The grand life writ small: a history of modern British aristocracy
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
