TO THE MANOR BOUGHT: THE AMERICANS WHO WANT TO BE BRITISH LORDS / THE ECONOMIST

To the manor bought: the Americans who want to be British lords

The market for “noble” titles is booming

By Kent Russell

George Wentworth, Lord of Hardwick, definitely looked the part of an aristocrat: blond hair, lantern jaw, manifestly excellent skin. 

His LinkedIn profile, however, suggested a less than noble upbringing: New Hampshire childhood, degrees in graphic design from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and in management from the London School of Economics. 

George’s career saw him rise from deputy general manager at a Subway to the owner of a human-resources consultancy, Group Wentworth. 

The first time we spoke, he Zoomed me from his high-rise office on 59th Street in Manhattan, two miles and several tax brackets away from my own hovel.

George told me he had wanted to acquire a noble title since he was a teenager. 

His father had some English blood in him – not much, but enough to turn him into a rabid Anglophile – and this misty sense of connection to England had been transmitted to George. 

When he was in his early 30s, George started poking around the internet with hopes of establishing a more solid bond. 

He discovered the Manorial Society of Great Britain, a network for historical preservationists that also deals in noble titles. 

“I decided to give myself a nice gift for my 40th birthday,” George told me.

He was drawn to the manor of Hardwick in Nottinghamshire because of the area’s association with the legend of Robin Hood. 

After the Norman conquest in 1066 the manor – a large parcel of land – was awarded as a spoil of war to Roger de Busli, a baron who died without an heir. 

The manor was given to another baron, only to be confiscated when he led a rebellion against the king. 

It then passed to a distant relative of de Busli, after which it was gifted and re-gifted like a fondue set until it ended up in the possession of the Dukes of Newcastle, who incorporated it into their estate, Clumber Park. 

In 1927 the last Duke of Newcastle sold Clumber Park to pay off debts, and in 1945 the estate – including the manor of Hardwick – was acquired by the National Trust, Britain’s leading heritage organisation.

With the help of the Manorial Society, George learned that he could buy the lordship of Hardwick without buying the manor itself – for less than £10,000. 

The process was relatively straightforward: the society brokered a deal with the current titleholder; meanwhile George hired a solicitor who confirmed the title’s authenticity and ensured the relevant paperwork was in order.

There was something rather preposterous about this. 

For less money George could have visited a Moscow flea market, invested in a bin of old military medals and declared that he was to be acknowledged henceforward as a Hero of the Soviet Union. 

What exactly had he bought that could survive the indignity of being sold?

Aristocracy retains a certain mystique for Americans like George and me precisely because our identity is cast in opposition to it. 

Our politics, art and culture has at its heart the belief that titles of “nobility” conferred by a monarch are ridiculous. 

Men are created equal, and so on. 

Hereditary nobles, like all good monsters, are gross and engrossing because they defy modern democratic principles. 

As disenchantment with these principles grows, so does interest in their antithesis. 

This interest transcends our everyday fascination with the British royal family, which stems mostly from the Windsors’ made-for-TV blend of palace intrigue and celebrity gossip. 

Real aristocrats are both living fossils and tailor-made nemeses. 

They send chills down our spine and shivers up our inseam when they, say, appreciate fine art, hold their cigarettes at odd angles and answer the question, “Oh so you think you’re better than us?” simply by existing.

Naturally, I’ve always wanted to meet one. 

George told me I could do just that at the next Manorial Society get-together in London. 

At Christmas, they go carolling. 

In the summer, they hold a reception at the House of Lords. George cordially invited me to be his guest at the latter. 

“They announce you, you have to bring the invitation…” he mooned.

“Do they read your title?” I asked.

“They read your title. 

It’s wonderful.”

“Yes,” I said. “Wonderful.” 

I bade George farewell. 

Then I dropped off my wedding suit at the dry-cleaners and booked the cheapest, most stopped-over flight I could find.

Today’s English nobility has its origins in northern France. 

After the Norman conquest, William the Conqueror divvied up his new island among trusted subordinates – barons – in return for their service. 

The barons had proved their worth in war; now they functioned as the king’s tenants-in-chief – literal landlords. 

Over the course of centuries, new ranks were added to this warrior aristocracy, and the chain of command that trickled down from God to king to men-at-arms stratified further.

In 1337 Edward III created the first English duke (from the Latin dux, or leader), when he fastened a ceremonial sword to his eldest son’s girdle and proclaimed him Duke of Cornwall. 

