A Fortean fascinating, fragile, and fascist.
Hastings William Sackville Russell was born 21 December 1888 to Mary du Caurroy Tribe and Herbrand Russell, the 11th Duke of Bedford. Both parents were avid naturalists, Herbrand Russell saving Pere David’s deer from extinction, Mary studying birds. She was also a suffragette and, late in life, an aviator. Hastings was their only son, heir to a title which had been established in the 1500s and the family seat Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, where Herbrand raised the last herd of Pere David’s deers, collected from European zoos after the animal could no longer be found in China.
Russell graduated from Eton, then Balliol College, Oxford—which had also educated Adam Smith. He, too, became a naturalist, organizing a 1906 expedition to China. Like his mother, he was a lover of birds, particularly parrots and their kin. He wed Louisa Crommelin Roberta Jowitt Whiwell in 1914, Russell served in the military, but ill health kept him out of World War I. Instead, he did charitable Christian work, prompted by an interest in Pacifism, which set him at odds with his father, who had a distinguished military career, and, in his fifties was involved in war. Father and son broke over Hastings’s turn toward Pacifism; the two did not speak for decades. In the years after the War, the elder Russell established the Tavistock Foundation to study the consequences of shell shock. The Foundation would become an important institution in later theories about the New World Order and fears that a financial elite ran the planet.
Hastings William Sackville Russell was born 21 December 1888 to Mary du Caurroy Tribe and Herbrand Russell, the 11th Duke of Bedford. Both parents were avid naturalists, Herbrand Russell saving Pere David’s deer from extinction, Mary studying birds. She was also a suffragette and, late in life, an aviator. Hastings was their only son, heir to a title which had been established in the 1500s and the family seat Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, where Herbrand raised the last herd of Pere David’s deers, collected from European zoos after the animal could no longer be found in China.
Russell graduated from Eton, then Balliol College, Oxford—which had also educated Adam Smith. He, too, became a naturalist, organizing a 1906 expedition to China. Like his mother, he was a lover of birds, particularly parrots and their kin. He wed Louisa Crommelin Roberta Jowitt Whiwell in 1914, Russell served in the military, but ill health kept him out of World War I. Instead, he did charitable Christian work, prompted by an interest in Pacifism, which set him at odds with his father, who had a distinguished military career, and, in his fifties was involved in war. Father and son broke over Hastings’s turn toward Pacifism; the two did not speak for decades. In the years after the War, the elder Russell established the Tavistock Foundation to study the consequences of shell shock. The Foundation would become an important institution in later theories about the New World Order and fears that a financial elite ran the planet.
The Hastings and Louisa had three children—John Ian in 1917, Daphne Crommelin in 1920, and Hugh Hastings in 1923. Russell continued to work with his birds, publishing Parrots and Parrot-like Birds. He helped form the Foreign Bird League in 1932, and bred a number of species. John Ian was educated privately and shunned by the family—he remembered stealing chocolates that the Marquess had left out for his birds to feed himself—not knowing that he was an heir until he was 16. Hastings Rusell and his wife went through a public spat in 1935, with her suing for restoration of conjugal rights; she lost, and the two separated. His mother died in 1937 in an aviation accident. John would later remember his father as "The loneliest man I ever knew, incapable of giving or receiving love, utterly self-centred and opinionated. He loved birds, animals, peace, monetary reform, the park and religion.”
Monetary reform, this interest developed in the early 1930s, sparked by his reading of Marshall Hattersley’s This Age of Plenty. By his own admission, Russell had to that point thought the solution to unemployment was emigration to the further reaches of the empire. He spent a couple of years studying the issues, talking with social credit proponents and their detractors, eventually concluding those in favor of social credit had the better of the arguments. Social credit was the name given to a variety of different ideas for reforming money to reduce taxation and unemployment. It found support among a number of writers, including Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot. As Russell came to understand the movement, social credit had two basic proposals. The first was the the state would rebate consumers for purchases based on particular formulas. The second was that everyone would receive some portion of a National Dividend—what he called a “Pensions-for-All.” The idea behind these actions was to equip consumers to buy enough of what was produced to keep the economy in motion, while avoiding taxes—since the government was printing the money—and thus ensuring there were jobs, as well as protection for those who loss their jobs to technological development.
