Gibbon's prediction that Tom Jones would outlive the Austrian House of Habsburg has been borne out by the passage of time. But even if the fanciful notion that Henry Fielding was descended from the royal family which provided numerous Holy Roman Emperors has now been discredited, the myth is not without significance to the biographer. As J. Paul Hunter rightly observes: ‘Fielding came from more patrician stock than any other major English writer in the eighteenth century’. When considering his various satirical portraits of degenerate peers and booby squires, it is worth bearing in mind that Fielding was himself descended on his father's side from members of the English and Irish nobility, and on his mother's from stolid representatives of the Somersetshire gentry. While one might not wish to go along with the suggestion of his first biographer, Arthur Murphy, that Fielding actually yearned, in all seriousness, to be nothing more than a private landed gentleman living on his country estate, it is important to identify his social background with accuracy. On both sides of his family, he was descended from the ranks of the nobility and gentry which together made up the English ruling elite.