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

by Lawrence James

  Burke and Paine had opened a still unresolved debate on the legitimacy and usefulness of the aristocracy. Both writers deployed reason to powerful effect, but Burke laced his arguments with emotional appeals to the imagination. Paine’s mindset was that of a man utterly convinced of his own rectitude, and his tone was often captious and doctrinaire. He loved statistics and used them to reveal how taxes were syphoned into royal and aristocratic pockets.

  Most important of all in terms of the future nature and course of British politics, Paine had compiled a text that gave a rational coherence to a hitherto inchoate sense of frustration and injustice felt by humble men and women. They were dissatisfied by the status quo and now they knew exactly why, and what needed to be changed. Mentally armed by Paine, his readers were ready to repudiate the past and their superiors’ veneration of a wisdom which had been contrived to keep them in perpetual subordination. Paine’s historical process was not evolutionary in the Burkean sense, but revolutionary. Its goal was that liberation of mankind which, he imagined, had been accomplished in the United States and was underway in France.

  Paine won converts, but he lost the debate. It was halted by Pitt’s emergency wartime legislation passed between 1794 and 1799, which silenced political debate and drove Paineites underground. The establishment remained physically secure, although prone to occasional spasms of bad nerves brought on by rumours of phantom revolutionary conspiracies. Burke had provided intellectual security through an ideology which reinforced the status quo and confounded its enemies. Yet Paine’s ideas had not been extinguished; they survived to provide ammunition for future generations of radicals and, in time, socialists. Moderates harnessed Paine’s logic to arguments for franchise reform and extremists worked to fulfil his vision of democratic republic. All shared his rejection of the aristocratic principle as bogus and moribund.

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  The Rights of Men and Reflections on the Revolution in France were the opening salvos in a war of pamphlets and speeches. It became increasingly one-sided after George III’s proclamation against sedition in May 1792 and the French Republic’s declaration of war on Britain the following February. The war was more than another Anglo-French military contest of the kind that had been fought for the past hundred years. It was a struggle for national survival in which Britain was defending its Constitution and liberties from an ideological offensive. Addressing the Commons in 1794, George Canning reminded his listeners that defeat would mean their replacement by a ‘Corresponding Society or a Scotch Convention’ and submission to the will of some satrap of the French Committee of Public Safety.5 This was happening on the Continent where indigenous quislings were assisting French armies of occupation.

  War transformed Paine’s followers into a potential fifth column. Their corresponding societies (there were about ninety in 1795) and the Edinburgh convention of radicals referred to by Canning were placed under intelligence surveillance. Henry Dundas told Canning that it was his duty as a Secretary of State to spy on anyone ‘meditating mischief and sedition’ and so his agents had penetrated corresponding societies and kept him forewarned of their plans. Some of the intelligence gathered was used for prosecutions under the new anti-sedition laws.

  Moderate government supporters in Parliament wondered whether the legislation was too severe and if the threat of subversion had been deliberately inflated by ministers. Perhaps so, but domestic economic problems, including poor harvests and food shortages, generated outbreaks of restlessness which could easily have been exploited by Paineite agitators.

  Occasionally, the hidden enemy broke cover. Paineite partisans appeared among the sailors tried after the Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797. One, a member of the London Corresponding Society, told his shipmates that ‘he had traced history and could not discover any one good quality belonging to him [George III]’. A ringleader at the Nore had foretold that the mutiny ‘shouldn’t end until the head is off King George and Billy Pitt’. ‘Damn and bugger the King! We want no king!’ declared another mutineer.6 Posters appeared in Lewes in 1795 calling upon militiamen to defy their officers and ‘join the Rage, the Aristocrat to quell’.7 In 1812 an anonymous Huddersfield Luddite warned a local mill owner that his fellow machine-breakers would overthrow the ‘Hanover tyrant’ with the help of Napoleon and create ‘a just republic’.8

  Had all these angry men read Paine? Some clearly had, for court martial evidence indicated that agitators discussed his ideas with their illiterate shipmates, not all of whom were sympathetic. The Huddersfield Luddite knew his Paine, but were his comrades driven by an urge to remake the nation? The answer is ‘No’. Like the sailors, the Luddites and nearly everyone who protested at this time were denouncing (and sometimes punishing) scapegoats rather than declaring war on the political system from which their authority was derived. Their targets were sadistic officers, heartless Poor Law bureaucrats, modernising industrialists who substituted machines for men in the name of efficiency and farmers and grain merchants who added to the miseries of the poor by playing the market in times of shortage. Lords were more likely to be troubled by burglars and highwaymen than protesting mobs.