Social credit would become a durable ideal among Forteans and science fiction writers. It had something of a Theosophical appeal, since among its early proponents was Alfred Orage, who went on to publish a Theosophical journal. Robert A. Heinlein wrote stories with societies run according to the rules of social credit, as did Eric Frank Russell. Indeed, according to an article in the News Review, there was a bit of a split among British Forteans in the years immediately after World War II, with the Londoners “criticisng their Liverpool colleagues for their too-ready acceptance of Social Credit dogmas. Liverpool members assert the Londoners tend to approach problems and discussions from a stand-point of destructive criticism. The Londoners prefer constructive criticism.” The author obviously garbled the last line, and never named names, but it is important to realize that Russell lived near Liverpool at the time.
All of that was in the future, though—more precisely, in future dreams of the future—and for the most part Russell was frustrated by the lack of interest in social credit shown by the general public. “Persuading people to have more money should, I thought, surely be easy, especially in view of their marked readiness to have more of my money whenever there seemed a remote chance of securing it! However I got a surprise; a few converts were made, and are still being made, but the average individual declined to be interested.” He blamed “The Appalling Stupidity of the Ordinary Person.” In 1939, the Marquess helped to found the British People’s Party, in part to agitate for social credit.
But, only in part. The British People’s Party grew out of the British Union of Fascists, and the British People’s Party stood on the far right of the ideological spectrum. John Finlay, a historian of the social credit movement has argued that social credit was, at heart, anarchist. That may be true (or may not), but it’s also a fact that some developments of social credit marked it as fascist-leaning. Social crediters complained that a financial elite was running the economy for their own well-being, at the expense of everyone else. (This strand would later feed the New World Order fantasies that implicated the Tavistock Foundation.) Of course, the financial elite was usually thought to be comprised completely, or almost completely, of Jews, and so it was only a small step from worrying over a financial elite to anti-Semitism.
That year was a momentous one for Russell, 1939. On a personal level, he became the 12th Duke of Bedford, having reached a kind of rapprochement with his own father, the two speaking but only on uncontroversial topics, like the weather, crops. And history repeated itself: he disinherited John Ian because of his marriage, father and son never speaking again (although there were letters). Russell worked with Herbrand to tie up the Bedford fortunes so that it would be difficult for John Ian to receive—father and grandfather thought him too much a layabout. On a global scale, the world fell into war again, twice in a quarter century. Russell was in the House of Lords and stood up against the war.
In 1940, his father died. Russell moved forward on his peace plans. In March, he traveled to Ireland to meet with members of the German government and negotiate peace—which caused him a great deal of bad publicity and put on a government suspect list: if there was an invasion of England by Germany, he would be arrested so as not to head a puppet regime. His travel provisions were revoked. He also fought the government over the use of Woburn Abbey, from which he was blocked as the government was using its airstrip (built for his mother) and some wanted to appropriate his railings for scrap. He continued to put out pamphlets throughout the war, arguing Germany’s case. Many thought his pacifism was only a front for his Fascism, among them George Orwell, who was led by the Duke of Bedford to question the entire pacifist movement. His actions would later be fictionalized in The Remains of the Day.
The post-war years saw Russell continuing both his stumping for Germany and his work on behalf of social credit. He opposed the Nuremberg trials, for example, and downplayed the number killed in German death camps. And yet, one of the main outlets for his writings was the anarchist journal The Word—there was the anarchist trappings of social credit and pacifism. Much as his father had, he lived his last years isolated from the rest of humanity, although he may have had a good relationship with his youngest son, Lord Hugh Hastings Russell, who was a Conscientious Objector during the second world war. And he had his birds, parakeets and budgerigars. In 1953, he disappeared. Unlike his mother, though, his body was found. He had shot himself in the bushes near his home. Perhaps by accident, perhaps to further complicate the passage of the estate to his eldest son.
The Duke of Bedford was mentioned a handful of times in the pages of Doubt, from the mid-1940s until his death. It was not the first time that Thayer’s penchant for outcasts and gadflies had led him to associate with fascist-sympathizers. He had also connected Doubt to the writing of George Sylvester Vierick, who was jailed for his Nazi sympathies. And of course Thayer was a great fan and supporter of Ezra Pound, even after he was incarcerated in a mental hospital after a series of radio broadcasts supporting Italy. James Blish considered himself a theoretical Fascit. And in Doubt 12, Thayer laid the groundwork for Holocaust denial, writing,
“If any member has been nursing the hope of visiting Europe one day and, by subtle investigation, of producing evidence that the horror stories of World Fraud II were of no more substantial stuff than those of World Fraud I, now is the time to stop nursing.
