loo, 1728

On another level entirely, the name Saint-Simon means something else to historians of a different stripe, those who are interested in the social and political movements of the early nineteenth century. ‘Saint-Simonians’ were those who followed the ideologies of the Count of Saint-Simon, a political and economic theorist who called for a form of socialist utopia in which science and industry would drive society. The two men, the Duke and the Count, were in fact distant cousins, though their ideologies were worlds apart.

Both the Duke of Saint-Simon and the Count of Saint-Simon were members of the family of Rouvroy, which did indeed have ancient roots. The small towns of Rouvroy and Saint-Simon are both in the far north of France, in Picardy—the village of Saint-Simon in particular is in the easternmost part of the Province of Picardy, the Vermandois, one of the most ancient feudal counties of France. The earliest known members of the family emerge from medieval documents as having close ties to the counts of Vermandois, as vassals, officers and agents, and this proximity is what probably led to the exaggeration by the Duke of Saint-Simon in his writings that they were not just servants of the Vermandois dynasty, but members, from a junior branch. What makes this claim even more noteworthy is that the House of Vermandois itself was a junior branch of the Imperial dynasty of Charlemagne. By claiming direct lineal kinship with the Carolingians, Saint-Simon was, not very subtly, asserting that his family had a better claim to the French throne than Louis XIV, whose ancestor, Hugh Capet, ‘usurped’ the throne from the legitimate Carolingian heirs in the late 10^th century. (see the chart at the bottom of this page)

coat-of-arms of the Marquis de Saint-Simon (uncle of the memoirist), which includes the blue and gold checkers of the counts of Vermandois, with French fleurs-de-lis)

Upon closer examination, the weak link in this dynastic story seems to be a certain Eudes de Vermandois ‘the foolish’, who, according to Père Anselme’s massive royal genealogy of the late 17^th century, only appears in some accounts, while his more well-documented sister, Adèle, is known to have transmitted the county by marriage back into the royal house of France. Anselme adds that those who mention Eudes explain that he had been disinherited in about 1077 because he was ‘of little understanding and without government’ (ie, he was probably mentally ill). Nevertheless, Eudes is said to have married an heiress called Avide, daughter of the Lord of Saint-Simon. He adopted her name and started a new dynasty. The last lord of Saint-Simon of this line died around 1330, leaving his lands to his sister, Marguerite, who in 1332 married Mathieu de Rouvroy, ‘le Borgne’ (‘one-eyed’). Mathieu had lost an eye in battle in service to the Capetian monarchs in battles along the northern frontier of Picardy and Flanders, and was appointed governor of Lille. His ancestors had filled important leadership roles like this, but the most prominent were on the far side of the Kingdom, Renaut and Alphonse both serving as governors of the Kingdom of Navarre in the late 13^th and early 14^th centuries. Mathieu’s son, Jean, would also lose an eye in battle, and similarly sported the nickname ‘the one-eyed’, before he was killed at Agincourt in 1415. Those looking for physical remains of the Rouvroy de Saint-Simon family won’t find very much in Picardy. Fragments of ancient castles can be found at Saint-Simon, Rouvroy, Clastres and other family estates, but most of the land today is wide rolling countryside. For imposing châteaux, we’ll need to travel south, to later centres of power, to the northwest and southwest of Paris (Sandricourt, La Ferté-Vidame), and even further to the lands northeast of Bordeaux (Ruffec and Giscours)—though even with these, they are either ruins or much later rebuilds.

But before the family expanded south, they expanded further north. Before he died, Jean de Rouvroy married a Flemish heiress, Jeanne d’Haverskerque, Lady of Rasse (or Râches, in Flanders), and their two sons founded the two main lines of the House of Rouvroy-Saint-Simon. The elder, lords of Saint-Simon and other properties in Vermandois and Picardy, rose through service to the late medieval dukes of Burgundy (who governed Picardy) and kings of France, were named viscount of Clastres, but never fully joined the ranks of the grandees of France until the eighteenth century, aided by the pre-eminence of the junior branch, the lords of Rasse. We will return to the senior branch below. The junior branch of Saint-Simon-Rasse held several lordships near Orchies and Douai, and were appointed to important military posts along the sensitive frontiers of Flanders, until one of these rose to the high rank of maréchal de camp in 1591. His son, Louis, was also a commander in the wars of religion in the 1580s-90s, and, like many nobles, bankrupted his family in supplying his own men with food and supplies. His three sons, however, managed to rebuild, and even surpass the family fortunes, with the middle son in particular, Claude, becoming a royal favourite. This was the father of the famous memoirist.

Claude de Rouvroy, Comte de Rasse, was born in 1607, and was appointed to be a page in the household of the Dauphin Louis. Once the Dauphin became king, as Louis XIII, Claude remained one of his close companions, a Gentleman of his Chamber, named Premier Equerry of the King in 1627, then only a year later, Master of the Wolf Hunt of France (Grand Louvetier), one of the Great Offices of the Crown. Like most Bourbons, Louis XIII passionately loved hunting, so it is significant that his closest friends were named to positions like Master of the Hunt, Master Falconer, etc; this ensured that they were always near him in his day-to-day activities. Claude was also one of the young men of the court best known as a dancer, an important and often politically charged evening pastime, and indeed, he remained a protector of musicians for the rest of his life. Gossips who always wondered why the King had thus far not produced any children with the Queen (and why he had no mistresses) naturally jumped to the conclusion that the King was having an affair with the attractive Claude de Rouvroy. And maybe he was.

In 1630, Claude was named governor of the fortress of Blaye, a very lucrative post as one of the keys to controlling the defense of Bordeaux and Aquitaine, and governor of the of royal châteaux of Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye. By 1635 he had accumulated enough money through his various court offices and government appointments to purchase a grand estate at La Ferté-Vidame, in the former province of Perche (southwest of Paris, bordering on Normandy) which came with an interesting title of ‘vidame’ de Chartres. The cathedral town of Chartres was about 50 km to the east, and the vidames were secular lords who aided the bishop in the administration of his lands. The lords of La Ferté were vidames of Chartres from the early 12^th century; their castle was older, built in the 10^th century, and, as rebuilt in the 14^th by the Vendôme family, would become the Rouvroy family’s primary country seat for the next century and half.

The royal favourite, Claude de Rouvroy, also convinced his distant cousins to cede the original family lands to him—the seigneuries of Saint-Simon, Clastres and others in Vermandois—and these were erected into a duchy-peerage by the King in 1635. But the new Duke of Saint-Simon was almost immediately disgraced—for what sounds like a pretty flimsy reason of defending his uncle who had failed to defend a key fortress in the north, though 1636 was a fairly stressful year for the King, as Spanish armies came within a hair’s breadth of invading the Isle de France and Paris itself. I wonder if it didn’t have more to do with the fact that Cardinal Richelieu, the real power in France, was finding it difficult to control the King’s favourites and worked for their removal (one of Louis XIII’s only real ‘mistresses’, Louise de La Fayette, was also sent away later that year), in part so he could place his own creature within the King’s intimate circles: note the swift rise of the young and debonnaire Marquis de Cinq-Mars, a client of the Cardinal’s, was only a year later.

The 1^st Duke of Saint-Simon retired to Blaye and did not return to favour at court until the King was on his deathbed in 1643 (and notably following the disgrace and horrific execution of Cinq-Mars in late 1642). The Duke’s son claims in his memoirs that the King, overjoyed with the reconciliation, promised to name his erstwhile favourite Master of the Horse (Grand Écuyer), one of the top court offices in France, and that he died before he could make it official. Saint-Simon firmly believed the office was then ‘stolen’ by Henry de Lorraine, Count of Harcourt, a favourite of the new Queen Regent, and it was then passed on to his son and grandsons in the reign of Louis XIV (they did in fact control this prestigious office until the Revolution). This ‘theft’ (for which there is no real evidence beyond the word of Saint-Simon) is the source of many, many pages of outrage and bile in the Memoirs of Saint-Simon towards the House of Lorraine. In fact he did lose the position of Master of the Wolf-Hunt and that of Premier Equerry of the King, in the new regime of the Regent Anne, but one does wonder why exactly the former consort of Louis XIII disliked Saint-Simon so much.

The 1^st Duke of Saint-Simon outlived his royal patron by fifty years (that’s right, fifty) but is almost never mentioned in the histories of the Regency of Queen Anne or the court of young Louis XIV. His elder brother, Charles, Marquis de Saint-Simon, was more prominent: a lieutenant general and captain of the château of Chantilly in the 1630s-50s, the primary seat of the Prince of Condé, first prince of the blood, and one of the most powerful men in the Kingdom. The Marquis also made the first marriage in the family from amongst the high aristocracy, Louise de Crussol, daughter of the Duke of Uzès, and Dame d’honneur of Queen Anne. Charles introduced his wife’s daughter from a previous marriage, Diane-Henriette de Budos de Portes, to his brother Claude, and they were married in 1644. But neither Charles nor Claude had a son to carry on the name or the title, so Claude remarried, at age 65, to try to beget an heir. The bride was the 32 year old Charlotte de l’Aubespine, Dame de Ruffec, daughter and co-heiress of the Marquis de Châteauneuf and Eleonore de Volvire, Marquise de Ruffec. Ruffec was a large estate in Angoulême (now the Department of Charente) north of Bordeaux. A son, Louis (known as the Vidame de Chartres as heir) was born in 1675, but as he complains in his memoirs, just as his father was introducing him to the world of the court and helping to start his military career, he died in 1693.

the young Saint-Simon, as Vidame de Chartres, 1692, by Rigaud

The 2^nd Duke of Saint-Simon, the memoirist, therefore had to make his own way. His aunts and uncles were dead, and his elder half-sister too, Gabrielle-Louise, who had married very well, to the Duke of Brissac, but died with no children. So Saint-Simon had no well-placed in-laws or cousins. He was not entirely without support, however: the King was in fact his godfather, which entailed a certain level of protection, and certainly had a hand in his marriage, in 1695, to a daughter of another duke, and one very much in favour, Guy-Aldonce de Durfort, Duke of Lorges, Marshal of France. The new Duchess of Saint-Simon, Marie-Gabrielle, was said by many to be the more successful courtier of the couple, and it surely humiliated the Duke when, in 1706, the King talked about appointing him ambassador to Rome—finally a prestigious posting!—but his advisors counseled him sharply to do nothing without first seeking the advice of his wife.

The Rome posting never materialised, and the King never did give the Duke of Saint-Simon the kind of appointment he felt he deserved in his administration. Nor was his military career any more successful, and after being passed over for a promotion in 1702, he quit the army, and made a big show about it, thus losing any chances he may have had of ever returning to the King’s favour. His wife, meanwhile, continued to thrive, and in 1710 was appointed Dame d’honneur (chief lady-in-waiting) to one of the royal princesses, the King’s favourite grand-daughter (via his illegitimate daughter), the Duchess of Berry. The Duke placed his hopes in this next generation, the grandchildren of the King, and became a member of the circle of the Duke of Burgundy, heir to the throne from 1711. The two young men shared a vision of a new France that would be built after the old king would (finally!) die, a kingdom based on traditional values of Christian piety, and especially respect for the old aristocratic families, like Saint-Simon’s of course, who had been cruelly abased and so ignored by the Sun King in his vanity and false notions of absolutism in government. At least this is how Saint-Simon viewed it, but these ideas are supported by the writings of the Duke of Burgundy’s former tutor, the Archbishop Fénélon, whose thoughts on this subject had earned him exile from the court. All they had to do was wait: Louis XIV was now 73 years old.

