Impoverished Patrician / Real Life

• Audrey Hepburn, whose mother was a Dutch baroness. During World War II, her Dutch/Belgian family's property, bank accounts, and even heirlooms were confiscated by the Germans. Audrey and her family suffered greatly from the Dutch famine of the winter of 1944-45, and the effects of malnutrition remained with her all her life (in fact, part of the reason she became an actress - rather than her original goal of a ballerina - was because her health was too frail to sustain the rigors of dancing).
• China:
  • 3rd century politician and military leader Liu Bei spent a good portion of his youth making and selling mats and sandals with his mother despite being a distant relative of the currently ruling emperor, although he later managed to lift himself out of poverty due to his hard work, cunning, natural charisma, and a little bit of luck, and he died as a ruler of 1/3 of China.
  • Pu Yi, the second-last Chinese Emperor, and later the collaborator Emperor of Machukuo, spent time in various prisons and sanitariums after being deposed (both times). After being released from a Communist prison, he was allowed to live in an ordinary residence in Beijing. He spent the last three years of his life working as an editor for the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference for 100 yuan per month (which was still good pay for 1967 Beijing).
• Christianity:
  • Saint Alberto Hurtado came from a well-off Chilean family, but his father died when he was a child, his family soon went into bankruptcy and had to sell their land which was a big deal among the elite at the time. He went on to become a Scholarship Student in both school and university, growing up into a lawyer and Jesuit priest and the advocate for social Christianity in Chile.
  • Angelo Roncalli's family were sharecroppers, but they descended from a very secondary branch of an Italian noble clan. Angelo himself would go the Rags to Riches (sorta) way and become Pope John XXIII.
• France:
  • The country nobility under the Ancien Régime often fell under this. For instance, Louis-Nicolas Davout, future Marshal of the First Empire, could trace his lineage back to the 11th century but he was born in a rented farmhouse.
  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born to a well-to-do old-money family: his father was a count and an insurance executive (France, having long been a republic, got used to working nobles long before Britain began thinking about it). However, he died when Antoine was 3 years old, leaving the family with far less income. As a result, his mother had to severely cut back in order to send her children to good schools.
  • Napoléon Bonaparte: His descendants—or more accurately, the descendants of his relatives—fit this trope. One of the (disputed) heirs to the throne has studied management. The other is an economist. Napoleon himself grew up as this.
• • Hugues-Bernard Maret, Duke of Bassano, became President of the Council (the French head of state at the time) in November 1834 largely due to a fluke with personal connections rather than experience. It then turned out that he was so deeply in debt that his debtors seized his salary the moment it was paid out. The other ministers in his ministry resigned in protest of his poverty just three days after he took office, making him France's shortest lived head of state.
  • The Védrines family, aristocrats ennobled on 1828, became this as a result of being brainwashed by cult guru Thierry Tilly, who met them in 1999 and who pushed a persecution complex on them, while fleecing them. As a result, they lost around €5 million, including their family castle in Montflanquin, which they owned for four centuries.
• Hungary: Some section of the Hungarian nobility, the nobles with one parcel were merely farmers and craftsmen with noble titles and lived in separate villages.
  • In the 1840s, due to their poverty, Nicholas I reduced 64,000 of lesser szlachta to Odnodvortsi.
• Imperial Russia: Unsurprisingly, impoverished nobles formed the bulk of Anarcho-Communism, Communist, and Socialist groups' leadership. This is because the middle class was equally prominent among liberal groups and the two hated one another. The countryside-dwelling peasants who made up the vast bulk of the Russian population tended to be suspicious of the Impoverished Patrician-led groups because Anarcho-Communism was basically advocating a way of life (village communes) that they already had but with some unwanted changes (i.e. the collective ownership of all property), Socialism and Communism focused almost exclusively on urban issues, and Communism also was against private property. The Anarchist Bakunin and Communist Vladimir Lenin were of noble birth, albeit lesser nobility, as was Felix Dzerzhinsky (the founder of VChKa).
