The New Murrey and Blue blog

There’s a new “blockbuster” coming up on Netflix. It’s called The Gentlemen, and is described as follows: “….Army captain Eddie Horniman is working for the UN abroad when he learns his aristocratic dad has died….everyone expects Eddie’s older brother Freddy to become next Duke of Halstead and inherit the estate…but his father has disinherited Freddy and left it all to Eddie….” (Extract from tv choice magazine.)

Now then, the hawkeyed among you will have spotted the deliberate mistake. Although the late duke can leave his personal possessions to a younger son, he can’t prevent the older son from becoming Duke of Halstead or from inheriting any lands etc. that are entailed to the dukedom. Personal possessions only for Eddie, I fear.

This has been the rule since the medieval period. It is also the reason why titles passed from a childless eldest brother down to his next brother, who if he also died childless passed it on to the next brother and so on into cousins and whatever. There could be no jumping brothers because one of them hates the sight of the next one in line.

When Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, the Black Prince, died before his father, Edward III, he left a small boy, the eventual Richard II, as the new heir to the throne. Children were always at risk of dying suddenly in the medieval period, so in one quarter there was immediate scheming by someone who thought his line should be next if Richard were to die young. This someone was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

Now, I’m not saying John of Gaunt (who was Edward III’s third surviving son) hated the sight of Lionel of Clarence (the second and therefore senior son, who had died leaving only a daughter), but he certainly attempted to leapfrog Lionel’s line from the succession, citing (rather preposterously) that a female line shouldn’t be included. I say preposterously because Gaunt himself pursued the throne of Castile through his wife, who was the Infanta). Gaunt’s purpose was to also have the succession of England. So, hey-ho, suddenly the female line is completely undesirable. What a hypocrite!

Of course, it depended on whether or not Richard II produced heirs, which unfortunately he didn’t, and in the end he was murdered by Gaunt’s son and heir, the first Lancastrian king Henry IV. Winning by murder was Henry’s route to the throne, not right of inheritance. Lionel of Clarence’s line was ignored, and as the daughter had married the Mortimer Earl of March and produced a son, there was clearly going to be trouble. The Mortimer heir was the true heir to the throne and he was from a senior line to Gaunt.

I’ve related the above from the 14th century to illustrate what happens when the rules of succession are broken. The Duke of Halstead in the new Netflix TV series could not decide to leapfrog his inheritance to his second son, no matter what the reason. Unless the first son was proven illegitimate of some such.

This point has been confirmed by my friend Brian Wainwright: “….The title is non-transferable and the only way a second son could get it would be if the first son was proved not to have been *conceived* in lawful matrimony. (There is the odd precedent for this, but they are vanishingly rare and I doubt this rule would be enforced in 2024.) Land can however be left at will unless it is somehow entailed, much less common now than it once was, although family trusts are not that dissimilar and are the norm for the seriously rich….”

An example of this is the Moynihan case of about a quarter of a century ago, in which an heir was held not to be an heir to a barony because his parents’ bigamous marriage meant he was illegitimate. I thank another friend, Stephen Lark, for bringing my attention to the Moynihan barony.

The new series is Guy Ritchie’s first-ever TV series, and maybe the rest of the plot is superb, but I’m afraid I can’t get past that clunking great error at the beginning. You can read more here.

Please don’t confuse this new series with the Guy Ritchie 2019 film of the same name, because none of the characters in the film are in the TV series.