These plans for a bright future were dashed however, when the Duke of Burgundy died, in the Spring of 1712. The old king Louis XIV finally died himself in 1715, and Saint-Simon saw some hope in the new regime of his friend and close contemporary in age, though quite different in temperament, the Duke of Orléans, who now became regent for the child-king, Louis XV. Saint-Simon’s vision of a decentralised government where the grand old aristocrats were once again given premier place in running the state was tested by the Regent (in various councils, known as ‘polysynody’), but failed miserably since all the aristocrats did was bicker over issues of precedence and their own special interests. Unable really to find his place on the various governing councils of the Regent, the Duke looked elsewhere for a place to express his superior rank, and was gratified with the post of Extraordinary Ambassador to Spain in 1721, with the specific task of requesting the hand of the Infanta Mariana Victoria for Louis XV. His mission was successful in that a marriage contract was signed (though later rejected), but also personally, in obtaining the great favour from the King of Spain (the former Duke of Anjou, another of Louis XIV’s grandsons) of having his first son awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece, the highest honour in Spain, and his second son the title of Grandee of Spain, a rank which was recognised at the French court as equal to a dukedom, with all its privileges. That same year, he negotiated a prestigious marriage for his only daughter, Charlotte, with a prince, Charles-Louis-Antoine de Hénin-Liétart, Prince of Chimay, who was one of the leading grandees of the Spanish Netherlands, a lieutenant-general in both French and Spanish armies, had a Cardinal-Archbishop for a brother, and, even more thrilling for Saint-Simon, was considered to be a sovereign prince, albeit in the tiny principality of Revin and Fumay (in the Ardennes). This family even claimed descent from the Carolingians, via the ancient House of Alsace, so Saint-Simon must have been the happiest father-of-the-bride who ever lived.

But the ambassadorial trip to Spain (and undoubtedly his daughter’s significant dowry needed to attract the Prince of Chimay) ruined the Duke of Saint-Simon’s finances, and his future in politics was dashed when the Regent Orléans fell from power and then died, in 1723, and his replacement at the head of government was an old enemy of Saint-Simon, Cardinal Dubois. Saint-Simon retreated to his château at La Ferté-Vidame, and spent the next decades writing his famous memoirs. The grand château still retained its medieval appearance, with eight great towers. The Duke did maintain a residence in Paris, but he moved from place to place—the building at 17 rue du Cherche-Midi in the 6^th arrondissement (not far from the Luxembourg Gardens) bears a plaque indicating that this was where he wrote the memoirs—but he was not often seen at court.

the manuscript memoirs, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France

The 2^nd Duke of Saint-Simon knew he needed to try to maintain to the family’s position at court and in the government while he languished in the provinces. In 1727 he oversaw the marriage of his elder son, Jacques-Louis, to a daughter of the Duke of Gramont, and in 1728, he formally resigned his peerage to him, thus allowing him to sit as a peer in the Parlement of Paris and appear at court in the rank of a duke. To differentiate father and son, the latter was known as the ‘Duke of Ruffec’, taking his title from his grandmother’s marquisate near Bordeaux. When Jacques-Louis died in 1746, the old Duke once again resigned his peerage, now for the second son, Armand-Jean, who was now legally the 4^th Duke of Saint-Simon, but he too predeceased his father, in 1754. And when the by now fairly ancient memoirist-duke died himself in 1755, there only remained his daughter, the Princess of Chimay (who had no children), and one daughter by the eldest son, Marie-Christine, who had married the Comte de Valentinois, younger brother of the Prince of Monaco.

The Countess of Valentinois had a very good court career—she inherited her uncle’s title ‘Grandee of Spain’, which meant she was treated as a duchess (or even better, since her Grimaldi husband was ranked as a ‘foreign prince’), and was given the important court office of Dame de Compagnie of ‘Mesdames’ (the unmarried daughters of Louis XV), in 1762, then Dame d’atours of the Comtesse de Provence (the sister-in-law of the future Louis XVI), in 1770, and finally the same princess’s Dame d’honneur, in 1772. Like many court aristocrats of the later 18^th century, however, she ran into financial troubles. Although she had inherited the magnificent château and estates at La Ferté-Vidame, and the estates in the south of France at Ruffec, she sold these off: Ruffec to the Comte de Broglie in 1762; and La Ferté to the financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde in 1764 (who significantly remodelled it). Just as she was reaching her apogee, as first lady of the second lady of France, she died in 1774, childless, and with her, the junior branch of the House of Rouvroy.

But the memory of the memoirist persisted. The 2^nd Duke of Saint-Simon had understood the importance of solidifying the position of all of his dynasty, not just the immediate family, and reached out as a patron to his very distant cousins from the senior line of the family. As early as 1712, he looked after Claude-Charles de Rouvroy-Falvy, who lost his father that year, and helped him acquire a lucrative benefice, the Abbey of Jumièges in Normandy, in 1716. The young Abbot accompanied the Duke on his embassy to Spain in 1721-22, and was first promoted to higher clergy as Bishop of Noyon in 1731, then Metz, in 1733. Neither Noyon nor Metz were amongst the wealthiest sees or the most prominent politically in the French church, but to the status-conscious and history-loving Saint-Simon, they were perfect: Noyon, though one of the smallest dioceses in France, was also one of the oldest, and its bishop was one of the six ecclesiastical peers who crowned the monarch; Metz was formerly an Imperial bishopric and thus entitled to be addressed as ‘prince’ and ‘highness’, or so Claude-Charles thought. His assumption of princely airs and graces (and claims to regalian rights, ie, as if he was a sovereign, some judiciary, some financial), caused the local Parlement of Metz, in 1737, to issue a formal statement prohibiting him from using the title ‘Prince of Metz’. He was a true heir to Saint-Simon. And in fact, the Duke left him his papers in his will, including the famous memoir manuscript, though he never actually took possession due to legal complications, before he himself died five years later in 1760.

Claude-Charles de Rouvroy, Bishop of Metz

The Bishop of Metz in turn had promoted the career of another cousin, from an even more remote branch, Charles-François de Rouvroy-Sandricourt. He was first appointed to be the Bishop’s Grand Vicar (chief administrator), then given his own diocese as Bishop of Agde (on the Mediterranean coast) in 1759. He survived into the world of the French Revolution, but continued the family tradition of clinging to traditional values, refusing to swear the oath supporting the new ‘state church’ of 1790, and succumbing to the guillotine in 1794.

Another cousin, Claude-Anne, from the line of Rouvroy-Montbléru, raised the military profile of the family in the later 18^th century, and even managed to revive, in a round-about way, the title of Duke of Saint-Simon. Both Claude-Anne and his brother Claude (a popular family name) served in the French army aiding the Americans in their quest for independence (both of them notably at Yorktown). The younger was named one of the founding members of the Order of Cincinnatus, the hereditary order founded to commemorate the heroes of the American Revolution, and his descendants continued to bear this honour until they died out in the early 20^th century. Claude-Anne, a field marshal from 1780, served as a deputy of the Second Estate (the nobility) from Angoulême (where he held properties, notably the château of Giscours) to the Estates General of 1789. Soon after the outbreak of revolution, the Marquis de Saint-Simon (or Marquis de Montbléru) emigrated, to Spain, where he was named a lieutenant-general in the Spanish army and gathered together a group of fellow émigrés to form the Légion catholique et royale des Pyrénées (aka Légion de Saint-Simon) in 1793. In 1796, he was named by Carlos IV second in command of the Army of Navarre, Captain-General of the Province of Old Castile, and colonel of the Regiment de Bourbon, which he led in combat in Majorca, Catalonia, and Portugal. He was rewarded by his services first with the title of Grandee of Spain, first class, 1803, then Duke of Saint-Simon and Capitàn General of Spain (the equivalent of a Marshal of France), by the restored King Ferdinand VII, in 1814. He remained in Spain as colonel of the Walloon Guard, but stayed out of politics. His properties like Giscours has been confiscated and sold, so he remained in Spain, in Pamplona or Madrid, where he died in 1819.

The Duque de Saint-Simon left behind only a daughter, ‘Mademoiselle de Saint-Simon’ who is known today for a dramatic painting by Charles Lafont depicting the moment she begged the Emperor Napoléon to spare her father’s life after he had been captured in 1808.

Clemency of Emperor Napoleon before Mlle de Saint-Simon, Lafont, 1810

The Duke’s heir was his nephew, Henri-Jean-Victor, who had led a very different life in the military, serving from age 18 in the armies of the French republic, including campaigns in Spain against the very same royalist forces being led by his uncle. From 1809, he commanded one of the guards regiments of Joseph Bonaparte (Napoléon’s brother) as King of Spain. Like so many aristocrats, the Vicomte de Saint-Simon rallied to Louis XVIII at the Restoration, in 1814, and remained loyal during the Hundred Days, accompanying the King to Ghent, where he was named a maréchal de camp. When his uncle died, Henri-Jean-Victor succeeded as second Spanish Duke of Saint-Simon, and confirmed as a peer of France by Louis XVIII in 1819 (though with the rank of marquis, not duke). Crucially for our story here, he petitioned the King to formally release from state possession the already famous, but unpublished, memoirs of his distant cousin. The first complete version of the Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon appeared under his patronage in 1829-30 in 27 volumes.

The Marquis de Saint-Simon (he didn’t start to use the ducal title until the 1840s) entered royal service; he was an ambassador first in Lisbon, then in Copenhagen, before being named Governor-General of the French colonial possessions in India, based in Pondichéry, in 1834. Recalled in 1841, he played a role in the Senate in support of the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and was promoted to lieutenant general in the army, though he was ineffectual in preventing the revolution of 1848 that swept this regime from power. As a good political chameleon, he supported the proclamation of the Second Empire in 1851, and was named Senator of France. Late in life, he ceded his rights to the manuscript of Saint-Simon’s memoirs to the publisher Hachette, who produced what is now considered one of the premier editions of the memoirs, edited by Adolphe Chéruel, in 1856-58. As he was dying in 1865, the ‘6^th Duke of Saint-Simon’ tried to have one of his sons from his second marriage—born long before the marriage—recognised as a legal heir (and thus potentially 3^rd Duque de Saint-Simon, Grandee of Spain), but was rebuffed by all legal authorities in France and Spain.

