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

by Lawrence James

  In Scotland, the ancient bonds of blood and customary obligation to clan and chieftain were thoroughly and sometimes cynically exploited. Of the twenty-nine officers of the Duke of Sutherland’s Fencibles, twelve were from his extended kin. In 1800 a supplicant for the promotion of Alexander Cameron in Lord Seaforth’s volunteers listed his qualification as experience of soldiering, his ‘genteel’ demeanour and the fact that he was a ‘cousin once removed’ to Seaforth.23

  Cameron was seeking advancement in what could easily have been mistaken for a feudal host, had it not been for the cut of its uniforms and its modern weapons. In 1797 the government had authorised the Dukes of Atholl, Montrose and Argyll and the Earls of Aberdeen and Gower to raise sixteen thousand volunteers organised into nine brigades, each commanded by a nobleman or some other figure high in the clan hierarchy. Below them were Highlanders recruited from the circle of clans and septs traditionally attached to their colonel. Macnabs, MacGrigors and Menzies served under Atholl’s command, as their ancestors had under his ancestors.24 All shared the atavistic bonds of common ancestry and inherited obligations.

  There were limits to the Highlanders’ patriotism and endurance. Reports of colossal losses of soldiers in the West Indies from indigenous fevers had a baleful effect on recruitment and triggered a spate of mutinies among Highland militiamen and volunteers. All involved fears of posting abroad and the defiance of local figures of authority, noblemen, lairds and ministers of the Kirk.25 Revealingly, they were accused of having betrayed their paternal responsibilities by deceiving the clansmen. Elsewhere in the country, men refused to join the militia because service was an intrusion into their time or out of indifference to the threat of invasion.

  Lassitude was strongest in districts, often urban and industrial, where the influence of landowners and parsons was weakest. This was unsurprising thought one ultra-conservative commentator. The ‘proprietors of the soil’, their tenant farmers and labourers were natural patriots and monarchists. Their loyalty was unshakeable, unlike that of manufacturers, tradesmen and artisans, who were rootless creatures with no real stake in the kingdom.26

  At every level, command was entrusted only to those with a ‘real stake’ in the nation. All volunteer officers had to be gentlemen with a landed income of at least fifty pounds a year. Exceptions were allowed in the case of militia officers. Faced with a dearth of qualified candidates, the third Duke of Richmond grudgingly agreed to give a commission in the Sussex militia to a keen Lewes ironmonger, although he would have preferred ‘an independent gentleman’. Necessity also persuaded the nobility to admit poachers to their units on the pragmatic grounds that they would prove excellent skirmishers.27

  Sussex poachers-turned-sharpshooters joined detachments raised from the tenants and servants of the county’s five leading peers. Units included a battery of horse artillery partly funded by Richmond, and the Petworth Yeomanry recruited and commanded by the third Earl of Egremont, who was more interested in the arts and agriculture than amateur soldiering. Nonetheless, he performed his public duty and, like so many aristocratic yeomanry commanders, simultaneously upheld his prestige and satisfied his vanity by designing and paying for the uniforms of his troops. The Petworth yeomanrymen wore green jackets, white waistcoats, blue cloaks trimmed with scarlet and Tarleton helmets with bearskin crests; Egremont’s was distinguished by a large scarlet feather. Basic funding and arms came from the government; muskets, bayonets, sabres and pistols supplied to the Leicestershire militia and yeomanry are now attached to the walls of Belvoir Castle.

  In 1804 Egremont’s dashing horsemen were ready to repel Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which was mustering at Boulogne for a seaborne invasion of the south coast. The nature of the war against France had changed dramatically. Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself Emperor of France and, like Hitler, he believed that conflict was natural to the human condition. Again like Hitler, Bonaparte intended to create a subordinate Europe of cowed monarchs and puppet kingdoms kept in line by the threat of force, ruthlessly applied. Britain’s new adversary was a godsend for official propaganda; Britons were repeatedly told, and on the whole believed, that they were fighting not only to save their own liberties, but to rescue Europe from the grip of a bloodthirsty tyrant who was indifferent to the suffering he inflicted.

