Separate fact from fiction in the life of the 5th Duke of Portland with Welbeck Assistant Curator Dr Lauren Batt.
The reclusive 5th Duke of Portland is best known for having a suite of subterranean rooms and a network of tunnels built under the Welbeck Estate, as well as a range of enormous buildings above ground. The question visitors ask me frequently in my role as Assistant Curator is: why did he build them? Unfortunately, it is not a simple question to answer, as the “Burrowing Duke” left no written explanation for the motivations behind his unusual building campaign. Where he has left silences, people have been quick to fill them with speculation.
Letter box Door
There are so many strange stories about the reclusive 5th Duke of Portland, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction. A few of them can be proven, at least in part, by physical evidence. It appears to be true, for example, that towards the end of his life he preferred not to see anybody, and communicated with his servants through two letter boxes fitted into his bedroom door, angled so that nobody could peep inside. We know this because the door still exists today and is currently on display at the Harley Gallery for Tunnel Vision – an exhibition all about the 5th Duke of Portland.
Tunnel Vision at the Harley Gallery. Photography by Alex Wilkinson
Personal Accounts of the 5th Duke of Portland
There are also a handful of accounts left by people who worked for him and knew him personally. Elizabeth Butler, one of the Duke’s laundry maids, for example, wrote a memoir in which she remembers him as kind and considerate, happy to walk among and talk to the people in his employ. She writes:
When we got down to the lodge we met the Duke again and he advised our walking on the park because the road was needing a coating of very fine stone to finish it. He said we “could go anywhere we wished, across the grass or anywhere we liked.
A letter I discovered recently, by a draughtsman who worked on the Duke’s building projects, is similarly sympathetic:
The truth is, as I was then authoritatively given to understand, that the late Duke suffered from a very painful infirmity, which rendered him peculiarly sensitive, and he in consequence, shrank from being seen…
It was frequently at the time stated that had the late Duke been born in another and less exalted sphere of life, and been able to mix among men more freely than, owing to his affliction, he was able to do, he without doubt, would have attained a high position by reason of his amazing talents, as apart from his great and practical knowledge of all pertaining to architectural design, he was also a marvelously clever civil engineer, as the underground works show.
New Discoveries from the British Newspaper Archive
There is a marked contrast between the accounts of the Duke written by those who knew him personally, and the myths and legends that surround him. In my mission to demystify the man behind the tunnels, I wanted to discover the origins of these stories, so I delved into the British Newspaper Archive for answers. There, I found a gossip columnist with a grudge, and a scandalous court case…
Surprisingly, the earliest article outlining the mysterious lifestyle of the 5th Duke of Portland was published in 1868, eleven years before his death. It stated that the Duke was:
as eccentric as the wildest imagination of a French penny a liner could desire… he keeps no company, gives no entertainments on any occasion, and lives the life of a monk… The tenants are informed of the Duke’s wishes ; if they meet him they are to pass him “as they would a tree”.
This description of the Duke directly contradicts Elizabeth Butler’s memory of the person who passed her on the roads at Welbeck ‘with the usual salute’ and spoke to her kindly about the roads. So, what would motivate a newspaper to write an exaggerated and unkind exposé on a living nobleman who mostly kept to himself?
19th Century Gossip
I suspect it was personal. The author of the article was an anonymous Lady Whistledown-esque gossip columnist, someone well-connected in the worlds of horse racing and politics, who clearly had beef with the Portland family. The same writer elsewhere dismissed the 5th Duke’s buildings as “absurd freaks” and wrote a scathing obituary on his death in 1879, calling him “the wealthiest misanthrope in the country”.
They dedicated another of their columns to a character assassination of the Duke’s brother, Lord Henry, calling him a “despot” and writing in scantily coded homophobic language about his hatred of women. The author recounts an anecdote about sharing a train carriage with Lord Henry, suggesting that they were personally acquainted.
The timing of the article also suggests a political motivation. Having been a quiet backer of the Liberal Party for many years, the Duke uncharacteristically announced that he intended to vote for the Conservatives in the 1868 General Election, having found William Gladstone’s policy on the Church of Ireland impossible to support. The liberal press was outraged at this shift in allegiance and claimed the landowner was abusing his power and attempting to influence how his tenants voted.