Henri-Jean-Victor, Marquis (or Duc) de Saint-Simon

Had he been still alive, the last member of the family to have left a significant mark on history, Henri de Saint-Simon (he ceased to use a title during the Revolution), might have applauded this attempt to transfer noble status onto the son of double adultery. The Comte de Saint-Simon was actually a double-dose Saint-Simon, with his father heading up the junior branch of Sandricourt, and his mother from the more senior line of Falvy. The line of Sandricourt, an estate northwest of Paris, a marquisate from 1652, had been a distinct branch from the early 16^th century. They became in fact more prominent than their cousins at the court of the last Valois kings, but lost prominence under the Bourbons. But they were always there, and in the late 18^th century, the numerous brothers and sisters of Count Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon de Sandricourt all served in the army or the navy and at court—one of the most prominent was his sister, Marie-Louise, Dame de Montléart, who succeeded her Saint-Simon cousin as Dame d’honneur of the King’s sister-in-law, the Comtesse de Provence, in 1786. Claude-Henri (who went by Henri) served in America under General Rochambeau, and like his cousin, was awarded the Order of Cincinnatus. He was the King’s Lieutenant in the city and region of Metz, but quit military service to devote himself to industry and plans to build canals and factories.

portrait of Henri de Saint-Simon in middle age, painted after his death

He embraced the Revolution fully, made a lot of money working for the regime, then lost it all, and turned instead to writing, though not much came of it until 1817, when he published l’Industrie, an important forerunner in the history of socialist thought. More successful though brief, was a periodical he founded, l’Organisateur, to criticise the government and make plans for a better system, but it was shut down in 1820, after only a few issues. He published more books advocating the primary of industry for building a more equitable future, then began to write about philosophy and how a new religion could be forged out of the best parts of Christianity in the service of the state, society and its poorest members. His final work, Nouveau christianisme: Dialogues entre un conservateur et un novateur, was left unfinished when he died in 1825.

Henri de Saint-Simon left no descendants, but his brother, a naval officer, did, and there remains a Rouvroy de Saint-Simon family inscribed in the official lists of the modern French nobility. In fact, one of the caretakers of such lists was Fernand, Comte de Saint-Simon, one of the authorities on the history of the French nobility in the 1970s. There are no grand buildings left associated with the Saint-Simon family (the grand château that exists today at Sandricourt was built in the 19^th century by a different family—and had interesting inhabitants in the 20^th century, including the American millionaire Robert Walton Goelet, whose first cousin Mary had joined the British aristocracy as Duchess of Roxburghe, and Hermann Goering during the occupation of France in the Second World War).

The still monumental ruins of the château of La Ferté-Vidame, a symbol of the lost world of ancien régime France. Looted and sacked during the Revolution, it became the property of the Orléans family after the Restoration, then confiscated by Napoleon III and sold and re-sold many times, until the French state acquired it and used it as the home of a religious charity aimed at rehabilitating imprisoned women. In 1991 the state ceded it to the department of Eure-et-Loir who has restored the grounds and opened them to the public.

(images from Wikimedia Commons)

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Leinster Dukes and Princes: An Irish Driving Tour

In September 2014, I attended a wedding of a dear friend in the south-east corner of Ireland, near Kilkenny. The wedding was hosted in a gorgeous country house called Borris. I knew nothing about this house with an odd-sounding name, but in the evening before the wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, I chatted with the owner, Mr Morris Kavanagh, who told me without much fanfare that if the ancient Kingdom of Leinster still had a king, that this would be his residence. Leinster—one of the four ancient provinces of Ireland—has not had a recognised king since the twelfth century, following the English invasions led by Richard ‘Strongbow’ de Clare, but it does have a duke today, even if he hasn’t lived in Ireland since the 1940s. This driving tour blog will follow a circuit I made in the days preceding the wedding, and the castles and towns I visited related to ancient kings of Leinster (and the neighbouring kingdom of Munster), and to Ireland’s two ducal families: FitzGerald and Butler. Along the way, the itinerary also stops in on the Duke of Devonshire’s Irish seat, Lismore Castle, and we will learn that this part of Ireland has been influenced by both St. Kenny and St. Kevin!

As you can see from this map, the trip covered mostly south-central Ireland, the counties of Tipperary, Waterford and Kilkenny, with stops in counties Kildare and Carlow. It was a brilliantly warm September, so I was looking forward to a long drive in the countryside with windows rolled down and lots of wind and music. I picked up a car at the airport in Dublin and drove west into the countryside of County Kildare where I ventured into the parking lot of the ‘luxury hotel and golf resort’ Carton House, formerly the seat of the FitzGeralds, dukes of Leinster since the 18^th century. I did peer into the lobby, but alas am not a millionaire, so couldn’t see much beyond. The conversion of this house and its estate into a golfer’s paradise has been criticised as a great loss to the heritage of Ireland, and I certainly agree, though I can see the point of the Irish government and people not wishing to commemorate or celebrate a palatial home that could be seen to represent over 900 years of oppression by the English. Still, it seems like something beautiful and of genuine historical importance has been lost. I see on the hotel’s website that there is a plan for 2020 to renovate much of the 18^th-century interiors, so I hope they allow plebs like me in to see it.

When thinking about built heritage, it’s worth asking: do families like the FitzGeralds really represent the English colonial oppression of the Irish? As always, history is rarely black and white, and, as is often pointed out, the FitzGeralds and other Anglo-Irish families like them resisted the Tudor attempts at tighter control in the 16^th century, and indeed, one of the leading members of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was Lord Edward FitzGerald, a martyr for the cause of Irish independence. Lord Edward represented the ideals of the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the French Revolution; even his close connections to the British royal family itself (his mother was a great-grand-daughter of King Charles II) were not enough to save him from a brutal death.

The Fitzgeralds were first awarded lands in this area in the 1170s as a reward for their part in the capture of Dublin by Anglo-Norman armies of ‘Strongbow’. The family remained in place as one of the chief families of the English-occupied area of eastern Ireland (known as ‘the Pale’), first as barons of Offaly, then as earls of Kildare, from 1315. In the 15^th century they reigned as virtual sovereigns in this part of Ireland (mostly while the English were preoccupied with the Wars of the Roses), but soon lost some of this prominence by resisting the Tudor reforms, both of politics and religion, imposed by Henry VIII—leading to full out rebellion in 1537, and the execution of the 10^th earl and several of his family members.

Slowly rebuilding their local power and influence over the next century, Carton House was designed in the 1740s as a palatial country residence for the 20^th Earl of Kildare, by the architect Richard Cassels, who also built the Earl’s Dublin residence, Kildare House, which was later known as Leinster House, and today is the seat of the Oireachtas, the parliament of Ireland. Kildare was raised to a marquisate in 1761, then again to a dukedom (of Leinster) in 1766. The Duke and Duchess of Leinster were sometimes referred to as the ‘king and queen of Ireland’, and they lived in almost royal splendour. The Duchess, Lady Emily Gordon-Lennox, the grand-daughter of Charles II (and his mistress, Louise de Keroualle) referred to above, was responsible for much of the development of Carton and its gardens, and in particular, the famous Shell Cottage, a small retreat decorated with shells sent to her from all over the world.

Carton House was enlarged and remodeled in the 19^th century by the 3^rd Duke of Leinster. But, becoming heavily indebted by the early 20^th century, and obviously having no more role in Irish politics after 1922, the FitzGeralds gradually sold off the lands and the house. In the 1970s Carton House was owned by a wealthy English peer (of Irish descent), Baron Brocket, and used for several films such as Barry Lyndon (1975), then sold to the owners who developed it into the golf course and hotel.

Having not really seen much beyond a parking lot and a lobby, I was eager to really get out into the countryside. I drove west along the new M4 motorway till I reached virtually the centre of the island, and turned south. The central plain of Ireland is gorgeous, rolling hills, of course very green. As with previous driving trips, I wanted to sample recordings of locally made traditional music, so I stopped in a small shop in a town and purchase two CDs: one a typically cheesy mix of tourist-friendly Irish folk music, and the other a bit more obscure, with the festive title “Jig it in Style”, by the fiddler Seán Keane, a member of The Chieftains. This recording is instrumental only, which makes for good driving music.

‘Brereton’s Reel’ from Jig it in Style

Continuing south, the flatness of this central region eventually produced a dramatic effect for the large castle outcrop that appeared on the horizon: the Rock of Cashel. I have to admit, my knowledge of Irish history was at the time almost nil, and I had never heard of Cashel, so I was so energised to discover this place, and can recommend it as one of the best sites I’ve visited in Ireland, not just for the visuals of a fairly romantic ruin, but as an important historical centre.

The Rock of Cashel is a fascinating combination of castle and cathedral, reflecting how early Celtic monarchies often blended the secular and the sacred more closely than other European monarchical systems. The story goes that this was the place where St. Patrick convinced the King of Munster to accept Christianity in the 5^th century. Munster is the kingdom to the west of Leinster, historically ruled by either O’Brians or MacCarthys (and then divided between them, into north and south), and was one of the last provinces to submit to English rule, and even after that remaining largely independent of the government in Dublin until the late 16^th century. There’s a lot of territory to cover, from Cork to Kerry, so that is certainly on the agenda of future driving tours. The Rock of Cashel remained the seat of Munster’s kings until 1101 when it was given to the Church (as the seat of an archbishop from 1118). New buildings were built in the 12^th-13^th centuries, notably by King Cormac MacCarthaigh. Taken over by the Protestant Church of Ireland in the Reformation, the old buildings were abandoned in the 18^th century and a new (pretty dull) cathedral was built in the town of Cashel. Catholics were once again allowed to have an archdiocese of their own in the 19^th century, and a new Italianate fantasy cathedral was built in the nearby town of Thurles in the 1860s. I spent the whole afternoon walking through the Rock of Cashel and its surrounding hillside covered in sheep, then stayed the night in town.

The next day, I headed west and briefly looked at the town of Tipperary (of course singing the famous World War I era song in my head the whole time). It is not a particularly remarkable town, and not the largest town nor even the administrative seat of the county that bears its name. I was, however, fascinated to see the huge presence in shop fronts and colourful billboards and banners all over town of a massive sports rivalry between Tipperary and Kilkenny—and not for football or rugby: hurling. Tipperary blue versus Kilkenny black and gold.

From Tipperary I drove a short distance to Cahir, another magnificent medieval castle built by a conquering Anglo-Norman family, the Butlers. Sometimes spelled Caher, or Cathair (‘stone ringfort’) in Irish, the castle sits magnificently on an island in the River Suir.

Originally the site of an abbey, in the 12^th century a castle was built by one of the O’Brian kings of Munster. Taken by the English, it was granted by Edward III to James Butler, 2^nd earl of Ormond, in 1375. This title (Ormond, or Urumhain) reflects the division of the ancient kingdom of Munster into three parts: northern (Thomond), southern (Desmond) and eastern (Ormond) and gave the earls great autonomous authority in this corner of Ireland. The Butlers had originally been hereditary Chief Butlers of Ireland since 1192—yes, the household officer in charge of supplying drinks, with the lucrative fiscal privilege of taking a cut on all barrels of wine imported into Ireland—and evolved into one of the other major Anglo-Irish families, like the FitzGeralds, for the next eight centuries, frequently holding high office like county sheriff or even several times Lord Lieutenant, the chief representative of the Crown in Ireland. Cahir Castle was given to a cadet branch of the Butler family in the 15^th century, and they were created Baron Cahir in 1542 by Henry VIII. But this branch of the family did not remain loyal (unlike their kinsmen the earls of Ormond), and defended Irish Catholicism in the wars against Elizabeth I, until their nearly impregnable fortress was finally taken, by the Queen’s champion, the Earl of Essex, in 1599.

