What is a prince? What is a duke?

When reading about someone who is the prince of this or the duchess of that, most people immediately conjure up an image of someone who is very grand, an elite part of the old aristocracy of Europe. But I am very often struck by how frequently historians, including professional academic historians, regularly use noble titles indiscriminately and interchangeably, and when asked to clarify whether the person being referred to is a count or a duke or a baron they say ‘it’s all the same, right?’ This short introductory piece will explain how they are not the same, and will focus on the top two titles in the system of noble titles: the prince and the duke.

The aristocracies of Europe have a wide range of variations in their composition, nomenclatures and customs, but there are also certain similarities across the Continent—for example, most have some form of the titles ‘prince’ or ‘duke’, both deriving from Latin words for command or leadership. There are exceptions, like in Germanic and Slavic languages, which use non Latin-based words, but with similar meanings. Most European countries went through a period of monarchy at some point in their history, some briefly while others maintain it still, and all of these monarchies created a system of hereditary nobility to assist them at first in defending the country and later in governing as well. The base-level nobles, the vast majority, were called lords or barons, but those who were given greater responsibilities, usually in a particular region, were created ‘counts’ (earls in English) or viscounts (‘vice-counts’), from the Latin word for companion (comes). This system emerged about the time Europe was reorganising itself under the Carolingians (the family of Charlemagne) in the 9th and 10th centuries. Higher up the hierarchy still, members of the ruling dynasties were called ‘prince’ (from princeps, the ‘first one’), which indicated they shared some of the authority of the head of their family, the monarch. Princely status from its earliest emergence was therefore something that is given to all members of a ruling family, by right of birth, not merit or achievement. This issue came up again just this year, when people asked whether Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, could have his status as prince removed. Back in the age of the Carolingians, some princes were given larger territories to govern, as autonomous rulers, with the title ‘duke’ (from dux, or ‘leader’). Often these leaders were supplied by the tribal chiefs of the ethnic groups being incorporated into the wider Imperial whole, like the dukes of the Saxons or the Bavarians east of the Rhine, or the dukes of the Gascons in southwestern France. The German term for duke is herzog, loosely from heer and ziehen, ‘puller’ or leader of the fighting men. In Slavic languages a similar term is voivode, ‘war leader’.

For much of their history, the titles prince and duke were restricted to royalty or semi-royalty only. As Europe’s kingdom’s evolved into more centralised territorial bodies, dukedoms were still given to younger sons to rule as ‘junior kings’ in what are called apanage territories, and these could be ruled with a certain degree of autonomy, but ultimately remained part of the kingdom as a whole. Well known examples in France include the duchies of Anjou, Orléans or Burgundy, or in England the dukedoms of Cornwall, Lancaster and York, but similar apanages existed in most countries: the duchy of Styria for junior Habsburgs in Austria, the duchy of Coimbra in Portugal, the duchies of Halland and Södermanland in Sweden, and so on. This predominance of royal-only dukedoms started to shift in the fifteenth century, as certain magnate families established so much power they had to be recognised as power-sharers in their own right within the kingdom. There were non-royal dukes in Germany and Italy from the 13th and 14th centuries (Brunswick, 1235; Mecklenburg, 1348; Milan, 1395), and these maintained such a degree of autonomous authority that we might call them semi-royal anyway. The same is true in Russia and Poland, where the word kniaz can be translated as either duke or prince (and seems to be a derivative of the early Germanic word for king). But the western monarchies of France, Spain and England did not have their first non-royal dukes until much later.

Early French non-royal dukedoms were given to powerful semi-autonomous magnates such as the Count of Armagnac (Duke of Nemours, 1461), important Italian allies (Valentinois for Cesare Borgia, 1499; Nemours for the Medici, 1515), then for representatives of foreign dynasties settling in France (Cleves, Lorraine, Savoy), and finally for some ‘native’ French noble families (Gouffier, Brosse, Montmorency) by the middle of the sixteenth century who had strong connections, personal or by marriage, with the royal family. Across the Channel, for the Plantagenets, aside from the early anomaly of the ‘duke of Ireland’ (Robert de Vere, 1386, for life only), the first non-royal dukedoms were created for nobles with close blood relations with the royal family: Norfolk for Thomas de Mowbray, 1397; Buckingham for Humphrey de Stafford, 1444; Suffolk for William de la Pole, 1448. Only a handful were created in the Tudor era (restoring the Howards, and new dukedoms for royal favourites Charles Brandon, Edward Seymour, and John Dudley), so it was not until the 17th century that the numbers began to increase in England (and the first Scottish dukedoms as well), with a similar large-scale increase in France as well.  Still, overall numbers of dukes in France or Britain were never more than 20 or so at a time (today there are about 25 in the United Kingdom, and about 40 in France).

a French ducal coronet

Looking further south, we see Spanish non-royal dukedoms emerging in the mid-15th century for grandee families like Luna, Guzman, Osorio, La Cueva, Alvarez de Toledo and Zuñiga. Portugal had only one non-royal dukedom this early, Bragança, and that was created for an illegitimate member of the dynasty (ie, his mother was not the queen), and Portugal never had more than a handful of dukedoms, royal or non-royal. In Spain, in contrast, by the 17th century, there was an ever-growing number of dukedoms (already about 40 by 1600), and, even more spectacularly, the kings of Spain began to reward loyalty in their overseas territories in Italy (Naples and Sicily) with dukedoms so these began to proliferate, literally into the hundreds by the 18th century.

To separate out some of these families, the higher title of ‘prince’ was introduced, but this too grew to exorbitant numbers in southern Italy until a principality came to mean little more than a particularly large feudal estate. In the Holy Roman Empire as well, a new title was introduced in the 17th century to distinguish certain grandee families, usually with strong connections with the Imperial court: there already were the territorial dukes (Saxony, Bavaria, etc), so instead these were called fürsts or ‘princes’—in German, a distinction can be made between the word prinz which generally refers to members of  those older ruling families, and fürst, a ‘ruling prince’ (from the same root word as the German führer, leader) who is not royal and not a duke. Well known princely families like these include the Liechtensteins, Fürstenbergs, Dietrichsteins and Schwarzenbergs. Their ‘rule’ was only personal until they acquired a fief that was held from no other prince besides the emperor (known as an ‘immediate fief’) and they then were allowed to join the top governing body of the Empire, the Council of Princes which acted as the upper house of the Imperial Diet. Liechtenstein is the only one of these tiny immediate territories that survived into the modern age as a sovereign state, a principality, not a kingdom—and ironically, until the 19th century, the estates around the castle at Vaduz in the Alps were not really considered an important part of the family’s landholdings, which were mostly concentrated in Austria nearer to Vienna, or in Bohemia. A few of these non-royal princely titles were granted in the Habsburg-governed Netherlands as well, for the magnate families like Ligne, Epinoy, or Croÿ. The most famous prince in the Low Countries, the Prince of Orange, was of a different kind, however, as a ruler of a sovereign territory in southern France, not too far from another sovereign family, the Princes of Monaco (sovereign meaning at least nominally outside the control of any other power). These micro-sovereignties were mostly self-proclaimed, and sometimes their status was recognised by their larger royal neighbours, and sometimes they were not.

a princely crown from the Holy Roman Empire

So there are different kinds of prince, royal, non-royal, sovereign prince, imperial prince, and a very uneven distribution, from hundreds in Sicily, to none at all in England.  France had almost no creations of non-royal princely titles, but those that were formed a peculiar category called the ‘foreign princes’, which included the dukes of Guise, princes of the House of Lorraine, and were the subject of my doctoral research. These families were considered to be princely because they were members of foreign sovereign dynasties, but their native titles had no legal standing within France—so all of them were granted dukedoms in France to maintain their elevated dignity and status, and, I would argue, to boost the prestige of the French court. French kings could point to their courtiers and show that they ruled over not only the subject nobility but also the higher princely clans of Europe—a sort of hearkening back to the ancient world’s concept of ‘king of kings’—and allowed them to compete in prestige with their rivals, the emperors in Vienna.

If you’d like to read a recent academic piece of mine on this topic, here is a chapter I published in Adel und Nation in der Neuzeit: Hierarchie, Egalität und Loyalität 16.-20. Jahrhundert, Martin Wrede and Laurent Bourquin, eds (Thorbeke Verlag, 2017)–don’t worry, it’s in English:

spangler-truly-princesDownload

The chief difference between princely status and ducal status in most of these countries was in the differences of inheritance systems. All members of the house of Lorraine, for example, were princes and princesses by birth, but only the senior male in France was the duke of Guise. This reflects the two basic systems of inheritance and succession that operated in medieval and early modern Europe: partible inheritance and primogeniture. Germanic custom leaned more towards partible, that is equally divided, inheritance, so all children got a portion of their parents’ wealth: all of the children of a duke of Saxony were called duke or duchess of Saxony, though in terms of actually ruling, men were (no surprise) favoured. But this is why Germany so famously saw ever increasingly tiny dukedoms in the late middle ages, until primogeniture was imposed, often by force, in the early modern period. Primogeniture, in which the firstborn gets everything, had been the more favoured system in the Roman world, and gradually took hold in the Germanic kingdoms once it became clear that, while seemingly unfair to younger sons, avoided quite a lot of bloodshed, fratricide and civil war.  Primogeniture mostly favoured males, and this is true for principalities and dukedoms as well as for royal thrones, but not always, and there are certainly instances where, in default of a son, a throne passes to a daughter, even if there male cousins—though this was almost always a source of strife and legal deliberation. At one end of the scale, German dukedoms never passed to a woman, and this is (mostly) true for England and France as well, though there are some exceptions. In these kingdoms, dukedoms were created, existed for a few generations, then became extinct through lack of a male heir. At the other end of the scale, Spain allowed for almost universal succession, so it is the one place in Europe where hereditary titles never become extinct, and certain aristocratic clans simply accumulate more and more, resulting in extreme cases like the Duchess of Alba, who died in 2014, and was the possessor of about 40 titles, eight of them dukedoms, the most titled person in the world according to the Guinness World Book of Records.

There are also a good deal of other variants in the two titles of prince and duke. Some dukes were deemed to be of higher status than others, so they were called ‘grand dukes’, first with the Medici of Tuscany in 1569—which annoyed the neighbouring dukes of Savoy and Mantua and Ferrara very much, whose ruling families saw themselves as older and grander, even if they had less wealth. Many more grand duchies were created in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars: Luxembourg, Mecklenburg, Baden, etc. In keeping up with the Joneses, the Habsburgs wanted to ensure that everyone knew their dynasty was of higher rank than anyone else in Europe, so invented the title of ‘archduke’ for their sons and daughters in 1358. Because the language of eastern Europe makes duke and prince fairly interchangeable, the early rulers of Poland were called grand dukes or grand princes before they were fully recognised as kings at the end of the 13th century. The same is true for Russian grand princes of Kiev, Moscow, Vladimir, Tver and so on, until the line of Moscow adopted the title of tsar (‘caesar’ or emperor) in the 16th century.  From this point, grand duke and grand duchess began to be used for all members of the Russian imperial family. All of the magnate families who could claim descent from the original rulers of the various Russian principalities began to use princely titles, and by the 19th century, these numbered in the hundreds. Other rulers in the east in the early modern era were referred to as prince or grand prince—Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia, Serbia—in part to show their simultaneous autonomy and subservience to a greater power, whether Byzantine, Ottoman or Habsburg. On the other edge of Europe, the title of prince was sometimes used by Celtic families in Ireland or Wales to indicate descent from a family that had been formerly sovereign before the coming of the English, for example the O’Donnell princes (or flatha) of Tyrconnell or the MacCarthy princes of Desmond.  Some would say the title ‘prince of Wales’ used today is a bit of an insult to those princes of Gwynedd and Powys who were genuinely Welsh.

Besides the hereditary principalities and dukedoms, there were also those (rare) given for life only—as a reward for a great victory or peace accord—and there were those held by churchmen. Ecclesiastical titles originally were part of the means for making the church independent of the state, by allowing bishops to rule a particular territory and generate their own income, but later they became a means for honouring senior prelates. In France, the earliest of these were the ancient Frankish bishops who were central to coronation rituals: the archbishop of Reims was considered a duke and a peer of the realm (see below for what it means to be a peer), as were the bishops of Laon and Langres. Later (1674) the archbishop of Paris was similarly honoured with the title duke of Saint-Cloud, but it didn’t have the same sense of territorial rule over the lands in his diocese. Imperial bishops started out with much the same powers, but as Germany increasingly decentralised (as opposed to France increasingly centralising) their powers as territorial rulers were strengthened and they became known as prince-bishops. The top three were the prince-archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier, and they controlled vast territories in the Rhineland and central Germany as virtual sovereigns. Some of the largest of these territories were formally recognised as duchies: Bremen, Magdeburg, Würzburg (aka ‘duke of Franconia’), and Westphalia (ruled by the archbishops of Cologne). There were also several large abbeys that enjoyed princely status, such as Fulda or Corvey, and some for women, like Essen or Quedlinburg. Being a princess-abbess was just about the best job you could get if you were a woman in pre-modern Germany and you didn’t want to rule as simply a consort to a duke or prince. The main thing that connected all of these ecclesiastical princes was of course that they were non-hereditary (at least in theory; in practice some families treated them as their own personal fiefs, most notably the Wittelsbachs in Cologne).

The other thing that connects together all of the hereditary and non-hereditary princes and dukes, at least in the pre-modern world, was their formal role in creating their monarchs, and in holding them to account if necessary. These magnates were thus known as ‘peers’ in that they were equal (from pair in French) to each other, and in the early days of the history of monarchy, equal to the prince before his coronation (or sacralisation once the Church got involved)—they liked the use the phrase primer inter pares, the ‘first amongst equals’, to describe this semi-tribal tradition, and to remind monarchs that they were made and could thus be un-made. Those responsible for choosing or electing (or perhaps merely acclaiming) the monarch were called peers, formally codified into peerages in England and France, and only informally in Spain or Portugal (where they were called ‘grandees’), and they developed even further in the Holy Roman Empire into ‘electors’. By the mid-14th century there were seven electors in Germany, three sacred and four secular. Not all of these were dukes: only the elector of Saxony was a duke (and arguably the archbishop of Cologne), while the others were the king of Bohemia, the margrave of Brandenburg and the count palatine of the Rhine, though all of these ranked as territorial princes. In France, the original six lay peers entrusted with the coronation ceremony included three dukes (Normandy, Aquitaine and Burgundy), but also three counts (Flanders, Champagne and Toulouse), and when new dukedoms were created, they were also called peers (mostly; some were not), which did not affect the coronation rites, but it did reflect their other role which was to act as a supreme court for the Kingdom, as members of the Parlement of Paris. Similarly, in England, the peers of the House of Lords acted as a supreme court, a job they retained until 2005. Of course, there are a lot of peers in England who are not dukes (barons have been peers since the earliest days of the English peerage), which underlines that much of this history is imprecise and hard to put into firmly delineated categories.

Charles VII of France sitting with some of the Peers of the Realm in the Parlement of Paris

So to conclude this introductory essay, we can see that there are a lot of overlappings and variations of definitions, systems, practices. The peerage does not always mean the dukes; and the titles duke and prince are often overlapping (in fact, in the early modern period, most dukes in England are referred to as ‘high and mighty prince’ in formal documentation). This is why I am treating them together here on this website. There is quite a large chronological and geographical spread to be covered, so I have made some dangerous generalisations above. In England, there are generally only two kinds of dukes, royal and non-royal, though they can be divided into separate peerages for England, Scotland and Ireland. In Germany and Italy they can be ruling and non-ruling (like Mantua for the Gonzagas versus Bracciano for the Orsini). In France the scene is much more complex, with ancient dukes like Aquitaine or Burgundy wielding essentially sovereign (or ‘regalian’) rule, ancien-régime (that is, before the Revolution), dukes acting as peers in the Parlement, then Napoleonic, Restoration and Second Empire dukedoms being created mostly as purely honorific titles. And then there are the countries that have virtually no non-royal princely or ducal titles (like Denmark or Sweden), and those where princely and ducal titles run into the hundreds, like Russia or Naples. There is also a lot of confusing and sometimes contradictory information out there, so hopefully, I can help navigate these complexities to provide some interesting history!

Hello and Welcome!

This website is the product of many years of research, travel, conversation with friends, and so on. I first became obsessed with dynastic history when my family and I visited Innsbruck, Austria, in 1984 and I saw the magnificent tomb of Emperor Maximilian I — who was this guy? who were these ancestors?

I was hooked on the Habsburgs, wrote papers about them as an undergraduate, then wrote about their relatives, the princes of Lorraine for my doctorate. This sparked the idea that there was more to just studying kings and queens, or the nobility of one particular nation or other. I wanted to do a much broader comparative study of those who were not fully royal (kings, queens, emperors), nor fully ‘local’ nobility (barons, counts). There was an in between category, the dukes and princes, who could easily move between the courts of Europe and had an identity all their own.

each rank has its own style of crown

In addition to reading about all these families, I have continued in my initial desire to see the spaces in which they lived or were buried, so I have enjoyed many years of travel to locations all across Europe to visit country houses, palaces, or ruins. One of my favorite adventures was finding the Duke of Albemarle’s house in the remotest corner or Devon.

Great Potheridge, near Torrington
The remaining south wing, now an outdoor activity center for young people

The blogs I write here will tell the stories of these families, from Spain to Russia, make comparisons, share photos of trips I have made to these properties, and so on. I hope you enjoy them!

Jonathan

Me and the Duke of Westminster’s carriage, Eaton Hall, Cheshire

Double Duchess—William & Mary Choir Tour, Summer 1993

What technique do you use to get a duchess to offer you tea and biscuits? In this travel account, this will be revealed as we follow the Choir of the College of William & Mary in its European tour of May and June 1993 as part of the celebration of the College’s tercentenary. I will focus on the parts of the tour around England, with the help of a journal I kept during the trip, carefully noting our visits to various sites connected to King William III, Queen Mary II, their celebrated architect Sir Christopher Wren, the city of Williamsburg, or the Commonwealth of Virginia more generally. On this tour we met two duchesses (Beaufort and Roxburghe) which makes this journey pertinent to this website. And we did visit two ducal residences, Badminton and Knole. Oh, and we met the Queen of England, naturally, plus Baroness Thatcher, Lord Avebury, two German counts and a countess, the son of ‘Desert Fox’ Rommel and the son of Vita Sackville-West. All in all, a pretty average vacation.

