Blue Blood

People often boast of having “blue blood” in their veins, meaning of course that they are related more or less closely to some member of the nobility. This is supposed to lend a charm to their character, not possessed by more common folk.

A peep into “The Complete Peerage” a work, still in the process of construction, it will not be finished until 1954, will at least make people hesitate before claiming relationship with the “gentry.” Baron Hungerford was found guilty of so many unnatural crimes that he was beheaded in 1540.

For four years he imprisoned his starved wife in a castle, and suborned the chaplain to poison her.

A Mad Earl of Queensbury fell upon a cookboy who was burning the spit in the kitchen of Holyrood in 1707 and spitted and roasted him in front of the fire.

Lady Glamis, ancestor of the present Queen, was burned at the stake as a sorceress who tried to poison the King of Scotland in 1537.

Maybe the sacked dustman now reinstated, “who was dismissed because he was supposed to have mimicked the Queen,” will be surprised to learn this.

Some of these gentry also possessed a sense of “humour”. As in the case of the cruel Lady Marischal who died from laughing at a killing in 1598.

Lady Janet Gray smothered her first husband at the end of the fifteenth century but found two more.

These are some of the facts drawn from this work, there are many more but these will suffice to illustrate the kind of people many of them were.

It may be said in their defence that the period was a vicious one, but it does not lend any weight to their claims of being the lords of creation. These facts about the nobility are taken from an article in the Sunday Express on May 28th entitled “The Peerage without Whitewash,” by Sidney Rodin.
P. S. M.