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

by Lawrence James

  Boys learned how to survive in a robust, competitive world, while their parents fretted about their intellectual progress and the likelihood that idle sons would drift into the sexual vices for which public schools had become notorious. In 1784, Charles Jenkinson, first Earl of Liverpool, urged his fourteen-year-old son Robert, the second Earl and a future Prime Minister, to stick at his Homer and Virgil and ‘apply yourself to algebra and mathematics’ so as to ‘acquire a habit of reasoning closely and correctly on every subject’. The Jenkinsons were in the foothills of the political world and hoped to ascend higher, and so Charles reminded his son that his family ‘look forward with anxiety to the figure you will hereafter make in the world . . . and in the character you bear’.9

  At sixteen Robert Jenkinson undertook the next aristocratic rite of passage and proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, the college of choice for noblemen’s sons, where they wore a distinctive gold-laced nobleman’s gown and dined with the college fellows as of right. He left after the usual two years, having shown what his tutor considered an alarming preference for ‘general ideas’ rather than close textual analysis. Jenkinson was already immersed in the world of politics, challenging his father’s support for the slave trade. He also cultivated what he called ‘a few particular people’ whom he liked and whose political sympathies he shared, and his companions included future ministerial colleagues and an adversary, George Canning.

  Attachments and sometimes antipathies made at school and university bound together the often overlapping aristocratic networks which dominated political life. Jenkinson also acquired his nickname ‘Jenky’, which has a schoolboy or undergraduate ring to it, as did those of other contemporary grandees. The Prince Regent called the Duke of Norfolk ‘Jockey’, while Henry Addington, the first Lord Sidmouth, was ‘Doctor’ on account of his father’s profession, and Lord Grenville was inexplicably ‘Bogy’.10

  Nicknames were a novelty in the everyday discourse of politics. They could be heard at court levees, balls, masquerades, over card tables, at race meetings, cricket matches and in coffee houses, in fact anywhere where the rich and powerful enjoyed themselves. In his diary for October 1731, John Perceval, first Earl of Egmond, recorded coffee house discussions which ranged over religion, metaphysics, ancient statutes, the ‘antiquity of Parliament’, and a recently published gloss on Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.11 Over seventy years after, Creevey described an evening’s conversation with the Duke of Norfolk which wandered ‘from the bawdy to the depths of politics’.

  Political conversation encompassed persiflage, anecdote, rumour and speculation as well as hard-nosed horse-trading over the dispersal of power and patronage. Ultimately, all political activity focused on the crucial business of persuading men how to vote, either in Parliament or at provincial polling booths. Astute electoral management at both levels explained both the progress and durability of Thomas Pelham-Holles, first Duke of Newcastle, who was a Secretary of State between 1724 and 1754 and Prime Minister between 1754 and 1756, and, with William Pitt the Elder, between 1756 and 1762.

  Newcastle was a maestro who exploited the avarice, vanity and ambition of those whom he persuaded to beef up the Whigs in the Commons and Lords. Survival depended on strings pulled in London and in the provinces, where indifferent or uncommitted voters had to be petted. Newcastle worked in tandem with Charles Lennox, second Duke of Richmond, whom he counted ‘his best and dearest friend in all the world’. Together, they seduced the voters of Sussex, where both owned substantial estates.

  Every social occasion was turned to political advantage. In 1733 Newcastle urged his friend to sound out the feelings of the Sussex gentry whenever they gathered for the assizes and races at Lewes. Personal contact was vital and so, in 1737, Richmond attended the Lewes races in person to charm the electors. Meanwhile, his steward spied on the Tories, who were using a race meeting at Steyning to select their candidate for Chichester. Another of Richmond’s agents strolled among spectators at cricket matches, testing opinion. But it was Richmond’s presence which won hearts: squires, substantial farmers and anyone who had a forty-shilling freehold were flattered by the personal attention of the first man in the county and a celebrated sportsman.

