Married bliss was brief – they had just five weeks together – before Billy rejoined the Coldstream in France. Mass-going Kick, as chaste as her brothers were wanton, would not renounce her faith, nor would Billy so, instead of the gothic glories of Westminster Abbey, or indeed the byzantine wonders of Westminster Cathedral, their wedding, after four long years, was a 10-minute ceremony in redbrick Chelsea Town Hall. Yet she was simply reflecting the unbending stance of the church hierarchy as it was. Rose, a strict and distant mother, is always cast as the worst sort of Catholic – doctrinaire, divisive, and blinkered.
But Eddy Devonshire was as fiercely opposed to a Catholic daughter-in-law as Rose was to a Protestant son-in-law.
She soon captured the heart of Billy, Marquess of Hartington, model heir to the 10th Duke of Devonshire. Toothsome, tanned and slim, these escapees from sectarian Boston soon conquered Britain, particularly the Golden Trio: Joe Junior, Jack and Kick – but especially Kick, whose unaffected, life-enhancing spirit enchanted the scions of noble strongholds from Hatfield House and Hardwick Hall, to Cliveden and Cortachy Castle. When Joe Kennedy arrived in London in 1938, as the US Ambassador to the Court of St James, with his wife, Rose, and their nine children, Life magazine declared that the United Kingdom had got "eleven ambassadors for the price of one".
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