The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Page 18
Valuation of Selected Heirlooms
Pictures
£1,000 T. Gainsborough, R.A. Portrait of Charles, 4th Duke of Rutland
49in. x 39in.
£4,000 Murillo. The Virgin and Child with St Rosalie
74in. x 57in.
The Adoration of the Magi.
74in. x 56in.
£3,000 Rembrandt. Portrait of a Young Man, in black cap
31in. x 26in.
£500 A. Dürer. Portrait of a Man, in fur cape on panel
32½in. x 26½in.
£1,000 T. Gainsborough. The Woodcutter’s Home
57½in. x 47½in.
A Woody landscape, with a Youth, Girl and Cattle
£3,000 Rubens. The Crowning of St Guthrie
40in. x 83in.
£300 Rubens. The Holy Family – on panel
21in. x 19in.
£200 Rubens. Hercules and Antaeus – on panel
25in. x 19½in.
£100 Robert Walker. Portrait of the Artist
29in. x 24in.
£500 D. Teniers. The Quick Doctor – on panel
9in. x 7in.
£300 D. Teniers. The Ox Stall
18in. x 23in.
£400 P. Wouvermans. Horseman outside a Farrier’s forge
14in. x 16in.
£150 D. Teniers. A group of Storks among rushes
14½in. x 21in.
£2,000 A. Cuyp. A River Scene, with figures and cattle
14½in. x 19in.
£1,000 D. Teniers. Dutch Proverbs
51in. x 81in.
£100 Rubens. A Shepherd embracing a woman.
57in. x 50½in.
£500 Wynants. A Landscape, with a hare hunt.
39½in. x 33in.
£40,000 A suite of 8 panels of old Gobelins Tapestry, with subjects from Don Quixote; in flower festoon borders, on pink ground.
£10,000 An Elizabethan Rosewater Ewer and Dish, of chased Silver-Gilt and Agate.
Ewer 15¼in high. Dish 18¾in diam.
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£77,050
----------- I VALUE the foregoing Pictures, Tapestry and Silver-gilt plate, for the purposes of Sale, at the several prices fixed against each, making a total sum of Seventy seven thousand and fifty pounds.
Tom Cox
A few weeks before John left for Rome, when Henry could no longer put off paying the £76,000 he owed, he was confronted with the problem of how to realize these valuable assets. Quietly, on the side, and without telling John, he had already sold a few ‘heirlooms’. But even Henry, ‘philistine’ as he was, realized that the sale of works of art of such calibre would leave glaring gaps on the walls of the state rooms at Belvoir. He had to get John to agree to his plan.
On 5 January, after confiding in Violet, he had caught the train to London to see his lawyers. In the course of their meeting, he instructed them to alter the 6th Duke’s settlement agreement. Its original purpose was to ensure that the castle, its contents and the land that surrounded it stayed within the main line of succession. Under the terms of the agreement, they could not be sold, bequeathed by will or otherwise alienated: by operation of the law of entail they had to pass from one Duke to the next. Henry was asking his lawyers to break the entail. If the heirlooms were to be separated from the family’s ‘settled’ estates, they would no longer belong equally to John.
There were thousands more besides the twenty-five items on Cox’s list. Over the years – by the very fact that the heirlooms were formally annexed to the settled estates – lawyers had meticulously listed them. The lists – one for each of the family’s properties – ran to pages and pages and encompassed any item worth more than £100: down to the last Fabergé egg, the lawyers had been careful to see that nothing was missed out. The potential cash reserve offered by future sales, as Henry recognized, was huge. Rather than haggle with John over the sale of specific heirlooms, it was far simpler to have them made over to him.
Still, however, he was confronted with a problem. The 6th Duke’s settlement agreement was a legal document; it had been specifically designed to protect the interests of the next in line. It could not be altered at whim. To resettle the heirlooms – i.e. to ‘unsettle’ them – he needed John’s agreement.