  Patience, good humour and a resilient liver were vital for canvassing. Newcastle once shrank from attendance at the Lewes races and assizes, for he was ‘not at all fond of a week’s drunkenness’. Nevertheless he had to abase himself, show warmth and affability towards social inferiors and heartily join in the alcoholic revels which Hogarth portrayed in his sequence of election paintings. Sussex Whigs sang:

  Then fill your glass. Full let it be

  Newcastle drink while you can see

  With heart and voice, all voters sing

  Long live great Holles – Sussex king.12

  Voters expected bribes as well as beanfeasts. Richmond described the borough of New Shoreham as ‘a new whore that is anybody’s for their money’, and a place where, thankfully, ‘that ugly word conscience is not known’. New Shoreham succumbed to sweetners, and excise posts procured from Whitehall were scattered among leading townsmen. Tom Baker, a Chichester chandler and ‘chief pillar of the dissenters’, understood the game when he pledged his vote and powers of persuasion in return for Richmond’s pressure on the trustees of St Thomas’s Hospital to secure his son a position as a surgeon there.13 Small men did favours for great and vice versa. In 1754 Newcastle gave the novelist Laurence Sterne the archdeaconry of York in return for his costly endeavours in expelling ‘Popish seminaries’ from the city.14 The political nexus demanded that grandees in Westminster helped and were helped by chandlers, schoolmasters, farmers and the growing number of urban businessmen who had acquired a forty-shilling freehold.

  With so many applicants for favours, clashes were inevitable and ministers had to judge precisely the political consequences of satisfaction or disappointment. In 1759 Newcastle was faced with rival requests for the governorship of Dunbarton Castle. One was from Lord Eglinton, who raised the matter at Lewes races, the other from General Campbell, a kinsman of the fourth Duke of Argyll. Honour was at stake and the Duke became ‘very violent’ when Newcastle hinted that he favoured Eglinton. He bluntly warned the Prime Minister that a slight to the Campbells would have bruising repercussions for the Whigs in Scotland.15 Argyll prevailed, as his family usually did.

  Titles and promotions within the peerage were incentives for lobby fodder in both houses. Approving a peerage for one MP, Newcastle noted that he was ‘faultless and one of the best supports I can have in the House of Commons’. John, second Viscount Bateman, was an Irish peer who sat for Woodstock in Oxfordshire and deserved the post of Lord of the Admiralty because he was a ‘most useful man who does not speak’ and had the goodwill of his uncle, the Duke of Marlborough.16 Bateman’s mute services obtained him posts within the royal household, first as Treasurer and then Master of the Buckhounds. He was at home in George III’s court, for ‘he possessed that mediocrity of talents, which forms the best recommendation to royal favour’.17 The Tory Bateman was dependable in the Lords where he faithfully supported Lord North’s ministry. When it fell in 1782, Bateman forfeited his sinecure, since it was customary for posts in the royal household to be redistributed when governments changed.

  Like every other Prime Minister, North had to bargain with an increasing number of peers who, by inheritance or through investment, owned so-called pocket boroughs, constituencies in which the voters were, metaphorically at least, in their landlord’s pocket. In many instances there were only a handful of voters and in a few (the rotten boroughs) none at all. Where they existed, voters had to be cherished: at Newark in Nottinghamshire each received half a ton of coal at Christmas and at East Retford in Nottinghamshire each received an annual twenty guineas. Truculence did occur and was stamped on. In Yorkshire in 1807 Malton voters defied Lord Fitzwilliam, who retaliated with evictions and raised rents, which did the trick, for next year they returned his candida
te.18 Alcohol induced compliance and gratitude, and in Westminster, where nearly every adult male had a vote, £2,285 (brandy was two shillings a bottle, beer a penny a pint.) was spent by Newcastle on tavern bills in 1754.19

  Tractable constituencies were valuable assets and were bought and sold. In 1787 Lord Egremont paid £40,000 for Midhurst in Sussex, and in 1812 the sixth Duke of Bedford paid £32,000 for Camelford.20 The number of boroughs owned by aristocrats rose sharply from 156 in 1747 to 207 in 1784, which represented nearly 40 per cent of the Commons. The aristocracy was tightening its grip on the legislature in the face of a growing challenge from India and West Indies moneybags who were buying up seats and, by 1790, had a block of forty-five members keeping an eye on the East India Company’s interests. They were a force to be reckoned with, for there were enough of them to play havoc with ministerial majorities.

