The Dukeries

WELBECK ABBEY

The present house of Welbeck was built upon the site of an abbey for Premonstratensian canons, which was begun in 1140. Nothing, however, remains of the old place save some stonework in the cellars and a few inner walls. A portion of the house dates from 1604; in an engraving from the great Duke of Newcastle's book on Horsemanship we find that it originally bore some resemblance to a French château. Charles the First and Henrietta Maria were entertained here – the house being placed at their disposal whilst their host occupied Bolsover Castle, some miles distant. Ben Jonson devised a masque entitled "Love's Welcome" for the royal amusement, and there was such feasting and show that it cost between fourteen and fifteen thousand pounds.

The Abbey is richly furnished, and contains one of the finest collections of pictures and miniatures in Europe, and a wealth of ancient manuscripts. The miniatures were gathered together in the early part of the eighteenth century by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Of these treasures Mrs. Delany writes in 1756: "I have undertaken to set the miniatures of the Duchess of Portland [Lord Oxford's daughter and heiress] in order, as she does not like to trust them to anybody else, and for want of proper airing they are in danger of being spoiled. Such Petitots! such Olivers! such Coopers!" About that time the good lady describes an evening walk in park and gardens: "By the time we came in, the moon was risen to a great height, and we sat down in the great dining-room to contemplate its glory, and to talk of our friends, who in all likelihood were at that moment admiring its splendour as well as we". Later she confesses that Welbeck has a glare of grandeur, and that although she admires her Duchess when receiving princely honours and acquitting herself with dignity, she loves her best in her own private dressing-room!

The miniatures were wellnigh lost in the middle of the nineteenth century. The late duke had lent the collection to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, and a certain well-known literary man, who was in the owner's confidence, arranged for all to be sent to London, so that, like Mrs. Delany, he might arrange them in suitable order. There he pawned the whole lot for trifling sums, with seven different pawnbrokers; but, thanks chiefly to a well-known inhabitant of Worksop, all, with the exception of five, were recovered.

Here are two famous Riding Houses, one the pride of the author of the great work on Horsemanship in Stuart times. This is used nowadays as a picture gallery, the late Duke of Portland having built another of dimensions almost double. To my thinking, one of the chief beauties of Welbeck is the gilded gateway opening to the avenue on the road from Worksop to Ollerton – surely one of the most graceful and yet imposing structures of its kind in the country. Another and more singular attraction consists of the subterranean roadways – gigantic mole runs the cause of whose creation is, and probably always will be, a mystery to the world in general. The pleasure gardens are stocked with rare trees, and the vast lake has so natural an appearance that one forgets that it was made by human folk. The kitchen garden is notably fine: we are told that it covers thirty acres, and that the houses for peaches and other luscious fruits extend over a quarter of a mile. There is a story of a monstrous bunch of Syrian grapes having, some generations ago, been grown there, and sent by the duke of that time across country to Wentworth House. It weighed nineteen and a half pounds, and was carried – as was the trophy taken by the spies from Canaan – attached to a pole.

Finest of the Welbeck trees is the "Greendale Oak", which in 1724 was transformed, by cutting, into an archway, the aperture being 10 feet 3 inches high and 6 feet 3 inches wide, so that a carriage, or three horsemen riding abreast, could pass through. From the branches cut off at that time a cabinet was made for the Countess of Oxford – a fine piece of furniture, inlaid with a representation of her spouse driving his chariot and six through the opening.

