#peerage of Great Britain

[roehenstart]

George V of Hannover by William Essex.

[kingoftheu]

Arms I made up for Jane Roland (and later Emily’s) Ducal House. Roland’s titles are never mentioned in the books, but I have her created Duchess of Carmarthen. Carmarthen was a major center in Wales prior to industrialization. It is meant something of an insult from the government because the Welsh are icky, just like women and aviators. The Rolands, naturally, do not care one bit and rather take a liking to the place. Most estates they are awarded are in England, however. They do not currently have a seat because they have dragons to fly. Might get some subsidiary titles (maybe something named for Scotland near Loch Laggan) so that Emily can be a Countess.

The dragon is not a perfect longwings, but it is blue, and holding a grenade to symbolize the guns and bombs. Four yellow stripes on green for an Admiral of the Air. Golden Laurels for Victory. A ducal coronet above. Jane is extremely mad that the College of Arms said she couldn’t swear in her motto, and refuses to use Latin or French until someone suggests “Excidium.” The dragon himself is quite pleased with this, although wishes his portrait was better. But the poor College of Arms people are already so sad about his hastily put together arms that Jane just left it.

[diemelusine]

Blenheim Palace from the water terraces, Oxfordshire. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:DeFacto

[chaxan08]

British Titles

I usually don't share posts of this type, but I've taken the liberty of doing so because I've read several fanfics and seen too many posts both here and on TikTok, in which it's more than evident that many people don't know how British noble titles worked in the 18th and 19th century. This is something I've seen more in the Bridgerton fandom, but many content creators or writers from other fandoms have made the same mistakes when interpreting noble titles.

First of all, I would like to clarify something. English and British noble titles are not exactly the same, although they are related. The following explains the difference and the historical context:

Historical Context.

England:

Before the formation of the United Kingdom, England had its own system of noble titles.

Titles such as duke, marquess, earl, viscount, and baron were common.

2. Great Britain:

In 1707, with the Act of Union, England and Scotland united to form the Kingdom of Great Britain.

After this union, noble titles became titles of the Kingdom of Great Britain.

3. United Kingdom:

In 1801, with the incorporation of Ireland through the Act of Union, the Kingdom of Great Britain became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

This further expanded the scope of noble titles.

Noble Titles.

Despite these political changes, the titles themselves (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron) remained consistent in terms of hierarchy and honor. The main difference was the realm and origin of the title:

English Titles:

Referred specifically to those created in the Kingdom of England before 1707.

Examples: Duke of Norfolk, Marquess of Winchester, Earl of Derby.

2. British Titles:

Refers to those created after 1707 in the Kingdom of Great Britain and later in the United Kingdom.

Examples: Duke of Marlborough, Marquess of Rockingham, Earl of Chatham.

Differences and Similarities.

Similarities:

The hierarchy and responsibilities of the titles remained the same, regardless of the change in the kingdom's designation.

Titles granted by the British crown maintained the same forms of address and privileges.

2. Differences:

British titles cover a broader scope, including Scotland and Ireland (later Northern Ireland).

English titles were specific to the Kingdom of England before the formation of Great Britain.

In short, while English and British noble titles are part of the same hierarchy and nobility system, the main distinction lies in the political and historical context in which they were created. During the 18th and 19th centuries, this difference was based on whether the titles originated before or after the unions that first formed Great Britain and later the United Kingdom.

Now then, with that said, I want to mention that my main reference for this is the article 'ENGLISH TITLES IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES' by Jo Beverley, who is a Member of the RWA Hall of Fame for Regency Romance. Here is the link if you want to read the original article: On Titles (jobev.com)

It is also important to mention that, as Jo Beverley said, this brief run-down of English titles is for use by fiction writers. It is by no means comprehensive, but covers the more common situations arising in novels set in the above periods.

Now, the peerage basically runs according to primogeniture, ie the eldest son gets nearly everything. If a peer has no eldest son, the title and possessions that belong to it go to the next male heir, probably a brother or nephew.

There are a very few titles that can pass to a female if there is no direct heir, but they will revert to the male line when the lady bears a son. (Such as the monarchy.) Some titles can automatically pass through a female heir (when there is no male heir) and most can be revived by subsequent generations by petitioning to the Crown. But that's getting into more complicated areas. If your plot depends on something unusual, please do research it thoroughly before going ahead.

As Beverley said, this is a bit more complicated and requires further research if it's something you wish to incorporate into your work, especially if it's set in the 18th or 19th centuries. In the 20th century, this was more common. A clear example would be Lord Mountbatten (1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma), who had no sons, only two daughters. Therefore, he passed his title to his firstborn, Patricia Knatchbull (née Mountbatten). Thanks to this title, the Countess was entitled to a seat in the House of Lords, where she remained until 1999, when a House of Lords Act removed most hereditary peers from the chamber.

But returning to the main topic, the eldest son is called the heir apparent, as he is undoubtedly the heir. If there is no such son, the next in line is called the heir presumptive because, however improbable (such as the duke being on his deathbed), there remains a possibility of a closer heir being born. Therefore, an heir presumptive does not hold the title of heir, if there is one. (See below about heir's titles.)

If a peer dies leaving a wife but no son, the heir inherits unless the widow says she might be with child. It is for her to do that. If she stays silent, it is assumed that she is not. If she's pregnant, everything waits until the child is born.

These last two paragraphs can be perfectly illustrated by an example that many know. In 'When he was wicked', after the death of John Sterling, Earl of Kilmartin, Michael Sterling is not immediately named as the new Earl upon his cousin's death, as Francesca announces her pregnancy. But since she had a miscarriage, there was no longer a possible heir to the late Earl of Kilmartin, and therefore, the title is immediately inherited by Michael.

Continuing with the main topic, an heir must be legitimate at birth to inherit a title, though that could mean a marriage ceremony performed while the mother is in labor. A peer may raise bastards with devotion and/or marry the mother later, but a bastard child can never be his legal heir.

It's also crucial to mention that peers automatically had seats in the House of Lords. Note, however, that courtesy titles (those held by heirs) do not give seats, or any of the other privileges of the peerage.

Something else that is highly important to clarify, as confusion is quite common, is that most peers do not use their surnames as their title. Thus, the usual pattern would be something like Sebastian Burgoyne, Earl of Malzard. He is Lord Malzard NEVER Lord Burgoyne. (Or, for that matter, Lord Sebastian.) As an author, you might like variety, but take as a general rule is that no one ever had two forms of address.

THE RANKS OF THE PEERAGE

Duke.

Leaving aside royalty, this is the highest rank. His wife is the Duchess. They will be duke and duchess of something.

If we use the famous main couple from Bridgerton Season 1, the example would be: Duke and Duchess of Hastings. Address is "Your Grace", though familiars may address them just as Duke and Duchess. Like, "Fine weather for shooting, eh, Duke?" or may address the duke by title. "Care for more port, Hastings?"

The duke will also have a family name, that is, a surname, but he will not use it in the normal course of events. And something crucial that is also commonly confused, the duchess does NOT use the surname at all. Continuing with the same example, if Daphne Bridgerton marries the Duke of Hastings (whose surname is Basset), she will be the Duchess of Hastings and will informally sign as Daphne Hastings, NEVER as Daphne Basset.

