Splendour & Squalor by Marcus Scriven: review
Christopher Silvester is entertained by an account of the
life and crimes of the aristocracy in Marcus Scriven's Splendour & Squalour
By Christopher Silvester11:20AM GMT 23 Dec 2009
"In as far as they developed talents, it was to
misapply them; in as far as they were aware of their own deficiencies, it was
to ignore them.” Thus does Marcus Scriven introduce his cast of four scapegrace
aristocrats, whose lives coincided with a wider decline of aristocratic power
in the 20th century. These are Edward FitzGerald, 7th Duke of Leinster, an
inveterate gambler known as the “bedsit duke” after the ignominious accommodations
to which he was ultimately reduced; Victor Hervey, 6th Marquess of Bristol, who
was sent to prison as a jewellery thief in his youth and subsequently struggled
to overcome this stigma; Angus Montagu, 12th Duke of Manchester, who was dubbed
the “Crook of Manchester” by the News of the World after being jailed for fraud
in his mid-fifties; and Hervey’s estranged son John Jermyn, 7th Marquess of
Bristol, a cocaine and heroin addict who was twice jailed for drugs offences
and impelled to raid his own tomb to pay for his hedonistic habits, before
dying prematurely.
FitzGerald arguably made one of the worst bargains in
history when he mortgaged the entire future income from his family estates
during his lifetime (once he had inherited his title from his mentally
incapacitated brother) to the financier Sir Henry Mallaby-Deeley. In return,
Sir Henry agreed to pay off FitzGerald’s gambling debts of £67,500 and to give him
a lifetime annual allowance of £1,000. Predicated on the assumption that
Edward’s brother would live for a long time, the bargain came into operation a
mere 17 months later, though were it not for this agreement Edward would almost
certainly have dissipated his family fortune in some other way. He may not have
been vicious, but he was “driven by an incendiary wilfulness” and careless in
causing pain to others. “His wives, and other women,” Scriven notes, “usually
died unhappily – variously overdosed, drowned or demented.”
Hervey seems to have been the most monstrous of all these
characters. At Eton, he assaulted a fellow schoolboy with a knuckle-duster and
was expelled for keeping a book. His annual allowance while at school was
£1,000 (a staggering £269,000 in today’s money). He had been abandoned by an
unloving mother early in his childhood and inherited his title from his distant
father at the age of 19. He sought to compensate for this lack of parental
affection with a “lifelong shriek for attention”, even inventing stories about
heroic exploits during the Spanish Civil War. His conviction for jewellery
theft in 1939 became confused in the minds of others with a more notorious
hotel robbery involving violence that had taken place at around the same time.
Thus he “came to be remembered for a crime he did not commit – an oddly
appropriate fate for this most delusional of men”. His business enterprises
were disappointing rather than disastrous, but his treatment of his eldest son
was shameful.
Angus Montagu’s “hunger for companionship, for cosseting,
never diminished”. His father and older brother kept him at a distance. Like
Hervey, he was a fantasist. His desperate craving for affection rendered him
vulnerable to unscrupulous business colleagues, who implicated him in a
fraudulent transaction. He was likeable and generous, but a hopeless figure
when it came to earning a living.
Jermyn was more gifted than the other three black sheep in
this book. He had business acumen and a core of decency, but was ravaged by
drug addiction. Scriven includes a chilling description from a friend of how
Jermyn would “chase the dragon” (smoke heroin) and drink Vodka Collins while in
command of a helicopter, then switch on the autopilot while he took a brief
snooze, only waking just before he reached his destination. Like the others,
though, he liked to cast himself as the “perpetual victim” of his upbringing.
There is no particular lesson to be drawn from this quartet
of misspent lives. Instead, their capacities for self-destruction and
self-delusion are to be wondered at. Scriven guides us through each catalogue
of errors with relish and wit, but at the same time invites us to pity his
subjects for the horrible failings of their parents. When Jermyn, who was
bisexual, decided to marry, his father, Victor Hervey, by now a tax exile in
Monaco, decided not to attend the ceremony. He rubbed salt in the wound, taking
out an advertisement in The Times to say that he would not be attending his
son’s wedding because of a prior engagement in London.
