One thought he was descended from Adam, another that he was a Hapsburg prince. In this latest blog, Dr Robin Eagles, editor of the Lords 1660-1832 project, examines some of the more dramatic claims made by members of the House of Lords…
Members of the House of Lords prided themselves on the antiquity of their families. While most peerage titles by the time of the Restoration of the monarchy were of relatively recent creation, their holders were keen to demonstrate that they were connected to men who had been in Parliament time out of mind. They were probably the more anxious to do so as concerns were voiced frequently that the peerage was becoming swamped with unsuitable men. As John Cannon has pointed out, this was an old worry. Complaints had been made about Piers Gaveston and Michael de la Pole in the 14th century, while the first Lord Spencer was subject to teasing that his ancestors were busy tending sheep when more established lords were leading armies into battle. [Cannon, Aristocratic Century, 15]
In the 18th century the pattern continued and some peers (and their families) were openly disdainful of the people sporting new titles. Lady Townshend was said to have lived in expectation of receiving a bill from her fishmonger newly elevated to Lord Mount-Shrimp. [Cannon, 16] The large-scale elevations made while Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister were thought by some to have exacerbated the problem. One author noted ‘society was turned upside down and the mud came uppermost’. [Gentleman’s Magazine, LXXXIV (1), 32].
To counter such fears of society being in chaos and the ranks of the peerage invaded by tradesmen, some peers went to extremes to prove that their families were truly ancient. One of the most dramatic examples was that of the Nevill lords Abergavenny. The barony was genuinely one of the oldest in the country and the Abergavennys routinely vied with the holders of two or three other peerages for the distinction of ‘premier baron’. However, while the Nevills had no trouble in proving their descent from an old Anglo-Norman family, they went a step further and attempted to prove their direct descent from Adam. In getting there, they charted a line through Noah, Woden (with no apparent concerns at the contradiction) and Hengist, one of the legendary brothers who had led the first Saxon settlers to Britain.
Others made similar, if slightly less mythical, claims to greatness. The Windsor earls of Plymouth routinely christened their sons ‘Other’, a fanciful reimagining of the old name ‘Uther’ to emphasize their claims to descent from a Viking adventurer who had attended the court of Alfred the Great. The Feilding earls of Denbigh believed that they were European royalty. They asserted their family name was a corruption of von Felden and that they descended from a Hapsburg prince, who had fled to England at some point in the distant past. The tale was adopted eagerly by Basil the 2nd earl, who also secured an additional barony (St Liz) to help underscore their mediaeval origins. William the 5th earl was so convinced of his Hapsburg heritage that at least one of his correspondents referred to him as the comte de Hapsberg, rather than earl of Denbigh.
(c)British Museum.
More recent additions to the Lords were equally eager to prove that their families were no less ancient. As a result, the end of the eighteenth century onwards saw new lords adopting ever more fanciful titles in an effort to prove their antiquity. When James Bucknall Grimston, 3rd Viscount Grimston was granted a British barony in the summer of 1790 he chose for his title Baron Verulam. Having previously represented St Albans in Parliament, he probably liked the idea of taking Verulam as his title, a contraction of the classical form Verulamium, and the peerage formerly held by Sir Francis Bacon under James I.
Rather more dramatic claims were made by another new peer, Sir Francis Basset, who was promoted to the Lords on 17 June 1796 as Baron de Dunstanville. He was one of 19 men receiving new peerages that year (some of them already members of the House promoted to higher titles) but he stood out for his particularly glamorous sounding peerage.
Basset certainly had a good claim to be elevated. He was one of the most influential politicians in Cornwall – and later to be immortalized in the Poldark novels. Elected for Penryn in 1780, he quickly came into the orbit of the duke of Portland, attracted in part by promises of elevation to the Lords, though he was made to wait several years for the honour. When it came, though, why did he plump for such an antique sounding title? The answer lay in a piece sent into the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1825 setting out the descent of the original barony of Dunstanville, which dated back to the reign of Henry I. The first holder, Reginald de Dunstanville, was noted to have been lord of Winterbourne in Wiltshire. He had married Adeliza de Lisle, daughter of Brian FitzCount, himself a son of Eudo (or Odo) earl of Brittany. Their grandson, Walter, was said to have given the manor of Winterbourne to one Alan Basset, while their granddaughter, Alice, married Thomas, Lord Basset.
Basset may have been proud of his connexion to the mediaeval nobility, but his own family claimed to be of similar antiquity to the Dunstanvilles. The Bassets were said to have come over with the Conqueror and subsequently acquired lands in Devon and Cornwall, including the manor of Tehidy in Cornwall from the de Dunstanvilles in 1150. As a descendant of this family, Basset’s choice of title neatly pointed to his long-established pedigree. The fact that Walter and Alice were also said to have been descended from one of Henry I’s illegitimate offspring was no doubt icing on the cake. [Samuel Drew, The History of Cornwall… (1824), 334-5]
Despite all of this effort, de Dunstanville was to be the only holder of his newly framed antique peerage. The year after his elevation to the House of Lords, he secured a second barony – rather more modestly that of Basset – which could descend to his daughter should he die without a son. In the event, that was precisely what happened and his only child, Frances, who was said to be ‘ugly as sin’ and ‘cross as the devil’ succeeded her father as Baroness Basset. The mediaeval sounding barony of de Dunstanville disappeared back into the distant past from whence it sprang.
RDEE
Further Reading:
John Cannon, Aristocratic Century (1984)
Wallace Henry Hills, The History of East Grinstead (1906)
The History of Parliament 
Thank you for another interesting and informative piece.