The Dukes And Their Domain (2024)

The founder of the family was not, however, a man, but a long-nosed, sharp-eyed woman, Elizabeth Hardwick, born in 1527. By marrying and burying four increasingly prosperous and powerful husbands, she was able to leave to her sons a territorial and commercial empire that lasted her descendants 14 generations, and made them princes in the land.

Two years after marrying her second, William Cavendish, she built Chatsworth, near her birthplace in Derbyshire, a Tudor mansion furnished in splendor. Their sons and daughters were her only children, though she married twice again, both times seeing to it that she, not her husband's own families, inherited his properties. When her last spouse, the Earl of Shrewsbury, died, she was the richest woman in England, with vast properties, many houses, coal mines, and forests.

Like great gardens, seeming to have about them an air of immortality, so families, John Pearson remarks, however solidly entrenched, are fragile creations. But good fortune and good judgment preserved the Cavendishes on foundations Bess laid to last the ages. For generations to come, the head of the family, always named William, was in some way remarkable for accomplishments, tastes, even wives. But it is as politicans that the Cavendishes have most amply distinguished themselves.

For three generations after Bess of Hardwick, they were earls; the dukedom was won by the fourth earl in recognition of his services to the Crown -- services that consisted in throwing out one king, James II, and replacing him with another, William of Orange. His son, the second duke, was a leading figure in the great Whig oligarchy that ruled 18th- century England under the first two Georges. His seat in Parliament, representing Derbyshire, was to be a family heirloom until 1835. Both the third and fourth dukes served as viceroys of Ireland, the fourth a man of great charm and perfect manners, known as the "Crown Prince of Whigs." While serving in Ireland, he retained his leading role in English politics, controlling 12 seats in Parliament, four of them held by his family. In 1756, the duke served briefly as prime minister, but in the ensuing conflict among Pitt, George III, and the Whigs, the Whig hegemony was destroyed, so ending the role the dukes of Devonshire had played in government as if it were their right. They would not return to it until a century later, with the eighth duke.

The first to wear a beard, he was a sloppy dresser who looked, to one observer, like "a seedy, shady sailor," even wearing his Garter ribbon upside down. But under an asinine exterior was deep political craft. "His ability would deserve respect even in a man; in a marquis admiration," said Vanity Fair in 1869. In the House of Lords he cut a languorous figure. "I fell asleep one afternoon," he related, "and dreamt I was addressing that just assembly, and when someone woke me up I found that my dream was true. I their Lordships." A member of the cabinet at 32, and coming three times in his life within an ace of being prime minister, he "uncomplainingly took his place in history as the best Prime Minister the nineteenth century never had."

As they were great politicians, so they were great collectors. Bess of Hardwick had amassed lavish furnishings: "2,124 ounces of gold and silver plate, scarlet silk bed covers embroidered in gold and silver, furniture and tapestries" . . . and six books. In the 1670s, the third earl laid the foundations for the great Cavendish library with no less a man than Thomas Hobbes as librarian. Early in the 18th century, the second duke, who had a superbly educated eye, accumulated a collection of old master drawings second only to that at Windsor, doing the bidding at auction with keen relish. The sixth duke added to the Cavendish library some of its greatest treasures: the first four Shakespeare folios and 39 Shakespeare quartos, as well as the library of Henry Cavendish, the great 18th-century scientist. But this charming "Bachelor Duke" was no intellectual. He assembled his library "in much the same spirit as he was amassing thousands of specimens of different marble without ever being a geologist. His cure for depression was 'booking,' which was not reading, but rearranging the library." Unhappily, a philistine duch*ess early in this century despoiled the library of its treasures. The Shakespeares and Caxtons went to the Huntington Library.

The most durable legacy of the Cavendishes is Chatsworth itself, Bess of Hardwick's Tudor pile that the first duke transformed into a splendid baroque palace while spending 20 years in the "howling wilderness" of Derbyshire rather than pay a fine of s3,000 for tweaking an offending nose at court. The house's facade was utterly altered; inside, the best French artists created those illusions of theatrical grandeur that had transfigured the palaces of Louis XIV. Chatsworth was now a visible symbol of power. Even the plumbing was magnificent: in an age of privies and unwashed necks, the house boasted flush toilets and marble baths with hot and cold running water.