  Inflation hit the borough market as more and more colonial Midases sought seats in the Commons. Politics became increasingly expensive; Newcastle was compelled to sell off estates worth £200,000 to meet the debts he had run up sustaining the Whigs in power.21 Leaders chasing Commons’ majorities were forced to haggle with boroughmongers competing in a seller’s market. In 1774 Lord Edgecombe demanded £15,000 for his five Cornish seats, but Lord North knocked him down to £12,500, which was the going rate. The Prime Minister considered Viscount Falmouth had been ‘rather shabby’ by accepting the standard price, but asking for payment in guineas (worth one pound and five pence) for his six Cornish seats, thus slipping an extra 5 per cent onto the final bill.22

  Hugh Boscawen, second Viscount Falmouth, was notoriously greedy: at a levee he had once asked Pitt the Elder to recommend him for the Garter and was refused. Furious, Falmouth warned the Prime Minister that: ‘I bring in five votes who go with the ministry in the House of Commons; and if my application is disregarded, you must take the consequence.’ Pitt remained obdurate and quoted a Roman proverb: ‘Optat Ephippia Bos piger’ (‘as much as the lazy ox wishes to be saddled’). Ignorant of Latin, Falmouth asked where it came from and what it meant. On hearing it was from Horace, he presumed, to the amusement of everyone present, that the words had been uttered by the contemporary dilettante Sir Horace Walpole.23

  Falmouth was a dunce, but he was acutely conscious of the immense prestige attached to the pale blue ribbon of the Garter. It and the orders of the Thistle, founded in 1703, and St Patrick, founded in 1783, were tokens of special royal favour which created an elite within the peerage, immediately recognisable by the ribbons and badges worn in the Lords and on public occasions. Like titles, these honours required ministerial recommendation, which made them counters in the political game. George I (1714–27) and his son George II (1727–60) acquiesced, not always graciously, but they had the compensation of the civil list, a payment annually endorsed by Parliament to cover the Crown’s private expenses. In 1760 it stood at £800,000.

  George III chafed against the constraints that had bound his predecessors. Wilful and dogmatic, he was guided by an atavistic philosophy of kingship and cast himself as the ‘patriot King’, an honest patriarch dedicated to the welfare of his subjects and above the venality and bickering of partisan politics. George considered Parliamentary debates exercises in fruitless verbosity. Old ideas were briefly brought out of mothballs, and Pitt the Elder was perturbed to hear a royal chaplain preach on the doctrine of non-resistance.24 Others may have been amused, although there were plenty of MPs and peers who were glad to indulge the royal fancies and harvested the rewards which came the way of the King’s ‘friends’. An axis of Whigs, Tories, apolitical country squires and officials of the royal household (whom George called his ‘household troops’) kept the biddable mediocrity of Lord North in power from 1770 to 1782.

  The tentative revival of the Crown’s executive power foundered because of George’s pigheadedness. Its fruits were humiliating reverses in America, the temporary loss of British maritime supremacy in the Atlantic and Caribbean which led to an invasion threat in 1779, and spiralling levels of taxation. George convinced himself it was all the fault of the Whig opposition, whom he accused of fomenting rebellion in America and hampering his ministers at home. The decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781 confirmed what was already clear: Britain could not suppress the colonists. A ministry whose justification was to continue fighting collapsed and North resigned.

  George III became entangled in serpentine manoeuvres to exclude his old enemies from office, turning in 1783 to the Tory William Pitt the Younger. The patriot King swallowed his disdain for partisan politics and, through flagrant intervention, sustained the minority ministry of Pitt until the general election of 1784. George converted the uncommitted with peerages: Edward Eliot was made Lord St Germains in return for delivering his two Cornish boroughs and their quartet of MPs to Pitt.