The duke's eldest son is his heir and will have his father's second-best title as his courtesy title. Nearly all peers have a number of titles marking their climb up the ranks. The heir to a duke is often the next lowest ranking peer, a marquess, but the title could, however, be an earldom, or even a viscountcy. For example, the eldest son of Daphne and Simon, the Duke and Duchess of Hastings, holds the courtesy title that his father had when the Late Duke of Hastings was still alive: Earl of Clyvedon.

Important note, a courtesy title does not give the holder a seat in the House of Lords or other privileges of the peerage.

If the heir has a son before the heir becomes duke, that son will take the next lowest title as a courtesy title. If the heir dies before his father, his eldest son becomes the heir apparent and takes his father's title.

Apart from the heir, a duke's sons are given the courtesy title Lord with their Christian name. (Lord + firstname + surname). Continuing with the example of the Duke and Duchess of Hastings, assuming that like in the book, they also have David and Edward in the series, their courtesy titles would be: Lord David Basset and Lord Edward Basset. They are NEVER Lord Basset or Lord David Hastings and Lord Edward Hastings.

All duke's daughters are given the courtesy title (Lady + firstname + surname). And continuing with the same example, the daughters of the Duke and Duchess of Hastings, Belinda and Caroline, would be: Lady Belinda Basset and Lady Caroline Basset. Also, they are NEVER Lady Basset or Lady Belinda Hastings and Lady Caroline Hastings.

And also, if they marry a commoner, they retain the title. Let's say Lady Belinda marries Mr. Sticklethwait, she becomes Lady Belinda Sticklethwait. But if she marries a peer, she adopts his title. If Lady Belinda marries the Earl of Herrick, she becomes Countess of Herrick, Lady Herrick. And if she marries the holder of a courtesy title, then she may use his title or her birth title as she wishes.

I make this clarification because it's the most common mistake in these types of novels. Note that in all cases, titles like Lord or Lady with both first and surname (eg. Lady Anne Middleton) and Lord or Lady "last name" or "title" (Lady Middleton) are exclusive. No one can be both at the same time. Moreover, Lord or Lady "firstname" is a title conferred at birth. It CANNOT be gained later in life except when the father accedes to a title and thus raises his family.

So, Lady Mary Smith is not Lady Smith and vice versa. Lord John Brown in not Lord Brown and vice versa. If Mary Smith marries Lord Brown she becomes Lady Brown, NOT Lady Mary. (If she marries Lord John Brown, she becomes Lady John Brown. Yes, it may sound odd to modern ears, but the past is, as they say, a different country. That's the charm of historical fiction.)

Marquess.

This is the next rank. (As above, it can be spelled marquis or marquess, but in either case is pronounced markwess.)

Similar to the duke, he will be the Marquess of something, for example: He is Richard Byron, the Marquess of Salisbury, or Lord Salisbury, or simply Salisbury to his family. His wife is the Marchioness of Salisbury or Lady Salisbury. She would sign with her firstname and title, for example: Diana Salisbury, NEVER Diana Byron.

His heir apparent takes his next highest title as a courtesy title (eg. Earl of Cranborne). All other sons have the title of Lord with their first and surname (eg. Lord Arthur Byron and Lord Albert Byron, NEVER Lord Byron or Lord Arthur Salisbury and Lord Albert Salisbury). All daughters have the title of Lady with their first and surname (eg. Lady Alexandra Byron and Lady Amelia Byron, NEVER Lady Byron or Lady Alexandra Salisbury and Lady Amelia Salisbury).

Earl.

He will nearly always be earl of something. His wife is the Countess. If we take another famous couple from Bridgerton, they would refer to him as "the Earl of Kilmartin" or "Lord Kilmartin," or simply "Kilmartin" among family. His wife will be the Countess of Kilmartin or Lady Kilmartin, and she will sign as Francesca Kilmartin. In the same way as with the wife of a duke or marquess, considering that the Earl of Kilmartin is named John Stirling, Francesca will NEVER be called Francesca Stirling. That's why in the series, when she introduces herself to Michaela, she says that her name is now Kilmartin and NOT Stirling.

It's important to mention that some Earls do not use 'of' like Earl Spencer, and in that case, the family surname is the same as the title (following the previous example, the surname would be Spencer), but this is quite unusual and I think it should be avoided in fiction unless it's a crucial plot point.

As with a duke or marquess, the earl's heir will take the next lowest title as a courtesy title, and the heir's son, the next again. Continuing with the example of the Kilmartins, it's not very clear what the courtesy title for John Sterling II (son of Francesca and Michael in the books) is, but if Michael Sterling is the Earl of Kilmartin and has a subsidiary title of Viscount, then their eldest son, John Sterling II, would use the courtesy title of Viscount Glenmore or Lord Glenmore. If there is no specific subsidiary title, then the eldest son would simply be known as Lord John Stirling.

All the daughters of an earl are given the courtesy title: Lady + their first name. Again, using the Kilmartins as an example: Lady Janet Stirling and NEVER Lady Janet Kilmartin. Younger sons of an earl, however, are merely "The Honorable" which is not used in casual speech. So, assuming in the books Michael and Francesca had another son, for example, Michael Stirling II, he would simply be The Honorable Michael Stirling, but in casual speech, he would simply be referred to as Mr. Michael Stirling or just Mr. Stirling.

Viscount.

His wife is a Viscountess. He will not use 'of'. He will be, for example, Viscount Bridgerton, usually known as Lord Bridgerton, or just Bridgerton. His wife will be known as Lady Bridgerton and will sign herself Kathani Bridgerton.

His heir has no special title. All children are known as "The Honorable". Continuing with the example of the Viscount and Viscountess Bridgerton, their children would be called:

*The Honorable Edmund Bridgerton, and simply be referred to as Mr. Edmund Bridgerton.

*The Honorable Miles Bridgerton, and simply be referred to as Mr. Miles Bridgerton.

*The Honorable Charlotte Bridgerton, and simply be referred to as Miss Charlotte Bridgerton.

*The Honorable Mary Bridgerton, and simply be referred to as Miss Mary Bridgerton.

Baron.

This is the lowest rank in the peerage. His wife is a Baroness. NOTE that the terms baron and baroness are only used in the most formal documents, or when the distinction has to be made elsewhere. General usage is simply to call them Lord and Lady.

She will sign with her name and title. The children are known as "The Honorable".

Using another character from Bridgerton, if we assume that Colin and Penelope Bridgerton's son is named Elliot, then Elliot Bridgerton, the new Lord Featherington, would sign as Lord Featherington and NEVER as Lord Bridgerton. Therefore, his wife would also sign with his title, that is, Featherington. For example, if the wife's name is Elizabeth, then she would be Lady Featherington and would sign as Elizabeth Featherington, and NEVER as Elizabeth Bridgerton or Lady Bridgerton.

Baronet.

The next in the ranking—and not of the nobility—is Baronet. A baronet is addressed as Sir + first name + surname. For example, using another couple from the Bridgerton universe, Sir Phillip Crane. His wife would be called Lady + surname. For example, Lady Crane and not Lady Eloise Crane unless she is the daughter of a duke, marquess, or earl (which is not the case). She would sign with her full name, as Eloise Crane.

