Not Exactly a Stellar Lot.......
Of Sex, Violence & Noblesse Oblige
In the last week of every year it is common for newspapers
and periodicals world over to do a review of events of the
past year as well as a round-up of the well known departed,
just as I did here in the last issue. In the first week of
the New Year, in Britain at any rate, you get the same sort
of thing in the form of what’s called the New Year’s
Honours List. This is where the sovereign, mainly on the say
so of the Prime Minister of the day, confers a variety of
honours on worthy citizens.
In days of old this meant a lot more than it does today. The
whole thing was redolent of mediaeval chivalry and the pomp
and circumstance of Empire, now long gone. This is when the
new aristocrats got made. Hereditary Peers of the Realm, who
sat in the House of Lords and who wore crowns and ermine and
constituted the backbone of the traditional ruling classes.
New Dukes, Earls and Viscounts, and Barons were created from
the ranks of untitled younger sons of the aristocracy along
with favourites and mistresses of the sovereign. The lowest
and most recent class of the nobility were Baronets or hereditary
knighthoods. Finally came Knights, who were not nobles as
such, and had no title they could pass on to their children.
In olden days, that is to say before 1485, the main criteria
for the upwardly mobile was how good a thug you were in the
service of whichever contender for the throne you supported
and how rich you became from rapine and ransom in their foreign
wars. With the honour you actually got a large chunk of England
thrown in, which you were expected to administer for the sovereign
and to wring money from the wretched commons as required.
With the advent of the Tudors things changed a bit. Monarchs
found it expedient to ally themselves with a rising middle
or merchant class against an unruly and often treacherous
nobility. This is about when lawyers started to hit the Big
Time. With the unbelievable land and treasure grab by Henry
VIII that was the Dissolution of Monasteries a whole new class
of aristocrats came into being, who were rich and power hungry.
Once seriously rich you were expected to become a noble by
way of a very considerable donation to your sovereign. If
you did not, you could not only find yourself poor again but
in very real danger of losing your head as well.
At various times of need, that is to say when the monarch
needed cash because an increasingly powerful parliament would
only raise taxes if they had some say in how the money was
spent, the monarch would create and sell a new class of nobility
for wealthy commoners eager to ennoble themselves. James I
created Baronets for just this purpose. Of course it wasn’t
always just about money. Sex came in to it too. Charles II
created a whole slew of pretty new Duchesses from his numerous
mistresses. Regrettably, this did not include the delicious
Nell Gwynn, who on being pelted with rotten vegetables in
her carriage by the London mob and denounced as a Catholic
whore, stuck her pretty head out the carriage and chirped,
“Good people, pray desist. It is Nell, the Protestant
whore”. Such presence of mind certainly merits a Dukedom
in my book and England’s hereditary ruling class is
much diminished by not clasping Sweet Nell much more firmly
to its bosom. I can’t really see any of our dreary paparazzi-hounded
celebs coming up with anything half as good.
As the Crown lost more and more of its prerogatives to Parliament,
politics also became a key reason for the creation of spanking
new aristocrats. Since the House of Lords was made up of hereditary
peers it tended to resist social change and on occasion this
could lead to an impasse with the House of Commons, who by
the 18thC ruled the country in the name of the Crown. During
the Great War of 1914-18, Prime Minister Lloyd George created
100 or so new peers overnight to pack the upper house and
force through the blocked legislation.
So what all this goes to show is that all of you who get some
kick out of any intrinsic qualities of character and nobility
supposedly running through your veins on account of the length
of your family tree and grand forebears, can almost certainly
attribute such qualities to a capacity for violence of psychopathic
proportions and/or the cunning to cheat and chisel your fellow
countrymen. Quite apart from anything else, you’re not
that special, practically all England’s upper middle
class can trace their lineage back to Edward III and via the
Plantagenets that plugs you into William the Conqueror and
beyond. Not only that, since one in every 200 people in the
world has Genghis Khan as their ancestor the blood of the
Golden Horde most likely courses in your veins to boot. So
you see, sex and violence have everything to do with it. And
today, you really can add, Rock & Roll. Drugs too, if
you do it on a big enough scale that is, mules need not apply.
Nowadays it really is a lot more prosaic. You can still buy
a title if you want and, depending on the amount and if you
haven’t actually been convicted of a felony, you get
to call yourself Lord So & So or Sir So & So, but
only you and your lovely wife, Lady So & So. You can’t
pass it on to you kids anymore. The House of Lords is now
completely staffed by Life Peers. Which means all those hereditary
loonies who once graced its ranks and the morning tabloids,
are no more - and we are the poorer for it.
So what did Tony Blair ask the Queen to do for 2006? Whom
do we know, among all those faceless worthies in the expanding
Civil Service and ever-shrinking armed forces, that has been
honoured or ennobled? Out of a cast of thousands, it doesn’t
amount to very much this year I’m afraid. A few lacklustre
entertainers engaged in good works toward the latter part
of their careers. Only one is likely to be known outside Britain.
Sir Johnny Dankworth, longlasting British jazzman and husband
of the much missed Cleo Laine.
Sir Tom Jones. Dear oh dear! Is old lunge hips the best Tone
can come up with to play to the gallery? I reckon we were
much better served with Sir Mick and Dame Elton.
Lesser honours to:
Rotund and gifted character actor Robbie Coltrane (more commonly
known as Rubeus Hagrid); the incredibly ancient and colossally
unfunny comic and TV personality.
Bruce Forsyth; as a sop to the working class North West and
a touch of mature Lancaster totty.
Roy Barraclough, from what has to be the world’s longest
run TV series “Coronation Street”.
And I do believe that hoary old Irish smoothie and radio presenter
Terry Wogan insinuated himself in there somewhere.
