The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  They were glory years for the Turf, with the Duke of Westminster’s legendary Bend ’Or winning the Derby, and siring the almost no less brilliant Ormonde.fn1 In 1892 the Duke of Devonshire married his mistress of thirty years, Louise, Duchess of Manchester (she was German – daughter of Count von Alten of Hanover). There had been no reigning Duchess of Devonshire since the celebrated Georgiana died in 1811. For the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 the Duke and Duchess gave a great ball in Devonshire House, in London: it was the most lavish and extraordinary of all the entertainments that year, in which the cream of the aristocracy and many members of the royal family came in court costumes of all times and countries.

  The Duke himself was clad as the Emperor Charles V and the Duchess as Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. The Prince of Wales – who himself attended in the costume of Grand Master of the Knights of Malta – lent the Duke the Collar and Badge of the Golden Fleece; Princess Henry of Pless came as the Queen of Sheba, her train borne by four negro boys; Jo Chamberlain came as Pitt the Younger and Mr Asquith, prophetically in some senses, came in the riding dress of a seventeenth-century Roundhead, while not actually claiming to be Oliver Cromwell. It would be during his premiership that the power of the House of Lords (after the prolonged constitutional crisis following the 1909 Budget) was critically curtailed. (The peers effectively thereby lost their power wholly to veto, rather than merely to check, legislation passed by the Commons.)

  The photographs of the ball, perhaps because the costumes are studiedly obsolete, do look to the eyes of the twenty-first century like a doomed order: but – as with almost all impressions one might form of British political truth – it is only partly true. Apart from its colossal wealth, what impresses about the upper reaches of the British aristocracy is its immense staying-power. For almost the entire twentieth century, the hereditary peerage retained the power to sit in the Upper House of the British Parliament, legislators by right of birth. In no other European country would such an arrangement have been even a thinkable political proposition.

  If the Whigs were the losers politically in the new order, they were not – many of them – the losers financially. The class which suffered the greatest loss of political and financial status was the squirearchy. The traditional Tories of the shires.

  ‘On a careful inquiry, it will be found that the coming in of American wheat has wrought a greater change in the composition of the British House of Commons than the first two Reform Acts,’ wrote L.B. Namier in 1931.17

  The squires in pre-industrial England were the effectual administrators of the country. Their lands provided employment for the agricultural labourers who made up the bulk of the population. Their pew in the parish church signified the indissoluble union between Church and state at a local level, just as their patronage of the living demonstrated in concrete form the Erastian character of that Church. The poacher who stole game or rabbits from the squire’s land would find himself prosecuted before the local justice of the peace; and the justice of the peace was also the squire. The local government was conducted by unelected squires, and the seats in the Commons which were not occupied by aristocrats were occupied by this solid landed class. Their position was gravely jeopardized, however, with the passing of the Corn Laws and the crisis of agriculture, caused by the departure of men from the land and the decline both of rents and corn prices.

  Disraeli extolled as the ideal type of legislator ‘an English gentleman, born to business, managing his own estate, mixing with all classes of his fellow-men, now in the hunting-field, now in the railway-direction, unaffected, unostentatious, proud of his ancestors’. This London-born middle-class man of letters had a rich appreciation of the county families in his constituency, delighting in visiting ‘the Pauncefort Duncombes of Brickhill Manor … Colonel Hanmer of Stockgrove Park, the Chesters of Chicheley, the Lovetts of Liscombe, the Dayrells of Lillingstone Dayrell and many more’. They were as he said, many of them ‘greater men by a good deal than many German princes, and yet utterly unknown in London society’. Within half a century of Dizzy’s death, none of the above-mentioned families appeared in Burke’s Landed Gentry. Squires who had been in the same manor-houses for generations, often farming the same land from the time of the Norman Conquest to the time of Disraeli, found themselves facing ruin. The owner of 50,000 acres almost certainly owned London properties too, from which he derived rents; or coal mines; or he had interests in the City. The smaller squire, who owned 1,000 to 3,000 acres – owning together on average 12.4 per cent of the land in England in 1883 – could no longer make ends meet without selling his chief, sometimes his only, capital asset: the land itself.18