The barons Cahir were eventually pardoned and restored, but they had lost most of their power, and the castle was mostly in ruins by the 18^th century. The last Baron died in1961 and the castle passed into state ownership, and is now a major tourist attraction in this region. Like Carton House, Cahir Castle has also been used as a film set, notably for Excalibur (1981) and some scenes of the recent television series The Tudors. I stayed my second night in this really lovely town—highly recommended.

Early the next morning, I headed further south, along a small windy road across the Knockmealdown Mountains, into County Waterford, and the valley of the Blackwater River. Here I visited Lismore Castle, the Irish seat of the dukes of Devonshire. It has a tremendous vantage point over the Blackwater, and its extensive gardens are impressive to walk around, but sadly the house is not open for visitors.

How did one of the leading Derbyshire families, the Cavendishes, come to own one of the largest castles in Ireland? It passed to them by marriage in 1753, that of the daughter of the 3^rd Earl of Burlington (Lady Charlotte Boyle) and the 4^th duke of Devonshire, and is today the seat of the heir to the dukedom, who uses the title Earl of Burlington. He has opened part of the castle as an arts centre, and commissioned contemporary artists to populate the gardens, notably Antony Gormley, whose standing human figures are instantly recognisable.

Lios Mór (‘great fort’) was originally built by Prince John (the future King John) in 1185 to defend a river crossing in the northern approaches to County Waterford, one of the English strongholds on the south coast. Like Cashel and Cahir, this too had religious origins, and Lismore Abbey had been an important centre of learning since the 7^th century. It remained the seat of the local bishop until it was taken over the earls of Desmond (another branch of the FitzGeralds) in the early 16^th century. These earls also rebelled against the Tudor crown in the 1590s, but unlike the Butlers in Cahir, their lands were not restored, but instead were sold, first to Sir Walter Raleigh, then in 1602 to an English adventurer and colonial administrator, Richard Boyle. He was later created Baron Boyle, 1616, Earl of Cork, 1620, and finally Lord Treasurer of Ireland, 1631. Having amassed a large fortune, he transformed his new seat at Lismore into a palatial residence. It was the birthplace of his many children, including the famous chemist, Robert Boyle, but the Castle was sidelined by later descendants who preferred to develop instead properties closer to the court in London, notably Burlington House, on Piccadilly, and Chiswick House on the River Thames. All of these properties were therefore part of the great windfall of the heiress Lady Charlotte Boyle, 4^th Duchess of Devonshire. The 6^th Duke of Devonshire transformed the castle into its current neo-gothic appearance in the 1810s-20s (with fantastic neo-gothic interiors as well), and continued remodelling it as late as the 1850s, commissioning the designer of his gardens at Chatsworth, and the Crystal Palace in London, Joseph Paxton, to perform his magic at Lismore. In the 20^th century, the castle was given to a younger son, Lord Charles Cavendish, who lived here with his wife Adele Astaire (the dancer, sister of Fred)—she lived until 1981, and is commemorated in some of the artworks in the public art gallery.

It was raining as I set off eastwards, then crossed the hills back into the valley of the River Suir. Now back in Butler territory, I travelled down the river valley to the town of Carrick, located at the juncture of the counties Tipperary, Waterford and Kilkenny. Carrick (Carraig) means simply ‘rock’, and the town was formerly an island in the river. The main line of the Butler family was based here from the early 14^th century, and their first major Irish title was Earl of Carrick (1315), but this was soon replaced with the Earldom of Ormond (1328), for James Butler (or ‘Le Botiler’ as it was still sometimes spelled), 7^th Chief Butler of Ireland. The earldom was created with ‘palatine privileges’ over County Tipperary, which means authority ‘from the palace’, as if the sovereign were present in person (receiving oaths, organising military activity, administering justice, etc); and these unprecedented privileges were enjoyed by the Butlers until they were finally reclaimed by the Crown in 1715. The castle built here, therefore, had to be symbolic of English royal authority, and in the 15^th century, the earls improved the original fortress by adding four large round towers. These are now mostly a ruin, but still extant is the adjacent Tudor manor house, the first residence built in this style in Ireland. It was erected by the 10^th Earl of Ormond who had spent time at the court of Elizabeth I, his cousin via the Boleyns, and desired to bring back some of this Tudor architectural style to Ireland.

In the 17^th century, James Butler, the 12^th Earl of Ormond, founded a woollen industry in Carrick and the town flourished—well situated between the sheep-covered interior and the major port of Waterford just a few miles downstream. He was probably the family’s most prominent member: commander of Royalist forces in Ireland during the Civil War, and rewarded at first with a marquisate (1642), and then a dukedom in 1661 as he was sent back to Ireland to govern as Lord-Lieutenant for much of the Restoration period. Following the Duke’s death in 1688, his descendants mostly abandoned Ormond Castle in Carrick, in favour of Kilkenny Castle. It was given to the state in the 1940s, and restored in the 1990s.

That afternoon I drove cross-country into County Kilkenny, and its county town of the same name, where I was to stay for the next few nights. This town, similarly festooned for the upcoming hurling match versus Tipperary—now everything was in black and gold stripes, not blue—is a lot more lively than its sporting rival.

Situated on both banks of the River Nore, it had been a prosperous walled city of merchants as early as the 13^th century. This prosperity of course masks a darker history, as with many towns here, in that most of these merchants were English or Anglo-Irish, and the Irish-speaking community were kept firmly segregated (there is still an area of the town called ‘Irishtown’). The town then, and now, was dominated by two great buildings, sacred and secular, the cathedral and the castle. The first of these gave the town its name, as the Church (cill) of St. Canice (Cainnech, also known as St. Kenneth or even St. Kenny), a warrior-monk who supposedly defeated the last archdruid of Ireland on this hilltop in 597 and finally completed the conversion of Ireland. The abbey founded on the spot took the Saint’s name, and was later raised into an archbishopric in 1111. One of the original 9^th-century round towers survives, but most of the building is from the 13^th century. Some of it features a distinctive local black marble, the same stone used in the new tomb built for Richard III in Leicester Cathedral for his reburial in 2015.

As with Cashel, princely and ecclesiastical power often mingled, and this cathedral site served as the seat of the kings of Ossory (Osraige)—a narrow wedge between the larger kingdoms of Leinster and Munster—until they were pushed out of the area by the arrival of the English. Strongbow himself built a new castle on a rise on the other side of the river in 1195, probably of wood, and a massive stone fortress with four round towers was later constructed in the 1260s. Three of these massive towers still stand, while the fourth was destroyed in the violence of the 1640s. The Butlers took over the castle in 1391, and Kilkenny Castle became their primary seat by the 17^th century.

By this point there had been significant transformations in the town—the Cathedral was now Protestant, as were the Butlers (well, some of them). The Marquess of Ormond (the later Duke) nevertheless permitted the Confederation of Kilkenny to be based in his castle in the 1640s, while he resided in Dublin as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. This Confederation was formed by a group of Catholic nobles and gentry who, while professing their loyalty to the Crown, pressed for greater Irish autonomy. Based in Kilkenny, they set up a government which controlled about 2/3 of Ireland until it was crushed by Parliamentary forces in 1649. Ormond himself followed the new king (Charles II) into exile in France, and when he returned during the Restoration, the now Duke of Ormonde (usually spelling it now with a terminal e, as being more French), he remodeled much of Kilkenny Castle according to French tastes.

The Butlers of Ormonde lost much of their influence after the 2^nd Duke joined the Jacobite cause in the early 18^th century, and their titles were attainted. As a dynasty, the Butlers were surpassed by the Fitzgeralds as the first family of Ireland, though their lands and titles (earldom and marquisate, but not dukedom) were restored by the 19^th century. Kilkenny Castle was remodelled once again in the now fashionable neo-gothic style, which is how it appears today. The family remained in residence during the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, then finally in 1935 sold the contents in a massive public sale and relocated to London—the 6^th Marquess of Ormonde sold the castle to the town in 1967, for a mostly symbolic £50. Kilkenny Castle today forms a central part of the city parks and the tourism industry of the town. Since 1997, the marquisate is extinct, or at least unclaimed, though there are several other branches of the Butler family spread across Ireland.

Having completed my wanderings, I now engaged with wedding celebrations for the next few days. The drive cross country (on tiny! roads) between County Kilkenny and County Carlow was a pleasant way to get into the spirit of things, and the setting of Borris House could not have been lovelier for a wedding. As already described at the start of this post, the owners of this enormous private house claimed that Borris would be the seat of the kings of Leinster, had the kingdom survived into the modern age. I was sceptical, as, in my line of work, you very often find aristocrats who make wild claims about their family’s past based on legend or misremembered history. So I did some checking up on Mr Kavanagh and found that there was really much truth to his claim, and it turns out, the story is even more intriguing.

The name Kavanagh is an Anglicisation of Caomhánach, which means ‘of Kevin’, and refers to the founder of this branch of the royal house of Leinster, Domhnall ‘Caomhánach’ MacMurchada, who was raised at the Abbey of St. Caomhan (or ‘St. Kevin’, don’t laugh), in County Wexford. Wexford and Carlow (the county in which Borris House is situated) were the heartlands of the old kings of Leinster who adopted the surname MacMurchada (MacMurrough) in the 11^th century. Their capital was at Ferns (in County Wexford, the area formerly known by its Gaelic name, Cheinnselaig or Kinsella) and several are buried there at the Abbey of St. Mary. Like most Gaelic ruling dynasties, they traced their lineage back for centuries through oral tradition, all the way back to ‘Milesians’, warriors who supposedly left Scythia and settled in Iberia, then eventually made their way to Hibernia, or Ireland. In recorded history—though certainly still open to mythologizing and misrepresentation—we have the father of our Domhnall, King Diarmaid, who was deposed by the High King of Ireland in 1167, fled to Wales, England and France seeking aid; and convinced the Earl of Pembroke, Richard ‘Strongbow’ de Clare, and his allies, to help him retake his lands (and probably aimed at becoming the High King himself), in exchange for his daughter’s hand and promise of succession—a promise which then involved Henry II, King of England, who did not wish his vassal, Pembroke, to attain such independent power. For inviting foreigners to invade Ireland, Diarmait is sometimes called Diarmait na nGall, or ‘Dermot of the Foreigners’. It should be no surprise that the Norman warlords did not help him become High King, and claimed his kingdom for themselves in the name of his daughter Aoife (or Eve, perhaps fitting for someone who—though not really her idea—caused the downfall of independent Ireland?), thus disinheriting Prince Domhnall ‘of Kevin’.

