The British aristocracy: how gossipy memoirs feed national fascination with privileged elites
They donât dominate parliament, they donât own Twitter and they donât star in big Hollywood movies. Yet the British aristocracyâs capacity to intrigue and enthral seems boundless.
The continuing popularity of the TV and film series Downton Abbey, Evelyn Waughâs upper-crust novel Brideshead Revisited and Nancy Mitfordâs autobiographical The Pursuit of Love underscore the popular appetite for all things aristocratic.
In 2016, Vanity Fair noted that an enduring fascination with the Mitford sisters was reignited by the publication of their letters.
This has intensified recently with a wave of biographies and memoirs (long predating Prince Harryâs royal hand grenade, Spare). A notable publishing phenomenon was 91-year-old Lady Glenconnerâs 2019 autobiography, A Lady In Waiting which became a New York Times bestseller, and 2020âs well-received Diary of an MPâs Wife by Baroness Sasha Swire.
The memoir of Lady Glenconner â daughter of the fifth Earl of Leicester and the wife of the Third Baron Glenconner â made her a minor celebrity. Appearing on the Graham Norton Show, she entertained fellow guests, who, like the audience, listened agog, shocked and amused.
Hailing from Devon gentry, Baroness Swire, wife of former Conservative minister and old Etonian Hugo Swire, made political waves with her memoirs. It included intimate revelations such as Samantha Cameron (David Cameronâs wife, whose mother married into the dynastic Astor family) claiming her husband liked Jeremy Hunt (who has since become chancellor) because he sucked up to him.
A different world
It is unlikely nostalgia drives this interest in aristocratic lives. What grabs headlines are the usual gossipy standards â shocking indiscretions, sex scandals and marital troubles or spousal abuse.
The attraction is peering inside aristocratsâ mysterious world, to feel its privilege and strangeness, its peculiarly gilded yet feudal lifestyle and wealth. Aristocrat biographies reveal the secrets behind the persistence of ancient privilege in modern Britain.
But academic studies and fictional accounts of the British aristocracy have painted a glummer picture. Whether you read David Cannadineâs definitive history The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy or Waughâs Brideshead Revisited, the message remains the same: like their grand estates, aristocrats have fallen into ruin.
Which portrayal is correct? Are aristocrats worthy of popular interest or irrelevant as academic historians suggest? Without doubt, aristocrats hold less power than they once did. They havenât completely fallen, however. For example, former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne is heir to a baronetcy, and the Duke of Westminster is one of Britainâs richest men.
But rather than a tapestry of anecdotes and individual stories, our research, which looks at the status and modern history of British and European elites, relies on an approach that quantifies and compares the aristocracyâs power as a whole and over time.
Money, money, money
Historians, the aristocracyâs leading chroniclers, build their case on patchworks of individual examples that offer weak foundations for generalisation. Even if a major historian such as F.M.L. Thompson in his English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century identifies the economic or social position of dozens of titles in the early 1900s, thousands of their contemporaries are ignored.
You can count on one hand the times that historians have followed one family through three generations, let alone the several passing between 1850 and 2022. There is no consistency of evidence. An estate sale is quoted here, the diminishing role of the hunt is noted there. While providing fascinating detail about the customs and lifestyles of the aristocracy, general insights elude readers.
In our research, we seek the wood obscured by individual aristocratic trees to reveal the British aristocracyâs wealth and status as a whole from the mid-19th century to the present.
Analysing probate records of British peers between 1858 and 2018 we found their mean wealth declined from a high of over ÂŁ20 million (in todayâs money? in the first decades of the 20th century to approximately ÂŁ5 million after the second world war, before rising to nearly ÂŁ15 million in the decade following the financial crisis of 2008.
This swing must be placed in context. First of all, probate records underestimate aristocratic fortunes by excluding wealth held in trusts â a mechanism for transmitting and controlling âfamilyâ wealth. Second, their decline was not unique, but part of an âimpoverishment of the richâ in the 20th century. Nevertheless, aristocratsâ average wealth has kept them firmly in the top 1% of Britainâs richest people.
Keeping pace with the ânormalâ rich is an extraordinary testament to aristocratic tenacity. Aristocrats have a handicap other elites in Britain donât: itâs a closed shop with no mobility into it and no mobility out. The title passes from father to son.
If an aristocratic heir squanders a fortune, the family becomes poor but it remains an aristocratic family. For the âordinaryâ rich, if a family squanders its wealth in one generation it drops out of the top ranking but is often replaced and replenished by the socially mobile nouveau riche in the next, keeping their aggregate wealth high. The aristocracyâs ability to stay, on average, in the richest 1% throughout the 20th century is remarkable.
Itâs a rich manâs world
Why so resilient? Contrary to existing accounts, aristocratic wealth does not follow land values, the traditional basis of their social position. To endure and flourish, British aristocrats understood they had to be economically astute like their rich counterparts.
The durability of aristocratic wealth thus hints at a tantalising possibility: upper-class families that rose pre-20th century can persist in modern democratic capitalist societies. But they can only do this by hiding ruthless economic acquisitiveness behind a feudal veneer. Meaning, for example, that they can present as country gentlemen while wheeling and dealing like any other businessman.
But it is their special status and privilege that highlights their advantages and pleasures. For many readers, those pleasures are experienced vicariously through myriad accounts of gilded lives seasoned with riches, decadence and scandal. And as any publisher will tell you, that always makes a good read.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Matthew Bond is a member of the Labour Party.
Julien Morton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.