What is extraordinary is that Henry didn’t even talk to him about it. Effectively – and very obviously – he was disinheriting John; he was proposing to take away a portion of his inheritance worth millions. Yet he did not explain why he was doing it; far less did he make any effort to persuade John to go along with it. Instead, he simply instructed his lawyers to courier the resettlement agreement to him for signature.
John received it two weeks before he left for Rome. There are no letters in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir to tell us how he felt, or what his reaction was, on first reading the agreement. But a remarkable letter from Violet survives.
On 19 February – more than three weeks after John had arrived in Rome – Violet handed the letter to a footman at Belvoir. It was marked ‘Urgent: Delivery by Hand’.
In the grey light of a cold winter’s morning, a pony trap took the azure-coated footman to the railway station at Grantham. From there, he caught a train to London. Arriving at King’s Cross, he hailed a hansom cab to 97 Cadogan Gardens in Chelsea.
Violet’s letter was to her brother Charlie. The previous day, Henry had told her that John had appointed his own lawyers to contest the resettlement agreement.
Violet was reporting the conversation that had followed.
29
Belvoir Castle
19 February 1909
Charlie dear,
Henry let out his heart to me yesterday and I was touched – and fussed – re John and him.
He says it is unheard of that in annals of father and son etc that there should now be 2 lawyers. Therefore he thinks to start with that it was most unfriendly to make the ‘business’ like this – ‘never has happened in his family before’. He thought he had always been an indulgent and kind father – John certainly never having done anything to please him – (quite true).
John must not be allowed, Charlie dear, to make any more breach. It is most impolitic, I can see.
Henry at this moment says quite gently and calmly and sadly that he can never forget or forgive John’s dreadful attitude to him.
I can’t disguise from you, C. dear, that it hurts me also to the quick that John should have slowly, and behind my back, brought such pain and hurt to his Father – it is a big slap in his face – from an unexpected quarter.
If only I had been told at the beginning. Why can John never have confided in me – he might have known I should have seen to his interests. He might have known that H. would also (considering him to be his only son). I can’t bear it – I think John is being ungrateful. Oh, it’s a cruel mess. It may mean a real break.
To me it’s all an earthquake – to a sweet home – when we are all such a happy family! I think we have all been wrong to let John think we despise Henry for his tempers etc. Anyhow, Henry is tender-hearted enough never never never to have behaved to his father like that. I think John has been terribly badly advised and I think the sooner he undoes the ‘fighting feel’ of it the wisest.
Loving VR
Of course, I shall write to John. My gentle views.
I must admit Henry was quite gentle and not in a temper or violent but just I thought in all he said.
There can be few ‘happy’ families in which a child encrypted his letters to his uncle to describe one of his parents as a ‘c***’. Violet was being disingenuous. She was writing to the man who had looked after her son since he was a boy; until a few weeks before, when John had left for Rome, Charlie was still looking after him. During his childhood, she and Henry had barely seen him: they had sent him away. Yet here she was supporting her husband’s belief that ‘he had always been an indulgent and kind father’. Behind the dissembling, what her letter actually amounted to was a naked appeal to Charlie to bring John into line.
Looking at other letters from the period, the attempt to browbeat John was part of a greater pattern. It wasn’t the absence of a loving relationship with him that mattered to Violet and Henry: their overriding concern was to bludgeon him into becoming the son they wanted him to become. They had not moved on from the death of their beloved Haddon. John could never replace him: he had failed to come up to their expectations.
On 25 January, two days before John left for Rome – and before he contested the agreement – Henry wrote to him:
‘Dear Boy,’ it began:
I don’t want to preach, but this is just the beginning of whatever you choose to make of your life. You’ll be well advised if you throw yourself thoroughly into the job, and pick up and absorb all the information of all sorts of which you can get hold. Make yourself quietly popular if you can!
Go about and see and talk to people and things – all comes in useful later in life: and remember always that you’ve got to fit yourself for a troublesome heritage here when I slip my cable.
