The Devonshires: The Story of a Family and a Nation

by Roy Hattersley

The story of the Devonshires is the story of Britain.

William Cavendish, the father of the first Earl, dissolved monasteries for Henry VIII. Bess, his second wife, was gaoler-companion to Mary Queen of Scots during her long imprisonment in England. Arbella Stuart, their granddaughter, was a heartbeat away from the throne of England and their grandson, Lord General of the North, fought to save the crown for Charles I. Fifty years later, the First Duke of Devonshire conspired to depose James II, and make William of Orange king. For the next two centuries the Devonshires were at the heart of fashionable society and the centre of political power. The Fourth Duke became prime minister and Georgiana, wife of the Fifth, scandalised even the Regency. Spencer Compton, the last of the great Devonshires, was three times offered the premiership, and three times refused it. Even the Devonshire servants made history. Joseph Paxton was their gardener and Thomas Hobbes was the family tutor.

With the help of previously unpublished material from the Chatsworth archives, The Devonshires reveals how the dynasty made and lost fortunes, fought and fornicated, built great houses, patronised the arts and pioneered the railways, made great scientific discoveries, and, in the end, came to terms with changing times. It is popular history at its very best.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, British Literature

496 pages, Hardcover

First published May 9, 2013

About the author

Roy Sydney George Hattersley, British Politian and author.

Reviews

[Gretchen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the information this book provided but it was a tough read. I took notes.
I’m spending a week in Chatsworth in the Spring so wanted the background this book provided. I got that but there were times I wanted to forget it and pick up something else.
I pressed on and finished it!

[Claudia · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a book. I loved the private and personal insights into the family and their connections. Many parts on politics were so detailed that one fell into a black hole, but nonetheless amazing what this family's history actively and passively changed and did to English history. I don't think any other English noble line can really say that for more than 500 long years still going... wow.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, Roy Hattersley, was a senior Labour politician back in the day (indeed, I briefly worked with him in my youth in the ancient Solidarity campaign to stop the rise of the SDP) but he was always, like Denis Healey, a bit more than that - a man with a 'hinterland'.

Very late in life, he produced this family biography of the aristocratic Devonshire family, one of around 20 books. This might seem an unlikely subject for a lower middle class lad who became Deputy Leader of the Labour Party but his interest here is in the exercise of power.

It is an odd book because it is not really a family biography (though it does present itself as that) so much as a set of essays on the moments in history from the sixteenth to late nineteenth century when the senior members of the family played important roles in decisions that shaped Britain.

At one level we see the canny rise of a family into the highest ranks of the aristocracy, part of the class that emerged after the plundering of the Catholic Church, through astute marriages, purchases and courtly connections as well as its 'fall', largely from democratic death duties and debt.

At another level, Hattersley's quite detailed descriptions of the political engagements of successive Dukes and other key family members sheds light on who ran Britain, the risks they sometimes ran and how they and Britain transformed each other at each point.

The Devonshires were very much Whig Grandees. What that meant was that they were committed to property (of which they had immense amounts, albeit often with nearly as large debts) and to liberty. English liberties, which they undoubtedly defended, were intimately bound with the right to property.

This is something British Socialists have often had difficulty coming to terms with. Liberty is a core English (not Scots) value and it has become embedded at the poorest levels of society precisely because it was defended so vigorously by those who fought for it against the Crown.

The classic internal contradiction was that the Devonshires could see no fundamental difference between their values of service and honour (which undoubtedly were sincerely maintained) and their 'interest'. If they owned estates in Ireland then fighting Home Rule became 'principle'. Hmmm!

We can cite the role of Hartington (the title of the 'crown prince' of the Devonshires) in transitioning the Whigs from the Liberal Party to the support of the Tory Party as it became the Conservative & Unionist Party. Whigs owned estates in Ireland = interest!

Thus, we see a House (as in 'Game of Thrones' or 'Dune') having a powerful interest in the Protestant ascendency and central to the Glorious Revolution but also being liberal and tolerant towards minorities so long as they did not actively threaten the prevailing order.

When things were stable, their instinct seems to have been towards laziness and holding office out of apparent duty but without the ambition to do anything that was not on their terms. Sometimes they became introvert scientists, collectors, often builders and pleasure lovers.

The cultural shifts in the nation are all here - from the civil war and post civil war tensions where there were real risks to property and even lives on to the louche eighteenth century and Regency period (where we have the scandalous story of the spoilt and dim Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire).

Then we are into the Seventh Duke's personally disastrous but nationally important dabblings in industrialisation and the creation of the resort town of Eastbourne before his son's politics in the age of Gladstone take centre-stage.

