Littering castles all over the land

I rashly discarded this book’s dustjacket when I received it, and thus saw only the unlettered cover, a faded photograph of three generations of an aristocratic family, somewhat camera-shy in their silken breeches. Oh I see, I thought, this is one of those books on the foibles of the aristocracy, always an entertaining subject.

How wrong can one be? Instead, it’s a polemic against crats aristo, auto, mono or pluto; and the author apparently yearns for any crat of a different stripe — not just demo and bureau, but mobo, neo and probably ochlo to boot. Naturally I went immediately to the index, to look up my family. It lists just one member, Eric, 10th Earl of Bessborough, who, as Chris Bryant somewhat sarkily puts it, had an ‘enthusiasm for the stage’ — a harmless and rather pantisocratic pursuit one might think.

But of course there’s nothing about Eric’s more substantial forebears, among them the 2nd Earl, an important and admired ambassador to the Sublime Porte; or the 9th, a memorable 20th-century governor general of Canada; let alone the several Ponsonbys who were influential Whig politicians in Ireland; or Sir Fritz and Sir Henry, father and son, between them private secretary to the monarch from Queen Victoria to George V.

Bryant’s theory is that anyone who ever held the crown, power, wealth or position in Britain was a land-grabbing, money-grubbing, rubbing-underlings-noses-in-their-poverty tyrant. And not just your run-of-the-mill Richards and Henrys and Georges. No, no; he starts around the year 700, when surely things were a mite less civilised than they became, and we wade through several chapters on Sigered of Essex and Cenewuf of Mercia, earldormen Odda, Aethelnoth and Oslac and their various wapentake sons, Aelfgar, Wulfheah, Ufegeat and Yffrunts.