Merlin Charles Sainthill Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley, FSA (born 17 June 1939) is a British peer, author and veteran right-wing activist.[1] In 1941, at the age of three, he succeeded his first cousin once removed, the 6th Lord Sudeley, to the Barony of Sudeley and until the House of Lords Act 1999 sat in that body as a hereditary peer.
A member of the Conservative Party all his adult life, he was sometime President and also Chairman of the Conservative Monday Club for seventeen years. He is Vice-Chancellor of the International Monarchist League.
Sudeley, who lives in London, has been married and divorced twice; he has no children.
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Sudeley's father, Captain Michael Hanbury-Tracy, a Scots Guards officer, died from wounds received at Dunkirk.
His paternal grandfather, Lieutenant Felix Hanbury-Tracy, also an officer in the Scots Guards, was killed attacking German positions near Fromelles on 19 December 1914.
His maternal grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel Collis George Herbert St. Hill,[2] the Royal North Devon Hussars, then commanding the 2/5 Sherwood Foresters, was killed by a sniper at Villers-Plouich, France, on July 8, 1917.
Sudeley served his National Service obligations in the ranks of the Scots Guards.
Sudeley was educated at Eton, and later read history at Worcester College, Oxford. As a young man, studying at Oxford, he was offered the position of Tutor to King Hassan II of Morocco whilst on a visit to the country. He would have been charged with teaching the King how to hunt, swim and shoot. Although able to ride a horse, he declined, wishing to continue with his studies. Sudeley has also lectured at the University of Bristol.[3]
Sudeley was an active member of the House of Lords for thirty nine years (since he was 21, the minimum age one can take one's seat), introducing several measures, most notably the debate to prevent the unlicensed export of historical manuscripts and in 1981 a Bill to uphold the Book of Common Prayer which was cleared on Second Reading. He was one of the hereditary peers expelled from the Upper House by the House of Lords Act 1999. He spoke out against the reform of the Lords, saying: "If it isn't broken why mend it?", and also that since he believed inherited titles were "inextricably" tied to the monarchy that it was "odd that they just want to touch one institution and not the other". He also cited the wealth of experience that the Lords had built up.[4]
Since the early 1970s, Sudeley has been active in and sometime President of the Conservative Monday Club, and in 1991 he authored a booklet for them entitled and arguing for "The Preservation of the House of Lords".
In 1985 he was elected a Vice-Chancellor of the International Monarchist League.[5]
Sudeley was also a former Vice-president of the now-defunct Western Goals Institute, and on 25 September 1989, chaired a WGI dinner at Simpson's-in-the-Strand for El Salvador's President, Alfredo Cristiani, and his inner cabinet.[6][7][8]
In 2001, the then Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith publicly distanced the party from the Monday Club until it ceased to "promulgate or discuss policies relating to race"; he also indicated that no Conservative MPs should contribute to Right Now!, a quarterly magazine with which Sudeley was a Patron, after an article in it called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. On (2 June 2006), The Times quoted Sudeley as stating, in a report of the Monday Club's Annual General Meeting, that "Hitler did well to get everyone back to work". It also reported him saying that "True though the fact may be that some races are superior to others", going on to suggest that such rhetoric might interfere with the Monday Club's hopes of being accepted again in Conservative Party circles.
He is Patron of the Bankruptcy Association (4th Lord Sudeley was foreclosed upon by Lloyds Bank in 1893, when his debt was covered twice over by large assets), and Convenor of the Forum for Stable Currencies. Lord Sudeley is also Lay Patron of the Prayer Book Society and a past President of the Montgomeryshire Society.
Sudeley once described in Who's Who one of his hobbies as "Ancestor Worship", with "Conversation" being listed in Debrett's. His enduring love throughout his life, and in which he continues to take an active interest, has been for the former family seat of Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire, personally designed by the 1st Lord Sudeley to replace the mediaeval moated manor house built on land which had been in the family for 1,000 years. In its successful blend of the Perpendicular Gothic and Picturesque styles, Toddington is the fore-runner of the Houses of Parliament.
At Easter 1985, in conjunction with the century-old Manorial Society of Great Britain (of which he sits on the Governing Council), Sudeley held a conference at his old home entitled "The Sudeleys - Lords of Toddington", taking the history of his family back to Charlemagne and Becket's murder. On 21 November 2006 he arranged a further conference at the Society of Antiquaries in Visual Aspects of Toddington in the 19th century.
Sudeley is an historian who has written a history of the English Gentleman for a German pharmaceutical magazine Die Waage, read by 30,000 German doctors; and is completing a history of the House of Lords to give ascendancy to its Tory as opposed to Whig history interpretation.
Sudeley is also author of a satire on Greek mythology (published in John Pudney's Pick of Today's Short Stories) and a quantity of politically incorrect short stories mostly published in London Miscellany. In the recent years Sudeley style-edited a definitive monograph on Azerbaijan's architecture translated from the Russian.
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Mark Mayall |
Chairman of the Monday Club May 1993 - December 2007 |
Succeeded by Andrew Hunter |
| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by Richard Hanbury-Tracy |
Baron Sudeley 1941–Present |
Succeeded by Incumbent |