Britain’s air is heavy with the belief that the aristocracy’s become irrelevant. Breathe in and you’ll inhale a molecule or two, and it will multiply until it becomes a belief structure inside your brain. Think of it as the intellectual version of Covid. 

You know where I’m  going with this, right? No one starts an essay/article/post with that sort of assertion unless they’re about to shred it.

Irrelevant photo: a thistle

Meet the shredder

It’s true that the aristocracy doesn’t have the unadulterated power it had in, say, 1166, a hundred years after the Normans invaded England, awarded themselves the land, the serfs, and the fancy titles while making themselves the country’s new ruling class, but in the intervening years, even though their power waned, the aristocrats hasn’t surrendered their I’m-special cards and become like the rest of us. They not only kept their titles (and take them quite seriously, thanks), they still own a third of Britain’s land, which is surely more important. In Scotland, ownership’s more concentrated, but since the figures aren’t given in a parallel format, even though they’re in the same article,  I can’t compare them. Sorry. I’ve lived in this country for 20 years and the best I can offer by way of explanation is that handling statistics that way is a British thing. 

So never mind Scotland. Let’s look under the couch cushions and see what other numbers we can find: 

• In 2001, the descendants of the Plantagenet kings were worth $4 billion. They owned 700,000 acres of land. (The exact quote refers to the aristocratic descendants, so they may have dropped those who fell from grace.) 
• The average wealth of someone with a hereditary title grew from £8.9 million in 2009 to £16 million in 2019. That beats hell out of the rate of inflation.
• In addition to large swathes of the countryside, aristocrats own pricey chunks of London property. They benefit from a nifty real estate law that allows them to sell the leasehold on a property instead of the property itself. To translate that, the buyer pays for the right to pay the owner rent (okay, it’s called ground rent) for some set number of years, after which the property goes back to the owner and the buyer has nothing more than some dust and a handful of memories but can try to negotiate a new lease. For a price. In other words, the buyer does buy something but it’s not the property. That turns into a pumpkin at midnight. And the owner gets to sell the pumpkin for a second (or tenth) time.

But wait

Didn’t the aristocrats find themselves impoverished (compared to their previous status, that is) and unable to maintain their great houses, with their expensively leaking roofs and badly fitting windows? Didn’t it get so bad that they ceded them to organizations like English Heritage and the National Trust so that commoners could pay to see how the other one one-thousandth of one percent lived? (The numbers there are purely imaginary. Just skim past and they won’t even bark, never mind bite.)

Well, yes, some did. Others set up their own charitable trusts to collect entrance fees and herd the commoners through and pick up a tax break every time they pass Go. Business is good. And in a different category, the stately homes that were in private hands until 1960 are still mostly in private hands, and still lived in–sometimes by titled someones who move from one great house to the next, making sure that none of them get their architectural feelings hurt.

Enough with the architecture

One of the ways aristocrats keep their connections is through the schools they send their children–generally the same ones they went to–to and the clubs they belong to, which are generally the ones their ancestors belonged to. They hunt. They play polo. They police their vocabulary so that they won’t mistake each other for the middle classes. Or so I’m told by the long article in the Guardian that I linked to earlier. It keeps a straight face when it writes about it, and, you know, it’s a reputable source and it didn’t publish on April 1st, so no, they weren’t pulling our leg. Or legs.

Taxes? Weren’t loopholes made to serve the rich? A person pays tax on income, but assets? Hell, you put them into a trust and preserve them for the next generation. Nothing to it. That doesn’t cover the full range of ways taxes don’t apply to the aristocracy, but take it as a marker. 

Political power? Although their numbers in the House of Lords have been reduced, 92 members are still there for no better reason than because they inherited titles. Assorted people with impressive if slightly silly titles were part of John Major’s and Theresa May’s governments. 

How have they preserved their power?

One way is by the winner-takes-all system of primogeniture. The title goes to the oldest son and tradition pushes the aristocracy to keep their assets whole instead of dividing them equally among their children. I mean, your kids are all very nice and all that, but it’s the family’s power that must be preserved. It’s a ruthless system, but power is ruthless.