I am always suspicious when the word ‘aristocrat’ finds its way into the press. Usually, the person in question is not an aristocrat at all, but a common-or-garden public school boy with a tenuous link to a baronet’s sister-in-law. But with last week’s exposé of Nigel Farage’s convicted fraudster adviser George Cottrell, we have a proper one. Cottrell is the grandson of a peer, Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton, and the nephew of two others, the former Tory treasurer turned Ukipper Alexander Fermor-Hesketh, 3rd Baron Hesketh, and the former Life Guards officer Milo Watson, 4th Baron Manton. His mother was briefly romantically involved with the then-Prince Charles. Reading about Cottrell in the Sunday Times, I was reminded of Sydney Freeman-Mitford, Baroness Redesdale’s line: ‘whenever I see the words “peer’s daughter” in a headline, I know it’s going to be something about one of [my] children.’
The aristocracy is no stranger to black sheep. Indeed, it has perfected the art of producing them – from marquesses that splurged their fortune on chorus girls to eccentric baronets prone to wearing six coats at a time. And so when people like Cottrell emerge, it’s no huge surprise. Indeed, you might ask, hasn’t the aristocracy always been a bit dodgy? Well, maybe – but, I’d argue, no more than any other group. We just know more about it, thanks to Fleet Street’s intermittent obsession with covering its exploits. Indeed, one of the arguments made for why the hereditary peers ought to stay in the House of Lords was that their titles are so old that they cannot be bought.
There is something in that – but it doesn’t negate the essential strangeness of the upper class, even within the law. To be fair, this can hardly be helped. Wouldn’t you be a bit odd if you were from a family that lived in a massive house, had endured generations of being waited on, and had a flag outside that went up and down depending on whether you were at home or not? Not for nothing was Frederick Hervey, 4th Marquess of Bristol described as ‘peculiar’ by his grandson Robert Erskine, the result of ‘somebody living in the middle of a park [at Ickworth] which is nine miles in circumference’.
The Bristols are small fry compared to the Buccleuchs. In the 1880s, Walter Montagu Douglas Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch had 12 principal homes in England and Scotland, and 460,000 acres – a land mass approximately the size of Mauritius. When, 60 years later, his great-grandson, also called Walter Buccleuch, was placed on a kind of wartime house arrest, after almost but not quite attending Hitler’s 50th birthday party, his was hardly a stint in Pentonville. Indeed, the Buccleuch estates were so large that even by 2007, when the next duke died, it was supposed that if laid end to end the fences containing his estates would stretch from Dumfries to San Francisco. The current duke, for his part, is a model of measured modern ducalness, though still a territorial magnate with just under 200,000 acres and three major houses – ‘a nomad,’ he insists, ‘with some very substantial tents.’
All of that perambulating might make you a bit odd. So would being told that you were It – and then proving otherwise. John Hervey, 7th Marquess of Bristol, was so bullied by his father into believing that his hereditary status was the be-all and end-all, that when he died in 1999 Jessica Berens could only describe how ‘periwigged lordly decadence, the shadow of aristocracy in the Jungian sense, darkened the life of a man who wore his crest on his chest but was not protected by it’.
In the 20th century, the upper class faced an identity crisis: pressures have forced progress on even the richest families. The best of them have redefined themselves in the face of the persistent narrative of their own apparent decline, finding respectable careers and downplaying their titles. The unwise have performed a frantic rearguard action in attempting to claw back some relevance – the most egregious example being Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, who in the 1930s allowed his misplaced belief in the continuation of People Like Him to overtake his natural patrician conservatism when flirting with the Third Reich.
Think of the UFO spotter Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, sometime editor of the Flying Saucer Review
Somewhere between lie those comfortable in their oddness, those of the Millwall persuasion: ‘no one likes us, we don’t care’. Think of the UFO spotter Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, sometime editor of the Flying Saucer Review; the high church bachelor Niall Campbell, 10th Duke of Argyll, who refused to have a telephone at Inveraray; and the maverick Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, whose exploits ranged from taking tea with Myra Hindley to – rather sweetly – demanding that his book on humility should be prominently displayed in bookshops. My favourite harmless eccentric is William ‘Paddy’ Westenra, 7th Baron Rossmore, who died in 2021 – a man described by his own son as being ‘unassertive to an almost dangerous level’. Stories of Paddy’s quaint eccentricity abound. Having moved to County Cork in later life, to begin with he did not have a washing machine, and instead of taking his laundry to a friend’s house nearby, he flew it back to London, washed it, and then brought it back to Ireland.
And so we are left with the foolish and the downright criminal, like Cottrell – not to mention the handful of peers who, in recent years, have not just let themselves but the whole side down: the bankrupts, the sexual assaulters, the domestic abusers, the fraudsters, the philanderers. They’re the modern black sheep – and that is all they are. As for the rest of the aristocracy? F. Scott Fitzgerald supposed that the very rich are ‘different from you and me’. Yes, and the aristocracy is odder still.
Heirs and Graces: A History of the Modern British Aristocracy by Eleanor Doughty is published by Hutchinson
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