I decided to write this book because, as a part-time Londoner, I had for long admired the Duke of York’s column. Having walked past it one sunny day on the way to have lunch at my Club in Mayfair, I happened to mention it to those at the table, very few of whom – though aware of the column – knew much about the man it honoured. The duke has not had many biographers: two rushed into print in the year of his death, itself a testament to his popularity at the time, but one of them, Robert Huish, has not enjoyed a good reputation for reliability. The other, John Watkins, produced a work packed with information, much of it very detailed, but of a selective nature and full of lengthy digressions.
It was more than a hundred years before anyone else attempted to relate the duke’s story and during that time the Victorians had passed a stern verdict on the scandals of the Regency and the loose morality of George IV and his circle. Sir Roger Fulford, himself a politician as well as an historian, edited the diaries of Charles Greville and then, in 1933, published a brilliant book, Royal Dukes, a witty, irreverent but also scholarly account of the lives of George IV’s brothers, fifty pages of which are devoted to the Duke of York. Finally, in 1949, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Burne DSO, soldier and military historian, published his carefully researched military study. This was prompted by the fact that Burne had found himself, in the closing years of the First World War, fighting over terrain that would have been familiar to the duke in 1793 and 1794, and wondering whether he deserved his reputation of being, as he put it, ‘an amiable dolt, a dull dunderhead, or an incompetent nincompoop’.
Without whitewashing York in any way, Burne produced a balanced judgement on his military career and I could not have written this biography without frequent reference to his book – which has been validated and amplified by subsequent military historians, especially Professor Richard Glover, to whose work I am also indebted. However, I have attempted to present the duke ‘in the round’ and to set his life story against the eventful times, military, political and social, in which he lived. In addition, I have tried to produce a theory about the source of the famous ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ nursery rhyme which I think is far more realistic than the long-held assumption – based on no sure evidence – that it was a critical joke at York’s expense.
My thanks to friends at the Savile Club whom I have bored from time to time about the duke, and especially to Robert Harding, who made available to me a fine contemporary caricature in his private collection. Andrew Murray found time, despite being in the middle of moving house, to walk across to the Esplanade at Edinburgh Castle and photograph the duke’s fine statue there, and Don Oliver provided information about his home town of Woodbridge. Anthony and Lorna Hamilton made visits to Oatlands and Weybridge possible, and I am grateful to the London Library, the Institute of Directors and the National Portrait Gallery for their help and co-operation.
Derek Winterbottom
Isle of Man, 2016