The College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, was founded in 1693 by the British crown for two main purposes: to allow sons of the colony to obtain theological training without having to cross the Atlantic, and to bring European education to the native population of the New World. It is the oldest properly founded (dismiss those claims by damn yankees at Harvard) university in the United States, with certainly one of the oldest buildings of higher education, named for Christopher Wren who may or may not have had a direct hand in its design. Sometimes known as ‘the Alma Mater of the Nation’, its alumni include three US presidents (Jefferson, Monroe, Tyler), four Supreme Court justices, and more recently, former CIA Director Robert Gates and film and television stars Glenn Close, Steven Culp, Jon Stewart and Patton Oswalt. In 1993, the College celebrated its 300th anniversary with several large-scale commemorative events, capped off with a commemorative rekindling of the historic ties between William & Mary and the United Kingdom through the appointment of recently retired British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, as Chancellor of the College (the last British chancellor being unceremoniously dumped in 1776), and with a reception and concert in London for Queen Elizabeth II.

The full choir (not all were able to go to Europe) in front of the Wren Building

I was lucky to be graduating from the College at precisely the right moment. The speakers at graduation ceremonies in 1992 had been completely forgettable, whereas our graduation in May 1993 featured Thatcher, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder, and main speaker Bill Cosby (long before any hints of scandal). I sometimes used to wonder what some of the Virginia good ole boys in the audience might have thought about a woman chancellor, an African-American governor and a comedian (who was also an African-American) as the three featured guests that day. Anyway, if this wasn’t exciting enough, only a few days later, members of the college choir reconvened at Dulles Airport and flew off on the greatest adventure any of us had ever experienced. We were led by our cherished and well-beloved choir director, Frank Lendrim (known affectionately as ‘Doc’) and his tireless and exceptionally witty wife, Bettye-Jean. Dr Lendrim had spent time earlier in his career in England, and somehow knew everyone, which would benefit us all, as you shall see as you read on. As an academic, Lendrim was a specialist of Brahms and the Romantics, and I will never forget the thrill of being in his class on nineteenth-century music where he would lecture from behind the piano, and play excerpts of symphonies or operas from memory to make a specific point. He loved that I was a French horn player, and would often shout in the middle of class, “the horns, Jonathan, the horns!” when they featured, as they often did, in key moments of Brahms, Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’, or Richard Strauss.

[have a listen to this. ‘Four Last Songs’ with the amazing Jessye Norman—the entrance of the French horn at minute 8, moves my soul, every time, deeply, utterly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDoqnjB7Um4 ]

Anyway, let’s get on with it. As with my previous tour blog, I am fortunate in that my parents trained me to never throw anything away, so I still have a little brown journal in which I recording my experiences of this trip (the notebook is itself an oddity as a recycled object my mother gave me, dating not from the early 90s, but I think from the 1940s?).

I also still have the printed roster of names and the full itinerary, with dates, times, even addresses of the hotels we stayed in and hosts all across England.

My little brown notebook is full of details about places I went, people I met, friends I did things with, how much I paid for food and so on.

I even noted down a game we played while riding around on the bus that was a combination of ‘telephone’ and ‘tongue-twisters’ (‘Larilyn likes limey lemons’). We had two tour buses:  one was always known as the ‘quiet bus’, while on the other, we regularly danced to a disco soundtrack (ABBA was the favourite).

Dancing on the Disco Bus: Andy, Deena and Me

Some comments in the notebook are truly precious as I experienced English culture for only the second time in my life: “mango pickle is good but very hot”; Church of England services are full of “lots of memorized, ancient, cultic words”; the toilet in one of our hotels made “violent exploding sounds”; a woman cautioned me from going up an ancient church tower because it had “wooky stairs” (or at least that’s what I thought she said—certainly she said “wonky”); and the most enigmatic, as we drove through Rye, I commented “very stupid”. I marvelled that McDonalds in England served strawberry trifle.

The first few weeks of the Choir Tour were in France, Switzerland Germany and the Netherlands, but I will skim over these fairly quickly, and focus mainly here on the English part of the tour. We landed in Paris on 18 May—already I see how dated my travel log is, since one of the chief complaints about the flight was how several of us were accidentally seated in the ‘smoking section’. A bunch of groggy young people then sat waiting for our coaches to pick us up and take us into Paris.

The morning after: Matthew, Me and Missy in Charles de Gaulle airport. One of the words we invented on this trip was ‘unsat’, which is what is depicted here on my face.

We spent about five days in Paris, visited all the major sites (including my first experience of the Palace of Versailles!), and gave short concerts at Chartres Cathedral and the Church of La Madeleine. Our concerts were mostly made up of American choral music, modern and traditional songs, but not entirely American, as we also included some of Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor. We also explored Paris and enjoyed many of its famous sights…

Kate and Adam in the iconic pose

After Paris, we made short stops and concerts in Geneva and Lucerne, where we ascended to the top of an Alpine peak.

On Mount Pilatus: Me, Jen, Steven, Kim, James and Kevin

We then crossed into Germany and spend a few days in Stuttgart, where we did a concert in the old Ducal Palace, in its beautiful ‘Weißer Saal’ (‘White Hall’).

Afterwards there was a reception where I met some interesting people. Our host was the Mayor of the City, Manfred Rommel, whose father had been the famous ‘Desert Fox’ commander of German forces in North Africa in the Second World War. Much more interesting to me, however, was a man we had met earlier in the day at the Mercedes-Benz museum, Count Schweinitz, about whom I knew absolutely nothing (and still don’t), but was the very first genuine titled person I had ever met. Given my fascination with noble history that had absorbed me throughout my university studies, this felt like I was seeing a real live manifestation of that history for the first time. (I see now looking online that his family has an ancient pedigree in Silesia). A few moments later, my historical interest was raised several notches when I met the Count and Countess von Stauffenberg. He was the son of the famous Claus von Stauffenberg who led the attempted assassination plot against Hitler in July 1944. According to my notes, the Count was not very thrilled to be chatting with a 21-year-old American, but his wife, a Countess in her own right (von Bentzel-Sturmfeder-Horneck, of Schloss Thurn in Bavaria) was very engaging, talked to me about politics and life in Germany following reunification, and even gave me her card and invited me to visit when I came back through Germany, as I was planning to do later that summer. I didn’t visit her—for boring reasons mostly involving fighting with my travel partner; we are no longer friends—and I wonder what it would have been like if I had.

After Stuttgart, the Choir took a leisurely boat cruise down the Rhine, then re-joined our buses the next morning for a short drive across the border into the Netherlands.

Jen, Dob and Me, on the Rhine
James and our very cool driver, Jan Evert

In the Netherlands, we spent the morning at Het Loo Palace. This was the favourite residence of William and Mary as Dutch stadtholders before they became king and queen of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1689. It’s a beautiful building, and especially its gardens, though the scale really drove home the point to me of what it meant to be a prince in a Calvinist republic versus an Anglican monarchy (which was itself of course a lot more restrained than what we had seen in absolutist France at Versailles the week before).

On a previous European tour, the William & Mary Choir had famously sang at Het Loo for Princess Margriet, sister of the then Queen of the Netherlands, as part of the ongoing theme of re-connecting with our William & Mary past. But on this trip we did not—I guess it was felt that meeting the Queen of England in a few weeks would be ample royal contact. Another outstanding anecdote emerges from my notebook at this point: in the gift shop, none of us had any guilders, since we were not even staying one night in the Netherlands, and this was before many people had a credit card. Our friend Kate did have one, but there was a spend minimum, so a bunch of us tried to pool our purchases, and “the shop ladies were so slow and funny and it took nearly a half an hour. So we were quite late for lunch!” In the back of the notebook where I kept track of my spending, there is a note that says I owe Kate 18.75 guilders—I wonder if I ever paid her back?

That evening we took the ferry from Hoek van Holland to Harwich, then in the grey mist of a London morning we had a tour on a boat up and down the Thames. It was my second time in London, so I felt like an old hand. There’s a fun picture of me (and the same Kate) with Barbara and Larilyn who all considered ourselves to be devoted Gilbert and Sullivan fans (and we had performed in several operettas together in the previous four years).

We stayed in a warm and friendly hotel run by Italians very near the British Museum, St. Margaret’s—I’ve often walked down these streets more recently trying to remember which one it was, and now, looking at the itinerary, I see the address is on Bedford Place, and it looks like the hotel is still there but is now called the Beauchamp. In my diary I noted how strange it was to have to walk up and down stairs to get to our room (it was three old houses connected together), and how nice it was of the owner “Mrs Marazzi” to let us put things in the refrigerator, and even lent us plates and cutlery one night when we ordered dinner from an Indian takeaway. When we left London a week later, we serenaded the hotel staff from the street—such was our way when we were on tour. While in London we visited many, many sights, as a group, in pairs, or me by myself. Often they were connected to William, Mary or Christopher Wren. For example, we visited the Wren Chapel at the Royal Hospital Chelsea (which looks amazingly like the Wren Chapel back in Williamsburg, but larger), and the Wren Chapel at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. We also visited the Tradescant Museum in Lambeth where we learned about two collectors who went to Virginia in the early 17th century to learn all they could about plants and native cultures in the new colony. We visited the graves of William & Mary in Westminster Abbey, where we ceremoniously placed flowers: orange and blue for the Orange-Nassau dynasty, light blue for Mary’s love of Delftware porcelain, and some small yellow buds “because I like them”, said Bettye-Jean Lendrim with a twinkle in her eye. We sang some concerts and church services where I struggled with “weird Anglican hymns” and their asymmetrical structure, and where I was amused by the way chaplains said “will you please sit down”.

the Choir sang in these rather unappealing green robes when we did church services (here in Canterbury)

While in London, we also visited the College of Arms, where one of the heralds showed us the original patent granting a coat-of-arms to the new college in the colony of Virginia. I noted in the journal that I had no idea such a career as ‘herald’ existed, and determined that one day I would become one.

I would eventually like to replace this image with a photo from the College of Arms itself–does anyone have one?

There were also some great adventures in London, such as meeting up with some of my high school friends and going clubbing at the Hippodrome (which was not such a good thing given that it made my ears ring at a steady pitch for several days, making singing a bit difficult); and, probably the oddest experience of the whole trip, encountering “Mike” in a pub near Covent Garden with Adam and Andrea (‘Dob’). Mike, a fairly rotund man with a mop of white hair, said he was a managing editor at TimeOut magazine, and entertained us for hours by quoting old American movies and singing songs. I noted that “We were sort of afraid he might turn out to be dangerous”. He kept buying us drinks, and then took the three of us round the corner for dinner (it was 11 PM), where he bought us “chips, 2 bottles of great wine [how would I know?], cheeses and deserts”. “Was he going to stick us with the bill?”, I wrote. “Nope, he paid, said he loved meeting Americans, and left. We laughed all the way home.” Mike, whoever you are, thank you for a hilarious encounter!

Then came the big day, June 3, where we gathered at Drapers’ Hall on Throgmorton Street in the City to perform for Elizabeth II. The Worshipful Company of Drapers, a survivor of the ancient London guilds of the Middle Ages (and of which William, Prince of Orange, had been a member), was now a philanthropic charity and had recently established a scheme to support William & Mary students who wished to study in the UK. As we sat in the anteroom waiting for the evening concert to start, the new Chancellor of the College, Baroness Thatcher, came and sat next to me on a bench and said she’d been trying to learn the words to the alma mater—she added that she once had a good singing voice, but was now mostly a “smoky baritone”. Not at all into politics then (or now), I had very little to say in my notebook about the encounter other than “Seems very nice”. A few days earlier we had voted on who would be presented to the Queen, and I was selected to be one of the four, alongside the choir president, Kate, plus Kim and James. We sang half the concert for Her Majesty (and I noted carefully, her lady-in-waiting, the Duchess of Grafton, so actually this blog could be about three duchesses, but never mind), then Doc was presented to her, and he in turn presented us four, but in his nervousness he introduced me as Kate. I noted in the journal that “The Queen looked great. Not her typical same-ole, same-ole dress. What a rush”. I also noted how odd it felt to sing “God save the Queen” to the Queen. She asked us in her teeny-tiny voice how long we had been on tour (“So long—how do you do it?”).

William & Mary News, July 1993 (see bottom for full link).
I was told there were more photos, including one of me being presented, but I’ve never seen it…

Then she left and we performed the rest of the concert. There were more speeches, by the Master of the Drapers’ Company (‘not very original but obviously well educated”), and by Thatcher (“Great Speech—she’s really got it together!”). Then there was another reception (we were getting good at those) and I met Lord and Lady Avebury—he introduced himself by saying “I’m the chap who owns those rocks”, meaning the Stone Circle at Avebury, not far from Stonehenge. His wife was an alumna of William & Mary and they both seemed pretty excited about making the connection. Again, I had no idea who was at the time, but I see now in looking him up that he had been a fairly prominent politician, a Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords and respected human rights campaigner.

From William & Mary News, July 1993

On June 7 we left London to begin the last portion of the tour, in the English countryside. Again there were two coaches, driven by a friendly couple, John and Naomi, both Welsh and both only about 5 feet tall. We first headed south into Sussex, where we sang at the Hurstpierpoint School, and had a brief stop in Brighton, which is now one of my favourite spots in Britain. Of course I went to visit the Royal Pavilion with its extravagant interiors and sculpted serpents and dragons, and I made a note in my journal about how bizarre it was to see people on the beach “wearing so little” (European men not sporting the huge bathing trunks we were accustomed to at home) and yet wearing shoes, since the pebble beach is otherwise impossible to walk on. That night I and my two roommates for the tour, Seth and Steven, stayed in an amazing old house—old, from the 15th century, to be precise! My comment was that our wing, the older part of the house, was ‘sagging a bit’, but I was very excited to see a peacock on the lawn in the morning. I think I was very lucky in my host accommodations because I was in a group of three, while most were in pairs, so we tended to get the hosts with bigger houses.

We then proceeded east, into Kent, and over the next few days visited Hever Castle (home of Anne Boleyn), Churchill’s country retreat at Chartwell, Bodiam Castle, Ightham Mote and Canterbury Cathedral. While in Kent we were once again amazingly lucky to have the best host family, in Cranbook, where we stayed in a 16th-century house. One evening our hosts drove Seth and me across the Thames Estuary to Cambridge University where we watched their daughter Suzie perform in what was called a ‘Scratch Annie’—a tradition they did during exams where they started working on a play, in this case ‘Annie Get Your Gun’, on Tuesday, then performed it on Friday. We were invited to the afterparty in St. Catherine’s College and both fell in love. It was especially fun to return with the rest of the Choir to Cambridge a few days later and introduce people to our new friends, Suzie and Steve, and in particular participate in a rehearsal of an a capella singing group (then a phenomenon newly arrived in the UK from the States) called ‘Something for the Weekend’, who performed creative arrangements of songs like ‘Summertime’ and ‘Like a Virgin’. Suzie, is now a fairly well known actress on the British stage; and I wonder what ever became of Steve.

Back in Kent, the Choir enjoyed one of the most special days of the whole tour. We visited Sissinghurst Castle and its amazing gardens, each with a different theme, either in type of flower or in colour. One of the concerts I remember giving most was in the rose garden. Doctor Lendrim was clearly in his element.

a most GLORIOUS photo!

The gardens were designed by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, in my mind two of the most intriguing people of the 20th century, leaders of the Bloomsbury Set. They had purchased the dilapidated Tudor manorhouse at Sissinghurst and restored its main tower and some of the outbuildings, converted into a modern home, in the 1930s. While we were there, Harold and Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, personally showed us around the gardens and even let us into the house—then off-limits to tourists—and in particular into the library, where, as I recorded in the journal, I was fairly overwhelmed to think of a library stocked almost entirely with books written by either your famous mother or your famous father. I wrote: “Vita Sackville-West was his mom—a real person”. I think it was my first real physical connection with a historical figure.

Vita’s Tower at Sissinghurst

Later that day, Nicolson accompanied us to his mother’s ancestral home, Knole, one of the largest country houses in England, and one of the few Tudor mansions to survive mostly unmodified by later generations. Knole, today managed by the National Trust is also noted as having one of the largest collections of 17th-century furniture, and one of the largest deer parks.

Knole

Knole fits neatly into the category of dukes’ houses for this website, as seat of the dukes of Dorset in the 18th century. Built in the 1450s, it was at first the residence of successive archbishops of Canterbury. Acquired by Henry VIII in the 1530s, it was later granted by Elizabeth I to one of her cousins, Thomas Sackville, who largely rebuilt the house. The Sackvilles were subsequently earls of Dorset (1604), then dukes of Dorset (1720). The 3rd Duke was one of the great collectors of the late 18th century, but when his son died unmarried in 1815, the dukedom became extinct. The house and its contents passed via a niece to the West family, who became the double-barrelled Sackville-Wests, and barons Sackville in 1876. Vita was the daughter of the 3rd Baron, and always lamented that, being female, she could not inherit the title or the house. She spent much of her time there, however, and it is said that her most-famous lover, Virginia Woolf, based her characters in her novel Orlando on the Sackville portraits at Knole.

One of my favourite examples of the extravagance of male dress at the court of James I: Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset

It was perhaps fitting, then, that I bought a book of letters between Vita and Virginia and read them with rapt interest on the bus, in the melancholic rain, with Kim. It’s one of my most cherished memories of the entire trip, and we cried together over Virginia’s growing despair at the end of their relationship. To add to the sombre mood, the very next day several of us witnessed the sudden death of the porter of the King’s School in Canterbury, where we were staying for the night. We had been amiably chatting with him only moments before. I think it was a transformative moment for many of us, to have come so close to death in our still very young lives.

On a happier note, the sunshine returned and we visited the romantically situated Leeds Castle, and took part in the traditional William & Mary Choir scone-eating contest. There was also a fascinating link (once more on this trip) with the history of Virginia, and we were proud to maintain the connection. Leeds Castle—in Kent, nowhere near the city of Leeds in Yorkshire—was built on an island in a lake in the early 12th century. It was later a favoured residence of King Edward I, and then of several Plantagenet and Tudor queens. What we see today, however, is a mostly 19th-century Tudor fantasy built by later owners. The Virginia connection comes from the castle’s 17th-century owners, the Culpepers, who were one of the original grantees of the Northern Neck proprietary colony given by Charles II in 1649 (confirmed in 1660 when he actually had the power to make such a grant). One of the Culpeper daughters married one of the other grantees, Lord Fairfax, and both families gave their names to counties in northern Virginia. The Fairfaxes owned Leeds Castle in the 18th century, then sold it following the American Revolution as they assimilated into a new life in a republic (one of the only English aristocratic families to do so). In the 1980s, the Governor of Virginia (and future presidential hopeful) Chuck Robb ceremoniously opened the newly redesigned Culpeper Gardens. I thought this connection with my home state was fascinating, but I was less impressed with the interiors, redesigned in the 1930s to look like what they at that time thought medieval interiors should look like—pretty kitsch. Also inside, we were served an inordinately huge amount of scones and jam and clotted cream (and of course tea), and one of the basses, Chris, won the contest with 12 scones.

