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

by Lawrence James

  The bad nerves or common sense of retainers were constraints on aristocratic power. Nonetheless, the ranks of armoured men wearing their lords’ liveries must have seemed awesome, even terrifying on the battlefield or parading through towns under enormous war banners with such intimidating devices as the black bull of Clarence, the white boar of Gloucester and the yale (a tusked antelope) of Beaufort. Onlookers could have been excused for imagining that they were witnessing the zenith of aristocratic political power.

  But was it? Events strongly suggest so. Between 1399 and 1487 aristocratic coalitions deposed Richard II, Henry VI (twice), Edward IV, Edward V and Richard III. Noblemen had also conspired to unseat Henry IV, murder Henry V and replace Henry VII with a pseudo-prince. Aristocratic propaganda had endeavoured to justify these actions as undertaken in the best interest of the country. There was a degree of truth in this in the case of Richard II, although his high-handedness hurt the nobility more than his humbler subjects. Henry VI’s utter incompetence was a far greater threat to the stability of his realm and the safety of his subjects, but in the other instances the self rather than the public interest of the aristocracy was uppermost. Warwick, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, attempted coups because they knew they could get away with them. They did in the short term, but the regimes they created were shallow rooted, lacked legitimacy and were short-lived.

  The fate of would-be kingmakers did not wholly chasten the aristocracy, and old habits died hard. In 1503 news that Henry VII was suffering from a severe illness prompted a group of officials to speculate on the succession. They wondered whether either the exiled Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, or Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, might succeed and bypass the King’s only surviving son, Henry, Prince of Wales.20 Intelligent and well-informed men still believed that an aristocratic coup de main of the kind that had occurred in 1483 was a possibility, even after two decades of efficient government and domestic stability. As it was, Henry VII died in 1509 and Henry VIII succeeded unchallenged. Athlete, huntsman, jouster and warmonger, he was soon the darling of the nobility.

  The violent changes of dynasty during the previous century had left the balance of power between Crown and aristocracy unchanged. The royal prerogative remained, as did the structures of conciliar and Parliamentary consultation. Edward IV and Henry VII repaired and adjusted the machinery of the law and achieved solvency. Statutes passed in 1468 and 1504 outlawed the giving of liveries to yeomen, artisans and labourers (the cannon fodder of armies during the Wars of the Roses), and made the retaining of men above the rank of gentlemen subject to royal licence. Many were granted by the Tudors, who, like their predecessors, needed the nobility and their retainers for military service and, in an emergency, public order.

  Most important of all, the Wars of the Roses had not shaken the philosophy which underpinned the political order. Chancellor John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, reiterated it in 1484 when he addressed the Lords and Commons. ‘Noblesse’, he argued, was ‘virtue and ancient riches’ and its possessors were like firm rocks in a turbulent sea. ‘The politic rule of every region well ordained stands in the nobles,’ the Bishop concluded. His reassurances were welcome after thirty years of aristocratic violence and listeners who recalled Gloucester’s bloody seizure of power a year before may have been sceptical.

  6

  In Foolish Submission:

  Irish and Scottish

  Aristocracies

  Medieval England was an expansionist state which preyed on its neighbours. Territory equalled power and profit for kings and their noblemen. There were four areas open to conquest: France, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. France with its greater wealth and population was the most attractive objective, but in the end its superior resources always told, and occasional dazzling English victories like Crecy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) were followed by long and unwinnable wars of attrition. Normandy, Aquitaine and Anjou, all acquired by the Norman and Angevin kings, had been lost in 1214 when King John’s army was defeated at Bouvines. Only Gascony was retained and its defence was a headache for Edward I and Edward II. Edward III launched a concentrated counter-offensive, but this had petered out by the 1370s. Henry V tried again in 1415, but within forty years England was left with just a toehold, Calais.

