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All were tried ‘by their peers’; meaning by other titled persons. This right continued until 1948, as did the tradition of the silken rope, with which aristocrats could be hanged more soothingly than with hemp.
A further right was ‘privilege of peerage’, which could be pleaded by those found guilty of a first offence. It did not extend to murder, but it allowed a peer to walk free from a lesser charge.
In 1760, for instance, the 4th Earl Ferrers shot a man named John Johnson, a steward for his family estate.
This was the last occasion to date on which an aristocrat would be tried and convicted of murder in England.
That same year, 1841, the right to plead exemption from justice for a first offence was ended, but nobody really believed that privilege of peerage did not carry on regardless.
It was not until 1891 that the practice of wife-confinement (by then very rare) was ruled unequivocally illegal.
The late 1870s had seen the upper class at the tranquil zenith of its fortunes, sitting among the ancestral portraits as if all had at last been achieved. Seven thousand families owned four-fifths of the British Isles. Two hundred and fifty families had 30,000 acres or more.
Decline began in the 1880s, although it did not immediately show its inexorable face. It was propelled by the forces of democracy: the doubling of the size of the electorate meant that the social status quo could not hold. The 1881 Irish Land Act gave far greater rights to tenants. The 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ imposed British land taxes. When the House of Lords made trouble over it, Lloyd George simply took them on and cut their powers. ‘Oh these dukes,’ he said, ‘how they oppress us.’
It was rebellion against his parents again, albeit of the perverse kind that sends the rebel strutting defiantly into White’s.
Lady Osborne, ‘the Chancellor’s granny,2 who was as bent as a corkscrew. She was bliss. She always wore a wig, and when she got smashed, which was most nights, the wig would always go off at one side.’
‘Aspers’, one of his club regulars would later say, ‘did more damage to the landed gentry than Marx and Lenin put together.’
‘Casinos should be the preserve of the rich: it keeps these people away from the rest of us.’
It was only fair that she wanted to go there with her husband. Yet her presence became a clamp upon his mood: although she took up very little space, one was always somehow very aware of her, a tiny white succubus amid the merriment.
Most of the Clermont women had married a place in the world, as much as a man.
Had he won the custody case, and acquired his family without its disruptive element (as he saw it), it is entirely possible that he would have gambled less.
There’s actually no basis to think this is true or none that the author bothers to explain.
‘What a pity! Good nannies are so hard to find’?
Elwes was accompanied to the hospital by Christina and Lucan’s brother Hugh. As he entered Veronica’s room, she fixed him with a black eye and said: ‘Well, now who’s mad? Now who’s the one with paranoia, eh?’
‘I said, if she’d been my wife, I’d have bashed her to death five years before and so would you. I said, don’t come that line with me...’
