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|title=The Devonshires: The Story of a Family and a Nation

|sort=Devonshires: Story of a Family and a Nation, The

|publisher=Vintage

|date=May 2014

|summary=A chronicle of the Cavendish family, Earls and then Dukes of Devonshire, and of their ancestral home at Chatsworth, from Tudor times to the present day

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According to the back of this book, ‘the story of the Devonshires is the story of Britain’. That’s an extravagant claim, but it contains more than a germ of truth. Certainly one would be hard-pushed to find an aristocratic, non-royal British family who has more consistently been central to our history since medieval times, as this detailed chronicle demonstrates. From the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII presided over in part by Sir William Cavendish, father of the first Earl, to the big business that their ancestral home Chatsworth House in Derbyshire has now become, the somewhat inaccurately geographically-named Devonshires have often been, or helped to, contribute to, part of the fabric of Britain’s past and present.