A Catalogue of Coronets, Some Cut-Rate

The gates of Buckingham Palace will swing open one day this week for a taxi bearing a 9 1/2-lb. tome that to many Englishmen--particularly those whose names do not figure in its 3,088 pages--seems as monumentally irrelevant to postwar Britain as the Domesday Book. To scholars, snobs, statusticians and society hostesses, nonetheless, the 103rd and fattest-ever edition of Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage is an invaluable, intriguing gazetteer to the proliferating aristocracy.

The nobility has grown so numerous that today it would take 16 double-decker buses to haul all the members of the peerage to the House of Lords. As Emerson observed in 1856, they belong to an "aristocracy with the doors open." In contrast with Europe's titled bluebloods, who are descended from a hereditary knightly caste formed between the 11th and 14th centuries, Britain's noblemen are two-a-penny come-latelies. Throughout the nation's history, Kings and, later, Prime Ministers have freely handed out titles to deserving--and undeserving--comers. George I even made "petticoat peeresses" of his mistresses in order, as one peerage pundit noted, "to reward their merits in their respective departments and encourage the surrender of prudery in younger and handsomer subjects." In a preface to the new edition, Sir Anthony Wagner, who as Garter King of Arms is Britain's top working genealogist, concludes that, by Continental standards, the nobility in England has in fact "not existed since the Norman Conquest."

Hence the value of Burke's, which is often called "the Englishman's Bible." Founded in 1826 by John Burke (whose son became Sir Bernard in time for the 17th edition), the book is a kind of Who Was Who that lists more than 150,000 names, and traces each lordly family back to its earliest noble ancestor, thus clearly differentiating survivors of the old, landowning aristocracy from the plebeian parvenus whose titles, created in the past half-century, now represent more than 50% of the peerage.

Texans & Tahitians. Some lineages in the latest edition are brutally brief. Lord Morrison of Lambeth, who was known to working-class Englishmen on Our 'Erbie when he was Deputy Prime Minister in Clement Attlee's Labor government, rates one sentence of genealogy: "His Lordship is son of the late Henry Morrison, police constable of Brixton, England." On the other hand, Burke's--which sends the Queen a free copy of the $32.34 book specially bound in her favorite blue goatskin--devotes 45 pages of minute type to the royal family's doings since the days of its ancestor Egbert, King of Wessex (d. 839), who was one of England's first kings and grandfather of Alfred the Great.

Among other forebears of the Queen, not all recognized by Burke's, are Shakespeare, three clergymen, an innkeeper, Frederick the Great of Prussia, a plumber, and Spain's11th century hero, Rodrigo (El Cid) Diaz de Bivar. Elizabeth's surviving kinsfolk include eight-year-old Kira Alexandrine Harris of Amarillo, Texas.

Unkind to Crofters. Britain's 596 barons are its least exclusive lords. Though there are still a handful of baronies that date back to the middle ages, their ranks have more than doubled in the 20th century. The greatest boom in baronies came when Lloyd George was Prime Minister and scores of wealthy Englishmen bought themselves into Burke's by contributing a total of $15 million to the Liberal Party. However, since Queen Victoria's day, baronies have been most frequently conferred as rewards for distinguished service in industry, government, the armed services and other fields. So many brewers have been made barons that they are known collectively as the Beerage.

Today, even most socialists agree that Britain's unexclusive aristocracy has a rightful place in democratic society; under Clement (now Lord) Attlee's postwar Labor government, a near-record 98 peerages were created in six years, v. 28 under Harold Macmillan. One test of its survival is that few Britons ever say no to a title when it is offered. But there are those who would prefer not even to be mentioned in Burke's. A few years ago, when Burke's editors sent Harold Macmillan a biographical questionnaire, the Prime Minister shot back the empty form with a note: "I don't believe I want my name alongside those who exploited my crofter ancestors." He is in there anyway as an adjunct to the 9th Duke of Devonshire, whose daughter,

Dorothy Evelyn, b. 28 July, 1900; m. 21 April, 1920, The Rt. Hon. Harold Macmillan, P.C., M.P.

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