The funeral of Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, brought to mind Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” in the sense that duchesses aren’t what they used to be, but here was perhaps the last one who lived up to the image. She was ninety-four. The service took place at Chatsworth, the historic house in Derbyshire built for the Dukes of Devonshire to the design of Capability Brown. Next day, The Times carried photographs of the mourners in a procession led by Prince Charles and his wife, a much less duchessy duchess, both of them in deepest black. Some of these two hundred mourners had been given first-class train tickets from London. Six hundred members of the staff also attended, “dressed in traditional attire,” whatever that might be.
“She was generally addressed as Your Grace. I even saw people curtsey to her. Somehow one felt that one must wear a tie in her presence,” wrote Charles Moore, the biographer of Margaret Thatcher and a man of good sense. His tribute in the Daily Telegraph rose to a crescendo: Her life had provided “the full idea of aristocracy, with its duties and its dynasties, its seasons and its splendours.”
“She was generally addressed as Your Grace. I even saw people curtsey to her.”
Nothing gives me the right to refer to her as Debo, but everyone else did, as though the intimate abbreviation implied equal social footing. Whenever the Spectator
