‘Amazing Grace; The Great Days of Dukes’, Wrote by E.S.Turner

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‘Amazing Grace; The Great Days of Dukes’, Wrote by E.S.Turner

‘A fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up a two Dreadnoughts. They are just as great a terror and they last longer.’

So said David Lloyd George, the fiery Welsh duke-baiter in 1909. Amazing Grace surveys the dukes of Great Britain in their prime, chiefly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dukes were expected to bring something extra to the grand manner, writes E.S.Turner, ‘something which unmistakably conveyed that here was a man who owned Belgravia or Eastbourne or Ben Lomond’. He offers an anecdote-packed study of ‘godhead, eccentricity, noblesse oblige, self-indulgence and landlordism’; but his eye for the outrageous does not prevent him from paying tribute to those dukes to whom humanity has been much indebted.

In these pages will be found a Duke of Somerset who cut £20,000 from a daughter’s inheritance because she sat down while he slept; an heir to the Duke of Richmond who embarked on the Grand Tour within minutes of contracting a marriage of convenience – with a Georgette Heyer-like conclusion; and a Duke of Northumberland who defiantly assured a Coal Commission that he owned all the minerals in his lands right down to the centre of the earth, and that he was very happy with this arrangement. All noble life is in these eye-opening pages.

E.S.TURNER is a prolific freelance writer and journalist. He has contributed to Punch, the Sunday Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement and many other journals. He is the author of, among many others, What the Butler Saw, The Court of St.James, Boys Will Be Boys and May It Please Your Lordship. He lives in London.

Cover illustration: Lordly Elevation, by James Gillray (courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/photography Bridgeman Art Library, London)

E.S.Turner. (2003) Amazing Grace: The Great Days of Dukes. Gloucestershire, Sutton Publishing.

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