  • Author Alexey Tolstoy, for example. A member of the famous Tolstoy clan, but quite poor when growing up. After fleeing Russia after the Revolution, he decided that being a poor artist, his aristocratic heritage didn't matter too much, and came back. He became a staunch supporter of Stalin and was considered a major figure in Socialist Realism, although his reputation fell by a lot after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, his work of science fiction and children's literature are still regarded fairly highly.
  • Similarly to the Hungarian example, there existed a whole social class of "Odnodvortsi", or "One-yard nobles" — that is, basically common farmers with a noble title, usually received as a military award or descended from the minor nobility tasked with the military service, which in 1866 was largely folded into Cossacks. One chief distinction that separated them from common peasants was that they had the right to own land (and sometimes even serfs), even though few held more land than an average serf.
  • After the revolution, some Russian nobles exiled in France ended up as taximen; in Shanghai, they ended up as bodyguards or even caring for running dogs.
  • Felix Yusupov, Rasputin's assassin and sole heir to a colossal fortune larger than that of the Romanovs, found himself forced to sell off piece after piece of family heirlooms and priceless paintings in order to escape poverty. His wife, princess Irina, niece of the tsar, would go to parties wearing a string of black pearls given to her husband's family by Catherine the Great herself, after which she would come home, eat the food stolen for them by a gypsy friend and wash the family's underwear in the bathtub of their apartment. Their gardener was a Russian count who would work wearing a suit and a top hat, to the bewilderment of their visitors.
• Japan:
  • Happened to a lot of aristocratic families around the Sengoku Jidai, to the point where lords and even emperors were reduced to selling their calligraphy for money. Also, around this time merchants were the ones with all the wealth; unfortunately, they were despised, and rules had to be made so they wouldn't look wealthier than their betters.
  • During the Tokugawa period, low-ranking samurai could easily be as poor or poorer than the peasants they were supposed to rule over (A key part of this was that the daimyos traditionally paid the samurai in rice, which the samurai would resell for whatever else they needed. When the rise of the merchant class caused the bottom to drop out of the rice market, the buying power of their salaries went down with it even though their pay was technically unchanged). Many went so far as to sell their swords or replace the metal blades with wood or bamboo.
  • Happened yet again during the Meiji era, when the feudal system was (at least outwardly) abolished. The daimyo managed okay (for instance, the Tokugawas, who had been overthrown as Shoguns, are today shipping magnates), but a lot of the samurai didn't.
  • Happened to Nashimoto Morimasa in 1947 following the redefinition of who is specifically part of the Imperial Family. Unlike most other former members, he didn't receive any compensation for his losses due to his military career. He ends up dying in poverty in 1951 as a result.
  • Some Japanese Emperors were forced to work to pay for their own coronations. One's wife had to sell flowers to pay for her husband's coronation. Since the Japanese Emperor has been little more than a figurehead for centuries, this is hardly surprising.
• Poland: During the Middle Ages, nobles were allowed to add a -ski to the end of their family names (the equivalent of an English knight adding a Sir in front of his name). Many of the lower nobility were rather poor which became an issue during the Elective Monarchy period when all the nobles had the right to vote on major laws and who would become the next king. Foreign powers would bribe the lower nobility into voting against the country's best interest which eventually led to Poland being taken apart by its neighbors. Once the nobility lost their power, most people stopped caring about enforcing the naming conventions and many non-nobles added -ski to their names in order to improve their social standing. This was so prevalent that it is mostly impossible to tell based on names alone who is descended from impoverished nobles and who from upstart peasants.
• The Roman Republic:
  • Julius Caesar and Lucius Sergius Catilina. Both were fair examples of people who thought that their family's position should have granted them a higher station in life than they had and led them to challenge the system. It worked out well for Caesar (until the end), but less so for Catiline, who would be on the receiving end of one of the greatest condemnatory speeches in human history. There is no real consensus on Catilina. Depictions vary from just another corrupt politician using the poor for his own gain to someone along the line of the Gracchi brothers.
