The Dukes (65 page)

3.
   
Quoted in
Complete Peerage.

4.
    
Old and New London,
IV, 392.

5.
    
Marshall,
op. cit.,
p. 229.

6.
   
Duchess of Bedford,
Now the Duchesses,
p. 60.

7.
    
Walpole, XX, 311.

8.
    
MSS of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, quoted in Walpole, Vol.

XX, p. 303 fn.

9.
    
Walpole, XX, 3.17.

1 o. Creevey,
Papers,
Vol. I, p. 309.

11.
     
Timbs,
English Eccentrics and Eccentricities,
Vol. I, p. 162.

12.
   
Augustus Hare,
The Years With Mother,
p. 188.

13.
   
James Pope-Hennessey,
Queen Mary
, p. 148.

14.
    
Duke of Manchester,
My Candid Recollections,
p. 248.

15.
    
Complete Peerage,
Vol. I, App. B.

16.
    
Hamilton Papers M8, (42, 47, 63, 2, 5, 20, 40).

17.
    
Lord James Douglas-Hamilton,
Motive for a Mission, passim.

18.
    
Gentleman's Magazine,
October 1789.

19.
    
Timbs,
op. cit.,
II, 286.

20.
   
Wraxall,
Posthumous Memoirs,
Vol. I, p. 61.

21.
    
Journal
of Lady Elizabeth Holland, Vol. II, p. 67.

22.
   
ibid.,
p. 70.

23.
   
Wraxall,
op. cit.,
I, 65.

24.
   
Lord Ernest Hamilton,
Old Days and New,
p. 26.

25.
    
G. E. Russell,
Collections and Recollections
(1898).

26.
   
Journal
of Elizabeth Lady Holland, Vol. II, p. 69.

27.
    
Lord Ernest Hamilton,
op. cit.,
p. 30.

28.
   
Lord Ernest Hamilton,
Forty Years On,
p. 43.

29.
    
Lord Frederic Hamilton,
Here, There and Everywhere,
p. 157.

30.
   
Lord Frederic Hamilton,
Days Before Yesterday,
p. 325.

31.
    
Duke of Portland,
Men, Women and Things,
p. 309.

Lord Ernest Hamilton,
Forty Years On,
p. 302.

Duke of Sutherland

At the northernmost tip of Scotland there lies the huge county of Sutherland, covering 1,298,000 acres of windswept, almost treeless highlands. Only Caithness and the Orkneys are more distant. Sutherland is battered by the sea on three sides, and dominated by wild outbursts of rock in the interior. Its inhabitants are descended from hardy Norsemen and rough independent Gaels. It is a forbidding but beautiful place, and it belonged in its entirety, as personal property, to one man in the nineteenth century, an Englishman - the Duke of Sutherland.

Now the Duke of Sutherland lives in Roxburghshire and Suffolk, with not an acre in Sutherland. His kinswoman, on the other hand, Elizabeth Countess of Sutherland in her own right, does still own 100,000 acres in the county, while the ancient family seat of Dunrobin Castle belongs to a Charitable Trust.

At first glance, it is not easy to see what these two people have to do with each other. They do not even have the same surname: the Duke is John Egerton, the Countess is Elizabeth Sutherland, Mrs Janson. These surnames, however, are very misleading. In fact, both the Duke and the Countess
should
bear the surname Leveson-Gower (pronounced Looson-Gore). Until 1963 the dukedom and the earl­dom were vested in one person, George Granville Sutherland-Leveson- Gower, 5th Duke and 23rd Earl of Sutherland. On his death, the dukedom went to a distant relation, while the earldom went to his niece. To find out why, we must go back 200 years and follow the fortunes of the Gower family.

The Gowers represent the single most illuminating example of how to advance in social status without talent or achievement, but by the unfailing method of marrying heiresses. They were by no means the only family to adopt this route to wealth (the Dukes of Buccleuch were another), but they did make the advance with more dazzling speed than anyone else. It was Disraeli who said they had a talent for "absorbing heiresses", a talent which was to bring them a million and a half acres, making them the largest private landowners in Europe.