His children have no special distinction. However, the title is inheritable. So, continuing to use Sir Phillip as a reference, when he dies, his baronetcy will pass to his eldest son Oliver, who will then be called Sir Oliver.

It's worth mention that although in the series Oliver is NOT Sir Phillip's biological son, he still married Marina before the birth of the twins and acknowledged them both as his own, so the baronetcy title will pass without any issue to Oliver. In the event that he did not acknowledge them as his children or that Sir Phillip and Marina married after the birth of the twins, then the title of Sir Phillip would pass to his next legitimate son, Frederick (son of Sir Phillip and Eloise in the books).

Knight.

A knight is essentially treated the same as a baronet, but with the difference that it is a lifetime title only. His wife will be Lady + surname.

OTHER MATTERS

Dowagers

When a titled lady is widowed she becomes a dowager, but the practice has generally been not to use that title until the heir takes a wife, since there can be confusion about who the true Lady Bridgerton is, for example.

And even if she has a daughter-in-law, in general usage she would still be referred to by the simple title unless there was likely to be confusion. So, if the Dowager Viscountess Bridgerton was at a house party while her daughter-in-law was in London, people would not be constantly referring to her as the Dowager Viscountess.

Female titles in their own right

There are a few, very few, titles that can pass to a daughter if there is no son, as in the Royal Family, for example. In this case, the usage is the same as if they were the wife of a peer of that rank, but their husband gains NO title from the marriage, just as the Duke of Edinburgh was not king.

A Peeress in her Own Right retains her title after marriage, and if her husband's rank is the superior one, she is designated by the two titles jointly, the inferior one last. Or she can say what form she wants to use. (eg The Marchioness of Rothgar is also the Countess of Arradale by right. She chooses to be Lady Rothgar and Arradale in the most formal situations, Lady Rothgar in general, but Lady Arradale in private, especially when attending to her duties as Countess of Arradale. Unusual situations do tend to get complicated.) Her hereditary claim to her title holds good in spite of any marriage, and will be passed on.

Since the husband gains no title from such a marriage, it's possible to have the Countess of Arbuthnot married to Mr. Smith.

Her eldest son will be her heir and take her next lowest title. If she has no son, her eldest daughter will be her heir, but until she becomes the peer she will hold only the title that comes from her birth — eg. Lady Anne — if any, because an eldest daughter is always an heir presumptive. There might still be a boy.

The most common errors observed in novels:

Interchanging courtesy titles like Lady Mary Smith and Lady Smith.

Interchanging peerage titles, as when Michael Downs, Earl of Rosebury is variously known as Lord Rosebury, Lord Downs, and Lord Michael Downs.

Applying titles that don't belong, as when Jane Potts marries Viscount Twistleton and erroneously becomes Lady Jane, a title form that can only come by birth.

Having the widow of just about anyone, but especially a peer, remarry before time has elapsed to be sure she is not bearing a child. Or rather, whose child it is that she bears!

Having the heir presumptive assume the title and powers before the widow has made it clear that she's not going to produce an heir.

Having an adopted son inherit a title. Legal adoption was not possible in England until the twentieth century, and even now an adopted son cannot inherit a title. Even if the son is clearly the father's offspring, if he wasn't born after a legal marriage, he cannot inherit the father's title. However, since they didn't have DNA testing, a child was assumed to be legitimate unless the father denied it from the first. Even if the son turns out to look suspiciously like the vicar, the father cannot deny him later. This, I assume was to avoid the chaos of peers coming up with all sorts of excuses to switch heirs on a whim.

Having a title left in a will, which follows from the above. A title cannot be willed to whomever the peer in question chooses. It goes according to the original letters patent, which almost always say that it will go to the oldest legitimate male in direct descent. The property can be left elsewhere, unless it is entailed, but the title goes by legitimate blood.

Having an heiress (ie a daughter without brothers) inherit a title and convey it to her husband. It could be done — anything could — by special decree of the Crown, but it was not at all normal.

Now, when you've arrived at the title you want to give your character, perform an internet search to see if it exists. You can also check The Peerage or do an advanced search on Google Books. You wouldn't want to give your fictional character a title that was already in use at that time. Additionally, some readers will be knowledgeable about the real nobility and it could disrupt the fictional reality you're trying to create.

If you really like the title but it already exists or existed, you can modify it while still retaining its appeal. For example, if Lord Amesbury exists, you could create Lord Aymesbury or Lord Embury. If your character's family has been in Suffolk for generations, names of places in Suffolk can provide ideas for names.

I hope this helps, although I'm sure it can be subject to debate and improvement.

[writtenbygracewilliams]

Peerages & Titles: everything you need to know

[A heavily researched 6.5k+ hyperfocus from my Google docs, to help your fanfics]

Disclaimers:

Sources are not consistent. You’d think they would be. They are not. I’ve corralled several reliable websites and books into something that I think makes sense, is accessible, and fits [largely] with portrayals in Bridgerton/modern media.

That being said, Bridgerton/modern media make mistakes. You might notice in reading through all this that there is something different to how it is portrayed in media. Feel free to discuss with me, I could very well be wrong, but also know that you are consuming fiction and this is intended to be fact.

However, whilst trying to be correct, many sources are modern and it is difficult to confirm how titling and forms of address may have changed in the past 200–300 years. Though, I imagine not greatly given the peerage and aristocracy still exists.

Where possible, I have used Bridgerton characters as the examples so that it is easier to make sense/contextualise it. Names in red are not characters, just placeholder names. Hence I have reduced, reused, recycled these names.

On the note of using names from within the Bridgerverse, the Marquess of Ashdown was not married when we met him. I’d also like to know what Julia Quinn has against Earls and Marquesses, Marquesses especially.

Second note of using names in the Bridgerverse, I refuse to use Baron of Kent because it is a factual/historical disaster. More on that here.

This only applies to aristocracy of Britain/UK [minimally Ireland, read here], if I do more of Europe/anywhere else I will link it below but let me know if you want that.

All of these posts may be edited/expanded at any time as my research continues.

Further posts:

General info, start here!

Glossary

A brief history of the peerages/titles

The different peerages [England, Great Britain, United Kingdom, Scotland, Ireland]

How royal titles work

Peerage applications and functions in the modern day

Privileges of the peerage

How titles apply to the child of peers

Rank and precedence within the peerage

Titling rules for non peers

Other roles and titles I can give address information for

Female inheritance of titles

Territorial designations, and when the surname differs from the title name

Haven’t decided if I will do a post on grammar rules when writing peers because despite studying etiquette and titles for over a decade, and linguistics and grammar for seven years, the grammar/capitalisation rules of writing peers broke my final straw of sanity. Let me know how much you want it, or just drop any specific questions.

Put any questions about any of this in my ask :)

–GW xo

[curioushabitforarivergod]

I LOVE the historical context you add to tom riddle meta. im curious. at that time how important and wealthy would tom riddle sr likely have been? i.e. how nice was the life that Tom missed out on by growing up in the orphanage instead of with his dad?

Omg thanks so much!