  They did, however, suffer defamation by Paineite polemicists, whose pamphlets depicted the nobility as rapacious, overbearing and extravagant. These enemies of the people built ‘elegant dog kennels’ and turned arable land into pasture for their hunters, while ‘the honest and labouring poor’ endured privation. The nobility was also decadent; one strait-laced Paineite (and many were) castigated the aristocracy as ‘the detestable patrons of boxers and strumpets’.9

  Open Paineites were a fragmented minority united only by their exclusion from conventional politic life; they embraced intellectuals like Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle; they were urban professional men, shopkeepers, craftsmen and artisans, in short the kind of people Burke had identified as the malign impetus behind the French Assembly and its levelling policies. There were also nonconformists, but their enthusiasm for radicalism was shaken by the militant atheism of the French Republic. Most Paineites favoured political reform through persuasion, although a minority called for an armed revolution. Internal disagreements, lack of an efficient national organisation, and, after 1793, official persecution combined with popular, patriotic hostility combined to neuter the radical movement. Nonetheless, a handful of covert Paineites from Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’ revealed their existence through isolated acts of individual defiance to authority, either by public outbursts or through clandestine handbills.

  But the aristocracy was in no immediate danger. Its political authority was unshaken; of the fifty-two men who held ministerial office between 1783 and 1815, forty were peers. Paradoxically, the threat from below actually strengthened the power of the aristocracy, the Crown and the Anglican Church. Each was a beneficiary of a deluge of propaganda written to convince Britons that their Constitution gave them freedom, wealth and domestic harmony. As Lord Mulgrave reminded the Lords in 1794: ‘This war which has been declared against us is not an ordinary war, it is a war for the annihilation of our laws, our liberties, our prosperity, our civilisation and our religion.’10

  What had more or less been taken for granted in the past now had to be vindicated through reason coupled with appeals to old-fashioned patriotism, including Francophobia. Paine’s comparison of the French and British aristocracies were invidious, claimed one loyalist pamphleteer, for the French noblesse had been ‘ignorant, proud and tyrannical’. By contrast, the Lords was filled with the ‘best men’ in a nation who were not, as Paine had alleged, effeminate, degenerate ‘drones’.11 The peerage was manly and athletic (witness their prowess in the hunting field) and many lords had reached their eminence through their intelligence and industry.

  A considerable effort was made to portray the nobility as an elite of ability, rather than birth. Loyalist literature insisted that the word ‘aristocracy’ did not describe a system of government in which power was held exclusively by a rich minority. Rather, the aristo
cracy was just one, admittedly very important element in a Constitution that was of universal benefit. A few loyalist hacks edged towards the idea that the peerage represented a meritocracy, and attempted to redefine the aristocracy as a broad elite which contained everyone who created wealth, including traders and manufacturers.

  Arguments along these lines were made to win over the middle classes, who had to understand that any assault against the aristocracy and their lands was a general attack on property as a whole.12 Revolution endangered factory owners, farmers and shopkeepers as well as noblemen. The anti-sedition laws supplemented the work of government propagandists; any slander or libel directed against the aristocracy was criticism of the Constitution and liable for prosecution.

