Dukes and Princes

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 This was before I used the internet for much except email, so I had a huge ‘master scale’ road atlas and an outdated Fodor’s Guide to Britain.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 18^th 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 17^th 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 18^th 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 15^th 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-18^th 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 18^th 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 16^th-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 18^th 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 16^th century, occupied since the 17^th by the Murray family, and remodelled according to tastes of 19^th-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 16^th 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 12^th 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 16^th century to the early 20^th. 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 18^th century, and the dukes of Rutland were amongst the tightly-knit clan of aristocrats at the head of Whig politics. By the later 18^th 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 11^th 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, 2^nd 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 2^nd Earl’s brother, John, married Dorothy Vernon who was the heiress of Haddon Hall and a junior branch was established. The 3^rd 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 4^th Earl (who was only earl for a year), Roger, the 5^th Earl of Rutland. The 5^th 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 6^th 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 8^th 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 1^st 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, 3^rd 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).

It was the 3^rd 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.

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 4^th 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-19^th century, but the immediate generation to follow was more interested in high society and their favourite pastimes: the 5^th 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 5^th 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

With the 6^th and 7^th 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, 8^th 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 9^th 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 9^th 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’.

Like his sister, the 9^th 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 10^th 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 19^th century. The son of the 8^th 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 9^th 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, 4^th 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.

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

Simplified genealogy for the Manners family:

manners-simplified Download

(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 16^th 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.