Did you follow that? Basically, infighting led to a foreign invasion. A lesson to be learned. The descendants of Domnhall Caomhánach at some point made Borris House their headquarters, further inland and away from the increasingly English southeast coastline. Some of these continued to use the title ‘King of Leinster’ though it didn’t mean much—with a notable exception in Art Og MacMurchada Caomhanach (MacMurrough Kavanagh), who genuinely revived the kingship in the 1370s, exerting his authority over Irish and Anglo-Norman lords alike; he did formally submit to Richard II in 1394, but immediately renounced his oath. The very last was Domhnall ‘Spáinneach’, who got his nickname (the Spaniard) from his travels abroad as a youth, and tried to assert his authority as King of Leinster in the 1590s, but was crushed alongside the other Irish chieftains by the forces of Elizabeth I. Unlike many of those who fled abroad, never to return, Domhnall submitted to Elizabeth in 1603, and lived in peace until 1632. His successors were simply ‘Mr Kavanagh of Borris’, or, unofficially, ‘The MacMurrough’ indicating their position as head of an Irish clan. The most famous of these was Arthur, head of the family from 1853, who, despite having essentially no arms and legs, just stumps, since birth, was nevertheless able to travel widely (Egypt, Persia, India) and even to ride a horse. He served for many years as an MP for County Carlow, and rose in the ranks to be named High Sheriff of County Kilkenny, Lord Lieutenant of County Carlow, and finally a member of the Privy Council for Ireland in 1886. Here’s an interesting article about him:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20592861

Arthur’s grandson, Sir Dermot MacMurrough-Kavanagh, was Crown Equerry of the Royal Household, 1941-55, one of the major household officers in Buckingham Palace. He was the last male of this family, and with his death in 1958, the title of ‘The MacMurrough’, by some accounts, became extinct. Borris House passed to his niece, Joanne, who, to bring a nicely circular end to this story, married the Duke of Leinster (though I have no idea if anyone made the connection that the potential Gaelic-Irish queen of Leinster was marrying the Anglo-Irish duke of Leinster). Their marriage ended in divorce, however, and by the time she inherited, she was married to Lt-Col. Archibald Macalpine-Downie. Their son and grandson changed their name legally to Kavanagh, and manage the property today.

Although it is a private home, Borris House, on a flatland on the banks of the river Barrow, is well-situated to make use of its lovely views of the Blackstairs Mountains as a venue for weddings and other events. There isn’t much there that signified to me as I wandered the grounds that this was an ancient place—the house was mostly built as a Tudor Revival manor house in the 1730s by Morgan Kavanagh, then remodeled with some neo-gothic elements in the 1810s. An indication that it certainly was once the home of great lords, however, was the presence of a small private chapel on the grounds, which makes the site even more useful for weddings. The one I attended was indeed magical, though has a somewhat bittersweet memory for me, as the groom tragically died only a few months later. So in his honour, I will leave you with a bittersweet Irish parting song:

May Kenny and Kevin be with you!

(images my own or courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

macmurrough-kavanagh-family-simplified Download

Dukes of Villeroy

The family history of the dukes of Villeroy is one of the best examples of a the successful rise of a non-noble family into the very highest ranks of the French aristocracy, even to the point of being considered members of the intimate royal circle at Versailles. Indeed, one of these, the 2^nd Duke, might be considered one of the few men Louis XIV would have called ‘friend’, a person who certainly would have made an intriguing contribution to the recent television show Versailles. The same might be said for his sister, Catherine, one of the great intriguers of the French court, whose brazen attempt to bring down the power of Madame de Maintenon led instead to her downfall and banishment from court.

Catherine de Neufville, Countess of Armagnac

The story of the Neufville de Villeroy family is also a neatly self-contained saga of the Ancien Régime, from their rising up in the era of ‘new men’ promoted in the exuberance of a reforming monarchy in the early 16^th century, to obtaining the highest positions of duke and peer, marshal of France and provincial governor in the 17^th century, then coming to a complete and swift end via the guillotine during the French Revolution. It is also one of the best examples of a family whose origins were most often obscured by the large-scale genealogical volumes produced in the eighteenth century. Rising from the status of a propertied government minister into the court nobility was acceptable for the image the monarchy and its supporters wanted to portray; rising from fish merchants was not.

Because of this desire to obscure a family’s origins in ‘trade’, there are therefore a lot of conflicting accounts about the origins of the Neufville family. Their surname means simply ‘new town’, but there’s no real indication what this refers to. It seems that they were successful merchants dealing in fish from one of the great port cities in Normandy, Rouen, who in the 15^th century transferred their business to the great central market in Paris known as Les Halles. Near this great commercial centre, they built one of the many residences that later bore the name Villeroy, named for a lordship they acquired by marriage in the 16^th century (see below). This Hôtel de Villeroy (rue des Bourdonnais) was conveniently located between Les Halles and the government centres a few streets to the west clustered around the Louvre. Richard Neufville combined his thriving mercantile business with administrative positions, first looking after the Paris residence of the Duke of Burgundy as his maître d’hôtel, then as a tax official for the district of Paris.

The Neufville coat of arms, as borne by an archbishop of Lyon

His son, Nicolas, seems to have added a ‘de’ around 1500 when he acquired some small seigneuries in the environs of Paris, and shortly thereafter the prestigious post of royal secretary. Most importantly, he had married well, to Geneviève le Gendre, whose father and brother (also from Rouen) both held offices of treasurer of France (high ranking finance officials), and Nicolas soon joined them in this position. He served Louis XII and Francis I as a finance secretary and a privy councillor, as did his son, Nicolas II. The latter in particular became an intimate financial officer for Francis I, financial secretary for his private affairs, and treasurer of his order of knighthood. He also continued the family’s rise in prominence within the city of Paris as administrator of the Hôtel-Dieu, the most prominent charity hospital. And he too married well, first to a great-niece of the Chancellor of France (Briçonnet), and then two more times within Parisian parlementaire circles. In the late 1530s, he secured for his son, Nicolas III, his mother’s claims to the Le Gendre properties, Villeroy and Alincourt, on opposite sides of Paris. Alincourt, in the small province known as the Vexin, was situated perfectly on the route between Paris and Rouen to allow convenient contacts with their former business network in Normandy. It possessed a medieval castle which was modified in the 16^th century and still exists today, in private hands.

the Chateau d’Alincourt in the 20th century

The lordship of Villeroy was to the south-east of Paris, in the region of great forests so cherished by royalty and the nobility for its hunting (the grandest of all these, Fontainebleau, is in the same general direction). Built on the banks of the River Essonne, near its confluence with the Seine, Villeroy was part of the lordship of Mennecy which had long been a fief of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, but was sold off to financiers in the 15^th century and eventually acquired by one these, Le Gendre. In the 1560s, Nicolas III de Neufville rebuilt the château and enlarged its gardens. The house was rebuilt in a neo-classical style in the 18^th century, and the family supported the opening of a nearby porcelain manufactury. This was closed by the 1780s, and in the 1790s, after the extinction of the family, the château was pulled down. Only the park remains today.

Nicolas III Le Gendre de Neufville, Seigneur de Villeroy and Alincourt, had a career much like his father, a royal finance secretary and a Parisian city official, who also married within the circle of Parisian high finance. He rose higher in the ranks, however, serving as a Secretary of State for King Henry II and his Lieutenant in the Ile de France, and ending his career in the top position in the hierarchy of the city of Paris, the Provost of the Merchants (essentially the mayor), 1566 to 1570.

Nicolas IV was therefore launched very well into his career, and would become one of the leading government figures of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. In addition to serving as one of the chief ministers of Charles IX, Henry III, Henry IV and Marie de Medici—in a long career spanning from the 1560s to his death in 1617—he and his wife, Madeleine de l’Aubespine, also hosted a leading Parisian salon at their home the Hôtel de Villeroy. She was a leading light in the Parisian intellectual scene, a hostess and patron of major poets like Ronsard, and known herself as a poet and a translator.

Nicolas III, Madeleine de l’Aubespine and Nicolas IV in the family chapel at Magny, near Alincourt

Père Anselme’s genealogical history of the family praises Nicolas IV as ‘a strong supporter of men of letters, with the reputation as one of the wisest and skilful men at court’. He succeeded his father-in-law as a Secretary of State in 1567, and soon became the close personal secretary of King Charles IX, then one of the most influential ministers, particularly in foreign affairs, of King Henry III. Initially a supporter of the Catholic League, Villeroy transferred his allegiance to Henry IV after his conversion to Catholicism in 1594, and was confirmed by the new king as a Minister of State. Towards the end of his career, his lordship of Villeroy was raised to the status of marquisate. He had been influential in the fall of the chief minister, Sully, in 1611, but was himself pushed aside in 1614.

Nicolas IV, Seigneur de Villeroy, as a young Secretary of State

By this point, however, the Neufvilles’ place was secure as a court family, and Nicolas V’s only son, Charles, Marquis de Villeroy, was already acting as a grandee nobleman, with the kinds of provincial and court offices that went along with such status. Charles had made a name for himself in the early years of the 17^th century as ambassador to Rome (two of his sons were born there and were honoured with significant godfathers, who gave them their names: Ferdinand for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Camille for Cardinal Borghese, the future Pope Paul V). On his return to France, Charles was named Governor of Lyon, and the neighbouring provinces of Lyonnais, Forez and Beaujolais, 1612, a powerful position in France’s second city that his family would turn into a nearly hereditary possession, retaining the governorship of these provinces until the Revolution. Charles also retained his father’s position on the Council of State, and obtained a court office, Grand Marshal of the Lodgings of the Royal Household, the officer in charge of distributing rooms when the court moved from one residence to another, or traveled in the countryside or on campaign. He was therefore key in determining access to the king, a crucial element of court life and royal patronage in this period. The Marquis de Villeroy displayed the perfect blending of administrative and court worlds that consumed the energies of so many families on the rise. This is seen in his marriages as well, and those of his children: he first married the daughter of the previous governor of Lyon, Marguerite de Mandelot, then the daughter of one of the most influential Parisian parlementaire families, Jacqueline de Harlay. The daughters of his first marriage both married within this same mixed old/new noble/ministerial world: a Brulart and a Souvré, and obtained posts as ladies-in-waiting to the Queen. From the second marriage, Villeroy’s elder sons were launched on military careers, while the younger sons entered the Church and the Order of Malta (an exclusively noble order—they had now definitely arrived)—the youngest was even named ‘Lyon-François’ to demonstrate the family’s new prominent position in the southeast of France.

Of the clergymen, Camille became the most prominent, first being sent to the southeast as an abbot and lieutenant-general of the Lyonnais, then elevated to the position of Archbishop of Lyon in 1654. His long reign in Lyon was one of the most intriguing fusions of secular and spiritual power in early modern France, as both archbishop and lieutenant-general (virtual governor, since his brother was usually elsewhere). He rebuilt the archiepiscopal palace and also a country château at Ombreval (renamed Neufville for the family), on the river Saône north of the city of Lyon. Here he acted like a virtual sovereign and lived in great splendour.

part of the 17th-century chateau of Ombreval (most of it today is a later construction)

He was a reformer in his archdiocese, built numerous schools and churches, rebuilt the Hôtel de Ville in Lyon, and gathered a huge collection of books (estimated at over 5,000) which he donated to the Jesuits of Lyon upon his death in 1698. His devotion to the city of Lyon was clear: although always supportive of Louis XIV in his struggles against religious dissent, he opposed the King’s actions against Protestants, since many of these were essential to Lyon’s most important industry, silk weaving. Ombreval was erected into a marquisate for him, and this and the château were passed on to Archbishop Camille’s nephew, the Marshal de Villeroy, and then into the family of Boufflers by marriage in the 1730s.