The title of marquess was given to those who oversaw the Marches – the restive border regions close to Wales and Scotland. 

William and his original barons may have been spurred by dreams of glory and plunder, but their descendants became less pugnacious, and more recognisably “noble”, when they sublimated their bloodlust into lofty ideals of chivalry.

Come the year 1611, James I found himself in desperate need of funds for a war in Ireland, so he decided to sell the title of baronet – one grade below baron – to any interested parties who could foot the bill of £1,000 (about $300,000 in today’s money). 

This proved so profitable that later monarchs would do the same whenever they were in a pinch.

Nobles themselves began to hawk assets as the financial need arose. 

This happened more often as industrialisation, urbanisation and political reform displaced their authority and privilege. 

Downwardly mobile aristos got into the business of auctioning off family holdings – lands, mansions, silverware and spare titles.

Trade in British titles continued until the Honours Act of 1925. 

Three years earlier David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was revealed to have been flogging new peerages to donors and unsavoury characters. 

The Honours Act outlawed the sale of peerages, which entitle their holders to sit as legislators in the House of Lords.

Little could Parliament have known that their well-intentioned legislation would do nothing to stop enterprising hucksters from peddling lesser titles and God-knows-what else on the world wide web – much to the chagrin of men like Richard Bridgeman, the seventh Earl of Bradford, who operates the Fake Titles web directory. 

The earl became the foremost debunker of scam titles after he learned of a fellow who had paid to become Lord Newport – which was irksome to Bridgeman because the real Viscount Newport happened to be his son. 

It turned out that one needed little more than a colour printer and an internet connection to sell bogus certificates to credulous marks around the world. 

(The Earl of Bradford’s activism has come at a cost: the restaurants he owns have been mysteriously review-bombed on Yelp.)

The only real noble title you can legitimately buy is a Scottish barony. 

A cheaper, if not genuinely aristocratic, option is the manorial lordship. 

These feudal titles refer not to Lord lords, but to the gentlemen who managed the lords’ estates. 

Groundskeepers, if you like. 

A world of difference is contained within the preposition “of”. 

A manorial lord cannot call himself the right Lord Grandiloquence; rather, he is John Bogminder, Lord of Grandiloquence.

Manorial lordships do not come with land, though some have limited privileges such as mining rights. 

The average cost for one was about £300 in 1955 (nearly £7,000 in today’s money), £12,000 in 1998 (nearly £23,000 today), and now is around £7,000. 

Some titles command a premium because of their connotation: the manorial lordship of Stratford-upon-Avon sold for £110,000 in 1993, and Wimbledon went for £171,000 in 1996.

The pre-eminent authority on manorial lordships is, unsurprisingly, the Manorial Society of Great Britain. 

According to its acting chairman, Stephen Johnson, the society was founded in 1906 to collect and research manorial records, which had previously been scattered among private individuals. 

Some 50 years later, the society expanded into the sale of Lordships of the Manor. 

Just after the second world war, there were a number of minor nobles who needed a quick infusion of capital, and the society was happy to act as middleman – for 20% of the final price.

Some customers are “Downton Abbey” superfans who have no clue as to what they’ve bought. 

But the way Johnson described his clientele led me to believe that the appeal for most of them goes beyond mere Anglophilia. 

It’s more existential. 

Your run-of-the-mill Western citizen, deracinated and disenchanted, gets to cold solder him- or herself onto the great chain of lordly heritage for less than the cost of a used car.

At my prodding, Johnson informed me that the Manorial Society does not perform background checks on potential clients. 

“Then I would love to receive your most recent brochure,” I told him.

The Manorial Society had warned of a possible tube strike coinciding with their summer reception, so after I checked into my hotel, I changed into my suit and set off across the cobblestones to the garden entrance at the Palace of Westminster, as per George’s invitation.

Because I was clicking along sockless in brogues like a chic yet tempestuous soccer player (I forgot to pack dress socks), sightseers made way for me. 

As I walked, Big Ben tolled five, and office drones poured out of every building. 

Suddenly I found myself caught up in a full sensory assault of rumpled blazers, sensible flats, canvas tote bags, chunky plastic glasses, discreet tattoos, synergy-speak, eau de MBA and the ambient rustling of ten thousand policy papers. 

Ah, I thought to myself, my present-day betters: the technocrats. 

Once I had shoved through and reached Westminster, I took a moment to cool down by marvelling at the fishbone-intricate Gothic façade. 

