Stately Passions: The Scandals of Britain's Great Houses

Stately

Passions

by the same author:

Horse Racing in Berkshire (1992)

Horse Racing (Hulton Getty and Allsport ‘Decades of Sport’ series, 2000)

Watching Monty (with Johnny Henderson, 2005)

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

Michael O’Mara Books Limited

9 Lion Yard

Tremadoc Road

London SW4 7NQ

This revised edition first published 2012

Copyright © Jamie Douglas-Home 2006, 2012

All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84317-154-6 in hardback print format

ISBN: 978-1-84317-955-9 in EPub format

ISBN: 978-1-84317-956-6 in Mobipocket format

Designed and typeset by Martin Bristow

Additional design by www.glensaville.com

www.mombooks.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

ONE Royal Scots: The Palace of Holyroodhouse

Balmoral Castle

TWO Chatsworth

THREE Hampton Court

FOUR Fort Belvedere

FIVE Inveraray Castle

SIX Sissinghurst Castle

SEVEN Cliveden

EIGHT Madresfield Court

NINE Powderham Castle

TEN Brocket Hall

ELEVEN Ickworth

TWELVE Sandringham House

Chapter Notes

Bibliography and Sources

Index

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my publishers, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, and in particular to Michael O’Mara and Toby Buchan, whose assistance and advice were invaluable; to my editors, Kate Gribble and Dominique Enright (who also made the index), and copy-editor, Hugh Morgan, and to Ariane Durkin for reading the proofs. Grateful thanks, too, to Judith Palmer and David Sinden for the illustrations for this book, to Button Group plc for the jacket designs, and to Martin Bristow for the design and layout of the text.

Introduction

WHILE I WAS WRITING and researching Stately Passions, the irresponsibility and lack of accountability shown, over the centuries, by the British royal family and aristocracy made me gulp in amazement with increasing and worrying frequency. After all, the different generations of owners of these palaces and stately homes are merely custodians, one of whose duties it is to keep such houses and estates intact for their children, for their children’s children, and, indeed, in royalty’s case, for the country and their subjects.

Yet throughout history, their willingness to gamble away their inheritances, produce strings of illegitimate children and partake of a hedonistic lifestyle of drink- and, later, drug-fuelled decadence, without any regard for the consequences or even the faintest degree of contriteness, almost beggars belief. Didn’t anybody in the opulent drawing rooms of these stately homes notice what was happening on the other side of the Channel during the French Revolution? Obviously not: indeed, the behaviour of Britain’s royals and upper classes throughout the century that followed was arguably even more debauched than it had been before our Gallic neighbours decided to dispense with their dissolute monarchy.

Boredom, which a privileged and spoiled existence inevitably brings, was probably partly to blame for the propensity for bed-hopping with members of the same or the opposite sex; wife-swapping; betting staggering sums on the horses and the tables, like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; and even, in Henry VIII’s case, beheading an unfaithful spouse. But not entirely – even those who took their duties seriously and displayed some sort of social conscience, such as Prime Ministers Melbourne, Palmerston and Grey, were constantly involved in adulterous relationships and, actually or reputedly, fathered several bastard children. In their case, perhaps, the old adage that power is the greatest aphrodisiac is true.

Of course, the aristocracy has now lost most of its political power and very few hereditary peers sit in the House of Lords. But modern members of this elite club still seem to have inherited the ability to shock lesser mortals with their eccentric and, sometimes, criminal behaviour.

When the contents of his recently deceased father’s will were revealed in 2010, Jasper Orlando Slingsby Duncombe must have had cause to regret a colourful past. The new Baron Feversham discovered that he had been disinherited and that Duncombe Park, his Yorkshire family seat, and a 46-million-pound fortune, based on coal, had been left to Jake, his younger brother.

Clearly their long-suffering father had not forgotten that, eleven years earlier, his eldest son, high on cocaine and sporting a false moustache, had held up a Bayswater corner shop. Furthermore, the sixth Baron did not seem to approve of his heir’s more recent employment, running two pornography companies, Tongue in Cheek and Relish XXX. The latter company distributes porn films, including titles such as To The Manor Porn, to NHS fertility clinics and sperm banks!