Leeds Castle

The next few days were spent in East Anglia, where my normal roommates, plus a few others, stayed in a large farmhouse near the deliciously named Woolpit, not far from Bury St Edmunds. In a slightly odd moment of re-connecting to current US culture, here we watched the final episode of ‘Cheers’ together with our host family. In my notebook I enjoyed making notes on how the broad East Anglia accent sounded…which I continued in the next few days as we shifted our base of operations to the West Country. In the small Somerset village of Bruton—which gave its name to Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Virginia—we stayed on another farm, possibly my favourite host family of the trip. They had such heavy accents that I wrote in the journal that sometimes the father in particular ‘speaks to us as if we are talking in a foreign language. And we reciprocate!’ They gave us Wellington boots and we trudged around the farm, watching the cows being milked by great automated machines, and accompanying their son to the local pub for another night of singing (mostly Beatles songs, but we apparently taught them our favourite: “Down Among the Dead Men” and “Shenandoah”). We were also quite happy for nearly the first time in England to have a proper cooked meal, not just cold salads and sandwich meat, which is what I think the hosts all thought we wanted (they all said “surely you’ve eaten so much on this tour, and don’t want to load up just before [or just after] a concert, so we’ll just give you something light”).

Have a listen:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k5-zZmqhdo This version is by the Penn Glee Club—with a very cheesy intro…but the other versions I found on Youtube are quite dreary. This captures well the spirit in which we sang it.

In the West Country our coaches drove up and down the countryside, it seems, back and forth. Following the itinerary is a bit dizzying, and we visited so many cathedrals (Worcester, Exeter, Wells) that at one point I noted “Too many cathedrals too quickly!”, and a day or so later, “On to Salisbury Cathedral which I don’t remember at all.” There was a quick jaunt to the south coast, and the town of Budleigh Salterton, where, due to a mix up, we were asked to perform as the chorus for both ‘Pirates of Penzance’ and ‘Trial by Jury’ in a Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, though only a handful of us knew the music, having put on ‘Pirates’ the year before. Somehow we managed. We went north again into the Cotswolds where we stayed in Cheltenham—where I would later live for three years in 2006-09—as guests of the Dean Close School. We also visited a girls school at Westonbirt House, a fantastic neo-Tudor monstrosity built in the 19th century by “a wealthy sheep merchant”. I tremendously enjoyed having tea in the gardens there, though I admitted to the diary, “I don’t have a clue where we are”.

The Lord of the Manor: Me and Westonbirt

We visited Stratford-on-Avon, sang at the Sexey School (which of course elicited great titters), visited Stourhead Gardens and Glastonbury Abbey (on the Solstice!) and even met (completely randomly) the actor Bob Sagett at nearby Stonehenge. We had a British music appreciation day, visiting both Down Ampney, the birthplace of Vaughan Williams—and singing the (to us) very oddly metred hymn he wrote with that name—and the Malvern Hills, the beloved landscape of Elgar. Here we hiked up hills (and enjoyed a sign ordering us not to ‘worry the sheep’) and met even more friendly English hosts.

Down Ampney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgUFay0th9A

And here, sadly, is where the journal stops. I know there is another notebook somewhere in my boxes of ‘old stuff’, and someday I will find it, and perhaps add more details to this account, but for now, we can wrap up the tour by finally attending to the title of this post, the Double Duchesses.

On Friday June 25th, we drove to South Gloucestershire and Badminton House, where we were extremely fortunate to be greeted and given a tour by its owner, the Duchess of Beaufort.

Badminton House

As usual, there was a connection with Virginia and a connection with William & Mary: as noted in the printed itinerary, “Lord Botetourt’s sister married the Duke of Beaufort and there are two portraits of Lord Botetourt in the House which the Duchess will show the choir”. Norborne Berkeley, 4th Baron Botetourt, was one of the last royal governors of Virginia (dying in Williamsburg in 1770), who was also Rector of the College, and is duly commemorated with a statue in a place of honour in front of the Wren Building. He gave his name to the small chamber group within the William & Mary Choir, as well as to a county in southwest Virginia (pronounced ‘bot-a-tot’)—some of my childhood church friends will certainly know the song ‘The Great Botetourt Bus-Truck Race’, but that’s not really part of this story. More pertinently, the barony of Botetourt passed to the family of the dukes of Beaufort, of Badminton House, in 1803.

Badminton was an ancient manorhouse in Gloucestershire which the Somerset family acquired in the early 17th century, then renovated to become their main residence after the family seat, Raglan Castle, was destroyed in the Civil War. They were created Dukes of Beaufort in 1682 by Charles II, and remained loyal to James II even during the Glorious Revolution. Nevertheless they reconciled with William & Mary, and flourished as one of the great court dynasties of the 18th century. An interesting fact is that the dukes of Beaufort are the only family descended in direct male line (though illegitimate) from the Plantagenet kings of England. In 2015, during the excitement over the reburial of Richard III, a scientist examined the DNA of the current Duke and said with regret that there had been a ‘genetic disconnect’ at some unspecified point in the past—ie, someone had lied about a child’s paternity, I am guessing in the wild and unruly days of the 18th century. In the 19th century, as the story goes, the children of the 8th Duke of Beaufort, finding themselves unable to play outside during a snowstorm, invented a new game in the Great Hall, with a shuttlecock light enough to not damage the walls or the priceless statuary in the hall, which took on the name badminton.

Badminton is also famous in the 20th century as organiser of one of the two largest fox hunts in Britain, the setting for the Badminton Horse Trials since the 1940s, and for hosting Queen Mary during the Second World War.

Most of the family stories were told to us by the Duchess herself, who turned out to be one of the funniest raconteurs I would ever meet. Born Lady Caroline Thynne, she was the daughter of the 6th Marquess of Bath and Daphne Fielding (a later married name)—both considered amongst the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 1920s (her mother became a well-known author, and her brother would much later become the more famously eccentric Lord Bath, the one with the ‘wifelets’, who just died in April this year). We never saw the Duke, but the Duchess took us all over the house—a real treat, since it is one of the few great country houses in the UK that remains closed to visitors except as private tours—and kept us in stitches with her stories. There were always dogs with us on the tour. Lots of dogs. On the priceless Queen Anne furniture. Oh well. We were shown a secret door in the magnificent library, which I think amused us greatly.

Kevin and Adrian and the secret door

The story I remember the most (sadly without the details from the journal) was about her mother-in-law, the Dowager Duchess, who one day, at quite an advanced age, fell all the way down the main staircase of the house, only to comment upon reaching the bottom, that she was so happy to finally be able to notice—in mid-fall—how the intricate carving on the Jacobean wooden stairs continued onto the underside of each step as well! She also told us how her mother-in-law (the former Lady Mary Cambridge, who lived in the house until 1987) had suffered during the War as she had been called upon to host her aunt, the Dowager Queen, Mary of Teck, who arrived with over a hundred suitcases and dozens of staff, but, more worryingly, was famously a kleptomaniac. The Duchess wondered how many Beaufort pieces might still be lurking somewhere in the Royal Collection. It was in the small museum where the family relics were kept where I earned my Choir Tour prize (we all got one, traditionally, on the last day of the tour): as the Duchess showed us the coronation robes last used in 1953, I asked (being sure to remember to address her as ‘Your Grace’) if they would be the same robes in the event of the next coronation. I of course meant that they looked a bit ‘worn’, but she laughed and said that “fortunately, the waistline IS expandable”. I was mortified, but the Choir’s prize-givers immortalised the moment at the end of the tour by naming me ‘Miss Manners’. We ended our visit to Badminton by giving a short concert for an audience of one in the Beaufort Chapel.

Beaufort Chapel
A photo of the Duchess of Beaufort sent to me fellow choir member, Karen, but she thinks it was taken by another of us, Maria. Thanks!

I was saddened to hear of our delightful tourguide’s death only two years later, but in another interesting twist of fate, I was really pleased to host her daughter, the popular historian Anne Somerset, as the guest speaker at conference I organised in 2013.

According to the itinerary we then spent three days in that well-known tourist destination, West Horsley. We even apparently had two free days there. What on earth we did for two days in West Horsley I haven’t the foggiest idea. What I do remember is our short visit to another Duchess (two duchesses in two days!), and learning how to manipulate etiquette to obtain favours (no wonder I became a court historian!). We arrived in our coaches at West Horsley Place, a large 15th-century red brick manorhouse near Guildford in Surrey, and were greeted by its long-term resident, the Duchess of Roxburghe. Again relying on my now fairly patchy memory, she had apparently been told that the Duchess of Beaufort had given us lunch (which she hadn’t), and so, not to be outdone socially, she put on a nice spread of biscuits (the English usage) and cakes. Why we met the Duchess is a mystery, and the itinerary this time fails to enlighten. The only clue is that we were there to do a benefit concert to raise money for a new organ in the local church of St. Mary’s. I welcome suggestions from former Choir members in the comments box! As the tour’s resident Miss Manners, I do recall checking the etiquette books and noting that she should be referred to not as the Duchess of Roxburghe, but as Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, since she had divorced the Duke and he had remarried.

West Horsley Place

The house itself, West Horsley Place, I remember as being pretty dilapidated, and it wasn’t until many years later, on the Duchess’s death in 2014, that I discovered what a fascinating person she had been. Lady Anne Milnes was the daughter of the 1st Marquess of Crewe, a lord lieutenant of Ireland, secretary of state for India and ambassador to France, and grand-daughter of the Earl of Rosebery, briefly Liberal Prime Minister, and his wife, the richest heiress in Britain, Hannah de Rothschild. She married the 9th Duke of Roxburghe, in 1935, and was described in her obituary, as one of the last great army hostesses of the waning days of the Empire, setting up for tea each afternoon in the tents of her husband’s military headquarters in the deserts of the Middle East, as if a war wasn’t going on. Civility must be maintained! The couple received more notoriety, however, after the war, when the Duke attempted to force the Duchess into divorce by evicting her from their enormous castle, Floors, on the River Tweed in Scotland. She maintained a life for several months under siege in one wing of the castle, though he cut off the, phone, the electricity and running water, until she conceded to a divorce late in 1953.

A photo of the Duchess from sunnier days

After her death, her nephew, the broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne discovered unanticipated treasures under the cobwebs of West Horsley Place. Check out this delightful short video made by Sotheby’s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmj9LQrttho

On June 28th we had one last great tour, of undoubtedly the best of all British palaces, Hampton Court, then one last concert at St. Peter’s Church in Staines. Staines does not have a reputation amongst English people as ‘beautiful’, but that golden evening in mid-summer, on the banks of the Thames, with swans in attendance, I do remember it as a beautiful setting, as we all said farewell to each other, amidst great tears, as we sang our choir’s signature song, ‘Shenandoah’, together one last time.

The Choir of the College of William & Mary, from a recording we did the summer before
My tour roommates, Steven and Seth in Staines

The printed itinerary says the Choir departed the next morning for United flight #921 at Heathrow, but I wasn’t with them, having set out on my own by train for Cologne, where I would meet my friend Miriam, for the next few weeks of high adventure. But that is a different journey.

(images either my own photos, those of fellow choir members shared over the years, or taken from Wikimedia Commons)

The William & Mary alma mater

A link to the William & Mary News story from 21 July 1993 (may require an alumni login):

https://digitalarchive.wm.edu/handle/10288/19748

Dukes of Alba

Some dynasties are remembered primarily for one member, for good or ill, and such is the legacy of the ‘Iron Duke’, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the 3rd Duke of Alba (1507-1582). His military genius served King Philip II of Spain very well until he was sent to quell religious and political unrest in the Low Countries, and instead ignited a genuine revolution due to his heavy-handed approach.

The 3rd Duke of Alba, by Antonio Moro

But the dukes of Alba represent a good deal more of Spanish history than this single legacy, and from the 15th century to the present day have embodied the richness and grandeur of the aristocracy of Spain. When the 18th Duchess of Alba died in 2014, the news was covered as if she was royalty—and indeed, some would suggest she was the true claimant to the thrones of England and Scotland; journalists revelled in naming her the most titled aristocrat in the world, with over forty titles, including eight dukedoms.

The 18th Duchess of Alba, in Seville

This over-abundance of ducal titles held by Doña Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart y Silva points to one of the singular characteristics of the Spanish aristocracy (shared somewhat in Portugal and Italy) that titles of nobility by custom pass to a woman in default of a male heir. As such, the Duchess of Alba was head not just of the Casa de Alba, but also the House of Fitz-James (the illegitimate descendants of King James II and VII), the House of Silva, and others. And the head of the House of Álvarez de Toledo, the original holders of the dukedom of Alba, are in fact distant relations whose main title is a different dukedom altogether, that of Medina Sidonia. So unlike most other blogs on this site, I will be following the title (Alba), not strictly the patrilineal dynasty (Álvarez de Toledo). It is very messy from a genealogical standpoint, but blame the Spaniards and their more egalitarian ways!

The basic coat-of-arms of the Alvarez de Toledo family

To start with the origins of the Álvarez de Toledo family, however, we need to plunge back into the midst of the Reconquista of the 11th-12th centuries, as Christian armies retook the Iberian peninsula from the Moors, and the city of Toledo in particular, south of Madrid. A family that rose to prominence locally, as successive alcaldes (magistrates) of Toledo, gradually took the patronymic of one of their founding members, and the sons of Álvaro became known as Álvarez de Toledo. In the 1360s, they acquired the lordships of Valdecorneja and Oropesa, to the west of Toledo, and formed the two main branches of the family. The Counts of Oropesa (a senior line, but illegitimate in origins) flourished in the 16th century, then that title passed out of the male line in 1621, into a cadet line of the House of Portugal. The lords of Valdecorneja were lifted to the premier ranks of the Castilian nobility through the efforts of an important churchman, Gutierre de Toledo, successively bishop of Palencia, archbishop of Seville, then archbishop of Toledo and primate of all Spain (d. 1445). He had acquired a lordship to the west of Madrid, near Salamanca, called Alba de Tormes, a fortress at an important crossing of the river Tormes, which flows north into the Douro.

The tower at Alba de Tormes

The Archbishop gave this lordship and its castle to his nephew, Fernando, a soldier on the southern frontier, who was created 1st Count of Alba in 1439, by Juan II, King of Castile and León, given the court offices of Copero mayor (Cupbearer) and chamberlain, and married into the highest circles of the court. His son, Garcia, proved his valour on the battlefield in Andalucia in the 1450s, and was one of the powerful noblemen who supported King Enrique IV and his daughter Juana in the dynastic crisis of 1464. He was rewarded with lands: the marquisate of Coria and the county of Salvatierra de Tormes (further upstream from Alba), and the elevation of Alba de Tormes into a duchy in 1472.

the first Duke of Alba

But when King Enrique IV died in 1474, the 1st Duke of Alba did not side with the Infanta Juana in the ensuing civil war with her half-sister, Infanta Isabella, for he had marital ties to her new husband, Ferdinand, King of Aragon: his wife, Maria Enriquez, and Ferdinand’s mother were half-sisters. The 2nd Duke of Alba, Fadrique (sometimes anglicised to Frederick), therefore had even closer ties to the royal house, and he was put at the head of the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella in the invasion of Roussillon in 1503 and the conquest of Navarre in 1512. As a reward for the latter, he was named Captain-General of Andalucia, and given the lordship of Huéscar in Granada. When Ferdinand and Isabella’s grandson, King Carlos I of Castile and Aragon, aka Emperor Charles V, set out to more formally delineate a high court aristocracy for a united Spain, the Duke of Alba was named first of the Spanish knights of the Golden Fleece, in 1519, and one of the first twenty noblemen officially entitled to the style Grandee of Spain, in 1520. He also acted as Mayordomo mayor of the King-Emperor, that is, head of his household, and Councillor of State, and he accompanied Charles V in journeys to his various domains in Germany, the Low Countries and Italy.

the 2nd Duke of Alba

The 2nd Duke’s eldest son died relatively young, fighting in a disastrous campaign to conquer Djerba (in Tunisia) in 1510, but his second son, Pedro, Marques of Villafranca del Bierzo (in León, near the border with Galicia), maintained the family’s pre-eminent position as one of the most powerful viceroys of Naples in that Kingdom’s history. For twenty years (1532-52), he worked to improve the city of Naples, building new streets, new shipyards, a new viceregal palace, and centralised the legal and governmental systems to the detriment of the old feudal barons—with a severity which nearly caused a revolt that sent him packing in 1547. Such was his high profile on the Italian peninsula, that his daughter, Eleanora de Toledo, was considered a worthy bride for the Duke of Florence (later Grand Duke of Tuscany), Cosimo I de Medici. She is the subject of my very favourite Renaissance portrait, by Bronzino.

A third son of the 2nd Duke, Juan, also entered Italian politics, but in Rome—having climbed the episcopal hierarchy in Castile (bishop of Cordoba, then Burgos, later archbishop of Santiago), he was named a cardinal in 1538, and bishop of two important Roman sees, Albano and Frascati—a philosopher and theologian, he was well regarded and considered a candidate for the papal throne itself in the conclaves of 1550 and 1555 (and died in 1557).

Back in Spain, the 2nd Duke’s grandson now came to maturity and distinguished himself in early military commands in the conquest of Tunis, 1535—a sort of revenge for his father’s ignominious death—and in the defeat of the armies of France at Perpignan in 1542. The 3rd Duke, Fernando, is today considered one the greatest generals of the 16th century, loved by his soldiers and feared by his enemies. In 1547 he helped Charles V defeat the German Protestant princes at Mühlberg in Saxony, and in 1557, he humiliated Pope Paul IV by marching on Rome to keep him from openly siding with the French. A later pope, the distinctly more pro-Spanish Pius V, rewarded the Duke for his efforts in North Africa and Germany by sending him the ‘Golden Rose’, the highest papal honour, along with other symbolic honours, the blessed sword and the blessed hat, the designations of a ‘champion of the Church’. It seemed logical therefore for Alba to be sent to the Low Countries to help his king, Philip II, root out heresy amongst his Dutch subjects and restore good order.

The 3rd Duke of Alba had gained administrative experience as Governor of Milan (1555-56) and Viceroy of Naples (1556-58), so in 1567 he was named Governor-General of the Netherlands, and arrived soon after at the head of a large Spanish army. Reversing the policies of his predecessor who wished to settle disputes between emerging Catholic and Protestant factions peaceably, Alba set about restoring the authority of the King of Spain through the creation of a tribunal, the Council of Troubles (known as the ‘Council of Blood’ or Bloedraad locally). But by targeting and ultimately executing even Catholic moderates, famously the counts of Egmont and Hoorn, he pushed the Dutch too far, and instead of smouldering discontent, the country burst into the flames of open rebellion. Alba as before was an unstoppable general, defeating the armies of Louis of Nassau and the Prince of Orange, but the vicious brutality of the capture of the cities of Mechelen in 1572 (known as ‘the Spanish Fury’) and Haarlem in 1573 finally convinced Philip II that Alba’s policy was not working, and he was recalled to Madrid.

a contemporary image of the brutality of Spanish justice at Haarlem
A Franco-Dutch political cartoon depicting Alba eating babies, encouraged by the Catholic hydra (headed by cardinals de Guise and Granvelle), the headless bodies of Hoorn & Egmond at his feet.