In the N.Y. Times of Thursday, May 24, 1945 old style, is an Associated Press Radiophone of great billows of black smoke and two automatic devices. The headline reads: THE END OF A NOTORIOUS GERMAN PRISON CAMP . . . and the caption: ‘British flame throwers destroying the concentration quarters at Belsen where thousands died.’
Burning the place was a sanitary measure, no doubt, to lay the stench.”
In all these cases, the connection between Fascism and Forteanism was never very strong—but it is, nonetheless, a troubling Fortean heritage.
First mention of the Duke of Bedford came int he issue after Thayer had questioned the integrity of reports about German death camps. Hastings Russell had been asked to be a fellow of the Fortean Society and accepted. Thayer effused,
“With great delight we beg to report that His Lordship the Duke of Bedford, Named Fellow of the Fortean Society for the Year 14 FS (1944 old style), has accepted. As you probably know, the Duke of Bedford is practically the only member of the House of Lords who does his own thinking. He is the author of A Call to Manhood, and The Financiers’ Little Game. (The Society takes pleasure in supplying both books for $1.50 for the pair. They are printed in Edinburgh.)
No Fellow, of all those Named to date, has a better right to the distinction than the Duke, as is evidenced by his war record of consistent and perpetual criticism of everything rotten in the Empire, most especially its never-articulated ‘war-aims’, its then Prime Minister, and the Bank of England. The Duke of Bedford has been he staunchest defender of Conscientious Objectorts in the realm, loudly decrying the ‘cat-and-mouse’ practice of imrpisoning the same man again and again for the same offense—i.e., refusing to kill.
For all these reasons—and because he declined to take ‘oath’ on the Holy Bible when he assumed his seat in the House of Lords, but only affirmed the necessary (being the first British Lord on record ever to make that distinction)—we hail the Duke of Bedford as a First class Fortean. After he had been Named Fellow, and before we received his acceptance, word came that an effigy or statue of His Lordship had been tarred and feathered. That is truly the accolade. As Ben Hecht says: ‘Their hatred is the caress incomparable.’”
As far as I can tell, the naming of Hastings Russell as a fellow and Thayer sending the request were never reported in Doubt. This is not surprising, as Thayer was only became really engaged with the various categories of membership as World War II ran down. That practice—of naming Fellows—highlighted a weird inconsistency that was made even more visible with the Duke of Bedford’s acceptance: for all that Thayer wanted to portray the Fortean Society as a band of outlaws, he still craved official recognition for Forteans. Thus there were Accepted Fellows and Honorary Founders. Thus, that a British Lord would join was seen as a coup. (As it was, the Duke of Bedford was among the first six Named Fellow to accept the honor, along with Manly P. Hall, Morris Ernst, Norman Thomas, Albert Jay Nock, and Claude Fayette Bragdon. The exact order of their naming and acceptance is hard to pin down.)
For all of his cheerleading, though, Thayer was never quite sure what to make of the Duke. He wrote to Ezra Pound in November 1946, about a year after announcing the Duke’s acceptance, “By the way, where does the Duke of Bedford stand with you? He is an Accepted Fellow of this Society but his politics are a bit foggy to me. He wants to reform ‘money’ but I don’t see him quoting Gesell.’ (No response survives.) Later, in 1950 (Doubt 28), Thayer noted, “Accepted Fellow the Duke of Bedford is reported renting rooms (American plan [meaning: meals were included]) for $35.28 per week, in one of his three family mansions. High taxes are said to have caused the move, but the Duke continues to work with anarchist Guy Aldred toward a perfect lawless community and monetary reform on a planet-wide scale.”
The nature of the confusion is revealing. Thayer wasn’t overly concerned with anti-Semitism—his correspondence with Eric Frank Russell revealed a disdain for Jews, although it could be fairly admitted that Thayer disdained just about everyone. Certainly, he was no fan of Ben Hecht’s late adoption of Zionism. What really concerned him was monetary reform, and how to understand the Duke’s philosophy—on taxes, on making money. Who exactly did he follow? He referenced Silvio Gesell, an Italian proponent of Henry George’s heterodox economic theories, which argued that civilization should pay for itself by taxing land values; Gesell wanted to get rid of all rents and inherited wealth. Thayer’s confusion thus suggests that the problem was, Thayer himself was mostly unfamiliar with social credit theories, thinking of economic reform in Georgist terms only. (Thayer also mixed together the theories of Henry George and the Duke of Bedord in Doubt 18, July 1947.) If this interpretation is correct, it is surprising, given how closely Thayer followed Ezra Pound’s career.