The case of Alexander Charles David Drogo Montagu, the thirteenth Duke of Manchester, springs to mind, too. His Grace, who, in his time, has been deported from Canada and imprisoned twice for fraud, was exposed as a bigamist in London’s High Court in 2011.

In the end, however, it must be left to the reader to decide whether promiscuity and degeneracy occur with similar regularity in the less fortunate strata of society, or if this strange state of affairs can be put down to the simple fact that Britain’s royalty and aristocracy were blessed, or fated, with oversized libidos, as well as often gargantuan appetites for drink or drugs – and occasionally both.

JAMIE DOUGLAS-HOME

CHAPTER ONE

THE PALACE OF HOLYROODHOUSE

THE RICH HISTORY OF the Palace OF HOLYROODHOUSE, which stands at the end of Edinburgh’s famous Royal Mile under the city’s prominent hillside landmark, Arthur’s Seat, began in the dark twelfth century. Almost nine centuries ago, in 1128, Scotland’s King David I was hunting on the outskirts of Edinburgh when he had a vision in which a cross, or rood, belonging to his mother, Queen Saint Margaret, appeared between the antlers of a stag that had turned on its pursuers. David was so moved by his religious experience that he ordered an Augustinian monastery to be built on the very spot where the attacking deer had stood. The apt symbol of the abbey – a stag’s head, with its horns framing a cross – is used to this day.

When Edinburgh grew to be recognized as the Scottish capital, the country’s monarchs chose to live at Holyroodhouse, surrounded by its tranquil parkland, rather than in cold and forbidding Edinburgh Castle, high on a windswept rock above the city. In 1501 James IV cleared the woodland close to the abbey and constructed a glorious palace where he could live with his new bride, Margaret Tudor, the daughter of England’s King Henry VII. The centuries have taken their toll, however; today, all that remains there is a small piece of the gatehouse of James and Margaret’s magnificent dwelling.

His successor, James V, added a huge tower between 1528 and 1532 and a new west front three years later. As James IV had built the palace to serve as a defensive stronghold, these renovations, which included an enormous amount of glasswork, made Holyroodhouse a far more comfortable place to inhabit for James’s first wife, Madeleine, the daughter of Francis I of France, and his second wife, Mary of Guise, who was crowned in the abbey and was later to bear the King a daughter who would succeed him as Mary Queen of Scots.

Mary Queen of Scots, who returned to rule Scotland in 1561 after the death of her husband, Francis II of France, spent much of her short but dramatic life at Holyroodhouse and married each of her two other spouses, Lord Darnley and the Earl of Bothwell, in the abbey. But the palace fell into disrepair under her son, James VI of Scotland, and was not used as a royal residence after he moved to London following the death of Elizabeth I in 1603 to become England’s king as well. When James returned to Edinburgh in 1617, the palace was smartened up, and further refurbishments were carried out when Charles I was crowned King of Scotland in 1633, having succeeded his father on the latter’s death in 1625.

In the 1640s, during the Civil War, when it came under the occupation of Cromwell’s soldiers, the palace suffered serious fire damage, but, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II ordered an extensive rebuilding programme following his crowning in Scotland. Although he never returned to see the results of his handiwork, ‘Old Rowley’¹ certainly made the new palace more hospitable for its first occupant, his brother, the Duke of York, later to be James II (and VII of Scotland), and their descendants. He created a new royal apartment to the east and added the spacious upper floor, where the royal family’s living quarters are now, to accommodate the court. Charles also commissioned the impressive classical façades that surround the central quadrangle, and transformed the old abbey church into the Chapel Royal.

After the English and Scottish Parliaments were united at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the palace began to be neglected by the royal family, whose apartments were then used as grace-and-favour dwellings for impecunious aristocrats. But royalty returned to Holyroodhouse in 1745 when the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart or, to Jacobites, Bonnie Prince Charlie, held court there during his ill-fated attempt to claim the throne for his father, James the Old Pretender, the only son of James II. Ironically, the next royal resident was George II’s soldier son, the Duke of Cumberland,² whose troops brought both the charismatic prince’s rebellion and the flower of Scottish Jacobite youth to an untimely end at the bloody Battle of Culloden in 1746.