Horace Walpole, in 1756, writes in his usual acid style: "I went to Welbeck. It is impossible to describe the bales of Cavendishes, Harleys, Holleses, Veres, and Ogles: every chamber is tapestried with them; nay, and with two thousand other morsels; all their histories inscribed; all their arms, crests, services, sculptured on chimneys of various English marbles in ancient forms (and to say truth) most of them ugly. Then such a Gothic hall, with pendent fretwork in imitation of the old, and with a chimney-piece like mine in the library. Such water-colour pictures! such historic fragments! There is Prior's portrait and the Column and Verelst's flower on which he wrote; and the authoress Duchess of Newcastle in a theatric habit, which she generally wore, and, consequently, looking as mad as the present Duchess; and dukes of the same name, looking as foolish as the present Duke; and Lady Mary Wortley, drawn as an authoress, with rather better pretensions; and cabinets and glasses wainscoted with the Greendale Oak, which was so large that an old steward wisely cut a way through it to make a triumphal passage for his lord and lady on their wedding! What treasures to revel over! The horseman Duke's manège is converted into a lofty stable, and there is still a grove or two of magnificent oaks that have escaped all these great families, though the last Lord Oxford cut down above an hundred thousand pounds' worth. The place is little pretty, distinct from all these reverend circumstances." Twenty-one years later he writes: "Welbeck is a devastation. The house is a delight of my eyes, for it is a hospital of old portraits." One is inclined to believe that something in the order of his reception had stung him into lasting pique.

The great ancestress of the owner of Welbeck, and of the other nobility in the Dukeries, was Bess of Hardwick, who built a magnificent country house on the "edge" overlooking the Vale of Scarsdale, some miles distant from the border of Sherwood Forest. This singular woman, as striking a personality as her contemporary and sometime friend Queen Elizabeth, occasionally passed in state along the "ridings".

Her life-story is a marvellous instance of genius devoted to the attainment of a high position. The daughter of a well-to-do squire, she was married at fifteen to a wealthy young gentleman whose estate lay ten miles away, and who, dying very soon, left her mistress of the greater part of his fortune. Her first house at Barlow, near Chesterfield, has entirely disappeared, save for a piece of old wall. She remained a widow for many years, then married Sir William Cavendish, by whom she had six children. After his death she chose Sir William St. Loe, inherited his extensive estates, then, well past her prime, accepted the offer of the widowed George, Earl of Shrewsbury; but before the marriage insisted that two of her young Cavendishes should be married to two of his young Talbots. For a few years her fourth venture proved satisfactory enough; but the custody of Mary Queen of Scots apparently became too much of a nerve-strain for both man and wife; and their wrangles finally became common property in high circles. She embroiled herself with Queen Elizabeth; she persecuted her husband for his so-called meanness – although she was exceedingly rich in her own right; and, worst of all, she sowed dissension between him and his own offspring. The poor earl's condition was melancholy enough; one has no doubt that he was thankful to the heart when they separated for the last time.

In the portrait at Hardwick Hall she is represented as a comely, roguish-looking matron in full maturity: a better idea of her character may be won from the effigy lying on the tomb she erected for herself in All Saints' Church at Derby. There one sees a face not unbeautiful, but cold and masterful in the extreme.

It was her grandson, William, first Duke of Newcastle, who first gave lustre to Welbeck, and perhaps, after all, he owed most of his celebrity to an intellectual wife, known in Restoration days as "Mad Madge of Newcastle". Few pictures of domestic life in the seventeenth century are more pleasing than that given by this lady in the short account of her girlhood, which opens her fantastical autobiography. Born the youngest of Sir Thomas Lucas's eight children, in a large country house near Colchester, she was trained under a system of education originated by her mother. The daughters, of whom there were five, were not kept strictly to their schoolbooks, but rather taught "for formality than benefit". Singing, dancing, music, reading, writing, and embroidery were their accomplishments; but Mistress Lucas, who was left a widow soon after the birth of Margaret, cared not so much for dancing and fiddling and conversing in foreign languages as that they should be bred modestly and on honest principles. In London, where they migrated for the season, they would visit Spring Gardens, Hyde Park, and similar places, and sometimes attended concerts, or supped in barges on the river.

As she grew to womanhood Margaret became filled with the desire to play maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, chiefly because she had heard that the queen in her poverty had not the same number of ladies as in her prosperity. After much persuasion her mother allowed her to leave home, and she joined the Court at Oxford, and soon afterwards met William Cavendish, who was her senior by nearly thirty years. They married, and the battle of Marston Moor forced them into exile. Obliged to return to England, so that she might raise funds, she wrote one or two volumes of Poems and Philosophical Fancies, successors to another grotesque work entitled The World's Olio. These were the first three of ten immense folios, treating of every imaginable subject, and most slipshod in grammar and style, that she gave to the world, tenderly regarding them, in the absence of any other offspring, as her children.

