The Dukes (12 page)

It was the Duke of Norfolk and his royal chum who effected a
revolution in eating habits in London society by establishing late
hours. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it was customary
to dine at four o'clock. By the 1770s this had advanced to seven
o'clock for most people, or midnight for those who knew the habits
of the Duke of Norfolk. It became fashionable to eat later and later,
and to stay up all night. Walpole wrote: "The present folly is late
hours. Everyone tried to be particular by being too late; and as
everybody tries it, nobody is so. It is the fashion now to go to
Ranelagh [where concerts were given at seven] two hours after it is
over. You may not believe this, but it is literal. The music ends at ten;
the company goes at twelve." People simply spent much less time
sleeping than they do nowadays.
³⁶

It was while dining with the Prince at one of these late parties that
the news was conveyed to Jockey that he had been deprived by the
King of all his offices. A couple of days before he had proposed a
toast at the Crown and Anchor "to the sovereign majesty of the
people", a sentiment which was seditious to say the least, and not far
short of treasonable. Of course, the Duke was drunk at the time, but
nonetheless he had to be shown that he had gone too far. When
he tried to strike up conversation with the King shortly afterwards,
George cut him short in mid-sentence, saying,
"A propos,
my lord,
have you seen 'Blue Beard' ?"

In order to hold office and to sit in Parliament (this was half a
century before the Catholic Relief Bill), Jockey had renounced the
Roman Catholic religion in 1780, but he remained a Catholic at heart
for all that, especially when drunk, as everyone in the House knew.
He was not always sober
there
either.

Another of Jockey's drinking companions was a Mr Huddlestone,
who after one night of intoxication fell off his chair to the floor. A
younger Howard went to assist the man to his feet, but the drunkard
would have none of it. "Never shall it be said that the head of the
house of Huddlestone was lifted from the ground by a younger
branch of the house of Howard," he bellowed. The good-humoured
Duke responded well. "The head of the house of Howard is too
drunk to pick up the head of the house of Huddlestone," he said,
"but he will lie down beside him with all the pleasure in the world."

And he lay on the floor.
³⁸

Glimpses like this show that old Jockey was far more than the
"dirty devil" that unkind Creevey called him, far more than a miser­able drunkard, and it explains why, in spite of his eccentricities, he
was enormously popular. He was never a violent drunk, never offen­
sive, never really objectionable. He was essentially a good man whom
life had treated badly. He had married twice, and his second wife,
who survived him, had become a lunatic. Lady Holland put his case
neatly. "The Duke of Norfolk is an extraordinary instance of the
impossibility of
situation
being sufficient to secure happiness : he, how­ever, finds in his own good temper an antidote to all the vexations of
his life. He has all that rank, dignity, and wealth can give; he mar­ried a beautiful woman whose person he liked, possessed of £15,000
per annum. About eight years after she became mad, and from
being intestate her immense possessions escheat to the Crown, there
being no male heir to the Scudamores. It appears to be a hardship
that the laws afford no relief to a person united to one insane, as
no pretext can be more valid towards the dissolution of a marriage
than an obstacle of that nature that impedes the fulfilling of every
function belonging to the institution. He maintains with solid mag­nificence the splendour of his rank; everything about him bespeaks
wealth and luxurious comfort. His servants are old domestics, fat,
sleek, and happy; his table is profuse and exquisite. His taste is bad;
he loves society, but has no selection, and swallows wine for quantity,
not quality: he is gross in everything. The Duchess' madness has
taken a sombre,
farouche
turn : she hates all mankind. The clergyman
during a lucid interval advised her to read religious books, supplied
her with some, and mingled his advice with pious exhortations. She
acquiesced, and took the books. A few days after she returned them
with scorn, saying, 'I wish I could believe your damned trumpery,
as I should then be certain two-thirds of mankind would roast in
Hell.' It was curious that in the Gospels she could find matter to
gratify her malignity. The Duke behaves uncommonly well to her."
³⁹

We, in an age less obsequious towards revealed truth, might find it
not so "curious" and if this be an example of the Duchess's ravings,
they appear more akin to solid good sense. But in truth she was much
further gone than this. Wraxall speaks of her "disordered intellect",
and the Public Record Office contains pages of information about her
insanity, as the records relating to the Scudamore inheritance reside
there.

