Book excerpt: In a 70-year period, the dukes of Leinster fell from being Ireland's premier aristocratic family, close friends of the British monarchy, secure within the world's most powerful empire, to relative obscurity in an independent Irish Free State that did not recognize titles. The narrative of decline and fall unfolds against such historical watersheds as the Land War of the 1880s and the simultaneous rise of the home rule movement; the breakup of Irish landed estates after 1903; the Great War of 1914-18; the revolutionary turmoil of 1916-23; and the 1920s global economic depression.