Improbable Pioneers of the Romantic Age: The Lives of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford and Georgina Gordon, Duchess of Bedford
Keir Davidson
London: Pimpernel Press, £40, 592 pages
John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford (1766-1839) unexpectedly inherited a dukedom and vast estates which included Covent Garden and Bloomsbury in London. His wife, Georgina (1781-1853), was the daughter of Jane, Duchess of Gordon (1749-1812) – the pioneer late-Georgian populariser of the Scottish Highlands with her Lodge at Kinrara in Perthshire, two generations before Queen Victoria acquired Balmoral. John strove to complete his dead brother’s agricultural and architectural improvements, and to continue the family’s support for Foxite Whiggery; Georgina perpetuated her mother’s love of the Scottish landscape. Their joint marital career is the subject of this book.
John felt overshadowed by his more handsome and worldly brother, Francis, who died prematurely of a tennis accident. Georgina, meanwhile, was not helped by the larger-than-life maternal character of Jane Gordon. Nevertheless they became patrons and leaders of fashionable society. As Keir Davidson shows, the two gradually “found themselves” through each other, and from a cool start their marriage became a successful partnership. They produced 10 startlingly clever children – whom the socialite Lady (Elizabeth) Holland compared to Homer’s heroes, the Atridae – and promoted fascinating cultural and scientific developments. The author is good on the family history, and draws on the exceptionally full Bedford archives to paint extensive biographies.
An interesting insight concerns John’s education at the University of Göttingen in Hanover. Founded by George II in 1734, by the late 18th century Göttingen was far ahead of Oxford and Cambridge as the best university for upper-class English boys, with an innovative Enlightenment curriculum and talented German professors. Göttingen had an excellent library where reading was encouraged, the earliest botanic garden on Linnaean principles, and a strong scientific emphasis. From it, the duke derived a life-long interest in botany, horticulture and agricultural experiment which he put into effect at the family seat of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, and at his own creation, Endsleigh in Devon. He developed pioneering interests in heathers and grasses, forming specimen collections which were transferred to Kew after his death, and commissioned George Sinclair’s Hortus Gramineus Woburniensis (1816) and other important scientific research.
Unusually for a Whig family, the Bedfords seem to have been completely without religion – unlike the Spencers, the Ponsonbys and the Cavendishes, who were all bitten by Evangelical Protestantism. Their religious strain derived originally from Georgiana Devonshire’s grandmother, old Lady Bessborough, who through governesses and tutors introduced a serious religious sensibility into her descendants. Ironically, its most dramatic fruit was the saintly, austere Catholic convert Fr Ignatius Spencer, whose cause for canonisation is currently being considered at Rome.
John and Georgina’s religious detachment came from heredity and education. The duke himself, thanks to his German Enlightenment education, had never been exposed to the remnants of medieval religion that he might perhaps have encountered at Oxford. His duchess was a descendant of the apostate Gordons who, after two centuries of doughty protection of Catholicism, had abandoned their religion in the wake of the failure of the ’45 and the Bonnie Prince’s March to Derby. She saw religion as a dangerous political thing that was best avoided; like her mother she found spirituality in the wildness of glens and hills and trees, as expressed at Endsleigh and Glenfeshie.
Davidson’s book falls into two not entirely integrated parts, the earlier being the Bedford and Gordon family histories. Perhaps too much is made of the Scottishness of the Gordons. Like many northern nobles they had become part of a “pan-British” network. They intermarried with English families even before the Act of Union after the accession of James I to the English throne: the 1st Duke of Gordon married Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the 6th Duke of Norfolk, and the Catholic 2nd Duchess spent most of her life at Norfolk House in London. In the south-west, at Endsleigh, John and Georgina found a family retreat, away from Woburn, where they hosted the smartest social and political house-parties of the age.
The book could have been more focused and set in context, comparing and contrasting the two houses and their parallel but different cul-tural and artistic significance. The story, however, is well-researched. It concludes with John and Georgina’s later roles back in the Highlands, where they rented Glenfeshie as one of the first sporting estates and entertained artists – especially Landseer, who became devoted to the duchess. In turn Georgina encouraged Landseer’s development into the most accomplished Victorian animal painter. Altogether, this book tells the story of an interesting and influential moment in early-19th century British scientific and artistic patronage.
Dr John Martin Robinson is an architectural historian and librarian to the Duke of Norfolk
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