Greetings, long-suffering readers. This is going to be a long road [edit: and I just made it longer] but eventually we’ll get to the place where celebrityhood and 9/11 intersect.

There is a noble line in Britain known as the Earldom of Carnavon. It’s a relatively recent creation, the title having been been conferred on the 1st Earl of Carnarvon in 1793 upon his inheritance of Highclere Castle. A friend of mine who should know this tells me that one of the many, many class markers that haunt ennobled Britons is whether their titles predate the arrival of “The Germans;” that is, the modern incarnation of the British royal family that washed up in London with the ascension of King George I, formerly Georg-Ludwig of Brunswick-Lüneberg (distantly related to Queen Anne, the 1701 Succession Act, the Whig Parliament, surely you know all about this) in 1714. This doesn’t matter, but Highclere Castle does: it is the setting for the greatest soap opera in creation, Downton Abbey.

Fine. The 5th Earl of Carnarvon was a famous Egyptologist during a period when everything Egyptian was all the rage, the first third of the 20th century. It was he who funded the excavation that ultimately discovered King Tut’s tomb, and when he died in Cairo in 1923 it was said that he was felled by the curse of King Tut. So that’s interesting. His son, the 6th Earl, was a notorious womanizer who seemingly slept with more women than Hugh Hefner himself. His son, the 7th Earl, might be familiar to you if you watch The Crown, the greatest lightly fictionalized bio-series ever filmed. This is “Porchey.” He’s called that because as the oldest son of an earl he’s allowed to use a courtesy title, another family title an earl might have in the family tree, so while his father was still alive he was Lord Porchester.

The Carnarvons are still quite close to the Royal Family; Porchey’s godfather was King Edward VIII and he was one of QEII’s closest friends. He went to Eton, of course he did, and then fought in WWII. After his “good war” he attended not Oxford or Cambridge, but the Royal Agricultural College. This isn’t as bizarre as it sounds. His intent was to work at Highclere and manage the farming and “the family stud” (that is, the breeding of horses), which he knew he would inherit as long as he outlived his father, and why not. He was obsessed with horses, like his pal Princess Elizabeth, and Highclere is actually in Berkshire, not too far from Windsor, and not up in dreary Yorkshire, as Downton Abbey would have you believe. Eventually he became QEII’s racing manager, which Prince Philip was none too happy about, but there wasn’t much he could do about it because she is the Queen.

On 9/11 Porchey, like the rest of the world, was watching the news coverage and that same day had a fatal heart attack. He was 77.

Porchey’s son (QEII’s godson, by the way) is currently the 8th Earl of Carnarvon. In this degraded modern age Highclere has been monetized about as far as it can go (no one on earth is as grateful for Downton Abbey as the Carnarvons, not even me) which led, as it must, to the 8th Earl’s (second) wife, the Countess of Carnarvon, having a website that, among other things, has a small selection of recipes with instructional videos featuring Her Ladyship. As of 2019 they had nine dogs, which sounds about right, but sadly none feature in the videos. Here’s the link for the Upside Down Tomato Tart which, conveniently for me, also contains the recipe:

Upside down tomato tart

You really should click on the photo/link and watch the Countess of Carnarvon in action.

THIS JUST IN! Porchey had another son, Harry Herbert (the family name of the Carnavons), who didn’t inherit. He too is on his second wife. His first wife, Francesca Herbert, is just now linked romantically to the recently divorced 18th Duke of Norfolk. I hope it works out for those two crazy kids, and if they marry it will represent a huge high-jump win for Frankie, as she is known. Being married to the second son of an Earl is fine and all; when Harry got remarried he did it at Highclere and in fact lives on the estate, but you can only take that so far. The Duke of Norfolk on the other hand: it is the oldest Dukedom, created in 1397, all holders of the title are descendants of Edward I, and as such in the order of precedence it is the best Dukedom of all. Not only that, but in the order of precedence, a Duke trumps a Marquess, who trumps an Earl (such as her ex-brother-in-law is), who trumps a Viscount, who trumps a Baron. Those are the five orders, in order, so the Duke of Norfolk basically beats everyone except a member of the Royal family itself. And because the Dukedom is so old its family is Catholic (the divorce came as a great sorrow to the Duke) and managed to survive Henry VIII and the following centuries of anti-Papism, and the Duke of Norfolk is considered the premier Catholic layman in all of the United Kingdom.

This is all quite a burden to bear and with it comes great responsibilities. For example, by tradition (and tradition is pretty much all the entire birthright society they swim in has to go on) the Duke of Norfolk plans the new Monarch’s coronation. If you watch The Crown you saw this, when Prince Philip muscled his way onto the Coronation Organizing Committee or whatever it was called and the other members’ reaction was, basically, “get away from us, you nasty Greek.”

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Did you watch the vid? She seems like a good down-to-earth “country girl,” doesn’t she, although in a Camilla horsey way, not in a barely intelligible rural accent way. There are loads of pre- and post-Downton “inside looks”at what Highclere is really like, supposedly. I saw one from about 1995 where the 7th Earl (Porchey) hires an estate manager who shakes everything up. Among other things he reorganizes the on-site tea shoppe and redirects the flow of visitors who go on house tours, which is a little catastrophic. Meanwhile the son, the current 8th Earl, runs a new horse at Ascot and this is make-or-break for him, because if the horse wins suddenly it will become very valuable and can be put out to stud in exchange for enormous fees. At one point a superannuated noble (not a Carnarvon) wanders onto screen. He seems to be about 125 and unaware that he’s at Ascot, let alone being filmed, but he’s adhering to the Ascot dress code and walking under his own power unattended, which is more than I can say I’d be capable of.