We don't actually know much about the Riddles. They likely lived in Yorkshire, Lancashire, or the very west of Cornwall (200 miles from Surrey as per Goblet of Fire), but I think it's more likely they lived in the North, specifically in Yorkshire. The Riddle's name is probably locational rather than profession based, and from a village called Ryedale in the North Riding of Yorkshire. It was probably mutated over time because spelling wasn't standardised or even close to standardisation when last names were beginning to become a thing (roughly 11th century in Britain).

Okay, now the reason I went into that is because I believe the Riddles were the big guys back in the day (by which I mean late medieval period c. 1100s until the late 1500s) and were the kind of wealthy landowners who employed serfdom potentially even past the Peasant's Revolt of 1381. I know a lot of people place them as merchants who made money from trade but based on their name and location (Yorkshire is famous for its sheep) I think it's more likely they were landowners. They probably had pretty solid generational wealth, potentially even being landed gentry (a class of gentry who made their money on leasing land and known as lords of the manor), although I'm fairly certain they lost most of this later. I don't think they ever were part of the peerage (the level above gentry in the British aristocracy who hold hereditary titles) but gentry usually married into peerage and vis versa so they were likely quite connected despite never being "Lords" themselves. They got their name through their association with the village as the big whigs.

Even if the Riddles had kept up serfdom for a century or so after the Peasants Revolt (entirely plausible), serfdom was abolished by Elizabeth I in 1574. Whenever they stopped working as part of the feudal system, I don't think it had major impacts on their wealth. Like I mentioned above, they were probable landed gentry, making their money by leasing out land and still profiting off the lower classes.

With the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Depression of the 1870s, I think they would've lost quite a bit of money, potentially even their place as landed gentry. They would've still been quite rich, but their wealth was probably in decline and they had to look elsewhere. Maybe they never succeeded in this.

The thing is, we know next to nothing about the Riddles and the family we see through Tom Riddle's eyes is one that's lost status and connections because of the scandal of Riddle Snr. having run off with Merope without being married and (rumours have it!) having a child out of wedlock. The Riddle family probably declined economically with WWII (and to a lesser extent WWI) as well, although they never got a chance to really see the era through properly due to their… untimely deaths.

I think if Tom had been raised by the Riddles, they may not have fallen so far, providing Riddle Snr. married Merope before her death, or at least had falsified documents that he did. Tom would've still grown up in declining wealth, but more than enough money still to not have to work. Life for Tom would've been far better, what without starvation, disease, poverty and later, bombs and would've remain largely untouched by the war. The Great Depression wouldn't have it so hard, and Tom, not being surrounded by so much death, would've been fundamentally altered. I'm not sure what the Riddle's reaction to Tom being magic would've been like, but I'll leave that to any writers. All in all, Tom missed out on a far better life.

Thank you so much for the ask! It really made my day!!

[portrait-paintings]

Edward, Viscount (later Earl) Ligonier

Artist: Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727-1788)

Date: 1770

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA, United States

Artwork Description

In this full-length portrait, Lord Ligonier is shown next to his horse. In his right hand, which rests on the horse's saddle, the sitter holds a black and gold-laced hat, while his left hand is on his sword hilt.

Biography

Edward Ligonier, a soldier, was born in 1740, the only son of Anne (Murray) Freeman, a widow, and Francis Augustus Ligonier (1693-1746), a French Protestant refugee who came to England in 1710 and rose to the rank of colonel in the 13th Dragoons and 59th Foot (infantry). Following his father's death from a battle wound in 1746, Edward was raised by his uncle, John Ligonier (1680-1770), who was promoted that year to the full rank of general and made commander-in-chief in Great Britain. Like his father and uncle, Edward Ligonier pursued a career in the army. In 1752, aged twelve, he entered the 2nd Dragoon Guards (Queen's Bays) as a cornet, and from 1757 he served as lieutenant in the 7th Dragoons. He was aide-de-camp to Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick in the Seven Years' War, and on August 15, 1759 was promoted to captain of the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards. Appointed aide-de-camp to George III in 1763, he traveled to Madrid as secretary to Lord Rochford's special embassy (1763-65).

On December 16, 1766 Ligonier married Penelope Pitt, eldest daughter of George Pitt and his wife Penelope Atkins, at the British Embassy in Paris. On his uncle's death, April 27, 1770, he succeeded to the title of 2nd Viscount Ligonier of Clonmell in the Irish Peerage (becoming Earl Ligonier in 1776). On May 7, 1771 he fought a duel with swords in Green Park with the Italian poet Vittorio Amadeo, Count Alfieri (1749-1803), whom he suspected of adultery with his wife. He sued for divorce and the marriage was legally dissolved in 1772. Gazetted colonel of the 9th Regiment of Foot on August 8, 1771, he eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant general on August 29, 1777. On December 14, 1773 he married Mary Henley (d. 1814), third daughter of Jane (Huband) and Robert, 1st Earl of Northington. This marriage, like his first, was without issue, and when Lord Ligonier died at the age of forty-two on June 14, 1782 his title became extinct. He had devoted the last years of his life to lobbying for the "red ribbon" of Knight of the Bath, an honor that he finally gained on December 17, 1781, but he died before installation.

[clove-pinks]

I was reading the interpretive signs at Fort Miamis when I had a John Graves Simcoe encounter in the wild, paging @acrossthewavesoftime!

Simcoe penned one of the Letters From 1794 excerpted on this sign!

I have to laugh at "Mr. Wayne" for General "Mad" Anthony Wayne. Wayne, Simcoe, and Wayne's aide-de-camp William Henry Harrison all used Maumee/Miami interchangeably for what is called the Maumee River today. Simcoe makes it plural with "Miamis."

I don't know why I'm surprised when I was already aware that Simcoe built Fort Miamis?? It's right there in the opening chapters of William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country: Frontier Fighting in the War of 1812 by David Curtis Skaggs:

The governor general of Canada, Sir Guy Carleton, recently elevated to the peerage as Lord Dorchester, promised such aid [to Indigenous allies] because he expected the United States and Great Britain to be at war shortly and, if so, they could expect direct assistance from His Majesty's government. To implement this, Carleton ordered John Graves Simcoe, the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada (modern Ontario), to construct a fort near the rapids of the Maumee River. (Named Fort Miamis, though often designated Fort Miami on early maps, was located in what is now the eastern edge of Maumee, Ohio, on the river's north bank.) All this was an aspect of a British desire to create an Indian barrier state between the lakes and the Ohio River [...]

I'll say it again: John Graves Simcoe may have had the greatest effect on the War of 1812, for a person who didn't live to see it.

What were Simcoe's thoughts on the aftermath of the Battle of Fallen Timbers? Did he know that the gates of Fort Miamis were closed to the Indigenous allies of the British, who fled there for shelter from Wayne's army?

[vxctorx]

Regarding Victor's pedigree

On his father's side, Lord Alastair Trevor is of Scottish/Welsh descent (hence the name Trevor). His grandfather, aka Victor's great grandfather, was not born rich, but he got into the spice trade in Calicut, India during the British rule and acquired a fortune. His son (Vic's grandfather) then went into the tea trade and was equally successful, and this was the business that Lord Trevor later inherited and passed down to Victor. He earned his title of Lord through peerage, owing to his baronial lifestyle and fortune, as well as his close connections to Britain's chief political figures and the royalty.