Splendour & Squalor: the Disgrace and Disintegration of
Three Aristocratic Dynasties by Marcus Scriven
Scandalous tales of excess, self-indulgence and sleaze among
British aristocrats
Thu, Dec 31, 2009, 00:00
PATRICK SKENE CATLING
Splendour Squalor By Marcus Scriven Atlantic, 397pp, £25
SCHADENFREUDE IS a German word with no one-word English
equivalent. But the neurotic kink it denotes, the delight derived from another
person’s misfortune, is universal. Never before have I read a book that so
relentlessly exemplifies this human foible as Marcus Scriven’s collection of
case histories of British aristocrats staggering down the primrose path to
perdition.
The stomachs of many otherwise normal readers have long been
inured to any amount of garbage, with appetites whetted for scandal, no matter
how loathsome, especially if it discredits members of families once rich and
powerful and considered to be socially superior.
Scriven writes in the manner of an indignant moralist as he
doles out the sleaze. Though he has chosen four extreme examples of
aristocratic squalor, he evidently abominates the whole House of Lords and all
its unearned privileges. His book’s epigraph is a quotation from Denis Healey,
one of the Labour Party’s most acerbic veterans of the class war: “The upper
classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent.”
Scriven read history at Oxford University. There are
fleeting passages in this book, his first, indicating that he is still
seriously interested in the subject. The decline of the English landed gentry
began in the 19th century, he relates, when the great landowners’ income from
their land shrank from colossal to merely enormous.
One factor he cites is the importation of grain in refrigerator
ships. The industrial revolution created rival new wealth in the cities. In
spite of increased taxation, hereditary peerages maintained potent though
diminished influence in the 20th century, but the aristocratic mystique was
irreparably corrupted by the sale of titles during the Lloyd George
premiership, a practice that has continued to the present day.
“At the end of the 17th century,” Scriven writes, “there had
been only 19 dukes, three marquesses, and a total of 152 earls, viscounts and
barons.” By the end of the 20th century there were more than 1,000 of them.
Scriven presents five genealogical pages of “simplified and
selective lineages” of his four principal scapegoats, diagrams of complex
family interrelationships between Fitzgeralds, Duncombes, Grahams, Herveys,
Montagus and others.
Then he gets down to spilling the beans. He concentrates on
men who were recreationally obsessed not so much with hunting, shooting and
fishing as with drink, drugs, gambling and bisexual promiscuity.
“Adultery,” Scriven writes, “was invariably a useful
antidote to the inexpressible boredom of so much aristocratic life.”
Edward Fitzgerald, the seventh duke of Leinster, ran through
£400 million, suffered a series of bankruptcies and took his own life; Victor
Hervey, the sixth marquess of Bristol, was sentenced to three years’ penal
servitude for a jewel robbery; Angus Montagu, the “absurdly stupid” and grossly
overweight 12th duke of Manchester, spent time in a prison in Virginia and
ended up broke; John Hervey, the drug-addicted, homosexual seventh marquess of
Bristol, had a New York entourage of “le tout Eurotrash”, collected luxurious
cars, of which the most ostentatious was “an eight-seater, six-door Mercedes
previously owned by pope Paul VI and rock star Rod Stewart”, and is believed to
have shot a peacock.
According to Scriven, it has often been said that the
Herveys were “genetically destined for damnation: programmed for lives of
cruelty, self-indulgence, untamed lust and ultimate self-destruction”.
By the end of my wade through all this, I turned with relief
from Burke’s peerage to the relative purity of the pigs in Animal Farm.
Through the Keyhole: Sex, Scandal and the Secret Life of the
Country House
by Susan C. Law
Scandal existed long before celebrity gossip columns, often
hidden behind the closed doors of the Georgian aristocracy. But secrets were
impossible to keep in a household of servants who listened at walls and spied
through keyholes. The early mass media pounced on these juicy tales of
adultery, eager to cash in on the public appetite for sensation and expose the
shocking moral corruption of the establishment. Drawing on a rich collection of
original and often outrageous sources, this book brings vividly to life stories
of infidelity in high places – passionate, scandalous, poignant and tragic. It
reveals how the flood of print detailing sordid sexual intrigues created a
national outcry and made people question whether the nobility was fit to rule.
Susan C. Law is a journalist and historian. Her work has
been published in a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including The Times
Higher Education Supplement, BBC History Magazine and London Evening Standard.
Dr Law completed her PhD in History at Warwick University, and has spent many
years researching the 18th and 19th century aristocracy, servants, family life
and country houses.