The Lives of the duke and of herself are, however, the only productions remembered nowadays. Of the first, Charles Lamb says: "There is no casket rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel"; but Pepys, who lived at the same time as the noble authoress, described it as "the ridiculous History of the Duke, which shows her to be a mad, conceited, rediculous woman, and he an asse to suffer her to write what she does to and of him". Her own memoir is charmingly and unaffectedly egotistical. She tells us: "I fear my ambition inclines to vainglory, for I am very ambitious, yet 'tis neither for beauty, wit, title, wealth, or power, but as they are Steps to raise me to Fancies Tower, which is to live by remembrance in all ages… My Disposition is more inclined to Melancholy than Merry, but not crabbed or peevish Melancholy, but soft, melting, and contemplating Melancholy, and I am apt rather to weep than to laugh." Always fearing that she might be mistaken by posterity for her husband's first wife, she gives an elaborate explanation at the end of the book, so that all in after years might accredit her with intellectual magnificence.

Although she met with much ridicule at the Court of Charles the Second, being satirized particularly by the libertine poets Etherege and Sedley, the fulsome praise of men of considerable intellect was lavished upon her, and even the sedate and usually truthful Evelyn, after a lengthy enumeration of the great women of history, flattered her with the assurance that all of those summed up together only divided between them what she retained in one! A curious story is told of her appearance with a train-bearer in the chamber of Catherine of Portugal. As this was a breach of Court etiquette, she was forbidden to repeat it, and resented the reproof by wearing at her next appearance a train of satin and silver thirty yards long, with the end supported by four waiting-ladies in the ante-room.

She wrote several plays, concerning one of which, The Humorous Lovers, Pepys tells us that although he would rather not have seen it, since it was so sickeningly silly, yet he was glad, because he could understand her better afterwards. At the end of the first performance, as a queen of breeding, she stood up in her box and made her respects to the actors.

In those days of better fortunes the quaintly assorted couple spent much time in the country houses of Welbeck and Bolsover. The duke's income was very large, being equal to at least £200,000 of our money, and, since both had rural tastes, it is probable that they were far happier in Nottinghamshire than in their fine town mansion in Clerkenwell Close. Welbeck she admired most, since it was seated "in the bottom of a park environed with woods, and noble, yet melancholy". One wonders if the ghost of this "wise, wittie and learned lady" wanders in those beautiful and amazing precincts, a little bewildered and more than a little angry that any of her beloved spouse's descendants should have dared to enlarge and embellish the comfortable temple of their conjugal felicity. If she could have had her will, his works in architecture, like hers in the realms of smoky fancy, would have lasted until the end of time.

CLUMBER

The most impressive approach to Clumber is by way of Normanton Inn, a red-brick hostelry draped luxuriantly with virginia creeper. At some slight distance is a magnificent glade of varied greens, with great patches of blood-coloured bent-grass. In the neighbourhood grow many fine Spanish chestnuts; when I was last there the ground was littered with the fallen flowers. A vast, festooned cloud, grey as the smoke of some monstrous fire, drifted from the east; then lightning sported wickedly amongst the trees, and the rain fell in torrents. Beside the balustraded bridge the water seemed covered with an army of white puppets. But it was at the entrance to the Lime Tree Avenue that I looked upon the greatest wonder of the day. Behind the shifting veil the view of that curving road seemed as fantastically unreal as the background of some ancient Italian masterpiece.

This avenue, three miles in length, has on either side two rows of limes, and on a hot July midday the fragrance is overpoweringly sweet. From this the house is not visible – to reach it one must pass down a private drive to the left. Whilst the present house was being built, Sir Harbottle Grimston writes on a tour enjoyed in 1768: "From Worksop Manor to Clumber, Lord Lincoln's, over the heath. The house is situated rather low in a very extensive park, near a noble piece of water, over which is a very handsome bridge on 'cycloidal' arches. The house is not yet finished, but by its present appearance seems as if it would be magnificent. There are nineteen windows in front, the middle one a bow, with two wings projecting forwards." About this time Walpole speaks of Clumber being "still in leading-strings". The building was finished about 1770, and is of white freestone, pleasantly age-coloured, with a south front that opens to a formal and beautiful Italian garden with terraced walks and graceful marble fountains. Beyond, reached by stone staircases, spreads the great lake, which covers eighty-seven acres. On this may be seen a gay full-masted frigate, the aspect of which in this tranquil and richly wooded country strikes a somewhat bizarre note. The park contains four thousand acres, and in the neighbourhood of the house may be seen many handsome cedars and yews. The finest view is obtainable from the opposite bank of the lake, or from near the head, where stands the home farmstead of Hardwick.

