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

by Lawrence James

  The old aristocratic sense of inherited distinction and responsibilities remained. Algernon Sydney, second son of the Earl of Leicester, declared: ‘Though I am not a peer, yet I am of the wood of which they are made.’ It was sound timber with Percy and Sydney roots, but some contemporaries would have detected a canker, for Sydney’s father had been a Parliamentarian commander. His defiance of the Crown was, for his son, a vindication of the aristocracy’s historic role as sentinels who guarded the rights of property and the liberties of the nation. According to the younger Sydney, men of high birth and ancestry had a unique moral duty and were subject to ‘a higher law’ which obliged them to challenge arbitrary kingship. In 1642 and, for that matter, in 1399 the nobility had performed its ancestral responsibilites. This was the thesis of Sydney’s Discourses Concerning Government, written before his execution for treason (he plotted against Charles II) in 1683:

  No better defence has been found against the encroachments of ill kings than by setting up an order of men who, by holding large territories and having great numbers of tenants and dependents, might be able to restrain the exhorbitancies that either the King or the Commons might run into.

  Sydney had been unchastened by the aristocracy’s recent misfortunes. Other peers had been and favoured quietism. Submission to the will of a strong monarch alone prevented the fragmentation of society into myriads of atoms perpetually contending with each other. This had been the lesson of the wars as understood by Hobbes in his Leviathan, published in 1651, in which he argued that benevolent autocracy was the only way of constraining the primal and raptorial instincts of mankind.

  The old dilemma remained for the aristocracy: where did its duties lie? Did it serve the Crown, or the nation as a whole as Sydney had suggested. The issues raised in 1642 had not gone away and pessimists wondered whether the Restoration marked a truce, rather than a termination of the civil wars.

  11

  Signal Deliverances:

  Restoration 1660–85

  Samuel Pepys was impressed by ‘the gallantry of the horsemen, citizens, and noblemen of all sorts’ who greeted Charles II as he came ashore at Dover on 25 May 1660. The jubilation (and relief) seemed universal, for the wars and experiments in government were finally over. A future of tranquillity and harmony beckoned, since before embarking from Holland, Charles had promised to defend the ‘just, ancient and fundamental rights of his subjects’ and to be guided by his Parliaments. The House of Lords and the Church of England were restored with the King and, superficially, at least, it seemed that the clock had been turned back to 1642.

  The old social order had not been changed by wars and experiments in government. It remained a layered hierarchy with the aristocracy at the top. Noblemen and their wives could still command deference and submission from inferiors and they continued to fill the great offices of state and supervise the government of their localities. The nobility remained an open elite: families died out for lack of heirs and new titles were created by the Crown, particularly for men who had stayed loyal to Charles II during his exile. Yet, society was changing, slowly and inexorably. The central section of the pyramid was broadening as the ‘middling’ orders of professional and business- and what were then called ‘money’ men expanded. Pepys belonged to this body – he was a civil servant – and to prosper he had to show extremes of respect to the peers to whom he looked for promotion. He had accompanied Charles on his voyage across the North Sea and had come ashore in the boat which contained the favourite royal dog, ‘which shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are just as others are’. A seditious thought, but a reminder that the ideas which had broken surface before and during the civil wars had not been forgotten.

  The revived House of Lords, complete with bishops and peers created by Charles I during the war, reassembled in its somewhat shabby chamber in the Palace of Westminster overlooked by a huge tapestry depicting the defeat of the Armada. One of the Lords’ first and most agreeable tasks was to approve an act to liberate all landowners from the Crown’s residual feudal powers, which had become ‘burdensome, grievous and prejudicial to the kingdom’.1 Among this legal lumber was the royal right to the wardship of underage heirs.

  The hereditary principle had been confirmed and reinforced. Henceforward, a peer was free to arrange for the maintenance of his offspring (and their property) by creating trusts and entails which prevented the fragmentation of estates. These legal formulae confirmed land as the prime and safest form of investment. Even though many noblemen invested in overseas enterprises, including the new Africa Company, which dealt in slaves, land remained the bedrock of their power and independence. A valuable gain could be offset by a small loss when in 1676 peers lost the right to assess their own taxes.

