24 dukes (not counting the various honorary dukedoms created for members of the royal family), 34 marquesses, 191 earls, 115 viscounts and 426 barons, as well as 4 countesses and 9 baronesses in their own right. Confusingly, peers can also hold multiple titles as they progress up the ranks, with their heirs adopting the subordinate honours: for example, the heir to the Marquess of Salisbury is styled Viscount Cranborne.fn1 Life peers, meanwhile, are a separate, more recent creation, invented to help modernise the House of Lords, with none of the land and wealth associated with the ancient hereditary peerage.
The whole arcane system of titles has become underpinned over the centuries by byzantine institutions and insignia. Old families proudly bear coats-of-arms, bedecked with heraldic beasts, mottoes and crests recalling their ancestors; the whole flummery policed by the College of Arms – whose head, the Duke of Norfolk, we met earlier. Aristocratic elitism finds its apogee in the voluminous pages of Debrett’s and Burke’s Peerage, obsessively compiled lists of current honours and their ancient bloodlines, which read a little like stock-books of good breeding.
The ranks of the peerage may appear convoluted and archaic to outsiders, but their complex, jealously guarded hierarchies are key to keeping the aristocracy exclusive. Sometimes, the closed nature of this club has proven problematic to kings wishing to broaden their pool of supporters and, above all, their income streams. James I ended up creating an entirely new class of hereditary titles, the baronetcies, which he sold to the lesser landed gentry in a seventeenth-century cash-for-honours scandal. Baronets have lower social standing than members of the peerage, but their titles are also hereditary, and their landed domains can be just as extensive. As of 2017, there were 1,204 extant baronetcies in the UK – meaning that the hereditary, titled aristocracy overall consists of just 2,000 families. Below peers and baronets sit knights and squires: holders of non-hereditary titles (‘Sir’, ‘Dame’, ‘Esquire’), but nevertheless often significant landowners in their own right. The ‘squirearchy’ of the early modern period were often lords of the manor across large parts of rural England. In terms of classes of landowners, however, this is where definitions become more blurred, and it gets harder to distinguish between estates that have been inherited and those bought more recently.
But was this exclusive club in fact open to newcomers? Overseas observers of England during the early modern period often marvelled at its political stability, and the fact that it had never suffered a far-reaching social revolution. They attributed this to what they surmised to be England’s ‘open elite’, a ruling class that was willing to welcome the newly wealthy bourgeoisie, and absorb those of middling rank who might otherwise become disgruntled and try to challenge the whole system.
Yet while there was a certain fluidity at the lower end, with merchants sometimes becoming members of the landed gentry, there was also great resistance to new money joining the peerage. Lawrence and Jeanne Stone, surveying the state of the aristocracy between the reign of Henry VIII and Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, concluded that ‘for 340 years, the elite maintained a highly stable social and political system’, in which upward mobility was enjoyed only by a comparative few. Just 157 ‘men of business’ bought their way into the landowning elite over these three centuries and were able to acquire estates of 2,000 acres or more. Throughout this period, ‘many of the same families still resided in the same seats’, and newcomers attempting to join the landed aristocracy had to overcome ‘infinitely resistant lines of snobbery’. Subsequent research has suggested that there were a greater number of wealthy entrants to landed society who succeeded in buying smaller estates of around 1,000 acres; but these were small fry compared to the vast landholdings of the dukes and earls of their day.
By the time of the Victorian Return of Owners of Land, the landed aristocracy was at the peak of its political power. A mere 4,217 peers, great landowners and squires owned 18 million acres of land – half of England and Wales, possessed by 0.01 per cent of the population. In a triumph for trickle-down economics, it had taken eight centuries for England’s landowning elite to broaden out from around 200 Norman barons to 4,200 Victorian nobles and gentry. ‘In terms of territory, it seems likely that the notables owned a greater proportion of the British Isles than almost any other elite owned of almost any other country,’ writes the historian David Cannadine.
What happened next to the aristocracy has often been portrayed as a catastrophe. Between Queen Victoria becoming Empress of India and the killing fields of the First World War, the sun appeared to set on the gilded world of inherited privilege. This perception owes much to the work of the historian F.M.L. Thompson in his 1963 book English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, later popularised and embroidered in David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. They recount how the entire aristocratic class experienced a sudden loss of territory, wealth and political power – plagued by death duties, assaulted by land reformers and Lords reform, and losing out to the nouveau riche. ‘The old order is doomed,’ bemoaned the Duke of Marlborough in 1919.
No one seriously disputes that the British aristocracy fell from grace after their Victorian heyday. But reports of the death of the aristocracy have been greatly exaggerated. This is particularly true when it comes to the land they own.
Thompson and Cannadine’s claims about the rapid territorial losses of the peerage in fact come down to one, rather shaky source. Cannadine states that ‘in the years immediately before and after the First World War, some six to eight million acres, one-quarter of the land of England, was sold by gentry and grandees’. Thompson likewise asserts: ‘it is possible that in the four years of intense activity between 1918 and 1921 something between six and eight million acres changed hands in England.’ For this startling figure, both relied on a single article in one edition of the property magazine Estates Gazette from December 1921.
That figure has recently been convincingly challenged by two statisticians, John Beckett and Michael Turner. They examined land sales data from the time and found that ‘much less than 25 per cent of England changed hands in the four highlighted years 1918–1921’. Instead, they concluded, it was actually more like 6.5 per cent, and that excitable estate agents at the Gazette had massively overstated the case.
Moreover, all sides agree that the highest echelons of the aristocracy were able to cling on to their landed estates with much greater success than the lesser gentry. As Thompson quietly admits in the final pages of his book, ‘The landed aristocracy has survived with far fewer casualties … Among the great ducal seats, for example … Badminton, Woburn, Chatsworth, Euston Hall, Blenheim Palace, Arundel Castle, Alnwick Castle, Albury and Syon House, Goodwood, Belvoir Castle, Berry Pomeroy, and Strathfield Saye are all lived in by the descendants of their nineteenth-century owners.’ That Thompson could say this half a century after his supposed ‘revolution in landownership’ is startling enough. It’s even more startling, then, that today, another half-century on, every single one of those ducal family seats still remains in the hands of the same aristocratic families.
What may have felt seismic at the time looks a good deal less drastic in retrospect. ‘When Thompson wrote in 1963, the great estate seemed to be in terminal decline,’ argue Beckett and Turner, ‘but the subsequent revival of the fortunes of landed society [have] brought seriously into question the whole business of just how bad things really were.’
At the same time as Thompson was performing the last rites on the aristocracy, another author found them to be in rude health, albeit rather leaner. The journalist Roy Perrott’s
