Lord John Buttifant Sewel, Baron of Gilcomstoun, CBE, chairman of committees and deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, recently made a splash playing a rather campy and entirely clichéd role as a drunken British aristocrat in a grainy art video now seen around the world. The highlight of the role is how he delivers the line, "It's not for lunch, lovey-darling, it's for this," as he bends over a line of white powder.
He's referring to lavish expense accounts for Lords such as himself. The line is straight out of Absolutely Fabulous, the 1990s' TV comedy about wealthy and clueless Londoners doing nothing much but drinking champagne and calling each other darling. And he really hams it up. Saying "lovey-darling" while hoovering a line is like saying "arr, matey" to mimic a pirate.
The role of the decadent Lord, the aristocratic rake, the privileged pervert, is a stock character with a long lineage. Sewel owes its creation to a tradition of writing that precedes Ab Fab – the character was established by Evelyn Waugh and Noel Coward and Nancy Mitford and P.G. Wodehouse, who were themselves in the shadow of Oscar Wilde. Dorian Gray and his friends are more deliciously corrupt than any in comedy. Wilde was in turn reworking the stock rake characters of Restoration comedy and the moralizing caricatures of artists such as William Hogarth.
All of these characters take their inspiration from the real rakes of the 17th and 18th centuries, depravity-seeking British nobles who not only became the subjects of multiple works of fiction, but who were also at the centre of the creation of art and poetry in their time. The great aristocratic rakes are developmental for English literature.
You have no doubt heard of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), star of the amazingly decadent court of Charles II – he was played by Johnny Depp in the 2004 film The Libertine (based on a 1994 play of the same name). Even during his lifetime, Wilmot was fictionalized in popular plays. He was a great poet and satirist; Voltaire called him a genius. Portraits show him wrapped in exquisite finery – silks and lace and long curls. He died, of course, of syphilis, establishing another mandatory attribute of the continuing role.
In the next century there was another famous British sex fiend, Francis Dashwood (1708-1781), founder of the notorious Hellfire Club, a very refined place for very rough drinking and gambling and whoring and parodic, ironic Satanic worship. The club members met in an abbey and called themselves monks. Their famous motto was François Rabelais' "Fais ce que tu voudras." Dashwood has become a fictional character in more than a dozen novels and movies.
There are dozens more such legends, including the well-born "Mohocks" who attacked prostitutes on the streets for fun in London in the early 1700s (described in Moll Flanders and in other art), and the dandies who gathered around Beau Brummell at White's in the 1790s and bet thousand of pounds on the course of a drop of rain down a window. All these people were acting and posing like the figures constantly being glorified in the theatres around them.
Why was the English nobility so very good at this? And why did they valorize the role to such an extent? The French had their decadents, of course – the Marquis de Sade's exploits were probably even more seriously immoral than the worst of the English rakes. But their Catholic absolute monarchy was more controlling and much harsher on rebels. Sade's punishment was brutal (he spent 32 years in prisons and insane asylums).
British kings didn't punish their whoring courtiers – they drank with them. England, considered culturally backward at the height of French culture in the 17th and 18th centuries, had a proto-democracy and much greater freedom of expression. It was quite simply a more permissive society.
And, usefully, the British nobility lived in the country rather than at court, like the French at Versailles. This gave them their uniquely earthy side. It has often been pointed out that the British elite was usually dirtier and shabbier than the wealthy middle-class ever allowed themselves to be. The very posh still liked to smell a bit of the stable. Aristocrats: Power, Grace and Decadence, a 2009 history of the upper classes by Lawrence James, describes a typical dinner party at the home of one Lady Strange, descendant of a venerable medieval line. At one point a ferret emerged from her cleavage, "gnawed at a lamb chop and then returned to its refuge." The image of the dank ancestral home, furry with dogs and their leavings, is a staple of comedies such as Mitford's.
Note that the role of rake is not the same as the Upper-Class Twit, the character we know from Monty Python. The Upper-Class Twit is played to perfection by Prince Harry and by the young banker recently filmed snorting coke on a London subway. The rake is not a buffoon; he is meant to be elegant and witty and refined. This is what Lord Sewel, a political scientist by training, was aiming for with his cross-dressing and his in-the-know gossip.
How is it that these horny British peers don't know by now that prostitutes in Britain are expected, pretty much mandated, to be equipped with video cameras? Didn't they see that Max Mosley, former head of the racing federation that governs Formula 1 and son of Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists, was filmed by his Nazi-dressed professional companions in an amiable S&M orgy? How can one then put on a bra and call the same ladies up?
Because any activity that involves such dress-up is a performance; it calls out for footlights. Wanting to play this famous role and wanting to be seen doing it is not a mystery. The only real mystery, frankly, is why prostitution and cocaine are still both illegal there. Possibly because the narrative would lack drama without that legal twist.