Duke of Denver

The fictitious title of Duke of Denver was created by Dorothy Sayers for the family of Lord Peter Wimsey. Lord Peter is the second of the three children of Mortimer Wimsey, 15th Duke of Denver. Gerald Wimsey, 16th Duke of Denver, and Peter's elder brother, is the chief murder suspect in Clouds of Witness, in which he is tried by his peers, in full form in the House of Lords.

Origin of the genealogy

C. W. Scott-Giles, Fitzalan Pursuivant of Arms Extraordinary, discussed the family with Miss Sayers from February 1936 until 1940, and they discovered many former Wimseys in their correspondence. These came in two types:

A biographical note, supposedly by his uncle Paul Austin Delagardie, says:

"Peter, I am glad to say, takes after his mother and me. True, he is all nerves and nose – but that is better than being all brawn and no brains like his father and brothers, or a mere bundle of emotions, like Gerald's boy, Saint-George. He has at least inherited the Delagardie brains, by way of safeguard to the unfortunate Wimsey temperament." NB: he says "brothers" i.e. plural--?

Miss Sayers published several articles and pamphlets on the Wimseys, including a series of "Wimsey Papers", the wartime letters of the family, which appeared in the Spectator from November 1939 to January 1940. After that she turned to her translation of Dante and other religious works. Scott-Giles writes that they met often, but he never ventured to bring up the Wimseys.

After her death, he wrote an article on Wimsey heraldry (Coat of Arms, January 1959), and a correspondent discovered a crux. The Wimseys are well-established as being of unbroken succession for sixteen generations (although, as will be seen below, Miss Sayers' genealogy found this too simple) but Gerald Wimsey is described at his trial as "Duke of Denver, in the Peerage of Great Britain and Ireland", which would mean that the title was created after the Union with Ireland, which was passed on 2 July 1800 and came into effect on the following St. Sylvester's Day (New Year's Eve).

Scott-Giles answered this in the manner of a Baker Street Irregular, by assuming that all the data given by Miss Sayers were correct, and coming up with an explanation to save the appearances, and he eventually produced a book on the House of Wimsey. He invented no Wimseys, which explains certain blanks in the list, but he enlarged some from half a sentence.

Armorial bearings

Adoption

The arms were altered from Sable, three plates argent when a crusading Wimsey advised his King to watch a besieged city as closely as a cat his mousehole. The family chronicles record this as being Richard the Lion-Hearted at Acre; the arms were actually changed after Edward I's crusade while Prince. (Gerald de Wimsey also fought for Prince Edward against Simon de Montfort at the battle of Evesham and elsewhere.)

Roger de Wimsey, his father, supported de Montfort; ever since, there has been a Wimsey on each side of civil strife, to preserve the family estates and intercede for their lives.

Gerald's grandfather, Peter de Guimsey, had guided King John across the Wash in 1215, and was very assiduous in searching for the King's treasury after it was swept away. He must have been unsuccessful, for none of it was handed in.

The supporters were adopted under Elizabeth; the badge, now unused, goes back to when Peter, Earl of Denver, left Richard III's camp on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth. One of King Richard's supporters sent a hangman's rope after him, so that he could get used to the feel; Earl Peter knotted it and sent it back.

Baron Wimsey (1289)

Earl of Denver (c. 1399)

Duke of Denver (c. 1485)

All daughters of Dukes are entitled by courtesy to the style of Lady; all younger sons, to the style of Lord. These are omitted here for readability.

Second creation (1820)

Abeyance and succession

When Edward I of England summoned his good servant Gerald de Wimsey to Parliament, the king created a barony by writ: an hereditary title, and an hereditary right to be summoned to Parliament. It is inherited according to strict customary law: If a Baron Wimsey leaves sons, the eldest succeeds him; if he leaves an only daughter, she succeeds him (compare Baron Noel). If he dies without descendants, the title goes to the children of the previous Lord Wimsey by the same rules; this usually means his next eldest brother succeeds.

If he leaves no sons, but several daughters, the rules are different: The title is left in abeyance between the daughters, and no-one succeeds. When all but one of the daughters die without offspring, or the offspring of all but one of them die out, the remaining daughter or her heir automatically succeed, as if she had been an only daughter all along. (The Crown may, of its grace, choose one of the heirs involved to succeed before all but one of them die out. It may choose the heir of a younger daughter over the older, and has done so.)

(Cokayne's Complete Peerage contains massive evidence that the 13th century did things differently; Edward I summoned many men to Parliament once, without their being summoned, or their sons, ever again. But this did not happen to the Wimseys.)

The other Wimsey titles were granted by letters patent, which specified inheritance by heirs male: no daughters could succeed, and no-one could succeed through descent from a daughter.

The second creation

The 12th Duke of Denver died in 1817 without children, or siblings, and with him the male line from the first Earl of Denver died out. As a result, his higher titles became extinct; and the Barony of Wimsey went into abeyance between his aunts, as daughters of the 10th Duke.

If Colonel George Wimsey had not died at the Battle of Waterloo, he would have succeeded, as the only other descendant in the male line of the Earls and Dukes of Denver. (Younger Wimsey sons led adventurous lives; and the practice of having one Wimsey on each side of a civil war kept the property together, but took a high toll in deaths, attainders, and executions.) Colonel Wimsey left an only daughter, Grace, who married a Charles Wimsey from another branch of the family; he was descended from the Barons Wimsey, and also from a daughter of the 6th Duke.