  A contented, loyal and active aristocracy was vital for Charles II’s survival and the stability of his three kingdoms. His propaganda eulogised him as a deliverer who ‘new borne and raised from the dead’ had rescued his subjects from the ‘late deplorable confusions’.2 This allusion to Christ’s resurrection comes from the preamble to a law which established an annual service to celebrate the King’s birthday on 29 May. Further loyal observances were added to the Anglican liturgy: on 31 January parsons remembered the ‘martyrdom’ of Charles I, and on 5 November prayers were offered in thanksgiving for that divine providence which had saved a Protestant nation from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. These rites affirmed a royalist, Anglican version of national destiny in which the monarchy was an agent for the fulfilment of divine will.

  Charles II needed God’s imprimatur to convince his subjects that obedience was in their own as well as his interests. He ruled kingdoms in which recent political and religious antagonisms were barely quiescent and periodically surfaced in the form of sedition, conspiracies and, in Scotland, a small-scale insurrection and terrorist campaign by the extreme Presbyterian Covenanters. Seen in retrospect, Charles’s reign was a brittle armistice during which an affable, concupiscent and flexible monarch with an overriding instinct for self-preservation strove to control his fractious and volatile subjects. Their passivity was the key to stability, prosperity and the survival of the Stuart dynasty.

  The aristocracy cooperated, for it too wanted peace. Charles could rely upon the House of Lords, his predominantly aristocratic ministers and, most importantly, those peers whom he appointed as Lords Lieutenants in the provinces. They and their deputies spied on and chivvied religious nonconformists (the confessional heirs of the Puritans), twisted arms to secure the election of pliant MPs and vetted potential magistrates. In 1676 Viscount Yarmouth, Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, forwarded to Charles a list of tractable justices with a note saying that he had chosen them ‘for the King’s immediate service and strengthening of my own interest in a greater capacity to service the crown’.3 The traditional reciprocity between Crown and peerage had been restored: the King made Yarmouth the first man in his county (he was made an earl in 1679), in return for which Yarmouth zealously prosecuted royal interests, though he managed his own badly and eventually slid into bankrupty.

  In Scotland Charles relied upon the influence and military muscle of the peerage and gentry to contain the Covenanters. Private detachments supplemented units from the small royal standing army which Charles had established in 1660 under young, loyal and largely aristocratic officers. Significantly, he allowed the mobilisation of Catholic and Episcopalian clansmen for operations against the Lowland Covenanters.4 Noblemen and lairds did their bit in rooting out sedition: the wonderfully named Cromwell Lockhart mustered his tenants to fight the Covenanters, and William, Marquess of Hamilton, pursued ‘skulking’ fugitives on his estates.5

  The Scottish Presbyterian rebels were called ‘Whiggamores’ and its derivative ‘Whig’ was the title given to Parliamentary opponents of Charles during the late 1670s. Whigs retaliated in kind by calling their adversaries Tories, the name given to Irish Catholic rebels thirty years before. An exchange of insults app
ropriately marked the infancy of British party politics, although neither faction resembled a modern political party with its ideological discipline and administrative apparatus. Rather, Whig and Tory represented states of mind which had been shaped by recent events and the ideas they had generated.

  The Whigs were the successors of the Roundheads who had regrouped and, their enemies alleged, were prepared to start another civil war in pursuit of their theories of government. In 1682 a Tory reviled them as the men ‘whose fathers have sucked on the poison of rebellion in the last age’, and who, behind the ‘mask of Liberty, Property and Religion endeavour the destruction and ruin of the King and kingdom’.6 There was an element of truth in this, since many prominent Whigs had been in arms against Charles I. Philip, the fourth Lord Wharton, had commanded a regiment at Edgehill in 1642 (it ran away) and afterwards immersed himself in less hazardous administrative duties for Parliament and the republic.

