WHEN GEORGE Robert Charles Herbert, the 13th Earl of Pembroke and 10th Earl of Montgomery, reached his twenty- first birthday in 1871, the celebrations at Wilton House were stupendous. The welcoming party awaiting his arrival at the family's ancestral estate four miles west of Salisbury included the mayor of Wilton, the local rector (a great-uncle, it turns out, of the future screen actor Laurence Olivier), 150 tenants on horseback, representatives of the Odd Fellows, the Royal Wilton Carpet factory, the local Friendly Societies and scores of ‘mechanics, artisans, and habitants’. Twenty labourers unhooked the horses from his carriage and dragged it to the great house under arches decorated with the family's initials and trees planted for the occasion. Like the young title-holder in Benjamin Disraeli's just published novel Lothair (1870), Pembroke modestly ‘thanked them all for the very hearty welcome which they had accorded to him, and more particularly so because he had been away a long time, and came among them almost as a stranger’ – an allusion to travels that had taken him out of the country for much of his adolescence. Everyone cheered George's mother for her numerous good works since coming to live at Wilton three decades before. Then the crowds adjourned for fireworks, choral singing, dances, dining and rural sports. The festivities went on for a week, engaging a thousand schoolchildren as well as ‘the elite of the town and neighborhood’.

‘Younger sons, as is well known, do not come of age’, groused George's contemporary Lord Ronald Gower, himself the eleventh child of the Duke of Sutherland. An aristocratic estates system that allowed eldest sons to inherit both public identities and stewardship of a great family and its assets produced such complaints. George's income placed him among the thirty wealthiest landowners in Britain. His revenues from farmland in Wiltshire were almost matched by skyrocketing ground rents from property developments in the Donnybrook, Irishtown and Sandymount areas of south-east Dublin. He inherited control of a church living at Jesus College, Cambridge, though he never attended university himself. With a seat in the House of Lords and a father who had served twice as secretary for war, Pembroke was a public personage even in his teens.