On his mother's side, Evelyn Maxwell is of Colombian and English descent. Her mother lived in a small village in Colombia, and that was where she met her adventuring and wealthy English husband. They married and moved to England, where Evelyn was born.

Evelyn inherited her adventurous nature from her father, and her passionate, tropical temper from her mother, both of which clashed terribly with Lord Trevor's reserved and somewhat puritanical nature, and although he dearly loved her at the beginning, he was accused of coldness and indifference. They completely drifted apart after Victor's little sister, Annabelle was born, and Evelyn began to take lovers while Alastair buried himself further in his work, perhaps to ignore what was barely concealed. The children were naturally ignored throughout their bouts of drama. They never divorced each other, mainly owing to Alastair's wish to save face and avoid his own name being tarnished, and continued to live together until Alastair passed away.

[duchessofostergotlands]

I got a dumb question that literally is just me thinking hypotheticals when I can’t sleep. Let’s say Harry had gone off and had a child with someone, didn’t marry her at the time, but for whatever reason years later did and they have a second child. I know legally that child one would get nothing in terms of title and line of succession, but, like, considering the PR side of things, it feels like the current societal climate would cause there to be some pushback on making it more fair for both children… at least my American brain would think that way. So basically I guess my question is how do you think that scenario would play out? I guess actually my first question really should be how would 20-something Harry having an out of wedlock baby have played out, but that’s besides the point lol

I don't generally answer hypothetical questions. I can tell you what is legally possible for any British royal, but I won't guess what the response actually would have been or make it about Harry. Because if we assume a scenario where Harry had had an out of wedlock child, we can't reasonably assume that every other variable in his life would have been exactly the same. And that scenario could play out in a million different ways. There’s a massive difference between a situation like Louis and Tessy in Luxembourg who were a couple, had a child out of wedlock, and married six months later to one like Albert in Monaco who had a 2 week fling with an American on holiday and then she had his baby, who he didn’t meet until she was 11. Too many unknowns. So:

Anyone can be made a Prince/ss by the monarch through the issuing of a Letters Patent. It only automatically goes to legitimate children but the monarch can give the title to whoever.

Scottish titles (by which I mean titles created in Scotland before the establishment of Great Britain) are the only ones in the UK which can be inherited by a child who is legitimised after birth. But even then, the child is only considered to have been legitimate from the moment of their parents' marriage (see more here). All other peerages can't be inherited by illegitimate children no matter what. The way a title is inherited is stated at the time of the title's creation and cannot be changed after the fact. So for example Lord Mountbatten only had daughters so when the Earl Mountbatten of Burma title was created it said that it would pass to his eldest daughter and then her lawful heirs. So I suppose there probably isn't anything legally to stop a title from being created and the Letters Patent saying "it goes to this legitimised child" - this is a special remainder - but it would be unprecedented to my knowledge in the modern era and highly context dependent. If the royal already had a title when the child was legitimised then there's nothing that can be done. They would have to pass an Act of Parliament which revises how titles are inherited. That is a legal possibility but also very difficult (see something I wrote about women getting titles here). It isn't exactly the same but the important bit is that a change in the law would apply to 700 different families, not just one child.

They would not be in the line of succession because only legitimate children can be in the line of succession. That would also have to be changed by the government and would also have to be agreed by all other Commonwealth realms because succession impacts them too.

The important thing to remember is most of this stuff is not within the royal family's control. Some of it isn't even entirely within the British government's control! So while it seems unfair, that's a monarchy for you! It's not a question of fairness or morality or family or any of that. It's about the efficient governance of the state. I am an illegitimate child myself - not that it matters, I wasn't in line to inherit anything! - but actually that has made me incredibly aware of how important your environment is to your development so my opinion on it would entirely change depending on the context.

[charlotte-of-wales]

I’m curious why the wales kids are not hrh of the United Kingdom or Great Britain? Because other royals are hrh of Sweden or Norway , Denmark etc.

it just happens that that's how the British monarchy style their titles: Prince/ss of whatever is their father's senior peerages. but they are prince/ss of the united kingdom

[diemelusine]

Cortachy Castle, Angus, Scotland. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kasteelbeer

[writtenbygracewilliams]

Peerage & Titles: rank and precedence within the peerage

[Full list of disclaimers is in the master post but tl;dr is that sources for this information are not consistent, sources may be modern, and this may be edited/expanded at anytime as my research continues.]

Sovereign > Royal family > Archbishop of Canterbury > Archbishop of York > Great Officers of State [eg Prime Minister] > Peers

Peers of England > Peers of Scotland > Peers of Great Britain > Peers of the United Kingdom > Peers of Ireland

However, never will a peer of a lower rank precede one of a higher rank [regardless of peerage]

Duke > Marquess > Earl > Viscount > Baron > Baronet

A married woman will always take on the title and precedence of her husband, even if it is her subsequent marriage and/or a lower rank or title.

A dowager peeress precedes the present holder of the same title. For example; Violet precedes Anthony.

A divorced peeress is no longer entitled to the privileges and styles of peeress that their marriage granted them. However, in the case of a Duchess, she may use the title without the The. For example; if they were to divorce, Daphne would go from Your Grace, The Duchess of Hastings to Daphne, Duchess of Hastings. The inclusion of the first name is to differentiate from a future wife of The Duke. If Simon remained unmarried, Daphne may be simply Duchess of Hastings.

Duke > Marquess > Duke’s eldest son > Earl > Marquess’s eldest son > Duke’s younger son(s) > Viscount > Earl’s eldest son > Marquess’s younger son(s) > Baron > Viscount’s eldest son(s) > Earl’s younger son(s) > Baron’s eldest son(s) > Viscount’s younger son(s) > Baron’s younger son(s) > Baronets

Children of the eldest son of a peer have precedence. For example; if Edmund was still alive [meaning Anthony would not yet be Viscount] then it would be Edmund > Violet > Anthony > Baby Edmund II > Benedict > Colin > Gregory > Anthony’s younger son(s)

Daughters take precedence after the eldest son’s wife, but before the younger son(s)’s wives. For example, if Edmund was still alive, Daphne [as Duchess, as she takes her husband’s precedence] Edmund > Violet > Anthony > Kate > Benedict > Colin > Gregory > Eloise > Francesca > Hyacinth > Sophie > Penelope > Lucy.

Canon example, because Anthony is Viscount, Daphne > Violet > Anthony > Kate > Baby Edmund II > Edmund II’s wife > Anthony’s younger son’s > Anthony’s daughters > Anthony’s younger son’s wives > Benedict > Sophie > Colin > Penelope > Gregory > Lucy > Eloise > Francesca > Hyacinth. Much like Daphne, Francesca will outrank Anthony once marrying an Earl.

Let’s all get on the same page about the full ranking/precedence, at the end of s3. Simon > Daphne > Auggie > John > Francesca > Saphne’s younger children (boys first) > Violet > Anthony > Kate > John & Francesca’s hypothetical eldest son would go here > Portia > Baby Polin, Baron Featherington > Baby Edmund II > John & Francesca’s hypothetical younger children (boys first) > Baby Polin’s eldest son > Kanthony’s future children (boys first) > Baby Polin’s younger children > Benedict > Sophie > Colin > Penelope. Polin will be outranked by their grandchildren. [I know that canonically John and Francesca have no children, but I wanted to illustrate].

