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indulged Austen's teenage daughter, Jane, in amateur dramatics. It is tempting to see him as a distant archetype for Persuasion's Sir Walter Elliot, in fact, especially as Brydges's sister, to whom Jane was especially close, was named Anne.17 Then he moved to his childhood surroundings near Canterbury. There Brydges devoted himself to agricultural improvements, conversations with rural gentry, and polite literary games with the military officers stationed nearby. But nothing he did succeeded. The agricultural projects lost money (despite crop prices being at record levels), the local squirearchy despised him as a snobbish arriviste, and after a briefperiod of enthusiasm even a cavalry officer's life proved distasteful.18 What Brydges really liked to do was write-and this liking he indulged freely. Decades later, when well into his decline, he remained capable of composing two thousand extempore sonnets ayear; we still have at least ten manuscript volumes of them.19 Before that he proved himself an indefatigable author of novels, essays, and topographical and genealogical works. He also served as editor of a slew of literary and antiquarian pieces ranging from Margaret Cavendish to Milton.20 The labor proved devastating, not least because, like his aspirations to nobility, his claims to genius received none of the acclamation he thought they deserved. The effect can be seen in two portraits that he incorporated into his autobiography in 1834. It is hard to imagine a starker "before and after" contrast illustrating the sheer enervation of aristocracy denied (figs. 9.2 and 9.3). For it was aristocracy of land and mind -nobility and genius - that defined Brydges and his campaigns.

Beginning in September 1789, the so-called Chandos case mushroomed over four decades. The Lancashire herald, George Beltz, called it "the most extraordinary attempt ever made to attain the summit of a British patrician's ambition. "21 The dukes of Chandos had been one ofeighteenth- century England's most prominent noble families, renowned for their patronage of the arts and sciences. One of them had been responsible for the Microcosm, that device so central to arguments about creative property.22 But the last duke had just died without issue at the age of fifty-eight. It was assumed that the line had become extinct. Within a month, how ever, Brydges had persuaded his elder brother, Edward, to petition for the barony. Their claim was that they were descended from the third son of the original Baron Chandos, one John Brydges, who had been granted the rank back in 1554. (They could not claim the dukedom because that was a later creation bestowed after the family branches had diverged.) The coincidence of names aside, Brydges's conviction was at first based on sheer Romantic inspiration. He believed that the old duke had died just as he himself had been poring over old funerary inscriptions in the Chandos vault, and to his mind the coincidence could only be portentous. He also remembered hearing his mother speaking about a link, and avowed that as a child he had been surrounded by heraldry and portraits of Gibbon, Hardwicke, and Lord Chancellor Egerton (a real ancestor, on his mother's side).23 But more evidence than that would be needed to convince others of the claim. So Brydges hired the Windsor herald for what became seven longyears of researches, retained the finest London lawyers, and launched his campaign.

FIGURE 9.2. Samuel EgertonBrvdgesasavotuigman.S.E.Brvdges,The Autobiography, 2 vols. (London: Cochrane and M'Crone, 1834), vol. 1, frontispiece. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library

FIGURE 9.3. Brydges as an old man. Brydges, Autobiography, vol. 2, frontispiece. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.

The resulting case became one of late Georgian England's more diverting causes celebres. It centered on questions of genealogy and documentary evidence. The opponents of Brydges's claim proposed an alternative family tree, according to which he was in fact the descendant of a quite separate fine- a humble family hailing from