In the last years of life, ‘El Gran Duque’ continued to dominate the court—he had been Mayordomo mayor since 1541, for both Charles V and Philip II, a Councillor of State and Grand Master of this Order of the Golden Fleece from 1546—and leader of the ‘hawk’ faction, pressing for harsher actions in the Low Countries, and punishments for England or France if they dared to get involved. In one final heroic act for the Habsburg monarchy, he led Spanish troops, at age 73, to Lisbon where he defeated the troops of the rival claimant to the throne of Portugal (Prior Antonio) in 1580, and served as that kingdom’s first Habsburg viceroy, a position he held until he died in 1582.

Having such a reputation to live up to, the succeeding dukes of Alba hardly stand out in the history of Spain’s ‘Golden Century’. The 4th Duke, while still the heir (from 1563 always known as Duke of Huéscar), scandalised the court when he broke a previous engagement with one of the Queen’s favourites, Magdalena de Guzmán, which cost him a year’s incarceration in the Castle of La Mota. He then led some of his father’s troops in the bloodiest campaigns in the Low Countries, before being disgraced once more in the eyes of Philip II upon the discovery that the real truth behind the earlier marital scandal was that he had secretly married his cousin Maria de Toledo; he was again exiled from court and died only three years after his father. Somewhat more successful were his illegitimate half-brother, Hernando, who was appointed Viceroy of Catalonia in 1571, and his legitimate full-brother Diego, who married one of the great heiresses of the age, Brianda de Beaumont, who brought the county of Lerin and the office of Hereditary Constable of Navarre into the family.

Diego’s son, Antonio Álvarez de Toledo de Beaumont, 5th Duke of Alba, restored the family’s prominence at court, as a Gentleman of the Chamber of King Philip III, Counsellor of State, and once again Mayordomo mayor del rey, in 1629. He also regained for a time his grandfather’s and great-uncle’s post of Viceroy of Naples, from 1622 to 1629. His period of rule in Naples was troubled, however, by bad harvests, a serious earthquake in 1626, and an increase in the number of Turkish pirate raids along the coasts of southern Italy. Back in Spain, he spent his time as one of the patrons of the poet Lope de Vega. His son Fernando II was also a patron of one of Spain’s great writers, Calderón de la Barca. The 6th Duke also married well, this time to the heiress of one of the leading families of Seville, Antonia Enríquez de Ribera. She brought with her several properties in Andalucia, but most importantly, the Palacio de las Dueñas in Seville, which would become, and continues to be, one of the main residences of the family. Like many palaces in the Mediterranean, Arab influence is easily seen in the architecture of this building, constructed in the late 15th century, in its relatively bland exterior, but exquisite inner courtyard, filled with an abundance of plants and fountains.

the gateway to the Palacio de las Dueñas in Seville
Las Dueñas interior courtyard

The 6th Duchess of Alba would ultimately become the heiress of her mother, Maria Manrique de Lara, as well, which allowed her son to add the Manrique dukedom of Galisteo (in Extremadura, near the border with Portugal) to the family’s growing collection of titles, in 1675. The next two generations do not particularly stand out: sons and daughters married well, mostly within the circle of Spanish ducal families (Fernández de Velasco, Silva, Guzmán, Ponce de León, López de Haro). The 9th Duke, Antonio IV Martín, gained prominence as ambassador to France in 1703-11, during the crucial transition between the rule of the houses of Habsburg and Bourbon, and attracted the attention of the young Philip V, who named him to be his Sumiller de corps, one of the top household offices, but he died en route back from France before taking up the post.

The 10th Duke of Alba, Francisco, was a Gentleman of the Chamber of Philip V and his son Louis I, Grand Chancellor of the Council of the Indies, as well as Montero mayor, of Master of the Hunt. In this last office, the Duke was in charge, as alcaide, of three of the most important rural royal residences, El Pardo, La Zarzuela and Valsaín. In 1688, he too married one of the greatest heiress of the era, Catalina López de Haro, 3rd Duchess of Montoro, 5th Duchess of Olivares, Marquesa del Carpio and of Eliche, Countess of Monterrey, Ayala, and so on. They had only one child, a daughter Maria Teresa, who inherited five duchies, five marquisates, five counties and the office of Constable of Navarre. In 1712, shortly after her father had succeeded as the 10th Duke, she married Manuel de Silva, Count of Galve, the youngest son of the Duke of Pastrana. The dukedom of Alba thus passed into the House of Silva for a time, and then in 1802 to the House of FitzJames-Stuart.

Before leaving the House of Álvarez de Toledo, we should note that the family continued and thrived in its junior line. The second major branch was founded by the Viceroy of Naples, the Marques de Villafranca del Bierzo (above), whose son acquired the Neapolitan dukedom of Fernandina and the principality of Montalbano, in 1569, during his time as Viceroy of Sicily and Captain-General of the Mediterranean fleet. This branch continued to hold prominent posts in the Spanish territories in Italy and in the Spanish navy for the next century, and in 1683 consolidated their position even further in the Kingdom of Naples through marriage to the heiress of the Moncada family, and the acquisition of the Sicilian dukedoms of Bivona and Montalto. A nephew married the triple heiress of the dukes of El Infantado (Mendoza), also dukes of Lerma (Sandoval) and Pastrana (Silva), forming another sub-branch until its extinction in 1841 (see Infantado). The main line soon (1713) married another significant heiress (though not until 1779) of the House of Guzmán, dukes of Medina Sidonia, which became the main title of the Álvarez de Toledo family and lasted into the 20th century. From 1955, however, these titles were inherited by another fantastic heiress, the famous ‘Red Duchess’ (see Medina Sidonia), and the senior male became the Marques de Miraflores, who succeeded as Duke of Zaragoza in 1975. The present head of the house is Manuel Álvarez de Toledo, 5th Duke of Zaragoza (b. 1944).

This now senior branch (Villafranca del Bierzo) has several junior branches, all formed in the 19th and 20th centuries, each with their own titles (mostly marquisates and counties). Two of these are prominent in Spain today as producers of quality olive oil (the Marques of Valdueza) and wine, one of the specialties of the El Bierzo region in northwest León. There were three other main sub-branches of the Álvarez de Toledo family, founded back in the 15th and 16th centuries. The counts of Oropesa, already mentioned, included a prominent Viceroy of Peru, 1569-81, then became extinct in the male line in 1621. The brothers of the 2nd Duke of Alba created two sub-lineages which included prominent courtiers and colonial governors. The line of Mancera, elevated to marquisate in 1623 for Pedro de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru (1639-48), was continued in his son, Antonio, Viceroy of New Spain (1664-73), then extinct in 1715. The line of Ayala, created a county in 1622, also included a Viceroy of Sicily (1660-64) before it too became extinct, in 1676.

Antonio, Marques de Mancera, Viceroy of New Spain

Returning to the story of the dukes of Alba themselves, we first look at the House of Silva, before turning to the curious British-French-Spanish hybrid dynasty of FitzJames-Stuart. The Silva family has its origins in Portugal in the 13th century (though claiming much more ancient ancestry through the kings of León to the Visigoths). In the 16th century, Rui Gomes da Silva, relocated to Castile and became a favourite of Philip II, who created him Duke of Pastrana (in Guadalajara, east of Madrid) and Prince of Eboli (in Campania, in the Kingdom of Naples). That story will be told in the entry on the dukes of Pastrana, while another branch is represented in the line of dukes of Hijar. As we’ve seen, the younger son of the 5th Duke of Pastrana married the Álvarez de Toledo heiress, and their son Fernando (1714-1778) adopted the surnames de Silva Mendoza y Toledo and the titles 12th Duke of Alba de Tormes, 9th Duke of Huéscar, 5th Duke of Montoro, 7th Count-Duke of Olivares, and so on.

Not succeeding his mother as Duke of Alba until 1755, he was better known as the Duke of Huéscar, using the traditional title for the heir, while he made his name in diplomatic and governmental circles. He was ambassador to France, 1746-49, where he befriended leading lights of the Enlightenment like Rousseau, and earned a reputation as a thinker which earned him the post of Director of the Royal Academy which he led for two decades from 1753. At court he obtained the post of Mayordomo mayor in 1753, and briefly served Ferdinand VI as Prime Minister of Spain (April-May 1754).

Ferdando de Silva, 12th Duke of Alba

The 12th Duke of Alba built a new palace for the family, known as the Palacio de los duques de Alba, on top of a ruined medieval fortress of Piedrahíta in Ávila province (west of Madrid) that had been in the Álvarez de Toledo family for centuries. The new palace was built in the late 1750s in granite, in Neo-Classical style by the French architect Jacques Marquet, at extravagant cost. The Duke had seen elaborate French gardens during his time as ambassador, and emulated them in his gardens here. It became the family’s chief summer residence, a place to escape the heat of the city of Madrid. Sold to the local community in 1931, it now houses a school.

Palacio de los duques de Alba, Piedrahíta

Duke Fernando (de Silva) married an Álvarez de Toledo, of the Oropesa line, and had only one son, who predeceased him, and only one daughter, who succeeded him. In 1775, Maria del Pilar Cayetana de Silva y Álvarez de Toledo, the 13th Duchess of Alba, nine times a Grandee of Spain, the richest heiress in Europe, married one of the richest heirs, the head of the House of Álvarez de Toledo, 15th Duke of Medina Sidonia. Together they dominated aristocratic society and patronised the greatest artists and thinkers of the day. The Duchess is most famously known from two full-length portrait paintings by Goya (the ‘White Duchess’ and the ‘Black Duchess’), and was thought by some to be the model for the scandalous nude ‘la Maja’ portrait.

‘White Duchess’
‘Black Duchess’

But when the 13th Duchess died in 1802, Alba was once again without a direct heir. Her great-aunt Maria Teresa had married in 1738 the 3rd Duke of Berwick, Liria and Xerica, who went by the interesting name Jacobo Francisco Eduardo FitzJames-Stuart (he had added the additional surname Stuart, to remind people where he really came from). This couple employed the Spanish architect Ventura Rodríguez to build an urban palace for them in Madrid. The Liria Palace, built around 1770, and today in the very heart of Madrid, remains the seat of the Dukes of Alba today, and is a repository of some of the treasures of the art world, including the Goya ‘White Duchess’ noted above.

Palacio de Liria

The grandfather of the Duke of Berwick and Liria was James FitzJames, illegitimate son of King James II of England (VII of Scotland) and Arabella Churchill, sister of the future Duke of Marlborough. His father created him Duke of Berwick in 1687 (a British peerage his descendants would still like to reclaim) and he led troops to try to save his father’s throne in Ireland in 1690, then went on to become a leading French general and helped Philip V claim his throne in the War of Spanish Succession. As a reward, he was created Duke of Liria and Xérica (or Llíria and Jérica, both in Valencia) in 1707, and Duke of Fitz-James in France, 1710. The succession was then split between his sons, the elder taking the Spanish titles (and the British titles, Earl of Tynmouth, Baron of Bosworth, though formally attainted), and the younger (half-brothers) continuing the line in France (see Dukes of FitzJames).

The 2nd Duke of Berwick, James Francis, was given Liria and Xérica and other Spanish dominions, including the curious title Grand-Alcalde and First Regent of the City of San Felipe, as the city of Xàtiva in Valencia had been (temporarily) renamed to honour the new Bourbon king. He served as a Gentleman of the Chamber of Philip V, general of his armies, and was sent abroad as his ambassador to Russia, 1726-30, Vienna, 1731-33, and later Naples where he died in 1738. In 1716, he had married another one of these colossal heiresses, Catalina Ventura Colón de Portugal, 9th Duchess of Veragua, 8th Duchess of la Vega, plus 4 marquisates (including Jamaica), 4 counties, and the hereditary office of Admiral of the Indies—the rank granted to Christopher Columbus (Colón in Spanish) by Ferdinand and Isabella after his discoveries in 1492. Veragua took its title from territory on the isthmus of Panama, while La Vega referred to the island of Santo Domingo.

The 3rd Duke of Berwick, Liria and Xérica, who married the Alba heiress above, was therefore also the Duke of Veragua and La Vega and Admiral of the Indies. His brother Pedro was First Equerry to King Ferdinand VI, and stayed true to the family’s Jacobite heritage through a marriage to Maria Benita de Rozas y Drummond, daughter of the Jacobite ‘Duke of Saint Andrews’ and Lady Frances Drummond. In a similar manner, the 4th Duke of Berwick married the sister of the Jacobite ‘Queen of England’, Louise von Stolberg, wife of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart (’Bonnie Prince Charlie’). The 4th Duke, while anticipating the windfall of the huge Alba succession, in 1787 lost the Colón titles, offices and estates after a lengthy lawsuit. His son and grandson, the 5th and 6th dukes of Berwick, also died before they could succeed to the Silva-Álvarez de Toledo titles. The 5th, Jacopo Felipe, was only 21 when he died, and his eldest son, Jacopo José, lived only from 1792-95. His younger son, Carlos Miguel, was only a year old when he became 7th Duke of Berwick, Liria and Xérica, and twelve when he became the 14th Duke of Alba, Duke of Huéscar, Montoro, Olivares, and all the rest.

The 19th-century history of the triple dynasty of FitzJames, Silva and Álvarez de Toledo, continued the pattern of grand marriages on an international, cosmopolitan scale. The 14th Duke married a Sicilian princess, Rosalia di Ventimiglia di Grammonte, and his son a Spanish-Scottish-Belgian countess whose sister Empress Eugénie was the wife of Napoleon III. The 14th Duke died at only 41, but is considered one of the great collectors and art patrons of the family, filling the Liria Palace with artworks he purchased in his Italian travels, and supporting young sculptors and painters. The 15th Duke and Duchess were close to the court of Queen Isabel II, he as Gentleman of the Chamber and she as a Lady-in-Waiting. The Duchess, Maria Francisca de Sales, like so many other Spanish noblewomen in this story, was an heiress, of the Portocarrero-Palafox family, and held in her own right the titles 14th Duchess of Peñaranda de Duero, 9th Countess of Montijo, 17th Countess of Miranda del Castañar, and about 10 others.

Jacopo Luis FitzJames-Stuart, 15th Duke of Alba, Duke of Berwick, Duke of Veragua etc

In the later 19th century, the Spanish aristocracy began the practice of granting some of their multitudes of titles and grandezas to younger children, both male and female, so the daughters of the 15th Duke and Duchess were created Duchess of Galisteo and Duchess of Montoro. Their son, Carlos Maria, succeeded first to his mother’s titles, in 1860, as 14th Duke of Peñaranda and Count of Montijo, then his father’s titles in 1881. The 16th Duke of Alba was 13 times a Grandee of Spain, Knight of the Golden Fleece and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos III. He served at court as Chamberlain to the Queen Regent María Cristina of Austria, in the government as a Senator of the Kingdom, and in international affairs as ambassador to Belgium, 1872-78, and to Russia, 1878-85, and as a diplomat in Istanbul and New York, where he died in 1901.

the 16th Duke of Alba

The early part of the 20th century saw the Casa de Alba as extreme loyalists to the royal family: both sons of the 16th Duke served as Gentleman of the Bedchamber to King Alfonso XIII, and their sister a Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria Eugenia. As was now tradition, the younger children were given titles: the counties of Baños and Teba to the daughter, Eugenia Sol; the Portocarraro-Palafox titles to the second son, Hernando Carlos, who therefore became 15th Duke of Peñaranda del Duero and 11th Count of Montijo; and the senior titles to the first son, Jacobo (who apparently went by the name ‘Jimmy Alba’). Both brothers were on the Spanish polo team that won silver at the 1920 Olympics, and both strongly supported the rise of the far right in the 1930s, with the younger of the two being a victim of the controversial Paracuellos massacres of November 1936. The 17th Duke of Alba would serve as Foreign Minister of Spain in the regime of Prime Minister Berenguer, 1930-31; later under General Franco, he was sent as Ambassador to the United Kingdom, in 1936, but his post was not formally recognised by the British government until 1939. In 1920, he had married yet another well-titled heiress, Maria del Rosario de Silva y Guturbay, 15th Duquesa de Aliaga, who would ultimately bring one more Duchy into the family, one of the oldest in Spain, that of Híjar.

the 17th Duke of Alba

Shortly after succeeding his father as 17th Duke of Alba, Jacobo FitzJames-Stuart decided that a family of practically royal status should themselves have a fittingly princely pantheon. One of the many families whose legacy they now represented, the Guzmáns of Olivares, had founded a monastery to the east of Madrid in the village of Loeches. The family crypt in the monastery of La Inmaculada Concepción was now rebranded as the Alba pantheon, and modelled on the royal pantheon built by Philip II at the palace-monastery of El Escorial. When the Duke died in 1953, his funeral was held here in great pomp and splendour.

