Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [134]
As resentment of the Chandos defeat festered, so did Brydges's genealogical sense of his own identity He refused to accept the Lords'verdict- on the contrary, he continued to lay claim to the title - and he campaigned to have the case retried before a jury. At the same time he threw himself into prodigious genealogical researches. From these he emerged convinced not only that he was indeed a descendant of the original baron Chandos, but that his family line could be extended far further back. His real ancestors, he now concluded, were Charlemagne and the Merovingian kings. Brydges now laid claim to a descent from all but half a dozen of the 144 noblest houses of Europe (and although he did not draw attention to this, we may note that the Merovingians had claimed descent from Christ). He designed an extraordinary coat of arms for himself combining the emblems of every one of them. (See fig. 9.4, which the Lancaster herald Beltz described as "HERALDRY RUN MAD!")27 Brydges printed his argument in a lavish folio designed to "open and trace the streams of royal and illustrious blood which have flowed into the Compiler's veins." The work contained a total of 252 tables of descent-"and yet," he threatened, "the subject is not half exhausted."28 In short, Brydges now boasted of a descent more refined than that of any contemporary royal family. "I am not merely contending for equality," he insisted, "but for superiority."29
In an age of antiquarianism and genealogical research, this was perhaps the most extreme manifestation of their ambitions. On its basis Brydges now built both an argument against the expansion of the peerage and a theory of the descent of virtue-even genius. The first of these rested on a simple demand: what title did those without noble blood have to privilege, and if noble blood were not a title, whyhave a peerage at all?30 It was a reactionary but pointed question. Recent years had in fact seen a "profusion" of new peers, sufficient to change the very character of the House. Altogether 209 new lords would be created between 1776 and 1830, after three-quarters of a century when the number of peers had been almost constant. Brydges expressed revulsion at what he saw as the industrialization of the House of Lords. He decried this intrusion of capitalist grandees as a calamitous dilution of principle in favor of capital. "The aristocracy of money is the worst in the world," he cried, "and that rank and title bought with new wealth is quite intolerable." The oldest male-line peerage now dated back only to 1442, while new peers shut the door on legitimate claimants. This amounted to a substantive change in the consti- tution.31 What had originally been a "senate," in which a virtuous, landed aristocracy had steered public affairs in an atmosphere of secluded contemplation based ultimately in the countryside, had fallen into the world of commercial interest. The peerage was becoming "blendedwith the people." Placing his genealogical facts in competition with the political-economic fact of industrial capitalism, he pronounced the latter wanting.32
FIGURE 9.4. Brydges's design for his coat of arms. S. E. Brydges, .Stemmata illustria (Paris: printed byJ. Smith, 1825), facing p. 4. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library
Brydges's genealogy of genius was twinned with this. "Perhaps the most influential aristocracy of the present day," he declared, "is the aristocracy of literary genius." But as defined by the literary marketplace, at least, this was