Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Read online

  ARISTOCRATS

  Also by Lawrence James

  Raj: The Making of British India

  Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of

  Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby

  The Iron Duke: A Military Biography of Wellington

  Warrior Race: A History of the British at War

  The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

  The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

  The Middle Class: A History

  ARISTOCRATS

  Power, Grace, and Decadence:

  Britain’s Great Ruling Classes

  from 1066 to the Present

  Lawrence James

  St. Martin’s Press New York

  ARISTOCRATS. Copyright © 2009 by Lawrence James. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  James, Lawrence, 1943–

  Aristocrats : power, grace, and decadence : Britain’s great ruling classes from 1066 to the present / Lawrence James. — 1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown, 2009.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-312-61545-1

  1. Aristocracy (Social class)—Great Britain—History. I.Title.

  HT653.G7J36 2010

  305.5'220941—dc22

  2010013041

  First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown

  First U.S. Edition: July 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the memory of Wellesley

  a Newfoundland dog

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  ASCENDANCY: 1066–1603

  1 A Game of Dice: The Growth of Aristocratic Power

  2 Manners with Virtue: The Cult of Chivalry and the Culture of the Aristocracy

  3 Their Plenty was Our Scarcity: Resistance

  4 Weeds Which Must Be Mown Down: The Wars of the Roses 1450–87

  5 As a True Knight: Honour and Violence and the Wars of the Roses

  6 In Foolish Submission: Irish and Scottish Aristocracies

  7 Obeyed and Looked Up To: The Tudors and Their Lords

  8 Stir Up Your Fame: A New Breed of Noblemen

  PART TWO

  EQUILIBRIUM: 1603–1815

  9 I Honour the King as Much as I Love Parliament: The Road to Civil War

  10 A Circular Motion: Revolution and Restoration 1642–60

  11 Signal Deliverances: Restoration 1660–85

  12 The People Assembled and Freely Chose Them: The Glorious Revolution and After

  13 I’ll Share the Fate of My Prince: Jacobites

  14 Magnificence: Grand Houses and Grand Tours

  15 Public Character: The Aristocratic Century 1714–1815

  16 A Fair Kingdom: Fame, Taste and Fashion

  17 We Come for Pheasants: Peers and Poachers

  18 A Gang of Ruffians: Americans and Aristocracy

  19 The Aristocrat to Quell: Peers, Patriots and Paineites 1789–1815

  PART THREE

  DECLINE: 1815–

  20 Rats: Crisis and Compromise

  21 Thoroughbred: Sport and Manliness

  22 The Surrender of Feudalism to Industry: The Mid-Victorian Peerage 1846–87

  23 Revolvers Prominently Displayed: The Downfall of the Irish Aristocracy

  24 Like Chaff Before Us: Hanging On 1887–1914

  25 Dangers and Honours: War, Empire and the Aristocracy

  26 Always Keep Hold of Nurse: Aristocratic Twilight

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  First I would like to thank my wife Mary for her encouragement, patience and helpful suggestions. My gratitude also extends to Dr Ian Bradley, Geordie Burnett Stuart, Richard Demarco, the Earl and Countess of Dundee, the Earl of Glasgow, Professor John Haldane, Michael and Veronica Hodges, Edward James, Henry and Ruth James, Viscount Kelburn, Yvonne Mallett, Dr Roy Oliver, Professor and Dr Anna Patterson, Professor Nick Roe, Dr Jane Stabler, Andrew and Sarah Williams, and Percy and Isabel Wood. All have offered suggestions and enlightenment.

  I would also like to thank John Forster the archivist at Blenheim Palace and Greg Colley of the Bodleian Library for their assistance, as well as the staff of the British Library, the National Archives, the National Archives of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland and St Andrews University Library. Guidance and support have come from my agent Andrew Lownie, and Steve Guise, Iain Hunt, Tim Whiting and Richard Beswick of Little, Brown for which I am grateful.

  Material from the Blenheim Palace archives appears by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough.

  Introduction

  This is a history of the British aristocracy and their now almost vanished supremacy. It explains how and why a tiny elite exercised such a vast and pervasive influence over the course of our history. Aristocrats created the constitution, made laws and commanded armies and navies. They rearranged the landscape to accord with their notions of beauty and to satisfy their passion for hunting. Their patronage dictated patterns of taste until recent times and aristocratic manners established codes of conduct for the rest of society which remained in place until recently.

  The word aristocracy appeared late in our language, arriving via France in the mid-sixteenth century. It was a compound of the Greek ‘aristo’ (the best) and ‘kratos’ (government) and defined an Aristotelian notion of the distribution of political power in an ideal state. Aristotle’s aristocrats were men of learning and wisdom whose wealth gave them the leisure to devote their lives to government and the general welfare of the rest of society. This concept of aristocracy was highly flattering to an already dominant elite, which, since the eleventh century, had been called the ‘baronage’, ‘nobility’ and latterly ‘the peerage’. The Aristotelian notion of aristocracy reinforced an already deeply rooted sense of superiority and public responsibility which justified power and privilege.