Within the space of three generations, they rose from a baronetcy to a dukedom, and also, as it happened, from nonentity to notoriety. By the time they had finished, they could claim to be the "richest, most powerful, and most disliked family in England".
¹

Sir Thomas Gower, the 2nd baronet, married Frances Leveson, sole heiress of Sir John Leveson in Staffordshire. From being a small Yorkshire squire, he was suddenly owner of the Trentham estate in Staffordshire and the Lilleshall estate in Shropshire. His son Sir William Leveson-Gower married another heiress, Lady Jane Granville, daughter of the Earl of Bath. Their son John married Catherine Manners, daughter of the 1st Duke of Rutland, and was the first of the three generations to climb towards a dukedom. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Gower of Sittenham. His son was created Earl Gower and Viscount Trentham, and married three rich wives, each of whom added to the nicely accumulating wealth. His son also married three times, choosing as his second wife Lady Louisa Egerton, daughter and co-heiress of the 1st Duke of Bridgwater, and leaping up the ladder to a marquessate: he was created Marquess of Stafford in 1786. It is
his
son, the 2nd Marquess of Stafford, who begins the Sutherland story by marrying the greatest heiress of all, the Scottish Countess of Sutherland.

The earldom of Sutherland, like many a Scottish title, has had a turbulent, bloodthirsty history. Tradition held that the earls were descended from a Norse invader who, on landing at the coast of Sutherland, was set upon by a number of wild cats.
²
The battle which ensued was long and fierce, but he slew them all, and survived to found the Sutherland family. To this day, the Countess of Sutherland has a wild cat on her coat of arms, and the motto
Sans Peur
("Fearless"). Be that as it may, the first of the family to own land was granted the district of Sutherland by William the Lion in 1196, and created earl about 1235.

Some of the stories involving his descendants are enough to freeze the spine. In 1395 the 6th Earl of Sutherland was parleying with the chief of the Mackays in an attempt to settle their inevitable differences by negotiation when he lost his temper and murdered Mackay and his son with his bare hands. In the sixteenth century Lady Isobel Sinclair, mother of the second in line to the earldom, decided to dispose of the nth Earl and his son by poison. She invited them to dinner, served the poisoned ale to her guests, and was thwarted only by the Earl's timely realisation of what was going on. He fled from the house, as Lady Isobel's son entered and was himself served the ale by a servant who was not privy to the secret. A few days later, the Earl and Countess were both dead, as was Lady Isobel's son, for whose sake the plan was conceived. Lady Isobel was sent to Edinburgh prison, where she committed suicide, and the rightful heir, Alexander, the only one-not to touch the poison, succeeded as i ith Earl.
³

The title passed through the heirs of line into different families, until in 1766 the 18th Earl died at the age of thirty-one, only two weeks after his wife had died, aged twenty-six. They left one surviv­ing daughter, an infant barely one year old, who was 19th Countess of Sutherland in her own right (although her guardians had to fight for this recognition against two other claimants), and
Ban mhorair Chataibh,
a Celtic title meaning "Great Lady of Sutherland". It was she who married Granville Leveson-Gower when she was twenty, culminating the series of clever marriages in the Gower family, and founding what was to be the line of dukes of Sutherland.

But for the moment we are in 1785, when Leveson-Gower married the Countess. As dowry, she brought her husband 1735 square miles of land, or two-thirds of the county of Sutherland. The following year, his father was created Marquess of Stafford, and he himself inherited that title in 1803, together with the Shropshire, Stafford­shire and Yorkshire estates. In the same year, his uncle the bachelor Duke of Bridgwater died, leaving him the finest private art collection in the country at that time, and a still greater fortune. Leveson- Gower had risen from comparative obscurity to an unassailable position, with tens of thousands of tenants and a colossal income of £300,000 a year; his nearest rivals, like the dukes of Devonshire and Bedford, were considered extremely rich with £50,000 a year. Greville rightly called him "a leviathan of wealth".
⁴
The pity was that neither he nor the Countess possessed the intelligence to know how best to use all this money. Neither subtlety nor sensitivity had been passed down by the Gowers. From 1803 to 1833, this couple were known as Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford, names which during that period were loathed in the shire of Sutherland, because the Marquess and his wife had decided in their wisdom to "improve" the land.

There can be no dispute that Sutherland needed improving. In 1812 there was not a single road in the whole county, and only one bridge. It was wild isolated country, rugged and barren, almost like a lunar landscape. Hardly anyone ventured into the interior, and those who did emerged weather-beaten and hungry, swearing never to go back. The Marquess of Stafford was not one of them. For twenty years he saw nothing of Sutherland save what was visible from Dunrobin Castle, and showed no inclination to explore.
⁵
But in 1811 Parliament offered to pay half the expense of building roads in Scotland, if landowners would bear the other half. First, Stafford bought off the Reay estate for £300,000 (only one year's income to him), so that he was master of almost the entire county, and then he set to work. By the time he had finished, twenty years later, he had built 450 miles of excellent roads, among the best in Great Britain, 134 bridges, and an iron bridge with a span of 1150 feet, uniting Sutherland and Ross-shire at Bonar. He had opened up the county to the mail service, which now went as far as Thurso, and previously did not penetrate Sutherland at all. Improvements there had been, and great was the achievement. But in the process the lives of the people had been made a misery.