In the case of the latter, Hattersley is in his element because he is speaking of a world he knew intimately: Cabinet and Parliamentary politics which has not changed very much in form since the Age of Walpole. We just elect the people who merge interest with power, that is all.

Where once the Devonshires relied on the Crown and then on the Whig Ascendency and the Glorious Revolution, power and interest moved surprisingly rapidly into the hands of 'voters', first on a small franchise and then in increments to the mass voting of the modern era.

This meant an entirely new politics of excitability and of delivering goodies and meaning through rhetoric, exemplified by Gladstone's Midlothian Campaign. An uneasy period when aristocratic power and popular power were mediated by Parliament eventually led to the elimination of the first.

The Tory Party was structured to use voters with patriotic promises to sustain elite power while first Liberals and then Labour emerged to represent popular needs and compete on patriotisms. Entirely new elites emerged that have since solidified into the political class we know today.

This all happened surprisingly quickly and could theoretically be reversed as quickly (indeed, I would argue it is being reversed by stealth by our current centrist establishment). My grandparents were born at that moment of transition just before Lloyd George emerged.

The book is thus not a history of Britain or a deep analysis of aristocratic power. Hattersley makes no significant political judgements drawn from his own history. All he allows himself is a little bit of lower middle class moralising of a mildly Pooterish kind about aristocratic sexual behaviour.

The work should thus be read only as an entertainment (even if Hattersley sometimes gets carried away with the dull detail of, say, Liberal educational policy in the early 1900s) or as a set of case studies in the actuality of power. It is the latter that should intrigue the intelligent reader.

To be honest, none of the Devonshires seems a particularly bad sort although many do seem to be cunning rather than truly intelligent and others lazy so a question arises whether aristocrats were a good or a bad thing in the construction of Britain.

But that question is meaningless. They were as they were. The process of history did for them in the long run. Whether we are much better off with our current political class is much more the moot question. It is a point of possible condemnation of the now rather than a possible praise of the then.

Death duties seem to have been a progressive innovation. So they should have been but looked at coldly, on the plus side, they helped construct a viable welfare state (probably no longer viable because of waste and mismanagement) but also a dangerous warfare state ('the Crown').

Similarly death duties also got 'democratised' into extensive inheritance taxes that unravelled the incentive for building family wealth and so families to feed the maw of the military-industrial complex and the public sector's special interest which has replaced first Church and then Whiggery.

In the end, popular democracy ended up being a half-baked reform in which political parties could construct self-interested professional elites who were skilled at manipulating public desires and needs but whose actual plundering behaviours often differed little from that of aristocrats.

Although perhaps not as bad as the regime of Louis Philippe, there is a strong whiff of 'enrichissez-vous' about the elite members of our current political class and certainly of office through connections. This is definitely not how the old Labour Party of Hattersley's day operated.

It is as if the Glorious Revolution not merely stalled but perhaps went into reverse once Labour and the Tories (in the era after Hattersley's retirement) turned politics into the twenty-first century equivalent of the old Tory vision of the 'Crown' as fount of patronage and office.

The aristocrats are gone now. Their patronage created some great and good things whilst still often being wrong'uns. Their departure is no bad thing but the democratic revolution that was supposed to replace them seems to have gone horribly wrong as fiscal and administrative ineptitude has mounted.

Hattersley's mini-case studies of power and privilege effectively stop just before the First World War when the rot of an over-powerful executive obsessed with its own security sets in but each is instructive about an aspect of how things came to be. And that is always a matter of 'interest'.

[Desirae · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and there were so many interesting characters, as well as the dukes there are younger brothers who didn't inherit the dukedom (Henry Cavendish for example) but had extraordinary lives and employees and colleagues like Joseph Paxton (a fascinating chapter). I thoroughly enjoyed and it's an easy good read. Personally, I would have liked a bit more on the houses and the art they collected, the collection we can see at Chatsworth now and why it remains a No1 visitor attraction, and it has only a tiny section on Andrew Cavendish and Deborah D of D (Mitford), I suppose there's so much written about them as it is and there's a limit to what could be included. A great book.

[Vincent Solomeno · Rating 2 out of 5]

After months on my bookshelf, I was excited to finally sit down and read Roy Hattersley's "The Devonshires." Full disclosure: I possess an amateur's knowledge and interest in British social and political history. While I did not expect this book to be riveting, I was still disappointed. Mr. Hattersley is an excellent historian. However, I found "The Devonshires" repetitive, boring, and generally a disservice to what is otherwise an interesting subject.

[Brian Gowthorpe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched and fluent book that emphasises the arc of power and wealth from city drapers through the downright crooked acquisition of land from the Dissolution of the M's to the ownership of more houses and land than all the Dukes. Then the rapidly succeeding and unexpected deaths of D9 & D10 post-WWII triggered the payment of enormous death duties and a massive selloff. Debo turned the whole affair into an effective group of businesses.