  Bonaparte’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808 gave a welcome substance to this view of the conflict. British forces under Wellington were the liberators of Spain and Portugal, nations which had been overrun by Bonaparte’s military machine but retained their spirit of independence. By the close of 1813, the French were expelled from Spain and the poet laureate Robert Southey celebrated a victory for freedom that would inspire the rest of the world.

  Now, Britain, now thy brows with laurels bind;

  Raise the song of joy for rescued Spain!

  And Europe, take thou up the awakening strain . . .

  Glory to God! Deliverance for Mankind!

  Within months, British, Russian, Prussian and Austrian armies were sweeping across France and at home patriots were awash with self-congratulation. In the Lords, a peer declared that Britain had fought tirelessly ‘for the sake of justice, for the sake of loyalty, for the sake of insulted and tortured humanity’.28 Soon after, ‘Boney’ was on his way to Elba and the Bourbon Louis XVIII was king of France. His restoration was depicted as a flattering moral triumph for the British Constitution. A jubilant Times announced that the allied sovereigns had compelled the new king to accept a constitution based on Britain’s, which gave France the equivalent of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.29 Moreover, the new French senate contained hereditary aristocrats, including diehard émigrés, peers who had been reconciled to Napoleon and some of the marshals he had ennobled, such as Ney and Soult.

  In his coup of March 1815 Napoleon, who had escaped from Elba, reinvented himself as the true heir of the Revolution and offered himself to France as a democrat and reformer. Exhausted by war, the French people were largely lukewarm or hostile, and the Emperor reverted to type and attempted to consolidate his power in the only way he knew, by an aggressive war. He was decisively defeated at Waterloo by an allied army commanded by Wellington, who famously remarked that, for all his martial talents, Boney was not and never could be a gentleman.

  Waterloo confirmed Wellington as a national hero. His victories were a spectacular vindication of the aristocratic principle in which he fervently believed. Approaching eighty, he explained his philosophy of war:

  The British army is what it is because it is officered by gentlemen; men who would scorn to do a dishonourable thing and would have something more at stake before the world than a reputation for military smartness. Now the French piqued themselves on their ‘esprit militaire’, and their ‘honneur militaire’, and what was the consequence? Why, I kicked their ‘honneur’ and ‘esprit militaire’ to the devil.30

  It had never been as simple as that. The principle worked because of the sheer force of Wellington’s character. He understood the mind of a gentleman and, when necessary, he used this knowledge to appeal, often caustically, to the consciences of his officers. After the 18th Hussars had been castigated by the Duke for looting and threatened with being sent home in disgrace, one of its officers, Lieutenant Woodberry, was cut to the quick. ‘I want language to express the grief I feel on this occasion,’ he wrote in his journal. He had been a Corinthian dandy who had dreamed of returning to England as a hero and boasting to his Brighton cronies that he was no longer the ‘puppy’ they had once known.31 The 18th Hussars continued to serve in Spain and the chastened Woodberry fulfilled his responsibilities as an officer and a gentleman. The second Earl of Portarlington had no second chance. After a distinguished career in the 23rd Light Dragoons, he somehow failed to join his regiment on the morning of Waterloo. He hastily attached himself to a Hussar regiment, fought in the battle and had a horse killed under him. His gallantry did not expiate what men of honour considered a default of duty: he had abandoned his men. Ost
racised, he led a life of gambling and debauchery and died in poverty in 1845.32

  The aristocratic principle worked for Wellington because he was a nobleman of remarkable intellect and energy, and a brilliant strategist who had mastered the mechanisms of war. This was why he devoted so much time to logistics and the collection and analysis of intelligence, and favoured officers who shared his sense of public duty and cared for the welfare of their men. Yet Wellington was often hampered by the aristocratic principle. Many times he was driven to protest to his superiors in London about the networks of patronage which promoted officers far beyond their competence and filled administrative departments with negligent drones. In a political career which lasted from 1818 to his death in 1852, Wellington resolutely upheld the aristocratic principle which he embodied in the public imagination. If it appeared to fail, the fault always lay with individuals and never the ideal.

