Another voice
Lady Pembroke's baby
Auberon Waugh
Everybody of good will in Britain will have rejoiced to learn last week, through the good offices of Mr Nigel Dempster, that the Countess of Pembroke is expecting a baby. It is seven years since Henry Herbert, seventeenth earl of Pembroke and fourteenth of Montgomery, blessed the human race with his third daughter, Lady Flora, and some of us may have feared that he had joined the fashionable retreat from activities of this sort. Just as by the death of a great nobleman like the late Duke of Norfolk we were all diminished, so are we • all magnified, given a new source of pride in our national heritage whenever one of our ancient families can be persuaded to multiply.
That said and it surely needed saying we might look a little closer at some of the implications of this momentous news. Mr Dempster headed his story 'The Earl hopes for an heir', and the statement is borne out by Lord Pembroke a few lines lower down, when he is reported as saying: 'Regardless of titles, I would very much like to pass the house on to a son if, indeed, there is anything left by that time. We've lived here for four centuries.'
The estate, on which Mr Dempster has counted 14,000 acres and which he 'conservatively' values at £14 million, includes Wilton House, one of the most beautiful and enviable houses in England. In discussing the application of primogeniture to this particular estate, I suppose I had better declare an interest. I rejoice at Lady Pembroke's news, not only as a loyal citizen of the United Kingdom but also as a poor relation of her infant. Descended as I am twice from the eighth earl of Pembroke, once from the tenth, I might have been able to claim a corner of some attic or cellar at Wilton if the reforms I am about to urge had been introduced by the end of the eighteenth century (when they arrived in America and France). Rather than be accused of base motives, I hereby renounce any claim I might have had in any part of the estate and award my putative share to whichever of Lord Pembroke's daughters appears the most beautiful (Mr Dempster's discretion) on attaining her fifteenth year.
That the English system of sole inheritance or primogeniture is cruel and unnatural strikes me as self-evident. I also propose to demonstrate that it is at the root of all our current national ills. But first let us look at its historical justifications.
In peasant communities, a system of primogeniture ensured that smallholdings were not split into such small parts as could not provide a living for the people who lived on them. In former times, this meant that they starved, but economic pressures already militate irresistibly against the survival of smallholdings, regrettable as that may be from any civilised point of view, and the social conditions which made sole inheritance a guarantee of their survival have long since disappeared.
One could trace the history of primogeniture (or sole inheritance I use the terms synonymously) back to feudal times (where land tenure involved various civil and military obligations) and even beyond, if one wished, but this would not throw much light on its survival today in Britain almost alone among the civilised countries of the world.
More recently, the survival of great estates has been seen as a guarantee of agricultural efficiency, affording, at the same time, a co-operative system of support for the tenant farmers under benevolently self-interested management. This argument would be as strong as ever today nobody can honestly claim that the new landowners, who are mostly insurance companies and pension funds, farm more efficiently or treat their tenants any better if it were not for the fact that the very existence of these great estates has inspired four decades of tax legislation dedicated to breaking them up, and will plainly continue to inspire such legislation until the end is achieved. The damage done by this legislation to the social structure of the whole country is far greater, I would suggest, than any advantages we might gain from the concentration of wealth.
The paradoxical thing about the whole matter is that opposition to this concentration of wealth has, historically, always come from the left, from the levellers. It is they who keep pointing out that five hundred individuals own more than half of Scotland, that the top one per cent own 24.3 per cent of the nation's wealth. Yet it seems to me that people like myself, dedicated to the preservation of an unequal society, have far greater reason to be alarmed by this state of affairs. Concentration of wealth simply makes it easier to confiscate.
A final historical justification for the system was that it preserved the power and prestige of the aristocracy. With the political power derived from entailed estates, the nobility was able to secure lucrative positions for its younger sons in the church, army, civil and colonial services, even in politics. This may have reduced the injustice of dispossession for younger sons, but one does not need a very metaphysical turn of mind to see in the new fashion for 'positive discrimination in favour of the under privileged' its exact counterpart. All that is left, then, is the more or less contemporary justification, that in a hostile world sole inheritance gives heirs a slightly better chance of keeping up such properties as Wilton, Chatsworth, Woburn and Longleat, whether as family residences or as museums open to the public. I am sorry, but this is nonsense. With the disappearance of a whole tradition of domestic service and existing rates of personal taxation, nobody is going to be able to live in the whole of these houses much longer. Lord Pembroke has used Wilton as a set for making 'soft porn' films, which is an admirable idea, but soon the only way these houses will be inhabited at all is by carving them up. Even in my own house, which is scarcely more than a quarter of the size of Wilton, I have found it useful to put a younger brother in a wing.
Those who doubt whether such a system would work should examine what happens in France, where the rich are much richer Of one excludes a tiny handful of freaks like Lord Cowdray), the middle classes are much richer and even the workers (although they need not concern us here) are richer. In England, only the very rich have any obvious stake in the survival of the capitalist system. The rest of us, I am sorry to say, simply laugh to see them discomfited while a few, who should know better, rejoice.
The greatest objection to my proposal that the restriction of the right to dispose of our property after death as we see fit involves yet another inroad on individual freedom is not one that need worry Conservatives, although it worries me. Every saloon bar punk in the land has plans for restricting individual freedom, whether bY banning caravans, imprisoning child nor' nographers or making the press more 'responsible', and it is a mistake to see the Conservative Party of Eldon Griffiths and Lord Hailsham as anything more than the distillation of such saloon bar vapourings. A more important objection, from the praetical point of view, is that there is no partieular demand for such a measure. I would not dream of advocating it if I did not believe that our laws of inheritance hold the key to explaining why capitalism is ifl worse condition in England than it is .In France, Germany or America: they explain our insanely punitive rates of taxation ar,a; the attitude of the intelligent, educate' classes to inherited wealth, which must be the cornerstone of any capitalist system. do not think that a law obliging parents to treat their children equally represents such an infringement of personal freedom as the present system, which enables the goyernment to take it all. In any case, I won° never urge it if I did not feel that this small, restriction was necessary for the survival 01 much greater freedoms. Until the Lord Pembrokes of this world can see that, I find myself in the unhappy position of being the only person in the country who hopes his Countess will have a girl.
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