Vanity.. all is Vanity as Shakespeare would say

This confection in stone, iron and Gilt is atop the Carlisle Memorial Column and was erected by public subscription to the memory of  George Howard, 7th Earl of Carlisle.
You can see the complete edifice on the second image, but unfortuately it is cordoned off so the sheer scale of it is hard to convey.
And what did this worthy (Apart from being born an aristocrat and a jolly fine fellow by all accounts)  do to merit so grand an edifice standing a couple hundred feet high and dominating the landscape around Castle Howard (the family seat) for miles.?
Well he did manage to be elected as a member of parliament, and that's about the sum of his achievements in life.
When I see the hubris of the English ruling classes, and the huge estates and enormous wealth they had when the poorer people starved quite literally on their doorsteps, I wonder how they escaped the fate of the French ruling elite.
I am all for retaining and caring for these monuments, as a lesson to us all never to go back to the days and ways that created them, and the people they glamourise who went out to create an Empire with the same attitude to "lesser mortals" (as they perceived them) abroad in the same way as they did here.
Gone and to be  remembered, but not with pride