The Ten Most Bizarre English Aristocrats Who Ever Lived

What would it be like to have unlimited money that your family earned years or generations before you, and you were able to do with it whatever you wanted? You get a title, social influence, esteem, and probably a pretty cool castle or other kind of estate to live in all the time. Sometimes, several of those! Sounds pretty awful, right? Such is the question every aristocrat must face during their lives. And some have answered it by doing some incredibly strange things!

In this list, we’ll take a look at ten fascinating and downright confusing English aristocrats. While most of society’s upper crust might involve themselves in collecting ancient artifacts, amassing a jewelry collection, or maybe even getting into something like horse racing (it is the sport of kings, after all), these aristocrats decided to do completely different and entirely bizarre things instead! Get ready for a weird one, y’all…

Related: 10 Scurrilous Royals and Nobles Who Were Involved in Juicy Scandals

10 The Prolific Pacer

Sir Tatton Sykes (1772–1863) was the 4th Baronet of Sledmere. He became known as “Old Tat” as he grew into adulthood. During his younger years, he became an accomplished boxer and even a successful horse racing jockey. But the weirdest thing about him was how much he liked to walk—inside his own library!

Old Tat would notoriously wake up at 5:30 every single morning and go pacing about his library. Hour after hour, day after day, he covered so much ground over so much time that he ended up pacing more than 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) every single day. Then, once his morning pace was completed each day, he would have breakfast. Of course, it included a beer or two. Because… why not?

Old Tat loved agriculture, too. He was a very hard-working person as far as an aristocrat was concerned, and even though he was weird, his servants enjoyed seeing him out in his garden. There, he figured out that bone meal made for a good fertilizer. Even though he was an adult 19th-century man, he refused to give up his 18th-century ways.

Notoriously, he would wear bizarre century-old clothes around his estate even as everybody else was rushing into the future around him. He even used 18th-century tools in his garden and furnished his home with 18th-century furniture right up until the day he died. Simply put, the man had decided he loved the 18th century and didn’t want to leave it. The only thing he loved more was his pacing!^[1]

9 The Original Fight Club Founder

Henry de la Poer Beresford, the 3rd Marquess of Waterford, lived a wild life between 1811 and his premature death in 1859. While the title he held sounds official, his life was far from it. He was notorious in his day for loving to get drunk and fight. He would binge drink with the best of them, then go out onto the street in London and elsewhere and look for random people to beat up.

Beresford loved seeing other people get hurt so much that he would even pay his friends and random strangers to get into fights just to watch them get pummeled. So, if Brad Pitt thought he might have had himself a good idea in Fight Club, well… it didn’t compare at all to the violence-loving, sadistic ways of Beresford. And that was far from the worst!

Once, Beresford actually wrote a letter to a train company asking them if they would organize a train crash for him. He offered the company a 10,000-pound check to have two locomotives going full-speed into each other on the track. He wanted to watch the collision and then laugh at the tragic casualties that would come about. He even started a riot once when he set up an impromptu shop in a hay market and began passing out mugs full of gin. Massive fights broke out among the commoners as Beresford watched while giggling and laughing.

He loved riding fast horses, too. One day, he was called into court after allegedly racing his horse through a very crowded street. He arrived at court on the very same horse and then insisted that the authorities question the animal. After all, by his logic, the horse was the only one who knew for certain how fast he was going.

Unsurprisingly, this defense did not work out well for Beresford. Horsemanship, in general, didn’t work out for him, either. He died in a gruesome horse racing accident in 1859, and his sickening, violence-loving ways went with him.^[2]

8 The Man Who Really Hated Wasps

Sir George Beresby Sitwell was an heir to an aristocratic family that went back more than 500 years by the time he was born in 1860. He was a noted writer and served for a time in the House of Commons, too. But he was most known for being a health nut who really hated wasps. Yes, wasps.

Sitwell loved to invent strange things during his life, and one of the strangest items was a toothbrush that would play music while a person was brushing their teeth. That had nothing on his other invention, though—a tiny gun that would shoot and kill wasps who were annoying him while he was outside trying to socialize with visitors and deal with servants.

Sitwell was obsessed with his own health, too. He did absolutely everything that he could possibly do to keep himself alive for as long as possible. That included keeping every single medicine known to man nearby at all times. Not only that, but he went to the trouble of carefully mislabeling (yes, mislabeling) each one so that nobody else might use his medicine for themselves so that he wouldn’t run the risk of getting horribly ill.

He didn’t want anybody to disagree with him at any point, either. Upon entering his estate, visitors were greeted with this sign: “I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.” Sure. We’ll go with that!^[3]

7 The Tunnel-Dwelling Badger

The fifth Duke of Portland was a man named William John Cavendish (1800–1879). He was a notorious loner who absolutely hated to socialize. For one, when he was traveling, he refused to leave his carriage for any reason whatsoever. He would rather have it unhooked from his horses and lifted onto a train car than get out and see people around him. Not only that, but he regularly walked around with an umbrella covering his face in public so that he wouldn’t have to talk to people walking by.