  In 1882 Charles Milnes Gaskell analysed the plight of the squire for his readers in The Nineteenth Century – ‘He has given up his deer, has dismissed his servants; he is advertising his house for a Grammar School or a Lunatic Asylum; he is making arrangements with little Premium for the sale of his ancestors, and with the nearest timber-merchant for that of his trees … He has made permanent reductions in three or four of his principal farms, and he has 800 acres on his hands.’19

  As so often since in England, it was a Conservative government which delivered the coup de grâce to some venerable old aspect of national life.20 Lord Salisbury appointed Charles Thomson Ritchie (1838–1906) as president of the Local Government Board, and he was the architect of the Local Government Act 1888. Ritchie, the fourth son of a Dundee merchant and jute-spinner, was himself a banker. He would rise to be chancellor of the Exchequer and home secretary. His Act was ‘distasteful’ to Salisbury, who did nothing to prevent it going through. Salisbury’s were crocodile tears. In the end selfishness and greed overcame the attractive Anglican pessimism in this mixture of a man. The most important fact about the Cecils and the other great aristocrats was, after all, that they were richer than anyone else. It was quite natural that Salisbury should ditch the old Tory squirearchy and chum up with New Money. Britain was a rich man’s club, sharing the ‘business sense’ of Birmingham radicals. Naturally it must be forced to ‘modernize’. Sixty-two county councils were created. County boroughs and counties were divorced. The London County Council took over the administration of London. In the country, the squires were for the most part elected to the new councils, committees and boards set up by Ritchie’s bureaucracy; but something had been lost. As Gladstone said, the public had confidence in the existing county authorities: their duties had not only been ‘well discharged, but unselfishly, wisely and economically’. Ritchie took away from the quarter sessions and gave to the county councils the task of administering almost all the things which affected the lives of those living in the counties: finance, county buildings and bridges, the provision and management of lunatic asylums, the establishment and maintenance of reformatories and industrial schools, the diseases of animals acts, main roads, liquor licences, the police.

  Henceforward, there was no particular reason for any local authority to be local. The squire, displaced economically from his land, was now politically redundant in his ancestral locality. Ritchie’s legislation was both deeply bureaucratic and profoundly destabilizing. Manning thought it the most radical legislation since 1833, and it certainly put the seal on Old England. The country which had, in the Queen’s girlhood, been a primarily rural community governed at local level paternalistically, at a national level aristocratically, was now an industrial country governed nationally by plutocrats, locally by bureaucrats.

  Having lost rents and status and political power, the minor landowners were to be hit finally by the Liberal chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt (1827–1904), introducing death duties in his budget of 1894. For those whose wealth was primarily bound up in land, this measure more or less guaranteed that inherited estates would diminish, or be broken up.

  All these measures, calculated to destroy the power and stability of the old landed class, were put in place when that class, and the aristocracy which largely depended upon it, were supposedly in power.
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  One should not, however, exaggerate the damage or suppose that it was all under way during the last ten years of the nineteenth century. In many places it needed the ravages of radical Liberal budgets in 1909 and 1910, and the First World War, to complete the revolution in English life which we have been describing. There was still a plenitude of squires in late Victorian England. In many parishes they were as old-fashioned and as all-pervasive as in the days of Colonel Sibthorp; and in the upper echelons of the squirearchy there were still some very rich men, such as the president of the Local Government Board in Salisbury’s Third Cabinet, Henry Chaplin (1840–1923).21 His sobriquet was ‘the Squire’ and Chaplin was ‘a Squire of Squires’.22

