Like Sasha Volokh, I don’t usually like these Internet / weblog quizzes, but this one is amusing. (Originally via Quare).
I am William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, the Fifth Duke of Portland!
bq. renowned as the finest judge of horseflesh in England, you took the tradition of aristocratic eccentricity to unprecedented heights. Having inherited the stately home of Welbeck Abbey, you proceeded to construct miles of underground tunnels and a ballroom, in pink, beneath it. The ballroom was complete except for one small detail. It had no floor. Despite this vast home, you lived exclusively in a suite of five rooms, each one also pink.
I remained unmarried, after being turned down by an opera singer, but I cared about the welfare of my servants and even helped them muck out the stables. However, if my servants met me in the corridor, they were to ignore me while I froze on the spot until they were out of sight. I made sure there was a chicken roasting at all times so I could sneak into the kitchen for a snack.
I actually know Welbeck Abbey. It’s just south of Worksop (Nottinghamshire), where I went to school. The house is an army sixth-form college now, but they let the public in on open days and for classical music recitals given in the main drawing room. It never struck me as particularly eccentric compared with other northern stately homes, but that’s not saying much.
Some maintained that the mad duke even had a tunnel built from Worksop railway station to the Abbey, so he could avoid meeting the locals whenever he came home from London. That seems a bit far-fetched to me, though, since it’s a good two miles and would have passed beneath the Chesterfield Canal and the River Ryton.
Yours &c., Joshua Abraham Norton, first and only Emperor of the United States of America.