They probably think you should eat cake, but you have to pay for it.
September 7, 2017 2:01 PM   Subscribe

How the aristocracy preserved their power. (slTheGuardian)

This is taken from a book called Entitled: A Critical History of the British Aristocracy by Chris Bryant .
posted by Kitteh (16 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
*smiling 18th century french guy taps his temple*

they can't preserve their power when you lop off their heads
posted by entropicamericana at 2:20 PM on September 7, 2017 [13 favorites]


And yet, even then, somehow they always do.
posted by dng at 2:21 PM on September 7, 2017 [6 favorites]


What's always struck me is how mediocre they all are, and how fundamentally lazy. You see pictures of them and they have blah clothes and boring hobbies, and even their houses were built by other people. You so rarely hear of one writing anything beyond a vanity publication or attaining to any sort of distinction other than wealth, while you'd think that a life of ease and the best schooling would generate, well, some scholars or something. You don't really blame the Queen, since she doesn't really have an option, but all these other people could do interesting things.
posted by Frowner at 2:24 PM on September 7, 2017 [39 favorites]


(Strangely, the friend of a friend is dating the parlor pink child of...an earl, maybe? Not a duke, not a baron, but a hereditary title and pictures in the society pages. They met on a socialist website and the friend's friend is not from a fancy background. I imagine the whole thing as an even less pleasant variation on The Line of Beauty, but maybe it's not.)
posted by Frowner at 2:30 PM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


the best schooling

They drink a lot, join the Bullingdon Club or similar if they're idiots, break a bunch of shit and then get a 2:2.

Source: I provided some of said schooling.
posted by PMdixon at 2:35 PM on September 7, 2017 [10 favorites]


Seriously, they even have a historical model Lord Gaga, Henry Cyril Paget, who turned his manor into a 24-hour party palace/performance space and put on productions of Salome with real jewels and a diamond encrusted ping pong court and a car that exhausted perfume and such.

Yu have all the money in the world, go build a ROCKET SHIP MADE OF COCAINE
posted by The Whelk at 2:41 PM on September 7, 2017 [20 favorites]


Yu have all the money in the world, go build a ROCKET SHIP MADE OF COCAINE

The hero of Angela Carter's excellent novel Nights At The Circus (with a guest appearance by an anarchist - watch out for la bombe suprise!) thinks much the same thing, except she thinks more about peacock feathers and Brighton Pavilion and so on since the whole thing takes place in 1900 and there are not yet rocketships.)
posted by Frowner at 2:49 PM on September 7, 2017 [7 favorites]


how mediocre they all are, and how fundamentally lazy

Second-most-powerful way to really prove your status -- be useless and still comfortable. (First-most-powerful, do dreadful things to other people and get away with it.)
posted by clew at 4:02 PM on September 7, 2017 [12 favorites]


ROCKET SHIP MADE OF COCAINE

Unfortuantely, their initial materials budget was mismanaged it seems.
posted by pwnguin at 4:54 PM on September 7, 2017


Buy guillotine futures.
posted by Slinga at 6:03 PM on September 7, 2017 [6 favorites]


But find a lady who will thump your ugly lawn snake. A lady of breeding, not too pretty. Keep 'er way from the garden shed.
posted by Oyéah at 8:24 PM on September 7, 2017


*smiling 18th century french guy taps his temple*

they can't preserve their power when you lop off their heads



Buy guillotine futures.


Note that the vast majority of people guillotined were middle class merchants, various political rivals in the revolution, and peasants. Odds are in a revolution, the people who call loudest for the guillotine are going to end up facing it.

And let's not forget what comes after the revolution...
posted by happyroach at 11:14 PM on September 7, 2017 [7 favorites]


You don't really blame the Queen, since she doesn't really have an option, but all these other people could do interesting things.

The actual Royal Family, on balance, does far more for the UK than the average aristo does. Practically all of them have served in the military, and not toff service either but real tours of duty, including active combat duty when the timing has coincided with it (Philip in WW2, Andrew in the Falklands, Harry in Afghanistan, et cetera). They all constantly make appearances at functions and events, which sounds like a bit of nothing but their appearance essentially constitutes the endorsement of the country and that matters. And they're all extremely active in charity work, and not just country-club charity work but the sort of charity organizing and fundraising that only royals can really pull off.

I'm not a royalist per se but the House of Windsor earns their keep, both in a purely economic sense and, more often than not, in a moral one as well. In comparison, most other British aristos are just a waste of fucking space.
posted by mightygodking at 12:27 AM on September 8, 2017 [16 favorites]


It's an odd thing to get worked up about.

Overall, hereditary peers tend to be as powerful as they are wealthy, and the power of a rich hereditary peer and a rich non-hereditary-peer is more or less the same. If families have retained that power it's because but for a period of the mid-20th century, Britain has had a legal structure that permits families to pass down most of their wealth, and even in that period families with better lawyers and accounts preserved a lot of their wealth.

In terms of getting and holding economic status, people with titles that they were given by politicians use the heck out of them to promote themselves, whereas people with hereditary titles (or the courtesy titles that come from having one as a parent) rarely use then in any serious professional context. Sometimes that non-use has a bit of false modesty in it, but it's the same false-ish modesty of someone whose dad is rich or famous just applied to someone whose great-x-grandfather happened to be an important general or politician or industrialist a long time ago.

The House of Lords hasn't had any real political authority for over a hundred years. The only actual change to the political status of peers that came about when Blair kicked the hereditary peers (less an elected rump) out of the House of Lords in 1998 was an ironic one: a peer with serious political ambitions could now serve in the House of Commons and in front bench jobs reserved for members of the Commons (the large majority of them) without giving up his or her peerage title, which they had been effectively required to do since the early 1960s. (Before then, someone who inherited a hereditary peerage was disqualified for life from the House of Commons and, from the early 1900s onward, effectively disqualified from serving as Prime Minister and subject to a very limited quota in terms of ability to serve in other high offices.)
posted by MattD at 5:05 AM on September 8, 2017


You see pictures of them and they have blah clothes and boring hobbies, and even their houses were built by other people.

The same is true of the super-rich today. It's worse, actually, because the opulent mansions of today's billionaires aren't even beautiful. There's so much one could do with enormous wealth. Of course, giving it away to those who need it would be the most ethical. But if one is not that way minded, imagine the fanciful possibilities!
posted by Vispa Teresa at 5:23 AM on September 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


^ see also McMansion Hell
posted by en forme de poire at 7:51 AM on September 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


« Older The long, winding road to fully automated cars   |   Should you wash your pyjamas every day? Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments