Or, Britons, to taste:
The Zetland estates were acquired in the 18th century by Sir Lawrence Dundas, scion of a long-established Scots family, who became the chief merchant-adventurer of his day. Having made a fortune supplying bread and forage to allied troops in Germany during the Seven Years’ War, he bought swathes of land in Sligo, Roscommon, Fife, Stirlingshire, Clackmannanshire, Orkney, Shetland, Hertfordshire and Yorkshire, where Aske Hall, near Richmond, remains the family seat.
…
Dubbed “the Nabob of the North”, Dundas became among the country’s largest landowners, but despite his best endeavours he never obtained a peerage – he was a mere baronet by the time he died in 1781.His son, though, was made Baron Dundas in 1794, his grandson rose to Earl of Zetland (an ancient variant of Shetland), and the 3rd earl became a marquess in 1892.
Spivvy lad* becomes vastly wealthy.
But he does not become a Lord, ho no, merely a Bt. The son becomes a Lord, the grandson an Earl and the gg grandson a Marquess having been a government minister and all that.
You’re not a real nob until the money has matured, see?
*You do not make a fortune out of military logistics without being spivvy.
The 21st century English are much more complicated. You have to be head of an organisation that decided all its senior employees had become thieves overnight and presecuted them so that some of them committed suicide. Or arse licked you way to head up an organisation which prosecutes criminals where your myopia sadly meant that you never saw some files that flopped off the edge of your desk, but for fun you joined forces with a bent solicitor to prosecute some servicemen that you both made up stories about, enjoying it so much you did it for free. In cases like this your unswerving devotion to stupid sadism gets you a knighthood…
One thing the story does illustrate is how little power governments of the day had. He made his money out of holding the army hostage over its supplies. It’s like with the “reparations” saga & who’s to blame. Governments of the time had almost no control over what private citizens outside of the country & very little of what they did in it.
True, and yet the world did not end!
That someone wasn’t made a peer in his lifetime starting from commoner isn’t all that unusual.
Commoner to marquess in three generations (or at all) is much more so.
Let’s be honest Tim. You do not make a fortune out of anything without being spivvy, unless you started out with a fortune.
James Dyson did; there’s a book (“Longitude”) about the guy (whose name I have forgotten) who invented a clock that worked onboard a sailing ship; George Stephenson, James Watt, Richard Arkwright, …
deleted.
Ah:
“on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Victoria, he was created Earl of Zetland for having provided financial assistance to the new Queen’s parents, the Duke & Duchess of Kent, in the years preceding her accession”
(from Wokipedia, but probably still true)
If it’s correct that he gave money to the Duke, that was very much a speculative investment.
The Duke of Kent, Victoria’s father died in 1820. Before his death, a son would have inherited before Victoria. And both before and after his death a child born to any of his three older brothers would have knocked Victoria out of the succession.
Yes, of the three brothers, George and Frederick were estranged from their wives, but the wives died in 1820 and 1821, so they could have remarried. And William had recently married after fathering numerous illegitimate offspring, so there
It wasn’t until some years later that it looked like she was probably going to inherit, so funding Victoria’s parents for that long, in the hope of reward should she become queen, was definitely risky.