Don’t shut yourself up with books entirely: that is an unhealthy process for anyone, and leads to no practical end. In fact, in Kipling’s words, ‘buy an “am an” and see life’.
If you keep your head screwed on right in so doing, then your experience thus gained is most valuable in enabling you to gauge human beings and their ways.
Seeing this letter, and others like it, it was obvious that Violet and Henry thought John odd. His scholarly interests were alien to them; his rejection of the values and lifestyle of their world infuriated them. Socially, as one of the most eligible bachelors in England, he was in constant demand; yet he refused to attend the customary round of balls and Saturday to Monday house parties hosted by their friends. Why he should prefer to shut himself away in museums and libraries, or to spend weeks on an archaeological dig in some obscure part of the country, was a mystery to them. Among their friends and acquaintances, they put it down to shyness. Privately, they thought him peculiar.
Time after time, Charlie had tried to persuade them that there was nothing wrong with their son. This explained his letter to Violet of 1 April 1909, which I had discovered among the bundles of letters John was working on when he died. ‘Society and parties are things for which he does not care a two-penny damn,’ he wrote: ‘It is not self-consciousness which makes him prefer to pore over old manuscripts, to grub about amongst ruins, to go and see old sights, rather than enjoy society – they are his formed tastes, part of his character. Rare and wonderful tastes to have – for his friends to understand and congratulate him upon. It’s no use not understanding or trying not to see, the real motive in his actions. You cannot, and never will get him to take active pleasure in things which don’t interest him. It is, quite possibly, a matter for argument, whether the time may not soon arrive when it would be wisest to urge him towards things he has a turn for and will do well, rather than push him towards things which you preconceive to be better.’
Charlie’s pleas fell on stony ground. Violet and Henry persisted in their efforts to stifle John’s academic interests. After leaving Cambridge in 1908, John told them he wanted to become a dealer in rare manuscripts and medieval ceramics. Henry refused even to contemplate this ambition. ‘If you are entirely without a profession it becomes a condition of things most eminently condemnable,’ he told him: ‘In these days, to be a loafer is more to be despised than even formerly (when he was more or less acknowledged). Now such a position is impossible.’
The label ‘loafer’ could better apply to Henry than to John. By the age of twenty-two, John had become a leading expert in medieval ceramics; others in the field consulted him. He had worked hard at it, teaching himself both the history and the languages of the period. He could read Early French and Middle English; he was also proficient in Greek, Latin and Coptic. Yet these achievements meant nothing to Henry; instead, in a series of threatening letters, he pressed John to look for an alternative career. ‘In your case it must be obvious that I could never even consider handing over to you during my life any portion of my property unless you had qualified for such a proceeding by putting in 8 or 10 years’ steady work at some profession where you are under discipline and compelled to work so many months in the year. Unless some part of the Estate is so given to you, when you succeed the death duties will smash you utterly. So, for every reason, as soon as you settle, or signify on what profession you wish to embark, I shall be delighted to assist you in any way I can.’
The word ‘settle’ was key. So hopelessly broken were the lines of communication between John and his parents that they were unable to articulate the true reason for their anger. The many rows over John’s choice of career were a smokescreen: they concealed the one issue that obsessed both Violet and Henry. Whom was he going to marry? His long-term happiness did not enter into it: it was all about blood lines and money.
Their preoccupation with the subject, as their letters reveal, was entirely self-regarding. Theirs was the highest title the Crown could bestow: they stood at the pinnacle of society, above all other subjects in the realm. If John failed to produce an heir, the dukedom held in direct line since 1703 would pass out of their branch of the family. For their progeny it would mean a drastic demotion in rank. Both Violet and Henry could trace their aristocratic lineage back to the Middle Ages: in the absence of an heir to the dukedom, their direct line, blue for almost eight hundred years, threatened to turn an ordinary shade of red.
The future social prestige of the family was not all that was at stake. They were counting on John to resolve their financial problems by marrying a wealthy heiress.
