Heirs and Graces by Eleanor Doughty review – what are aristocrats really like?

A large number of paragraphs, maybe every paragraph, of Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces starts like this: “Bert was the son of Charles “Sunny” Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough.” 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? “My dear, you thought he was called Henry? But anybody who’s anybody knows he goes by Boydy! Because of the time he once caught a ball, and ran around for a week, shouting, ‘I’m just like a real boy!’.”

Like any jargon, it’s a system designed to dominate and exclude, dressed up in the language – not really language, more like mouth-noises – of the 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’s the 9th Duke of Marlborough? Who knows which century the 6th Duke was in? I bet the Spencer-Churchills don’t even know!

In the end, the problem with any history of modern British aristocracy like Eleanor Doughty’s is not the implicit contempt of a class that believes in its own superiority to the extent that it considers the nicknames of its great-grandmother’s lurchers worthy of your time, yet will look you in the eye and tell you that hard work and merit are all that count – or to put that another way, piss on your shoes and tell you it’s raining.

The problem isn’t even the posh-adjacent, their not-quite-aristo-enough army of admirers who’ll die on the 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 – 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 – that no amount of punctuation in the world can even rescue its syntax, still less hold your interest.

So Henry “Master” Somerset, a notorious philanderer, “was asked at dinner 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, ‘for his splendid work as chair of the Marylebone Cricket Club’.” The answer is maybe fleetingly interesting but why does it matter who asked him? What’s David Somerset even doing in this sentence? Every story (and some of them could be diverting, there are some interesting deaths – 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 is the only measure of his value.

“Master” Somerset, by the way, wasn’t a good guy. “Pumped full of an extraordinarily exalted sense of self-worth and entitlement, he had little truck with good manners,” Doughty writes, going on to report a load of anecdotes in which Master is a prick. Effing and jeffing. Telling off proles for not moving fast enough, getting angry at dogs. In all this elaborate preservation of the bloodline, who bred out all the happy people?

All that said, Doughty’s 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’s like the Guardian and tofu, except their obsession connotes a value system that destroys its own young, whereas ours is just a tasty, proteinous ingredient.) She knows everything – 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’ books, the story of every great 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 undeniable quantities.