  The defeat of France left an imprint on Tory thinking. Britain’s ancien régime with its intricate constitutional and legal checks and balances had been assayed and emerged victorious and stronger than ever. Crown, altar and aristocracy had survived the ideological brickbats of Paine and his adherents. Their perfect state–revolutionary France – had dissolved into anarchy and, in its mutated form under Napoleon, had been trounced. Whigs did not interpret recent events in such uncompromising, triumphalist terms. As the liberal Edinburgh Review argued in 1814, the world and how individuals saw their place in it had been transformed forever by the French Revolution and its aftermath.33 Moreover, popular wartime patriotism was not necessarily a national endorsement of the political or social status quo.

  PART THREE

  DECLINE

  1815–

  20

  Rats: Crisis and

  Compromise

  Gilbert Elliot, second Earl of Minto, was proud to be a modern man who understood the nature and potential of the new world that was emerging after the French wars. The temper of the times seemed unfavourable to the aristocratic ideal, but he was certain that it remained valid. Men of his birth and outlook would remain the natural leaders of the nation, so long as they were flexible, imaginative and attentive to the opinions and needs of every section of society. Minto was a Whig peer and heir to the pragmatism and libertarian philosophy of his party, which, he believed, offered the best compass to steer the country through difficult and mutable times. Once, after a conversation with two like-minded noblemen, he approvingly remarked that the pair were ‘very decidedly men of the nineteenth century’.1

  Yet Minto’s political activities followed a traditional pattern. Like an eighteenth-century aristocrat he straddled and connected two worlds, one provincial and the other metropolitan. He regularly visited the Borders, where he owned vast estates, and used his prestige to promote the Whig cause among lairds and farmers. He also listened to their views, as well as chatter about livestock prices and hunting prospects. Conversation was very different in his other base, London, where he attended the salons held by Whig grandees and their wives. The discourse was witty, sometimes racy and concerned ideas, literature, policy, Parliamentary strategy and high-life scandal. Like others in political circles, Minto indulged in the fashion for asperity, making terse and spiteful summaries of the faults of eminent acquaintances. After meeting the second Lord Ellenborough at the Travellers Club in 1819, Minto observed that he had inherited the ‘coarseness’ of his father and that his ‘intellectual rigour’ was bogus and so a ‘commonplace vulgarity and shallow intolerance’ marked his political opinions.2 These shortcomings did not prevent Ellenborough from following a career as a proconsul, although it ended under a shadow when he was recalled as Governor-General of India after the blunders of the First Afghan War of 1838–42. Perhaps Minto had been right about his qualities.

  Since Waterloo, the political discourse of men like Minto and Ellenborough had been about reform. We are inclined to think that the word referred only to the reform of Parliament, which is partially true, but at the time reform embraced every area of national life. It was applied to all institutions which were being choked by the deadwood of venality, lassitude and an irrational veneration of the past. The Anglican Church, civil and criminal law, medicine, universities, the civil service, the arts and public morality needed overhaul and regeneration. Ossified institutions handicapped a country which portrayed itself as innovative and modern.

  Britain was being transformed by what were later recognised as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. They were slow and uneven processes that would continue until 1860 with the completion of the national rail networks which would remain in situ for the next hundred years. Economic change was the father to social and demographic revolutions. There was a gradual shift in population away from the countryside to towns and cities which owed their existence to mining, manufacturing and shipbuilding. These enterprises swelled the numbers of the urban working class and the middle class. The middle class embraced everyone engaged in the professions, commerce at all levels from shopkeepers to financiers, the proprietors and managers of industrial plants and clerks who, like Bob Cratchit, were the foot soldiers of capitalist enterprise.

