Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater

• 1. Introduction

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  Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, was a sickly child whose own mother seriously considered cutting the entail. The entail was the legal arrangement that kept an estate flowing down the family line. She judged his mind too unpromising to carry it. Yet he would later be called the father of British inland navigation. Coal, a broken engagement and a very strange will lie between those two pictures of the same man. How did a boy written off by his family come to change the way goods moved across northern England? Why does a Manchester concert hall carry his name while standing beside a different canal? And why did his property stay tied up in trust until 1903, a century after he died?

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• 2. The Boy Duke

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  On the 21st of May 1736, Francis was born as the younger son of Scroop Egerton, 1st Duke of Bridgewater. His father died in 1745, and his elder brother John became the 2nd Duke. John died only three years later, in 1748. Francis, until then known as Lord Francis Egerton, inherited the dukedom at the age of twelve. He also became the 6th Earl of Bridgewater.

  North-West England became the stage for his first ambitions. After some schooling, the heir his mother had doubted began to show real business acumen. He built up several business interests in that region before he was far into adulthood.

  His family had long moved among titles. Scroop, who lived from 1681 to 1745, had been created a duke in 1720. His great-grandfather was John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater, whose name is linked with a production of Milton's Comus. That earl was the son of Sir Thomas Egerton, who lived from 1540 to 1617. Sir Thomas served Queen Elizabeth as Lord Keeper and James I as Lord Chancellor, and he was made Baron Ellesmere in 1603 and Viscount Brackley in 1616.

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• 3. Retreat to Worsley

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  Soon after he reached his majority, the duke became engaged to the Dowager Duchess of Hamilton, a celebrated society beauty. The match collapsed because she refused to give up her acquaintance with her sister, Lady Coventry. The duke responded by closing his London household. He withdrew to his estate at Worsley and threw himself into the making of canals.

  The Bridgewater Canal ran from Worsley to Manchester, and its purpose was to carry coal from the duke's own lands. It is often described as the first true canal in Britain, and in the modern world. His agent John Gilbert built it with advice from James Brindley, the celebrated engineer. A striking feature was the aqueduct that carried the waterway across the River Irwell.

  The distinction matters because many earlier schemes simply made rivers easier to travel, which people called navigations. A rival claim to the title of first belongs to the Sankey Canal, which was projected as a navigation but built as a true canal.

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• 4. The Liverpool Link

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  In 1762 the duke obtained parliamentary powers to build a canal for an improved waterway between Liverpool and Manchester. The work faced formidable obstacles, among them the crossing of Sale Moor Moss. Gilbert and Brindley overcame every difficulty. The canal was finished even though the duke's own money was running short.

  By the time Bridgewater turned thirty-six, both canals were complete. He spent the rest of his life extending them and improving his estates. Although he supported the administration of Pitt, he took no prominent part in politics. His attention stayed on the waterways, and their success brought him what the sources call a princely income.

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• 5. Fortune and Paintings

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  Reports said that his annual income exceeded £80,000. A separate figure puts his yearly receipts from taxes and duties at £75,000, which a 1997 estimate translated to £2,360,000. His holdings included Belton House, a small estate in Sussex, the Old House and 6,000 acres at Ashridge. In London, the family owned Cleveland House in St James, which Sir Charles Barry rebuilt in 1840. It was renamed Bridgewater House in 1854 for Lord Ellesmere, the duke's heir.

  Once the fortune passed £2,000,000, the duke was the richest nobleman in England. He set about rebuilding Ashridge and began pulling down the old buildings. He died before the plans could be finished, which left his heir with nothing but rubble.

  Art absorbed some of that money too. In 1789 he led the syndicate that bought the famous Orleans Collection from the banker Jeremiah Harman, and part of it was resold. His own collection came to be valued at £150,000, about £4.75 million by a 1997 estimate. In 1798 he bought sixty-four Italian and French paintings together, including works by Raphael, Titian, Annibale Carracci and Nicolas Poussin. Among the old masters were Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. They passed to the 1st Duke of Sutherland, and the Egerton family still holds most of them.

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• 6. The Long Trust

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  On the 8th of March 1803 the duke died unmarried, and the dukedom died with him. The earldom passed to a cousin, Lieutenant-General John Egerton, who became the 7th Earl. The duke was buried in the Egerton family vault at the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Little Gaddesden, close to Ashridge.

  His will placed the canals and estates in trust. His nephew, the 2nd Marquess of Stafford, later the 1st Duke of Sutherland, was the first beneficiary. Next came the nephew's son, Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, later the 1st Earl of Ellesmere, and his descendants.

  To make the trust last as long as possible, the will stretched a legal rule that allows property to be settled for lives in being plus twenty-one years. The legatees were a great number of people connected with the duke, and their living children. They also included every peer who had taken a seat in the House of Lords on or before the day he died. The last of those peers died in 1857. One commoner among the legatees lived until the 19th of October 1883, so the trust ran until the 19th of October 1903. Then the whole property passed into the undivided control of Francis Egerton, 3rd Earl of Ellesmere.

  The canals had already left the family's hands. They were transferred to the Bridgewater Navigation Company in 1872, which sold them in 1887 to the Manchester Ship Canal Company.

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• 7. Monuments and Murals

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  In 1832 the Bridgewater Monument was erected on the Ashridge Estate. It was raised 'in honour of Francis, Third duke of Bridgewater, "Father of Inland Navigation"'. A marble wall monument to him also stands in Little Gaddesden Church.

  Manchester came close to having its own tribute. In the 1830s people discussed a memorial to the Canal Duke, but public statuary was still rare outside London. A 1836 proposal by William Fairbairn imagined a Bridgewater Crescent at the eastern end of Piccadilly, crowned with a statue of the duke. It was never built, and to date no statue of him stands in Manchester.

  Likenesses survive on paper and in wax. William Marshall Craig drew a portrait of the duke in 1788, and Edward Scriven engraved it in 1835. Prints are held at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Peter Rouw made two wax medallion portraits in 1803, now at the National Portrait Gallery and at Tatton Hall in Cheshire.

  Between 1879 and 1893, Ford Madox Brown painted The Manchester Murals. In The Opening of the Bridgewater Canal A.D. 1761, the duke stands on a barge hung with flags of his coat of arms. Beside him is James Brindley, and together they watch the first coal barges launch.

  In 1905, Francis Egerton, 3rd Earl of Ellesmere, put up a fountain in Worsley Green, Salford, in the duke's memory. It followed the demolition of a factory the duke had built there. A concert hall opened in Manchester in 1996 as the Bridgewater Hall, although it sits beside the Rochdale Canal, not the canal that carries his name.

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