  When the going was good, the aristocracy were enthusiastic partners in enterprises which yielded honour and profit. Richard, Earl of Arundel, made over £72,000 from plunder and ransoms during Edward III’s French campaigns.1 This was exceptional, but it explains why the nobility so strongly supported the Crown’s efforts to establish a Continental empire. Hope triumphed over experience and in 1513 and 1542 Henry VIII invaded France. Again, funds ran out and in 1558 Calais finally was recovered by the French.

  The subjugation and absorption of the polities on the fringes of the British archipelago was equally hard and success was limited. The piecemeal conquest of Wales was complete by 1282, but progress in Ireland was slow and by 1500 large tracts of the island still remained under its independent Gaelic rulers, whose allegiance to the English Crown was brittle. Scotland proved an even harder nut to crack. Edward I’s attempt to annex the kingdom ended with his son’s defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 and a sequence of destructive incursions into England by Robert the Bruce, whose brother Edward opened a new front against the English in Ulster.

  Henry VIII fared no better when he attempted to unite the two kingdoms in 1542 through an offer of the marriage of his son Edward to Princess Mary (Mary Queen of Scots) backed by a large-scale invasion of the Lowlands. English prestige soared after victories at Solway Moss and Pinkie, but so did the bills, and by 1550 the treasury had run out of the means to pay them. Costs included the wages of noble commanders in search of esteem. ‘I hear you are come to the Borders to win honour,’ a friend told Henry Manners, first Earl of Rutland, in 1549.2

  Manners was fighting against men like himself who believed themselves born warriors and rulers. The principles of aristocracy were deeply rooted in the hierarchical Celtic culture. Welsh bards constantly associated rank and political authority with illustrious ancestry, qualities which interestingly distinguished both the ancient rulers of Wales and their Anglo-Norman successors. The latter brought to Wales alien legal notions of feudalism, but the indigenous culture warmed to the incoming lords because they were men of honour and ancestry who lived according to ancient traditions of fairness and generosity. William Herbert, first Earl of Pembroke, was praised by a bard as a ‘chieftain in rank’. He was also a patron of Welsh poets.3

  Aristocratic assimilation in Ireland was more complex and fraught. When Henry I had first invaded the country in 1170 armed with a papal bull which granted him overlordship, his propagandists announced that his purpose was ‘correcting evil customs and planting virtue’. Imagined Irish barbarism seduced some of the conquerors, and in 1297 the Dublin Parliament introduced the first of many laws designed to discourage the Hiberno-Norman nobility from speaking Irish, wearing Irish dress, marrying Irish women and employing harpists and storytellers. Isolated from their original homeland, outnumbered and confined within what came to be known as the English Pale, the imported aristocracy was going native.

  Survival required a degree of assimilation that raised questions of identity and loyalty which continued to perturb the Anglo-Irish nobility for the rest of its history. Were they English, forever clinging to their Englishness in an alien and potentially hostile country, or were they the hybrid offspring of two cultures? Seen from London, any sign of ethnic eccentricity among Anglo-Irish landowners was interpreted as evidence of a political independence that had to be suppressed. An insurrection by Gerald FitzGerald, the ninth Earl of Kildare, in 1534 was one of the reasons why Henry VIII formally declared himself King of Ireland seven years later, the first step in the introduction of the machinery of centralised government. Thereafter, and whether they liked it or not (and most did not), the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic aristocracies were to be corralled into the English
polity and subordinated to English laws. In 1542 one bard lamented:

  O’Neill of Oileach and Earhain [Macha]

  the King of Tara and Tailté

  In foolish submission has exchanged his kingship

  for the Earldom of Ulster.4

  This demoted descendant of kings was a Gaelic patriarch who owed his status to his lineage. He was the head of a clan whose members were connected with him through blood and were obliged to serve him in war. Clansmen and -women worked the clan’s lands, shared its collective honour and, when it was slighted, were always ready to take revenge with fire and sword. Blood feuds were endemic in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, often enduring for generations. Status and honour rested on a capacity for immediate and bloody revenge. In Scotland in 1570 a band of MacGregors plotted to ambush the laird of Glen Urquhart, a relation of Archibald Campbell, fifth Earl of Argyle. It was as if the Earl himself had been the target, for, as a friend reminded him, a conspiracy against one of his kin was ‘an offence against your Lordship’s self’. Swift and ‘grievous punishment’ was imperative to teach the ‘world’ the perils of meddling with the Campbells.5