The house, though not one of the most impressive in its exterior aspect, contains treasures of priceless worth. The pillared entrance hall has several fine statues, notably one of Napoleon and another of the author of The Seasons. All the state chambers are extremely handsome, and in the large drawing-room may be seen five ebony cabinets and four pedestals surmounted with crystal chandeliers, which were brought from the Doge's Palace. Perhaps the most notable is the dining-room, 60 feet long, 34 feet wide, and 30 feet high. We are told that it can easily accommodate one hundred and fifty guests at dinner. The library, a fine room panelled with mahogany, contains many treasures, notably three Caxtons —The History of Reynard the Fox, 1481; The Chronicles of England, 1482; and The Golden Legend, 1493: the first and second folios of Shakespeare: and many examples – one printed on vellum – of Froissart's Chronicles. There is also a fifteenth-century manuscript of Gower's Confessio Amantis. In the smoking-room is to be seen a remarkable chimney-piece of carved marble, which once stood in Fonthill Abbey, the house of the author of Vathek. To the antiquarian, perhaps the most interesting objects are four funeral cysts, dating from two thousand years ago. There is a fine collection of pictures, chiefly of old masters of distinction, amongst which may be found portraits by Holbein, Vandyke, Lely, and Hogarth, of folk intimately associated with the history of our country.

Near by stands the Church of the Holy Virgin, built by the present Duke of Newcastle. Its walls and spire are of rich red and yellowish sandstone, in the fourteenth-century style. This is probably one of the most ornately beautiful churches in the kingdom, and the view from the open doorway is surpassingly rich in colour. The interior contains much fine carving – the altar-piece is of alabaster, with the Virgin and child for central figures. The windows are delicately tinted: in spite of the excess of splendour naught can offend the artistic taste.

The Clinton family, of which the Duke of Newcastle is head, is one of the oldest and most celebrated in our annals. Geoffrey de Clinton, a distinguished forbear, Chamberlain and Treasurer to Henry the First, was the builder of Warwick Castle, and after his day his collateral descendants devoted their lives to serving the Crown faithfully. Edward the First called one his "beloved squire"; others fought with glory in the French battles. A Clinton was in the deputation that received Anne of Cleves when she journeyed to meet her spouse. Another assisted in the suppression of Sir Thomas Wyatt's rebellion, and was afterwards one of Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council, being employed in various matters of high import, notably in the projected marriage of his royal mistress and the Duke of Anjou. He died in the fullness of honour, and was buried in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. His son was one of the peers at the trial of Mary Queen of Scots. In the time of George the First another of the family filled the highest office of state, and died Lord Privy Seal; whilst the present duke's grandfather, as illustrious as any of his predecessors, was a celebrated politician of Early Victorian days, and was, moreover, honoured with the friendship and admiration of the young Gladstone.

THORESBY

The village of Budby, beyond the confines of Thoresby Park, is one of the most placid and sleepy places I know. The stuccoed houses are perhaps devoid of picturesqueness, but the shallow Meden, which runs quietly beside the roadway, is crystal-clear, and from the wilderness on the farther bank one often sees pert black water hens slip gently from the shelter of the long grass, and glide to and fro like tiny boats. Beyond the bridge swans swim very proudly, with the austere dignity that has naught in common with the familiar bearing of petted birds in town parks. The Meden is a beautiful and melancholy stream, at whose side an exile from the hill country might sit down and weep. The rough woodland from which we are barred has a refreshingly cool aspect: in summer the wilder foliage contrasts strikingly with the rich purple of rhododendrons.