The abbey church’s roof collapsed in 1765, ruining Charles II’s Chapel Royal, but no further work was done on the palace until George IV’s time. The King’s state visit to Scotland on 15 August 1822 provided the impetus for his government to sanction the release of funds to give Holyroodhouse another fresh face. Queen Victoria, who succeeded William IV in 1837 and who liked to stay at the palace on her way to Balmoral, made further improvements, as well as re-establishing Holyroodhouse as Scotland’s premier royal residence. Her grandson, George V, who initiated the tradition of holding garden parties when the sovereign is in residence, also visited often and modernized the palace extensively.

It is true to say, therefore, that many monarchs have left their mark on Holyroodhouse, but George IV must take the credit for safeguarding the location of the most nefarious and dramatic event in the ancient palace’s chequered history. When he ordered that the apartment of Mary Queen of Scots should be ‘preserved sacred from all alteration’, the debauched old King cleverly ensured that future generations would be able to absorb the chilling, even ghostly, atmosphere that still exists in Mary’s bedchamber, and in the adjoining rooms at the top of the winding staircase that snakes up the palace’s north-west corner tower. For it was here that the young and beautiful Scottish Queen, heavily pregnant with a future King of England and Scotland, witnessed the savage murder of her trusted secretary, David Rizzio, by a group of ruthless Scottish noblemen, headed by her insanely jealous husband, Lord Darnley.

Mary Queen of Scots was born at Linlithgow Palace in West Lothian on 8 December 1542. Her father, James V, who had already lost two infant sons, was a sick man and had been confined to his bed in Falkland Palace since a crushing defeat by the English at Solway Moss two weeks earlier. When he received the news of his daughter’s birth, the Scottish King turned his head to the wall and, recalling that the Crown had descended to the Stuarts through Robert the Bruce’s daughter, Marjorie, muttered: ‘It came from a woman, and it will end with a woman.’ Six days later, James was dead, and his baby daughter inherited the Scottish throne.

In March 1543 the Scottish Parliament appointed Mary’s cousin and next in line of succession, the Earl of Arran, as regent until she reached her majority at the age of twelve. The by now excommunicated King of England, Henry VIII, thought it would be a good idea to arrange the marriage of his five-year-old son, Edward, to the tiny Mary to ensure that Scotland and England were united under his rule. Arran was willing to cooperate and, on 1 July, a treaty was signed at Greenwich confirming that Edward and Mary would eventually be wed.

The conditions of the agreement were that Mary should go to England when she was ten and be married the following year. But the Catholic faction, headed by Mary’s mother, Mary of Guise, violently opposed the agreement. So she removed Mary from Arran’s care, took her to Stirling Castle and had her crowned in its Chapel Royal on 9 December. A few days later, the Scottish Parliament repudiated Mary’s betrothal to Edward and renewed the traditional alliance between Scotland and France.

Henry VIII was furious when he heard that his well-laid plans to bring Scotland, for so long a thorn in the flesh of its southern neighbour, to heel had been thwarted. So he sent an army over the border in retaliation. The brutal series of raids, known as the ‘Rough Wooing’, inflicted much damage on Lowland Scotland. Henry’s troops burned the abbeys of Holyrood, where James V was buried, Melrose, Jedburgh and Dryburgh, and set fire to crops in the fertile Tweed valley. Henry persecuted the Scots until his death in 1547. The Duke of Somerset, the regent of the new boy king, Edward VI, pursued an identical policy, inflicting a terrible defeat on the Scots, who were under Arran’s command, at Pinkie in September 1547.

As the English forces now occupied a large swath of the south-east part of the country, Arran appealed to the French for aid. As an incentive, he suggested to Henry II of France that Scotland’s young Catholic Queen should be betrothed to Henry’s eldest son, Francis. The French king, realizing that such a union would effectively mean that Scotland would become a satellite of France, liked Arran’s idea.

