William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire

William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire (oil painting by Thomas Lawrence )

Coat of arms of William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire

William George Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire KG PC , (born May 21, 1790 in Paris , † January 18, 1858 in Hardwick Hall ) was a British peer and politician of the liberal Whig Party. Known as the Bachelor Duke , he was Lord Chamberlain of the Household from 1827 to 1828 and from 1830 to 1834 . In his mixture of generosity and generosity as well as refinement and at the same time solidarity with the common people, Cavendish was later considered the prototype of an old English country gentleman. Under his aegis, Joseph Paxton carried out numerous construction works on his property.

Life

His father William, 5th Duke of Devonshire , married Lady Georgiana Spencer in 1774 . After the two daughters Georgiana (1783-1858) and Harriet Elizabeth (1785-1862), William was born as the third child and ancestor in 1790 in Paris. Since the birth of their first daughter, the parents had lived in a ménage-à-trois with Elizabeth Hervey , whom the father William married after the death of his first wife in 1809 and with whom he had two more children. So the boy grew up in a very libertarian environment.

As apparent marriage of his father led the courtesy title Marquess of Hartington , from which his nickname "Hart" was derived. Early on, he left home and went first to the boarding school Harrow School and then studied at Trinity College of Cambridge University . At the age of 21, he inherited his father's huge, more than 800 km² property in southern England in 1811, as well as his title of nobility as Duke of Devonshire . His mother had died in 1806. Eight country houses were part of the legacy . Because of the title of nobility, he also became a member of the House of Lords . In Parliament, he campaigned against Catholic emancipation and followed the tradition of his family by holding the office of chairman of the Whig party. He also supported other political demands, such as the abolition of slavery and the reduction of the working hours of child labor.

From 1811 and 1858 he was Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire . At the coronation of King George IV in 1821 he carried the imperial orb . In 1826 he took part in the coronation of Tsar Nicholas I as a British ambassador to Russia . Since 1827 he was a member of the British Privy Council and in the same year he was accepted as a Knight Companion in the Order of the Garter. From May 5, 1827 to January 21, 1828 and from November 22, 1830 to November 14, 1834 he held the office of Lord Chamberlain of the Household . Despite his increasing deafness since early childhood , he was considered the center of social life and attracted the aristocracy of southern England. William was also very wealthy for his high standing, had a deep understanding of cultural heritage, and was very interested in the visual arts and literature. In 1812 he bought for 10,000 pounds , the library of the Bishop of Ely and 1821 the collection of dramatic works of John Kemble . Most of the paintings that adorned his Devonshire House and Chiswick estates now hang in the Long Gallery of Chatsworth House .

His deafness limited him more and more in the course of his life and led to his loneliness in old age. William was never married and remained childless, which is why he was referred to as a Bachelor Duke , as a "bachelor duke".

Chatsworth Garden, "Great Conservatory", home of his palm trees.

Furthermore, William was involved in architecture and garden art. In 1826 he enticed Joseph Paxton from the Royal Horticultural Society , who was only in his early 20s, and appointed him its chief gardener. Together with him, he designed and built the 84 by 20 meter conservatory in Chatsworth , an elongated glass house and model of the later Crystal Palace in London's Hyde Park . In 1838 he was elected President of the Royal Horticultural Society as the successor to long-time incumbent Thomas Andrew Knight and held this office for twenty years until his death. A generous donation made it possible in 1836 to merge the two cultural institutions Derby Town and County Museum and Natural History Society to form the Derby Museum and Art Gallery , of which he was honorary chairman.

When he died in 1858, his title Baron Clifford at Abeyance fell between his two sisters, while the Duke of Devonshire title, along with the other subordinate titles, fell to his cousin William Cavendish, 2nd Earl of Burlington .

Successful breeding with bananas

Williams' interest in gardening also included successful breeding in his greenhouse. It was again Paxton who succeeded in cultivating and propagating a banana plant given to William. Until then, no breeding attempts had been made in the UK, but Paxton dealt in detail with the plant, certain her and gave her the name Musa Cavendishii . It wasn't until over a hundred years later that the myth was revealed when it came to light that the bananas grown in Chatsworth during this period were the result of Paxton's breeding successes. His handwritten notes came to light during renovations in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1836 Paxton sent a banana tree from the Chatsworth greenhouse to the Horticultural Societys Show, which caused a sensation there and awarded Paxton the Knighton Silver Medal .

A few years later, William sent two of his plants to a missionary in Samoa , only one of which survived the trip. This banana plant was the basis of an extensive banana plantation in this country. In the Chatsworth archives there are documents that show that more Musa cavendishii probably reached the Pacific region in 1853 . There is evidence of a delivery to the Canary Islands for 1855 . Today, all commercially successful bananas come from this one plant after the stocks of the Gros Michel variety, which dominated until the 1950s, were largely destroyed by Panama disease . Investigations showed that all other bananas are genomically so far removed from Musa cavendishii that this must be called a separate variety. In the meantime, this cultivar has developed into the dominant variety in the trade, with a comparatively low susceptibility to disease and a relatively thin shell. Virtually all of the bananas sold today are of the Musa cavendishii variety .

William is also the godfather of the pine species Pinus devoniana .

literature

• Colin Matthew (Ed.): Cavendish, William George Spencer. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1995.

Web links

Commons : William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• William George Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire on thepeerage.com
• Devonshire, Duke of (E, 1694) at Cracroft's Peerage (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ James Lees-Milne: The Bachelor Duke. A Life of William Spencer Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, 1790-1858. John Murray Publishers, London 1998, ISBN 0719549205 .
2. ↑ John Campbell : Passages from the Past . Hutchinson, London 1907, p. 76
3. ^ House of Devonshire
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Orchids ( memento of March 24, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) from: Curtis' Botanical Magazine. Dedications Portraits 1827-1927. Compiled by Ernest Nelmes and William Cuthbertson, Bernard Quaritch, London 1931 and Violet R. Markham: Paxton and Bachelor Duke. Hodder & Stoughton, London 1935 (web archive)
5. ↑ London Gazette . No. 18360, HMSO, London, May 11, 1827, p. 1033 ( PDF , English).
6. ↑ Image description of an information board at the original location
7. ↑ ^{a b} The Cavendish Banana ( Memento from March 14, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), Peakland Heritage (web archive)
8. ↑ Musa cavendishii on globalnet
9. ↑ Pedro Arias, Cora Dankers, Pascal Liu, Paul Pilkauskas: The World Banana Economy 1985–2002 . Ed .: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations . 2003, ISBN 92-5105057-0 , ISSN  1810-0783 (English, fao.org ).

predecessor	Office	successor
William Cavendish	Duke of Devonshire 1811-1858	William Cavendish
William Cavendish	Baron Clifford 1811-1858	Title abeyant