  George III’s excursions into factional politics transformed the aristocracy. Keeping Pitt in office required a steady flow of creations, and between 1780 and 1800 the total of peers soared from 189 to 267. Arrivistes now predominated in the Lords, where four-fifths of its members had titles less than a hundred years old. Old blood was scandalised. ‘There are so many Lords made, that I can hardly spit out of my coach without spitting on a Lord,’ exclaimed the Duchess of Queensberry in August 1784.25

  A bandwagon was rolling and the ambitious quickly jumped on to it. Snobbery, vanity and anxieties over status compelled men to beg for titles, often blatantly and sometimes without success. In 1796, Sir James Graham Bt. pleaded with Henry Dundas, the Secretary for War, for a safe government constituency, reminding his friend that ‘my sole object for coming into Parliament would be to obtain a peerage’.26 His hopes were raised in 1798 when, with ministerial backing, he was elected for Ripon in Yorkshire, which he represented for the next nine years. Graham was asthmatic, which may explain why he never spoke in debates, but his silent support for successive ministries did not merit a peerage.

  Another loser in the scramble for titles was James Stewart, the seventh Earl of Galloway, a Tory, a Lord of the Bedchamber and Lord Lieutenant of Wigtonshire. Here he enjoyed ‘some consequence’ as he told Pitt and Dundas, but his kudos had been dimmed in 1793 when his nominee had been beaten in the county election. Only his elevation to an English peerage and with it a guaranteed seat in the Lords would restore his prestige.27 Over the next two years, he anxiously scanned the annual lists of creations and promotions in the belief that Pitt would heed his pleas. The Prime Minister did not, aware perhaps that this vain nobleman’s son had backed the opposition candidate for Kirkcudbright. The disappointed Galloway died in 1806 from gout of the stomach.28

  Graham and Galloway possessed large estates, but now acreage was beginning to count for less when it came to creating peers. Many new lords, including the naval commander Lord Collingwood and Lord Ellenborough, a former Lord Chief Justice, had little land. Looking back from the 1840s, the romantic Tory Benjamin Disraeli saw the separation of the aristocracy from the land as a blow to its ancient mystique. In his novel Sybil (1845), he castigated Pitt for giving titles to ‘second-rate squires and fat graziers’ and to bankers and businessmen whom ‘He caught . . . in the alleys of Lombard Street and clutched . . . from the counting houses of Cornhill.’ A few of these ‘mushroom’ lords were uncomfortable about their lack of the wherewithal to keep up their positions. On the eve of Trafalgar, Thomas Hardy, Nelson’s Flag Captain, confided to the Admiral that ‘his want of fortune’ would make it difficult for him to maintain the baronetcy which, he rightly guessed, he would soon be awarded.29

  No such embarrassment was allowed to disturb Wellington: after each of his major victories in the Peninsula he leapfrogged up the peerage from Viscount Wellington of Talavera to Duke of Wellington in five years. A financial award was attached to each title, culminating with £400,000 with which to buy estates sufficient to uphold the ‘dignity’ of his dukedom.30

  As in previous periods when the aristocracy underwent rapid expansion, there was b
ackbiting about a perceived devaluation of the peerage as a whole. It was already stratified, with English peers taking precedence over Scottish, who were allowed only sixteen representatives in the Lords, and both took precedence over Irish, who had none. The theatre of power required the strictest observation of protocols with everyone in their proper places in public processions, which offered plenty of opportunities for grumbling over slights. In 1733 some English lords believed that Irish peers were no more than commoners, and they were incensed by George III’s Queen’s kissing the hands of Irish countesses but not those of English viscountesses.31

  Always fussy about the minutiae of court punctilio, George III protested in 1776 when it was proposed that Irish peers might be given English lord lieutenantcies.32 When, in 1806, one Irish peer, Lord Mornington, was offered an Irish marquessate for having enlarged British territories in India, he was furious. ‘There was nothing Irish or Pinchbeck in my conduct,’ he declared and, therefore, he expected ‘nothing Irish or Pinchbeck in my reward’.33 His amour propre was satisfied with an English title, Marquess Wellesley, but his political ambitions were hampered by his libido. As Foreign Secretary between 1809 and 1812 he devoted more time to his mistresses than to his duties; his younger brother remarked that castration might be the only way to save his career.

  Wellesley joined an aristocracy at the apex of its political supremacy. Its future seemed assured, for over the past fifty years it had engrossed more and more political power. The steady acquisition of pocket and rotten boroughs, corruption and private non-aggression pacts were making the nobility less and less answerable to the electorate. In the 1761 election only one-fifth of seats were contested.