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Everyone loves a lord, or so the saying goes, and it is doubtless why Eleanor Doughty has written Heirs & Graces, a book about Britain’s aristocracy, otherwise generally known as the country’s hereditary peerage.1 There are quite a lot of them: twenty-four dukes, thirty-four marquesses, 189 earls, 110 viscounts, and 439 barons. They hold peerages with various designations: English, Scottish, Irish, British (created after 1707, at the Acts of Union between England and Scotland), or United Kingdom (created after the Acts of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1800). Until 1922, when the Irish Free State was created, Irish peers elected some of their number to sit in the House of Lords. Scottish peers also elected representative peers until 1963, when they were all allowed to sit in the Lords. Everyone else sat in the Upper House by right, or at least they did until 1999, when almost all of them were kicked out under a reform instituted by the administration of Tony Blair. The Labour government wanted them out of the legislature; as a sop to the Conservatives, ninety-two of them were allowed to continue, elected by their peers. Now even that appears to be ending. As I write, a bill is going through Parliament to end the right of any hereditary peer to sit in the Lords; by the time you read this, their centuries-old place in the government of Britain may be over.
The House of Lords would then comprise about 740 life peers, created by recent prime ministers. Life peerages were introduced by a Conservative government in 1958 to dilute the nature of a second chamber composed mostly of people who were there by accident of birth. I once met a hereditary peer who told me he could guess from a peer’s physiognomy whether his title dated from before or after the 1832 Reform Act (this chap’s was, I seem to recall, created in 1837). Doughty does not go into the polemical question of whether or not the elimination of hereditary peers is a good idea (for the record, it isn’t: the expertise that has already been cast aside in Britain’s revising chamber is alarming enough, and more is now set to go, unless the present prime minister awards some of the best hereditaries life peerages to allow them to continue to serve). The purpose of her book, which is rich in anecdote and the result of hundreds of interviews, is to examine the lives of these dispossessed beings today, and to provide some recent context.
Doughty (and here I should declare a minor interest: I know her a little and I introduced her to my publisher, who became hers) is scrupulous about defining her terms. The pukka British aristocracy are those with long-established hereditary peerages, their titles descending from one generation to another, usually (but not always) through the male line. Just because one happens to have a hereditary peerage doesn’t necessarily make one an aristocrat. Some are of comparatively recent creation and lack the bottle age, the great houses and estates that go with the accepted idea of what is, in the British Isles, considered truly aristocratic. The last hereditary peerage was created in 1984 when, twenty-one years after he finished being prime minister, Harold Macmillan called in the earldom that used to be traditional for departing prime ministers but which he had declined in 1963 in case he died and damaged the political career in the House of Commons of his son, who would inherit it. Macmillan, the grandson of a Scottish crofter and not one with great landed estates whose family came over with William the Conqueror, had his earldom in time for his ninetieth birthday. By then it was clear his son’s political career was burned out, as was the son himself: he died sixteen days after his father was ennobled.
The author does not trouble her readers with etymology, but I seem to recall from my Greek studies at school that “aristocracy” means “rule of the best.” It takes a few hundred years or so to learn how to be “the best,” by which the diminishing number of deferential Britons would mean engaging in consistent acts of noblesse oblige and leadership, having good manners, and being generally charming. Doughty presents, however, the occasional example of people with old peerages who at different times were entirely repulsive, had more understanding of quantum physics than of noblesse oblige, or were possessed of the manners of a skunk and the charm of a rat. If anyone had followed the lead of such types, the results would have been ugly. Two such were the sixth and seventh Marquesses of Bristol: the first was a crook, fantasist, and brute; his son was a spendthrift sociopath and junkie who thought it of no consequence that he had wounded a fellow gun in the leg on a shoot. He died of aids in the 1990s, deemed too dangerous to continue to live in the family seat and widely loathed by all who knew him. To be fair, he, like his disgusting father, was an extreme case.
Doughty does not only portray criminals such as the sixth Marquess of Bristol. She also runs through the hereditary peers who have been communists, fascists, homosexuals, adulterers (and adulteresses), plutocrats, near-bankrupts, entrepreneurs, and downright failures. As a result, one concludes that those who think that the aristocracy is deeply unrepresentative of the rest of the British public are wildly ill-informed. Where they are unlike the rest is that the twentieth century dealt them a pretty grim hand of cards. A great many heirs apparent died in two world wars. The growing impact of death duties over the last century meant that some great estates had to be sold off to pay them; often the grand houses, which had been in families for centuries with fabulous contents to match, went with them. In that way, a significant part of the fabric of the nation and its history disappeared.
Some peers were more proactive than others in the face of the undermining of their class by what politicians seemed to deem the necessities of the modern world. In the 1950s the Duke of Bedford turned Woburn Abbey into a tourist attraction; the Marquess of Bath did the same at Longleat and later had the additional wheeze of creating a safari park. A number of other châtelains did something similar. Often, the National Trust would take a house for the nation in lieu of death duties and allow the family to live in it on the understanding that they would open it and their grounds on so many days a year to allow the public to marvel at them. Many grand families became used to this as a price to pay for holding on to the ancestral home; others either couldn’t face it or never had the chance to do it, and had to downsize. Some fine seats didn’t survive: the twenty years after the Second World War saw a devastation of country houses, as there was no money to repair them and nobody with the spare cash to buy them. What ensued was the worst damage to fine architecture in Britain since the dissolution of the monasteries.
