Canada’s future Governor General, the Duke of Devonshire (Victor Christian William Cavendish) was born in England on this date in 1868. He went on to study at Cambridge and would enter politics in 1891, becoming the youngest-ever British MP up until that time. In 1916 he was named Canada’s 11th Governor General and would serve as the Monarch’s representative to Canada until 1921.
It is interesting to note that one of his aide-de-camps at Rideau Hall was future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Devonshire’s daughter, Dorothy, would marry her father’s assistant a year after they met in Canada. “It was amidst the wonderful scenery of Jasper Park in Canada that I first knew my affections were returned,” Macmillan would later write.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.