Is Britain’s aristocracy past its use-by date?

Posted on by

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.

18 thoughts on “Is Britain’s aristocracy past its use-by date?”

  1. Your post conjures up a vision of a blood thirsty mob marching up a long drive to pound on the monumental door of a country estate. A butler slowly opens and says, “Aristocracy? There’s no aristocracy here.” These aristocrats you speak of, however, seem like mere riff-raff compared to the nearly 1000 billionaires now living in the United States. So in some sense, maybe they really are slumming it.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • Great image. And I can’t disagree about the billionaires. The situation parallels the rise of the rich industrialists, whose (new) money often outstripped the fortunes of the old money, although where the parallel breaks down is that, at least in Britain, they didn’t have political power to match their fortunes. The tech bros (and any billionaires I’ve missed by reducing them to that lable) do. Maybe the butler could redirect the mob?

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply ↓

  2. Getting rid of royalty has brrn the subject of thr masses for years
    Look at France though. Didn”t wirk fir them. Years of corrupt politicians didn’t get them the
    Nation they wanted.mid zeuropean countrirs who banished royalry ended up eith countless wars. Greece has bever recovered from banishing Royalty.
    Worst case of all Aneeica. The idea was good,
    The constitution was good but fsiled becsuse it was left to politicians to translate it as they would. Trump has tried to convert it back to a Royal fanily with him as king. It’s the maddest. Place in the world. No gun laws, politicians for sale.. no protection for the environment. At least our zroyaks still have a voice on that dubject and a guiding hand. I know where i prefer to live
    Hugs

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • None of that convinces me that having royalty prevents any sort of corruption or disaster. I offer you Russia under the Tsar but please, let’s not start a game of Royalty Scrabble (or is it bingo?). I just don’t have the enegry for it.

      Like

      Reply ↓

  5. I can never quite get past the origins of the aristocracy in England, their pride in having profited from invasion and the thuggery that resulted in the feudal system being imposed. The previous establishment wasn’t all sweetness and light but there did seem to be some tendency to a rather kinder, more egalitarian, way of living. At this remove, it’s impossible to know for sure but I do tend to the opinion that the Norman conquest was one of the worst events in our history. A fantasy of a more prosperous north, Wales and Scotland as autonomous nations, no Irish question, no empire or slavery. Well, I can dream!
    Nothing is ever that simple but the ruthless and acquisitive victors certainly did dreadful damage to the existing society and yet their descendants are proud of their heritage. Over a thousand years, there would be countless opportunities for history to go down the wrong path but with a victory for Harold, at least some of the horrors, like the harrying of the North for instance, would not have happened.
    You will gather, this is not a vote for the aristocracy.
    Jeannie

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • The harrying of the North we could safely drop from the history books if Harold had won. Beyond that I feel the ground getting shaky. The Anglo-Saxons, from what I’ve read, started out more egalitarian than the Normans but I doubt that was still true by the time of the invasion. They had a fully devoloped aristocraxy, they had slavery, and they had something that sounds a hell of a lot like serfdom to my ear. I’d take a wild guess and say that more people might’ve been free, and for those who were it might well have been a more egalitarian society. That’s about as far as I want to go down that road because, fool that I am, I left my map at home and I want to be sure we can get back in time for supper. It’s the artistocrats’ turn to cook tonight and I can’t wait to see if they know how.

      Like

      Reply ↓

      • Fair enough, Ellen, there are too many variables to begin to forecast what a different history might have been but I reserve the right to fantasise. Even those delightful AI things would have problems…
        Just to add, there’s a new book by someone called Macartney, from Birmingham University called “The Assetocracy”, which discusses the wealth, property and investments belonging to the members of the scaled down version of the House of Lords. They are not going to be needing income support any day soon, although they seem to be wealthy enough that they could fund it for the rest of us peasants. Not that it seems likely that they would.
        Jeannie

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply ↓

        • Far be it from me to get in the way of a good fantasy. Apologies.

          The word assetocracy is a useful addition to the language. It’s clear, it’s brief, it’s accurate. And it helps clarify the way we think about the world. I vote we keep it. Thanks.

          Like

          Reply ↓

  7. One was sitting in the library at Eversleigh yesterday morning, trying to digest a remarkably undercooked kipper while our damp-remediation surveyor explained that re-pointing the Tudor crenellations would cost roughly the price of a small frigate, when my godson showed me Miss Hawley’s little polemic on his telephone.

    I’ll admit I choked on my tea. To suggest that the peerage is “past its use-by date” reveals a staggering, almost touching ignorance of the sheer, unremitting agony of our daily existence.