His roughly 500 employees weren’t even allowed to make eye contact with him, lest they risk getting fired for it. He had an intricate set-up involving multiple mailboxes in multiple places on his property. Employees had to deliver hand-written messages to those mailboxes instead of coming to see the aristocrat and actually speaking to him in person. But that is so unbelievably far from the weirdest part of his life!

By far, the strangest part of the tale of Lord Cavendish was his desire to keep the public off his expansive lands. First, he tried to close the public roads that traversed his property. The government didn’t care for that too much, of course. So, in response, he built a vast network of underground tunnels that would allow him to travel in private.

One of the underground tunnels went a stunning 1.5 miles (2.41 kilometers) in distance! He even built a secret trap door in his apartment that would allow him to slip down into his intricate tunnel network whenever he wanted. He did it so often and so quietly that his servants never had any idea where he was! The man just really liked to be alone.^[4]

6 The Red Bull-Drinking Divorcee

Daphne “Daffy” Guinness was born in 1967 into the notorious and cursed Guinness family, so she had all kinds of access to otherworldly things from a young age. Take, for example, that she swam in Salvador Dali’s pool as a very young child. He kept it filled with live lobsters, but that didn’t dissuade Daffy from swimming.

She also grew up as friends with world-famous people, including Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger. And in more recent years, she’s been said to have carried on a long and surprisingly public affair with Bernard-Henri Levy, a very much married French philosopher who is more than two decades her senior.

Guinness first got married when she was just 19 years old. She turned around and got divorced not long after that, earning herself a $20 million settlement in addition to her family fortune. So she started spending it. Her fashion sense is wild, and it includes heel-less shoes (yes, really) that cost $10,000 and on which she is constantly falling.

She also refuses to wear any clothing that she has seen someone else wearing before her—be it a celebrity or something in an advertisement. So she just keeps it original. And costly. She recalls growing up in a home with suits of armor littered throughout the house, so she clearly wanted to keep things original with her own fashion choices as an adult.

Guinness insists on keeping her hair up in a beehive with black and silver streaks. If that sounds familiar to you as a Cruella De Vil knock-off, well, you’d be right. A taxi driver once infamously mistook her for the 101 Dalmatians villain and was promptly told off.

Here’s the weirdest part of all, though. She doesn’t eat at all! Guinness claims that she very rarely takes a meal like a normal person and instead gets through the day by drinking Red Bull and coming up with energy through that. Maybe that drink really does give you wings after all!^[5]

5 The Man with 2,000 Pet Dogs

John Mytton (1796–1834) was such a wild man that everybody in his life knew him as “Mad Jack.” He was kicked out of the esteemed school Westminster for fighting with a teacher, then was later expelled from a second school. Somehow, owing to his father’s connections, he still made it on to study at Cambridge. He didn’t finish school there, though, either.

Instead, he once brought 2,000 bottles of port to his dorm room and had his fellow students party hardy with him. Another time, he notoriously stabled a horse in the bedroom of a tutor! In the end, after dropping out of Cambridge, he was given an annual income the equivalent of nearly one million pounds in today’s currency. It was simply too much for a young man with no sense of boundaries or guardrails.

After buying his way into Parliament and then promptly quitting, “Mad Jack” did a ton of crazy things. In one case, he rode a horse into a hotel, galloped up a staircase, and jumped over a few patrons before riding out of a balcony window. In another stunt, he tried to jump a toll gate in a horse-drawn carriage. That, as you might expect, was a failure. He became legendary for fox hunting while he was completely nude. And he would regularly pay local children around his area to roll down the local hill. Why not, right? Based on some of Mad Jack’s stunts, at least it wasn’t something worse than that for the poor kids.

The craziest story from Mad Jack comes in his esteemed dog kennel. He had nearly 2,000 pet dogs, which he kept fed with champagne and steak at regular intervals. He once rode a bear just to prove that he could do it. And he was such a horse lover that he couldn’t say no to his favorite steed, going so far as to let the animal walk through the halls of his home as if it were a pet dog or cat.

In the end, Mad Jack managed to spend his entire inheritance in just the first 15 years of his adult life. He was a prolific drinker, too, and that hastened his end. He died in 1834, at just 37 years old, after having suffered from horrific alcoholism and its effects that ravaged his body.^[6]

4 Dinner Parties for Dogs

Francis Egerton was born in 1756 as the 8th Earl of Bridgewater. His father was the famed Anglican Bishop John Egerton. However, while John may have done some significant things as far as the Anglican Church was concerned, Francis was more interested in his pets. The young aristocrat was best known for throwing lavish dinner parties for his dogs and cats.

Francis would dress them in fancy clothes, and he even found ways to get their paws into miniature shoes. Then, if the dogs misbehaved at all, he would put them in servants’ clothes for a week or two as if to really drive the point home that they were in the “doghouse,” as it were.