That he should marry – and marry well – went without saying. Unthinkable, but lurking in both their minds, was the suspicion that he might not marry at all. ‘Peculiarity’ – the word Violet used to refer to any behaviour that deviated from her conventional view of the world – ran in the family. Both she and Henry had numerous relations who had failed to marry. Lady Kitty, Henry’s half-sister, had brought disgrace on the family by becoming a Catholic and a nurse. Then, one Sunday afternoon in 1903, decked in all the jewellery she possessed, and leaving her parasol behind her, she had jumped from a bridge below the castle and drowned herself in the lake. Lord Cecil, Henry’s half-brother, was homosexual. On Violet’s side of the family, Charlie was thought to have male lovers too. Their anxiety regarding John’s reclusive personality was driven by the fear that he had inherited his aunt’s and uncles’ ‘peculiarities’ and that, like them, he would prove disinclined to marry. Even if this was not the case, if he shunned society and immersed himself in books and ‘old things’, how would he ever capture the heart of a wealthy heiress?
Regardless of John’s feelings on the subject, the search for a daughter-in-law consumed Violet.
In her hunt for an eligible candidate, she spurned the traditional ducal marriage market. For centuries, the dual obsessions of marriage and rank had united all ducal families. To avoid a dilution in rank, more often than not the sons of dukes married the daughters of other dukes. The result of this vast incestuous dance was that, in 1900, all thirty-three dukes were related. But, as Violet recognized, she was unlikely to find a suitable bride for John among the family’s cousins.
The thirty-year depression in the farming industry threatened to bring an end to the intermarrying. Until its effects began to be felt, wealth had never previously been an issue in the marriage alliances between ducal houses. No Duke owned fewer than 75,000 acres: his daughters were guaranteed to bring in a handsome dowry. But as land and rental values had collapsed, so too had the value of dowries, knocking the daughters of land-rich but cash-poor dukes out of the market. Only those whose families were protected from the crisis by coal, or other commercial interests, could offer the traditional combination of rank and fortune which every Duchess sought for her son. Consequently, the competition for the handful of eligible candidates was intense.
Violet did not rate John’s chances. She had known his riva
ls since they were children. There was the dashing George Stafford, the Duke of Sutherland’s boy. Also in the running was Hastings Tavistock, the heir to the Duke of Bedford. An intrepid explorer, he had recently returned from China, where he had been gathering zoological specimens for the British Museum. Then there was Sonny Titchfield, the eldest son of her great friend Winnie, Duchess of Portland. He stood to inherit the family’s coal fortune. Against such stiff opposition, how could her reclusive son hope to compete? But, Violet calculated, if wealth were to take precedence over rank, there was an alternative and, potentially, extremely lucrative marriage market.
In the early 1890s, American girls had begun to descend on London in droves. The daughters of America’s new billionaires – steel magnates, railroad owners, real-estate and stock speculators – they had come in search of the one thing their money couldn’t buy at home: a title.
‘Until then,’ New York heiress Jennie Churchill, the mother of Winston, remarked, ‘the American woman was looked upon as a strange abnormal creature with habits and manners something between a Red Indian and a Gaiety Girl.’ Among Britain’s cash-strapped aristocrats, dollars – millions of them – changed this perception.
In 1895, the Duke of Marlborough set the precedent by marrying Consuelo, the daughter of American railroad billionaire Willie Vanderbilt. Her dowry was a staggering $2.5 million dollars.* That year alone, nine American heiresses married members of the English aristocracy; by the end of the century, a quarter of the House of Lords had a transatlantic connection.
In this brisk, burgeoning marriage market, Violet had the advantage – a title was the only necessary credential.
In 1903, after seeing off the Duke of Manchester, Henry, the 8th Duke of Roxburghe, won the heart of May Goelet, the daughter of Mr Ogden Goelet, a New York real-estate broker. Her personal wealth was estimated to be in the region of $5 million.* Violet could see the equation was simple: the grander the title, the greater the chance to capture fortunes so huge they were almost unimaginable.