The first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is largely forgotten today — rotten luck for the great diplomat of the Victorian age. In the second half of the 19th century, Dufferin zoomed around the empire, hoovering up the sweetest plums in the diplomatic service: Governor-General of Canada, ambassador to the courts of Russia, Turkey and Italy, ambassador to France, Viceroy of India.
Why did Queen Victoria’s proconsul slip into oblivion? Andrew Gailey, the Vice-Provost of Eton — until now best known as housemaster to Princes William and Harry — answers the question, telling not just Dufferin’s sad, dazzling story but the story of the empire at its high point, before the fall.
Practically all the good fairies gathered for Dufferin’s birth in 1826. The son of an Anglo-Irish peer, he was heir to a chunk of County Down, between Belfast and Bangor. Throughout his life, his path was scattered with stardust; by accident and design he was the Zelig of the empire.
In Omaha, he met Sitting Bull — ‘only one eye and nose of brilliant hue’. Dufferin travelled eight hours through a frozen Pomerania to meet Bismarck, only to find the German Chancellor in his dressing gown, with a nasty bout of indigestion. At the height of the Risorgimento, Dufferin was sailing off the Strait of Messina when he glimpsed Garibaldi’s redshirts bivouacking on the shingle in the boiling heat. Putting ashore, he bumped into Alexandre Dumas — accompanied by an 18-year-old girl in boy’s clothing and 30,000 rifles he wanted to flog to Garibaldi.
There was something of the showman to Dufferin, with his goatee beard and outlandish clothes, his teetering pile of jobs and decorations and his expansive charm. When he retired, a Punch cartoon showed him on stage taking a final curtain call, with the caption, ‘The well-graced actor’.
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