Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 7/Ana (September 6, 1862)
ANA.
Our Ducal Houses.—With the exception of those two ducal titles which have been won by a Churchill and a Wellesley respectively, and, to some extent, at least, a few others which owe their existence to King Charles II., the rest of the titles which stand in the highest rank of our nobility are mostly the result of the fusion of two, three, or more fortunes together by the marriage of heiresses. Thus the proud Dukedom of Norfolk has absorbed into itself the castle and broad acres of the Fitzalans, Earls of Arundel, and the Duke of Richmond has added a large Scottish rent-roll to his English estates, through his grandmother, the heiress of the Dukes of Gordon: thus, the noble house of Buckingham (we speak of half a century ago), had grown great in the same way, by the addition of the Temple to the Grenville property, and, subsequently, by absorbing the inheritance of the “princely” Chandos, and that of the old Earls Nugent; the Duke of Buccleuch has united in himself, by a similar process, the wealth of the Queensberries, the Douglases, and the Montagues; and thus, too, the Duke of Sutherland, of more recent times, has incorporated together with the ancient inheritances of the Levesons of Staffordshire and the Gowers of Yorkshire, the entire estates belonging to two Scottish heiresses, who brought as their marriage portions the lordship of nearly the whole of two northern counties, those of Sutherland and Cromarty. Indeed, so vast has been the absorbing process in the latter case, that, as if sated with its wealth, and unable to digest a further supply, the last-named ducal house has thrown off two younger cadet branches, each most amply endowed, in the persons of the Earl of Ellesmere and Earl Granville.