Monastery of La Inmaculada Concepción, Loeches

The 17th Duke’s only child, 27-year-old Maria del Rosario Cayetana, succeeded to her father’s numerous titles in 1953, and then those of her maternal grandfather in 1955. She was now the head of the Casa de Alba, but also receiver of the treasures, lands and titles of the dynasties of FitzJames, Silva, Álvarez de Toledo, Guzmán, Sandoval and López de Haro. As 18th Duchess of Alba, 11th Duchess of Berwick and 17th Duchess of Híjar, she represented over 40 other Spanish (and Italian) titles, plus the now purely ceremonial posts of Constable of Navarre, Constable of Aragon and Marshal of Castile, 20 times Grandee of Spain. She was a high flying socialite, with a flamboyant personality, who partied with movie stars as a young woman and danced the flamenco at her third wedding when she was 85. Her first marriage, in 1947—considered by some to be the most sumptuous wedding in the post-war world, perhaps outshining another famous wedding celebrated that year in Westminster Abbey—was within the norms of accepted aristocratic practice: Pedro Luis Martínez de Irujo was the younger son of the Duke of Sotomayor, and they remained married (unusually for the high aristocracy of the mid-20th century) until he died in 1972. Their children were all given titles, the Dukedom of Huéscar, as usual, for the heir, and other dukedoms, marquisates or counties for the others (4 sons and 1 daughter), usually on their wedding—for example, the daughter, Eugenia, was created Duchess of Montoro as an appropriate pun when she married the prize bullfighter Francisco Rivera Ordoñez in 1998.

the Duchess of Alba in 1947

It was the second and third marriages of the Duchess of Alba that caused controversy in the family. In 1978 she married a former Jesuit and theologian, Jesus Aguirre Ortiz de Zarate; and following his death in 2001, she announced that she wanted to marry a non-aristocrat, Alfonso Díez Carabantes, 24 years her junior, which she did in 2011, but not before her children ensured that he formally renounced any claims to her vast fortune. By this point she lived mostly at the Palacio de la Dueñas in Seville, leaving the Liria Palace in Madrid and the administration of the Alba estates and collections to her eldest son. When the Duchess died in 2014, her son Carlos (b. 1948), who now used the surname FitzJames-Stuart instead of Martínez, became the 19th Duke of Alba, and his son, Fernando (b. 1990), the 15th Duke of Huéscar. It is uncertain who inherited the title of Duke of Berwick: by normal British peerage rules, a dukedom would pass to the next male heir, Jacobo Hernando, 17th Duke of Peñaranda, but some consider that the dukedom had become a Spanish title when it was recognised by Philip V in 1707, and therefore should follow Spanish regulations. It is within the power of Queen Elizabeth II to step in and reverse the attainder of 1695, but this is pretty unlikely. I suspect the Duke of Alba is content with his numerous Spanish titles and his collections in the Liria Palace.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)

Simplified Alba genealogy

dukes-of-alba-simplified-genealogyDownload

Current full titles:

  • Ten with Grandeza: 19th Duke of Alba de Tormes, 12th Duke of Berwick, Liria and Jérica, 14th Duke of Huéscar (ceded to his son), 15th Count-Duke of Olivares, 17th Marquis of Carpio, and five countships: Lemos, Lerín, Miranda del Castañar, Monterrey and Osorno (also ceded, to his second son Carlos).
  • Titles without Grandeza: 15 marquisates, 11 counties, 1 viscounty, 1 lordship, and the office of Constable of Navarre.

Other ducal titles in the family:

  • 2nd son, Alfonso Martínez de Irujo, 16th Duke of Aliaga, 18th Duke of Híjar
  • 5th son, Cayetano, 4th Duke of Arjona
  • Daughter, Eugenia, 15th Duchess of Montoro
  • Cousin, Jacobo Hernando FitzJames-Stuart, 17th Duke of Peñaranda de Duero, 12th Duke of Berwick, 8th Duke of La Roca

Borghese Princes

Most tourist visits to Rome include a stop at the Villa Borghese. The name evokes elegance and the splendour of the Baroque Age—the art gallery contained within holds some of the genuine treasures of the Renaissance art world. Visitors may not realise this was once the private residence and gardens of one of the leading aristocratic families of Rome. First laid out in the early years of the 17th century, the gardens of the Villa Borghese, the most extensive built in Rome since Antiquity, are still the third largest public park in Rome (80 hectares). Remodelled in the early 19th century along the lines of the ‘English garden’, they were given to the city of Rome and opened to the public in 1903. The famous Spanish Steps leads up to the park and to the Villa which now houses the Galleria Borghese and other buildings, including the Villa Medici, Vila Giulia and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, a zoo, and sports buildings that were built to host equestrian events at the 1960 Summer Olympics. The Gardens of the Villa Borghese are an integral part of the cultural landscape of Rome; they have been painted, described in poetry, and depicted musically in Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome tone poem from 1924.

The Borghese are still today one of Rome’s, and Italy’s, most prominent aristocratic families. Like most of the Roman princely clans, their pre-eminence derived from one of their members being elevated to the throne of Saint Peter. Some of the families of the papal aristocracy included more than one pope, but the Borghese had only one, Paul V, and one tremendously influential cardinal-nephew, Scipione. Also like many papal families, their origins were not in Rome itself. This family originally came from Siena, in Tuscany. The progenitor is usually given as a 13th-century wool merchant, Tiezzo da Monticiano, whose nephew Borghese gave his name to the family. Two centuries later, one of these merchants, Agostino Borghese, rose to prominence as a soldier in the wars between Siena and Florence—the competition between these cities was not only over local control of the growing wealth and industry of Tuscany, but was part of a much bigger struggle for influence in Italy between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Clever families like the Borghese could play off this rivalry and, if done right, obtain rewards from both sides. Agostino was first created a hereditary count of the Empire in 1432, then in 1458 was elevated to count palatine of the Lateran, an honorary position in papal service.

The Borghese dragon, with the Imperial eagle added

Agostino’s sons and grandsons continued to move between the worlds of trade and politics in both Siena and Rome, then his great-grandson, Count Marcantonio moved his family to Rome, as the ambassador from Siena to the Holy See in 1537. Shifting employers, he became a legal official within the papal government in the 1540s-50s, and ultimately papal governor of the cities of Ravenna and Orvieto. His shift in focus can also be seen in his two marriages: the first in 1531, to a Sienese patrician’s daughter, Aurelia Bargagli, then in 1548 to Flaminia degli Astalli, a Roman noblewoman. The eldest son from this second marriage would become Pope Paul V.

Pope Paul V, by Caravaggio

Camillo Borghese (1552-1621) studied law like his father, and entered papal service in the 1570s, quickly rising in the hierarchy until he was appointed vice-legate to Bologna, 1588, nuncio to Spain, 1595, and cardinal, 1596. As cardinal he filled the key administrative positions of secretary of the Roman Inquisition and vicar of the bishop of Rome. In the conclave of 1605, Borghese was found to be a good compromise candidate between the rival factions of French and Spanish cardinals, and was elected Pope Paul V. The nearly two decades of his papacy were important for the Catholic Reformation, reinforcing the authority of the Church, and in particular supporting the memory of previous reformers through canonisation: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Aloysius Gonzaga, Teresa de Avila, Carlo Borromeo and Philippo Neri were all made saints in this period (though several canonisations were completed only the year after Paul’s death by Gregory XV). The Borghese papacy is perhaps better known, however, for its policy of restoring the grandeur of the papal capital city—in particular, through the completion of the Basilica of St. Peter. Paul V commissioned Carlo Maderno to finally complete the massive building by constructing a monumental façade, and, not suffering from an overabundance of humility, ensured that the construction bore the inscription IN HONOREM PRINCIPIS APOST PAVLVS V BVRGHESIVS ROMANVS PONT MAX AN MDCXII PONT VII (‘In honour of the Prince of Apostles, Paul V Borghese, a Roman, Supreme Pontiff, in the year 1612, the seventh of his pontificate’).

The facade of St Peter’s Basilica

Like most Renaissance popes, Paul V was swift to elevate his family through offices and land grants. You never knew how brief your time in the papal throne was going to be, so it was imperative to act fast. His two brothers were both given huge estates in the rich agricultural lands north of the city (known as the Roman Campagna), and both elevated to noble titles: Giovanni Battista was named Prince of Vivaro (1609), and governor of the Borgo and Castle of Sant’Angelo (the principal papal centres in Rome besides the Quirinal Palace); and Francesco, was appointed Duke of Rignano (1607), and general of the papal armies. A Borghese cousin, also named Camillo, was named archbishop of their home town of Siena in 1607. But as far as papal nepotism goes, the real star was the Pope’s sister’s son, Scipione Caffarelli, who took the name Borghese, and became the ‘Cardinal-Nephew’ (cardinal nipote), the recognised head of the papal government. But Cardinal Borghese was more well known for his lavish parties, bordering on scandalous, and his skill and taste as a collector of antiquities and Renaissance masters. He was notorious for heaping favours on attractive young men, including one he allegedly had promoted to the cardinalate, Stefano Pignatelli. It was Scipione who built the Villa Borghese on the Pincian Hill, and laid out its gardens. He was a patron of Caravaggio and Bernini (two of my very favourite artists), and became one of the greatest collectors of art in Europe. His collections form the core of the Galleria Borghese in his former pleasure palace.

Cardinal Borghese, by Leoni
Caravaggio, Boy with a Basket of Fruit
Bernini, Apollo and Daphne

One of the key features of the Roman aristocracy, of course, is that popes and cardinals do not have sons (at least legitimate ones), so their wealth and power are channelled into nephews. In this case, everything went to Giovanni Battista’s son, Marcantonio II, 2nd prince of Vivaro in 1609, and 1st prince of Sulmona in 1610. Sulmona was not a papal fief, but was granted by the King of Spain as a favour to the pope, whose favour he was attempting to court. Located in the northern part of the Kingdom of Naples, the Abruzzo, it had been one of the earliest principalities created on the peninsula by the Habsburg kings, in 1526. The new prince was also created a Grandee of Spain and Knight of the Order of Calatrava. Closer to Rome, Marcantonio was loaded down with even more titles and estates: Principe di Sant’Angelo, Principe di San Polo, Duca di Monte Compatri, Duca di Palombara, Duca di Poggio Nativo, and several other fiefs with titles of marquis, count or baron. Much of these were paid for by the enormous dowry he received upon his marriage to Camilla Orsini, heiress of one of the oldest and most powerful families in Rome. As part of Paul V’s foreign policy, his nephew Marcantonio had at first been proposed as a groom for princesses—a daughter of Henry IV of France, or a daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany—but in the end, an Orsini marriage tied the Borghese forever to the top ranks of the Roman aristocracy. To further solidify the dynasty’s long-term presence in Rome, Paul V also built the stunning Pauline Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore to serve as the dynastic crypt, which is still does today.

Borghese Chapel, Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome

And of course they would need a centre of operations for the living, so the Pope also gave his nephew a sumptuous palazzo near the Campo Marzio, the Palazzo Borghese. Situated on the northern edge of the ancient centre of the city, near the river, the Palazzo had been purchased in 1604 and enlarged by Cardinal Camillo before he became pope, then given to his brothers; it was developed further in the later 17th century, and its new interior courtyard has been described as amongst the most spectacular anywhere. Other palaces were built nearby to house other members of the family, and the square was ultimately named for the family, Piazza Borghese. Most of the family’s great artworks were kept here until transferred to the Villa Borghese up on the hill. In more recent times, the Palazzo Borghese has hosted (since the 1920s) the exclusive aristocratic club, Circolo della caccia on the piano nobile, and the embassy of Spain.

Palazzo Borghese in Rome

Marcantonio’s son, Paolo, would also make a spectacular marriage (in 1638), to another great heiress, Olimpia Aldobrandini, 3rd Principessa di Meldola, 2nd Principessa di Rossano. The Aldobrandini were originally from Florence, and had been elevated into the Roman aristocracy by the election of Pope Clement VIII (Paul V’s predecessor). Meldola was a large estate in the Romagna (one of the main provinces of the Papal States), while Rossano, like Sulmona, was a principality created by the king of Spain in Calabria. Like so many papal families, the Borghese were now connected to both the Papal States and to the Kingdom of Naples. But aside from these two important feudal properties, Meldola and Rossano, much of the Aldobrandini fortune passed to other families (through Olimpia’s second marriage, to a Pamphili), and the Borghese would have to wait until the middle of the 18th century, and the outcome of lengthy lawsuits, to recoup their expected inheritance.

Inheriting all of his family’s vast wealth in 1717, Marcantonio III, 3rd Prince of Sulmona, was able to play host to princes and prelates, attracting the attention of the Emperor himself, Charles VI, who appointed him Viceroy of Naples in 1721. His pro-Habsburg position was adopted in part to secure the restoration of his Neapolitan properties (especially Rossano), which had been confiscated from his father for supporting the Bourbons during the War of Spanish Succession. His Roman origins helped smooth over political tensions between Naples and Rome, but in the end he was replaced by an Austrian, one of the Emperor’s favourites. In the next generation, the Borghese were lured back into support of the Bourbons, once more in charge in Naples after 1735, and their head, Prince Camillo Borghese, was created a Grandee of Spain, 1739, and a Knight of the Order of San Gennaro in 1740. They of course maintained ties to the Papacy, with Cardinal Francesco acting as Prefect of the Papal Palace, while sisters reinforced marital links with both Roman families (Odeschalchi and Pamphili) and Neapolitan families (Caraffa). This was continued in the subsequent generation as well, with the eldest son, Marcantonio IV, serving as a Senator of Rome; the second son Paolo taking on the Aldobrandini inheritance (and recognised as Prince in his own right, 1777); the third son, Cardinal Scipione, becoming Prefect of the Papal Household and Camerlengo of the Sacred College; and a fourth son, acting as ambassador of Spain to the court of Berlin. Marcantonio also married well, to yet another heiress, this time from the powerful Florentine Salviati family, and he made use of his wife’s large dowry to improve the gardens of the Villa Borghese in the 1770s-80s, remodelling them along the lines of the fashionable English garden style, and opening the Villa itself as a public museum, one of the first of its kind.

When the explosive energy of the French Revolution expanded into Italy in the late 1790s, the elderly Prince Marcantonio IV was a tepid supporter, but his sons, Camillo and Francesco, both embraced the movement fully, joining the revolutionary armies of Napoleon, and putting their faith fervently in the his ideals for the reinvigoration of Italy. Both brothers fought with Napoleon across Europe, but followed somewhat different paths. Camillo married Pauline Bonaparte in 1803, was created a Prince of the French Empire, 1805, and Sovereign Duke of Guastalla in 1806 (a tiny state in the Po Valley formerly held by the Gonzagas of Mantua). Both he and Francesco (known as Prince Aldobrandini, the family’s secundogeniture) rose through the ranks of the French armies, Camillo in particular making a name for himself by encouraging the Poles to rise up against their Russian overlords, and as a reward, being named Governor-General of the departments of France on the ‘far side’ (from a Parisian perspective) of the Alps (‘les départements-au-delà des Alpes’) in 1808.

Prince Camillo Borghese, by Gérard

Prince Camillo ruled from Turin as a virtual sovereign, though he did it alone, as by this point his marriage to Pauline was in name only. Camillo also agreed (under pressure) to sell a number of the Borghese treasures, notably the collections of ancient sculpture, to the Louvre in Paris. The famous (though somewhat scandalous at the time) Canova sculpture of the Emperor’s sister, however, remained in Italy.

Pauline Borghese, by Canova, Galleria Borghese

Camillo’s younger brother Francesco also married into Napoleon’s intimate circle, to one of Empress Josephine’s chief ladies-in-waiting, Adèle de la Rochefoucauld, and was named Brigadier General and First Equerry of the Emperor in 1811. When the Empire fell in 1814, Prince Camillo submitted swiftly to the Allies in Piedmont, and retired to his palace in Florence (the former Palazzo Salviati, now called the Palazzo Borghese), while Pauline remained in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome. Prince Francesco remained in France, and continued to serve in the now royalist army until he retired in 1830. He succeed his childless older brother in 1832, and, having been formally re-confirmed in his Roman titles by the Pope in 1831, began to purchase even more properties from Italian families who had not done so well under Napoleon: the principality of Nettuno, on the coast south of Rome, and the dukedom of Bomarzo, in the hills of northern Lazio.

Francesco Borghese, as a French general

Francesco’s three sons were models for how the world of the high aristocracy would look in the nineteenth century—rich, completely cosmopolitan and mostly floating above national borders. This is best seen in their marriages: the eldest, Marcantonio V, 8th Prince of Sulmona, married Lady Gwendoline Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury; Camillo, Prince Aldobrandini, married Princess Marie-Flore von Arenberg (from the Austrian branch of that family); while Scipione, Duke Salviati (a title confirmed by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1834) married Arabella de FitzJames, daughter of the French duke of FitzJames (a descendant of King James II). from these marriages sprouted the three main lines that continue today: Borghese, Aldobrandini and Salviati. A fourth separate branch was formed when Marcantonio’s third son, Giulio, married the heiress of the house of Torlonia (a Roman family, of French origins) in 1872, and took on their titles as Prince of Fucino (in Abruzzo). Other cadet branches followed as this family tree exploded: the princes of Nettuno, the dukes of Bomarzo (also princes of Sant’Angelo e San Polo), and the Princes of Leonforte. Depending on your reckoning, there are seven extant lines of the House of Borghese (though some of these use the surnames Aldobrandini, Salviati or Torlonia—see separate entries for these families).

In the 20th century, there have been several prominent Borghese princes or princesses. Scipione, 10th Prince of Sulmona, gained international fame by participating in the Peking to Paris automobile race of 1907. He was an avid traveller and published several accounts of journeys in Asia; back home he served as a member of the radical party in the Italian Parliament, 1904-13, interested particularly in agricultural reform.

Prince Scipione, centre, with his partner the journalist Luigi Barzini

But reform wasn’t enough to save the precarious family finances (which in part determined the donation of the Villa Borghese to the state in 1903), and most of the lands outside of Rome were sold off by the 1920s. In the difficult decades that followed, many family members supported the rise of fascism in Italy, notably Giacomo Borghese a cousin from the branch of Poggio Nativo, known as the Principe di Leonforte due to his marriage to the heiress of the Sicilian Lanza-Branciforte family in 1927. He was President of the Council of the Province of Rome, 1936, and Governor of the City of Rome, 1939-43. It was Prince Scipione’s nephew, Prince Junio Valerio, who was the family’s most prominent public face, known as ‘The Black Prince’. A prominent naval commander in the 1940s, Junio Valerio later became a leader of the post-war far right movement in Italy, a founder of the Fronte Nazionale in 1967, and leader of an unsuccessful neo-Fascist coup in December 1970.

‘The Black Prince’, Don Junio Borghese

Sticking to more tried and true methods of family aggrandisement, the Black Prince’s elder brother, Flavio, 12th Prince of Sulmona, made one last spectacular Borghese marriage, in 1927, to Angela Paterno, 7th Princess of Sperlinga dei Manganelli, though which he acquired estates in Sicily and the very grand but somewhat dreary (let’s call it shabby chic) 15th-century Palazzo Manganelli in Catania. Their son Camillo was head of the family until 2011, and their grandson Scipione (b. 1970), is 14th Prince of Sulmona, 9th Prince of Sperlinga, 15th Prince of Rossano, etc. Other prominent members of the dynasty in recent years have come from the cadet branch of Bomarzo, including Princess Marcella, who founded a cosmetics empire in the 1950s (part of Revlon), and her grandson, Lorenzo Borghese, an American reality television star.

Some Borghese properties to visit outside Rome, from north to south:

Palazzo Borghese in Siena
Palazzo Borghese in Florence
Palazzo Manganelli in Catania, Sicily

(images from Wikimedia Commons)

Current titles held in the senior branch: Principe di Sulmona, Principe di Rossano, Principe di Monte Compatri, Principe di Vivaro, Principe di Sperlinga dei Manganelli, Principe di Nettuno, Principe di Sant’Angelo, Principe di San Polo dei Cavalieri, Duca di Palombara, Duca di Canemorto, Duca di Castelchiodato, Duca di Poggio Nativo, Duca di Bomarzo, plus 6 titles of marchese, 2 of count, 1 of baron, and more than 15 titles of signore.

