So much for Burke's Peerage & Baronetage itself and the history of it over the last 172 years. What of developments in its subject matter, that is to say the history of the families that hold titles of honour and the titles themselves? Here it is instructive to compare the situation when the last edition came out with that now, when the present edition is published.

In 1970 inflation was in its infancy, losses at Lloyd's were well in the future and British overseas commitments were still extensive. The consequences of the first two have been fully covered in numerous books of social and economic history. As regards their immediate effect on Burke's Peerage & Baronetage families it is sufficient here to say that the diminution in the number of family seats since 1970 has been very noticeable. The consequences of the diminution in British overseas commitments since 1970, although also fully covered in purely geopolitical terms, has had one very interesting sociological sequel which has not been covered at all.

It is nothing less than the enormous drop in what one might broadly call long-term upper-class involvement in the armed forces, the severing of a connection which till the last 15 years or so had persisted for centuries, as a glance at a typical Burke's Peerage & Baronetage family entry for any prior period will testify. As recently as the early 1980s announcements of promotions in the Army and Navy were essential regular reading for editors of reference works such as Burke's Peerage & Baronetage because so many members of the families featured had sons (and very occasionally daughters) in those services. That is now no longer the case, although any sensible editor does of course still keep an eye on promotions.

The reasons are probably not just the shrinking of Britain's world role but the need for members of previously comfortably-off families to find more lucrative employment than fighting. The change is not just sociological. It is symbolic, even atavistic. The oldest families in Burke's Peerage & Baronetage, and implicitly the peerage as an institution, were originally supportive of the early-medieval kings as a fighting caste. Success in the battlefield remained a sure route to ennoblement long after the tenure of land by military service had become obsolete. Until the late 19th century many families who might until then have had no title but who were of ancient lineage (see for example MARLBOROUGH, WELLINGTON and the section on the Viscountcy of Wolseley in WOLSELEY of Mount Wolseley) became the recipients of hereditary honours because of a single member's military record.

The most obvious alternative career since the attrition of the armed services is finance. It would probably be fair to say that Burke's Peerage & Baronetage families have a disproportionate number of members involved in that field compared with other British Isles families. But there has also been a noticeable drift into the media. Employment in that field is sometimes extremely lucrative, but for the most part is not. One can therefore only hazard a guess that it is popular because it offers the sort of prospects for fame, perhaps even glory, that a military career used to do. Some of the media people in Burke's Peerage & Baronetage, like Lords Deedes and Rees-Mogg (qqv) and Bamber Gascoigne (O'NEILL, B), have been involved for decades. Others, like Richard Attenborough (qv) or Melvyn Bragg (see ADDENDA), have only been ennobled at all because they were media personalities in the first place. But the majority are people who have entered media-related professions over a period extending back to the 1970s. And their family connections presumably have nothing to do with their prominence in it.

They include The Hon Dominic Lawson, Editor of the Sunday Telegraph (LAWSON OF BLABY), Charles Moore, Editor of the Daily Telegraph (MOORE of Hancox), Ferdinand Mount, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement (MOUNT), and among former editors, freelances or staffers Simon Blow (TOLLEMACHE), Craig Brown (BETHELL), Cressida Connolly (CRAIGAVON), Nigel Dempster (QUEENSBERRY), A A Gill (CRAIGAVON), Julian Havilland (FERGUSSON), Richard Ingrams (REID of Ellon), Henry Porter (HERTFORD) and Miranda Seymour (HERTFORD). Among the family of PAGET of Cranmore Hall the media kinship pattern approximates to a dynasty within a dynasty. The novelist Will Self is married to the sister of the actress Anna Chancellor who appeared in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Her uncle the columnist Alexander Chancellor is father-in-law of Auberon Waugh's son Alexander and brother-in-law of the late John Wells, the satirist. On a smaller scale there is the family connection between Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, and his nephew-in-law Ian Aitken, that newspaper's political editor till 1990 and still a columnist on it (MACKIE OF BENSHIE).

Mention of Anna Chancellor is a reminder that actors and actresses have long been connected with peerage and baronetage families - film directors too, though on a much more modest scale. Most of the links have arisen through marriage - Robert Donat (WISEMAN), Shirley Anne Field (BUTE), Michael Gough (LEON), Miles Malleson (ANNESLEY), David Niven (ROLLO), Fiona Richmond (MONTGOMERY), Diana Rigg (HERON-MAXWELL) - but not all. Maria Aitken (BEAVERBROOK), Jane Asher (SAINT GERMANS), Rupert Everett (VYVYAN), Ralph Fiennes (SAYE AND SELE) and Dennis Price (PRICE) are ‘natives' in that they have been born into the relevant families.

Acting and the media have probably ceased to be unrespectable in all except the stuffiest families. With illegitimacy it is less easy to be certain. It has burgeoned enormously over the last three decades. To omit illegitimate children from Burke's Peerage & Baronetage would be absurd, not just because a number of titles have been specifically created for bastards (and not just royal ones either), a fact former editions have been announcing for some decades now, but because in certain circumstances an illegitimate child can be brought back into remainder to a title by the subsequent marriage of his or her parents (see Thomas Woodcock article). Indeed if one were to hush up such episodes altogether one would have to commit the ultimate idiocy of cutting out the entire royal lineage since it stems from WILLIAM I (THE CONQUEROR), himself the product of a dalliance unsolemnised by the Church between a tanner's daughter and a reigning duke. Moreover, some states in Australia or Canada accord full civil rights to children born out of wedlock, and though this would seem not to include the right to inherit a title of honour if the limitation of that honour is to ‘issue lawfully begotten', as the usual wording has it, there has yet to be a test case.

Read part 4 of 4.