The trouble was, the Staffords had no imagination. They were not the kind of people to see that what they were doing could cause distress, because they could see no further than their noses and their inhuman statistics. Even his own grandson, the Victorian aesthete Lord Ronald Gower, had to admit that Stafford was a bottomlessly dull man. He never did or said anything that was worth remembering, said Gower, and what he wrote was boring beyond comprehension. He suffered from gout and myopia, and was conspicuous only by virtue of his huge hawk-like nose, bigger even than Wellington's, a nose, incidentally, that was bequeathed by his family to the Beauforts, and is still proudly worn by the present Duke of Beaufort (Stafford's sister married a Duke of Beaufort). He had only one ambition, to be a duke, and it drove him desperate;
⁶
it was the only rank he could be awarded, having inherited the others already. "He might have slipped into his grave and the
Dictionary of National Biography
without being remembered for anything more spectacular than his wealth and his art collection had it not been for his marriage and its consequences."
⁷

As for his wife, she had been pretty as a young girl, and excited the admiration of Lady Bessborough, who thought her the most enviable person she knew, "with great cleverness, beauty, talents, and a thousand amiable qualities ... a propriety of manner and conduct".
⁸
Her tenants saw another person. Though she was the Great Lady of Sutherland, she spoke no Gaelic (the only language of her people), and according to one writer actually despised the customs and manners of the Highland people whose chief she was. "She was asEnglish in mood and taste as the furniture of a London drawing- room."
⁹

The folk over whom this cushioned couple ruled, and about whom they knew nothing, were a tough race of mountain-dwellers, completely insular (owing to the absence of roads) and fiercely independent. They lived in crude hovels scattered over the Highlands, grew potatoes, raised a few goats and cattle, and brewed raw whisky. Their standards were never far above famine level, and they lived in "conditions of penury and squalor that can only fairly be compared with those of a famine area in contemporary India, and were tolerable only because they were familiar and traditional".
¹⁰
There were about 25,000 of them, and they were as much a race of foreigners to the English (which includes the Marquess of Stafford) as the Red Indians of America or the Aborigines of Australia. They were said to be lamentably indolent, and only their bravery in war was acknowledged. The Countess thought of them as a burden, the Marquess didn't think of them at all.

So, when the government offered to share the cost of "improving" the land, it never entered Lord Stafford's head that the inhabitants might object to being forcibly moved from their homes, like a bother­some ant-hill. They were ignorant, illiterate, slothful. It was not their business to object. The Marquess's agents presented themselves at thousands of huts, with orders for the tenants to move to the coast. Not only were they to be evicted, but they were expected to pay four shillings each towards the cost of the road-building, which the Marquess would otherwise have to bear out of his own pocket. Those who went struggled to earn a new living on a notoriously inhospit­able coast, rugged and stormy and rocky, perched precariously like leaves in autumn. They had spent their lives rearing goats and growing crops; now they were to fish - there was nothing else for them to do. The huts they left behind, where they had lived for generations, were burned to the ground before they had time to get over the horizon. Those who refused to leave saw their houses burned before their eyes, sometimes with their few belongings still inside. Others emigrated to Northern America. One way or another, the land was swept clear of people, to make way for roads, and to prepare the land for southern sheep-farmers, who were even then being invited to establish themselves in Sutherland. The county was divided into lots, and advertised in the south.The Marquess and the Countess saw none of the evictions: they were not aware of any suffering, and if they were they would not have spared more than a moment's reflection; for these Highlanders were not
real
people; they were natives, and they were uneconomic. Lord Stafford was "seized as much as I am with the rage of improvements", wrote the Countess of Sutherland. "It was as if the whole population of Sutherland was being shaken in a great cup, thrown out, and allowed to fall where it would on the coast or blow away to the other side of the world", wrote the historian of the Great Improvement. There is no record of how many people were summarily removed in this way, but it was somewhere between 5000 and 15,000. The criminal insensitivity of Lord and Lady Stafford has not been for­gotten in Sutherland. One of them, a stonemason, immortalised his people's plight in later years: "The country was darkened by the smoke of burnings", he wrote, "and the descendants were ruined, trampled upon, dispersed, and compelled to seek asylum across the sea". This man, Donald Macleod, was hounded by Stafford's men, and driven eventually into exile; his wife was driven into madness by the persecution she suffered.
¹¹