  This new word assisted the long process of collective self hypnosis by which aristocrats convinced themselves that their distinctive qualities made them indispensable to the nation. In 1484 John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, told Parliament that the nobility represented ‘virtue and ancient riches’ and was the sheet anchor of the country. The Whig political theorist Edmund Burke said much the same in the 1770s when he praised the ‘upright constitutional conduct’ and ‘public virtues’ of the aristocracy. Virtue was genetically transmitted as the Marquess of Curzon assured the House of Lords in 1910. The ‘hereditary principle’ he insisted had given Britain ‘an upper class which, on the whole, had honourably trained itself in the responsibilities of government’. In 1999, when the hereditary peers were about to be expelled from the House of Lords, Lord Hardy, a former trade union leader and Labour life peer, recalled the long history of dedication to the public good of one noble dynasty in his native Yorkshire.

  The Aristotelian concept of aristocracy has had a long life and, on the whole, aristocrats have been highly successful in convincing the world that they were qualified to undertake the affairs of state, were supremely useful and that things would somehow fall apart without their guidance. Their conviction and its manifestations comprise the cent
ral theme of this book. Aristocrats did not, however, always have everything their own way: from time to time the aristocratic principle has been challenged, sometimes violently. I have, therefore, paused to examine the opinions and actions of those men and women who rejected aristocratic authority as irrational and unjust.

  Antipathy to the theory of aristocracy raises the question as to why it was tolerated for so long by so many. One explanation offered in this book is that there were always enough aristocrats who understood that consent to their power ultimately depended on its being used for the public benefit. From the Middle Ages onwards, aristocrats had encouraged the perception of themselves as robust, independent-minded fellows who would take up cudgels to protect the people from overbearing monarchs and elected governments with authoritarian instincts. The House of Lords was ‘like the Home Guard, ready in case of danger’, observed Winston Churchill, the grandson of a Duke. Within the last decade, the Lords have opposed legislation designed to overturn ancient legal freedoms in the name of the so-called ‘war’ against terrorism.

  I have argued that the consent of the masses underpinned the ascendancy of the aristocracy and its survival. This consent was almost withdrawn during the Reform Act crisis of 1830–2 and the row over the reduction of the powers of the House of Lords during 1910 and 1911. Yet there were aristocrats, most notably the first Duke of Wellington, who recognised that compromise was infinitely preferable to extinction. In the final sections of this book, I have tried to show that submission to public opinion and flexibility paid dividends. By shedding some of its powers, the aristocracy discovered that it could thrive and still exert some influence within a democratic and egalitarian society.

  I have interwoven the political history of the aristocracy with an exploration of the ways in which its members used their prestige to dictate aesthetics, literature and music. Aristocrats also dominated the world of sport. A thread of hearty muscularity runs through the history of the nobility: aristocrats hunted, bred horses and raced them, and patronised boxers and cricket teams. Sporting mania was surpassed by an urge to gamble, often recklessly.

  The sporting aristocrat with his devil-may-care panache fascinated the rest of society. Since the eighteenth century, middle-and working-class newspaper readers were fascinated by his antics as relayed by the press. This audience was also enthralled by the dazzling rituals of the London season and shocked by the frivolities and vices of wayward noblemen and their wives, sons and daughters.

  Thanks to the newspapers, their lives and indeed those of the rest of the aristocracy became a form of public entertainment. This engagement with the world, I have argued, may help explain why the nobility was accepted as part of the fabric of society. In her Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson likened the aristocracy to kingfishers, brilliant colourful creatures briefly glimpsed but remembered with wonderment.

  Eccentricity was central to the aristocracy’s mystique. It was inventive, often disconcerting and entirely natural to a self-confident caste which knew that it was different. Aristocrats were free to indulge their whims. Once at a supper party a ferret emerged from the cleavage of the late Lady Strange, approached her plate, gnawed at a lamb chop and then returned to its refuge. The other guests continued to eat without remark. Aristocratic quirkiness was not always so charming: the second Lord Redesdale flirted with Nazism and his daughter Unity fawned over Hitler. Her father was a visceral anti-Catholic and once interrupted a performance of Romeo and Juliet with a loud warning to ‘beware of the priest’. At various stages of this book I have found room for aristocratic eccentricity and perversity.

  On the other hand, Redesdale was a contemporary of aristocrats who used their leisure and wealth to advance scholarship and the arts. Lord Bertrand Russell studied and wrote about mathematics and philosophy, Lord Berners composed music and Lord Carnarvon sponsored the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb. All represented a long aristocratic tradition of patronage which stretched back to the Middle Ages and was extended to playwrights, poets, philosophers, artists, architects, composers, musicians, actors and scholars. Aristocratic patrons cherished the arts and dictated their development. I have argued that the British aristocrats were always cosmopolitan and their extended love affair with the Continent was the means by which the great European aesthetic movements took root and made headway in this country.