This Marshal de Villeroy was the second of two pre-eminent Marshals of France in the reign of Louis XIV, the first and second dukes of Villeroy. Most noteworthy about these men, father and son, was their position of extreme intimacy with the monarch himself, the first as governor of the young Sun King, and the second as intimate friend, then as governor of the royal successor, Louis XV.

The first of these, Nicolas V, first known as the Marquis d’Alincourt as his father’s heir, was given the survivance of the governorship of Lyon and the Lyonnais in 1615, when he was only 17. A survivance is an important indication of a family’s importance within the monarchical structure of ancien régime France, as it was a basically a guarantee that the office would pass from father to son, and that if it wasn’t, the family would receive significant financial compensation. Young Nicolas also secured a bright future through marriage in 1617 to Madeleine de Créquy, daughter of a leading general, the future Marshal-Duke de Lesdiguières, under whom he served in numerous campaigns in northern Italy in the 1620s-30s. Rising in the ranks of the French army himself, Alincourt played important role in the wars of Louis XIII in the Piedmont, Franche-Comté and Catalonia—often using nearby Lyon as his base of operations—then made a real name for himself in the siege of Turin, 1640, and the successful capture of the nearly impregnable fortress of La Mothe in Lorraine, 1645. The next Spring he was chosen to act as the governor of the new king, Louis XIV, who was now 7, the year princes traditionally were moved from the care of women into that of men. He was also raised to the rank of Marshal of France, the highest military grade in the Kingdom.

The Marshal was more than merely a loyal commander, but had been a childhood companion (enfant d’honneur) of Louis XIII, and the King’s widow now ensured that the two families would remain close. The proximity between the Hôtel de Villeroy and the Palais Royal where the young king was being raised meant that a lot of time was spent in both places, and the two Bourbon princes played and were schooled together with the Neufville sons and daughters. To further honour this long-term connection, the marquisate of Villeroy was elevated into a duchy in 1651, though given the fragile politics of the era, the new duke had to wait until 1663, once the King was fully in his majority, for the title and peerage to be confirmed by the Parlement of Paris, who were not so keen to promote this relatively arriviste family, formerly very much one of their own, to the premier ranks of the nobility. The King had to force them, and force them he did.

Now that Louis XIV was an adult, the first Duke of Villeroy’s position as princely governor was transformed into a government post, as Chief of the Royal Council of Finances, in 1661, though this was mostly symbolic—the actual financial control was held firmly by Louis XIV’s chief minister, Colbert. Here was a source of conflict, however, in that Villeroy continued his families links with the other main ministerial clan, the Le Telliers, rivals of the Colberts: his half-sister’s grand-daughter Anne de Souvré married the leading Le Tellier, the war minister Louvois, and his own grandson, Nicolas VI, would later marry the child of this union, Marguerite Le Tellier. Such was the way that Louis XIV encouraged his chief courtiers and ministers to remain in constant competition with each other rather than united and against the Crown. It is the chief strength of his reign.

The chief weakness, however, was in Louis XIV’s complete loyalty to his favourites, regardless of the cost to the state or to his reputation as king. One of these favourites was his governor’s son, his childhood friend, François de Neufville, 2^nd Duke of Villeroy. We can see it also in the King’s relationship with the Duke’s sister, Catherine, who was married in 1660 to the King’s other great childhood friend, Louis de Lorraine, Comte d’Armagnac. Such was the King’s affection for Armagnac that despite Catherine’s repeated scandalous transgressions at court in the later 1660s which cost her the post of Dame du Palais of the Queen and even her expulsion from court (after she informed the Queen about the King’s affair with Madame de Montespan), she never lost the King’s favour completely, and their sons were highly favoured by him throughout the reign.

This was hardly comparative with the on-going favour given to her brother, the 2^nd Duke, who was repeatedly rewarded with military commands even following great disasters. He had been ceded his father’s regiment from Lyon, his position as governor there, and even the ducal title and peerage from 1675. He was rapidly promoted brigadier general in 1672, field marshal in 1674, lieutenant-general in 1777, and finally Marshal of France like his father in 1693.

A year later the new Marshal de Villeroy was in charge of the siege of Namur, but allowed the armies of William of Orange escape, refusing to listen to the voices of his advisors. Yet he remained in command of the Army of the Low Countries until peace was declared in 1697. When the War of the Spanish Succession broke out in 1701, Villeroy was sent to command the Army of Italy, but was soon defeated by the Austrian General Prince Eugene, at Chiari, then shortly after at Cremona in 1702, and was held prisoner in Austria for several months. Nevertheless, he was welcomed back to Versailles with open arms—to the great ire and disgust of contemporary memoirists like Saint-Simon—and sent out again in 1703 to command the Army of Flanders. The greatest defeat of his career came at Ramillies, May 1706, at the hands of the Duke of Marlborough. This time Villeroy’s favour was not enough to save him, and he resigned his command as well as his household post as Captain of the King’s Guard.

Marlborough receiving captured French flags at Ramillies

Nevertheless, disfavour did not last long, and Villeroy was restored to Louis XIV’s inner circle in 1712, and was named to his father’s old post as Chief of the Council of Finances in 1714. More importantly, he was named future governor of the Dauphin Louis, aged only 4, soon to succeed as Louis XV. The Regency established in 1715 by the new King’s uncle, the Duke of Orléans, would be fractured by two major factions: that of the liberals and reformers led by Orléans and his chief minister Dubois, and the conservatives led (rather weakly) by Villeroy, and the late King’s widow, Madame de Maintenon and illegitimate (and favourite) son, the Duc du Maine. Villeroy was given a seat on the Regency Council, as head of the Council of Commerce, but his real power emerged in 1717 when the boy king was formally transferred into his care (upon reaching the age of 7). The Marshal lived with the King in the Tuileries, rather than in his large Paris residence the Hôtel des Lesdiguières.

This residence, close to the Bastille, was part of a large inheritance that fell to the Villeroy family thanks to the first Duke’s marriage to Madeleine de Créqui de Lesdiguières, followed shortly by the inheritance that came from his own wife’s family, heirs of the duchies of Retz and Beaupréau (both located in western France, near the mouth of the Loire). The 2^nd Marshal’s grandson would be known as the Duke of Retz from 1716 (as his father was already 3^rd Duke of Villeroy, from 1696). Since the King’s governor resided at the Tuileries, the Hôtel de Lesdiguières was provided for the visit of Peter the Great to France in 1717, and Villeroy and the King visited the Russian Tsar there to attempt to build stronger connections between their two nations.

Peter the Great meeting Louis XV, with Villeroy to the left in red (painted in the 19th century)

The Governor of Louis XV was known to contemporaries either as a bulwark of solid, pious louisquatorzian values, or as a vain, rigid relic of the past who was teaching the boy king to be pompous and frivolous. Finally, the Regent Orléans had enough and managed to exile Villeroy from court, ordering him to tend to his governorship in Lyon in August 1722. When the King attained his majority a few months later in February 1723, this order was not reversed, which demonstrates pretty clearly that the old love between the monarchy and the Neufville de Villeroy family was finally at an end. Although he did return to Paris in 1724 after the death of Orléans, the Marshal resided in the Hôtel de Lesdiguières and ceased to play an important role in the Kingdom.

The 3^rd Duke of Villeroy, Nicolas VI, may have seemed set to restore the family position. Already a lieutenant-general by 1702 (promoted despite his father’s defeat), and commanding a part of his father’s army crushed at Ramillies, he was nevertheless given his disgraced father’s post of Captain of the Guard in 1708, and assured the succession to the governorship of Lyonnais, Forez and Beaujolais. In October 1722, even after the father had been sent to Lyon, the son was given a place of honour at the coronation of Louis XV, as commander of troops camped outside the city of Reims and ceremonial captain of the Scottish Guard. But the timing was off for this generation—the 3^rd Duke was part of that missing generation, those born in the 1660s, who lost their chance of being intimates of the sovereign when that potential sovereign (the Grand Dauphin) died in 1711. His wife, Marguerite le Tellier, also died in 1711 during the same smallpox epidemic, severing the ties of the Neufville and Le Tellier families. Now firmly established as high aristocrats, the children of the 3^rd Duke and Duchess married into exclusively ducal circles: two of the oldest families in France, Montmorency and Harcourt, and a fairly recent military dynasty like their own, Boufflers, with a double marriage to a brother and sister in 1720 and 1721.

The 3^rd Duke didn’t live much longer to build on this new dynastic power base, however, and died only four years after his ancient father (aged 86), in 1734. His younger brother, François-Paul, had also been set up to continue to build the family’s power in the south-east, as Archbishop of Lyon in 1714. He had been considered as successor to his great-uncle Archbishop Camille as early as 1698, but at only 19, even Louis XIV’s extreme favour towards this family was not enough to overcome clerical opinion that an archbishopric was not appropriate. He did finally take over in Lyon, as well as the country château at Ombreval, but he too died in middle age, in 1731.

The 4^th Duke, Louis-François, who had been known as the Duc de Retz as heir, had no children, and his brother had been created Duc d’Alincourt in 1729 by royal brevet as a sign that he was the assumed heir (and he was also created lieutenant in Lyon). But Alincourt died in 1732, so the 4^th Duke raised the only surviving nephew as his own son.

The 4th Duc de Villeroy, like his ancestors, rose through the military ranks, attaining the rank of Field Marshal in 1738 in the run-up to the War of Austrian Succession. But his interests were more in developing his family properties, notably with the proclaim manufactury at Villeroy mentioned above, but also rebuilding the château there and its gardens, and building a new Hôtel de Villeroy in Paris. The Hôtel de Lesdiguières was mostly sold off in the 1730s, and the old Hôtel de Villeroy, entirely rebuilt by the first Marshal in the 1640s, had been sold in 1671 (the building remains and for a while served as the Bureau de Poste). So a new Hôtel de Villeroy was built in the newly fashionable neighbourhood on the left bank of the Seine, near the Invalides—originally built for the Swiss banker, Antoine Hogguer, it was redesigned in the 1730s by the fashionable architect Jean-Baptiste Leroux.

the old Hotel de Villeroy in the 1st arrondissement

the new Hotel de Villeroy in the 7th arrondissement

But like many of the grand court families in the latter half of the 18^th century, the Neufvilles ran into financial difficulties. The new Villeroy residence in Paris was sold in 1768 (it became a government building during the Revolution, and has been the seat of the Ministry of Agriculture since the 1880s), the porcelain factory was shut down in 1777, and the duchy of Retz was sold in 1778. The 4^th Duke had died in 1766, and even though his nephew the 5^th Duke, Gabriel-Louis, succeeded to the now informally hereditary posts of Captain of the King’s Guard and Governor of Lyonnais, Forez and Beaujolais, and rose through the military hierarchy as lieutenant-general by 1781, he was never a major presence, in court, government, or military. Having sold the Hôtel de Villeroy, he acquired the smaller Hôtel de Beauharnais for his residence in Paris, but spent much of his time at the Hôtel de Villeroy in Lyon. Like most dukes by the 18^th century, he married within the now exclusive circle of ducal families, Jeanne-Louise-Constance, daughter of the Duke of Aumont, but they had no children. No longer part of the inner royal circle, his family’s long service to the Crown nevertheless tarred him during the Revolution, and he was executed during the Terror in April 1794. There were no nephews or cadet branches, so when the Duke’s widow died in 1816, the Neufville de Villeroy name was completely extinguished.

