“All baronets are bad,” observes Ruth, a professional bridesmaid, in Gilbert and Sullivan's 1887 operetta Ruddigore. Yet the baronets of Ruddigore are not merely bad, but cursed to be so. According to Dame Hannah, in the reign of James I, the first baronet of Ruddigore, Sir Rupert Murgatroyd, spent “his leisure and his riches” in “persecuting witches.” Finally, a witch whom he was roasting on the village green uttered the following curse:

As a result, whoever holds the title has to commit crimes, or die. In making the baronets of Ruddigore cursed by the need to do evil deeds, the librettist W.S. Gilbert was playfully drawing attention to the nineteenthcentury tendency in both the novel and stage-melodrama to present baronets as bad. I hope here briefly to sketch the history of bad baronets in nineteenth-century British literature, and tentatively to suggest why they might be bad. The question has some social relevance at a time when through the reform of the House of Lords, many other British titles are becoming like baronetcies: that is, the title will in most cases indicate a family of longstanding recognition, but will have no other privileges. My main purpose here, however, is to consider how the presentation of baronets sheds light on the pervasiveness of medieval themes and motifs in British culture, so that even an institution like the baronetage, which simply did not exist in medieval times, becomes steeped in a medieval mystique, notably through the function of a curse. At first consideration, the representation of baronets as bad in melodrama and the novel, genres drawing largely upon a middle-class readership, might appear antimedievalist, a rejection of traditional, rather than earned, status, and a way in which middle-class authors and readers can feel a superiority over the lowest-ranking of the titled classes. But as I shall argue, surprisingly often, implied critiques of baronets are themselves medievalist.

The history of baronets was readily available to nineteenth-century readers. The word “baronet” occurs in medieval English writings, yet its precise meaning is unclear until James I of England and VI of Scotland established the rank in 1611.