The present house of Thoresby, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the site of its cold and damp predecessor, was built between 1864 and 1874. It is in the modern Elizabethan style, its walls of stone quarried at Steetley, some miles away, and is surrounded by a rich and beautiful park where may be seen many magnificent beeches and firs and oaks. The mansion is rich in art treasures, and may be counted amongst the most luxuriously furnished in the country; and the pleasure gardens are stately and beautiful.

Fine herds of deer wander among the bracken and heath, and the trees are haunted with happy squirrels. The park is thirteen miles in circumference, and near the house the little River Meden spreads out into a singularly picturesque lake, diversified with toy islands. The Thoresby of to-day possesses an atmosphere of tranquil splendour: in its neighbourhood one has some difficulty in evoking lively pictures of the celebrated folk who inhabited its predecessors.

The great woman of Thoresby was Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who spent there the greater part of her youth. The house in her time was a plain and uninteresting building of red brick. This was destroyed by fire in 1745. From the record by Sir Harbottle Grimston of his tour in the autumn of 1768, we find that – more than twenty years afterwards – the new hall was not completed. Sir Harbottle writes: "This parke excels the others much in beauty, having a very good turf, which in this country is very much wanting. The house, which is not nearly finished, is rather adapted for convenience than magnificence. It is fronted by a rising lawn, on the top of which is a very fine wood. On one side a noble piece of water, which supplies a cascade behind the house: the other side of this house is beautified by plantations." Horace Walpole found this hall dull, since he declared that "Merry Sherwood is a triste region, and wants a race of outlaws to enliven it, and as Duchess Robin Hood has left her country, it has little chance of recovering its ancient glory". This was obviously written after the famous Duchess of Kingston had departed on her Continental tour.

Before me lie a pair of tiny shoes of sea-green silk, shot with an undertone of flesh colour. For at least a century these were in the possession of a yeoman family in the neighbourhood of Wortley village. The toes are pointed, the heels high, and on the lappets are frayed marks where the pins of the jewelled buckles pierced the fabric. The insteps do not belie the tradition that a kitten could lie beneath the arch of the wearer's naked foot, for they are so high that it seems as if the blue blood of the Pierreponts were accompanied with physical deformity.

These are relics of Lady Mary, and were probably left at her husband's heritage of Wharncliffe, in Yorkshire, when the first happiness of her married life had come to an end, and before she became engaged in those famous travels which, by their result – the introduction of inoculation for the smallpox – raised her even to a greater eminence than that given by her intellectual ability.

She was born of a family that had already produced two men of splendid genius, whose names are written in golden letters in the annals of literature: Beaumont, the dramatist, who wrote, in collaboration with his friend Fletcher, some plays that are considered by our best critics as inferior only to Shakespeare's, was related by his mother to the Pierreponts of the Elizabethan age; and Henry Fielding, the novelist, was Lady Mary's second cousin. She is said to have written in her copy of Tom Jones as fine a tribute to an author's power as could be desired – simply the words Ne plus ultra. Villiers, the notorious Duke of Buckingham, whose end served Pope for some of his best satirical verse, was also of the same stock.

It was at Thoresby that Lady Mary's strange love affair with the handsome Mr. Edward Wortley, of Wharncliffe Chase – the abode of the Dragon of Wantley – began, and after many difficulties ended in one of the most mysterious marriages that ever puzzled literary students. When a girl of fourteen she met the gentleman at a party, and was delighted with the attraction which he found in her conversation. She became a particular friend of his sister, with whom she commenced a sentimental correspondence – most of the letters, it may be said, being written by Wortley himself. He became, through the vehicle of the complacent Miss Anne, her guide and philosopher, and soon we find him answering certain precocious queries about Latin. Then jealousy appeared – somebody had escorted Lady Mary to Nottingham Races! The flattered young beauty begs to know the name of the man she loves, "that I may (according to the laudable custom of lovers) sigh to the woods and groves hereabouts, and teach it to the echoes". Thereupon Wortley's inclinations were made known, and she replied: "To be capable of preferring the despicable wretch you mention to Mr. Wortley, is as ridiculous, if not as criminal, as forsaking the Deity to worship a calf; … my tenderness is always built upon my esteem and when the foundation perishes, it falls".