The Duke made up for the deprivation of "every function belong­ing to the institution" of marriage in his own beguiling manner.
Driving through the village of Greystoke in Cumberland with his
steward, he saw hordes of children waving at them from both sides
of the road. "Whose are all these children?" he asked. The steward
answered, "Some are mine, Your Grace, and some are yours."

In 1783, three centuries after the creation of the dukedom of
Norfolk in the Howard family, Jockey determined to hold a big party
at Arundel Castle for "all the blood of all the Howards", to which
every descendant of the 1st Duke would be invited to celebrate. He
was forced to abandon the idea when calculations showed that over
6000 people would have to be included.

In old age, Jockey of Norfolk grew so large that he could hardly
get through a door of ordinary proportions. But he was not fat in the
belly - he was simply of huge girth all over, a living giant. His death
in 1815 left a large gap, in bulk as much as in personality.
⁴⁰

The nineteenth-century Dukes of Norfolk are a much quieter col­lection of men. With the 15th Duke (1847-1917) we approach very
close to the present day, for this devout, unwordly man is the father
of the Duke who died recently. As he came to the title in 1860, only
two men held that title for the
hi
5 years until 1975.

The 15th Duke was the most religious of all the Howards, a
deeply brooding ascetic who spent money building churches rather
than buying clothes; he always dressed shabbily, was frequently mis­taken for a tramp, and was often offered money, so poor did he look.
Strangers whom he helped at railway stations would offer him tips.
One woman visitor to the grounds of Arundel Castle told him to get
off the grass, and a Salvation Army girl, when she saw his blue
Garter ribbon, thought he was one of the Army.
⁴¹
The churches he
built were St Philip Neri at Arundel and a church at Norwich
which was one of the largest built since the Reformation. As the senior
lay representative in England, he wielded much unseen power in the
Church of Rome, as did his late son. It was owing to his influence
that John Henry Newman was made a Cardinal.

The Duke was a saintly man, more so in fact than the ancestor
Earl of Arundel who has since been canonised; he was a profoundly
good and gentle soul. But, as so often happens with those whose
goodness springs from conviction, he was not always an easy man to
contend with. Devotion to the Catholic Church was the principle to
which all else must needs be subordinated. Hence his support for
Newman, who, though not an agreeable man, was a Catholic. The
Duke's first wife was Lady Flora Hastings, a Protestant. Whether the
Duke made it a condition of their marriage or not, she became a
Catholic, much to the displeasure of her family, who would have
nothing more to do with her.
⁴¹
The Duchess, too, was a saint of a
kind, a wonderfully simple and good character. If any couple
deserved to be happy, they did, yet it was upon them that catas­trophe of the cruellest sort descended. Their son, heir to the highest
dukedom of the realm, was mentally defective.

Philip Joseph Mary Fitzalan-Howard, Earl of Surrey and Arundel
(1879-1902), who would in the normal course of events have been
the next Duke of Norfolk, grew up an almost complete invalid.
Practically blind, deaf and dumb, with the mind of an infant, there
was never any hope that the boy would recover the use of his brain,
although the Duke turned to his religion time and again for assis­tance, making the pilgrimage to Lourdes twenty-five times. The entire
Catholic world prayed for him. As if this was not enough, the good
Duchess died after ten years of marriage, leaving the Duke alone with
his idiot son. He spent every possible hour as companion to the boy,
lavishing care and attention with barely a flicker of intelligent res­ponse.

Philip died in 1902, at the age of twenty-three. He left £558 in
his will. His father said, "After all, my boy has given more glory to
God than any of us. Look at the Masses, novenas and pilgrimages of
which he has been the occasion."
⁴³
He endowed a piece of land in
Yorkshire for the reception, maintenance, treatment and education of
children suffering from physical disability or infirmity.

The Duke's life was, then, mostly private, devotional, and tragic.
His forays into public life were, however, successful. Lady Warwick
records the opinion that he was the best Postmaster-General ever;
⁴⁴
it is to him that we owe the custom, now taken for granted, that
letters which go astray may be re-addressed and re-delivered free of
charge. His other contribution to public life was to restore the elabo­rate ceremonial for the coronation (in his capacity as Earl Marshal),
which had fallen into neglect. He arranged the coronations of
Edward VII in 1901 and George V in 1910.

Having no direct heir, the Duke was married again in 1904 to a
woman thirty years younger than himself, Baroness Herries in her
own right. The products of this union were three daughters and
Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan-Howard, who in 1917, at the age of
nine, succeeded to a bewildering list of duties and titles as 16th Duke
of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England.