Simplified genealogy

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Dukes of Mecklenburg

Lovers of British royal history are familiar with the period when royal brides were regularly imported to England from small German principalities with intriguing names: Ansbach, Saxe-Gotha, Mecklenburg-Strelitz. The last of these was the native land of Queen Charlotte, consort of George III—she is probably the most familiar of these consorts, in part due to her brilliant portrayal by Helen Mirren opposite Nigel Hawthorne in the 1994 film The Madness of King George. For me, I remember Charlotte of Mecklenburg mostly as one of the two imposing portraits in the state rooms of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I went to university.

studio of Allan Ramsay (1762)

A wider knowledge about Mecklenburg-Strelitz itself, however, is almost completely lacking. When you start to take a look more closely at this region, the northernmost part of the former East Germany, its history is far more fascinating than merely the birthplace of Queen Charlotte, as one of only two ducal families in the Holy Roman Empire with Slavic origins (the other being Pomerania), and one of very oldest and longest-lasting ducal dynasties in Germany, with continuous rule from the 12th century until the fall of the German monarchies in 1918, and representative claimants to the title still today. They had one of the more distinctive symbols on their coat-of-arms, the bull’s head, and a bull acted as a ‘heraldic beast’ alongside another creature typical of heraldry in this region, the griffin (or gryphon).

And although never remembered as one of Germany’s major princely houses, the Mecklenburgs managed to give their name to a county in western North Carolina (whose capital, Charlotte, is named for the queen-consort), and another, extremely rural county in southern Virginia. The rural nature of this county seems appropriate. The area ruled by the dukes of Mecklenburg (today’s German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), with a long coastline along the Baltic Sea, is mostly rural, with a few historic towns, but no major cities. Rostock is the largest, with just over 200,000 people, followed by the state capital, Schwerin, at just under 100,000. The terrain is flat and sandy or marshy, with soil not renowned for fertility, nor was it ever a major industrial centre. Yet its palaces look spectacular, particularly Ludwigslust, the region has not one but two of the oldest universities in Europe (Rostock, 1419, and Greifswald, 1456), and its dukes were amongst the wealthiest in the Empire at the start of the 20th century. I was therefore intrigued to learn more about their story, and as this is an area of Germany I have never visited, this short history will be as much a virtual tour for me as it is for my readers.

The House of Mecklenburg is sometimes referred to as the Nikotlings, named for Niklot, an early 12th-century chief of the region’s Slavic tribes, known as the Obotrites (or Abodrites), whose base was a fortress called ‘Mikla Burg’ (given as ‘big fortress’ in Old Saxon—but could it not be a corruption of not Niklot’s Burg, much like Nikolai becomes Mikołaj in Polish?). The Obotrites were also known to their German neighbours as Wends, a confederation of Slavic tribes living along the banks of the River Elbe (which gives them another name, Polabians, which means those who live ‘along’—po in most Slavic languages—the Elbe, or Laba). In their ongoing struggles against their Germanic neighbours to the west, the Saxons, they sometimes aligned with other powers, the Franks under Charlemagne, the Polish princes to the east, or the kings of a newly emergent power in the Baltic, Denmark. And sometimes they adopted Christianity and sometimes they rejected it, to best suit their shifting alliances. An earlier Obotrite prince (sometimes called ‘king’), Gottschalk, whose German name means ‘servant of God’—he doesn’t seem to have a Slavic name—married a Danish princess, established a much larger and more autonomous principality—stretching into what is now Holstein, with a capital at Liubice, today’s Lübeck—and tried to convert his people before he was murdered in 1066.

the Wends lived in the uncoloured area in the northeast

The eastward march of German and Christian colonisation was relentless, and eventually the rulers of the Wends turned to the Holy Roman Emperor for protection: Niklot’s son Pribislav, ruler of the eastern Obotrites, with his capital in Schwerin (Zuarin), was recognised as a prince of the Empire in the 1160s, formally converted to Christianity, endowed the bishopric of Schwerin, founded a major abbey at Doberan, and even went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But this came at a price: Mecklenburg was formally put under the feudal overlordship of the Duke of Saxony, then of the King of Denmark, until the 1220s when they freed themselves of any vassalage except the emperor himself. By this point they were becoming Germanised—I would be curious to know exactly when these princes and their high nobility stopped speaking a Slavic language—and adopted names like Heinrich and Johann, though interestingly, one of the most repeated dynastic names, up to the present day, would remain Borwin (from Buriwoj). Traces of Slavic origins are also still present in the names of towns in the region, like Stargard (stari, old, gorod, fortress), or other place names ending in ‘itz’ or ‘ow’. It is clear, however, that the Mecklenburg princes adopted the Germanic practice of partible inheritance. This meant that all sons inherited a claim to rule, and the territory was sometimes ruled jointly by brothers, and sometimes partitioned into smaller territories. From the 1230s, there were four Mecklenburg principalities: Schwerin, Werle, Rostock and Parchim. The latter two of these were soon reincorporated, but the line of Werle remained distinct until 1436. The senior line was elevated by Emperor Charles IV from princes to dukes in 1348, but this aggrandisement was immediately followed by another partition, and the line of Mecklenburg-Stargard would remain separate until 1471.

Marriage patterns in the fourteenth century for the new dukes demonstrate a balance between older alliances with other Slavic princes in Pomerania or Poland, with German neighbours in Brandenburg or Holstein (with whom they were also frequently at war), but also with their Baltic neighbours to the north, Denmark and Sweden. In the 1350s, the ambitious first Duke of Mecklenburg, Albert II, involved himself more directly in the internal politics of the Scandinavian kingdoms, using his wife’s connections, as sister of King Magnus IV of Sweden, and grand-daughter of Haakon V of Norway. With the support of disaffected nobles, he led a coup that allowed his son Albert to take the throne of Sweden in 1364. His grandson, also called Albert, claimed the Danish throne in 1375. King Albert of Sweden was never popular, seen as far too German, and after 8 years of civil war, his noble supporters turned on him, deposed him in 1389, and imprisoned him for five years. Still, he and his remaining allies held Stockholm, and his son ruled the island of Gotland, until 1398. The rule of the Mecklenburgs in Sweden and Denmark was short lived.

Duke Albert II (right) and King Albert of Sweden

Returning focus to Mecklenburg itself, Albert’s successors developed their capital cities in Schwerin, Stargard and Rostock, and founded the universities noted above. Brothers continued to rule jointly, with varying degrees of success, and reunified the duchy by the 1470s, only to divide it again in the partition of 1520, into Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Güstrow. Both branches, senior and junior, retained the title ‘duke of Mecklenburg’, and both were considered of equal rank as princes of the Empire, though the eastern part, governed from Güstrow (apparently from the Polabian ‘lizard place’ Guščerov), was smaller. Their biggest concern in the fifteenth century was keeping control over the port towns of Rostock and Wismar, who wished to increase their independence as members of the Hanseatic League of German trading cities in the Baltic. The dukes were not keen to let such a major source of tax revenue slip out of their control.

Bigger troubles came, of course, in the sixteenth century, with the outbreak of the reform movement led by Martin Luther. Duke Henry V was an early supporter and personal correspondent with Luther, but earned his nickname ‘the Pacific’ by trying hard not to get swept into the violence that engulfed Germany in the 1520s and 30s. He remained loyal to the Emperor. His brother (another Albert, of Güstrow) was even more loyal, and resistant to the new ideas, and fought on the Emperor’s side, but the family as a whole remained committed to the Protestant cause—Henry’s sons and nephews became the first Lutheran bishops of Schwerin and Ratzeburg, and both territories would eventually be secularised and incorporated into Mecklenburg territory. These two ecclesiastical principalities had often been useful to the dynasty to give younger sons territories to govern, so now there was even more pressure to divide up the duchy according to Germanic custom. Yet the leading female monastic establishment, Ribnitz, remained headed by Catholic Mecklenburg princesses until the last one died in the 1580s. It is important to remember that confessional divides in this period were not as clear cut as we like to think. Nevertheless, the Lutheran state church of Mecklenburg was formally established and recognised by the territorial diet in 1549.

In the midst of all this, dynastic aspiration remained an important part of the lives of the dukes of Mecklenburg, with Albert of Mecklenburg-Güstrow making one last bid for the Danish throne in the 1530s. His sons reunified the two duchies in 1557, and began to develop the territory after the tumults of the German religious wars came to a pause after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Güstrow and Schwerin were transformed into more fashionable Renaissance palaces, and the brother dukes John Albert I and Ulrich III became collectors of books, founders of institutions of higher learning, and educated themselves in the emerging fields of cartography and astronomy.

Duke Johann Albert

The Palace of Güstrow, built by Duke Ulrich, is the best remaining example of Renaissance Mecklenburg, its new building from the 1560s reflecting a fusion of Italian, French and German styles.

Schloss Güstrow today

Though devout Lutherans, the Mecklenburg brothers loyally furnished men and money to the Catholic Emperor to wage war against the Ottoman Turks in the 1590s. This unity and prosperity was continued for two generations more, until the brothers Adolph Frederick and John Albert II once more partitioned the duchy, again into Schwerin and Güstrow, in 1621, before being caught up in the Thirty Years War. They attempted to remain neutral in this conflict between the northern Protestant princes and Emperor and his Catholic allies, but they quietly supported the invasion of the King of Denmark (whose mother, Sophie, was their cousin), for which the Emperor deprived them of their ducal titles in 1627 and granted the Duchy of Mecklenburg to his leading general, Wallenstein. This act prompted the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, to invade the north coast of Germany, restoring the two Mecklenburg dukes in 1631, and leading a lighting invasion of central Germany in 1632 that changed the course of the war. In the peace settlements of 1648, Mecklenburg was successful in formally incorporating the former bishoprics of Schwerin and Ratzeburg into its territory, but was not successful in claiming some of the lands of the dukes of Pomerania, to the east, following the extinction of that ruling house in 1637. These lands went instead to Sweden, as ‘payment’ for liberating the Protestant German princes, and this part of the Baltic would remain Swedish territory until the settlements following the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, when Western (or ‘Hither’) Pomerania was given to Prussia. As further insult, the important and wealthy Mecklenburg port town of Wismar was also given to Sweden.

The rest of the 17th century was pretty quiet for the dukes of Mecklenburg. Of particular interest to me is the appearance in 1662 of Duke Christian Louis at the court of Louis XIV. He had divorced his wife (a Mecklenburg cousin), converted to Catholicism (or ‘abjured heresy’ in the parlance of the day), then married a prominent French widow, Elisabeth-Angélique de Montmorency, Duchess of Châtillon. She remained, now as the ‘duchesse de Mecklembourg’ a prominent figure at the French court, and although I know he died nearly 30 years later in the Hague, I know almost nothing else about his life. Certainly a future research project for me.

Christian Louis

At the end of the century, the last duke of the Güstrow line died, and the succession was squabbled over until a new partition agreement was hammered out in 1701, by which Frederick William was granted the central lands of the Duchy, based around Schwerin, and his uncle, Adolph Frederick II, was given an oddly formed non-contiguous territory called Mecklenburg-Strelitz, with lands in the east (Strelitz, from the Polabian word strelci, meaning ‘shooters’), as well as the lands of the former bishopric of Ratzeburg, in the west. Though called collectively, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the two pieces would be governed separately by its dukes. The other important detail of the 1701 agreement was the introduction of primogeniture in both duchies—there would be no more splitting of the territory or confusing successions leading to fraternal or uncle-nephew strife.

Schwerin in pink, Strelitz in purple

And so we come to the eighteenth century and the twin duchies as they are mostly remembered today: Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Right away, the larger of the two, Schwerin, began to emerge as the more actively reformist state: Duke Frederick William I set out plans that would abolish serfdom and establish taxes on the privileged groups of society, the knights and the clergy. His brother and successor, Duke Charles Leopold, pressed it further, and wanted to develop an absolutist state to control the old feudal nobility, notably with a standing army, and also with increased independent income derived from allowing Russia to station troops in Mecklenburg to fight in the Northern War (1700-21) against Sweden. To seal the alliance, he married the Tsar’s niece, Catherine Ivanovna (daughter of Ivan V, half-brother of Peter the Great) in 1716. The local nobility were not about to lose their tremendous power, however, and appealed to the Emperor, Charles VI, who judged in their favour and placed Mecklenburg under Imperial ban in 1719. The Duke went into exile and his Duchy was governed by deputies from neighbouring Hanover and Prussia until the ban was lifted, Charles Leopold deposed, and his brother Christian Ludwig II named as ruling duke in 1728, though with heavily restricted powers. In the late 1740s, he attempted once more to rein in the unfettered powers of the nobility, but was again defeated, and in a new government agreement of 1755, the nobles were formally assured of the freedom to rule their estates as they pleased unfettered, a situation that would remain in Mecklenburg, in sharp contrast to much of the rest of Germany, until 1918.

Christian Ludwig II

Meanwhile, Catherine Ivanovna had returned to Russia, with her only child, a daughter Elisabeth Catherine (renamed Anna Leopoldovna when she converted to Orthodoxy), and was considered briefly for the Imperial throne, but passed over in favour of her sister Anna, after the death of Tsar Peter II in 1730. A decade later, Empress Anna died, and Anna Leopoldovna was named regent for her infant son, Tsar Ivan VI, though his ‘reign’ lasted less than a year, and he and his mother would spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Anna Leopoldovna

Duke Christian Ludwig II, disappointed with his failed reforms in government, spent time building a country retreat called Ludwigslust (‘Ludwig’s pleasure’). About 40 km south of the capital, it is surrounded by rolling countryside and forests, not far from the Elbe Valley. The Duke’s son, Frederick II, moved the ducal government there and built a new, large palace in the 1770s, which is what is seen today, and a large country park, modelled after the then fashionable ‘English Garden’ style.

Duke Frederick was also interested in reforming the morals and education levels of the Duchy, abolishing torture and building schools. His son, Duke Frederick Franz I, was less of a reformer, and more concerned with paying for his father’s palaces, churches and schools. He made a deal with the Dutch Republic in 1788, to sell 1000 fighting men to supply their army (much like his neighbour the Landgrave of Hesse had done for Great Britain during the American War of Independence). And when the Revolutionary Wars broke out in Europe in the 1790s, he tried to remain neutral, but was exiled by Napoleon in 1806, and his duchy occupied. He reluctantly joined the Confederation of the Rhine in 1808—one of the last princes to do so, but was one of the first to leave in 1813, when his territories were liberated by Russian armies, in which one of his sons served as a general. Frederick Franz’s heir, Frederick Louis, was less a soldier, but a talented diplomat, and acted as a representative of Mecklenburg at the Congress of Vienna, 1815, where he pressed for territorial acquisitions in formerly Swedish Pomerania. These were given instead to the ever-expanding Prussia, and in compensation, both of the Mecklenburg duchies were elevated to the status of grand duchies, with the style of ‘royal highness’.

Meanwhile, 18th-century Mecklenburg-Strelitz was a much smaller affair, but went through similar transformations. Duke Adolph Frederick III rebuilt his capital, Neustrelitz, in the 1730s, after the old town had been destroyed in a fire. The castle at Neustrelitz was built in the imposing late Baroque Neo-Classical style by architect Christoph Julius Löwe, and remained at the centre of government affairs until it was destroyed in 1945.

Schloss Neustrelitz in about 1920

But Queen Charlotte of Great Britain was not born in Neustrelitz. She and her five siblings were born in Mirow, further south in Mecklenburg’s ‘Lake District’. The principality of Mirow had for many centuries been the headquarters for the local branch of the Knights of St. John (aka the Order of Malta), secularised in the 16th century, and used as an apanage for younger sons ever since. Duke Adolph Frederick’s younger brother, Charles Louis, rebuilt Mirow castle, also designed by Löwe, as a baroque palace in the 1740s.

Schloss Mirow

The Prince of Mirow’s son, Adolph Fredrick IV, succeeded his childless uncle as Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, in 1752. Nine years later, the new duke’s youngest sister, Sophie Charlotte, was married to King George III, and the ducal family would remain closely tied to Great Britain and Hanover for the rest of the century. Charlotte’s younger brothers all visited their sister in England, studied, and found employment in the British army. Charles was named governor of the Electorate of Hanover, 1776 to 1786 (and later succeeded as ruling duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz), while Ernst was governor of one of the chief towns of the Electorate, Celle, from 1763, and while there, acted as protector (ie, jailer) of George III’s sister Caroline Matilda, the disgraced Queen of Denmark. Ernst would later succeed his brother as governor of Hanover, 1802, and was named a Field Marshal of the Hanoverian army in the same year. The youngest brother, Georg August, took a different path: after he too briefly served in the British forces, he moved to Vienna and joined the Imperial army, rising to the rank of brigadier general in 1780, before dying in Hungary aged only 37.

Charles II in British uniform

As the Napoleonic Wars engulfed the region, Duke Charles II managed not to be exiled like his cousin in Schwerin, but was as reluctant to join the Confederation of the Rhine and just as eager to leave it. Charles had also recognised the need to balance dynastic relations, so while maintaining the link with Hanover and Great Britain, he encouraged his younger son, Karl Friedrich, to join the Prussian army, and by the end of the war he had risen to the rank of lieutenant-general (and would later go on to lead the Prussian government as President of the State Council, 1827-37). Charles II also solidified marriage ties with the Hohenzollerns in Prussia, and with other German dynasties in Hesse and Saxony. His youngest daughter Frederica married in 1815 Prince Ernst August of Great Britain, Duke of Cumberland, and therefore in 1837 became first queen of Hanover, now separated from the United Kingdom. Many years before, however, her sister Louise had become one of the most famous women in Germany, as Queen of Prussia, who met with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807 to plead for favourable terms after Prussia’s disastrous defeats. When she died in 1810, she was commemorated with the creation of the Order of Louise, and even in the 20th century, Queen Louise was held up in Nazi propaganda as the ideal of the virtuous German woman. Mecklenburg-Strelitz had thus shown the interesting large role a small state could play in placing its daughters on three of the thrones of Europe: Great Britain, Hanover and Prussia.

Louise, Queen of Prussia

As Europe began to re-assemble itself after 1815, the two new Grand Duchies tried to catch up in reforms. Both finally eradicated serfdom, but both were unable to shake off the power of the ancient feudal nobility. Grand Duke Paul (named for his grandfather, the Tsar Paul) moved the capital back to Schwerin, where he built a new official residence (now the State Museum), and modernised the legal system and the military. Grand Duke George in Strelitz, was initially also interested in reform, but grew more conservative as he got older and as Europe descended into a dangerous time for princely rule. When Paul’s son Frederick Franz II introduced a constitution in Schwerin following the wave of revolutions in 1848, it was George in Strelitz who led the opposition, and helped the old nobility bring down the constitution in 1850. Further attempts in Schwerin in 1909 would also be blocked, and by 1914, the two Mecklenburgs were the only member states of the German Empire with no written constitution guaranteeing legal freedoms to its citizens.

