The matter was most awfully urgent. The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire dashed up to London to see her son, Edward William Spencer Cavendish, 10th Duke of Devonshire, and his stately wife, the Lady Mary Alice Gascoyne-Cecil. Lady Mary's mother, the Marchioness of Salisbury, thought it wise to come, too. Reluctantly the Duke agreed that he was the one to speak to his headstrong son-&-heir, William John Robert Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington and a Captain in the Coldstream Guards.
The Marquess, 26, proposed to marry an American, a Boston girl named Kathleen Kennedy. The Marquess had been mentioned as a suitable suitor for the hand of Princess Elizabeth. Kathleen's father was Joseph P. Kennedy, wealthy, Irish and no admirer of the British. He had been a popular U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, who had later thrown away his popularity and then some.* What was more, the Kennedys were good Catholics; the Cavendishes have been strenuously Protestant since the 16th Century.
The Duke, the Duchess, the Dowager Duchess and the Marchioness, not to speak of the Kennedys, might have seen it coming. Kathleen had been going with the Marquess since 1938, when Ambassador Joe brought her to London. Paddling about London on a bicycle and working at an American Red Cross Club in Knightsbridge since last summer, Kathleen continued to see the Marquess. Last winter she visited West Derbyshire, when the Marquess tried and failed to win a seat in the House of Commons (TIME, Feb. 28). Apparently, everybody—except the Cavendishes and the Kennedys—understood that Kathleen and the Marquess were as good as engaged.
But the actual prospect of marriage hit the Cavendishes hard. One of England's oldest and loftiest family trees swayed perceptibly.
Slow Growth. The Cavendish family first appeared in 1366, when Sir John, the lord of Cavendish Overhall, acquired a seat on the King's Bench. In 1530 Sir William placed a firm foundation under the family fortunes while serving as a commissioner for Henry VIII. Bluff King Hal had yet to put away Catholic Catherine of Aragon, but was already breaking up the church monasteries and preparing to establish the Protestant Church of England. A share of the extensive Catholic lands fell to Sir William Cavendish.
At the beginning of World War II the family owned some 180,000 acres, Chatsworth House, Hardwick Hall, Bolton Abbey, Compton Place, Lismore Castle in Ireland and a town house in Carlton Gardens (now a heap of blitzed rubble). The Cavendishes rank well up among the "twelve families that own England." Their coat of arms: sable, three bucks' heads cabossed argent with a crest of a serpent nowed proper and two bucks, each wreathed round the neck with a chaplet of roses, argent and azure, as supporters. The Cavendish motto: Cavendo Tutus, Secure by Caution.