The Fountain of Honour: Directing the Spray

Pearce argues that honours do not deserve the earnest linguistic toil of the virtuous PAC. Starting with the peers, he observes that when William the Conqueror/Bastard distributed land stolen with violence to his armed band, it was the simple loot from which ancient chivalry, honour and nobility flows. Such lords developed under the more civilised early Whigs, like Walpole, into rent for sending steady support from owned boroughs into the Commons. Witness Bubb Dodington and his three and a half seats in Weymouth, made a Viscount in the name of one of its suburbs. Harold Macmillan would sack a minister with the wheedling consolation ‘A Little something to wear under your tie’. By inventing the Life Peerage, he helped the slow subversion of elected government by creating unelected, often powerful ministers with no relationship to country or people, candid nominees of the National Leader. The one virtue of the post‐Macmillan upper house lies in the disloyal, which is say minimally or not all party‐attached people of talent reliably voting against ministerial requirements. As for the insignia of all honours, their bars, discs and ribbons are kept on cards in Palace drawers like so much paste jewellery.