Frederick Franz II

Like so many German princes of this era, Frederick Franz II sponsored the rebuilding of the main grand ducal buildings in the 1840s to create a new neo-Gothic German style. The rebuilt palace in Schwerin is stunning, and almost completely unknown outside Germany. The original fortress had been built on an island in a lake, and the new palace, the masterpiece of architect Georg Adolph Demmler, draws on French Renaissance châteaux of the Loire valley like Chambord and Blois.

In this period of revival, Neustrelitz Palace would retain its 18th-century look, but new palaces were built nearby in the 1850s, the Marienpalais, for Grand Duchess Marie, and the Carolinenpalais for the divorced Crown Princess of Denmark, Caroline Marianne, both built in a more sober style than the Romantic fantasy in Schwerin.

Carolinenpalais, Neustrelitz

The last generations of ruling grand dukes in Mecklenburg-Schwerin were prominent servants of the crown of Prussia and the emerging German Empire: Frederick Franz II was a general in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars that built that empire; while his younger sons were active in constructing a German empire overseas, Johann Albrecht as President of the German Colonial Society, and Adolf Friedrich as Governor of Togo in West Africa, 1912-14. Johann Albrecht also acted as regent of Schwerin after his oldest brother, Frederick Franz III, committed suicide in Cannes in 1897. His homosexuality had been an open secret at the Prussian court, and although male same-sex relations had an oddly prominent place in the social sphere of Kaiser Wilhelm II, as the Eulenberg scandal would show in 1906, it could also lead to personal disaster. The Regent Johann Albrecht was also selected by the Kaiser to act as regent of the Duchy of Brunswick in Wolfenbüttel in 1907, until this territory was granted to the House of Hanover in 1913. But not everything was so Prussian: the youngest brother, Heinrich, married the Queen of the Netherlands in 1901, and he and Wilhelmina tried the best they could to defend Dutch independence during the Great War. Their daughter, Queen Juliana (whose dynastic name should have technically been Mecklenburg-Schwerin) would reign over Dutch hearts until 1980.

Meanwhile, affairs in Mecklenburg-Strelitz were quieter. Frederick William II was blind from the 1860s, and had a temperament of severe economy to the point of avarice. He failed to develop his country’s industry or infrastructure, but left behind one of the biggest private fortunes in the Reich, second only to the Kaiser’s. The Grand Duke owned up to a third of the land in the duchy outright. In this era of German Romantic revivalism, he re-created a chivalric order, recalling the dynasty’s ancient Slavic past, the Order of the Wendish Crown (1864), while Mecklenburg-Schwerin would also institute a new order, that of the Griffin (1884), using another visual symbol of the ancient Slavic tribes. The newly refashioned palace of Schwerin would also feature a heroic statue to the original Slavic chieftain and founder of the dynasty, Niklot.

Despite its relative backwardness, Mecklenburg-Strelitz was seen by some as a kingdom of fairytales, ruled by gentlemen and chivalry, in comparison to the hard military state in next-door Mecklenburg-Schwerin. This Strelitzian fantasy was not shared by the Grand Duke’s wife, Augusta of Cambridge, Princess of Great Britain, a grand-daughter of George III, who continued to maintain close ties with ‘liberal’ Britain, and a house in London, until communication (and her British pension) were cut off by World War I. Her son, Grand Duke Adolf Frederick V had tried and failed to liberalise the state in the early years of the 20th century, and died just before the war broke out, leaving his son, Adolf Frederick VI to scramble for a wife in wartime, and dogged by a scandalous past as a crown prince playboy. Dragged into despair, he committed suicide in February 1918, as the Reich was beginning to collapse, and a succession crisis arose.

Adolf Frederick VI, last Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin

His younger brother Karl Borwin (a name that re-emerged in this period of historical revival) had been killed in a duel in 1908, and their cousins were living in Russia and trying to survive the Revolution there. The ruling Grand Duke of Schwerin, Frederick Franz IV, was therefore named regent in Strelitz, unifying the two Mecklenburgs for the first time since 1701, but of course he, with all the other German princes, abdicated in November 1918. In the chaos of the last weeks of the German Empire, there had been some fairly odd proposals: one was to name the Grand Duke’s uncle, Adolf Friedrich (the one who had been in Togo) as ‘Duke of the United Baltic Duchy’ (or ‘Grand Duke of Livonia’), but this ephemeral state only lasted from 5 to 28 November 1918.

Frederick Franz IV, last Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

After the war, Frederick Franz IV and his wife Alexandra of Hanover lived for a time with his sister, Alexandrine, Queen of Denmark, then were allowed to return to their properties, and to visit their other sister, Cecilie, Crown Princess of Prussia, who lived in the Cecilienhof in Potsdam. The Grand Duke’s son, Frederick Franz V, rose in the new order to become a captain in the Waffen-SS. His father did not approve (and was himself detained by Nazis towards the end of the war), but it was the wider family’s disapproval of a marriage to a non-royal woman in 1941 that led a dynastic council to legally pass the role of head of the family to his brother Christian Ludwig in 1943. The latter was imprisoned by the Soviets in Russia from 1945 to 1953, then acted as head of the family, though all their properties were confiscated, until his death in 1996. The family’s personal properties were restored in 1997, to his two daughters and their distant cousin of Strelitz, while their uncle, Frederick Franz V, died in 2001, the last male of this branch of the Grand Ducal House.

It was therefore the head of the House of Mecklenburg-Strelitz who took over as chairman of the family foundation. Grand Duke Borwin (b. 1956) is the great-great-grandson of Prince Georg August who moved to Russia in the 1850s after marrying Grand Duchess Catherina Mikhailovna. Their son Georg Alexander was a Russian general but also a well-regarded composer and cellist in St. Petersburg, who married his mother’s lady-in-waiting, Natalia Vanliarskaya, who was created Countess of Carlow in 1890, as was usual for the wife of an unequal, or morganatic marriage. Their children were called count and countess von Carlow (more properly, Karlovka, in Poltava Province of Russia, now Ukraine) and were not entitled to the Mecklenburg succession. Given the lack of males in the Schwerin branch following the suicide of 1918, however, the last fully ‘dynastic’ male in the house, Grand Duke Karl Michael, who had himself been a lieutenant-general in the Russian imperial army, adopted his nephew in 1928, before dying in 1934. Count Georg Alexander thus became titular Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, confirmed by Grand Duke Cyril of Russia (as self-proclaimed head of the Imperial dynasty) and confirmed by the titular Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He returned to Mecklenburg in the 1930s, trained as a political scientist, was held by the Nazis then fled to the west in 1945, married a daughter of the last Austrian emperor (Archduchess Charlotte), and died in Sigmaringen in 1963. Their son, another Georg Alexander, who also married a Habsburg Archduchess (Ilona), moved into an apartment in 1990 in the old Mirow Palace to help with its reconstruction, and died in 1996, on the eve of the family’s restitution of their properties. His son, Borwin, therefore manages what is left of the Mecklenburg estates, with an aim to revive some of the Grand Ducal charitable institutions (like the Order of the Griffin) and renovate remaining built heritage.

Full titles: Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, Prince of the Wends, Schwerin and Ratzeburg, Lord of Schwerin, Lord of the Lands of Rostock and Stargard.

mecklenburg-simplifiedDownload

For a really interesting look at the lives and careers of the brother of Queen Charlotte, see the chapter by Clarissa Campbell-Orr, “Charlotte, Queen of Great Britain and Electress of Hanover: Northern Dynasties and the Northern Republic of Letters”, in Campbell- Orr, ed., Queenship in Europe, 1660-1815. The Role of the Consort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

(images from Wikimedia commons)

Best Ever Scottish Ducal Drive

Have you ever wanted to just jump in your car, head north, and visits six castles held by Scottish nobles? I’m sure you have. That’s what I did nearly twenty years ago, when I took a break while awaiting the viva for my PhD, spotted a rare sunny spell in the UK, and seized the moment. This was before I used the internet for much except email, so I had a huge ‘master scale’ road atlas and an outdated Fodor’s Guide to Britain. I guess that’s what made the trip so great, since I only had a vague plan, and had never really seen the much of the buildings or landscapes I wanted to visit. Luckily, being really into maps and record keeping ever since my family drove across the USA in 1979, I traced my journey on the road atlas, which I still have, so I can reconstruct the journey for you all here and now.

I headed north out of Oxford on the M40, then cut across to the M1 across Buckinghamshire on the A43. I remember it was extraordinarily sunny, my windows were rolled down as I passed through the countryside in which ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’ was set (true story), and I listened to Classic FM play Karl Jenkins’s Benedictus for the bazillionth time, then the catchy jingle ‘Autoglass repair, Autoglass replace’, followed by Ashokan Farewell by the violin boy-band Duel (one of whom I was briefly friends with years later) for the gazillionth time. Those were simpler times, when Britain only had one advertisement on the air, and two hit Classical music tunes on the radio, so I knew this was going to be a painful journey if I didn’t acquire some music, since the rental car was equipped with a cassette player, and I had brought only CDs.

Had I known about smart phones then, I might have been distracted to stop quite soon by the fact that I passed right by one of the major ducal residences of the 18th century, Stowe House, but that would have to await a later trip, and I knew I wanted to get really, really far north, and visit Scotland for the first time. In the end, on this trip I would visit four ducal houses, one ducal ruin, and a seat of a clan chief who may as well have been a duke: Drumlanrig, Inveraray, Dunvegan, Dunrobin, Blair Atholl and Châtelherault.

I was at first not really sure where I was going, so I got off the M1 at Chesterfield and drove west, across the Peak District. Stunning countryside, and the road passed by Chatsworth House—home of the dukes of Devonshire—and Haddon Hall—home of the dukes of Rutland—but I passed on, drove straight through the centre of Manchester (really? that’s what the purple highlighter on my map says!), then up the M6 to Lancaster where I spent my first night. There’s a castle there, but it wasn’t open and looked mostly like a Victorian prison (which it was), so I didn’t linger the next morning. I passed Carlisle and Gretna Green, so I knew I was in Scotland! I left the motorway there and drove along the coast a ways to Dumfries, then headed up into the Nithdale (the valley or dale of the river Nith—Americans, did you know that’s where any of those dale place names came from? In fact, I had just driven across the Annandale…who knew I’d come all this way just to end up in Annandale?).

By midday I was at my first destination: Drumlanrig Castle. This place is amazing. It is tucked away in the Southern Highlands, not very close to a motorway or a large city, so there were few tourists. From the long, long drive, you suddenly see this very pink palace. The local stone is very pink. The castle was built in the 17th century by the head of one of the branches of the Douglas family, one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Scottish history, who was elevated to the Dukedom of Queensberry in 1684. Inside the castle, I saw for the first time what would become fairly standard for Scottish ducal residences: lots of guns and antlers on the wall in the first few rooms, which I moved swiftly through, lots of huge magnificent portraits (which I scrutinised with care), and lots of tartan, on the walls, on the furniture, on the floors… The Douglas family merged in the 18th century with the Scotts whose seat was Dalkeith Castle outside Edinburgh, then with the Montagus, who owned Boughton House in Northamptonshire. Today’s family, triple-barrelled as Montagu-Douglas-Scott, is headed by the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, and still enjoys the luxury (or burden) of maintaining more than one seat (though Dalkeith has been swapped for Bowhill in the Borders). The real treasure at Drumlanrig is their collection of Renaissance paintings, and I was a little shocked to hear in the news the very next day on the car radio that a famous Da Vinci Madonna had been stolen—had the thief been one of the guests sharing the tea room with me?

That afternoon I drove across Ayrshire and skirted Glasgow by driving through Paisley and across the Erskine Bridge, up along the western edge of Loch Lomond, and spent the night with a busload of pensioners in a sharp bend of the road at Tarbet. Who knows how I found places to stay back then. I guess I called numbers in the guidebook and hoped for the best? A few years later I lived in Glasgow, so it is a little strange to be looking at the map now to see me driving through some places I later came to knew much better. In the early morning I got up, and drove across a pretty grueling road (the A83 if you are keeping track of these things) up to a pass called ‘Rest and be Thankful’, which I did not do, since I had only just started. Then down, down into Glen Fyne, and a visit to Inveraray Castle. The Dukes of Argyll built this castle on the banks of Loch Fyne originally in the 15th century, but completely renovated it in Gothic Revival style in the 1750s. Unlike Drumlanrig, everything here is grey stone. You may recognise the castle as “Duneagle” the residence of the Marquess of Flintshire from Downton Abbey (the parents of the unhappy Lady Rose). It is the seat of the head of Clan Campbell, whose tendrils reach across the former British Empire, with branches in the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The castle is not one of my favourites, as it felt much too modern, and in fact much is rebuilt after a fire in 1877. More interesting, I thought, was the brand new town of Inveraray, built in the mid-18th century along the rational and efficient lines of the Scottish Enlightenment, so is neatly laid out in a square design, its houses regular and clean, all painted white. Across the water is the amazing restaurant Loch Fyne, with the freshest seafood you’ll ever eat, but I didnae ken that then.

It was in the town that I went into a gift shop and asked if they had any cassette tapes, as I was slightly sick of Benedictus and Ashokan Farewell, plus radio reception in the Highlands had gotten pretty patchy. The wee shop had two cassettes, so I bought them both: one was “The Best Ever Scottish Compilation!”, and the other was a new album by a local group, Capercaillie, called “Nàdurra” which I instantly fell in love with. Their music combines traditional folk with modern beats—sometimes erring on the cheesy side, I admit, so I prefer the less drumbeat-driven tracks (and found more of that on their other albums when I got home). But this is one of my favourites from this album, ‘Hoireann O’:

I am a huge fan of the clear as a mountain stream Celtic female singing voice, so I became a fan of Karen Matheson, and went to see her perform a few years later in Glasgow. A good excerpt for her (minus all the drumbeats) is this song, ‘Ailein Duinn’, from the film Rob Roy (which is also one of my favourites).

Now equipped with appropriate listening matter, that afternoon I continued down the banks of the loch then did a sharp turn to the north towards Oban. I stopped briefly to inspect the stone circle at Kilmartin, which used to be a coronation site of the ancient kings of Dalriata, who came from northern Ireland then transformed themselves into the kings of the Scots. One thing that always fascinates me as a colonial when driving around Europe is that, because everything here is so much older than in the US, and there is just so much more of it, things like this are treated with a casualness that would be unthinkable at home. So here were these thousand-year-old stones, in a field, with cows, and absolutely nobody else around. It was magical. Then it started to rain.

I drove on up the coast, and quickly ducked in and out of Glen Coe—I had already heard the story of the massacre there, but now I had a song from “The Best Ever Scottish Compilation!”, so I could sing along:

I reached Fort William and found a place to stay. It is not at all a nice town, sorry, so I got up early and drove due west, past the Glenfinnan Viaduct (just becoming globally famous, since the release of Harry Potter II), then up a fairly wild coastline to Mallaig, where I caught a ferry to the Isle of Skye.

I pressed on to the far side of the island, and checked into a b&b near Dunvegan. Nearby Dunvegan Castle is the seat of the head of Clan MacLeod, who is not a duke, but in the misty past, their chiefs, said to descended from a Norse prince Leod, were often regarded as semi-independent lords, only doing homage to their monarchs in far-off Edinburgh when it suited them, until they were brought to heel after the two Jacobite Uprisings in the 18th century. The castle itself is not all that interesting, but the gardens are amazing (and so far north!), as is the setting on a clifftop above the sea.

The next morning I got the best treat of all as I did an early morning drive through the Cuillin Hills with my cassette no 2 playing ‘Highland Cathedral’, with massed pipes (hundreds?) at full volume. OK, that’s really corny, but what a glorious tune! (as Doc Lendrim might have said back at William & Mary). It’s the drawn-out bass notes, like a James Horner film score, that really make this version for me:

Sticking with the theme of learning odd things about places I had just visited, I was also surprised to hear on the radio that morning that Lord MacLeod was trying to sell the Cuillins. ‘But you can’t’, said the people, ‘they are a mountain range!’ ‘But they are my mountain range’ responded MacLeod of MacLeod. And speaking of money, I was the victim of highway robbery in paying the toll for the short drive across the Kyle of Lochalsh, probably the most expensive bridge in the world considering it is only a relatively short span. I’ve since learned that the toll was abolished about a year later.

The Cuillin Hills, Skye [not my photo, but it looked like this in the early morning]

This day’s drive was long, and on mostly isolated roads—all the way from west coast to east coast. Briefly stopping to look at the famous calendar-castle-porn Eilean Donan, then up Glen Shiel and a little bit of the Great Glen (that’s Loch Ness, which is actually not very pretty, in comparison to the other lochs I’d seen so far), then on a cross-country road to avoid Inverness, and on to Golspie and Dunrobin Castle.

Dunrobin was completely unexpected: a sort of 16th-century French Renaissance château, but on a much grander, Victorian, scale, on the banks of the North Sea. It seemed ridiculously out of place, luxurious and overly massive for its setting. The front door looks way too big. But the gardens and the views over the sea are stunning. There’s even a railway station that was specifically built for the duke of Sutherland and his family, the Leveson-Gowers (and as the story goes, for a visit from Queen Victoria, which never happened). So you can understand the gripes you hear in the town of Golspie, built by the Duke whose statue surveys the whole area from atop a nearby peak, since its residents had been forced to live there due to the Highland Clearances. Sheep are more profitable than farmers on this poor soil, and the dukes of Sutherland own almost all of it—once one of the biggest landowners in the UK. And like Drumlanrig, Dunrobin hosts a large art collection; and, also like at Drumlanrig, I was surprised to hear on the radio that the very day some news related to the house I had just visited, that the Leveson-Gower family had decided to sell Titian’s Venus Anadyomene to the National Gallery of Scotland. This trip was getting decidedly weird.

I stayed that night at a B&B on a huge hill in North Kessock overlooking Inverness and the Moray Firth. The next day’s drive was straight south, on the A9 though the Cairngorms, part of the Grampian Mountains. I began to understand why Scottish Highlanders felt so at home when they began to settle Appalachia in the 18th century, and brought with them their whiskey and their mountain music (I am now on day four of Capercaillie and ‘The Best Ever Scottish Compilation!’). A few years later, I was at a singing circle at Celtic Connections in Glasgow, and I offered up ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike’, only to find the old ladies (this was at 2 in the morning—the Scots take their song festivals seriously) clucking at me for thinking this was an original tune from Appalachia. Silly me.

