The Duke of Devonshire

Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, died on May 3rd 2004, aged 84

THE village of Edensor in Derbyshire is a pretty place. Its houses are eccentric, with Tudor chimneys and Italian doorways, and they sit around a spacious green planted with laburnum trees. The church boasts both a tower and spire, and it is here that Andrew Cavendish now lies along with many of his forebears. Edensor was moved and rebuilt by the sixth duke in the 19th century because, sitting as it used to on a ridge east of Chatsworth, it spoiled the view. It now blends seamlessly into the wide sweep of parkland that leads down to the great house, and knows its place: a tiny settlement amid 35,000 acres of moorland, woodland, meadows and gardens, all owned by one family.

The 11th duke could never quite believe he possessed all this. Delightedly, he would count his Chatsworth assets: 297 rooms, 112 fireplaces, 56 loos, 2,084 lightbulbs. The beauty of the house, stacked with books, paintings and sculpture collected by the Cavendishes for 450 years, constantly enthralled him. Chatsworth, he once remarked, was his idea of heaven; that, and drinking tea in the hall at Brooks’s Club in St James’s.

Nor was this all. He owned another 40,000 acres, including Bolton Abbey, the most romantic ruin in Yorkshire; Lismore Castle in Ireland; a chunk of the West End and a goodly extent of Eastbourne, a shabbily genteel resort on the Sussex coast. Each year the duke would spend a week there in his own hotel, the Cavendish, relishing the end-of-the-pier shows and the distant blare of military bands.

If he never took any of this for granted, strolling through life with an air of the utmost diffidence and happiness, it was because he had never expected it. As the second son of the 10th duke, he was told he would inherit nothing. He was vaguely preparing himself for a career in publishing when his elder brother was killed in action, in 1944, and everything was his.

Having stumbled by sheer luck into the Cavendish inheritance, he then almost lost it again. His father’s sudden death in 1950 saddled him with almost £7m in death duties, or 80% of the estate. Drastic measures were necessary. Hardwick Hall, another ravishing Elizabethan house in Derbyshire, was sold to the National Trust. Several Rembrandts, Van Dycks and Raphaels went to galleries, and the Caxton and Shakespeare first folios to America. The duke himself was driven to working as a minister of state in the government of his uncle, Harold Macmillan: a reward, he supposed, for having given him some good shooting. Around 150 staff had to be dismissed, including 15 gardeners. It was touch and go whether the magnificent cascades could be kept flowing and the topiary trimmed.

At this desperate point the duke took a leaf from the book of his hero and exemplar, the sixth duke. William Spencer Cavendish had been a member of the Whig party in the early 19th century: a liberal reformer and anti-slavery campaigner who, though a grandee to his fingertips, empathised with the common man. He eventually opened Chatsworth to the public every day, especially making sure that the great fountain was working for them to see. Whatever new wings he built, or new sculptures he acquired in Italy, he believed should be shared with the gawping crowd.

The 11th duke, pushed on by his “bossy” Mitford duchess, decided to do the same. Chatsworth was made over to an independent charitable trust, with the family renting their quarters, and the doors were flung open to visitors. Every possible means of making money was employed, as long as it was consonant with dignity; the duke had no wish to make his house a “circus”, like Woburn or Beaulieu. A shop was opened, the first of its kind, selling branded cushions, teapotsand hand cream; a farm shop offered Stilton and game. A hotel was built, then a conference centre. The duke happily attached his name to a hamper, retailing at £499, containing sloe gin, sausages and chutney. By 2002, Chatsworth was making a profit and bringing in 500,000 visitors a year.

The taxman, you could argue, had forced him to this pass. But the duke was also devoted to a far more ancient concept, noblesse oblige. Having been so fortunate, and having done nothing, as he said, to deserve it, it was incumbent on him to be generous to others. He opened his vast “back garden” to ramblers, where his grandfather had used his gamekeepers to send them packing. In 1991 he founded the Polite Society after an aged taxi-driver, pressing his hand, told him how good it felt to be thanked. He was active in all kinds of charities, and helped to save the Chesterfield football team from extinction.

Those with no stomach for feudalism remained unimpressed. They muttered about his fortune (£1.6 billion, by some estimates), his gaming and horse-racing, his pretty young mistresses, his self-declared “dimness”, and all the usual failings of the English upper classes. They were scandalised by his pledge to break the law if fox-hunting was banned, and by his patronage of the Europhobic UK Independence Party. But his Chatsworth staff, more than 600 of them, all of whom felt he had known and respected them, put on their uniforms and lined the road that led through the deer park to Edensor.