Splendour SqualorBy 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.
Patrick Skene Catling has written nine stories for children and 12 novels