  Archibald Campbell needed no prompting in such matters. He could muster at least three thousand Highland fighting men and owned a string of castles, an artillery train and a flotilla of galleys. Campbell influence on the west coast and among the isles was growing (Argyle fancied himself ‘King of the Gaels’) and he was once likened to the wild ash of the glen which ‘grows fast and fair, but kills all living things in its shadows’.6 Seen from the outside and through an official lens, clan chiefs like Argyle and their counterparts in Ireland were rulers of states within a state with a vast capacity for mischief. This increased during the second half of the sixteenth century when Protestantism became the state religion of England and Scotland. On the whole, Gaelic Ireland and Scotland remained Catholic. Argyle was an exception, which was one reason why his ascendancy was tolerated.

  Religion was one of the reasons why the governments in London and Dublin convinced themselves that collaboration with the old Anglo-Irish and Gaelic aristocracies was neither possible nor advantageous. Uprooting or emasculating these elites became a matter of urgency as England drifted into a war with Spain in the 1580s and the presence of thousands of armed Catholic clansmen became a threat to national security. Moreover, permanent stability required a docile aristocracy; a modern, centralised state could not tolerate the existence of semi-independent lords, their private armies and incessant tribal warfare on its peripheries.

  The Elizabethan re-ordering of Ireland required the introduction of a stratum of imported English landlords, the richest of whom would provide the seedbed for a new, utterly reliable nobility whose sympathies and outlook were English. A glimpse of the future was provided by Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex, who, in 1573, led an enterprise for the colonisation of Antrim, which was subscribed to by several other English noblemen. Their aims and methods were close to those of the Spanish conquistadores in the New World. Essex’s venture miscarried (there was fierce local resistance from the Gaels), but others followed in Ireland and Virginia. As in the earlier wars against France, aristocrats were active partners in what turned out to be a new wave of English expansionism.

  Soldiers benefited, as they had done after the Norman conquest of England. Many who served in Elizabeth I’s wars of pacification were rewarded with lands. According to a champion of the new Irish order, the poet Edmund Spenser, the colonists were physicians who would cure the moral depravity of the native Irish and their ‘Popish trumpery’ with ‘strong purgations’.7

  The patient rejected this therapy and the outcome was a sequence of wars. The longest, against a confederacy of the O’Neills, O’Donnells and Maguires, lasted from 1594 to 1603, involved forty-three thousand soldiers levied in England and cost two million pounds. The Irish pinned their hopes on help from Spain, but when it arrived in 1598, it failed to tip the balance. In 1607 the battered remnants of the old clan elites went into exile. It was a signal for a flood of immigrants from England and Scotland, including fifty men of the Graham clan from Eskdale whom James VI (1566–1625 in Scotland, 1603–1625 in England) deported from the Borders. They were settled on the Roscommon estates of one of Ireland’s new aristocracy, Sir Ralph Sidney. This precedent was followed later in the century when criminals from both England and Scotland were shipped to the New World plantations as labourers.

  Evicting troublemakers from a region long convulsed by feuding and cross-border raids was part of James VI’s efforts to impose ‘perfect civility and obedience’ throughout his kingdom. Politically, Scotland had long resembled a sandwich, with the comparatively peaceful Lowlands squeezed between the two areas of chronic disorder: the Highlands and the Borders. Both were largely infertile upland regions where agricultural productivity was low and whose inhabitants traditionally turned on their neighbours to supplement their livelihoods. From the top downwards the economic necessity of predation was glorified by the rodomontade of the honour of clan and the septs into which the clans were divided. Raids and massacres became the stuff of heroic minstrelsy, which, like chivalric romances, set examples of courage for warriors.