In February 1548, after the Scottish Parliament consented to the marriage of Mary and the Dauphin, Henry II sent French troops to Scotland. They recaptured the strategically important town of Haddington, east of Edinburgh, from the English in June, and in July a treaty between France and Scotland was signed, formally agreeing to the marriage of Mary and Francis. On 7 August 1548 Mary, aged only five, said goodbye to her mother and her country and sailed for France. It would be thirteen years before she returned, as a widow of only eighteen years of age, to rule her native land.

Mary was brought up in the French court and, at the age of fifteen, married Francis, younger than her by a year. Only a year later the Dauphin’s father was killed in a jousting accident, so his wife became Queen of France as well as Scotland (albeit under the regency of Francis’s mother, Catherine de’ Medici). This powerful union, however, did not last long, for Francis died of a brain tumour the following year. Although Mary was fond of her sickly husband, it is doubtful if her marriage to Francis, who reputedly had withered genitalia, was ever consummated. So when she came back to Scotland in August 1561, the young Queen was probably as inexperienced in the art of physical love as she was in the world of politics. Clearly, it was not going to be easy for the Catholic girl, who had been in France for so long, to rule the turbulent country that was now officially Protestant after religious reforms instigated by the fire-and-brimstone preacher, John Knox. In addition, the death of her mother, Mary of Guise, who had been Regent of Scotland since 1554, had left a highly unstable political situation.

Knox made many vicious attacks on Mary from the pulpit, denouncing her as a heretic, but the first year of her reign went relatively well. She was popular with her Protestant subjects, and her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, her principal adviser and the leader of Scotland’s Protestant nobles, helped his sister to rule with calmness and moderation. But things changed in 1562, when Moray persuaded Mary to put down a rebellion in Scotland’s Catholic north-west, led by the fourth Earl of Huntley.

It may seem odd that staunchly Catholic Mary agreed to repress those of the same religious persuasion so hard, but Moray had persuaded his sister that such action would make Elizabeth I look more favourably on Mary’s claim to the English throne. Because Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, she arguably had a better claim than Elizabeth, who had effectively been made illegitimate by her father, Henry VIII, when he nullified his marriage to her mother, Anne Boleyn.³ As it happened, Elizabeth refused to meet Mary, even though the rebellion had been crushed and Huntley was dead.⁴ Consequently, Mary began to realize that Moray had deceived her in order to destroy a personal enemy and advance the Protestant cause. Her brother lost his sister’s trust, and many Scottish nobles, who had been persuaded by Moray to ally themselves to the Protestant ranks, rejoined or turned to the Catholic fold.

Mary now began to follow her own judgement and decided to choose a husband who would advance her beloved Catholicism and further her claim to the English throne. The candidate who best satisfied those criteria was her second cousin, Henry Stewart (or Stuart), Lord Darnley, who, like Mary, was a great-grandchild of Henry VII. It also helped that Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox, was Scottish, while his mother was a prominent English Catholic.

The wedding took place on 29 July 1565 in Holyrood Abbey with Mary, being a widow, attired in a dignified black dress. There was riotous dancing and a great banquet after the nuptials. Then the young couple retired to bed. Mary presumably enjoyed this part of the ceremony, if John Knox’s memories of the occasion are correct. ‘During the space of three or four days,’ the puritanical preacher wrote, ‘there was nothing but balling, dancing and banqueting.’

Indeed, all the evidence suggests that Mary was deeply in love with the handsome Darnley before and immediately after her wedding. If not, she would never have ordered her heralds to announce, on 30 July, the day after her marriage, that her nineteen-year-old husband should henceforward be known as King Henry. There was even an unsubstantiated rumour that she had been so infatuated with her lover that she had gone through a secret marriage earlier in July so that the couple could consummate their relationship sooner.