For himself, Francis’s fashion tastes were just as weird. He would wear a new pair of shoes every single day. After he wore them for that one day, he would discard them, lining them up against a wall to measure the passage of time. And here’s an incredibly weird thing about him. Even though he spent a great deal of his life in France, he never actually learned any French whatsoever!

Whenever he had business to conduct there, he would do it in Latin. He had enough servants at his disposal that he didn’t think anything of it, but surely everybody else around him was annoyed after years and years of that crap!^[7]

3 The Bearded Health Nut

Born Matthew Robinson in England in 1712, the man who would become Lord Rokeby was the son of a wealthy landowner. Rokeby was highly educated for his time—or any time, really—having studied at Westminster and then completing a course in the law at Trinity College, Cambridge. But he was also one of the more quirky aristocrats to ever live. And certainly so in staid, boring 18th-century England!

For one, Rokeby wore his facial hair in a big, long beard nearly down to his knees. Beards that long have never really been in style for most people, so that was already sort of weird. But you must understand that beards of any style were completely frowned upon in England in the 18th century. Lord Rokeby didn’t care, though, and he did it anyway.

But the real tale was Lord Rokeby’s obsession with cold water. Every single day, he would walk down to the beach and swim in the sea until he was physically exhausted. He also thought people should drink much more water than they did at the time, so he had tons of public water fountains installed at his expense. He even doled out pounds at various times to people who he saw actually using the water fountains! He refused to drink alcohol, coffee, or even tea. When he got tired of drinking water, which rarely happened, he would switch to beef broth.

Lord Rokeby was as kind as he was weird. Mostly, everybody regarded him as a pleasant and odd man. He very rarely had visitors, and the ones he did have, he would bore them with recitations of very long, drawn-out poems. He was known for treating animals in a very humane way, too, which was rare at the time.

He believed that people should only eat locally grown food, as well. So he was a precursor to several major health movements that have exploded over the last few decades! Say, maybe this guy wasn’t so strange after all…^[8]

2 The Giraffe-Loving Lifelong Learner

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt Wilson was born in 1883 and fell into his family line as the 14th Baronet of Berners. He was an incredibly creative and talented man, but he was also pretty off the wall when it came to some of his more bizarre eccentricities. Lord Berners was famous for the musical compositions he created, even though most of those weren’t fully appreciated until after his death. However, more notable during his lifetime was a very strange series of habits.

Chief among them was the fact that he owned a pet giraffe—and he was so enamored by that giraffe that he and the animal had afternoon tea together nearly every single day! He had a large group of pet doves, too, and he would dye their feathers in different colors. He also made sure that all of his pet doves wore fake pearls when they went around his house. Why not, right? He was an aristocrat, after all!

He did other strange things around his house, too. For one, he posted random signs in unexpected places, the likes of which read things including “mangling done here,” as well as “members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk.” He did other bizarre things, too, like dying the dinner food of his guests in various colors and wearing a pig’s head mask around town to scare the locals.

In the end, when he died in the 20th century, he wrote his own epitaph, which still appears on his gravestone at Faringdon House: “Here lies Lord Berners / One of the learners / His great love of learning / May earn him a burning / But, Praise the Lord! / He seldom was bored.”^[9]

1 Building His Own Theater

Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, was born in 1875. His family had a very long and well-respected tradition of military service. His ancestor, Field Marshall Henry William Paget, had been named the 1st Marquess of Anglesey after he was injured during the famed Battle of Waterloo. But young Henry wasn’t interested in any of that.

Instead, he wanted to put on a show. And since nobody really wanted to have him star in their plays or productions, he simply built his own theater to make it happen! It all started when Henry’s father died when Henry was just in his early twenties. He was bequeathed a massive annual allowance, and he went about spending it all in very short order.

For one, he bought an expensive pink poodle and outfitted it with ribbons. He carried it all around London every day with him on lavish shopping trips. He spent more than half a billion pounds on jewelry and gold accessories, too, as well as jeweled gowns, kidskin gloves, and a variety of other expensive costumes. And did we mention the theater?! He came to be known as the “Dancing Marquess” because he would perform risqué dances for European audiences in his own personally-built 150-seat theater. It wasn’t clear whether those audiences were laughing at him or enjoying his performances, but either way, they showed up.

If that’s not weird enough for you, how about this. Paget actually married his cousin. His sexual orientation is up for debate, and it’s not entirely clear whether he and her ever actually consummated their marriage. For what it’s worth, he did buy her tons of expensive jewelry. And he even had her model it naked so he could see how it sat on her! He even requested at times that she wear the jewelry while sleeping—again, totally naked.

In the end, bankruptcy caught up with him, and Paget was forced to pay back tens of millions of pounds to his creditors. He ended up dying young of a long illness in 1905 with millions of pounds of debts still to be paid back.^[10]