  Like the rest of the Scottish nobility, the clan chieftain belonged to a divinely ordained social order. When worshippers in St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen looked heavenwards, they saw not angels but a ceiling painted with the shields of their earthly equivalents: the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, the monarchs of Europe and Scotland, and the bishops and noblemen of Scotland. The honour of the King and that of his knights was indivisible claimed Sir Gilbert de la Hay, a Scottish knight who believed that only men like himself should occupy the high offices of state. James IV (1488–1513) projected himself as a king in the Arthurian mould by holding tournaments with fashionable themes drawn from Arthurian romance. Mock Highlanders playing bagpipes appeared at one tournament in 1507 to remind onlookers of the King’s recent punitive expedition against the MacDonalds of the Isles.8

  These theatrical flourishes projected the Scottish Crown as the permanent guardian of the nation’s independence which had been won by Robert the Bruce. The Scottish aristocracy also saw themselves as defenders of their country’s freedom. Poets celebrated the exploits of the Douglases, Border magnates who were Scotland’s first line of defence against England. James, second Earl of Douglas, who was killed in the Scottish victory over Harry Hotspur at Otterburn in 1388, was praised as ‘a most ferocious knight and a permanent danger to the English’, while Archibald Douglas, the bastard son of the third Earl, was remembered in one ballad as a knight of ‘gigantic physique’ who could slay an adversary with one blow of his sword. The English dreaded him.9

  National security compelled successive Scottish kings to accept the regional ascendancy of the Douglases and families like them. For the Scots, particularly those who lived in remote and inaccessible regions, the local nobleman was the only agent of the state’s authority they knew. By the close of the fifteenth century, there were about thirty Scottish peers with a hereditary right to sit in the single-chamber Scottish parliament and their numbers rose steadily during the next hundred years through royal creations. Infertility and infant mortality led to extinctions, particularly among earls. Lords were more fecund, producing sons who founded cadet dynasties of lairds, which led to a proliferation of Gordons in Aberdeenshire and Campbells in the western Highlands.10

  Noblemen sat with the clergy and commoners in the Scottish Parliament, which censured as well as counselled kings. The point was forthrightly made by Sir James Graham during a session in 1436 when he accosted James I (1403–37).

  I arrest you, sir, in the name of the three estates . . . for right as your liege people be bound and sworn to obey your majesty royal, in the same wise be you sworn and ensured to your people to keep and govern your law, so that you can do them no wrong, but in right maintain and defend them.11

  As in England, a theoretic contract existed between Crown and subject and the no
bles believed that in extreme circumstances they could enforce it. At the same time, they looked to the Crown for patronage that would fill their pockets and raise their prestige.

  The outspoken Graham assassinated James I at Perth in 1437 at the instigation of his kinsman Walter Stewart, Earl of Atholl, a magnate with extensive local power and regal ambitions. At the very least, Atholl had hoped for control over the person of the infant James II, but the rest of the nobility spurned him and he was seized, tried and executed, a paper crown set on his head in mock of his pretensions. Graham and his fellow assassins were tortured to death.

  This dramatic incident exposed a dilemma which intermittently agitated the medieval Scottish aristocracy: how did a nobleman balance public duty with private selfishness? It was an unwelcome choice that had to be made repeatedly during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a result of a series of accidents which left Scotland temporarily kingless and in the hands of minority or regency governments. The English captured James I in 1406 and he was imprisoned for nineteen years, and between his murder in 1437 and James VI’s coming of age in 1587 Scotland had a hundred years of rule by various councils made up of noblemen and bishops.

  Their endeavours to discipline themselves and their countrymen were an object lesson in how vital personal monarchy was for national stability. The mystique of the Crown commanded reverence and obedience, sentiments which could never be aroused by a committee of lords and clerics, however well intentioned. Moreover, minorities made it harder for kings to restore their authority and practise active kingship, that is the assertion and extension of their power. James I’s attempts to do this through patronage persuaded Atholl to have him assassinated.