Aristocrats… aibu?

[Louusrg]

I watched a documentary the other day about Prince Andrew and it led me down a bit of a rabbit hole particularly with Victoria Hervey, who I hadn’t actually heard of before the documentary! She was on it and she came across as rather dim and just a bit… rough?! Very crass, outspoken and just not how I would have imagined an aristocrat to be.

I then (via Wikipedia) looked up various other aristocrats and found the theme was similar. Is this a fair assessment?! Have I just realised something obvious or do people really consider the aristocracy to be well mannered and educated? (As I did before coming across Victoria!)

I’m actually yet to find one who has done something decent with their life!

Aristocrats aren’t a different species from the rest of us. They’re people. Would you expect all working class or middle class people to behave in identical ways? Of course not. Just because people come from a different sector of society from you doesn’t make them aliens.

I think most people would consider the extended royal family to be pretty dim and inbred. There's a reason for the "chinless wonder" stereotype.

"Class" doesn't buy class.

I think the privilege and/or general entitlement owned by these people are the reasons for this behaviour. And also why they don't see it or if they can, couldn't give a flying fuck anyway.

She’s a Harvey. They’ve been rough as feck for 400 years as marquesses of Bristol.

Hervey, autocorrect.

@Thepeopleversuswork no but I suppose I wasn’t expecting Victoria to sound so crass. She seemed v different to Catherine, for example

They don't walk around in ermine. All the usual follies are there but allowed/encouraged. Mitford sisters were well known in society. People had/have money and large houses to do whatever they want in.

What were you expecting? They are normal people but with fancy names.

Traditionally it was the middle and upper middle classes who prized things like education, culture, taste, “refinement” and so on, whilst the upper classes looked down on this as bourgeois aspiration 😂 Why cultivate any of those things when you have money and land…?

Catherine PoW was hardly brought up as an aristocrat. Not that it should matter in the least, but it shows in a thousand small ways and apparently William’s friends weren’t very nice to her during the on-off courtship years. That’s aristocratic, and hardly anything to be proud of.

Of course she is top of the heap now, but is that the same thing? One hopes she has what she wants

@catontheironingboard thats interesting! And makes a bit of sense…!!

Of course there were plenty of aristocrats who saw their country houses as the repositories of objets d’art or manuscript collections or beautiful gardens. But often they would simply bring in decorators or landscape architects or librarians/clerks to do all that (hence why Capability Brown and Sir John Soane and so on were so much in vogue). And there were plenty of aristocratic estates, or the “smaller country houses” of landed gentry, which were ugly as anything inside, had no priceless furniture, and got torn down when someone wanted to build a new one (or didn’t want to pay some tax).

When you see the beautiful reconstructions done by the National Trust, those are often the exceptions, rather than the rule! Quite often the estates that contemporary aristocrats “own” are actually owned by family trusts, and the decorations and contents are inherited from someone in the past who did have some taste, rather than created by anyone in the present.

Well-educated isn't a given. Since they don't anticipate ever having to work for a living, aristocrats don't have the same motivation to get qualifications as the rest of us. Of course, plenty of them will have a love of learning for its own sake, but if they don't, there aren't the consequences to make them do it anyway.

Years of inbreeding and privilege.
Tim “Nice but dim”