Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [28]
The Duke joined with no visible zest. “Never angry though often bored,” according to one friend, “he takes things very easy indeed,” according to another. Some said his lethargy was laziness, others that it was a well-considered reluctance to hurry; in either event it was underlined by a habit of going to sleep in the midst of things. Even his own speeches bored him and once when speaking on the Indian budget he paused, leaned over to the colleague nearest him on the bench, and suppressing a yawn, whispered, “This is damned dull.”
His only passion was for his racing stud, although he also maintained, whether from passion, habit or indolence, a thirty-year liaison with “one of the handsomest women in Europe,” as she was when the affair began, the domineering, ambitious, German-born Louise, Duchess of Manchester. Her first Duke disappointed her by impoverishing himself, but obedient to his caste, refrained or was persuaded to refrain from bringing any unpleasant public action, leaving his wife and Lord Hartington to enjoy both each other and an unassailable moral and social position. When Manchester died, his widow married the Duke of Devonshire in 1892 just after he had succeeded to his title. Thereafter known as the “Double Duchess,” she continued to exercise her formidable talents toward her major goal, that of making her husband Prime Minister.
The Duke did not give her the necessary help. He was not the kind in whom a burning ambition for the highest post erases every other consideration. When, after he had led the Liberal Unionists out of the party, Lord Salisbury twice offered to serve under him, he again refused, not yet prepared for coalition. By 1895, however, the split between moderate and radical Whigs having widened and the habit of voting in concert with the Tories having made a bridge, the Duke with four other Liberal Unionists crossed over it to serve under Lord Salisbury.
This was the Conservative—now Unionist—Government which took office in June, 1895. A delicate situation was expected at Windsor when the Duke and the other former Liberals, arriving as members of Lord Salisbury’s Ministry to receive their seals of office, would pass their former colleagues on the way out. To avoid embarrassment, the Queen’s Private Secretary tactfully arranged that the outgoing Liberals should deliver up their seals at 11 A.M. while the new ministers waited in another drawing room until their predecessors had left. All would have gone off smoothly but for the Duke, who, arriving late as usual, missed the designated waiting room and met his old associates coming out, who peppered him with taunts about his new friends. “No face was more suited to a difficult situation,” wrote a witness, for the Duke, quite unperturbed, “passed through them with his mouth wide open and his eyes half closed.”
The Cavendishes stemmed from an ancestor who had been Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. His son John was the man who killed Wat Tyler, for which he was knighted on the spot by Richard II, while the father was seized elsewhere by the mob and beheaded in revenge. Dutifully, if none too enthusiastically, the Cavendishes down through the centuries helped to govern the country. The fourth Duke served briefly as Prime Minister in 1756–57, while Pitt and Newcastle were feuding, but resigned as soon as he could be replaced. His brother, Lord John Cavendish, was twice Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which capacity Edmund Burke praised him for his “great integrity … and perfect disinterestedness” but wished that Lord John could be “induced to show a certain degree of regular attendance on business” and be allowed only “a certain reasonable proportion of fox-hunting” and no more. The fifth Duke excelled by marrying the ravishing Georgiana, Duchess of