When the 8th Duke, William Russell, died unmarried in 1872, the title was to pass, as was the custom of most aristocratic families of the time, to the next in line, in this case his cousin Francis, a married father of four who, at the age of 53, became the 9th Duke. He had already been managing the whole estate for Duke William, who suffered from ill health, a task he had been involved with for the last 11 years. Son of Major-General Lord George William Russell and the grandson of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, Francis had followed a six year career in the Scots Fusilier Guards before being elected a Liberal MP for Bedfordshire in 1847. This role was to occupy him for 25 years before taking on the title and entered the House of Lords.
The 9th Duke was a man with strong views, in 1886 he resigned his support of Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone to become a Unionist in a disagreement over the thorny issue of Irish Devolution. Then as now, devolved government in Ireland was a major issue. The First Home Rule Bill, officially called the Irish Government Bill of 1886, was the first time that Parliament had made a concerted attempt to enact a law to give home rule to any part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Gladstone introduced the bill with a view to establishing an assembly for Ireland.
His Lordship’s dislike of change also ran through his management of the Bedford Estate, particularly in matters relating to modernisation and tenant matters. For example, when the electric telegraph came in, the Duke had a new clause introduced into leases forbidding posts and wires to be fixed on any premises belonging to the Duke without his permission. As the surge of invention continued, similar restrictions were later imposed on fittings for telephones and electric lighting.
By the late 1880s, the Duke and his fellow landowners also had to defend themselves when The Sunday Times published a series of articles by Frank Banfield in which several of the aristocratic estate-owners of London were depicted in a less than attractive light.
Meanwhile he was heavily engaged at Woburn where like his grandfather he was a great patron of agriculture and was elected the Vice-President of the Royal Agricultural Society. He funded a series of experiments on the growth of crops and the fattening of livestock, with a special relation to the fertilisers applied and the feedstuffs used, and then to the effect of the resulting manure created from the use of specific animal feeds. It was during this time that the Bedford Estates was at its most extensive and so much of the Duke’s time was spent in the management of his vast properties which extended to over 90,000 acres in Bedfordshire, Devonshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Dorset, Buckinghamshire, Huntingdownshire and Cornwall. He was also credited with many improvements in and around the town of Tavistock in Devon and on the family estates in the Fens. He was also greatly concerned with the education of estate children, in the building of schools and provision of appropriate materials.
The 9th Duke died in 1891, aged 71, it is not clear exactly what happened, but the Duke had been seriously ill with pneumonia for some time when he committed suicide. His ashes were buried at Chenies, Buckinghamshire and his eldest son and heir, George William, the 10th Duke took the title. Sadly he died after only two years. As he had no children, George was succeeded by his younger brother, Herbrand Arthur Russell, who became 11th Duke of Bedford (1858–1940).
