Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
By unforeseen good fortune, I found myself a short while ago dining in the Midlands and sit- ting next to a real earl. He was none of your promoted brewers or rewarded generals. He had not, like one new-made earl in this coun- try, managed to transfer party funds to un- intended destinations. He bore, indeed, one of the greatest titles of the 'Grand Whiggery.' He asked me what I thought of the proposed re- form of the House of Lords.
The preamble of the Parliament Act of 1911 has promised us a reformed House of Lords for fifty-eight years. I think the promise won't be kept this year or any year in my lifetime. The double front bench scheme seems to me absurd but a not intolerable abuse. Nominated upper houses, as the Senate of Canada shows, seldom amount to much. For a few years, the Senate of the Irish Free State provided a plat- form for W. B. Yeats, but I cannot think of many other uses of that body. In the federal system, there may be some utility in an upper house. Thus, the Australian Senate is not totally useless, and of course the Senate of the United States of America is the most important legis- lative body in the world. But the very thing which most noisy zealots on both sides criticised in Mr Wilson's original scheme for reforming or afforcing our existing House of Lords— giving quite large salaries to political dead- heads who would be nominated by Mr Wilson or Mr Heath, jointly or severally—did not shock- me a- great deal. It rather recalled Sydney Smith's attack on the strong family feeling of -Sir Spencer Perceval which resulted in so many jobs going to his kin. The country is very much more populous than it was in Sydney Smith's time. There are more deserving superannuated politicians today than there were In his time.
But talking to the Earl X I began to reflect on the whole idea of nobility and peerage. Mr Enoch Powell has pointed out the peculiar char- acter or the English peerage. It is an organised political body, which most continental noblesses are not. As such it has a great historical past if not much of an historical present or future. As Tocqueville pointed out, one of the troubles of France was that it had only a noblesse- and not a real aristocracy. Pairs de France, like the great Duc de Saint-Simon, had a few meagre political rights, but their main functions were social and snobbish. And the French nobility was never organised on a regular system of pre- cedence as was the English nobility, at any rate from the fifteenth or sixteenth century on.
It is the inability to understand this that has made so many detective story writers, and even less serious writers like mere novelists, use the term Almanach de Gotha in a fashion that shows that they have never studied that interest-
ing reference book, for the Almanach was not either Debrett or Burke. It confined itself to ruling houses, to heads of states (even Repub- lican heads of states), to ex-ruling houses, and to dukes and princes. (I say it did this, for I have not seen the Almanach since Gotha was occupied by the Russians.) Yet even Dorothy Sayers makes Lord Peter Wimsey look for somebody in the Almanach de Gotha who could not possibly have been there except as a younger son or a nephew. And Lord Peter's nephew, the heir of the Duke of Denver, is only a viscount. I once asked Miss Sayers about this, and she explained she had not imitated the Duke of Manchester (whose heir is Viscount Mande- ville) but had simply forgotten to change the second title when she made the Earl of Denver a.duke.
I used to study the Almanach de Gotha very largely to see how many of the Napoleonic titles still survived. For Napoleon systematised his new nobility in a way that Louis XIV never tried to do. Louis XIV, as Saint-Simon com- plained, flooded the ranks of the upper nobility with ducs a brevet. But the titles of the French nobility did not necessarily give any clue to their real rank. Thus, it was not true and is not true that a prince, as such, outranks a duke in the old French noble system. Of the two dis- tinguished noble physicists, the Duc de Broglie and the Prince de Broglie, it is the duke who is more important as a noble as well as being a Nobel Prizeman.
Some great families disdained titles, as the Rohans- were long supposed to have done. Some used titles which were considered by the nobles of France as usurpations. Thus, Saint-Simon detested les princes &rangers. Saint-Simon's father gave his heir the exotic title of Vidame de Chartres. A vidame was a secular nobleman who administered the estates of the Church, for the benefit, mainly, of the administrator. There were a good many Scottish noblemen of this type in the last hundred years or so before the Reformation. The royal family did not neces- sarily give itself or take titles of high rank : the two brothers of Louis XVI were both mere counts. But of course there were the private titles of the royal house—Monsieur, Madame, Monseigneur, and other family rankings of this kind. (All information you can want on this point can be found in Miss Lucy Norton's ad- mirable translation of Saint-Simon.)
In Germany, things were even more com- plicated, because there were by 1803 mediatised families of princely origin. There were great families, holders of great hereditary offices, like the Dalbergs, of which Lord Acton was a mem- ber on the distaff side. Some of the older families of the Austrian dominions disdained titles in the ordinary sense. There was a story in the First World War of an Austrian staff officer being sent to the German Great Imperial Headquarters at Ple.ss. He was received by an extremely pompous Prussian staff officer who announced all his ranks—General Oberst von und zu Sitzenfleisch. The Austrian emissary „al u ted , bowed, and simply said `Kinsky.'
ut there are oddities in the French imperial nobility because many of the junior members of the great Napoleonic families used the title of 'Marquis' which did not exist in the Napo-. leonic system (in which princes preceded dukes). Thus, one of the models for Saint-Loup was the Marquis d'Albufera who was a cadet of the family of that great soldier, Suchet, Duc d'Albufera. This is very wrong. Marquises were traditionally as wicked as the bad baronets of the English hereditarily titled classes.
I have no space to go into the highly com- plicated question of Scottish titles, including the title 'Master,' or to discuss why Stevenson made the great mistake of making the heir to Lord Durrisdeer the Master of Ballantrae instead of the Master of Durrisdeer. Nor have I space to discuss the dispute over the right to use the word 'The.' I was brought up to believe that only -three people were entitled to this very definite article: the Pope, the Devil, and the Chisholm.
Personally, I have more interest in lords than I have in the House of Lords, and I de- plore, for romantic reasons, the proliferation of life peers. I also deplore the legislation per- mitting the renunciation of peerages. However, as Evelyn Waugh pointed out in his controversy with the lady he called The Honourable Mrs Peter Rodd—better known as Miss Nancy Mit- ford—the antiquity of most English peerages is very bogus, and antiquity counts.for a great deal. (The title Lord Inchiquin conceals the great name of O'Brien, which is a pity.) But I have had conversation, more than once, with a -member of a family of Kuge nobles, the highly inbred descendants of the characters of The Tale of Genii. And I have seen two people whose pedigrees are of real antiquity. I once met a Spaniard who assured me he was a member of the family of the Duke of Osufia who are descended from Geryon whose cattle Hercules stole; and I also once saw at close quarters a member of the Japanese imperial house, descended from the Sun Goddess.
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