  The Tories had inherited the Cavalier mindset. They believed in quietism, loathed religious dissent and upheld the King and the Church of England in Parliament and the countryside. Cohesion and tranquillity could be achieved only through the supremacy of the Crown and acceptance of the Anglican doctrine of submission to authority. The quintessence of Toryism was explained by Edward Stillingfleet, the Dean of St Pauls, in a sermon of 1682. He conjured up a vision of society as an ‘orderly communion’, a Christian brotherhood which made it possible for people to ‘abide where they were called by God, [and] keep their ranks and places where right Reason [and] Religion have fixed them’. Those who questioned or, worse still, spurned this dispensation were, like Cain, ‘rebels against God’.7

  A model for the regulation of Stillingfleet’s perfect society was provided by a Cavalier, Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha, or that Natural Power of Kings Asserte was posthumously published in 1680. Universal peace and harmony were the fruits of abject submission. It was the product of a chain of command that stretched from monarchs downwards to masters of households. Greater and lesser patriarchs were wise, benevolent and guided by the knowledge that their authority came from God. This was not an original thesis: Filmer had elaborated on what was an essentially medieval view of society and, because of fears of a renewed civil war, it was accepted by conservatives.

  Participation in government rather than unconditional submission was the Whig response to Tory theories of natural obedience. With the approval of his master Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke proposed in 1663 that the new colony of Carolina should have buildings set aside for public meetings and that deputies elected by freeholders should make laws. There would also be religious toleration and, unlike in England and Scotland, no established Church with powers of social correction.

  Behind the constitution for Carolina lay the Whig assumption that popular consent should limit royal executive power. Tories argued that it was infinite because it derived ultimately from God. ‘It is better to obey God than a man,’ insisted a Tory journalist, Sir Roger L’Estrange, in 1680, rather than submit to the Whig conceit that ‘sovereign power is in the people’.8 It was absurd, he continued, to imagine that the Lords and Commons were somehow ‘two thirds of the King of England’. The clash of ideas which had been the prelude to the civil war was still underway and old convictions were as strongly held as ever by Whigs and Tories.

  Divergent views on the nature of kingship translated into political factions within the Lords and Commons. Yet, in 1710, one pamphleteer considered that ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ were terms which described the political affiliations of the lower orders. ‘Persons of the first rank, who either by their birth or abilities are entitled to govern others’ adopted these labels to win electoral support.9 This was cynical, but it was a reminder that legislators who ignored public feeling risked their careers. Watermen who rowed peers to Westminster talked to the passengers about public affairs as taxi drivers do today.10

  Public opinion was easily moulded alleged one Whig polemicist in 1667, when he accused Jesuits of ‘mingling with gentlemen to poison the Clubs and Coffee houses with fanatic disorders’.11 It seems that even the educated political elite could be beguiled by subtle political spin. Political debate raged at all levels, and at the lowest was heard most frequently in ale houses. In 1678 a Yorkshire labourer told fellow drinkers that ‘the King had thrown up his crown to the Parliament’, presumably in response to accounts of the Commons’s demands for new oaths of allegiance from Catholics.12

  Political discussion whether by gentlemen in the new, fashionable coffee houses or artisans in inns had been made possible by the rapidly expanding popular literature of politics. Reports of what passed in Westminster were printed in newspapers and journals, which were conveyed to the provinces by the new postal system. Interpretation and insights into the characters and motives of the nation’s rulers were provided by a mass of partisan and vitriolic pamphlets which transmitted the antipathies of Whigs and Tories to the country at large.

  The explosion of the press meant that it was now possible to speak of ‘national’ politics since issues were more widely aired than ever. The phenomenon of nascent popular politics coincided with an increase in the number of voters as a result of more and more men qualifying for the forty-shilling freeholder franchise. This had been set in 1429, confining the right to vote in county elections to all adults who owned freehold land worth forty shillings. It has been calculated that there were at least 250,000 voters in 1714, just under 5 per cent of the population. Despite bribery and coercion by candidates and their paymasters, the proportion of voters who turned up to the polls fluctuated from over a half to less than a fifth in county elections.13 Boredom with and indifference to politics have had a long history.