Those days, happily, have gone. When the Fermor-Heskeths had to give up their magnificent Hawksmoor mansion at Easton Neston in Northamptonshire in 2004, it was not difficult to find a buyer: he was the fashion designer Leon Max. Despite the parlous financial state of Britain today, any grand house that a family feels it can no longer maintain usually has two safety nets: one is the listing of buildings of architectural distinction, which means that if they fall into disrepair some arm of the state will intervene to rescue them; the other is that in the global economy there always appears to be someone—though more often than not someone who is not British—willing to part with a great deal of money to relieve an aristocratic family of what has become a burden and buy some spectacular piece of British history. Occasionally, though, a great property slips through the net. Mentmore Towers, the great Victorian Rothschild mansion in Buckinghamshire, has been empty for years after an attempt to commercialize it failed. It is in serious danger of falling down, although plans are afoot to have the local council intervene to start what will be a long and expensive process of saving it.
As Doughty puts it, the story of the British aristocracy since the end of the nineteenth century is one in which “the staggeringly wealthy became the extremely wealthy, and the extremely wealthy either remained extremely wealthy or became merely wealthy.” That is not the whole picture. Some old families have indeed continued to prosper, not least by monetizing the tourist appeal of their properties—such as the Percys (the Dukes of Northumberland) at Alnwick and the Cavendishes (the Dukes of Devonshire) at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The success of their enterprises allows the respective dukes to cut important figures in their locales to this day. The same is not quite true of the Dukes of Marlborough at Blenheim in Oxfordshire, though the house and estate are a huge success with tourists. It may be that the further the demesne is from London, the more feudal things become. For the Grosvenors, the Dukes of Westminster, the wealth is even more conspicuous: the duke owns most of Belgravia and a chunk of Mayfair, too. These hugely rich aristocrats are, however, very much in a minority. Some old families no longer, as the English so charmingly say, “have even a pot to piss in” and are forced to live in very reduced circumstances.
Often this is down to generations of pillaging by death duties, though sometimes sheer profligacy plays a role (some aristocrats are notoriously thick and have no idea how to manage money; the disappearing Lord Lucan, as well as being a murderer, was broke after years of reckless gambling). Sometimes it is because the property and contents have gone in a different direction from the title. Some very old English peerages, many Scottish ones, and a few more modern ones can descend through the female line. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially United Kingdom peerages bestowed for leadership in war were given special remainders to allow a daughter to inherit in default of “heirs male of the body,” at least in the second generation.
Doughty writes about the desperate efforts of some families to produce a male heir. One peer had eight successive daughters with two wives. Another peer’s wife fled to her bedroom, locked herself in, and cried after a local dowager had commiserated with her for having just produced a daughter when a son was required. If there is no son then there has to be a backward search through the family tree to find male descendants of earlier peers to inherit the title, meaning it goes not to a daughter of the last peer, but to a very distant cousin. Doughty recounts the story of the man who became Earl of Essex in 1949; at the time he was sweeping the streets in Southend-on-Sea. America and other former British territories have their share of hereditary peers, most of whom have no cause to come home: they cannot legislate anymore, and they often have nowhere to live if they come to Britain.
Sometimes there are too many sons; some younger sons seem to mind that they do not inherit (one thinks of the Duke of Sussex, or perhaps even more his lovely wife). Others are deeply relieved not to do so, because it allows them the freedom to do something else, especially when there remains an estate to run, and where the running of that estate consists increasingly of coming up with new gimmicks to draw in the public and make money. The old problem of being shunned by society for being “in trade” is long gone: most of what passes for the aristocracy in Britain today is precisely that, if they are lucky. And then there are those peers who prefer not to recognize, or have the world recognize, that they are peers. Some disclaim their titles, as they have been allowed to do since the Act of Parliament driven through by Tony Benn in 1963 so that he could continue to sit in the House of Commons and not be saddled with his father’s viscountcy. There is little point in doing that now, since heredity no longer brings with it the duty to sit in the House of Lords and also has the effect of preventing one from sitting in the House of Commons.
Some peers told Doughty how embarrassed they were at school to have courtesy titles (before they succeeded they would, if their father was an earl or above and had a peerage of a lower rank with a different territorial designation, use his secondary title out of courtesy, so the Marquess of Salisbury’s first son is always Viscount Cranborne). Other peers are refreshingly realistic: they use their titles not because they seek to be grand (grandeur seldom goes with hereditary peerages these days) but because it would be, as one puts it, to deny his family’s history and his identity if he did not.
This endangered minority continues to survive and will for generations to come, just as the revolution of 1789 in France has not prevented it from still being a nation heaving with barons, vicomtes, comtes, marquis, and even the odd duc. The days of belligerent class persecution are over. Doughty asks at the end of her entertaining book, “are we all middle class now?” The answer appears to be, more or less, yes. She does not go back to the start of the persecution of the aristocracy by the “new men,” to the nauseating grandstanding of Lloyd George before the 1909 “People’s Budget”—when he said a duke cost more to run than a Dreadnought—but she does describe in detail the revolting vindictiveness of the minister of power in Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour administration, Emanuel Shinwell. He insisted that the gardens at Wentworth Woodhouse, the magnificent Yorkshire seat of the Earls Fitzwilliam, be churned up almost to the house itself for open-cast mining in 1946. Even local Labour supporters were disgusted by this act of naked class hatred. Shinwell had been a Red Clydesider and had become one of the most loathed men in public life because of his small-minded, spiteful, aggressive, and ignorant personality. Of course, he was also a repulsive hypocrite, and therefore ended up in the House of Lords—but as a life peer, with never the slightest prospect of becoming an aristocrat.
