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Grandees

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Grandees 

(Grandes), the higher nobility in medieval Spain, both clerical and secular (as opposed to the main body of the nobility, hidalgo and caballero); from the 16th century to the 20th grandee was a title of nobility. From the 13th century (when they are first mentioned) grandees occupied high state positions and enjoyed great privileges. They were free of taxes and had the right to defend their “liberty” to the extent of declaring war on the king and transferring their allegiance to another lord. With the flourishing of absolutism in the 15th century grandees were transformed into court nobility. The title grandee was abolished in 1931 with the liquidation of the monarchy.
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They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park.
Turn Of The Screw by James, Henry View in context
Their villages or towns consist of these huts; yet even of such villages they have but few, because the grandees, the viceroys, and the Emperor himself are always in the camp, that they may be prepared, upon the most sudden summons, to go where the exigence of affairs demands their presence.
A Voyage to Abyssinia by Lobo, Father View in context
Then she would come out of her dream, and look round at the grandees of the Gardens with an extraordinary elation.
The Little White Bird by Barrie, James Matthew View in context
 
 
 
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