  When he came of age in 1862, Chaplin inherited an estate in Lincolnshire of 25,000 acres, as well as properties in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. His rent-roll was then £90,000 per annum. Thirty years later his seat, Blankney Hall, was up for sale. He was master of the Blankney hunt. His children ‘in their infancy were taught to think, speak, and dream of hunting and riding almost like a religion. “The library of his daily use” constituted of the Bible, the Racing Calendar and the Parliamentary Guide.’ He ate and drank on a prodigious scale and he was a generous host, keeping up – in the happy days before his financial troubles began – not merely Blankney but also a town house in Lincoln, Burghersh Chantry, where the hospitality was princely. This essentially eighteenth-century figure would have been at home in the pages of a novel by Fielding; he lived into the age of the motor-car. He detested these contraptions almost as much as he detested ‘villa’ or ‘democratic’ Conservatism, which he rightly saw as a contradiction in terms. Yet as president of the Local Government Board it was he who was responsible for the Act which relieved them from being preceded by a man with a red flag. During the bicycle craze of 1896, when many notable persons might be seen riding in Battersea Park, ‘Mr Chaplin stood on the side-walk looking on.’ He was to see worse things than motor-cars or bicycles. By the end of his life he had seen the class to which he belonged, and which had been ruined by death duties, low rents, agricultural depression and income tax, all but obliterated in the First World War; almost every village war memorial in England shows that the local aristocratic grandee and the local squire, or at least one of their sons, fell in France or Flanders. ‘The War … changed the British aristocracy for ever … The belief … that proportionately more of their sons died than those of other classes was not just an arrogant illusion. It was true … Not since the Wars of the Roses had the English aristocracy suffered such losses as those which they endured during the Great War.’23

  Even though Chaplin wore a frock-coat and a silk hat rather than a helmet and chain mail, he and his like probably had more in common with those who fought in the Wars of the Roses than those who came back from the trenches whistling Dixie music or expecting their wives to vote in democratic elections. Because the First World War was so overwhelmingly terrible, so destructive in its effects, we tend, with metaphors of Indian summers and long afternoons, to suppose that the ancien régime in England went on until the news came in 1914 of the assassination in Sarajevo. The fate of the Victorian squires reminds us that things were otherwise. The old order had changed irrevocably long before the death of the Queen. Tennyson, Chaplin’s fellow man of Lincolnshire, returned in ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ to the fictitious Lincolnshire manor house which had been his theme in 1842. The trochaics of the young man’s poem had lamented the loss of his beautiful cousin Amy to the local squire.24

  As the husband is, the wife is; thou art mated with a clown.

  Returning to Locksley as an old man, the poet sees this ‘clown’ as the embodiment of the good old ways, who

  Served the poor, and built the cottage, raised the school, and drained the fen.25

  The poem is a hymn of hate to the modern world, seeing the country run down, the cities riddled with vice and injustice.

  And the crowded couch of incest in the warrens of the poor.

  He laments

  Poor old Heraldry, poor old History, poor old Poetry, passing hence

  In the common deluge drowning old political commonsense.26

  It was indeed an age of commoners, and as if to prove it, on 4 May 1896 a young Irishman called Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922) launched a new newspaper called The Daily Mail.27 It was designed to encapsulate world news in bulletin form. The first issue sold 397,215 copies, so many more than predicted that it was necessary to hire the use of machinery from two evening newspapers to meet the demand. With his brilliant editor, Kennedy Jones, Harmsworth provided the public with an easily assimilable newspaper, with plenty of crime stories, football, racing and cricket. Lord Salisbury sent Harmsworth a congratulatory telegram, while famously sneering at the venture in private: Thackeray’s Pendennis, said the prime minister, produced a newspaper ‘by gentlemen for gentlemen’; the Daily Mail was ‘a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys’.

  Salisbury’s acute political judgement would not have pursued ‘villa Conservatism’, against every aristocratic instinct, if he had not known that the new England had a very great number of office boys in it. They in turn had wives – leading Alfred Harmsworth to found the Daily Mirror in 1903, with an all-woman staff for an all-woman readership.