I soon arrived at my next ducal residence: Blair Atholl, the castle of the dukes of Atholl. It is completely different from Dunrobin, much more traditional, built mostly in the 16th century, occupied since the 17th by the Murray family, and remodelled according to tastes of 19th-century Scottish Baronial Style. It suits the landscape a lot more in my opinion, and its stark white walls stand out in the green Perthshire hills dotted with sheep. Like Dunrobin, the village has its own train station, which is a bit too grand for the size of the local population. The local area also has its own private army, the only one allowed in the UK for vague ‘historical’ reasons, and they parade once a year at Castle Blair when the current Duke visits from his regular residence in South Africa.

The main facade of Blair castle, Blair Atholl, Scotland.

I think I stayed in nearby Pitlochrie that night, as it is highlighted in the road atlas, but I don’t remember anything about it, except that it has a really cool name. From there, I continued southward and stopped briefly at two Scottish royal, not ducal, stops: Scone Palace, outside Perth, where ancient kings were crowned, and Stirling Castle, a fortress where the Stuarts held court when politics got a bit too hot in Edinburgh. A few years later I was extremely lucky and proud to work on the massive renovation project of Stirling, and got to know the histories of James V and Marie de Guise very well, but that was still in the future. When I visited Stirling on this trip, the Great Hall and Chapel Royal had just been re-opened, and the palace block (the real treasure) was yet to be restored, so there wasn’t really much to see.

And finally, the last full day in Scotland. Motorway back down towards Glasgow, but hopping off the road for a little walk around one of Scotland’s true curiosities: Chatelherault. This is not a ducal residence, but was the hunting lodge, stables and dog kennels built in the 1730s for the dukes of Hamilton, whose huge palace lay in the valley below (until it was dismantled in the 1920s). The whole area is now a country park, and offers lovely long walks. But why this odd French name in a Scottish country park? It commemorates an ephemeral French ducal title that the Hamiltons claimed from the middle of the 16th century, when the Regent of Scotland, the Earl of Arran, was a chief participant in the latest renewal of the Auld Alliance. It’s true Arran was created Duc de Châtellerault (a town in Poitou, just south of the Loire—and yes, I have visited, but that’s the subject of another road trip blog) in 1548, for arranging the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the French Dauphin, but it was taken away again in 1559 when the winds of politics shifted (and the duchy was given to the King’s illegitimate daughter, Diane). But, as a true oddity in the history of ducal titles, it was re-created (or ‘recognised’) by Napoleon III (who was a distant cousin of the Duke of Hamilton) in the 1860s. I also walked up further into the hills to see the ruins of Cadzow Castle, which is the original cradle of the Hamilton dynasty, built way back in the 12th century.

Rather than return to the motorway, I took a smaller road up the Clydesdale (remember, dear reader? the valley of the river Clyde!), looked in at New Lanark (socialist something-or-other), then re-joined the main road near Tinto—one of the finest mountain peaks in one of the most lushly green regions of the UK. I’ve driven or taken the train through the upper Annandale many times now, but I am always overwhelmed by this stretch of hills and valleys. So I enjoyed listening to ‘Highland Cathedral’ again. (don’t judge me) Possibly to ramp up the emotional ending of this trip even more, I stayed my last night in the small town of Lockerbie and visited its cemetery just as the sun was setting. I was completely overcome with emotion seeing the graves of all those who had died just over a decade before. The entire town had been emotionally wrecked, my b&b hosts explained to me later over a mug of tea, when in December 1988 a terrorist bomb brought down a Pan Am flight overhead, killing over two hundred passengers and eleven people in the town. The most tragic monument was one to the thirty-five students from Syracuse University returning home for Christmas following a semester abroad in London. But what a beautiful setting for a memorial.

The next morning, feeling so glad to be alive and happy and healthy, I headed south once more on the motorway, crossed back into England, and was extremely grateful I had my two cassettes since I lost all radio reception when I passed through my other favourite driving spot in the UK, the really narrow valley between Penrith and Lancaster near Shap Summit (maybe it is called the Lunedale? I don’t even know). I still think it amazing how really isolated this little valley is, with both the train and the motorway squeezing through it. Then after a quick zoom down the M6, around Birmingham, I was back in my slightly crazy living arrangements at the Maison Française d’Oxford. But that’s a different story altogether.

(images either taken by me or from Wikimedia Commons)

Dukes of Rutland

The dukes of Rutland are not the most famous dukes in British history. But as successful ducal families go, the Manners family got it right: they combined a solid land base with royal favour, regular service in politics and the military, and sustained their prominence across three centuries. You may not know the name, but you might recognise their main residence, Belvoir Castle, as it has featured in a number of well-known films, from Young Sherlock Holmes to King Ralph, and recently as a stand-in for Windsor Castle in the celebrated TV show, The Crown.

The name Rutland always makes English people smile, a little, as it is famously the smallest English county—only 18 miles by 17 miles—which disappeared off the maps, then re-appeared in 1997 after a popular campaign. As a dukedom, it is one of the few that is closely linked in name to the place it represents, sort of, as the bulk of the family properties are nearby in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. As a family, the Manners have long been dominant in the East Midlands, with almost every earl and duke serving as Lord Lieutenant (the crown’s representative) in Leicestershire or Lincolnshire from the 16th century to the early 20th. Originally a northern family, they moved into the Midlands thanks to a spectacular marriage in about 1470, followed by another in about 1490 that made them close relatives to the royal family. Manners sons and daughters thereafter were close to successive Tudor and Stuart monarchs, and have maintained this royal affinity down to the present day. The height of their power was during the so-called ‘Whig Ascendancy’, when one political party dominated government for much of the 18th century, and the dukes of Rutland were amongst the tightly-knit clan of aristocrats at the head of Whig politics. By the later 18th century, the family were more successful as generals, notably through the Marquess of Granby, commander-in-chief of British forces in the Seven Years War, and the man for whom more pubs are named than anyone else, except perhaps ‘The Queen’s Head’. They are also one of the few families with two seats, both Belvoir (pronounced ‘beaver’) and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire.

Like so many aristocratic families in England, the family story is said to begin in Normandy, in the town of Mesnières (not far from Dieppe), but the documented history begins with a series of Northumberland barons who helped the Plantagenets defend the northern frontier against the Scots in the fourteenth century. In the middle of the Wars of the Roses, Sir Robert Manners, Sheriff of Northumberland and captain of Etal Castle (near the River Tweed) married Eleanor de Ros, the heiress of one of the oldest baronies in England. Her son became the 11th Baron Ros (or Roos), which was based at Helmsley in the North Yorkshire moors, and Belvoir in eastern Leicestershire. The new baron then took the family up one rung further in the social hierarchy through his marriage to Anne St. Leger. Her father was a relatively important Yorkist lord, but through her mother, Anne of York, she was the niece of kings Edward IV and Richard III. The Manners family were now blood relatives of the royal family, and from this point added the arms of England (the lions and the lilies) to their own coat-of-arms.

Of course, being related to the House of York after the Battle of Bosworth Field wasn’t exactly auspicious, but Thomas Manners managed to win the favour of his cousin Henry VIII, served as his Cupbearer at court, and was rewarded with the title Earl of Rutland in 1525 (a title which previously had been held by his grandmother’s brother, Prince Edmund of York), the office of Warden of Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, and loads and loads of formerly monastic properties in the 1530s. His son Henry, 2nd Earl, was a prominent military commander in the Scottish borders and in northern France, and was named President of the Council of the North by Elizabeth I in 1561. The 2nd Earl’s brother, John, married Dorothy Vernon who was the heiress of Haddon Hall and a junior branch was established. The 3rd Earl, Edward, was lord lieutenant of both Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire for Queen Elizabeth, but had no sons—the barony of Ros therefore passed to his daughter and through her to the Cecil family, until it returned (though lack of heirs) to the Manners in the next generation to the son of the 4th Earl (who was only earl for a year), Roger, the 5th Earl of Rutland. The 5th Earl is a fascinating character, one of the young guns who joined the Rebellion of the Earl of Essex against Elizabeth in 1600 and spent the next three years contemplating his folly in the Tower of London, then enjoyed great favour in the reign of James I as a man of cultivation and taste—he was a great patron of the arts and architecture, and has been proposed as one of the potential candidates to be the ‘real’ author of the works of Shakespeare. He married Elizabeth Sidney, daughter of the famous poet Sir Philip Sidney, but they had no children. His brother, the 6th Earl, was also a prominent courtier, but felt he had been cursed by three local Lincolnshire witches who had caused the deaths of his two sons. The barony of Ros once again passed out of the family, this time for good, so there are those who suspect foul play by the Duke of Buckingham who married the rich heiress of this barony…

The Earldom of Rutland, and Belvoir Castle, thus passed in 1641 to a cousin, to the branch residing at Haddon Hall. Another good marriage propelled them from the ranks of the major provincial landowning families, to one of the leading political dynasties of the next century. John Manners, son of the 8th Earl, had scandalised society by divorcing his first wife, Anne Pierrepont, in 1668—the first divorce since the Reformation—but his sisters had married in the major political circles of the period, including two Cecils and an Ashley-Cooper, founders of the Whig Party, and major supporters of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that invited William of Orange to take the throne and secure the dominance of Protestantism, limited monarchy and ‘country power’ of the great rural aristocracy. This political union was solidified through the marriage in 1693 of the Earl’s son, John, with Lady Catherine Russell, daughter of the martyred Lord William Russell, and Lady Rachel, a prominent courtier who was one of Princess Anne’s favourites. On the accession of Anne as Queen in 1702, Lady Rachael Russell pressured her to honour her daughter’s family with the elevation of the earldom of Rutland into a dukedom. This the Queen did, and Catherine’s father-in-law became the 1st Duke of Rutland in 1703, passing it on to his son and daughter-in-law when he died in 1711.

For the next fifty years the Manners family were at the centre of Whig politics, often serving at MPs for Leicestershire or Lincolnshire, and holding various posts in the royal household. John, 3rd Duke and his brother Lord William were both prominent in the ministry of their brother-in-law, Prime Minister Henry Pelham, with John being rewarded with the premier court offices of Lord Steward of the Household (1755), then Master of the Horse (1761-66), and seat in the cabinet. He had married an heiress, Bridget Sutton, of Kelham Hall in Nottinghamshire, and set up another cadet branch, Manners-Sutton of Kelham, which flourished on its own, providing an Archbishop of Canterbury (1805-28, the prelate who baptised the future Queen Victoria) and a Lord Chancellor of Ireland (1807-27).

the 3rd Duke of Rutland

It was the 3rd Duke’s son, John, Marquess of Granby, who was perhaps the family’s most famous son, described even by his enemies as one of the greatest military commanders of the age. Granby was the courtesy title used by the heir to the dukedom, to which he never succeeded. He rose through the ranks during Britain’s involvement in the major Continental conflict known as the Seven Years War, and was named Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in 1766. His brother Robert was also a soldier, but also maintained a prominent position in one of the family’s other major interests, hunting, being named Master of the Staghounds in 1744, and Master of the Harriers (Foxhounds) in 1754. Several of Granby’s uncles and cousins were also generals or sea-captains, and his second son, Lord Robert, was captain of the Resolution, which saw a lot of activity in the American War of Independence.

Granby

As the more conservative wing of Whig party transformed itself through the ministry of William Pitt the Younger, the Manners family went along with it. Charles, the 4th Duke of Rutland served Pitt as a member of his cabinet, and acted as Lord Steward of the Household (1783), Lord Privy Seal (1783-84), and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1784-87). As viceroy of Ireland, he was relatively popular, as he actually took an interest in the country and its people, touring the north and hosting lots of events at Dublin Castle. This popular touch in politics would manifest itself again in the mid-19th century, but the immediate generation to follow was more interested in high society and their favourite pastimes: the 5th Duke, John, was a prominent breeder of thoroughbred racers, and his younger brother Lord Robert was part of the fashionable set of the Prince of Wales and Beau Brummel. The 5th Duke is also notable for redeveloping much of the castle and gardens of Belvoir, though much of this should be credited to his talented wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, whose fairly public affair with the Duke of York (the Prince of Wales’s younger brother) is highlighted, fairly blatantly, in one of the most memorable features I remember from touring the interior of Belvoir Castle: a ceiling painting in the main receiving room (the ‘Elizabeth Saloon’) that commemorates the love of Jupiter and Juno, with the Olympian couple overtly resembling the Duke of York and the Duchess of Rutland. The castle was rebuilt at this time by James Wyatt in the fashionable Gothic Revival style, so it looks more like what the Romantics thought a medieval castle ought to look like, hence its resemblance to Windsor Castle and usage in film and television programmes. There are peacocks in the gardens, designed by the Duchess, and in the images of her, as the symbol of the goddess Juno, but also appropriately, as one of the symbols of the Manners family since the 1520s, seen as the crest atop the family’s coat-of-arms (‘a peacock in its pride’) and in decorations all over Belvoir Castle.

the ‘Duke of York’ in the Elizabeth Saloon
the Duchess and her peacock

With the 6th and 7th dukes, brothers Charles and John, we see a return to high politics. Both were leaders of the newly reborn Conservative party in its reformist wing in the 1840s: John in particular, was a leader of the ‘Young England’ movement (with Benjamin Disraeli) which aimed to regenerate the United Kingdom by paying attention to the needs of the people in the industrial north and in Ireland. Later in his career he held cabinet posts of Postmaster General and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1870s-90s) under the premiership of the Marquess of Salisbury (another Cecil).

Lord John Manners, later the 7th Duke of Rutland

His son, Henry, 8th Duke of Rutland, as a young man served as private secretary to the Prime Minister, and was known as ‘Salisbury’s Manners’, but was the last of the family to be so heavily involved in politics. Following the Great War, like many aristocrats, he sold much of his land in order to support the remaining properties and artworks, and it was the world of art that his children were known for: John, the 9th Duke, as a specialist in medieval art, and Lady Diana as a writer, actress and socialite, part of ‘the Coterie’ of bright young things in the years before the Great War. Considered one of the most beautiful women of her day, after the war Diana married Duff Cooper, and they remained leaders of the beau monde for much of the century—he was created Viscount Norwich, and their son became the well-known popular historian John Julius Norwich, whom I had the pleasure of meeting once in London before he died in 2018—and my high school friends still tease me about taking his enormous books on the history of Byzantium with me to Beach Week!

The 9th Duke of Rutland applied his interests in medieval art to the family’s other substantial property, Haddon House, in Derbyshire, which he redeveloped in the 1920s. It is worth a visit, usually bypassed by the tourists rushing to get to nearby Chatsworth, as a genuinely medieval building, with a number of beautiful later Tudor modifications, notably its long gallery and garden front. Simon Jenkins called it ‘the most perfect house to survive from the middle ages’.

16th-century garden terrace
Long Gallery

Like his sister, the 9th Duke married into one of the leading social sets, well-connected to the royal family, in Kathleen Tennant, and their daughter, Ursula would continue this link as a maid of honour at the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1936, then keeping a high profile in the gossip columns as mistress of the Maharajah of Jaipur in the 1940s and of J. Paul Getty in the 1960s. Lady Ursula’s younger brothers, Charles the 10th Duke, and Lord John, returned to local politics in the 1970s, the elder as Chairman of the Leicestershire County Council, and the younger as High Sheriff of Leicester. John’s daughter Lucy was a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of York in the 1990s, while the current Duke, David Manners, remains prominent as a host to high profile visitors to Belvoir Castle, including the royal family, but also as an avid supporter of the UK Independence Party. In photos he looks somewhat like the family’s mascot, the peacock, and he takes a keen interest in the filming that takes place at his home (and I am certain he can be spotted as a footman opening a car door to Princess Margaret—Helena Bonham Carter—in a recent episode of The Crown). The Duke has two sons, and his brother Lord Edward, who runs Haddon Hall, also has two sons, so the dukedom of Rutland is probably secure for at least another generation. The Duke also has three daughters, who have gained the dubious nickname in the tabloid press ‘the bad-Manners sisters’.

There are also a two main cadet branches of the Manners family. The Manners-Sutton branch generated a viscounty of Canterbury (for the son of the Archbishop, who was Speaker of the Commons, 1817-35), from 1835 to 1941; and the barony of Manners, 1807 to the present.  An illegitimate son married in 1765 the heiress of the Scottish earldom of Dysart, and also heiress of the wonderful Ham House, near Richmond (on the Thames in western London). Their descendants changed their name to Tollemache, and generated some of the more eccentric members of the British aristocracy of the 19th century. The son of the 8th Earl, was a playboy and accumulated over £200,000 debt (and was briefly put in debtors’ prison in 1842); he eloped with his mother’s maid, Elizabeth Acford, then abandoned her and their three children. He then married for duty, had three children, then later resumed his relationship with Elizabeth (and had 2 more children), claiming that she was his actual wife so he wouldn’t have to pay her an agreed annuity—the courts did not agree. Lord Huntingtower (his courtesy title since he predeceased his father) had four more children with another mistress, then died in 1872, and the poor Elizabeth tried unsuccessfully to get her son Albert Acford (b. 1863) recognised as the 9th earl of Dysart. His cousin Ralph Tollemache had a great fondness for history, and gave an increasingly bizarre array of names to his massive family (15 children in all): Plantagenet, Saxon, Ydwallo, Lyonesse, Lyulph, Lyona, Lyonella, Lyonetta, and famously the WWI captain Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. His son Sir Lyonel Tollemache, 4th Baronet of Hanby Hall (Lincolnshire), inherited Ham Hall in 1935 from his cousin the last Earl of Dysart (in this family—it continues in another family via female succession). He lovingly refurbished the house then donated it to the National Trust in 1948, before he died in 1952. Ham House is still one of the best days out in London, and one of the real treasures of the National Trust.

Ham Hall

Current titles: 10th Duke of Rutland and Marquess of Granby, 19th Earl of Rutland, 11th Baron Manners of Haddon, 5th Baron Roos of Belvoir.

Simplified genealogy for the Manners family:

manners-simplifiedDownload

(All images are either my own photos, or courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Dukes of Guise

The dukes of Guise are famous primarily as leaders of the ultra-Catholic side in the French Wars of Religion of the late 16th century. One of the most famous political assassinations in European history is undoubtedly the double murder of the third duke of Guise—with the dramatic nickname ‘scarface’ (‘le Balafré’)—and his brother the Cardinal de Guise, on Christmas Day, 1588. The King, Henri III, feared the power of this family so much that he resorted to such drastic action to try to preserve the power of his own family, but instead further alienated those who might have supported him, and in the end was assassinated himself a few months later, bringing the rule of the Valois Dynasty in France to an ignominious end.

Continue reading “The Dukes of Guise”