Of Death & Taxes

Of all the stately homes of England, perhaps the stateliest is Chatsworth, a vast Palladian palace set on 50,000 acres of park and woodland, which for generations has been the family seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, whose family name is Cavendish. The first earl, who was one of Henry VIII's bullyboys, began amassing the huge family fortune by taking over some of the prize abbey lands confiscated during Henry's fight with Rome. The Devonshires came to epitomize the British landed aristocracy, and became famous for their arrogant eccentricities.

The present Chatsworth, their ducal seat, was completed in 1706. Besides such wonders as a copper beech tree fashioned of real copper and a conservatory large enough to drive through in a coach-and-four (so that visitors would not have to step down from their carriage to see the blossoms), Chatsworth boasts one of the world's greatest private art collections. Its graceful galleries are hung with Michelangelos, Raphaels, Titians, Velasquezes and Rembrandts. Its bookcases are crammed with rare manuscripts and incunabula; its halls are studded with classic sculpture.

In recent years the Dukes of Devonshire have been fighting a rearguard action against the welfare state. High death duties were making it difficult for them to bequeath their treasures intact to posterity. In 1926 the ninth Duke of Devonshire did what he could to preserve Chatsworth by turning the whole estate into a stock company and signing over most of its shares to his son. Twenty years later the son, by then tenth duke, a crusty veteran of Gallipoli and France, negotiated a contract by which his wife and the Duke of Buccleuch, as trustees, would take over -L-1,850,000 worth of the estate, thus exempting that much from death duties. However, the duke made the arrangement too late, and in 1950 he died before it could become legal. A chancery court ordered the heir to pay a full 80% of the -L-3,000,000 assessed value of Chatsworth and its art collection. To cover the cost of the levy, the art collection itself would have to be broken up and sold. Without much hope of success, 34-year-old Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, the elegant young eleventh Duke of Devonshire, appealed the ruling.

Last week, without explanation, the duke dropped the case. Presumably the government has agreed to take over Chatsworth itself as a national museum in lieu of the death duties. "The dispersal of this collection," the Daily Telegraph said approvingly, "would have been a tragic and irretrievable loss, for the greatest of its incomparable treasures had its value enhanced by the company it kept."

The eleventh duke will probably continue to live, with his wife and two children, in the modest country home which used to belong to the steward of the estate.

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