  The Harmsworth family (Alfred’s brother Harold was also a newspaper proprietor, buying the Mirror from Alfred, and for a while owning The Times) exemplifies the difficulty of defining the nature of social and political change in terms which would make sense to Karl Marx or to Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The aristocratic world, and its ethos of accepted deference, were done away with less by trade unions or striking dockers than by the acre upon acre, square mile upon square mile of perky, self-sufficient suburbanites who could happily get through life without once meeting a squire or a lord, still less having to doff their caps. Lenin’s good old questions Who? Whom? came into play here. In the agricultural past, the peasantry or even the small yeomanry (the class from which the Harmsworths came) depended on landlords, just as urban proletarians depended on mill-owners and factory-owners. The Harmsworths had left Ireland, and the land, become merchants in a small way and taken up a shabby-genteel, hand-to-mouth London life, threatened by the constant spectre of bankruptcy (the father drank) but no longer specifically beholden to anyone. In short, Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1925, created Viscount Northcliffe 1918) and Harold (1869–1940, created Viscount Rothermere 1919) catered for Carrie and Charles Pooter, and moreover they drew attention to the fact that politicians now had to woo the petite bourgeoisie, not lord it over them.

  Whereas a sentimental Ruskinian, or an old-fashioned Tory, might bemoan the modern, the Harmsworths celebrated and in some ways created it – from an imaginative point of view. The Daily Mail shared its proprietor’s obsession with speed, expressed admiration for motor-bicycles, and was enthusiastic for ‘automobilism’.28

  On the one hand, the Harmsworths liked the idea of themselves as suburban men excitedly telling their hundreds of thousands of readers that the era of the Common Man had dawned. On the other, like so many newspaper proprietors since, they were megalomaniacs, power-crazed fanatics who in their furiously cruel behaviour to underlings and their bloated idea of themselves seemed like mini-dictators. The American war correspondent for the New York Times came upon Lord Northcliffe in 1919, shouting into a telephone, ‘What have you done with the moon? … I said the moon – the moon. Someone has moved the moon … Well if it’s moved again, whoever does it is fired.’ It turned out that the weather report had been moved to a different page.29

  In this new political world it did indeed feel as if someone had moved the moon. The balance of the electoral system, and the lack of cohesion or political sophistication, partly explained, perhaps, the reluctance of the urban working classes to rally in greater numbers to the Independent Labour Party. Many of them in any case were arch-Jingoes who preferred Lord Salisbury. The Whigs and the Tories of the old breed had both of them passed
or were passing into oblivion. Except in Ireland, where the collapse of Parnell had badly weakened the cause of Home Rule, and the merest threat of its success had solidified Unionist opposition in the Protestant North, the political parties were losing touch with what could be seen as their natural constituencies. The field was open for a new type of politics altogether, based less upon identifiable interest and more on a kind of adaptable energy, prepared to ride the wave and watch the wind.

  Surely much the most interesting political career, after Parnell’s fall, is that of David Lloyd George (1863–1945), who would succeed Asquith as prime minister in 1916, and whose radical budgets when chancellor of the Exchequer – introducing welfare benefits, old age pensions and so on – did more for the working classes than Keir Hardie’s rhetoric before the Labour Party had a chance of power or Ramsay MacDonald’s incompetence after he’d been given that chance and squandered it.

  Maynard Keynes’s description of Lloyd George is that of a clever young man lampooning a wartime prime minister whose party broke into smithereens after the peace of 1918. It is well-known because it is so funny and so well-expressed; and it is only half-true – ‘How can I convey to the reader, who does not know him, any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity? … Lloyd George is rooted in nothing, he is void and without content; he lives and feeds on his immediate surroundings.’30

  Lloyd George was not, in fact, rooted in nothing. He was rooted in something which was harder perhaps even for the economic genius of the great Keynes to fathom: namely, Victorian North Wales. In a sense, his political destiny was formed by Gladstone’s obsessive mission to ‘pacify Ireland’, for it was the defection of so many English Liberals to the Unionist (and Imperialist) cause which forced Gladstonian Liberalism to the Celtic fringes of Britain, giving a prominence to Scots, Welsh and Irish which they might not have otherwise had. After Parnell, the Celtic fringes were not picturesque additions to a great metropolitan alliance between Whigs and Radicals: they were the Liberal heartlands. It was inevitable that Ireland should go its own way. In Scotland, radical opinion moved between the Liberal Party and the new-formed ILP – as to a slower degree it did in Wales. (Keir Hardie, after his defeat at West Ham, was adopted for the South Welsh mining constituency of Merthyr Tydfil.)