  • Lucius Cornelius Sulla started out as one of these.
• Simón Bolívar: An unusual example of a patrician who impoverished himself voluntarily as a matter of moral principle. Born to a family of aristocratic criollos (i.e. of European origin but born in the New World) that had come to Venezuela 200 years earlier, Bolívar was heir to a massive fortune... that consisted largely of agricultural estates and mines that depended on slave labor for their profits. In his youth, he was too focused on partying to much care, but as he grew into the radical and revolutionary he would become, he began to accept that slavery was indeed bad, though like many rich liberals of his day he offhandedly dismissed the idea of actually abolishing slavery as impractical. However, after taking refuge in Haiti after the disastrous collapse of the Second Venezuelan Republic in 1815, Bolívar seems to have been persuaded of the moral urgency of abolishing slavery (and damn the consequences) during his extensive discussions with Haitian leader Alexandre Pétion. At the very least, Pétion had conditioned his promise to give Bolívar ships, guns, and men on a promise from Bolívar to end slavery in any territory he managed to control, and whatever Bolívar's convictions, he absolutely insisted on scrupulously keeping his promises. Whatever his reason, Bolívar absolutely followed through, pushing abolition in all the lands he liberated, and freeing all his own slaves as soon as he got back to his estates. The lack of slave labor and the continuing wars of independence meant that Bolívar could not sustain most of his properties profitably, and over time he lost them and thus most of his fortune. Thus, despite his historically massive family wealth and ancient (by Venezuelan standards) pedigree, Bolívar found himself a pauper whenever he was not in office (and admittedly, he was usually in office)—but he wouldn't have had it any other way.
• Spain: Many of the early Conquistadores came from landless hidalgo families. When you have all the military training and constrained career choices that other nobles have, but no land, the New World sure seems like the place to be.
  • Pedro de Valdivia and many other Spanish hidalgos fell into poverty during the Renaissance and later, so they came to the Americas in search of riches, lands, servants, and especially honor and a name for themselves. The results were... well, varied: some did become famous and powerful, others died in either poverty or the war, etc.
  • During the 19th century, the nobility lost their privileges, most notably tax exemption. This hit the lower nobility, whom often became landless laborers as a result, particularly hard.
• United Kingdom: Happened uncomfortably frequently, as it was very common for a family with a lot of land to squander it on women, horses, gambling, and alcohol.
  • In 1478, George Neville, 1st Duke of Bedford, was stripped of his peerage for lack of money to maintain the lifestyle of a duke.
  • By the time James VI of Scotland came to the English throne as James I in 1603, a century of war and inflation had practically bankrupted the Crown. He quickly began selling knighthoods (and inventing the concept of a baronetcy so he could sell those for more cash) and demanding money from the nobility. The nobility, in turn, were also running out of money, and increasingly leaning on the rising class of merchants... You can see where this is going, right?
  • Many common surnames from the eastern parts of Ireland (such as Burke, D'Arcy, Fitzgerald, Grace, Morell, and Russell) can be traced back to old Anglo-French and Norman nobility who lost all their wealth, land, and power during the English Civil War and ended up as poor serfs and farmers under the plantation system.
  • In the first half of the 19th century, cheap grain from the United States and Canada (and to a lesser extent South America) started to crater the price of food in Britain. While this was good for most British people, it was a disaster for the aristocracy, who were mostly large farmers and earned most of their income from selling grain. They managed to pass the Corn Laws restricting the importation of foreign grain for a time, but eventually these were repealed, and the bottom fell out of the grain market, leaving the fortunes of the British aristocracy to fall with it. Rising wages, inheritance tax, and the reduced influence of the House of Lords in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did the rest. This was sometimes resolved by marrying into new money families:
    • A lot of rich Americans made their way to Britain in the 19th century, creating a lot of Anglo-Americans in the British gentry, such as Consuelo Vanderbilt marrying the Duke of Marlborough.
