Another Voice | 9 May 2009

It was in the spring that I went to the funeral of Andrew Cavendish, the late and 11th Duke of Devonshire, at Edensor on Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire. It was almost five years to the day after his death that last Friday I went to the funeral of Ken Buxton in Flash, in Staffordshire.

Though they are not far from each other, the bleak Staffordshire moorlands are a different world to the sweet, grassy banks of the Derbyshire Wye where it flows through Chatsworth Park. And Andrew Cavendish and Ken Buxton lived anyway in different worlds, one a duke in his eighties, the other a supplier of plastic tanks in his fifties; and though both would have been friendly had they met, they could have had little to discuss. But something links them, and through each of their funerals it shone.

The morning of Andrew’s funeral was one of those perfect English spring mornings that, though we do not enjoy them often, define for us the English spring. I hardly knew him well and was only a chance mourner; it being a lovely day and he having been kind to me when I was his Member of Parliament, I could think of no better way to spend a sunny hour. He had been a popular man — everyone knew that — and I did not expect pew space in the church, but thought I’d stand outside with the stragglers.

Stragglers? There were more people outside the church than within: hundreds, perhaps a thousand. The event afterwards became quite famous and was widely described, and lyrically in the Spectator by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Robert Salisbury, too, has written about Andrew in this magazine, with greater acquaintance.