50 Fun Facts About Nobility

Which rank of the British peerage sits directly above a baron and directly below an earl?

Viscount is the fourth of the five peerage ranks. It was first granted in England in 1440, about a century after the first dukedom.

Lesser British peers are addressed as 'My Lord'; which form of address is used for a duke instead?

Your Grace is a style shared with duchesses and archbishops. Peers of the four lower ranks are commonly just 'Lord', which is why a duke is never merely a lord.

Which lunchtime food is named after an 18th-century English earl said to have eaten it while gambling?

The sandwich honours the 4th Earl of Sandwich. The story goes that meat between slices of bread let him keep playing without a fork or greasy cards.

Which founding document forbids the United States from granting anyone a title of nobility?

The Constitution bans it in Article I, in the same clause that stops officials accepting gifts or titles from foreign kings without the consent of Congress.

Which rainy-day footwear takes its name from the British duke who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo?

Wellingtons began as the duke's own design. He told his London shoemaker to modify the tasselled Hessian boot worn by soldiers of the day.

The 5th Earl of Carnarvon paid for the excavation that uncovered which Egyptian pharaoh's tomb in 1922?

Tutankhamun's tomb was found by Howard Carter on the earl's money. Carnarvon's home, Highclere Castle, later found fame as the main location for Downton Abbey.

English never developed a feminine form of the word earl; what is the wife of a British earl called?

Countess is borrowed from the Continent, where an earl's equal is a count. A countess who holds an earldom in her own right keeps the title, but her husband gets none.

Earl Grey tea, said to be named after an 1830s British prime minister, is flavoured with which citrus fruit?

Bergamot oil gives the blend its perfume. The 2nd Earl Grey, the supposed namesake, led the government that passed the Reform Act of 1832 and abolished slavery in the British Empire.

The 9th Marquess of Queensberry lent his name to the 1867 rules of which sport?

Boxing took its gloves from the Queensberry Rules, the first code to require them. The marquess only endorsed the rules; a Welsh sportsman drafted them.

Rebel barons forced which English king to seal Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215?

John sealed it to buy peace, and the Pope annulled it soon after. One clause set up a council of 25 barons to hold the king to his word.

A duke outranks every other peer; which English dukedom, created for the Black Prince in 1337, came first?

Cornwall was made a duchy to give the heir to the throne an income. It has gone to the monarch's eldest son ever since Edward III handed it to his own.

A marquess outranks an earl in the British peerage; the title once meant the ruler of what kind of territory?

A border region, or march, had to be fortified against hostile neighbours. That extra trust is why a marquess came to rank above lords whose lands lay safely inland.

Which Old Norse title for a chieftain is a close relative of the English word 'earl'?

Jarl crossed the North Sea with the Danes. Under their influence the Old English ealdorman gave way to the earl in the 11th century.

The coronets worn by British dukes and other peers traditionally display the leaves of which fruit plant?

Strawberry leaves became such a badge of rank that Disraeli's novels use them as shorthand for the whole peerage. Dukes were the first peers allowed to wear a coronet.

A baronet holds a hereditary title without being a peer; which prefix goes before a baronet's first name?

Sir is shared with knights, but a baronetcy is passed down the family. Either way the holder is a commoner rather than a peer of the realm.

Which courtesy style goes before the first name of a daughter of a British duke, marquess or earl?

Lady went before Diana Spencer's first name once her father inherited his earldom in 1975, years before she married a prince.

On which large cushioned seat does the Lord Speaker sit in the chamber of the House of Lords?

The Woolsack began in the 14th century as a bale of wool, set there to recall the trade that made medieval England rich.

The Duke of Norfolk holds which hereditary office, responsible for organising coronations and state funerals?

Earl Marshal has been a Norfolk family office since 1672. The 18th duke arranged the state funeral of 2022 and the coronation that followed.

By tradition the reigning British monarch, whether king or queen, is also styled the duke of which place?

Lancaster's ducal estates came under the Crown when their owner took the throne as Henry IV in 1399. Their income goes to the sovereign personally.

The Duke of Atholl commands the Atholl Highlanders, described as Europe's only legal example of what?

A private army is what the regiment is: it answers to the duke, not the British Armed Forces, and is based at Blair Castle.

Which British wartime prime minister, born the grandson of a duke, turned down the title Duke of London?

Winston Churchill declined partly because his son Randolph, who would have inherited the dukedom, objected to it.

Which Labour politician campaigned for the Peerage Act 1963 so that he could give up his inherited title?

Tony Benn's protest produced a law that lets heirs disclaim a peerage. The title then lies vacant until the disclaimer dies, when it passes to the next heir.

Which duke of Normandy took the English throne in 1066 from a king who had been Earl of Wessex?

William the Conqueror had been a duke since he was seven or eight years old, and he descended from the Viking leader Rollo.

Which nickname is given to Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick who switched sides in the Wars of the Roses?

The Kingmaker earned the name by helping one king to the throne and deposing two, fighting first for the Yorkists and then against them.

Which English queen had her former favourite, the Earl of Essex, beheaded for treason in 1601?