    • Perhaps the most famous example was of this phenomenon was Jenny Jerome marrying the Duke of Marlborough's uncle, Lord Randolph Churchill, definitely a marriage that had its effect on history, given that Lord Randolph and Jenny's son was none other than Sir Winston Churchill. Despite his reputation as the Quintessential British Gentleman, Winston was very proud of his American heritage, once upbraiding British military brass for insulting the US military in his presence. The fondness for America helped his special relationship with FDR, and no doubt his American ancestry contributed to the Congress' decision to grant him honorary citizenship of the United States (the first person so honored).^note Churchill would not at that time have been eligible for actual American citizenship through his mother. In the late 19th century, American women who married foreign men generally lost their American citizenship upon marrying, and even if they retained their citizenship, they could not pass it on to their children born abroad. It wasn't until 1934 that children born outside the US to an American woman married to a non-American man could inherit U.S. citizenship from their mothers, and until 1978 they had to live in the US for a certain amount of time to claim it. In the event, Churchill never qualified. That said, for joke purposes, please feel free to note that under current U.S. law, Churchill would have been considered a "natural-born" citizen of the U.S. and have been able to become President (so long as he also met the residency requirement of having lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years). He even had the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" played at his funeral.
    • Another famous example is the Astor family, German immigrants to the US who made their fortunes (you may have heard of their hotel in New York, the Waldorf-Astoria...) and managed to not only marry British nobles but have the male line ennobled itself (as the Viscounts Astor). Nancy Astor, the first female MP in Britain and inveterate House of Commons opponent of Churchill ^note "Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I'd put poison in your tea." "Lady Astor, if I were your husband I'd drink it.", was herself an American who married into this family (confusing ain't it).
    • In a reversal of the above trend, Louis of Battenberg—a junior German prince and son-in-law of Queen Victoria—decided to become fully British and join the Royal Navy. During World War I, he disclaimed all his German titles (and what little German property he had), Anglicising his name to Mountbatten. His nephew George V insisted that Prince Louis be made a British peer in compensation (and in recognition of his skill as a naval officer),^note By the start of World War I, he'd risen to the rank of First Sea Lord, the highest professional position in the entire Royal Navy, only to be forced out of his job in the first months of the war by vicious anti-German sentiment. and initially wanted to make him a duke; Louis had to beg the king to give him some other peerage, as his only income—his naval salary—was not enough to support the style of a duke. George obliged—but made him a marquess (only one step below duke) to show his gratitude.^Postscript One of Louis' grandsons was none other than Prince Philip, longtime consort of Elizabeth II and father of Charles III. And one of his sons (Philip's uncle) Louis Mountbatten was an equally prominent Royal Navy admiral and later the last Viceroy of India.
  • More recent examples of British aristocrats who ended up impoverished were Edward FitzGerald, 7th Duke of Leinster, who was part of one of Ireland's oldest noble families but died by suicide in a bedsit in London in 1976, and Angus Montagu, 12th Duke of Manchester, who on his death in 2002 had lived in a flat in Bedford for many years. Ironically, Lord Manchester's great-grandfather had earlier married one of those American heiresses, and that lady was also called Consuelo.
  • Baron Sir Benjamin Slade, the (childless) last scion of a British noble family that had fallen on hard times, famously announced in 2006 that he was holding "open auditions" for an heir who would be able to afford to maintain the house's ancestral holdings after he died. The following year, he named distant cousin Isaac Slade, lead singer of The Fray, as his successor.