Other Forteans, though, understood the Duke of Bedford, and were enthusiastic about him. In particular, Clara and Alfredo Studer were ardent fans. More will be said about them later, when they get their own entry; suffice to say here they were monetary reformers and self-declared world citizens. They translated the Duke of Bedford’s pamphlet, The Financier’s Little Game into Italian, and helped spread Forteanism—or their version of it—through that country. When word finally came that the Duke of Bedford’s body had been found, Clara Studer wrote to Thayer (published in Doubt 43, 1954), “To this Fortean, he will always seem the most spiritually fine, intelligent, articulate person of his age. Certainly the bravest Englishman, if not man.” Thayer continued to appreciate him because he was independent of “any party discipline” and would be “sorely missed in a world hell-bent on conformity.”
In a final twist, John Ian, the Duke’s eldest son, came into his inheritance and solved the financial Gordian knot into which his father and grandfather had tied the estate by opening it to the public and charging for visits—not unlike his father’s late efforts to extract rents from it by charging those who stayed. Meanwhile, the Duke’s name lived on among those who worried—like him—that the world was run by a financial elite. Except he was now seen not as a crusader against that elite, but as a son of the shadowy organization that oversaw the unfolding of history.
Monetary reform, this interest developed in the early 1930s, sparked by his reading of Marshall Hattersley’s This Age of Plenty. By his own admission, Russell had to that point thought the solution to unemployment was emigration to the further reaches of the empire. He spent a couple of years studying the issues, talking with social credit proponents and their detractors, eventually concluding those in favor of social credit had the better of the arguments. Social credit was the name given to a variety of different ideas for reforming money to reduce taxation and unemployment. It found support among a number of writers, including Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot. As Russell came to understand the movement, social credit had two basic proposals. The first was the the state would rebate consumers for purchases based on particular formulas. The second was that everyone would receive some portion of a National Dividend—what he called a “Pensions-for-All.” The idea behind these actions was to equip consumers to buy enough of what was produced to keep the economy in motion, while avoiding taxes—since the government was printing the money—and thus ensuring there were jobs, as well as protection for those who loss their jobs to technological development.
Social credit would become a durable ideal among Forteans and science fiction writers. It had something of a Theosophical appeal, since among its early proponents was Alfred Orage, who went on to publish a Theosophical journal. Robert A. Heinlein wrote stories with societies run according to the rules of social credit, as did Eric Frank Russell. Indeed, according to an article in the News Review, there was a bit of a split among British Forteans in the years immediately after World War II, with the Londoners “criticisng their Liverpool colleagues for their too-ready acceptance of Social Credit dogmas. Liverpool members assert the Londoners tend to approach problems and discussions from a stand-point of destructive criticism. The Londoners prefer constructive criticism.” The author obviously garbled the last line, and never named names, but it is important to realize that Russell lived near Liverpool at the time.
All of that was in the future, though—more precisely, in future dreams of the future—and for the most part Russell was frustrated by the lack of interest in social credit shown by the general public. “Persuading people to have more money should, I thought, surely be easy, especially in view of their marked readiness to have more of my money whenever there seemed a remote chance of securing it! However I got a surprise; a few converts were made, and are still being made, but the average individual declined to be interested.” He blamed “The Appalling Stupidity of the Ordinary Person.” In 1939, the Marquess helped to found the British People’s Party, in part to agitate for social credit.
But, only in part. The British People’s Party grew out of the British Union of Fascists, and the British People’s Party stood on the far right of the ideological spectrum. John Finlay, a historian of the social credit movement has argued that social credit was, at heart, anarchist. That may be true (or may not), but it’s also a fact that some developments of social credit marked it as fascist-leaning. Social crediters complained that a financial elite was running the economy for their own well-being, at the expense of everyone else. (This strand would later feed the New World Order fantasies that implicated the Tavistock Foundation.) Of course, the financial elite was usually thought to be comprised completely, or almost completely, of Jews, and so it was only a small step from worrying over a financial elite to anti-Semitism.