Elizabeth I had raised Essex high as a courtier and commander, but he led a failed coup against her government and went to the block at the Tower.

Edward de Vere, a Tudor earl said by some to have written Shakespeare's plays, held which earldom?

Oxford was first put forward as the true author in a 1920 book by J. Thomas Looney, three centuries after the plays were written.

In legend, Godiva, the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, rode naked through which English city?

Coventry's people were her husband's tenants, and the ride was the price of easing his taxes on them. The tale is first recorded in the 13th century, long after she died.

Which naval officer and later earl, an uncle of Prince Philip, oversaw Indian independence as the last Viceroy?

Louis Mountbatten stayed on as independent India's first governor-general, and was made an earl in the same year, 1947.

Which British earl vanished in 1974 after his children's nanny was found murdered at the family home?

Lord Lucan was never found, and he was declared dead only in 1999, a quarter of a century after he disappeared.

Which former prime minister became Earl of Stockton in 1984, two decades after leaving Downing Street?

Harold Macmillan asked for the earldom customarily given to departing prime ministers. He was 90 years old by the time he received it.

Which Romantic poet, the author of Don Juan, inherited an English barony at the age of ten?

Byron became the sixth baron when his great-uncle died in 1798. The ancestral home, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, came with the title.

Which great house at Woodstock was built as a reward for the 1st Duke of Marlborough's victories over the French?

Blenheim Palace takes its name from the duke's 1704 battle in what is now southern Germany. Building it took from 1705 to 1722.

The French baron Pierre de Coubertin is remembered as the father of which modern international sporting event?

The Olympic Games were revived on his initiative. He co-founded the International Olympic Committee and served as its second president.

Baron Haussmann supervised the sweeping new boulevards and parks of which European capital in the 1850s and 1860s?

Paris gained its grand opera house in the same rebuilding, the landmark that crowned the centre of the new city. Haussmann was appointed in 1853.

By which nickname is Manfred von Richthofen, the German pilot credited with 80 First World War victories, known?

The Red Baron was a Freiherr, the German rank equal to a baron, and he flew a signature red Fokker Dr.I.

Which fictional German baron boasts of riding a cannonball and travelling to the Moon in a 1785 book?

Munchausen was named after a real German nobleman, who was so upset by the character that he threatened legal proceedings against the publisher.

Which French marquis volunteered to serve under George Washington and became a hero in two countries?

Lafayette commanded American troops at the decisive siege of Yorktown in 1781, the last major battle of the Revolutionary War.

Which singer had a 1962 American number one with the song 'Duke of Earl'?

Gene Chandler was born Eugene Dixon. The song grew out of warm-up exercises with his vocal group, the Dukays, whose members included a singer named Earl Edwards.

In the television drama Downton Abbey, Hugh Bonneville plays Robert Crawley, the earl of which place?

Grantham is a real market town in Lincolnshire, although the fictional family's estate is in Yorkshire. The earl saved it by marrying an American heiress, Cora Levinson.

In the tragedy Macbeth, which old Scottish noble title does the hero hold over Glamis and later Cawdor?

Thane was a real office: a local royal official in medieval eastern Scotland, equal in rank to the son of an earl.

Which powerful feudal lords ruled most of Japan from hereditary domains while answering to the shogun?

Daimyo lost their domains soon after the Meiji Restoration, when Japan adopted a system of prefectures in 1871.

Which title was held by the leader of the Republic of Venice, elected for life by a complex vote?

Doge comes from the Latin dux, 'leader', the same word that gave English its duke. The office lasted until the republic ended in 1797.

Which Habsburg title was held by Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914?

Archduke began as a self-awarded title. A 14th-century Habsburg duke simply claimed it, the emperor refused to recognise it, and it became official only in 1453.

In the Peerage of Scotland the lowest rank is not called baron; which title is used instead?

Lord of Parliament takes that place because Scottish barons were historically feudal landholders, a dignity separate from the peerage.

Which title belonged to the highest nobles of medieval Russia, second only to the ruling princes and tsars?

Boyar influence never recovered from the administrative reforms of Peter the Great, who set out to westernise Russia.

Which Spanish term for an untitled nobleman comes from an old phrase meaning 'son of something'?

Hidalgo status spared its holder from paying taxes. Cervantes gave Don Quixote the sobriquet 'the Ingenious Hidalgo'.

Which name is given to the hereditary nobility of old Poland, whose civic duties included electing the monarch?

Szlachta made up some 8 to 10 percent of Polish-Lithuanian society, several times the share of nobles in other European countries.

Which directory of royalty and higher nobility was first published at a ducal court in 1763?

Almanach de Gotha became the accepted authority on which families counted as royal or princely, and it appeared annually until 1944.

Which name was given to the landed nobility of eastern Prussia, who supplied most of its military officers?

Junkers descended from the knights who settled the Slavic lands east of the River Elbe during the Middle Ages.

Which courtesy style is given to the younger sons of British earls and to all children of barons?

The Honourable was the style of the writer Vita Sackville-West. An earl's eldest son instead borrows one of his father's lesser titles by courtesy.