The line to get in was long, and not everyone was here for the Manorial Society’s gala. 

Noble or not, each of us had to be humiliated in the manner of airport security: belts off, shoes off, wandings before admittance. 

My blistered feet attracted some attention. 

“It’s the Mediterranean style,” I explained.

Once inside, I scanned for George but couldn’t locate him. 

Cliques quickly formed, and I found myself on the periphery next to a youngish bald man who had paired Vans with his monkey suit. 

He asked if I had skateboarded here like he did. 

I said no, no, I was carried here by my hope of meeting the man who had prescinded from our base conditions and, with a sublime will to transcendence, had re-embodied the conquering lord for our new aeon. 

The man laughed in my face and said he was here for a University of Exeter work thing.

I divined that the manorial lords were those in the crowd wearing the society’s green-and-gold ribboned medallions. 

These individuals were mostly white, mostly male, mostly aged and either whippet-thin or ponderous enough to buckle a mule’s knees. 

This was dispiriting. 

Scourges of modernity these men did not appear to be.

We were herded towards an interior courtyard. 

I tried to attune myself to the heroic impulses that had inspired this fine architecture, but it was hard to do at a trot. 

“Left turn now!” cried a security guard, and we were steered into the gift shop. 

While the manorials browsed the House of Lords-branded bathrobes, playing cards, blended whisky and teddy bears, I went looking for George.

After a couple of wrong turns in the maze-like hallways of Parliament, I stumbled upon an open bar. 

From the white-gloved attendants I learned that the Manorial Society’s gala was around the corner in the Attlee Room, named after Clement, the Labour prime minister who ousted Winston Churchill’s government after the second world war. 

I accepted two glasses of wine, took a deep breath in between them, then handed my invitation to the chamberlain and made my entrance.

When my name was announced at the threshold, I paused for a moment to allow a sense of enlargement to overtake me. 

When that didn’t happen, I opened my eyes on a smallish, shabby room half-filled with clusters of people paying zero attention to the door. 

I crossed to the back and picked at a helping of crisps.

“Well, you’ve got me beat for hair,” said the man nearest to me, an older Brit in a tan three-piece suit. 

He introduced himself as the Lord of Newton, or something like that. 

His nasal voice was thick and the din was increasing. 

I nodded and said “Charmed!” as he raked two handfuls of mixed nuts from a bowl. 

Terrific sun damage to his pate as well as a handlebar moustache lent him the air of a beleaguered colonial administrator. 

We commiserated over our treatment at the hands of the palace guards. 

“The humiliation is the point,” I told the lord. 

He chuffed heartily.

The lord had expected two of his noble friends to join him here, but one was still in Mykonos and the other had had a wife die on him. 

Nonetheless, he was pleased to have a graceless Yank on hand. 

As soon as the lord had corrected my pronunciation – “‘-alogy,’ my boy, not ‘-ology’” – we dug into the topic of our respective genealogies. 

The lord’s father had been Lord of Newton, then his brother, and now the title had passed to him. 

The lineage grew more illustrious the further back you went. 

I told him that most Americans can’t trace their ancestry past their great-grandparents, after which it gets apocryphal. 

Anyway we tend toward a more cyclical view of familial saga. 

“The saying is: ‘Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” I explained between gulps of wine. 

The lord seemed to like that.

“So do these ever turn into sex-party-type things? 

Or…?” I enquired.

“It has to,” he replied. 

“It quite simply has to.”

At last I spotted George on the far side of the room, where he was holding court before a semicircle of natty younger men. 

Visibly if fleetingly alarmed to see me, George introduced his retinue: Drew, a new lord from Hell’s Kitchen; Drew’s gangly partner Adam, talc-dry in affect; Guy from El Paso,who was distressed by his mother’s refusal to leave ultra-violent Texas for the relative safety of Blighty.

In time, the conversation turned to the young lords’ portfolios of real estate. 

George explained how his lordship paired well with the Catskills home of John Francis Hylan, the former mayor of New York City, which George now owns and has kitted out with amenities such as a five-person hot tub and Street Fighter II arcade cabinet – all available for $350 per night on Airbnb, where George is a superhost. 

Drew and Adam described the property they had recently bought in an iffy part of London, where they intended to kick-start the process of gentrification.

I marvelled performatively at Drew’s new British passport, which included his title, though he appeared just as pleased to be a subject of the crown. 