This one melted my brain a little ngl. Master post here, it’s got general peerage info and links to all my other deep dives. Drop any questions in my ask :)

–GW xo

[mariailoveyou-guerin]

In English law, heirs of the body is the principle that certain types of property pass to a descendant of the original holder, recipient or grantee according to a fixed order of kinship. Upon the death of the grantee, a designated inheritance such as a parcel of land, a peerage, or a monarchy, passes automatically to that living, legitimate, natural descendant of the grantee who is most senior in descent according to primogeniture, males being preferred, however, over their sisters regardless of relative age; and thereafter the property continues to pass to subsequent descendants of the grantee, according to the same formula, upon the death of each subsequent heir.

Baronies created by writ of summons to Parliament usually descend to heirs of the body of the grantee, and may thus be inherited by females. By the terms of the Act of Settlement 1701 and the Acts of Union 1707, the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland descends to heirs of the body of the Electress Sophia of Hanover who are not Catholics or married to Catholics, subject to subsequent modification by Parliament (e.g. His Majesty's Declaration of Abdication Act 1936 and the Succession to the Crown Act 2013

In property law, a conveyance by the owner O "To A and heirs of the body", without more, creates a fee tail for the grantee (A) with a reversion in the grantor (O) should the natural, lawful descendants of the grantee all die out. Each person who inherits according to this formula is considered an heir at law of the grantee. Since the inheritance may not pass to someone who is not a natural, lawful descendant of the grantee, the heir is necessarily also "of the body" of the grantee. Collateral kin, who share some or all of the grantee's ancestry, but do not directly descend from the grantee, may not inherit. When there are no more heirs of the body, the terms of the original grant are expired, and the property becomes extinct (e.g. peerage), or some other criterion for allocating the property to a new possessor must be applied. If the original grant stipulated an alternative formula for succession upon exhaustion of heirs, that formula is immediately applicable. Thus, if a peerage is granted to "heirs of the body of John Smith, failing which, to heirs general", the title would pass to a descendant of John Smith's sibling when all of John Smith's descendants die out.

Thus property settled upon someone and the heirs of their body—whether male, female, or generally—will pass to children, grandchildren and so on, but not to nephews of the grantee, his or her sisters, uncles and their descendants. Nor will a limitation in a grant to someone's "heirs" carry the property to collateral heirs in England, since the law presumes that "heirs of the body" are meant though a grant to the grantee and his heirs male will.

thx for this

[us-cj]

THE HOLINESS OF SIN: FREUD, THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND THE KABBALAH

by David Livingstone on 09/19/2013

The following is an excerpt from Black Terror White Soldiers

MK-Ultra, the CIA's infamous "mind control" program, was an extension of the behavior control research conducted by the Tavistock Institute. Formed at Oxford University, London, in 1920 by the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), a sister organization to the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) created by the Round Table, the Tavistock Clinic became the Psychiatric Division of the British Army during World War II.[1] The clinic took its name from its benefactor Herbrand Russell, Marquees of Tavistock, 11th Duke of Bedford. The Dukes of Bedford was the title inherited by the influential Russell family, one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain who came to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor dynasty. Herbrand Russell and arch-conspirator Bertrand Russell shared the same great grandfather, John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford. Bertrand Russell was descended from John Russell’s third son, Bertrand’s grandfather, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, who served twice as Prime Minister of the England in the 1840s and 1860s. Herbrand Russell’s son, Hastings Russell, Lord Tavistock, the 12th Duke of Bedford, went on to become patron of the British Peoples Party, a far-right political party founded in 1939 and led by ex-members of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. It was he whom Rudolf Hess flew to England to contact about ending World War II.

The basis of the project of the Tavistock Institute was explained by Round Tabler, Lord Bertrand Russell, is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is widely held to be one of the twentieth century's premier logicians. Russell offered a revealing glimpse into Frankfurt School’s mass social engineering efforts, in his 1951 book, The Impact of Science on Society:

______________________

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called "education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

…Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.[2]

______________________

A successor organization, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, was then founded in 1946 under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation when it separated from the Tavistock Clinic. According to John Coleman, a former British Intelligence agent, it was Tavistock-designed methods that got the US into World War II and which, under the guidance of Dr. Kurt Lewin, established the OSS. Tavistock became known as the focal point in Britain for psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. Tavistock is ostensibly a British charity concerned with group behavior and organizational behavior. Tavistock engages in educational, research and consultancy work in the social sciences and applied psychology. Its clients are chiefly public sector organizations, including the European Union, several British government departments, and some private clients. Its network now extends from the University of Sussex to the US through the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Esalen Institute, MIT, Hudson Institute, Brookings Institution, Aspen Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Center of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, US Air Force Intelligence, and the RAND Corporation.[3]

The Tavistock Institute’s projects were a follow-up on the work of the Frankfurt School, a predominantly Jewish group of philosophers and Marxist theorists who fled Germany when Hitler shut down their Institut für Sozialforschung, “Institute for Social Research,” at the University of Frankfurt. The school’s main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber and Lukacs, and focusing on the study and criticism of culture developed from the thought of Freud. The Frankfurt School’s most well-known proponents included Max Horkheimer, media theorist Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Jurgen Habermas. Dr. Kurt Lewin, the founder of the study of “group dynamics,” was a member of the Frankfurt school in America, and an important influence on the work of the Tavistock.

In producing their critical theory, the Frankfurt School brought together the dialectical versions of history of Hegel and Marx. They were deeply influenced by Hegel's idealism and dialectical interpretation of history, and derived a sense of the power of Spirit (Geist) or of cultural forms in human cultural life. From Marx they derived a sense of the importance of material forces in history and the role of economics in human and social life. They were also heavily influenced by Nietzsche, particularly his critiques of mass culture, society, morality and the state, which in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he had denounced the new idol, a new object of worship. Nietzsche also criticized "mass man" and conformity, and was one of the first critics of the role of journalism in creating mass opinion. The Frankfurt School agreed with Nietzsche that a lot of the common cultural forms repressed natural instincts, and therefore tried to develop a philosophy that would lead to the supposed emancipation of the human being in society.

The Frankfurt School recognized that modern consumer society was the new form of capitalism, creating novel forms of social institutions that integrated the working class into advanced capitalist systems. Important, therefore, was their attempt to update traditional Marxist interpretation by analyzing the role of what they recognized as state and monopoly capitalism. While, beginning in the late nineteenth century, a new era of monopoly capitalism had arrived, additionally, with the Great Depression the state began to play a much more important role in managing the economy, resulting in the new model of state capitalism exemplified by the New Deal. There were two forms of state monopoly capitalism: there was the fascist and authoritarian state capitalism of Nazi Germany and the democratic state capitalism of the United States. In both of these forms of state capitalism, new types of administration, bureaucracy and methods of social domination emerged that contributed, they believed, to a curtailing of individual freedom and democracy, giving rise to conformity and massification. In particularly, the Frankfurt School explored the role of the mass media. Where control of mass media was overt in Nazi Germany, and similarly in the Soviet Union, the Frankfurt School saw that the instruments of mass culture and communication were playing an equally important role in marketing capitalism, democracy and the American way of life.

