GREAT BRITAIN: Death and Taxes

In England's more spacious days, Sir William Cavendish won his family's fortunes as one of Henry VIII's crown commissioners, requisitioning monastic estates for the crown and the nobles; his great-great-grandson, the first Duke of Devonshire, won political power for the family by leading the Revolution of 1688 against the last of the Stuarts. On the ancestral Derbyshire lands the duke reared a vast palace that stands today in its 50,000-acre wooded park as a proud symbol of the centuries of the Whig ascendancy. Successive dukes festooned Chatsworth's 273 rooms with Michelangelos, Raphaels and...

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