  Loyalism prevailed. By 1800 that stout-hearted curmudgeon John Bull had been persuaded that the House of Lords was an essential part of that bulwark which protected him, his family, his home, his tankard of ale and plate of roast beef from Gallic predators and their homegrown accomplices. Furthermore, Burke’s prognosis as to the final outcome of the revolution had been correct. Frenchmen had lapsed into a prolonged madness and placed themselves in the hands of a gang of demagogues and atheists without education, honour or possessions of their own; the elevation of the jealous had been accompanied by a slide into depravity. In 1799, the Anti-Jacobin described Paris under the Consulate as ‘the most filthy place in Europe’ and its rulers as slaves to ‘luxury, dissipation and debauchery’.13 Ultra-loyalists argued that France could only be brought to its senses by the full restoration of its ancien régime.14

  Its political ascendancy secured, a confident aristocracy threw itself into the war effort with varying degrees of enthusiasm. An overwhelming majority of peers backed the Tory-dominated coalitions which ran the country between 1793 and 1815. Noblemen commanded armies and fleets and represented Britain at the courts of the Continental powers, cajoling emperors, kings and princes into alliances, usually with pledges of subsidies. Diplomacy was traditionally an aristocratic art practised by men of breeding and fine manners who understood the protocols of courts and spoke French fluently with men of their own caste.

  Not all peers marched in time to the strident drum of patriotism. A rump of seventy or so Whig followers of Charles James Fox remained on the opposition benches and undertook a guerrilla campaign against soaring wartime taxation and strategic miscalculations. Foxite Whig peers stayed true to their party’s libertarian traditions and condemned Pitt’s sedition laws as encroachments on the liberties of Britons. The watchdogs of liberty barked loudly during the Lords debate on the 1795 Treasonous Practices and Seditious Meetings Bill. The fifth Duke of Bedford echoed Paine by invoking the long history of ‘oppression’ imposed by the aristocracy on the people of France, and reminded peers of the ‘profligacy and extravagancy’ of the Bourbon court. Crushing legitimate and lawful protests under the colour of national security was a ‘remedy worse than the disease’ argued the eleventh Duke of Norfolk. The bill was carried by a huge majority, but Bedford and Norfolk joined with eleven like-minded lords to issue a formal statement that ancient rights were now in jeopardy.15

  Bedford may have made surreptitious approaches to populist radical groups, a flirtation with treason which might explain why his private papers were burned after his death in 1802.16 Norfolk’s proclaimed his views boldly. At a party celebrating Fox’s birthday in 1798, he proposed a toast to ‘Our sovereign, the Majesty of the People’, which prompted his immediate sacking as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding. In a perverse way (which neither they or he would have appreciated), these peers were justifying Burke’s faith in the independence of the aristocracy.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the nobility were zealously promoting the war effort in the provinces. Everywhere they took the lead in coaxing their countrymen to fight to preserve their freedom and immersed themselves in every form of activity contrived to boost national morale. Aristocrats financed and attended public celebrations of unity which were orchestrated to prove that patriotism transcended social divisions. After the naval victory of the Glorious First of June in 1794, the Earl of Aberdeen headed the list of subscribers to a fund for the widows and orphans of men killed in the battle with a gift of ten guineas. Below were the names of Aberdonian lawyers, merchants and shopkeepers who subscribed between two guineas and five shillings each. A few months later, the local newspaper reported that Aberdeen’s leading citizens were ‘vying’ with local lairds in their efforts to raise a regiment of volunteers.17 What better proof could there be that the aristocracy and the middle class were of the same spirit and resolve.

  On the ideological front, aristocrats joined forces with Anglican clergymen to beef up loyalist organisations, of which the largest and most boisterous was the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, founded in 1792. Some of its members sponsored drunken, popular street parties in which patriots burned effigies of Paine (he had successively fled to France and the United States), smashed the windows of radicals and sometimes manhandled them.

  Noblemen also patronised more sedate festivities. At one, held at Frogmore, near Windsor Castle, on a sunny day in July 1800, George III and Queen Charlotte together with lords and ladies attended a grand fête champêtre devised by Princess Elizabeth. She wanted her father’s subjects to have a jolly time and, as they did so, reveal to the world that here was a truly united kingdom in which there was harmony between Crown, peers and people. Guests were entertained by a tightrope walker, dancers dressed as gypsies, and musicians. Many of the performers were men from the Staffordshire militia, one of whom sang a riposte to Paine:

  When republic doctrines are everywhere found, Sir

  And levelling principles so much abound, Sir

  Let each son of Liberty, joyfully sing, Sir

  Long to reign over us, God save the King, Sir.

