One of the facts that emerges from this detailed study of ‘modern British aristocracy’ is that the divorce rate among peers is roughly twice that of the rest of us, although the old unwritten adage that it didn’t much matter how you behaved provided discretion prevailed has long held good among many. Witness the 10th Duke of Beaufort, one of whose many mistresses, Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk, would even boss the servants and change the menus when she stayed at Badminton. Most of these lady loves attended his funeral – but then, as Eleanor Doughty points out, the Duke’s relationship with the cuckolded husbands suggests ‘that embarrassment was not a word that figured in his dictionary’, since they were frequently invited to shoot at Badminton.
At the other end of the spectrum was the Argyll divorce, which kept London dinner tables humming for weeks. Ian Campbell, the 11th Duke of Argyll, characterised by Chips Channon as ‘a fraud, a liar and a cad’, divorced his second wife, the former Margaret Sweeny, whose money had paid for the refurbishment of Inverary Castle, in a case that featured salacious photographs, including ‘the headless man’. There was also a gasp-making string of co-respondents (88, according to the BBC), identified through Margaret’s diaries, filched by the Duke. ‘A completely promiscuous woman, whose sexual appetite could only be satisfied by a number of men,’ thundered the Edinburgh judge, with all the outraged Scottish puritanism of a latterday John Knox. Another peer, the 7th Marquess of Bath, avoided these complications by maintaining a collection of ‘wifelets’ at Longleat, where he painted erotic murals on its walls.
Today, there are 24 non-royal dukes, 34 marquesses, 189 earls, 110 viscounts and 439 barons, many, if not most, of whom Doughty has interviewed for this book. It tells us much of their family history and charts their progress under headings taken from the novels of Evelyn Waugh (the scandals above come under ‘Vile Bodies’), focussing largely on the period between the end of the second world war and the present.
In earlier days, aristocrats had owned great swaths of the country and took it for granted they would continue to lead the grand life. But high postwar taxation, death duties and sometimes government intervention took their toll, as in the case of Wentworth Woodhouse, a house so huge that guests were issued with balls of string so that they could find their way back to their rooms after dinner. Its park and gardens were unnecessarily destroyed when the Labour minister of fuel and power Emanuel Shinwell turned them into an open-cast mine, despite the pleas of the family and the miners who worked in nearby shafts and strolled and picnicked in the park. It finished the Fitzwilliamses’ tenure. For most others, there was a certain retrenchment, mainly in the form of selling land.
One of the facts that emerge is that the divorce rate among peers is roughly twice that of the rest of us
To the rescue of many of these great and wonderful houses came the National Trust (founded in 1895), often in the tall, angular person of James Lees-Milne, cravat neatly knotted (as I recall, he seldom wore a tie). He would bicycle tirelessly round the country persuading owners to accept the Trust’s proposition – significantly lower death duties and permanent living quarters in part of the house, balanced against a certain number of days open to the public and loss of ownership. Knole, the ‘calendar house’, with its 365 rooms, 52 staircases and seven courtyards, was a notable success.
Others were saved by their owners’ ingenuity. Longleat, for 383 years the home of the Thynne family, with its 43 indoor servants, 50 gardeners and 14 stable hands, was the first stately home to be opened to the public by the family on a commercial basis. Henry Thynne, the 6th Marquess of Bath, sold much land to pay off death duties and opened in April 1949, with the family working as car park attendants and tour guides. When the lions arrived, bought for £10,000 from Chipperfield’s Circus in 1966, that Easter weekend the roads around Longleat were jammed, as people queued for five or six hours to get in. Soon Blenheim Palace was opened by the Duke of Marlborough and then Woburn Abbey, after total refurbishment by Ian Russell, the 13th Duke of Bedford. The house was in such chaos that an 800-piece set of marvellous Louis XV Sèvres porcelain was discovered in boxes in the stables. The safari park was added later. All this is headed ‘Brideshead Revisited’.
There are pen portraits of various peers and much historical perspective. Fascinating nuggets gleam from the densely textured background. So deeply ingrained was the principle of primogeniture that a strong rearguard action was fought against allowing the few female hereditary peers into the House of Lords. Only when female life peers were created did this happen but even then, the welcome was hardly warm. When the 31st Countess of Seaford (one of the few titles allowed to pass through the female as well as male line) entered the Lords on the death of her father, she found that ‘all the chairs were made for men with long legs’.
When Doughty visited the Duke of Bedford at Woburn she was ‘told to call him Your Grace and stand up when he entered the room’ (the telling detail being the ‘told to’). The present Marquess of Salisbury, a member of a political family going back to the reign of Elizabeth I, is described as having ‘speech peppered with unselfconscious signs of a high-powered intellect’, and ‘a sense of ease beyond confidence’ – which, says Doughty, is what makes him a true aristocrat. ‘I’m proud of my ancestors,’ Lord Salisbury says, ‘but I’m not the only one who’s descended from them, so that doesn’t make me unique. But it does make me a sort of flag-waver for them.’
Is there anything that binds this caste of some 800 families together? In her perceptive analysis, Doughty believes that yes, there is still
an aristocratic way of life. There’s also still a definitely aristocratic way of approaching the world, whether it’s in the nature of their family life, or the choice of schools for their children, or in political outlook.
Even the careers chosen are remarkably homogenous. Of the 673 whose professions are a matter of record, more than 100 work in finance and 300 class themselves as landowners. For though the size of estates may have diminished – the Duke of Sutherland’s holdings have dropped from 1.4 million acres to the present 81,367 – they are still considerable. As Doughty points out, that ‘aristocratic way has proved remarkably resilient and slow to alter’. Or as Evelyn Waugh might have put it, decline, certainly – but not fall.
Comments