  Finally and to make sense of what follows, I must say a few words about now unfamiliar and often bewildering subjects: the nature of former social structures, status and titles. The best starting place is perhaps Chipping Campden church in Gloucestershire. On the chancel floor is the ambitious brass to William Grevel, a rich wool exporter, who died in 1401. He invested in land and his descendants were knights with estates in nearby Warwickshire. They called themselves ‘Greville’, which suggested Norman blood, and, by the end of the sixteenth century, the family had been ennobled by the crown with the title Lord Brooke.

  The upwardly mobile Grevilles had flourished in a fluid society. Its profile was conical with a broad base and a narrow apex. At the top were men and women who were ‘gentle’ and they included the aristocracy. Within this elite there were gradations which, in ascending order, were gentlemen, esquires and knights and then the hereditary peerage. This group too had its own hierarchy which had evolved by about 1400. At the top were dukes and then marquesses, earls, viscounts and lords. Titles could be accumulated through marriages to heiresses and were shared among eldest sons and even grandsons if there were enough to go round: the eldest son of John de la Pole the second Duke of Suffolk (d. 1491) was Earl of Lincoln. Much later the daughters of dukes and marquesses were allowed the honorary title of ‘Lady’.

  A porous frontier divided the gentle from those beneath them. Although a wool merchant, William Grevel had a coat of arms on his brass to announce that he was a gentleman. Another local boy who made good, William Shakespeare, a glover’s son, also ended his life as a ‘gentleman’ with the right to be addressed as ‘esquire’. Proof of his rank was a coat of arms he had purchased from a herald. Cynical contemporaries of Shakespeare remarked that anyone who lived by his wits could call himself a gentleman and have their presumption endorsed by a herald.

  All aristocrats were by definition gentlemen, even if they neglected the moral codes by which gentlemen were expected to live. Charles II joked that a king could make a lord, but not a gentleman, an aphorism that was repeated by the Duke of Wellington who took a lofty view of the public duties of the aristocracy. However they chose to behave, peers were unlike other gentlemen. They enjoyed a superior public status and expected deference from all inferiors, gentle or not.

  The aristocracy have always been an open elite. New blood was welcomed and assimilated. Yet aristocrats emphasised their superiority by never letting slip the chance to announce that their virtue and superiority was genetic. Like the finest bloodstock, they were all thoroughbreds. Close to William Grevel’s brass in Chipping Campden is the flamboyant marble monument to Charles Noel, second Lord Campden, who died in 1642 fighting for Charles I. According to his epitaph, Campden was ‘a lord of heroic parts and presence’, while his wife was ‘a lady of extraordinary adornments both of virtue and fortune’, qualities that were passed to her ‘numerous and gallant issue’. Yet Campden sat in the House of Lords alongside the sons and grandsons of lawyers, civil servants, judges and merchants like William Grevel. These noblemen too would commission monuments which proclaimed an illustrious ancestry and its concomitant, accumulated honour.

  PART ONE

  ASCENDANCY

  1066–1603

  1

  A Game of Dice:

  The Growth of

  Aristocratic Power

  The history of medieval England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland is of four embryonic polities engaged in a prolonged struggle to achieve order, stability and prosperity. It was a difficult, slow and frustrating task because political power was inseparable from military, and those who possessed it used it promiscuously. A king wa
s the first warrior in the realm: he defended it from its external and internal enemies and was ready to uphold the laws he made by force. Immediately below him were a body of men who enjoyed his favour and owed their elevation to their skill in war. Before the Norman Conquest of 1066 they were called ‘thegns’ and afterwards, ‘knights’, but their function and status were the same. The Crown granted them land that was cultivated by a peasantry which was largely unfree. Their labour supported the knight; it gave him the leisure to train for battle and it paid for his warhorse, armour, sword and lance.

  From childhood, the knight mastered their use, inured himself to the weight and discomfort of armour, and learned how to control an often temperamental charger which had been bred for weight, strength and ferocity. Stamina and training made knights the masters of the battlefield; one can see them in their element on the Bayeaux Tapestry. They also appear mounted alongside a nobleman on an eleventh-century stone cross now in Meigle Museum in Angus.

  The Norman, Breton and Flemish knights who won at Hastings were more than fighting machines. They upheld the authority of the Crown and defended the kingdom they had helped to conquer. Kings were always paramount, but they were bound by obligations imposed by God. In one thirteenth-century romance an archbishop tells the newly crowned King Arthur that ‘Our Lord has shown your are His elect’ and, to confirm this, the King had to swear ‘to protect the rights of the Church, keep order and peace, assist the defenceless and uphold all rights, obligations and lawful rule’. William the Conqueror (1066–87) would have understood this and so would his knights. They too were the servants of God. Speaking for them in 1100, Robert de Beaumont, Earl of Leicester and Count (Earl) of Meulan in Normandy, reminded Henry I (1100–35) that ‘we . . . have been entrusted by God to provide for the common good and the safety of the realm’.