Chatsworth's surroundings were changed out of recognition in the 18th century by the fourth duke. The house had been described as a diamond "set in a vile socket of ignoble jet"; now Capability Brown created an ideal landscape of rolling lawns and wooded hills, bringing the great house into harmony with "nature." The bill for this transformation came to s40,000 -- in an age when laborers in the mills and mines earned pennies a day.

A century later, the Bachelor Duke had the self-taught architect Jeffry Wyatt (after remodeling Windsor for George IV, puffed up to Wyatville) double the facade and add a belvedere and tower. Later, he brought into his employ a far greater genius, Joseph Paxton, who came to Chatsworth as head gardener and stayed to build the Great Conservatory (a forerunner of his Crystal Palace), a half-acre of steel and glass with an underground railway to feed the furnaces, in which palm and banana trees flourished along with a gigantic water lily. "Paxton here," wrote the duke to his niece. "O joy of plants!"

But vandals work even from within. Early in this century, a hatchet-faced duch*ess named Evelyn set about obliterating the Bachelor Duke's great additions. The greenhouse -- "one of the most original buildings of the 19th century" -- was dynamited and a banal rose garden planted on the site; Paxton's own gardens were dug up and replaced with rhododendron and bamboo; murals were covered with cream-colored paint. The present duke and duch*ess have redeemed many of these insults and the ravages of time, though with a vastly smaller staff to carry out the work.

Unlike Evelyn, some Devonshire duch*esses have actually been more engaging than their husbands. The fifth duke was a cold fish whose duch*ess, Georgiana, brought a radiant glamour to Chatsworth and Devonshire House in London, where the worlds of wealth, high fashion, and revolutionary whiggery mingled -- "the earliest example history offers of what Tom Wolfe would one day scathingly describe as 'radical chic.' " With the entrance into the household of Georgiana's adored friend Lady Elizabeth Foster, the Devonshires became a triangle. Both women produced children by the duke, though no heir was born until late in the day. To Fanny Burney, Georgiana seemed "by nature to possess the highest animal spirits, but she appeared to me not happy." Besides her uneasy marriage, she was calamitously addicted to gambling. Desperate, ill, grown ugly, begging a final loan from her own mother, she died still a young woman.

The present exemplary duch*ess, youngest of the Mitford sisters, is remarkable for her good looks, charm and wit, and the energy and imagination with which she has thrown herself into the work of maintaining and restoring Chatsworth. A duch*ess-who-might-have-been was her sister-in-law, Kathleen Kennedy, who married the Marquis of Hartington, heir to the dukedom, only weeks before he was killed in World War II. She died in a plane crash a few years after.

Besides ability and character, there has been genius in the Cavendish family. The Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, given in 1874 by the seventh duke -- an earnest Christian and a money-making industrialist -- was named in honor of a scientist at least as brilliant as any of the Nobel Prize winners the lab has produced. This was Henry Cavendish (1731- 1810), a painfully shy and inarticulate cousin of the ducal line, who was "the most original and wide-ranging British man of science since Newton." Henry's father, Lord Charles (the second duke's son), received a medal from the Royal Society for inventing a maximum/minimum thermometer; Henry's own experimental work in chemistry and physics was highly original, consisting of research on heat, the composition of air and water, the nature and properties of hydrogen, and the density of the earth. It anticipated many 19th- century discoveries. Sir Humphry Davy called him "an immortal honor to his house, to his age, and to his country."

John Pearson's title The Serpent and the Stag attempts to suggest a theme -- a contrast between two sorts of Cavendishes, the cautious and the bold, but it fits awkwardly, except insofar as sons often react against fathers. If his history of the Cavendishes lacks the concentrated fascination of his study of two generations of Sitwells, it is always highly entertaining, a lively picture of an evolving society and a remarkable family whose unusual abilities have helped them hold on to power and position within it. Too bad the illustrations are so parsimonious.