Not everyone in Scotland, however, was as happy as Mary with her marriage. Moray and some of the Protestant lords soon rebelled, but were eventually driven south of the border by Mary’s army, led by Darnley’s father, Lennox, and James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who was a leading member of Mary’s new and largely Catholic council. Yet Darnley’s behaviour soon became of greater concern to Mary. Her once romantic suitor had become arrogant through pomp and position and, by the autumn, was spending less and less time with his adoring wife.

It seemed that he much preferred hawking and hunting to attending to his royal duties. There was also gossip that he was drinking heavily and consorting with prostitutes in the less savoury parts of Edinburgh and Glasgow. It was little wonder, then, that by the end of 1565 Mary was beginning to tire of Darnley’s insensitive and inattentive behaviour. The great love she had felt for her husband began rapidly to fade. Darnley, however, had fulfilled one of his conjugal obligations before his eyes had strayed. He had made his young wife pregnant.

Conscious that there was increasing coolness between Mary and her husband, some Scottish Protestant nobles, who hated the Queen’s Catholic inner circle of advisers, saw the easily led Darnley as the means to regain control of Scotland and engineer the return from exile of many of their peers. So one of their ringleaders, the Earl of Morton, told his cousin, Darnley, that David Rizzio, Mary’s secretary from Savoy⁵ and arguably her most trusted confidant, had too much influence at court. When Darnley questioned him further, Morton informed his gullible relation that the hunch-backed Rizzio was actually Mary’s lover and therefore the likely father of the child she was carrying.

There was no evidence that Mary was having a sexual relationship with ugly little Rizzio, and the subsequent date of her child’s birth shows that the talented Italian musician could not have been the father. But the jealous Darnley, whose judgement was probably also clouded by alcohol, stupidly chose to believe Morton and agreed to help the scheming Protestant lords commit a dreadful crime. The conspirators persuaded Darnley that Rizzio, who had apparently insulted his honour by having a torrid affair with Mary, should pay the ultimate penalty for such deceit.

On 9 March 1566, when Mary was hosting an intimate supper party, at which Rizzio was a guest, in her small apartment on the second floor of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Darnley unexpectedly appeared on the narrow staircase that connected his rooms on the floor below to his wife’s. A few moments later, a breathless Lord Ruthven joined him and said to Mary: ‘Let it please Your Majesty that yonder man David come forth of your privy-chamber where he has been overlong.’ Mary, not immediately clear about the purpose of this impromptu visit, replied that Rizzio was there at her invitation and enquired if Ruthven had taken leave of his senses.

The terrified Rizzio, realizing that he was in mortal danger, slunk back and hid in the large window at the end of the dining room. As Ruthven made a lunge towards the cowering Italian, Mary’s guards moved forward. Ruthven then shouted: ‘Lay not hands on me, for I will not be handled.’ This was the signal for the rest of his band to enter. Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, Patrick Bellenden, George Douglas the Postulate, Thomas Scott and Henry Yair burst into the room, knocking over the dining table in the ensuing commotion. While Rizzio hung on to Mary’s skirts like a terrified child, Ker and Bellenden produced their pistols and the other conspirators drew their daggers.

They tore the wretched Italian’s fingers from Mary’s dress and hauled their captive, screaming and kicking, out of the dining room and across the Queen’s bedchamber into the small hall at the head of the staircase. There, the slight figure was butchered to death in a manner that could hardly have been more savage. George Douglas shrewdly administered the first wound with Darnley’s dagger, thereby inextricably linking Mary’s husband to the pernicious act. Incredibly, Rizzio was stabbed fifty-six times before the murderers threw his crumpled, bloodstained body down the winding staircase.

Bothwell and another of Mary’s favourites, George Gordon, the fifth Earl of Huntley, were also targets of the conspirators that night. But when they heard the row in Mary’s rooms, they sensed trouble and escaped by jumping out of one of the palace’s rear windows. Mary, now parted from two of her closest allies, quickly realized that she could be in grave danger from the rampant Protestant lords. She knew that she would never be able to forgive Darnley for his role in Rizzio’s demise or for endangering her unborn child, but she was certain that he now represented her only hope of survival.

