Bring back the baronetcy
Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd
AA !though the popularity of our ..hereditary sovereign knows no bounds (despite any damage done by what could be termed the modern `Mustique of Monar- chy'), the hereditary principle is now generally regarded as indefensible. Apart from one or two amiable eccentrics, no peer seems prepared to justify the existence of an hereditary element in the House of Lords. No new hereditary peerages have been created since New Year's Day 1965, though dukedoms for Princes Andrew and Edward are confidently predicted.
To complain about the inglorious il- logicality of all this has probably become a waste of time; to warn of the underlying threat to our constitution is to court deri- sion. Too much damage to the system of hereditary peerages has already been done — by Churchill declining a dukedom, by Macmillan declining an earldom, and by Edward Heath, who fulfilled Evelyn Waugh's dictum that the Tory Party never turns the clock back, compounding Wilson's failure to create any hereditary honours at all. To her credit, it is said of Mrs Thatcher that she regrets they were ever stopped, but she has failed to start them up again. (A good opportunity was missed in the Falklands Honours List.) In a spuriously egalitarian climate, the confer- ment of legislative power on an hereditary basis seems to have become a dead duck.
But has she forgotten the poor little baronetcy? The creation of this perfectly harmless hereditary honour has also lapsed since the mid-1960s for no discernible reason. The word 'baronet' suggests a `mini-baron' but baronets are definitely not peers; they have never had any legislative powers and they are styled the same as a knight, with the prefix 'Sir' before their Christian names.
The Baronetage was instituted by James I in 1611. The purpose of the Order was to help in the colonisation of Ireland. The baronets were made to pay the equivalent of 30 soldiers' wages for three years in return for the new dignity. This connection between the baronetage and colonisation was extended by Charles I to the New World when he instituted the Baronetage of Nova Scotia in 1625 — charging those who joined this Scottish Order £3,000. In return, they were to receive not just a baronetcy, but also a grant of land in Sir William Alex- ander's North American colony. These grants of land soon ceased; and the idea that a new recruit to the baronetage should pay a substantial sum of money towards colonisation in Ireland, Nova Scotia or anywhere else was likewise dropped.
Since the baronetage was instituted as a means of raising money, it was originally
limited to substantial county landowners with estates that brought in at least £1,000 a year (multiply in terms of telephone numbers to reach today's equivalent). Jane Austen's Sir Walter Elliot doubtless ap- proved of such a qualification: 'You mislead me by the term gentleman', he once said, 'I thought you were speaking of some man of property'. Landowners of such standing had, in the past, almost invariably been knighted — so that their elevation to the baronetage simply meant that the knighthood which had formerly been given to sucessive heads of their family as a mat- ter of course would in future come to them by hereditary right.
The territorial qualification for becoming a baronet was afterwards abandoned. Baronetcies, unlike peerages, were fre- quently given to gentlemen possessing neither a landed estate nor any other form of endowment. And so the baronetage in- creased through the centuries, becoming much more broadly based than the peerage. Not only were baronets of later creation on the whole people of more modest means than the original ones — as Sir Walter Elliot noted with 'pity and contempt' — but the preponderance of great county magnates in the baronetage grew still less as the descen- dants of many of the early 17th-century baronets were themselves made peers.
As landless baronets became more numerous, it was natural that there should have been some of them living by their wits. This is what probably gave rise to the tradi- tion of the 'Bad Bold Bart' in Victorian melodramas — a character not wholly to be trusted on the Turf or with a lady's virtue. No doubt because it is such a uniquely British institution, the baronetage occupies a special place in the national folklore. As well as the Villainous Baronet, with his twirling moustaches and a wicked glint in his eye, there is also an Heroic Baronet, a fine, upstanding, soldierly figure more rom- antic than any Lord. The latter is likely to have had his origin in the number of landless `You know you're really getting old when Santa Clauses start to look young.' baronets who followed a military career.
, Baronets are so boring', one 05°5 debutante was heard to observe. 'They are all descended from Lord Mayors'. ThAe reason why so many baronets of 19th an', 20th-century creation are indeed descended from Lord Mayors is that, until the end °f 1964, when baronetcies ceased to he created, it was customary for a baronetcy to be given to every Lord Mayor of London towards the end of his year of office. Since that year in the Mansion House usuallY represents several decades of service to the City and its charities, and also entails large- scale entertaining towards the cost of which each Lord Mayor is expected to contribute large sums out of his own pocket, the Lord Mayor's baronetcy was in the great ma.lorl- ty of cases very well earned.
The conferring of baronetcies on Lord
Mayors was also a way of honouring tile leading City families. In the same way, the giving of baronetcies to eminent members of the legal, medical and other professions, which was customary in the 19th and earlY- 20th centuries, conferred an hereditary distinction on leading professional families' This emphasised the fact that such farnilies, though they may be landless, are Psi as much part of the hereditary aristocracy the owners of ancestral acres. And wbat was most useful, the granting of baronetcies enabled successful men in all walks of life td be rewarded with a title which they cool hand on to their sons without swelling n'' ranks of the hereditary peerage. In his invaluable Index of Baroneidge Creations (Canterbury, 1967), C.J. Prij lists 3,482 baronetcies created between 1,",, and 1964, not forgetting the five createnc`:Jr Cromwell (including, I am happy to saY, Henry Massingberd) and 25 by t.".. Jacobites. The rate of creation became fad- ly brisk after 1911 and as Sir Martin LIn. e say of Dowhill pointed out in his definnl;, monograph on The Baronetage (2nd • s recommendedt l n , l979) between. January 1921 and June 1922 'must be c0,110 sidered tainted'. There are today over 1,1% mabnyy Lloyd ytdheG7e4orgbearonetcie baronets (including over 200 peers win) a,15 of hold baronetcies), but by no means all 'lc these appear on the Official (,)10` Baronets maintained by the Home Office I which proofs of succession should be sobat mitted. Sir Martin Lindsay noted th `Since about eight baronetcies become ex. _, the tinct each year, actuaries could tell us that within less than two hundred years tn' Order may well have disappeared'. , l! I have recently been enjoying the delightsbe of The Complete Baronetage (shortly twat reissued in a single volume at the give-avvajf price of £75 by Alan Sutton Ltd ! Gloucester) and have come to the con cT_ sion that there is much to be said for r Walter Elliot's habit of never taking dale `any book but the Baronetage'. There, _ him, you may find 'occupation for an inciele. hour, and consolation in a distressed one.' briAng it b
baronetcy is such a modest dynastic n_. ambition. So why does Mrs Thatcher not
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