A deft analysis of sex, power, and the media in the Regency
era describes how the scandalous private lives of the Georgian aristocracy were
used to undermine hereditary power
The potent allure of sex, money, and power has always
created a public appetite for juicy tales of scandal in the hidden private
lives of the English aristocracy. Millions of viewers are captivated by the
television series Downton Abbey and screen versions of Jane Austen novels,
while visitor numbers to National Trust stately homes have never been higher.
The real and fictional dramas being enacted inside country houses were just as
compelling for audiences in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the cultural
media of the day exploited stories of aristocratic adultery for commercial and
political motives in newspapers, novels, and satirical prints. But such attacks
on the aristocracy’s moral fitness to rule ultimately undermined traditional
hereditary power and marked the first steps towards its decline. This book
draws on a rich collection of original sources, bringing vividly to life a cast
of engaging characters and their stories of infidelity—passionate, scandalous,
poignant, and tragic.
Country House Society: The Private Lives of England’s Upper
Class After the First World War by Pamela Horn
When the cataclysm of the First World War impacted on
British society, it particularly affected the landed classes, with their long
military tradition. Country houses, as in a variety of popular TV dramas, were
turned into military hospitals and convalescent homes, while many of the
menfolk were killed or badly injured in the hostilities. When the war ended
efforts were made to return to the pre-war world. Pleasure seeking in
night-clubs, sporting events and country-house weekends became the order of the
day. Many of the old former rituals such as presentation at Court for
debutantes and royal garden parties were revived. Yet, overshadowing all were
the economic pressures of the decade as increased taxation, death duties and
declining farm rentals reduced landed incomes. Some owners sold their mansions
or some land to newly enriched businessmen who had prospered as a result of the
war. Others turned to city directorships to make ends meet or, in the case of
the women, ran dress shops and other small businesses. The 1920s proved a
decade of flux for High Society, with the light-hearted dances, treasure hunts
and sexual permissiveness of the 'Bright Young People' contrasting with the
financial anxieties and problems faced by their parents' generation. Pamela
Horn draws on the letters and diaries of iconic figures of the period, such as
Nancy Mitford and Barbara Cartland, to give an insight into this new post-war
era.
REVIEW: Country House Society: The Private Lives of
England’s Upper Class After the First World War by Pamela Horn
January 2, 2014 by Evangeline Holland
Country House Society: The Private Lives of England's Upper
Class After the First World War by Pamela Horn
The late social historian Pamela Horn is in top form with
her final release, Country House Society: The Private Lives of England’s Upper
Class After the First World War. I own a number of Dr. Horn’s books, and prize
them for her thoroughness, her compulsively readable prose, and her unerring
ability to let primary sources (letters, diaries, memoirs, articles) speak
through her writing. Country House Society is no different–in six lengthy
chapters, Horn takes us through the swift changes to English high society in
the wake of the Great War.
Though many hoped to turn the clock backwards to 1914, the
carnage and destruction of the war proved to be a point of no return for both
aristocrats and the people who served them. I winced a bit while reading about
the crippling costs of the great landed estates:
In July 1921…in a leading article headed ‘Landowners Bled
White’, Country Life examined a number of ‘typical’ estates selected from
different parts of Scotland. In one case the figures showed that whereas parish
and borough rates, land tax, heritor’s assessment, and other public and
parochial burdens had amounted to £2,320 in 1911–12, by 1920–21 they had
climbed to £4,838. The costs of management had similarly grown from £1,210 in
1911–12 to £1,677 in 1920–21, while renewals, repairs and improvements had
risen from £3,069 at the earlier date to £4,983. Income tax had nearly
quadrupled, from £636 in 1911–12 to £2,342 in 1920–21. No personal expenses,
according to Country Life, were included in these figures.
A very interesting section of the book deals with the
General Strike of 1926, where young men arrived from Oxford and Cambridge and
debutantes set aside their ballgowns to became “scabs” when 1.7 million workers
in the transport and heavy industries set down their tools. The irony of how
willing the aristocrats were to pitch in to keep the country running is that
this very action further marginalized the working classes once the strike
ended. Furthermore, beneath the “froth” of the chapters devoted to the London
Season and other social pursuits, there lurked the frenetic melancholy and
unease of both the Edwardians and their Bright Young Thing offspring that
lingered from WWI. Horn does not fail to present a biting, yet balanced
portrait of the hedonistic coterie of upper class men and women who took their
fun a bit too far. Though Country House Society does discuss life in the 1930s,
the focus is mostly on the 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash and the rise of
Hitler made frivolity and selfishness appear in poor taste. Accompanying the
text are 16 pages of fantastic photographs and period illustrations.
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