Neither of them inherited any titles, but the 12th Duke arranged for them to inherit the lands. In recognition of this, and the multiple family connexion, Charles Wimsey was created, in 1820, Viscount St. George, Earl and Duke of Denver. Although strictly first Duke of the new creation, he is almost always called (as in the case of Lord De La Warr) 13th Duke of Denver, since the title was recreated promptly in the same family.

The 13th Duke

Charles Wimsey, 13th Duke of Denver, was the son of Sir Bredon Wimsey, a cadet of the Wimseys, to whom the 12th Duke transferred the Wimsey properties (the entails lapsed at his death). Sir Bredon was descended from John Wimsey, Colonel in the Parliamentary armies, during the English Civil War; who descended in turn from a brother of the first Earl. Matthew Wimsey, Lord Peter's third cousin, the family archivist, would himself descend from a younger son of this Sir Bredon, and thus have no claim on any of the family titles.

Colonel Wimsey was assigned to watch over Duke's Denver and Bredon Hall, in the interests of the Commonwealth of England, while the seventh Duke was in exile as a Royalist after the Battle of Worcester. The Colonel did his duty to his government and his family. The Wimsey estates survived the war intact, and Colonel Wimsey's small force did its best to prevent Bredon Hall being used for Royalist intrigue.

The Duke, however, managed to get into the broad Wimsey lands at night, dressed as "Captain Brown", and his efforts helped to persuade the Earl of Manchester to support the Restoration of Charles II. After the Restoration, "Captain Brown" invited Colonel Wimsey to visit Bredon Hall again, and in short order, Colonel John Wimsey married the Duke's sister, Lady Elizabeth Wimsey.

The descent from the Colonel is not specified; but the Wimsey papers tell us that Captain Henry Wimsey, RN, was a nephew of the 7th Duke, whom his uncle had taken sailing in the yacht which had been used by Captain Brown. He lived to a ripe old age, and his son and grandson were admirals; his sea stories may have inspired Horatio Nelson. He is presumably the younger son of Colonel John and Lady Elizabeth: if the 6th Duke had been his paternal grandfather, his descendants would have had to be extinct by 1817.

His Duchess

Lady Grace Wimsey was, as said, the daughter of

This Richard Wimsey was a "much older first cousin" of the 10th Duke (which implies that fourth cousin above = "third cousin once removed", as it can), who was also the Duke's next heir after his only son. This makes it likely, but not certain, that he was born about 1685, and his father was the Lord Richard Wimsey who met Evelyn.

Gerald Christian Wimsey, 16th Duke of Denver

Gerald Christian Wimsey, 16th Duke of Denver, was elder brother of Lord Peter Wimsey. He appeared most notably as chief murder suspect in the novel Clouds of Witness, where he is tried in the House of Lords but eventually acquitted through his brother's efforts.

According to the novel The Attenbury Emeralds, he died 1951 from a heart attack during a fire at Duke's Denver. As his son, the Viscount St George (a fighter pilot) did not survive the Second World War, his brother Peter inherits the title.

Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, 17th Duke of Denver

The former Lord Peter Wimsey accepted the title rather reluctantly. However, out of a sense of duty, he left his former life in London behind, moving to Duke's Denver, rebuilding the estate, and picking up life as a landowner. See also the novel The Late Scholar.

Literary References

Except for the first, these are not to be taken as factual.

le comte d'Enfer / Sourisoit comme un chat chasseur ("the Earl of Hell moused like a hunting cat")
has been distorted into "grinned like a Cheshire cat".

Lord Christian Wimsey

There were three Elizabethans called Lord Christian Wimsey. Lord Peter's mother wrote him, in the "Wimsey Letters":

...the third Lord Christian, for example, who could write four languages at eleven, left Oxford at fifteen, married at sixteen, had two wives and twelve children by the time he was thirty (two lots of twins, certainly, but it's all experience) besides producing a book of elegies and a learned exhibition [Qy: disquisition ? D.L.S.] on Leviathans, and he would have done a great deal more, I dare say, if he hadn't unfortunately been killed by savages on Drake's first voyage into the Indies – I sometimes feel that our young people don't get enough out of life these days.

Scott-Giles feels this is a bit much, even for an Elizabethan Wimsey, and suggests that the Dowager Duchess had confounded the accomplishments of different Lords Christian.

References

  1. ↑ Strong Poison, Ch. XXI
  2. ↑ Although the Earldom de la Warr is cited as the precedent, a better precedent would be the very real Dukedom of Norfolk, created by Richard III for John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, co-heir of the Mowbray Dukes of Norfolk, themselves heirs of the Plantagenet earls and Countess of Norfolk. Although the 1st Duke was killed fighting for Richard III at Bosworth (unlike the fictional 1st Duke of Denver), his heirs retained the dukedom. At least two dukes were attainted and the dukedom itself under attainder for a period, but in 1660, the dukedom was restored by Act of Parliament with the same precedence as if it had never been attainted. Otherwise, the Dukes of Norfolk would only have precedence from the 1660 Act of Parliament. The rather less ancestrally distinguished Dukes of Somerset were similarly regranted a 16th-century dukedom, originally created for a maternal uncle of Edward VI of England, only legitimate son of Henry VIII. The 1st Duke was attainted, but his descendants enjoy the precedence from his creation.

External links

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