  Polling was done in public in the county town. The aristocracy had always taken a keen and active interest in Parliamentary elections; the ability to get his man in was a token of a nobleman’s influence over his locality. He could rely on deference to sway squires and tenant farmers, and if this did not work, then bribery and bullying were applied. In 1661 William Cavendish, third Earl of Devonshire, veteran royalist and Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, rhetorically asked the gentry of that county whether his son would be ‘acceptable’ as a knight of the shire.14 No one was bold enough to invite the Lord Lieutenant’s disfavour and so William Cavendish was elected.

  He later abandoned his father’s Toryism and became a prominent Whig. While there was an element of family tradition in attachment to political factions, it never prevented peers from making independent judgements, or, more commonly, trimming their sails to the prevailing wind. The growth of faction was one reason why peers considered it imperative to fortify their influence by placing their offspring in the lower house. Stepping up the infiltration of the Commons was both a political stratagem and, more significantly, an admission by the peerage that it needed trustworthy allies in a body which represented the nation as a whole. Between 1660 and 1690 just over two hundred heirs or younger sons of peers sat in the Commons.15

  Winning an election was an expensive and, for young patricians, an occasionally demeaning business. In 1679 the Whig Henry Sydney, a younger son of the second Earl of Leicester, complained of the embarrassment he and the rival candidate, the Tory Henry Goring, suffered when they endeared themselves to the thirty voters of Bramber in Sussex. They ‘made us spend much more than we should to keep our party firm . . . You should have laughed to see how pleased I seemed in kissing old women and drinking wine with handfulls of sugar, and great glasses of burnt brandy, three things much against the stomach.’16 The flattered electors agreed to let Sydney and Goring share the two-member borough. Head-to-head contests, particularly for county seats, were far more demanding in terms of entertainment and bribes.

  *

  Charles II could not change the minds of the Whig nobility and gentry, but he could isolate their potential supporters, the Nonconformists. During the 1660s laws were passed which made active Anglicanism a qualification for all
public offices from parish constable and juryman upwards. Additional hurdles were constructed in the form of oaths of allegiance whose wordings were repugnant to all Nonconformists. All royal servants had to swear that it was ‘not lawful upon any pretence whatsoever to take arms against the King’ and pledge never to ‘endeavour any alteration in government either in Church or State’.17 Dissenters were, however, still permitted to vote. When they did, they favoured the Whigs, whose attitude to religious conformity was more flexible than the Tories.

  Both parties united in their loathing and distrust of Catholics, who had lost none of their capacity to make Protestant flesh creep. Anti-Catholic paranoia took on a new lease of life in the late 1670s: the King was flirting with his cousin Louis XIV of France (and receiving secret subsidies from him) and there was unease about Catholic and crypto-Catholic influence within the court.

  The conditions were right for a fresh spasm of anti-Catholic hysteria. It was triggered in 1678 by the ravings of Titus Oates, who claimed to have uncovered plans for a violent coup which would place the King’s brother, James, Duke of York, on the throne (he had converted to Catholicism five years before) with the assistance of a French army and English Catholics. Oates was a nasty creature, physically and morally akin to another self-appointed purifier of public life, the American Senator Joseph McCarthy. Both understood the psychology of their audiences and exploited their neuroses with lurid revelations of a hidden enemy whose duplicity was surpassed only by its ruthlessness. No matter that Catholics, like American communists, were a tiny minority; what they lacked in numbers they made up for in determination and cunning.

  Critical disbelief was suspended and the aristocracy shared the general alarm which followed Oates’s disclosures, which implicated several Catholic peers. They were detained and the Commons and Lords immediately joined forces and compelled Catholic peers and MPs to swear an oath in which they denied the doctrine of the mass and declare that prayers to the Virgin Mary and the saints were ‘superstitious and idolatrous’.18 Seventeen of the nineteen Catholics lords refused to comply and were expelled from the Lords.