"Elvis, Chatsworth, JFK and Me:" An Interview with Deborah Mitford

In light of the release of her memoirs, Wait for Me!, The Daily Telegraph writes a wonderful and very entertaining profile of Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. There are certain quotes in the article, which remind me why I find the Mitfords' style so inimitably delicious and hilarious. There are also moments of great triumph in diversity, downplayed in a very old "stiff upper lip" kind of way - the quarter of a century it took her and her husband to pay of the Death Tax levied upon them, the deaths of three of her children and the Duke's battle with alcoholism.

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Debo, as everyone calls her, was 90 this year. Having greeted me in her pretty garden, shaking my hand and looking me directly in the eye, she leads me into the apple-green-walled and flagstone-floored hall – 'Do put your bags down, no burglars here' – and shows me into her sitting-room, which has an extraordinarily nice atmosphere, and we take to the floral sofa, where she positively lounges, looking at me brightly, waiting to be amused.

There have been countless books about the Mitfords, both biographical and autobiographical, and now her own memoirs, Wait for Me!, are about to be published. (She has written several books, mostly about Chatsworth, her former home.)

"Wait for Me!": The memoirs of the last of the Mitford girls

"Money and illness and sex were not talked about in those days and they are the only things people talk about these days, aren't they? ... Self-pity and self-esteem, which are now the key things in school, were not allowed. Self-esteem? Nanny used to say, 'Who's going to look at you?'" - Deborah Cavendish (nee Mitford)

"This last surviving member of the Mitford clan has written a memoir old-fashioned in its unwillingness to spill the beans, yet one which is still rich enough in anecdote to be unputdownable."

Bel Mooney at The Daily Mail reviews the newly-published memoirs of Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, perhaps better-known to the world by her maiden name of Deborah Mitford. Known within the family as "Debo," the Dowager Duchess's memoirs sound fascinating and I've ordered my copy to keep as a treat for finishing Popular's sequel in October - along with the official biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, C.J. Sansom's new novel Heartstone, Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark and re-reading Elena Maria Vidal's Madame Royale and William Boyd's Any Human Heart. So looking forward to two weeks of doing absolutely nothing.

I've always had a great admiration for the Duchess. My grandmother told me a story that, during the Blitz, coming across a working-class woman sitting amidst the bombed out ruins of her house, Deborah walked over and handed her her diamond engagement ring, to sell and re-start her life with. It's easy to see why she is so respected and why she managed to keep-up amicable relations with all over her, often-quarrelling sisters. However, some harsh words are reserved in the memoirs, apparently, for the brilliant but difficult Nancy, who (it was recently discovered) was actually one of the sources writing to the British government recommending the imprisonment of her pro-fascist sister, Diana, during the Second World War.

Copies of Wait for Me! can be ordered here. (And, on a side note, I couldn't agree any more with Miss Mooney's description of inheritance tax/death tax/death duties as a "crippling abomination.")

James II's wedding suit

Via Tea at Trianon comes an account of the sumptuous wedding suit worn by the future King James II when he married his second bride, the lovely Italian princess, Maria-Beatrice of Modena, in 1673. The suit, shown above, is still preserved and on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

James's time as King in Britain was short, lasting only from 1685 until he was deposed in 1688. He and Maria-Beatrice were to spend the rest of their lives in exile, as guests of the French Royal Family, with Maria becoming an important figure in Court life at the recently-completed palace of Versailles, where she was much admired.

James, then Duke of York, had been married before, to the late Lady Anne Hyde, who had lost her battle to cancer two years earlier. With Anne, James had fathered eight children, although only two survived - the future queens, Mary II and Anne. With the beautiful Maria (or, to give her her full name, Maria-Beatrice-Eleanora-Anna-Margareta-Isabella d'Este of Modena), James was to have a further seven children - Catherine-Laura (died at the age of ten months), Isabella (died aged five), Charles, Duke of Cambridge (died as a baby during the smallpox epidemic of 1677), Elizabeth (died a few weeks after her christening), Charlotte-Maria (died of a possible allergy at the age of three months), James Francis Edward, regarded as "King James III" by his father's supporters and "the Old Pretender" by those who supported James II's exile (1688 - 1766) and Princess Louisa-Maria (1692 - 1712), who was born during the royal couple's exile in France.