That year was a momentous one for Russell, 1939. On a personal level, he became the 12th Duke of Bedford, having reached a kind of rapprochement with his own father, the two speaking but only on uncontroversial topics, like the weather, crops. And history repeated itself: he disinherited John Ian because of his marriage, father and son never speaking again (although there were letters). Russell worked with Herbrand to tie up the Bedford fortunes so that it would be difficult for John Ian to receive—father and grandfather thought him too much a layabout. On a global scale, the world fell into war again, twice in a quarter century. Russell was in the House of Lords and stood up against the war.
In 1940, his father died. Russell moved forward on his peace plans. In March, he traveled to Ireland to meet with members of the German government and negotiate peace—which caused him a great deal of bad publicity and put on a government suspect list: if there was an invasion of England by Germany, he would be arrested so as not to head a puppet regime. His travel provisions were revoked. He also fought the government over the use of Woburn Abbey, from which he was blocked as the government was using its airstrip (built for his mother) and some wanted to appropriate his railings for scrap. He continued to put out pamphlets throughout the war, arguing Germany’s case. Many thought his pacifism was only a front for his Fascism, among them George Orwell, who was led by the Duke of Bedford to question the entire pacifist movement. His actions would later be fictionalized in The Remains of the Day.
The post-war years saw Russell continuing both his stumping for Germany and his work on behalf of social credit. He opposed the Nuremberg trials, for example, and downplayed the number killed in German death camps. And yet, one of the main outlets for his writings was the anarchist journal The Word—there was the anarchist trappings of social credit and pacifism. Much as his father had, he lived his last years isolated from the rest of humanity, although he may have had a good relationship with his youngest son, Lord Hugh Hastings Russell, who was a Conscientious Objector during the second world war. And he had his birds, parakeets and budgerigars. In 1953, he disappeared. Unlike his mother, though, his body was found. He had shot himself in the bushes near his home. Perhaps by accident, perhaps to further complicate the passage of the estate to his eldest son.
The Duke of Bedford was mentioned a handful of times in the pages of Doubt, from the mid-1940s until his death. It was not the first time that Thayer’s penchant for outcasts and gadflies had led him to associate with fascist-sympathizers. He had also connected Doubt to the writing of George Sylvester Vierick, who was jailed for his Nazi sympathies. And of course Thayer was a great fan and supporter of Ezra Pound, even after he was incarcerated in a mental hospital after a series of radio broadcasts supporting Italy. James Blish considered himself a theoretical Fascit. And in Doubt 12, Thayer laid the groundwork for Holocaust denial, writing,
“If any member has been nursing the hope of visiting Europe one day and, by subtle investigation, of producing evidence that the horror stories of World Fraud II were of no more substantial stuff than those of World Fraud I, now is the time to stop nursing.
In the N.Y. Times of Thursday, May 24, 1945 old style, is an Associated Press Radiophone of great billows of black smoke and two automatic devices. The headline reads: THE END OF A NOTORIOUS GERMAN PRISON CAMP . . . and the caption: ‘British flame throwers destroying the concentration quarters at Belsen where thousands died.’
Burning the place was a sanitary measure, no doubt, to lay the stench.”
In all these cases, the connection between Fascism and Forteanism was never very strong—but it is, nonetheless, a troubling Fortean heritage.
First mention of the Duke of Bedford came int he issue after Thayer had questioned the integrity of reports about German death camps. Hastings Russell had been asked to be a fellow of the Fortean Society and accepted. Thayer effused,
“With great delight we beg to report that His Lordship the Duke of Bedford, Named Fellow of the Fortean Society for the Year 14 FS (1944 old style), has accepted. As you probably know, the Duke of Bedford is practically the only member of the House of Lords who does his own thinking. He is the author of A Call to Manhood, and The Financiers’ Little Game. (The Society takes pleasure in supplying both books for $1.50 for the pair. They are printed in Edinburgh.)
No Fellow, of all those Named to date, has a better right to the distinction than the Duke, as is evidenced by his war record of consistent and perpetual criticism of everything rotten in the Empire, most especially its never-articulated ‘war-aims’, its then Prime Minister, and the Bank of England. The Duke of Bedford has been he staunchest defender of Conscientious Objectorts in the realm, loudly decrying the ‘cat-and-mouse’ practice of imrpisoning the same man again and again for the same offense—i.e., refusing to kill.