It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that the unflattering description of the Duke’s private life was circulated just two months before the election, and reprinted by other newspapers who may have hoped to discredit his character. If this was their plan, it was very successful, and the first article was followed up by several others prying into the unusual lifestyle of a shy, elderly gentleman who was suffering from poor health.
Death of the 5th Duke
When the Duke died in 1879, the press were generally respectful and sympathetic. Rather than focusing on the reclusive nature of his last few years at Welbeck, journalists took into account his early life, his great talents as a horseman, the vast employment opportunities he had offered, his charitable donations and his architectural achievements. One article stated:
Recluse though he, by choice, was in the latter part of his life so far as society was concerned, the late Duke kept a watchful eye on all matters of social and political interest… there can be no doubt that he will bear with him to his grave many a fond recollection from those – who know that under a reserved exterior there beat a warm and sensitive heart.
This picture of the Duke – as a reserved, but kind and generous man with a great talent for building – might have been how he was remembered by history, if it wasn’t for the Druce case…
The Druce Case
In 1897, a woman called Anne Marie Druce launched a legal case that was to last eleven years. Her remarkable claim was that her late father-in-law, Thomas Charles Druce, the owner of a London upholstery business, had been the 5th Duke of Portland living a double life. She claimed that the Duke had faked Druce’s death in 1864 and retired to the Welbeck Estate, and crucially, that her own son was the rightful heir to the Portland fortune. Some people were so convinced by her evidence, a limited liability company was set up to finance the claim.
Finally, in December 1907, the coffin of Thomas Charles Druce was exhumed. It contained – not weights, as Anne Marie Druce hoped – but the remains of an elderly bearded man. The case was finally dismissed as ‘frivolous and vexatious’. The Druce-Portland company collapsed, Anne Marie Druce was committed to a lunatic asylum, and perjury cases were brought against several of the main witnesses.
Rumours run Rampant
Despite the result of the case, many people remained convinced that the story was at least partially true, and several years of sensational forensic media coverage did untold damage to the 5th Duke of Portland’s posthumous reputation. Over the eleven years of the court case, local and national papers published an unrelenting barrage of wild, contradictory theories, and analyzed everything from his handwriting to his clothing.
He was, they claimed, a recluse who shunned female company (but had several illegitimate children); he wore a false beard; he never spoke to anyone but his valet; he was disfigured and ugly, and hid behind an umbrella if anyone tried to speak to him; he ran a furniture shop in London; he wore three coats with 9 pockets; at one time he posed as another man named Dr Harmer; he spied on people in Hyde Park from a coffin built on the roof of Harcourt House… the list goes on.
The 5th Duke’s heir was a distant relative whom he had never met, and his polar opposite in almost every way. Once the Druce case was finally over, the 6th Duke of Portland had little motivation to rectify the damage done to his uncle’s reputation. His memoir, Men Women and Things, published in 1937, only fuelled the mythology of the Burrowing Duke with its description of the dilapidated state of Welbeck Abbey as he found it in 1879:
The other rooms in the house were absolutely bare and empty. They were all painted pink, with parquet floors, and all bare and without furniture except that almost every room had a ‘‘convenience’ in the corner, quite exposed and not sheltered in any way.
Legend and Legacy of the 5th Duke of Portland
The legend of the Burrowing Duke endured through the twentieth century, capturing the attention of Bill Bryson in Notes from a Small Island and providing inspiration for the character of Badger in The Wind in the Willows.
Over the last few years, I have noticed a growing sympathy on the internet for the reclusive Duke and his compulsion to tunnel underground. Perhaps it is the effect of our shared experience of isolation during the Covid 19 pandemic, or our increased awareness of the stigmatization of neurodivergence and disability. Whatever the reason, the more time I spend around the 5th Duke of Portland’s fantastical architecture, the more I, too, feel compelled to dig into the real-life story of this enigmatic figure.
Dr Lauren Batt
Lauren is a historian and Assistant Curator at Welbeck Abbey.
Her experience includes historical research for Gucci, and projects at Chatsworth, Hardwick Hall, and Derby Museums.
