Prince Fortunatus has ascended his throne, and the echoes of the ceremonial trumpets are over and gone.
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John Augustus Basil FitzTracy was the fifth Duke of Paddington, Earl of Fakenham in Norfolk, and a baronet of the United Kingdom.
His seats were Fakenham Hall, at Fakenham, Castle Trink, N. B., and the old Welsh stronghold, near Conway, known as Carleon, which had come to him from his mother's aunt, old Lady Carleon of Lys.
In regard to his houses, there was, first and foremost, the great square pile in Piccadilly, which was almost as big as the Duke of Devonshire's palace, and was known as Paddington House. There was an old Saxon house near Chipping Norton, in Gloucestershire, which was used as a hunting-box—the late duke always having ridden with the Heythrop. There was also a big blue, pink-and-white villa upon the Promenade des Anglais at Nice—the late duke liked to spend February among the palms and roses of the Riviera, though it was said that the duchess never accompanied him upon these expeditions to the sun-lit shores of the Mediterranean.
The Duke of Paddington was not a great country nobleman. Fakenham was some three thousand acres, and though the shooting was excellent, as is the shooting of all the big houses which surround Sandringham Hall, the place in itself was not particularly noteworthy. Nor did the duke own coal mines, while no railways had enriched him by passing through any of his properties.
The duke's enormous revenues were drawn from London. He and their graces of Westminster and Bedford might well have contended for a new title—Duke of London. If extent of possessions and magnitude of fortune could alone decide such an issue the Duke of Paddington would have won.
A huge slice of the outer West End—anywhere north of Oxford Street—belonged to him.
His income was variously stated, but the only truth about it, upon which every one was agreed, was that it was incredibly large.
There was a certain modest, massive stone building in the Edgware Road where the duke's affairs were conducted. It was known as the FitzTracy Estate Office, forty clerks were regularly employed there, and only old Colonel Simpson, late of the Army Service Corps, and now chief agent to the duke, knew what the actual income was.