Teaching us to fawn over a title?: Claudia Jessie as Eloise Bridgerton (left) and Nicola Coughlan as Penelope Featherington in an episode of Bridgerton.
Despite vastly increased competition from other social groups, the aristocracy remains as influential in this century as it ever was
Of all the groups of elites that have been challenged, confronted and scrutinised in recent years – bankers, celebrities, Etonians, metropolitan dinner partygoers, and one-percenters – there is one category that always seems to slip by unnoticed: aristocrats.
Aristocrats rarely become the focus of public or activist ire, at least in modern times. Instead they are often treated with a sort of affectionate nostalgia. This is reflected in popular culture, which mostly places them in period dramas. Bridgerton, Downton Abbey and The Crown were all smash-hits.
The upper crust is merged, on our screens and in our minds, with our history and heritage – National Trust homes, rolling countryside – and consigned firmly to the past. Nowadays, if we think of them at all, we perhaps imagine a marginal group eating baked beans in their mouldering dining rooms, surrounded by buckets to catch the drips from cracked stucco ceilings. But this is not quite true.
The fortunes of aristocrats may have declined since their ruling days. But they have also maintained astonishing wealth and influence. This group has, in the last century, been joined by others at the top, but it has not resigned its elite status.
Let’s start with money. Almost a third of the land in England and Wales belongs to the aristocracy; a list of major landowners in the 1800s would contain names familiar to us today. The Duke of Westminster still owns vast estates in Cheshire and Lancashire, as well as large chunks of London’s Mayfair and Belgravia. Cadogan Square, Sloane Street and King’s Road still belong to Earl Cadogan.
In fact, the value of a hereditary title grew in the 30 years to 2019, particularly in the latter decade. In 2007, the average wealth of someone with a hereditary title in the UK stood at £8.9m; in 2019, it reached more than £16m.
An enduring theory, captured by Brideshead Revisited and cemented in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, is that the fortunes of this group were brought low over the 20th century, overtaken by thrusting industrialists. But work by Dr Matthew Bond and Dr Julien Morton at London South Bank University has been chipping away at that assumption. They looked at more than a million wills of members of the nobility, dating back to 1858, and found a different story. “When you look at the decline, it’s that the rich as a whole got poorer over the 20th century,” says Bond. “The aristocracy didn’t escape that, but they didn’t fall behind. They dealt as well with the modern world as the industrialists: you could even argue that they did better.”
We think of this group as out of touch. ‘In fact, they’re canny wealth managers’
The idea that the gentry is a fallen group is perhaps based on an optimistic misconception about what you have to do to remain rich in modern capitalist societies. In fact, you can live off existing wealth. But it’s more than that. If we were to look at the richest 1% through time, we might see families dipping in and out of the group: a wealthy CEO passes money to their children, who remain in the top echelon; but their grandchildren perhaps then fall out of it. Among the aristocracy, though, family lines have managed to sustain themselves in the 1% over many generations. Why? After all, the titled few have just as much, or as little, control over how their children turn out as other wealthy people. Why is it that aristocratic wealth persists and other types often burn out?
Bond and Morton have two possible answers, both of which concern cultural traditions. One is that members of this group are particularly concerned with their dynastic reputation, which prompts them to keep assets together rather than split them between multiple inheritors. The other is that they have a long history of managing money. We think of this group as being out of touch and out of time. “In fact, they are canny wealth managers,” says Morton. “The image of the bumbling aristocrat is false.”
Aristos also continue to have startling levels of influence. Some of this is political – there are still 92 members of this minority group in the House of Lords – and some cultural. The nobility has flooded into the arts: 42% of George V’s great- great-grandchildren work in arts and entertainment. Each issue of Tatler magazine, which chronicles the doings of toffs, sells around 60,000 copies in the UK.
A study on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in which entries must have achieved something and cannot be admitted on the basis of their rank, found that in 2018 the gentry were about as influential in public life as they were in 1858. This despite the fact that their competition has hugely increased – non-aristocrats are not only living to adulthood in vastly greater numbers, but are far more educated than they once were. But aristocrats are somehow holding their own. A member of the gentry is almost 300 times more likely than anyone else to be listed in the book.
This bias applied even within the aristocracy itself: dukes are more likely to appear in the dictionary than lower-ranking marquesses, even when the authors controlled for wealth.
Of course, like other rich and connected people, the nobility has a starting advantage: parents can get children into the best schools and surround them with useful networks when they leave. But it may also be that some sort of deference to aristocrats has persisted even into the 21st century, giving the nobility a leg up. Could it be that our diet of aristocratic period dramas – in which they may be portrayed as good or bad, refined or unsophisticated, but always, always fascinating – is, even now, teaching us to fawn over a title?
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