(images from Wikimedia Commons)

Dukes of Villeroy simplified Download

Dukes of Bridgewater

When it comes to name swapping within the British aristocracy, the Egertons are champions. At various times their surname has been Malpas or Grey or Tatton, or more recently Leveson-Gore or Grosvenor. In fact, the dynasty’s founders used the name Le Belward before marrying the heiress of the barony of Malpas in the southwestern corner of Cheshire. They were one of the families who settled these sensitive borderlands between Wales and England in the 11^th century. There are claims that William le Belward was in fact descended from Welsh lords in Gwynedd; but other family histories suggest that they, like many of their contemporaries, came from Normandy (and that Belward is a corruption of Belvoir). By the end of the next century, the family had split into three lines, each taking the surname of their feudal estate, Malpas, Cholmondeley, and Egerton. The last of these is a small village not far from Malpas, close to the southern border of Cheshire with Shropshire. The Egerton family would go on to form several branches, and in time would hold a number of titles, including Duke of Bridgewater, Earl of Wilton and Baron Egerton of Tatton. The family has strong connections to the city of Manchester, as former owners of Heaton Park and Worsley Hall, and giving their name most famously to the Bridgewater Canal, as I’ll explore in this post.

the start of the Bridgewater Canal in Worsley, Lancashire

The senior line of this multi-lineal Cheshire family, de Malpas, remained prominent in the county until they died out in the 14^th century, and the barony passed to the Breretons. The Cholmondeleys (pronounced ‘Chumley’) continued in the area, and still do today, having been elevated to an earldom in 1706 and a marquisate in 1815. Since 1778, they have also possessed half of the hereditary office of Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the ceremonial officers of state in the United Kingdom, who carries the long white staff at the opening of Parliament and dresses the monarch before a coronation. The office alternates between the Marquess of Cholmondeley and the other co-heirs, by reign—this family has held the position since 1952, but will give it up in the next reign. They have two family seats, an 18^th-century Palladian villa in Norfolk, Houghton Hall, and the ancient family seat, Cholmondeley Castle in Cheshire, rebuilt in the 19^th century as a neo-Gothic medieval fantasy.

The junior line, the Egertons, also continued to thrive in Cheshire, regularly holding the office of sheriff and other county posts in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, and inter-marrying with other members of the local gentry whose families names are familiar to anyone interested in the history of Cheshire and the northwest of England: Venables of Kinderton, Brereton of Tatton, Warburton of Arley, or Grosvenor of Eaton. Through marriage they acquired the estate of Oulton, not far from the villages of Egerton or Malpas, which became their seat. There was once a grand 18^th-century house at Oulton, but it was destroyed in the 20^th century.

The main line of Egerton of Egerton and Oulton added further properties to their portfolio, notably Wrinehill in Staffordshire, and were created baronets in 1617. The first baronet, Sir Rowland Egerton, married well, in 1620, to Bridget Grey, daughter of the 14^th Baron Grey de Wilton, a former Lord Deputy of Ireland. The Greys were one of the oldest and most well-established noble families in England, with numerous branches in various counties. Bridget Grey ultimately inherited one of these, and her family’s properties in Herefordshire, notably at Wilton (though the ancient castle itself had already been sold). Her descendants would have to wait over a century, however, before they could bear the title Baron Grey de Wilton, as her brother, the 15^th Baron, had been attainted in 1603 for his participation in a plot against the life of the new king, James I.

Ruins of Wilton Castle, Herefordshire–gave its name to the later Egerton title, though they never owned the castle itself

Meanwhile, the family continued to add properties in the northwest of England through heiresses, notably in 1684, when they acquired Heaton Park from Elizabeth Holland. Today a sadly abandoned, yet still stately, 18^th-century mansion on the northern outskirts of the city of Manchester, Heaton Park was once the centre of a large estate in what was then southern Lancashire. Built on a rise overlooking the Mersey and Irwell valleys and the Pennines to the east, the hall was an early commission for one of the great architects of the later 18^th century, James Wyatt, built in the 1770s for the 7^th Egerton baronet, whose rise in fortunes was further marked by the elevation of his title, first to Baron Grey de Wilton, 1784, then Earl of Wilton, 1801. The hall had an elegant saloon with painted ceilings and a built-in organ, which survives in situ today; its park, with a boating lake and an observatory (and at one point a track for horse racing) was originally laid out by William Emes in the style of Capability Brown. Heaton Park would serve as a centre of the county nobility of Lancashire in the early 19^th century, who watched from afar as a new industrial city was blossoming on their very doorstep.

The Grey-Egerton earls of Wilton died out only a few years later, in 1814, though the title was allowed by royal licence to pass to a grandson in the Grosvenor family, another ancient Cheshire family who suddenly rose to national prominence in the 18^th century as property developers in London (Belgravia, Mayfair), and were created Earl Grosvenor in 1784 (the very same year as Wilton), and later Marquess of Westminster, 1831, and finally Duke of Westminster in 1874. The new earls of Wilton changed their surname from Grosvenor to Egerton, until 1999, when the title passed to a different branch of the Grosvenor family. Meanwhile, Heaton Park was sold to the Manchester City Council in the late 19^th century, as the earls of Wilton found the encroaching city just a bit too close for comfort (in fact, the Manchester to Bury train line was run through a tunnel directly under the estate), and they relocated to their family estates in the south.

After the death of the last Egerton earl of Wilton, the Egerton baronetcy continued in a cadet male line, and still does: the current baronet is the 17^th, William de Malpas Egerton (b. 1949). In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, several members of this branch distinguished themselves as admirals and generals, and further cadet branches were established, including the Bulkeley Egertons and the Warburtons (formerly Egertons) of Arley Hall, which is a familiar setting to fans of the TV show Peaky Blinders.

It is the second major branch of the Egerton family that interests us here as qualifying this family as ‘ducal’. Founded by an illegitimate son who rose to become Chancellor of England, this branch would ultimately become earls then dukes of Bridgewater.

In the late 15^th century, a cadet branch of the Cheshire Egertons had been formed based in the nearby manor of Ridley. Sir Richard Egerton of Ridley (d. 1579) and his children married into the usual circles of the Cheshire gentry—a Grosvenor of Eaton, a Warburton of Arley, a Brereton of Tatton—but it was his son born out of wedlock who rose to national prominence. Despite his illegitimacy, Thomas Egerton was supported by his family and given an education in law, first at Oxford, then at Lincoln’s Inn in London. In the 1570s, he made a name for himself as a lawyer, and was hired by the Crown to work as a prosecutor in the 1580s—most notably at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1586, and later at the trial of his friend, the Earl of Essex. By 1592, Egerton was Elizabeth I’s Attorney General, then Master of the Rolls (the head of the Court of Appeals) in 1594, and finally Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, 1596. King James kept Egerton on as his chief judicial officer, and promoted him to the top job, Lord Chancellor of England, in 1603, along with a peerage, as Baron Ellesmere.

Today the name Ellesmere is more usually associated with the port built at the terminus of the Ellesmere Canal in the later 18^th century, but the original castle and town are across the southern Cheshire border in the next county, Shropshire. Baron Ellesmere also acquired lands in Cheshire, Tatton Park, from the Brereton family, lands in Northamptonshire, Brackley, and a large estate in Hertfordshire, closer to London, in the Chiltern Hills, the former Ashridge Priory (a former monastic building acquired by Henry VIII in 1539, home to Princess Elizabeth in the early 1550s). Ashridge would become the main Egerton family seat, and the nearby church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Little Gaddesden would host the family chapel and tombs.

As Lord Chancellor, Lord Ellesmere used his position to support some of King James’ ideas about strengthening the legal position of the crown, and in particular in fusing the governments of both the realms of England and Scotland, a project James was unable to complete due to hesitation in both parliaments. In 1617, well into his 70s, the Lord Chancellor was finally allowed to retire, and was honoured with a higher peerage title, Viscount Brackley, but died soon after. Evidence of his rise in the social hierarchy can be seen in his second marriage in 1600, to Alice Spencer of Althorp, widow of the 5^th Earl of Derby—not bad for an illegitimate son of a junior branch of a provincial gentry family.

But the family’s rise was by no means complete. King James had reputedly wished to raise his Lord Chancellor higher into the nobility with an earldom, and he did so for his son, John, who was created Earl of Bridgewater in 1617 shortly after his father’s death. Like so many noble titles in England, the name of the earldom had little to do with the geographical concentration of estates or social standing of its bearer. The name was taken from Bridgwater in Somerset, where the Egertons did have some lands, but it was not their centre of operations. There is no ‘e’ in the Somerset town, as it is (apparently) referring not to a bridge over water—as you might logically think—but to the burg (fortress) of Walter. And of course Bridgewater would work so well as a descriptor for the most famous canal builders in England, but that is merely a convenient coincidence, as the canal duke didn’t live until the mid-18^th century. There had been a previous earldom of Bridgwater, briefly, for the Daubeney family of Somerset, between 1538 and 1548, but there is no direct connection with the Egertons.

The first Egerton earl of Bridgewater succeeded his father with a seat on the Privy Council in 1626, and was appointed by King Charles I to act as Lord President of Wales and the Marches (Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire) in 1631. He had solidified his family’s position in the court nobility, and in the county families of the northwest, by marrying his step-sister, Frances Stanley, only two years after his father had married her mother. Their children’s marriages reflect in some ways this expanded influence along the borders between England and Wales—a Vaughan of Carbury, a Herbert of Chirbury—but also court families like the Hobarts and Cecils. The eldest son, the 2^nd Earl of Bridgewater, married into the top ranks of the nobility in 1641: Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Newcastle. Both the Egertons and Cavendishes were royalists during the Civil War, and afterwards the 2^nd Earl was rewarded in the Restoration with the posts of Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Lancashire and Hertfordshire, at one point holding all four at the same time (1681-86), which is rare.

The next generations changed allegiance somewhat. Whereas most of the formerly royalist families gravitated to the newly forming Tory party, the 3^rd Earl became one of the leading members of the Whig aristocracy, those descendants of moderate Parliamentarians who supported monarchy, but one with limits. John, 3^rd Earl of Bridgewater, was active in the Whig government under William III as First Lord of the Admiralty, 1699-1701, and Speaker of the House of Lords in 1697 and 1701.

