A large number of paragraphs, maybe every paragraph, of Eleanor Doughty\u2019s Heirs and Graces starts like this: \u201cBert was the son of Charles \u201cSunny\u201d Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough.\u201d Why do aristocrats insist on broadcasting their domestic nicknames to the wider world and to history, as though these are the passwords to polite society? \u201cMy dear, you thought he was called Henry? But anybody who\u2019s anybody knows he goes by Boydy! Because of the time he once caught a\u00a0ball, and ran around for a week, shouting, \u2018I\u2019m just like a real boy!\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like any jargon, it\u2019s a system designed to dominate and exclude, dressed up in the language \u2013 not really language, more like mouth-noises \u2013 of\u00a0the nursery, but reader, you do not have time to get irritated by this, because you will need all your resources of patience to get to the end of the sentence, without thinking: who cares whether he\u2019s the 9th Duke of Marlborough? Who knows which century the 6th Duke was in? I bet the Spencer-Churchills don\u2019t even know!<\/p>\n
In the end, the problem with any history of modern British aristocracy like Eleanor Doughty\u2019s is not the implicit contempt of a class that believes in its own superiority to\u00a0the extent that it considers the nicknames of its great-grandmother\u2019s lurchers worthy of your time, yet will look you in the eye and tell you that hard work and merit are all that count \u2013 or to put that another way, piss on your shoes and tell you it\u2019s raining.<\/p>\n
The problem isn\u2019t even the posh-adjacent, their not-quite-aristo-enough army of admirers who\u2019ll die on\u00a0the hill of these people being fascinating, in which Doughty is an awesomely diligent officer. No, the real problem, from a narrative perspective, is that every sentence is loaded with so much extraneous information \u2013 where that character sits, not just in relation to the inheritance of their nearest stately home, but in relation to the queen, to their closest duke-by-marriage, to the second-cousin-twice-removed who would have pipped them to the pile were it not for his untimely death \u2013 that no amount of punctuation in the world can even rescue its syntax, still less hold your interest.<\/p>\n
So Henry \u201cMaster\u201d Somerset, a notorious philanderer, \u201cwas asked at\u00a0dinner by the wife of his heir presumptive, his first cousin twice removed David Somerset, who he considered the greatest man of the 20th century, [and] he opted, not for such an obvious figure as Winston Churchill, but Bernard Norfolk, \u2018for\u00a0his\u00a0splendid work as chair of the Marylebone Cricket Club\u2019.\u201d The answer is maybe fleetingly interesting but why does it matter who asked him? What\u2019s David Somerset even doing in this sentence? Every story (and some of them could be diverting, there are some interesting deaths \u2013 in a biplane with a mistress; of alcoholism) is like watching a baby bird try to fly, except its tiny wings have been dipped in the cement of dynastic detail that tells you nothing at all about the human, yet\u00a0is the only measure of his value.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaster\u201d Somerset, by the way, wasn\u2019t a good guy. \u201cPumped full of an\u00a0extraordinarily exalted sense of self-worth and entitlement, he had little truck with good manners,\u201d Doughty writes, going on to report a load of anecdotes in which Master is a prick. Effing and jeffing. Telling off proles for\u00a0not moving fast enough, getting angry at dogs. In all this elaborate preservation of the bloodline, who bred\u00a0out all the happy people?<\/p>\n
All that said, Doughty\u2019s expertise jumps off the page. She started her career as a journalist on the Telegraph, and wrote their Great Estates column from 2017 (who even knew they had one of those? It\u2019s like the Guardian and\u00a0tofu, except their obsession connotes a value system that destroys its own young, whereas ours is just a tasty, proteinous ingredient.) She knows everything \u2013 where an earl sits relative to a viscount, how many there are of each. Her work is peppered with first-hand accounts, piquant details from visitors\u2019 books, the story of every\u00a0great house told brick by brick, through centuries of wealth and turbulence. If the whole saga is weighed down by its own self-regard, it takes pluck and determination to leaven it, and Doughty has those in\u00a0undeniable quantities.<\/p>\n
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