For all these reasons—and because he declined to take ‘oath’ on the Holy Bible when he assumed his seat in the House of Lords, but only affirmed the necessary (being the first British Lord on record ever to make that distinction)—we hail the Duke of Bedford as a First class Fortean. After he had been Named Fellow, and before we received his acceptance, word came that an effigy or statue of His Lordship had been tarred and feathered. That is truly the accolade. As Ben Hecht says: ‘Their hatred is the caress incomparable.’”
As far as I can tell, the naming of Hastings Russell as a fellow and Thayer sending the request were never reported in Doubt. This is not surprising, as Thayer was only became really engaged with the various categories of membership as World War II ran down. That practice—of naming Fellows—highlighted a weird inconsistency that was made even more visible with the Duke of Bedford’s acceptance: for all that Thayer wanted to portray the Fortean Society as a band of outlaws, he still craved official recognition for Forteans. Thus there were Accepted Fellows and Honorary Founders. Thus, that a British Lord would join was seen as a coup. (As it was, the Duke of Bedford was among the first six Named Fellow to accept the honor, along with Manly P. Hall, Morris Ernst, Norman Thomas, Albert Jay Nock, and Claude Fayette Bragdon. The exact order of their naming and acceptance is hard to pin down.)
For all of his cheerleading, though, Thayer was never quite sure what to make of the Duke. He wrote to Ezra Pound in November 1946, about a year after announcing the Duke’s acceptance, “By the way, where does the Duke of Bedford stand with you? He is an Accepted Fellow of this Society but his politics are a bit foggy to me. He wants to reform ‘money’ but I don’t see him quoting Gesell.’ (No response survives.) Later, in 1950 (Doubt 28), Thayer noted, “Accepted Fellow the Duke of Bedford is reported renting rooms (American plan [meaning: meals were included]) for $35.28 per week, in one of his three family mansions. High taxes are said to have caused the move, but the Duke continues to work with anarchist Guy Aldred toward a perfect lawless community and monetary reform on a planet-wide scale.”
The nature of the confusion is revealing. Thayer wasn’t overly concerned with anti-Semitism—his correspondence with Eric Frank Russell revealed a disdain for Jews, although it could be fairly admitted that Thayer disdained just about everyone. Certainly, he was no fan of Ben Hecht’s late adoption of Zionism. What really concerned him was monetary reform, and how to understand the Duke’s philosophy—on taxes, on making money. Who exactly did he follow? He referenced Silvio Gesell, an Italian proponent of Henry George’s heterodox economic theories, which argued that civilization should pay for itself by taxing land values; Gesell wanted to get rid of all rents and inherited wealth. Thayer’s confusion thus suggests that the problem was, Thayer himself was mostly unfamiliar with social credit theories, thinking of economic reform in Georgist terms only. (Thayer also mixed together the theories of Henry George and the Duke of Bedord in Doubt 18, July 1947.) If this interpretation is correct, it is surprising, given how closely Thayer followed Ezra Pound’s career.
Other Forteans, though, understood the Duke of Bedford, and were enthusiastic about him. In particular, Clara and Alfredo Studer were ardent fans. More will be said about them later, when they get their own entry; suffice to say here they were monetary reformers and self-declared world citizens. They translated the Duke of Bedford’s pamphlet, The Financier’s Little Game into Italian, and helped spread Forteanism—or their version of it—through that country. When word finally came that the Duke of Bedford’s body had been found, Clara Studer wrote to Thayer (published in Doubt 43, 1954), “To this Fortean, he will always seem the most spiritually fine, intelligent, articulate person of his age. Certainly the bravest Englishman, if not man.” Thayer continued to appreciate him because he was independent of “any party discipline” and would be “sorely missed in a world hell-bent on conformity.”
In a final twist, John Ian, the Duke’s eldest son, came into his inheritance and solved the financial Gordian knot into which his father and grandfather had tied the estate by opening it to the public and charging for visits—not unlike his father’s late efforts to extract rents from it by charging those who stayed. Meanwhile, the Duke’s name lived on among those who worried—like him—that the world was run by a financial elite. Except he was now seen not as a crusader against that elite, but as a son of the shadowy organization that oversaw the unfolding of history.
