The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse by Piu Marie Eatwell Read Free Book Online Page B

imprisoned, in the vault-like gloom of his London home, barely a mile away. Harcourt House was the London residence of the 5th Duke of Portland. An eighteenth-century townhouse occupying almost the entire west side of Cavendish Square, it did not benefit from its privileged position in one of London’s most prestigious locations. Rather, it confronted the square with a vast and forbidding expanse of wall, punctured by heavy wrought-iron gates topped with sharp spikes. Behind the walls was a stucco-fronted, cavernous house, barely more welcoming than the gates. Originally designed for Lord Bingley in the 1720s, Harcourt House had become a London landmark known for its dismal grandeur and excessive privacy. Thackeray used it as the model for Lord Steyne’s dreary mansion, Gaunt House, in Vanity Fair :
    All I have ever seen of it is the vast wall in front, with the rustic columns at the great gate, through which an old porter peers sometimes with a fat and gloomy red face – and over the wall the garret and bedroom windows, and the chimneys,out of which there seldom comes any smoke now. For the present Lord Steyne lives at Naples, preferring the view of the Bay and Capri and Vesuvius to the dreary aspect of the wall in Gaunt Square.
    The writer E. Beresford Chancellor was one of the few people allowed to visit Harcourt House. He wrote of the house in his 1908 book, The Private Palaces of London Past and Present :
    …nothing could have exceeded the dreariness of its interior, except perhaps the gloom which sat perpetually on its outward walls. The very size of its rooms, and the remains of their former magnificence, with their elaborately carved and moulded cornices; their ceilings painted ‘en grisaille’ and their fine old chimneypieces, added to the sense of desolation which seemed to have irrevocably settled on the whole place.
    As if the towering surrounding walls and spiked entrance gates were not enough, the 5th Duke had tall iron and glass screens built round the garden of Harcourt House to shield him from the curious eyes of his neighbours. The screens were a massive 80 feet high by 200 feet long, and presented an extraordinary sight. The duke’s fear of public appearances was such that he took most of his exercise within his private garden, which had a large, circular path running round it for precisely this purpose. Little else existed in the garden save for a few stunted trees and some blackened grass that pushed up in miserable patches around the path. The basement of the house was taken up almost entirely by a huge bathroomcontaining various baths, in which the duke spent a great deal of time trying out vapour treatments for his mysterious skin disease. A trapdoor from this bathroom led directly up to his bedroom above.
    Although he was always shy, in his youth the 5th Duke of Portland had not been the eccentric recluse that he was to become in later years. Known to his friends and family as Lord John, he joined the army in 1818 to serve a relatively undistinguished career, becoming lieutenant and captain in the Grenadier Guards in 1830. On the death of his elder brother in 1824, he succeeded him as heir-apparent to the dukedom, taking the title of Marquess of Titchfield. He also – reluctantly – replaced his brother as Tory MP for King’s Lynn. On the day he was elected, he did not even attend the hustings: his uncle, Lord William Bentinck, filled his place. Sir William Folkes (who lost to the marquess by 177 to 89 votes) remarked, somewhat caustically:
    To the present Marquess I feel not the slightest hostility. He is, however, a perfect stranger to you; you have never seen him – perhaps you never will see him; and I must say that had it not been for that most useful work ‘The Peerage’ I should never have known that such a person existed.
    In the event, the marquess served as MP for only two years, gladly giving up the seat to his uncle Lord William, having little taste for active politics. He even