I am spending the half-term week in Northumberland, where we kicked off our holiday with a trip to Alnwick Castle on Monday. It’s an amazing place: poking incongruously up through the gentle Northumbrian hills, its medieval turrets and towers picture-postcard perfect. It is extraordinary to think that parts of this crenellated country house have sat on this site, guarding the gateway to the North, since 1096.
During that 928-year history, Alnwick’s fortunes have often been steered away from disaster via the wit and drive of some enterprising women. Elizabeth Percy, the only daughter of the 7th Earl of Northumberland, who inherited the barony on her father’s death in 1750 was one such example. Driven by romantic ideas about her family’s history and her passion for the castle and its countryside, she was compelled to restore Alnwick and turn it into a family residence. The current Duchess, Jane Percy, a martial arts enthusiast, renovated Alnwick Garden and turned it into one of the north-east’s biggest visitor attractions.
The Percys great historic rivals, the Nevilles of Durham and Yorkshire, begot some similarly formidable females. As wife of Richard III and Queen of England, Anne Neville played a critical part in the Wars of the Roses. Cecily Neville, Anne’s great aunt and mother-in-law ( for a time the most powerful woman in England), gave birth to two kings and survived the bloody civil wars by dint of her wits.
Fast forward a few centuries and we still see examples of canny aristocratic women everywhere: the Duchess of Rutland became one of the shrewdest castle custodians in the country, defying the prediction of one of her early butlers that she would be “broken” by her position. Lady Carnarvon, the real duchess of Downton Abbey, manages affairs at Highclere Castle to keep the show on the road. Mary Hazel Czernine, 10th Baroness Howard de Walden, under whose stewardship the previously grotty Marylebone High Street has become a thriving and profitable independent shopping mecca.
The Duke of Westminster’s forthcoming wedding to Olivia Henson on June 7 has sparked fresh calls to change the law preventing firstborn daughters inheriting their family’s titles. If he has any qualms about this happening, he shouldn’t fret. History shows that it’s often the aristocratic women who’ve powered their families’ dynasties anyway. At the very least, they’re the ones who beget the sons. Time, surely, to allow their daughters the same privilege of primogeniture.
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