The members of the Frankfurt School were, for the most part, from assimilated Jewish families. And it would seem, due to their secularism, despite retaining a Jewish identity, as well as their cohesiveness and theories promoting a reinterpretation of traditional morality, particularly sexual morality, that they must have been of Sabbatean origin. When they treated religious topics, as in the case of Walter Benjamin, it was of a decidedly mystical orientation. Benjamin was highly influenced by his close friend Gershom Scholem, the renowned twentieth-century expert on the Kabbalah, regarded as having founded the academic study of the subject. Scholem, by tracing to the origins of Jewish mysticism from its beginnings in Merkabah and all the way forward to its final culmination in the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, rehabilitated perceptions of the Kabbalah as not a negative example of irrationality or heresy but as supposedly vital to the development of Judaism as a religious and national tradition.[4] According to Scholem’s “dialectical” theory of history, Judaism passed through three stages. The first is a primitive or “naïve” stage that lasted to the destruction of the second Temple. The second is Talmudic, while the final is a mystical stage which recaptures the lost essence of the first naïve stage, but reinvigorated through a highly abstract and even esoteric set of categories.

Frankfurt School historian Martin Jay concedes that a certain degree of Jewish identity nurtured the Frankfurt School’s perspectives. Having attempted to live assimilated lives in Weimar Germany with dubious success, he says, must have had an impact. “The sense of role-playing that the Jew eager to forget his origins must have experienced,” says Jay, “could only have left a residue of bitterness, which might easily feed a radical critique of the society as a whole.”[5] Jay additionally concedes that the Kabbalah would have had some influence as well, as noted by one of its own members, Jurgen Habermas. Jay summarizes:

______________________

Jurgen Habermas has recently argued that a striking resemblance exists between certain strains in the Jewish cultural tradition and in that of German Idealism, whose roots have often been seen in Protestant Pietism. One important similarity, which is especially crucial for an understanding of Critical Theory, is the old cabalistic idea that speech rather than pictures was the only way to approach God. The distance between Hebrew, the sacred language, and the profane speech of the Diaspora made its impact on the Jews who were distrustful of the current universe of discourse. This, so Habermas has argued, parallels the idealist critique of empirical reality, which reached its height in Hegelian dialectics… The same might be argued for its [the Frankfurt School’s] ready acceptance of [Freudian] psychoanalysis, which proved especially congenial to assimilated Jewish intellectuals.[6]

______________________

Habermas cites the example of the Minima Moralia of Theodor Adorno who, despite his apparent secularism, explains that all truth must be measured with reference to the Redemption, meaning the fulfillment of Zionist prophecy and the advent of the Messiah.

______________________

Philosophy, in the only way it is to be responsive in the face of despair, would be the attempt to treat all things as they would be displayed from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but what shines on the world from the redemption; everything else is exhausted in reconstruction and remains a piece of technique. Perspectives would have to be produced in which the world is similarly displaced, estranged, reveals its tears and blemishes the way they once lay bare as needy and distorted in the messianic light.[7]

______________________

David Bakan, in Sigmund Freud and The Jewish Mystical Tradition, has shown that Freud too was a “crypto-Sabbatean,” which would exlain his extensive interest in the occult and the Kabbalah. As shown in “The Consolation of Theosophy II,” an article by Frederick C. Crews for The New York Review of Books, several scholars have established that Freud was among the key figures who developed therapy through the retrieval of forgotten trauma, through a debt to Franz Anton Mesmer.[8] Adam Crabtree’s From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing traces Mesmer’s use of artificially induced trance-states to uncover the influence of unconscious mental activity as the source of unaccountable thoughts or impulses. Jonathan Miller traced the steps by which psychologists gradually stripped Mesmerism of its occult associations, reducing it to mere hypnosis and thus paving the way for recognition of nonconscious mental functioning.[9]

Hypnotism is nothing new. It is merely what had been known as putting someone under a spell, and practiced for thousands of years by witchdoctors, spirit mediums, shamans, Buddhists, and yogis. Freud himself was renowned in Vienna as a suggestive healer, his practice relying heavily on the use of hypnosis, a method he characterized as essentially "mystical."[10] Freud engaged in magical propitiatory acts and tested the power of soothsayers. He confided to his biographer Ernest Jones his belief in "clairvoyant visions of episodes at a distance" and "visitations from departed spirits."[11] He even arranged a séance with his family members and three other analysts. He also practiced numerology and believed in telepathy. In Dreams and Occultism, he declared, "It would seem to me that psycho-analysis, by inserting the unconscious between what is physical and what was previously called 'psychical,' has paved the way for the assumption of such processes as telepathy."[12]

Freud, when he was made aware of the Lurianic Kabbalah apparently exclaimed, “This is gold!” and asked why these ideas had never previously been brought to his attention.[13] Carl Jung, who had worked with Freud, commented approvingly on the Jewish mystical origins of Freudian psychoanalysis, stating that in order to comprehend the origin of Freud’s theories:

______________________

…one would have to take a deep plunge into the history of the Jewish mind. This would carry us beyond Jewish Orthodoxy into the subterranean workings of Hasidism...and then into the intricacies of the Kabbalah, which still remains unexplored psychologically.[14]

______________________

Freud’s theories were excessively concerned with sex and even incest, which is reflected in Sabbatean antinomianism. As Gershom Scholem noted, the Sabbateans were particularly obsessed with upturning prohibitions against sexuality, particularly those against incest, as the Torah lists thirty-six prohibitions that are punishable by "extirpation of the soul,” half of them against incest. Baruchiah Russo (Osman Baba), who in about the year 1700 was the leader of the most radical wing of the Sabbateans in Salonika and who directly influenced Jacob Frank, not only declared these prohibitions abrogated but went so far as to transform their contents into commandments of the new “Messianic Torah.” Orgiastic rituals were preserved for a long time among Sabbatean groups and among the Dönmeh until about 1900. As late as the seventeenth century a festival was introduced called Purim, celebrated at the beginning of spring, which reached its climax in the "extinguishing of the lights" and in an orgiastic exchange of wives.[15]

As Bakan indicated, in his book Moses and Monotheism, Freud makes clear that, as in the case of the Pharaohs of Egypt, incest confers god-like status on its perpetrators. In the same book, Freud argued that Moses had been a priest of Aten instituted by Akhenaten, the Pharaoh revered by Rosicrucian tradition, after whose death Moses was forced to leave Egypt with his followers. Freud also claims that Moses was an Egyptian, in an attempt to discredit the origin of the Law conferred by him. Commenting on these passages, Bakan claims that his attack on Moses was an attempt to abolish the law in the same way that Sabbatai Zevi did.

Thus, Freud disguised a Frankist creed with psychological jargon, proposing that conventional morality is an unnatural repression of the sexual urges imposed during childhood. Freud instead posited that we are driven by subconscious impulses, primarily the sex drive. In Totem and Taboo, published in 1913, which caused quite a scandal. Freud theorized about incest through the Greek myth of Oedipus, in which Oedipus unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, and incest and reincarnation rituals practiced in ancient Egypt. He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire incest and must repress that desire.