[Caroline Cormack · Rating 4 out of 5]

The back of the book claims that the story of the Devonshires is the story of Britain, which of course it's not, but their proximity to the seats of power over five centuries does make it an entertaining history of the aristocracy and politics of the time.

[Stephen Tubbs · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is too much information to digest on a first listening - intend to follow up by reading the book.

[Ken Sampson · Rating 4 out of 5]

[2013] An interesting and informative read.

[Sally Slade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Readable yet scholarly. Well done Roy. Book number 8 of my #60before60.

[Anders Hanson · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a family as prominent as the Devonshires it seems surprising that more hasn't been written about them, but Roy Hattersley seeks to put that right with this authoritative and lengthy volume taking the Cavendish family from their first known origins to the turn of the twentieth century. Hattersley is the perfect author for this book with a long and credible bibliography to his name of many similar, and in some cases interlinked subjects. He also lives close to Chatsworth and has a clear passion and fascination with the subject of this book. His background in politics also helps him to explain and bring to life the political careers of many in the family in a way that other writers perhaps wouldn't.

The subtitle of this book 'the story of a family and a nation' is key to understanding this book as it is in large part a history of the country through the eyes of the Cavendish family. Readers looking for a history of their most famous current legacy Chatsworth won't find that here in any great detail. Whilst the key elements of the house and the park such as Paxton's glasshouses and the fountains do play a part, this book is very much about each generation of the family and how they are entwined with the wider history of the UK. In doing so Hattersley spends considerable time, and perhaps occasionally too much time, focusing on some of the more interesting and colourful such as Bess of Hardwick, Arbella Stuart and Georgiana Cavendish, along with the family's role in the English Civil War. What the book also does is draw attention to many of the family characteristics and parallels through the generations.

This is a book that deserves to be read in longer concentrated stints, rather than in small portions, to really absorb each part of the family's story, which at times can become a little confusing with chapters zig-zagging around in chronology to allow Hattersley to cover the story of events from beginning to end but then still considering other aspects of the lives of people whose death he has already mentioned. Sadly if I have one other criticism it is that the story very much ends at the turn of the twentieth century and only considers the more recent history of the family in the afterword. Whilst the family is now less prominent in public life, it seems a shame that the way the family has found a new role in society doesn't get any consideration.

[Jack Bates · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this at Holker Hall I think, which is a Cavendish house.

It's good, well researched, Hattersley writes good accessible history but I think it sort of fails in the 20th century. Obviously the excitement of building, of Bess of Hardwick and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire gets a lot of attention. But having read Debo Mitford's autobiographies it's clear that he barely scrapes the surface of the last Duke but one. Andrew Cavendish may have brought forth one of the first and most successfully adapted post-War visions of the enormous country pile, opening Chatsworth to we gaping proles and developing the estate, but if he'd been an 18th or 19th century duke we'd have had all the other stuff, wouldn't we, the miscarriages and the alcoholism. Not mentioned. It would have been better, perhaps, if he'd just chosen an arbitrary end, 1939 maybe, or the death of Andrew's brother, rather than making me wonder what else he'd left out, and why he chose to leave it out when Debo was happy to talk about it. I mean it's worth a read if you're interested, of course, perfectly adequate - the first two-thirds are very good.

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

After making it through the 400 pages of this book, I was a little disappointed that everything post-Victorian was only briefly discussed in the short Afterword. I had so looked forward to getting as much detail about the twentieth century as Hattersley had given us about the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. This slight drawback, however, didn't take away from my overall enjoyment of this book. I particularly loved learning about the family's beginnings, the procuring of land/houses throughout the periods, and the Sixth Duke of Devonshire (1790-1858).

[Bob Pedley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hattersley could have done a lot better. It's crammed with historical detail, a parade of facts and characters altogether too much to be digestible. It's also skewed by Hattersley's contempt for privilege; most of the leading figures are lampooned, one or two are respected. The sleeve notes talk of a family which is intimately entwined in the nation's history; H could have focussed on this aspect much better.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much politics, not enough personality and certainly not the story of a family. Although talked about every Duke, barely mentioned spouses, mistresses or other family members. Spent too many pages on Bess of Hardwick, Arbella Stuart and Georgiana; all of whom have whole books dedicated to them. Not enough included of recent history. The most interesting part was about Joseph Paxton.

[Jane Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hattersley is one of my favourite history writers, and this book doesn't disappoint. It traces the family through from the Tudor period and so we get a journey through English history from a slightly different perspective than is usual.

[Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well written book on this fascinating family who are completely intertwined with English history. Very much enjoyed it.