The couple and their surviving children lived out most of their exile in the magnificent château of St. Germain-en-Laye (below), a gift to them from King James's cousin, Louis XIV. James II died there in the autumn of 1701 and he was originally buried in the Chapel of Saint Edmund in the Church of the English Benedictines on the Rue St Jacques in Paris. James was followed to the grave eleven years later by his daughter, the unmarried Princess Louisa-Maria, who died at St.-Germain at the age of nineteen in the spring of 1712, to her mother's great distress. The princess's body was taken to the Church of the English Benedictines, to rest alongside her late father's. Queen Maria-Beatrice died six years later in the early summer of 1718, after an agonising battle with cancer. She was buried in the Abbey of the Visitation of Saint Mary at Chaillot. The bodies of King James, Queen Maria-Beatrice and Princess Louisa-Maria were all destroyed during the French Revolution.

After a failed attempt to retake the British thrones in 1715, James-Francis re-settled in Rome, where he married Princess Maria-Casimira of Poland and fathered two sons - including the future "Bonnie Prince Charlie" of legend. James-Francis or, "James III and VIII" as his most loyal adherents had known him, passed away as a guest of the Papacy on New Year's Day 1766 and he was granted the honour of being buried in Saint Peter's Basilica.


Today, James II and Maria-Beatrice of Modena have no mutual living descendants. All of their children, bar James-Francis, died before they could reproduce and of James-Francis's two children - "Bonnie" Charles-Edward's marriage to Princess Louisa-Maximiliana von Stolberg-Gedern was barren and his younger brother, Henry-Benedict, entered the Roman Catholic Church and became Cardinal of Santa Maria.

"The Queen of Maryland"

Historical novelist, Elena Maria Vidal, profiles the life of Henrietta-Maria of France, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, wife of King Charles I and mother of Kings Charles II and James II. The daughter of King Henri IV of France and his second wife, Marie de Medici, Henrietta-Maria married the new King of England in 1625 and remained by his side until the traumas of the Civil War, which took her husband's life. It was in the Queen's honour that the future American state of Maryland, Elena Maria's home State, was named.

"In the lone tent, waiting for victory,  
She stands with eyes marred by the mists of pain,
Like some wan lily overdrenched with rain:
The clamorous clang of arms, the ensanguined sky,
War's ruin, and the wreck of chivalry
To her proud soul no common fear can bring:
Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord the King,
Her soul a-flame with passionate ecstasy."

- From Henrietta Maria by Oscar Wilde

"Titanic" gets a sequel

How gloriously awful.

September 5th, 1548: The Death of Katharine Parr

"She was not a pretty woman, or a beauty, but rather comely with red-gold hair and hazel eyes ... Katherine's looks, however, were not her chief attraction. People were drawn more to her warm and amiable personality and her intellectual qualities; she exuded goodwill... Katherine was also to prove popular with most people, mainly because she had a pleasant manner with both nobility and servants alike. Her chaplain, John Parkhurst, who later became Bishop of Norwich, remembered in his latter years that she was 'a most gentle mistress'. Perhaps the most outstanding thing about her was her formidable intellect, which had been cultivated to an unusual extent by her mother and by the people with whom she associated herself in later life. She was perceptive, articulate, thirsty for knowledge, both general and religious, and industrious. Her virtue, a female quality always suspect in an age that believed that teaching women to write would encourage them to pen love-letters, was beyond question."
- The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir (1991)

On this day in 1548, Katharine Parr, Queen Dowager of England and Ireland, died an agonising death at the age of thirty-six. She had outlived her third, and most notorious, husband by just over eighteen months and had died as a result of trying to give her fourth husband, Lord Thomas Seymour, a son and heir. Instead, the former Queen had given birth to a sickly daughter and she herself was now "lying on my death-bed, sick of body but of good mind and perfect memory".

"The beauteous Anne Boleyn and the guilty Catherine Howard"

"In front of the altar, repose the beauteous Anna (sic) Boleyn, and the guilty Catherine Howard, two ill-fated wives of Henry VIII".
- The History and Antiquities of the Tower of London by John Bayley (1830)

Claire Ridgway at The Anne Boleyn Files concludes her series of posts on the exhumation of several bodies in the Tower's Chapel of St. Peter-ad-Vincula and concludes that there is no good reason to conclude that the body exhumed in 1876 was not, in fact, the remains of "the beauteous Anne Boleyn." Claire writes:

"My conclusion is that there is no reason to think that the Victorians were wrong in their identification of Anne Boleyn’s remains. I know that their identification relied on circumstantial evidence, the fact that the body lay where they expected to find Anne Boleyn, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that it wasn’t Anne."

The 1876 exhumation and whether they were Anne Boleyn's, Jane Boleyn's or Catherine Howard's, also feeds into the intense academic debate over Anne's date of birth, which was discussed on this blog, where I put forward the case for the minority position - arguing that Anne was born in 1507, not 1501, as is commonly argued by most historians today. (And as proof of how seriously Tudor enthusiasts take this debate it is, so far, the single most commented upon post on this blog.)