• United States:
  • Grey Gardens: 78-year-old "Big Edie" Beale and her 56-year-old daughter "Little Edie" Beale. Members of the very rich Bouvier family, they were, respectively, the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Unfortunately, husband/father Perce Beale left them, Big Edie's father John Bouvier disinherited her, and Little Edie never married. By the time the film finds them, they are Crazy Cat Ladies living in a filthy, dilapidated mansion that is all they have left.
  • H. P. Lovecraft came from a wealthy New England family that fell into poverty while he was a child. His grandfather was very rich but after his death, his fortune was badly mismanaged by relatives. By the end of his life, he was living on an $70-per-year annuity from a mortgaged gravel pit and whatever money he could scrounge up ghostwriting pulp stories.
    • To wit, his middle name Phillips represents his lineage to one of the "Boston Brahmin" families, a nobility whose roots date to the landing at Plymouth Rock. Many of his traits—his Anglophilia, his distrust of the "dark" other—were linked to that, as did his inability to find work (since he found menial labor to be beneath him).
  • Most Southern families of any means whatsoever incurred this trope after the American Civil War. To this day, the American South has a highly unusual lack of correlation between social class and wealth.
• World War I / World War II: Many, many royal families were overthrown and lost their status following these conflicts:
  • Tsar Simeon of Bulgaria was forced out of Bulgaria when it became a satellite country under the watch of the USSR... and made a comeback by becoming Prime Minister half a century later. He is the only person to have been a hereditary monarch and then an elected head of government. A few others have been both, but usually it's the other way around.
  • While King Peter II of Yugoslavia spent the war in England, the Yugoslavian resistance fractured became between Communist partisans and royalist Chetniks. By the end of the war, the Communists had gained control of the country, and Peter was prohibited from returning. As a monarch in exile, he managed his money poorly and was in frequent need of funds. His wife suffered depression and attempted suicide twice. Peter became an alcoholic and died at the age of 47 from an unsuccessful liver transplant.
  • Emperor Charles I of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was exiled to Madeira after a failed bid to reclaim the Hungarian throne, dying of pneumonia in 1922. His family, meanwhile, continued living in relative poverty for a time, sustained by voluntary collections and what property they still owned. The Habsburgs would eventually rebound, albeit more modestly, with Otto and his children reinventing themselves in a changing Europe.
  • Tsar Nicholas and his family initially had pretty comfortable accommodations after deposition. Still, when the Bolsheviks came to power, they were robbed of many of their luxuries and jewels and were forced into an ugly and cramped House of Special Purpose.
• The small town Bethlehem during Antiquity. It was known for farmers and shepherds who were descendants of King David.
• The von Trapp family — yes, The Sound of Music guys. It wasn't in the movie, but it's described in Maria von Trapp's book. Financial difficulties after the "Anschluss" (Nazi annexation of Austria) caused a lot of bank failures — including theirs — and all of Captain von Trapp's savings were wiped out overnight.
• One of the last members of the Timurid dynasty which ruled Central Asia and India (as the Mughals) is a tea vendor in Calcutta.
• Given the length of time that nobility in some form has existed and the way human populations work, it's safe to assume that very close to every poor person is the descendant of at least one noble house. Be it the Egyptian Pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty, Charlemagne or some chieftain in the Americas a millennium before Columbus. It's just that some people know it and think they're special because of it.
  • On that note, many Brits and Americans of British descent, including all the U.S. presidents (even Barack Obama), can trace their ancestral lines to William the Conqueror. Of course, not all of them are official members of the Royal Family, and, with the passage of nearly ten centuries, few of them are rich, let alone filthy rich. Though the aforementioned U.S. presidents usually are rich, as wealth tends to make a political career a lot easier to launch.
• Until his death in October 2016, Kigeli V, the exiled last king of Rwanda, lived in Section 8 (government) housing in Virginia and received food stamps. During the 1980s while living in Nairobi, tourists gave him schillings in exchange for being allowed to photograph someone who once wore a real crown. His "chambellan" (read: driver), meanwhile, worked at Sears in his 80s.

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