The Earl’s sister Elizabeth married into one of the premier Whig families, the Sydneys, earls of Leicester, while his brothers continued the family tradition of dividing their time between activity in the House of Commons and developing their country estates. One of these, Sir William, inherited the property of Worsley, in Lancashire; while another, Thomas, was given Tatton Park, across the Mersey in Cheshire. These two properties, to the west and south of the developing market town of Manchester, would bring the Egerton story much closer to the history of the great industrial city in the following centuries, much as their Grey-Egerton cousins were doing to the north of Manchester, at Heaton Park. As the Egertons of Heaton also owned estates in Denton, to the east, you might say Manchester was now ringed on all sides by this one family. The Egertons of course needed a London seat as well, so the 3^rd Earl purchased the former Cleveland House (named for Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland), in 1700, to replace an earlier Bridgewater House which had burned down in 1687.

Bridgewater House, London (as redeveloped in the 1840s)

In 1673, the 3^rd Earl married his second wife, Lady Jane Paulet, whose father, the Marquis of Winchester, would later become 1^st Duke of Bolton. Her mother was the heiress Mary Scrope, and they named their third son after her: Scroop. Born in 1681, the Honourable Scroop Egerton became the heir after the 1687 fire at Bridgewater House in London, which tragically killed his older two brothers. He was then known as Viscount Brackley (the courtesy title used by the heir) until he succeeded his father, aged only 20, as 4^th Earl of Bridgewater. He also inherited the post held by his father and grandfather, Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, but was otherwise not very involved in politics. Instead, his younger brother, William, occupied the family seat in the Commons as MP for Brackley, while another younger brother, Henry, entered the church and became Bishop of Hereford in 1723. The 4^th Earl did obtain prominent positions in the royal household: first as Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Master of the Horse to Prince George of Denmark (the husband of Queen Anne); Lord Chamberlain to Caroline, Princess of Wales, from the start of the new reign (1714); and finally Lord of the Bedchamber to King George II. He maintained the family’s position at the heart of the Whig aristocracy by marrying first Lady Elizabeth Churchill (daughter of the Duke of Marlborough) and then Lady Rachel Russell (daughter of the Duke of Bedford). It was therefore maybe inevitable that the Earl was raised another level in the peerage himself in 1720, as the 1^st Duke of Bridgewater.

The first Duke spent the next two decades fairly quietly at court and at Ashridge. He and his second wife tended their estates and managed the education and marriages of their offspring. Only one child survived from the Duke’s first marriage, Anne, who married into her step-mother’s family to become Duchess of Bedford herself; and although there were several sons born of the second marriage, again the elder sons died fairly young. The first, Charles (who was called by the new courtesy title, Marquess of Brackley) lived only six years, and although his brother John survived long enough to succeed as 2^nd Duke of Bridgewater, in 1745, he too died, only three years later, at 21.

The youngest son, Francis, thus became 3^rd Duke of Bridgewater at age 12. He was raised by his widowed mother, the Dowager Duchess (who lived to the ripe old age of 70), but never seemed to fit in with London society. After breaking off a rumoured engagement with society beauty, Elizabeth Gunning (the widowed Duchess of Hamilton, later Duchess of Argyll), he retired to his estates in the north, and began to develop Worsley in particular. It is the 3^rd Duke who would become the most famous member of the family, the celebrated ‘Canal Duke’, also known as ‘the Father of British inland navigation’.

The village of Worsley in Lancashire was owned for many centuries by the family of the same name, then by their successors the Breretons, at one stage the most prominent family in Cheshire. The estate had fallen to the Egertons in the 1630s, but never really developed. The Old Hall, a classic Tudor era timber-framed house, was relegated to the side in the 1760s when the 3^rd Duke of Bridgewater turned his attentions to his northern estates, and he built a new residence in neoclassical style (known later as the ‘Brick Hall’).

It is what was underneath, however, that became more important. The Duke soon discovered that the hills on his Worsley estate were full of black gold: coal. The question soon became how to transport it effectively and economically to the newly emergent boom town of Manchester, about 7 miles away.

In 1761, the Duke and some of his associates invited the engineer James Brindley to Worsley Old Hall, and here they developed plans for the Bridgewater Canal, the first major project of its kind in Britain. Swiftly completed between Worsley and Manchester, extensions were soon made to take the canal all the way to Runcorn in the Mersey Estuary, which allowed products being manufactured in Manchester (mostly woolen and cotton textiles) to be transferred to oceangoing vessels in the port of Liverpool.

The Bridgewater Canal crossing the River Mersey
(I live on the other side of Turn Moss)

In Worsley, the Canal emerges literally from the subterranean coalfields

The Bridgewater Canal made the Duke an enormous fortune, and by the time of his death in 1803, he was the richest nobleman in England, with a fortune estimated at about two million pounds (well over one-hundred million today). He acquired a large collections of old masters (notably two famous Titians still in the Egerton collection), participated in the purchase and resale of the enormous Orléans Collection in France in 1789, and began to upgrade Ashridge House in Hertfordshire, projecting a new grand-scale country seat for his dynasty.

the 3rd Duke in old age (Salford Museum)

But he didn’t create a dynasty. Having never married, he spent his final years devising legal means for the estates to stay together, entailing most of it to his long-deceased sister’s second grandson, Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, son of the Marquess of Stafford, who in 1833 changed his name to Egerton, and in 1846, was created Earl of Ellesmere. The dukedom of Bridgewater became extinct in 1803, but the earldom of Bridgewater and the Hertfordshire estates passed to a cousin, a distant male heir (see below). The new Lancashire dynasty created by the last Duke’s will, continued to live at Worsley. The Earl of Ellesmere was nominally head of the Bridgewater Trust, which sold the Canal to the newly formed Bridgewater Navigation Company, 1872, then to the Manchester Ship Canal Company in 1887 (who built a much larger waterway to replace the now far too small Bridgewater Canal).

In the 1840s, the Ellesmere earls rebuilt Bridgewater House in London, and at the same time built a vast new country house outside Manchester, known as Worsley New Hall, in a neo-Elizabethan style, designed by Edward Blore. They also laid out extensive terraced gardens, designed by the well-known landscape architect, William Andrews Nesfield. Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington visited, in a specially designed barge, shortly after the completion of house and gardens in 1851.

But the New Hall didn’t survive very long: the trials of the First World War and crippling death duties in the 1920s forced the Egertons of Ellesmere to consolidate, and they sold off the Worsley estate, with both Old and New Halls (Brick Hall had been demolished in the 1840s), and New Hall was demolished in the aftermath of the Second World War. Only Old Hall remains, now a pub restaurant. The grounds of the New Hall were recently excavated by a team from Salford University—who shared fascinating images of the remains they discovered, notably of an electric lift, one of the earliest of its kind!—and the grounds and surviving garden landscapes are being developed for a grand re-opening by the Royal Horticultural Society.

recent archaeology works at Worsley New Hall

The earldom of Ellesmere continues to the present, but since 1963 it has been subsumed within the greater title of Duke of Sutherland, and the Egerton name changed back to Leveson-Gower.

Meanwhile, the earldom of Bridgewater passed to a junior line. Henry Egerton, Bishop of Hereford, married (as Anglican bishops can do) and his son continued in the same pathway, rising from bishop of Bangor to Lichfield, then to Durham in 1771. His eldest son, John, succeeded as 7^th Earl of Bridgewater in 1803. Unlike his Whig cousins, he had been a long-serving Tory MP in the years of the Pitt administration, and rose through the ranks of the military during the Napoleonic wars, ending as a full general in 1812. He completed his cousin’s desire to rebuilt Ashridge Hall, an early example of Gothic Revival style designed by James Wyatt (today it houses a business school). On a hill above the house was built a monument to the 3^rd Duke of Bridgewater, a great Doric column crowned by a giant copper urn, today managed by the National Trust.

The 7^th earl died childless in 1823 and the earldom passed to his brother, the 8^th and last earl, named Francis like the last duke. One of the great noble eccentrics (in an era curiously full of very odd aristocrats), he lived in Paris, where he reportedly dressed up his dogs and cats as ladies and gentlemen and drove them around in an open carriage. A more considerable legacy however, was his intellectual and financial support of natural science and antiquarianism—at his death he bequeathed a collection, the Egerton Manuscripts, to the British Museum, with funds for further acquisition, and today the collection (now housed at the British Library) includes over 3,000 manuscripts (most famously the ‘Egerton Gospel’, a set of papyrus fragments from Egypt acquired in the 1930s). With the 8^th Earl’s death in 1829, the earldom of Bridgewater ceased to exist, and the estates and properties in Northamptonshire passed to his sister’s grandson, John Cust, Viscount Alford (who of course took the name Egerton), then to his son, John Egerton-Cust, 2^nd Earl Brownlow.

Which finally brings us back to the topic of the ever changing Egerton surname. There is a final Egerton branch to be mentioned, descended from Thomas Egerton, of Tatton Park in Cheshire, noted above. These were successively known as Egerton of Tatton, then Tatton of Tatton, then Egerton again. They finally achieved an earldom named Egerton itself, though it was short-lived. At the start of the 18^th century, John Egerton built a new Tatton Hall, a short distance from the old hall, a brick Tudor house. There were plans to redesign the new house again, along more rococo lines, by John’s brother Samuel, in the 1770s, this time by Samuel Wyatt, brother of James Wyatt. Neither lived to see the building works completed, but they were carried out by Samuel Egerton’s sister’s son, William Tatton, of Wythenshaw Hall. In 1780 he changed his name to Egerton, and completed the envisioned works at Tatton Park.

His grandson, William Tatton Egerton, was created 1^st Baron Egerton of Tatton in 1859, a long-term MP for Cheshire (and later Lord Lieutenant), and a developer of one of the new suburbs of Manchester, Chorlton (where I live!). His son Wilbraham (great name) was also a long-term Conservative MP, and a chairman of the Manchester Ship Canal Company. He was elevated to the rank of Earl Egerton (and Viscount Salford) in 1897, and died in 1909 with no male heir, so the earldom became extinct. The barony passed to his brother, Alan, whose son, Maurice, was the 4^th and last Baron Egerton of Tatton.

Maurice Egerton, 4th Baron Egerton of Tatton

Maurice Egerton was one of those Edwardian imperialist, collector, philanthropist, ‘confirmed bachelor’ types. He opened Tatton Park to the local public on occasion, and specially built a grand exhibition hall to display his vast collection of trophy heads and horns and other artefacts he had collected on his many shooting trips in East Africa, where he built a regal residence for himself in Kenya (‘Lord Egerton Castle’), as well as an agricultural college (now Egerton University). An endlessly fascinating individual, he was also a fervent early supporter of aviation (and friend of the Wright brothers) and early motor cars. He died unmarried in 1958, and Tatton Park was given to the National Trust; it remains one of the most popular destinations for Mancunians on a day out.

The Egerton name may finally be gone, but Manchester is still known in part for the Bridgwater Canal, which runs right into the heart of the city, which in 1996 opened a new state-of-the-art performance venue, Bridgewater Hall. There is also an Egerton Park high school in Denton and an Egerton Football Club in Knutsford.

the Rochdale Canal enters the Bridgewater basin in Castlefield, central Manchester
on the right is the restaurant Dukes 92, named for the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater

(images my own photos or from Wikimedia Commons)

Egerton family-simplified Download

UPDATE (19 May 2020): Yesterday, I spotted this barge on the Bridgewater Canal, so some elements of the old Company still exist!