Chris Bryant - Entitled: A Critical History of the British Aristocracy

STAFFORD CRIPPS:

THE FIRST MODERN CHANCELLOR

GLENDA JACKSON:

THE BIOGRAPHY

POSSIBLE DREAMS:

A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE BRITISH

CHRISTIAN SOCIALISTS

PARLIAMENT: THE BIOGRAPHY

VOLUME I: ANCESTRAL VOICES

PARLIAMENT: THE BIOGRAPHY

VOLUME II: REFORM

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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Doubleday

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright Chris Bryant 2017
Cover photography V&A Lafayette
Left to right: Edwyn Francis Scudamore-Stanhope, 10th earl of Chesterfield, and his page, Ferdinand Fairfax
Cover design by Sarah Whittaker/TW

Chris Bryant has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473525511

ISBN 9780857523167

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Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands stolen either by force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues; do these things and you shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pocket.

Tom Johnston, Our Scots Noble Families, 1909

I AM INDEBTED to many people for their assistance and advice in bringing this book to fruition. My agent Jim Gill has regularly steered me in a wiser direction; my editor, Doug Young, was supportive from the beginning, was patient when nothing seemed to be forthcoming and made excellent suggestions when I submitted my first draft; Gillian Somerscales tidied up my typos and my prose with elegant fastidiousness; and Amanda Russell has researched the illustrations.

It has only been possible to cover such a large period thanks to the scholarship of many others who have gone before. I would particularly like to mention the work of David Cannadine, David Crouch, Peter Mandler, Helen Cam and Rosemary Baird, who in their specialist periods have dug deep in the archives to haul out gems, and who have inspired many of the ideas behind this book. I am grateful to them, although any mistakes in this book are entirely my own.

I am especially grateful to the libraries and manuscript collections I have consulted, including the British Library, the Bodleian, the Lambeth Palace library and the collections at Kings College London and Southampton University. The staff at the House of Commons Library have always been immensely helpful, especially Phillip Arnold and Greg Howard.

I am very grateful to my friends, family, colleagues and staff who have listened to me while I have attempted to regale them with tales of ancient aristocratic misdemeanours or noble derring-do and have put up with me when I have disappeared into a library or a book for whole weekends, and when I have stayed up far too late or got up far too early to try to hone another chapter.

Above all, the people of the Rhondda, which was mined, developed and exploited by the marquess of Bute, whose title lives on in street names in Treorchy and in Treherbert, have shown me the greatest forbearance. I have endeavoured faithfully to be their voice since 2001 and will ever be in their debt. I hope they will find an echo of their own distrust of aristocratic privilege and entitlement in these pages.

Porth, the Rhondda, June 2017

IT WAS THREE oclock in the morning of Thursday, 6 April 1837 when Henry Beresford, the 3rd marquess of Waterford (25), and John Cust, Viscount Alford (24), turned up with a band of aristocratic friends at the Thorpe End tollgate in Melton Mowbray after a heavy nights wining and dining at Croxton Park races. They were in a boisterous, disdainful mood. Having first boarded up the tollgate with the keeper locked inside, they stormed through the town, overturning a caravan in which people were sleeping, vandalizing the post office, demolishing flowerpots, threatening the police with murder, and daubing doors, shutters, signs and police constables with red paint. The event gave us the phrase painting the town red.

Plenty of contemporaries were not impressed. The Stamford Mercury voiced its contempt for the marauders in pointed sarcasm:

On being obstructed in their career of mischief by the watchmen, the blood of the Beresfords rises, and the Noble Marquis as nobly offers to fight them all! and then (oh Most Noble, most magnanimous deed!) knocks down and tramples upon a poor old man of 60! vows hell murder the bridewell-keeper for refusing to set at liberty a prisoner, one of his fellow-rioters; and at length succeeds in releasing him and carrying him away in triumph on his back a feat we have no doubt it would be his highest ambition to have recorded in the history of the Noble House of Beresford, and emblazoned on its shield.

True, Beresford a regular duellist, prankster and gambler paid for the damage, and he and his roistering friends were fined a hundred pounds each for common assault, but such was their sense of entitlement that they imperiously demanded local editors expunge the story from their newspapers; and such was the misplaced sense of deference to the nobility that several editors did as they were asked.

Beresfords antics were by no means the worst aristocratic misdemeanours in British history other members of the nobility got away with rape, fraud, deception and murder but his arrogance has been the default attitude of countless numbers of the well-bred and well-heeled through the ages, right up to the members of the Bullingdon Club who did ten thousand pounds worth of damage to an Oxfordshire pub in 2004. At the heart of their self-indulgent destructiveness lay their sense of entitlement. They knew they could wreak mayhem because nobody would dare question them and anyway, they could easily afford to pay for the damage.