Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined way, than to do things oddly. They put milk in their tea, drive on the wrong side of the road, pronounce Cholmondeley as “Chumley,” celebrate the Queen’s birthday in June even though she was born in April, and dress their palace guards in bearskin helmets that make them look as if, for some private and unfathomable reason, they are wearing fur-lined wastebaskets on their heads.
Even the simplest things are done with a certain resolute commitment to perversity in Britain. Consider the lowly salt cellar. In England a salt cellar comes equipped not with a series of little holes, as in other more sensible countries, but with a single large hole. I have yet to meet a foreigner who could tip a British salt cellar even fractionally towards the horizontal without having all the contents fall in a heap onto his lamb chop.
Almost every realm of British life you could care to name, from the running of Parliament to the rules of cricket, is predicated on a system guaranteed to confuse and confound foreigners—that is, of course, the whole purpose of it—but in one area British practice rises to a zenith so rarefied that most Britons themselves are left in a state of profound confusion. I refer to that complex and ancient assemblage of privileged pointlessness known as the aristocracy.
If you have always been confused by why some people in Britain are called Sir This while others are Lord That, and others are the Earl of Such-and-Such or Viscount Something-or-Other, worry not. I’m here to help you. But I must also warn you. Like most things rooted in centuries of British tradition, it is an immensely complicated business.
So complicated, in fact, that the bible on the subject, The Complete Peerage, fills nine fat volumes. A companion work, Debrett’s Correct Form, which deals with how aristocrats should be addressed and who should sit where at formal functions, runs to 422 densely printed pages. So arcane are the workings of the system that only a handful of people at the College of Arms in London—the HQ of the aristocracy—can truly be said to understand it.
There, officers with such splendidly florid titles as First Rough Dragon Pursuivant, Garter King of Arms, and First Bluemantle Pursuivant, rule on protocol, succession, and titular deportment.
One complicating factor is that just because someone is called “Lord” or “Viscount” or “Marquess” doesn’t necessarily mean that he is one. The relatives of some, but by no means all, nobles are allowed by custom to use what are called courtesy titles.
The higher you move up the noble scale, the more freely courtesy titles are employed. The eldest son of the Duke of Leinster, for instance, may style himself the Marquess of Kildare. He isn’t actually a marquess at all—that is to say, he isn’t allowed to sit in the House of Lords or to enjoy privileges of lordship—but nonetheless the title is his to use. The son of this semi-ersatz marquess can in turn call himself the Earl of Offaly, while his son is know as Viscount Leinster. If one person in the chain dies, everybody moves up a position, rather like a game of work-up in baseball.
Matters are further complicated by the fact that many aristocrats have, over the centuries, accumulated a multiplicity of titles. As Simon Winchester notes in his study of the aristocracy, Their Noble Lordships, the Duke of Beaufort may also refer to himself as the Marquess of Worcester, Lord Botecourt, the Earl of Worcester, or—if he is feeling really silly—the cherishably inane Lord Herbert de Herbert. Most aristocrats also have what you might call a civilian name, and some of these are no less impressive than their titles. For instance, Viscount Massareene and Ferrard, in addition to his already ambitious title, also revels in the decidedly fulsome name John Clotworthy Talbot Foster White-Melville Skeffington. Altogether some 40,000 lordly titles are in use in Britain, but the actual number of nobles is only a tiny fraction of that—a little under 1,200, or barely .2 percent of the British population.
True nobility begins with Queen Elizabeth II and the members of her immediate and extended families, including the three royal dukedoms of Kent, Gloucester, and Cornwall. Below them, in descending order of precedence, come two archbishops, 25 nonroyal dukes, 27 marquesses, 162 earls and countesses, 99 viscounts, 24 bishops, and 880 barons and baronesses.