  As evening approached, the royal party and the peers and peeresses withdrew for dinner and a ball held in a converted barn.18 These and similar events were reported in the local and national press.

  Many of the younger noblemen at Frogmore would have been in uniform. They were fulfilling the historic duty of all gentlemen, irrespective of their rank. Its nature and manifestations were outlined by Captain James Macnamara RN in his trial at the Old Bailey in 1803. He was accused of murdering a cavalry officer whom he had fatally wounded in duel which his personal honour and public reputation as an officer had compelled him to fight. ‘When called upon to lead others into honourable danger,’ he told the jury, ‘I must not be supposed to be a man who had sought safety by submitting to what custom has taught others to consider a disgrace.’ Macnamara’s innate courage and leadership was in his blood, instinctive and beyond analysis. ‘It is impossible to define . . . the proper feelings of a gentleman; but their existence has supported this happy country for many ages, and she might perish if they were lost.’ Two famous titled admirals, Hood and Nelson, testified to Macnamara’s character, which was evident to the journalists covering the case, who were impressed by his confident bearing and ‘manly’ appearance. He was acquitted.19

  Throughout the war the British people learned as never before of how men of Macnamara’s stamp conducted themselves in battle. The London and provincial press reprinted official despatches which vividly described acts of heroism by individual, named officers. One, which appeared in 1814, may attest for hundreds of others. During the capture of the French frigate Clorinde, Lieutenant Foord of the Marines had been mortally wounded in the thigh by grapeshot, ‘gallantly leading his men’.20

  If Macnamara was to be believed, and on the whole the nation accepted his analysis of the ingredients of leadership, Foord’s men followed him because they respected him as a gentleman and, therefore, a man of courage and honour. So too was Nelson, whose death and funeral saw an outpouring of national grief more heartfelt and intense than that later expressed at the obsequies of Princess Diana. Nelson was joined in the national pantheon of heroes by another e
qually audacious commander, Lord Thomas Cochrane, the eldest son of the tenth Earl of Dundonald (and the historic model for Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey). Differences in status did not matter unduly – Nelson was the son of a parson – what really counted was that they were both gentlemen.

  Gentlemen of all ranks were kept busy at home. In July 1792 France had called for the levée-en-masse, which transformed every able-bodied male citizen into a soldier of the Republic. War was democratised and huge armies materialised, full of volunteers whose idealism compensated for their lack of training and discipline. Between 1797 and 1798 and 1803 and 1805 these mass French armies threatened to invade Britain. The response was a carefully controlled form of the revolutionary levée, which involved mobilising, arming and training about a quarter of a million men. It was a potentially risky enterprise, given the groundswell of sedition and recurrent economic distress, which was why Pitt’s government turned to the nation’s landowners, who could be relied upon to be loyal and uphold the political and social status quo.

  Lord Lieutenants supervised the enlargement of the county militias and appointed their officers. In a signal display of its faith in the aristocracy’s loyalty and influence, the state licensed individual peers to raise volunteer regiments of infantry (fencibles) and troops of light cavalry (yeomanry) and nominate their officers. This devolution of military power meant that a large section of the nobility took responsibility for the deployment of troops for external and internal security and the creation of a reservoir of soldiers for service overseas. Political animosities were suspended; at least one yeomanry troop was raised by a Whig nobleman who objected strongly to Pitt’s obduracy and wartime taxation.21

  Paradoxically, an outwardly modern state was adapting an essentially medieval expedient. The local prestige of the nobility, its networks of kinsmen and dependants, and ingrained habits of deference combined with the new popular affection for George III and the cash bounties provided by the Treasury produced a formidable army. In 1804 it was calculated that there were about four hundred thousand men under arms, two-thirds of them volunteers and militia.22