  Capitalism required efficiency, which could be achieved only through the dispassionate application of reason to human relationships and the management of public affairs. Old accretions of privilege in public bodies, arcane professional practices, monopolies such as the East India Company and arthritic administrative machinery frustrated efficiency. They also, and this angered many of the middle class, held back ambitious, talented men who lacked the personal connections to facilitate the advancement they deserved. The self-perpetuating and self-satisfied elites who upheld the status quo were united by a horror of change. In 1832, the Whig Lord Althorpe denounced the mandarins of the Royal Academy as the ‘Borough Mongers of Art’, who, like the peers then opposing Parliamentary reform, were ‘interested men who are fearful of their supremacy’.3

  The concept of reform contained elements which denied the aristocratic principle. Wellington, who sometimes treated his countrymen as an awkward squad which needed to be knocked into shape by doses of firm discipline, believed that all demands for reform reflected a ‘contempt for authority’. In the vocabulary of the more radical reformers, the word ‘aristocracy’ became synonymous with any exclusive body whose power rested upon ancient custom, birthright or connections, or a combination of all three. Antiquity and custom were replaced as touchstones for future survival by public utility. The passionate reformer Shelley insisted in 1819 that ‘A man has no right to be a King or a Lord or a Bishop but so long as it is to the benefit of the People and so long as the People judge that it is for their benefit.’4

  Minto believed that the nobility would pass the assay of usefulness, but he was disturbed by the implications of such thinking. As a Whig peer, he was broadly sympathetic to the principles of reform and hoped that his party would implement them in such a way as to satisfy public feeling without compromising the influence of the aristocracy. Committed to what would prove a very tricky balancing act, the Whigs made alliances of convenience with nonconformists, moderate reformers and radical populists, many of whom wanted to diminish the influence of the nobility. Another equally dangerous threat to the aristocracy were the diehard Tory and Anglican enemies of reform, whose intransigence inflamed social and political tensions.

  Minto was exposed to visceral Toryism in the Borders at the end of 1819, when reluctantly (he would have preferred to be chasing foxes) he attended meetings at which local landowners drafted addresses to the Prince Regent. The matter at issue was the Tory government’s reaction to the ‘Peterloo massacre’, an incident in Manchester earlier in the year in which cavalrymen had knocked down and trampled to death a dozen demonstrators at an open-air reform meeting. And quite right too, thought the lairds and farmers who gladly endorsed new laws which clamped down on sedition. Nevertheless, and to Minto’s secret pleasure, his neighbours shared his revulsion at the ‘violent and intemperate’ langua
ge of that Tory ultra Sir Walter Scott, who had had experience of dealing with mobs as a yeomanryman over twenty years ago. Minto’s suggestion that the conduct of the Manchester magistrates ought to be thoroughly investigated was also rejected.5

  Back in London at a meeting in Burlington House, Minto heard the Whig leader Lord Gray reiterate his party’s old support for popular liberty: ‘the privileges of the people’ were not to be ‘violated with impunity’. However, Lord Liverpool’s Tory ministry placed order before liberty and succumbed to the same neurosis which had infected Pitt nearly thirty years before. New laws were passed which treated calls for reform as subversion. One justification was the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, in which the half-crazed Arthur Thistlewood planned to murder the Cabinet and declare a republic, although there were rumours that the plotters had been egged on by government agents.

  In the same year, reformers of all kinds united behind Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the profoundly unloved George IV (1820–30) who wanted to divorce her. She demanded to be crowned alongside her husband and fellow adulterer, and across the country petitions were drawn up and mobs assembled to defend her legal rights. London rioters cornered Wellington and asked him to give a hurrah for Caroline, which he did, adding, ‘May all your wives be like her.’ His security measures, including a guard of champion prizefighters, kept Caroline out of Westminster Abbey and this ‘people’s princess’ died soon afterwards.

  A wronged, pitiable and slightly mad woman had briefly become the symbol for a wronged nation. Its rights and aspirations, like hers, had been trampled on by an oppressive government and an ultra-reactionary monarch, who incidentally embodied the dissipation that Paineites had once attributed to the aristocracy. Minto was worried by the tone and language of radicals who lumped aristocracy and gentry together as ‘a corrupt and [self-] interested oppressor’ of the people. The response of the landowners was panic, which was why so many welcomed the ‘arbitrary and violent’ measures introduced by the Tories. During 1821 he was troubled by the ‘revolutionary spirit’ among the Whigs of the Borders.6 All this fed Minto’s pessimism; a rift was widening between the upper and lower classes and the aristocracy seemed to have lost its way and its capacity for steady leadership.