The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse by Piu Marie Eatwell

delegated the writing of his farewell speech to his father, the 4th Duke.
    Timid and endlessly plagued by mysterious ailments, Lord John never matched up to his brilliant younger brother. Onthe face of it, Lord George seemed a much better embodiment of the Cavendish-Bentinck tradition of political and public service, begun by the original Hans-Willem Bentinck, and epitomized by the 3rd Duke of Portland, who had twice been prime minister of Great Britain. The old 4th Duke was not slow to express his impatience at the shortcomings of his heir as compared to his younger son, and rumour had it that relations between the marquess and his father were less than cordial. It was an odd circumstance that, when the old duke died in 1854, Lord John was absent from the funeral. A contemporary newspaper report stated simply that ‘the present Duke of Portland was prevented by illness from attending’. Nor was the new heir to the dukedom a favourite of his mother: the old duchess never forgave Lord John for surviving her favourite eldest son, and the marquess was noticeably absent from her funeral as well.
    As far as the female sex was concerned, there was only one woman whose name was publicly linked to the 5th Duke. This was the opera singer Adelaide Kemble, with whom the duke fell in love when he was Marquess of Titchfield. Adelaide was the strikingly handsome younger daughter of the actor Charles Kemble. Her aunt, Sarah Siddons, was the most famous stage actress of the age. So intense were the marquess’ feelings that he would haunt the Opera House at Covent Garden when Adelaide was performing, sending her gifts and passionate letters. He commissioned the fashionable society portraitist, John Hayter, to reproduce Adelaide’s likeness from every angle, lending the artist his private box at the Opera House to enable him the better to study his subject. Unfortunately, the marquess’ passion for the stately diva wasunreturned. When he did, finally, pluck up the courage to offer her his hand, he was rejected. This was probably for the very good reason that Adelaide was, at that point, engaged to another man: she married the businessman Edward John Sartoris in 1843, whereupon she retired from her brief, but brilliant, stage career. Called to Cavendish Square by urgent dispatch one windy evening, the portraitist Hayter found the marquess icily alone in the gloom of the drawing room at Harcourt House. Every one of the dozens of portraits of Adelaide that hung in the room had been turned to face the wall. ‘Take them, Hayter,’ said the marquess, with a grandly desolate sweep of the arm. The artist duly took away the offending paintings, which remained with him long after the 5th Duke’s death and until his own, whereupon they reverted to Welbeck Abbey. There they hang to this day, a melancholy testimony to the 5th Duke’s unrequited passion.
    After the Adelaide affair, the 5th Duke seemed – at least, to the outside world – to take no further interest in women. This led to a certain amount of speculation. ‘None of the three Bentinck brothers was married, and none of them was likely to marry,’ wrote Lady Londonderry, a family friend, without further comment. It was rumoured that there was some mysterious physical or psychological reason why the 5th Duke could not marry or have children. In recent years, it has been mooted that he was a repressed homosexual.
    In the winter of 1851–2, the duke was involved in a serious accident, in which the wheel of a horse-drawn cab actually passed over his head, injuring him severely. From that moment on, he could no longer bear to sit on a horse or listen to music. Already fragile in health, he became a veritablehypochondriac. In the view of his closest friends, this was the point at which his eccentricity started to increase.
    Whether because of his rejection by Adelaide Kemble, the strange circumstances of his younger brother’s sudden death, the physical or psychological consequences of