    Miss Hawley writes as though inheriting a title and a modest patch of the Home Counties is like winning the football pools. If only! If she’d spent just one afternoon trying to explain to a breathless Italian conservationist why an eighteenth-century dry-rot outbreak in the nursery wing can’t simply be sprayed with supermarket disinfectant, she’d realise that being born into land isn’t a privilege. It’s an unpaid, lifelong prison sentence served in a house where the central heating gave up during the Suez Crisis.

    Take her rather shrill complaint that we own a third of the country. Has she ever tried to look after three hundred thousand acres? It’s relentless. If we didn’t own it, who on earth would? Property developers would plaster it with bypasses, garden centres, and dreadful, identical little brick boxes with garages too narrow for a sensible Land Rover. We don’t hold the land to exploit it; we hold it to protect Britain from the terrifying aesthetic tastes of the modern public. We’re not landlords – we’re human barricades thrown between the ancient woodlands and the relentless advance of drive-through burger franchises.

    Then she has the cheek to bring up the average wealth of titled families climbing to sixteen million pounds. Sixteen million! Good heavens, that’s not money you can actually spend. You can’t nip down to the village shop and buy twenty cigarettes with a miniature of the Duke of Wellington painted on vellum! It’s all tied up in lime mortar, estate drainage pipes, and the ghastly legal expenses of defending our fishing rights from wild swimmers in neon wetsuits. We don’t have liquid capital; we’re completely cash-poor. I’ve had to wear my grandfather’s shooting tweeds since 1984 because Savile Row prices are now utterly out of reach, and the moth holes on the cuffs are getting quite drafty.

    Her attack on London leaseholds is even more uncharitable. She calls it a “pumpkin at midnight”. What an extraordinary misunderstanding of Christian kindness! The leasehold system exists solely so that respectable people can live in the magnificent stucco terraces of Belgravia without the crushing, soul-destroying anxiety of having to maintain the roof. We take on the ghastly burden of structural repairs, and in return, they give us a trifling sum each year so the garden square doesn’t become overgrown with weeds. Allowing the property to return to the estate after ninety-nine years is merely good manners. Left to themselves, freeholders would paint the porticos bright purple and install plastic double-glazing. We provide architectural salvation, and people treat it like a con trick!

    As for the stately homes, Miss Hawley seems to think opening our doors to the public is some sort of cunning, lucrative tax scam. Let me tell you, having several thousand damp strangers traipsing through your great hall every Sunday in squeaky trainers, breathing their warm mist over the Chippendale chairs and asking where the lavatories are, is hardly a jolly holiday. We put rope barriers across our own drawing rooms so the public can experience what real taste looks like, and we do it with a smile while eating cold toast in a damp corner of the scullery. That isn’t a tax dodge; it’s an act of pure, patriotic martyrdom.

    Her remarks about schools, polo, and language are simply childish. One doesn’t “police” one’s vocabulary out of malice; one merely avoids words like “lounge”, “settee”, and “toilet” out of basic human hygiene, so one’s guests don’t suffer spontaneous indigestion at the dinner table. It’s called manners.

    Finally, she takes a swipe at primogeniture, describing it as “ruthless”. Ruthless? Tell that to my younger brother, Hugo! Poor Hugo had to endure the heartbreak of being left out of the main estate, with nothing to comfort him except a five-bedroom Georgian rectory in Gloucestershire, a few measly thousand shares in a boutique investment bank, and a minority interest in a Scottish grouse moor. It was devastating for him, of course, but he pulled his socks up and took a non-executive directorship like a gentleman. If we’d divided Eversleigh equally between all four of us, the portrait collection would’ve been split up, the deer park would’ve been auctioned off, and where would the country be then?

    Without the ninety-two hereditary peers in the House of Lords, Westminster would be entirely overrun by former public-relations consultants and career politicians who don’t even know how to manage a pheasant shoot. We sit on those red benches without taking a salary, providing the only truly independent, unbribable common sense left in the kingdom. Why? Because we already have everything we want, and none of it can be sold.

    Miss Hawley may fancy her little “shredder”, but the British aristocracy has survived the Black Death, the Roundheads, and the introduction of inheritance tax. I suspect we can easily survive an American with a blog and an axe to grind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must put on two more jumpers and see whether the estate carpenter has managed to stop the dining-room ceiling falling into the soup.

    Lord Peregrine “Pip” Courtenay-Vane, 9th Viscount Eversleigh
    Hereditary High Carver to the Duchy & Senior Managing Trustee, the Eversleigh Settled Estates

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply ↓

    • I had seen that and, I confess, couldn’t come up with anything I could do with it on the blog. Maybe that’s just me being lazy too. I could cheerfully sleep for a month and I suspect Friday’s post will be short and superficital. Interesting article, though. Thanks.

      Like

      Reply ↓

Talk to me