Freud also read Nietzsche as a student and analogies between their work were pointed out almost as soon as he developed a following. Freud and Nietzsche had a common acquaintance in Lou Andreas-Salomé, a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships and affairs with a broad array of well-known western intellectuals, giving her a reputation of somewhat of a femme fatale. These included Richard Wagner and Rainer Maria Rilke, considered one of the most significant poets in the German language, and who was a friend to Gurdjieff’s collaborator, Thomas de Hartmann. Salomé claimed that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her and that she refused his proposal of marriage to her. During her lifetime she achieved some fame with her controversial biography of Nietzsche, the first major study of his life.

Salomé was a pupil of Freud and became his associate in the creation of psychoanalysis. She was one of the first female psychoanalysts and one of the first women to write psychoanalytically on female sexuality. She developed Freud's ideas from his 1914 essay On Narcissism, and argued that love and sex are a reunion of the self with its lost half. She was eventually attacked by the Nazis as a "Finnish Jewess,” though her parents were supposedly of French Huguenot and Northern German descent. A few days before her death the Gestapo confiscated her library, because she was a colleague of Freud, practiced "Jewish science" and had many books by Jewish authors. The fact that Salomé would have secretly been Jewish despite professing a Christian heritage would suggest that her family were Sabbateans. We may suppose that their deviant sexual practices might have contributed to a trauma that gave rise to her inability to develop normal relationships with other men, and in turn to her unconventional theories. We may speculate that, sadly, the origin of Salomé’s dysfunctions were possibly incestuous relationships with her father and five older brothers. In fact, Lou would claim to see a brother hidden in every man she met. Lou married linguistics scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas, and despite the marriage never being consummated, they remained together from 1887 until his death in 1930. Nevertheless, Salomé maintained sexual relationships outside marriage and visited regularly a gathering place for gay men and lesbians. Freud considered Salomé’s article on anal eroticism from 1916 one of the best things she wrote. This led him to his own theories about anal retentiveness, where prohibition against pleasure from anal activity “and its products,” is the first occasion during which a child experiences hostility to his supposedly instinctual impulses.[16]

Essentially, by rejecting that man could be driven by a higher moral inclination, Freud believed all that was left was man’s animal nature, particularly what he called the libido, a belief that was reflective of his association with the traditions of occult thought and its veneration of the act of sex as the only true vital impulse. Freud believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object of desire, a process codified by the concept of “sublimation.” He argued that humans are born “polymorphously perverse,” meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that as humans develop they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development. The first is the oral stage, exemplified by an infant’s pleasure in nursing, then in the anal stage marked by a child’s “pleasure” in evacuating his or her bowels, and finally in the phallic stage. In the phallic stage, Freud contended, male infants become fixated on the mother as a sexual object, referred to as the Oedipus Complex, a phase brought to an end by threats of castration, resulting in the castration complex, the severest trauma in man’s young life.

Through Freud’s influence, the “incest taboo” would become an issue of fundamental concern to the Frankfurt School. For example, Claude Levi-Strauss (1908 – 2009), a French anthropologist and one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought, considered the universal taboo against incest as the cornerstone of human society. Incest, he believed, was not naturally repugnant, but became prohibited through culture. Lévi-Strauss’ theory was based on an analysis of the work of Marcel Mauss who believed that the basis of society is the need for the exchange of gifts. Because fathers and brothers would be unwilling to share their wives and daughters, a shortage of women would arise that would threaten the proliferation of a society. Thus was developed the “Alliance theory,” creating the universal prohibition of incest to enforce exogamy. The alliance theory, in which one’s daughter or sister is offered to someone outside a family circle starts a circle of exchange of women: in return, the giver is entitled to a woman from the other’s intimate kinship group. This supposedly global phenomenon takes the form of a “circulation of women” which links together the various social groups in single whole to form society.

[1] "The Aquarian Conspiracy"; Konstandinos Kalimtgis David Goldman and Jeffrey Steinberg, Dope Inc.: Britain's Opium War Against the U.S, (New York, The New Benjamin Franklin House, 1978), Part IV.

[2] (Unwin Paperbacks, 1976) p. 41.

[3] Eustace Mullins, The World Order.

[4] Steven B. Smith. “Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss: Notes toward a German-Jewish Dialogue.” Modern Judaism, Vol 13, No. 3 (Oxford University Press, Oct., 1993).

[5] Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) p. 34.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jurgen Habermas. “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers” (Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity).

[8] See, e.g., Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (Basic Books, 1970); Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (North-Holland, 1991; second edition forthcoming from MIT Press, 1997); and Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (Yale University Press, 1993).

[9] Jonathan Miller, “Going Unconscious,” in Hidden Histories of Science, edited by Robert B. Silvers (New York Review Books, 1995), pp. 1-35; cited in Frederick C. Crews, “The Consolation of Theosophy II” The New York Review of Books Vol. 43, No. 15 (October 3, 1996).

[10] The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes, translated by James Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), Volume 11, p. 22.

[11] Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, (Basic Books, 1957), Volume 3, p. 381.

[12] The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 22, p. 55.

[13] Sanford Drob, “This is Gold”: Freud, Psychotherapy and the Lurianic Kabbalah.” [http://www.newkabbalah.com/KabPsych.html]

[14] Carl. G. Jung, Letters (Gerhard Adler, Aniela Jaffe, and R.F.C. Hull, Eds.). (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), Vol. 2, pp. 358–9.

[15] Gershom Scholem, “Redeption Through Sin,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, (New York: Schocken, 1971).

[16] Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, S.E. Vol. 7, p. 187.

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

I love that the ridiculousness of the Jeeves timeline is such that we have "favorite problems" :D

But yeah, thanks to the nature of the ambiguously floating timeline, trying to tie any of the stories to a real-world year is even more of an exercise in futility. Like, Wodehouse will make references to contemporary (at time of publication) celebrities and current events, but at the same time sets all his stories (save Ring for Jeeves) in an eternal Edwardian/1920s garden of Eden. They all just take place in Schrödinger's year where it's always both 1920 and whatever year it was at the time, and you never get to open the box and find out which it is.

My favorite problem is probably in Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, where I was going by the floating timeline interpretation and assuming it as taking place in 1971, because it references the Peerage Act of 1963 which allowed peers to renounce their titles. But @noandnooneelse and I were discussing it, and he pointed out that the joke where Bertie asks a woman whether she's able to vote would place the book between 1918 and 1928, contemporary with the rest of the books. Britain enfranchised propertied women over 30 in 1918 before extending it to all women in 1928, so that's the period of time where it could have been uncertain whether a given woman had the right to vote.

That said, I think it's really funny to imagine that Tie That Binds DOES take place in 1971, and Bertie just panicked so badly at having to have an unexpected conversation with a woman that he started babbling about how great it was that women were given the vote FIFTY YEARS AGO.

“I recollect clearly that, on the occasion when I first had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, nearly eighteen months ago, Richard was desirous of marrying this same waitress.”

THAT WAS ONLY EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO?? We’ve had HOW many girls in that period of time???