Unfortunately, it would seem that Henry James was correct: separation from basic Americanness was a major draw of nobility, as though a social climber’s provincial background could be jettisoned on ascent like a rocket booster. 

That this was in fact the most bootstrappy American move possible, I did not mention to Drew.

To change the subject, I asked George about his title’s line of succession. 

“My younger brother is trying for a child,” he told me. 

“One of the first things he asked was, ‘If you die, do I get it? 

And if you don’t have any kids, will our children get it?’” George seemed undecided as to who might deserve his rank once he’s gone. 

He promised that he’d come up with some criteria eventually.

“You could give it to a nephew, as is Hardwick tradition,” I said. 

“Unless…” I shrugged, simpered, upturned my empty palms.

I decided it was time to leave. 

Johnson, the chairman, grabbed my elbow on my way out. 

“Well, what do you think?” he asked. 

“Do you think more Americans will want something like this?” 

Before I could answer, he added, “It can be good and bad, turning backwards.” 

He took pains to point out the lone Sikh in the room, his way of apologising for the general lack of diversity. 

Johnson suspected, I think, that an American might disqualify the society on this ground alone.

I left through the garden. 

By now my feet were throbbing too painfully to ignore, so I removed my brogues, climbed a fence, and descended to the bank of the Thames. 

In the brown water, I soothed my feet.

After I returned home, I managed to locate an American for whom this Cinderella fantasy of finding out he was a blueblood had actually come true. 

David Drew Howe is a middle-aged government employee from Maryland who, once upon a time, liked to blog about his heritage. 

“I was researching civil-war ancestors,” Howe told me. 

“That’s what you do when you enter your 30s.” 

One day, he received an email from a perfect stranger that contained big news: Owing to his descent (on his mother’s side) from Sir Thomas Stanley, first Earl of Derby and stepfather to King Henry VI, Howe was the rightful heir to the throne of the Isle of Man, a dependency of the British crown in the middle of the Irish Sea.

Howe was inclined to believe his strange benefactor and, with his help, went through the byzantine process of being recognised. 

This included the requisite advertisement in the centuries-old journal of record for the British government, the London Gazette, in which Howe announced his claim. 

No one challenged the notice, so Howe declared himself de jure king of Man.

This would, Howe believed, give him the right to create and bestow new titles of nobility upon whomever he chose. 

Or he could sell them, as was the plan of his benefactor – whom Howe later learned was an antiques dealer who also ran an online title mill.

Once he’d fully grasped the cynical nature of his benefactor’s business plan, Howe felt compelled to abdicate in 2015. 

(Conveniently enough, his abdication came after the full seven-episode run of his Learning Channel reality series, “Suddenly Royal”, had wrapped.) 

That was all very noble, I told Howe. 

“But, c’mon,” I pressed. 

“The discovery that one is a secret king must change one’s life, right?”

“It has no utility,” Howe answered flatly. 

“You meet new people, to a certain extent your social circle expands a little bit. 

But it’s always made me feel a little silly, like we’re all in cosplay.”

In the end, I bought myself a title. 

A little gag gift for the low, low price of €33.40 ($35). 

I got it from noble-society.net, a title purveyor wrapped in a charity bundled inside a limited liability company (LLC) offshored in the Seychelles. 

Is my new rank phoney? 

Most certainly. 

Does it matter? 

Not if I live up to it.

For I am a Pasha now, an Ottoman military designation that is still conferred informally as a mark of respect to a social superior. 

I chose it because it was the cheapest, and also because its coat of arms features a blue-green scarab flanked by two black cats. 

Indeed, you could think of the ideal aristocrat as being something akin to a cat. 

He has terrible claws but knows when to retract them. 

He is self-reliant, beautiful in every one of his movements, brave to the point of heroism, voluptuous. 

Above all, he does what he likes and likes only what he does. 

He has nothing of the lackey in his constitution; he could never be put on a leash or made to beg.

The downside is that neither the feline nor the aristocrat is fit for collective life. 

But that’s OK. According to my PDF deed of transfer, I am the co-proprietor and ruler of a plot of land in the Egyptian port city of Safaga. 

My wife gets to share in what is probably the closest we’ll get to property ownership. 

I have reached out to the LLC to ask what kind of reception we should expect when we tour our new principality and whether there’s a summer residence on the Red Sea, or what. Meanwhile we must get to work producing an heir.

Kent Russell is a writer from New York City. His most recent book is “In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida”

ILLUSTRATIONS KLAUS KREMMERZ