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By Root 1059 0

the halls in thousands. The Duke liked to watch them, and thinking his face as unknown to them as theirs to him, would stand, unconscious of being recognized, “wondering why the housemaid who acted as guide and the whole party had suddenly stood still and were staring at him.” Though racehorses were more to him than books, he once astonished his librarian who was showing him his own first edition of Paradise Lost by sitting down and reading it aloud from the first line with simple pleasure, until the Duchess came in and, poking the Duke with her parasol, remarked, “If he reads poetry he will never go for his walk.”

He was bored by pomp and hated pomposity. When the King decided to make him a Grand Commander of the new Victorian Order, the Duke, “in his sleepy way,” asked the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, what he was supposed to do with “the thing.” “Anyone less anxious to receive an order I have never seen. He seemed to think it would only complicate his dressing.” At the rehearsal for King Edward’s coronation in 1902, at which the appearance of the peers wearing coronets with morning dress produced a comical effect, the Duke arrived late as usual and, with his right hand in his trouser pocket and an inexpressibly bored look on his face, strolled about the stage at the bidding of the Earl Marshal. He liked old baggy, casual clothes, never took the slightest trouble with his guests, deliberately ignored those who might prove tiresome, and once, when a speaker in the House of Lords was declaiming on “the greatest moments in life,” the Duke opened his eyes long enough to remark to his neighbor, “My greatest moment was when my pig won first prize at Skipton Fair.” His favorite club, after the Turf, was the Travellers’, known for exclusiveness and an atmosphere of “solemn tranquillity” in which reading, dozing and meditation took precedence over conversation. For the disagreeable task of speaking at public meetings he trained himself by a method he once revealed to the young Winston Churchill when they were appearing together at a Free Trade meeting in Manchester. “Do you feel nervous, Winston?” asked the Duke, and on receiving an affirmative reply, told him, “I used to, but now, whenever I get up on a public platform, I take a good look around and as I sit down I say, ‘I never saw such a lot of damned fools in my life’ and then I feel a lot better.”

When he chose he could be “the best of company,… delightful to talk to,” that is, if conditions were right. At a dinner party in 1885 he arrived tired and hungry after a long day in Committee and sulked in silence when the first courses proved to be fancy but insubstantial French dishes instead of the solid fare that he liked. When a roast beef was brought in, he exclaimed in deep tones, “Hurrah! something to eat at last” and thereafter joined in the conversation. A fellow guest, the writer Wilfred Ward, noticed that in every case where he differed from Mr. Gladstone, who was of the company, Lord Hartington “put his finger on the weak point in the logic which Mr. Gladstone’s rhetoric tended to obscure.” Eighteen years later Ward met the Duke again at the British Embassy in Rome and confronted by a blank face reminded him of the place of their previous meeting. Thereupon the Duke exclaimed with feeling, “Of course I remember. We had nothing to eat.” The inadequate French dishes, as Ward told the story, “had dwelt in his mind for nearly twenty years.”

After succeeding to the title in 1891, he still returned, unlike Salisbury, to visit the House of Commons and “could generally be seen yawning in the front row of the Peers’ Gallery” on the nights of big debates. As Duke he had more work to do than ever. He owned estates in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Cumberland, Sussex, Middlesex and Ireland and personally went over all accounts of his properties and all important questions with his estate agents. He was Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, Chancellor of Cambridge University, President of the British Empire League and patron of various clerical livings