Two nights later she went to his rooms and managed to convince him that the conspirators had been using him for their own designs. Before long Darnley was eating out of the palm of her hand and begging her forgiveness. The briefly reunited couple left Holyroodhouse by the same staircase that Darnley and his fellow murderers had used and fled to Dunbar. There they met Bothwell, who was gathering the army that would later march on Edinburgh, restore Mary and force Rizzio’s murderers to flee.

Mary was absolutely devastated by Rizzio’s death. She scarcely stopped weeping, and refused to leave her chamber for days. Her worried aides heard her utter the same haunting refrain over and over again: ‘I could wish to be dead.’ Despite their apparent reconciliation, she hated Darnley with a passion for his part in the murder of her favourite, and the birth of their son James (later James VI of Scotland and I of England) in June 1566 did not change her feelings for her treacherous and unreliable husband in the least. Significantly, Mary was not alone in detesting Darnley. The nobles with whom he had conspired were infuriated that he had betrayed them two days after Rizzio’s death. Bothwell, now the only man in Scotland Mary trusted, also wanted Darnley replaced as King. When Bothwell persuaded Mary to recall Moray and the other Protestant nobles from exile, more of Darnley’s enemies came back to Scotland. The Queen’s husband was rapidly running out of friends.

At Craigmillar Castle in November 1566, Bothwell convened a meeting of all the dissatisfied Catholic and Protestant nobles to discuss the issue of Darnley. They agreed upon two alternatives: divorce or assassination. Mary ruled out the former as it would make her son, James, illegitimate. She also told the nobles that they must do ‘nothing against her honour’, an ambiguous statement which they took to mean that she was happy to leave Darnley’s fate in their hands. Immediately they left the Queen’s presence, they are said to have signed a pact, known as the ‘Craigmillar Bond’, to murder her husband.⁶

In January 1567 Mary travelled to Glasgow to join Darnley, who believed he was safer from his enemies in Scotland’s second city. On 1 February she persuaded her husband, who was seriously ill at the time, that he would recover quicker in Edinburgh. So Darnley, who may well have been suffering from syphilis, was installed for his convalescence in a small house, Kirk O’Field, about three-quarters of a mile from Holyroodhouse, just outside the city walls. Mary played the dutiful wife for several days and looked after her ailing spouse. On the evening of 9 February, she told Darnley that she must return to the palace at short notice to attend the wedding of a servant. As it turned out, it was fortunate that Mary chose to sleep at Holyroodhouse, for Bothwell and his accomplices had planned to murder Darnley in his bed that very night. They placed gunpowder below the house, but somehow Darnley survived the blast, only to be strangled as he tried to flee from his assassins.

Mary and Bothwell were quickly blamed for Darnley’s murder. Soon, posters appeared all around Edinburgh depicting the Queen as Bothwell’s whore and accusing the pair of the crime. Hearing that Moray and the Protestant exiles were behind the gossip, Bothwell, frightened for his and Mary’s safety, abducted the Queen and rode to Dunbar Castle, where legend tells that he raped her before persuading her to be his wife. On 15 May, just over three months after Darnley’s death, they were married in Holyrood Abbey. Exactly a month later, however, the Protestant lords defeated their troops at Carberry Hill, near Edinburgh. Mary agreed to give herself up provided Bothwell was allowed to go into exile. The newly married couple kissed passionately in front of both sides before Bothwell galloped away to try to raise another army in his wife’s cause.

Two days later, Mary was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle, near Kinross, where she later miscarried Bothwell’s twins. Next, she was forced to abdicate in favour of her infant son, James. Bothwell fled to Scandinavia, where he was arrested on a trumped-up charge and held prisoner until his death in Denmark ten years later, by which time he was insane. Mary eventually escaped from Lochleven in 1568, but her supporters were again routed at Langside. She then sought shelter in England, believing that Elizabeth would rally to her cause. Sadly, she was wrong; the Virgin Queen kept the cousin she believed to be seditious under house arrest (see here). The English monarch was almost certainly right to be concerned,⁷