Henry Percy, Earl Percy ('South Kensington')

Leslie Ward's 'Spy' renders Lord Warkworth, M.P. — the future seventh Duke of Northumberland — as a lean, fair-haired young man in a black frock coat and grey trousers, cigarette tilting from his lips, both hands adjusting his lapels with the studied nonchalance of inherited confidence. The caption 'South Kensington' locates him socially rather than geographically: the district was synonymous with well-heeled Liberal Unionist respectability, and Warkworth sat for South Kensington in the Commons. No ethnic distortion is present; Ward flatters the patrician type, treating aristocratic hauteur as its own gentle joke. The crowned Vanity Fair device upper right signals the subject's rank. Spy No. 689 in the Statesmen series.