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

by Lawrence James

  One celebrated big-game hunter imagined, with some accuracy, the upper-middle class lad returning home from his public school:

  The first thing he does . . . is to rush off to his own den to see if his fishing-rod or stuffed birds are all right; then he goes to his kennel to see his spaniel and ferrets. His first question will be whether there are lots of rabbits and trout about, and whether the rats have come back to the hayloft . . .26

  Moving upwards in the scales of age and social status, these preoccupations parallel those of a sporting peer, who, on returning from London to the country, immediately inspects his stables and kennels and questions his keepers and huntsmen about pheasant numbers or the whereabouts of local foxes.

  In all likelihood, the sporting lad would have been exposed at school to indoctrination in the rules of the new chivalry. The young Victorian knight was strong, courageous, courteous, just and, like Sir Galahad, he was pure in heart and mind. What was taught in the public schools was disseminated to the lower-middle and working classes through the Boys Brigade and, in the early 1900s, the Boy Scouts. There was a paradox here: the Gothic moral revival was resuscitating and elevating the values of the medieval aristocracy at a time when its successors were gradually forfeiting their political and social eminence.

  The Victorian adoration of chivalric virtues was selective and never an endorsement of the excesses of some of the contemporary sporting peerage. Some of their activities were judged incompatible with spiritual regeneration. Dr Arnold banned sporting guns and dogs from Rugby in the 1830s, and at Marlborough in the 1850s illicit ratting and poaching were replaced by football and cricket. Team games demanded the suppression of the individualism of the hunting field, even if footballers and cricketers were likened to knights.27 This extended to horse racing: figures of knights were chosen for the silver trophies designed in 1852 and 1853 for the Ascot Queen’s Cup and the Doncaster Race Cup.

  The reinvention of chivalry was an offshoot of the Romantic Gothic movement which had emerged at the close of the eighteenth century. Its prophet and guide had been Sir Walter Scott, whose Toryism coloured his historical novels and appealed to aristocratic ultras. They found themselves immersed in a world favourable to their kind at a time when their old power was being challenged and eroded. The England of Ivanhoe (1819) was a rural country united by the human ties of feudalism: vassals obeyed lords who cared for their welfare. It was much the same in the Scotland of the Waverley novels, where the bonds between chieftains and clans held society together. There was reverence for the hierarchy of Crown, aristocracy and Church, and, so it was imagined, happiness for all in a universe in which everyone knew their duties and their place.

  Industrial Britain had discarded ancient certainties and modern economists focused on profit had little truck with theories of social reciprocity, or paternalism. The Gothic past was, therefore, an attractive country for conservative noblemen, who, unable to preserve its spirit, resorted to restoring its outward trappings. Peers rebuilt and altered their houses in the Gothic style and filled them with collections of genuine and fabricated armour. One nobleman, the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, went a step further and, in 1838, announced that he would hold a tournament at his castle in Ayrshire in the August of the following year.

  Eglinton was a Tory and a celebrated racing peer who, like many of his kind, had been dismayed by the way in which the cheapskate and prosaic Whigs had stripped the Queen’s coronation of its medieval splendour. Out had gone the banquet in Westminster Hall and the challenge made by the mounted and armoured royal champion, and the high officers of the royal household were denied their ornamental functions. Eglinton offered to make amends with a Gothic extravaganza to which he invited 2,690 guests; Whigs and radicals were banned.

  The Eglinton tournament was a splendid fiasco. Thirteen armoured knights (including six peers) turned up to cross lances and swords, visitors wore medieval dress and there was an unfunny jester. All were soaked by heavy rain and the jousting field became a quagmire. There was some compensation for the Gothic-minded aristocracy in 1842, when Queen Victoria held a medieval bal costumé at Buckingham Palace in which she appeared as the fourteenth-century Queen Phillipa and Prince Albert as her husband Edward III. Another less celebrated (or notorious) tournament was held in 1912 at Earl’s Court before a blue-blooded audience. Lady Curzon was the ‘Queen of Beauty’ and five peers jousted for her favour. The winner was the first Lord Ashby St Ledgers, whose family had made its fortune in steel.28 At the same time, General Baden-Powell was persuading his scouts to think of themselves as young knights dedicated to chivalry. A few years later, images of medieval knights and St George were used extensively to promote Britain’s war effort.29 Many appeared on the war memorials of the 1920s.

  *

  Pseudo-Gothicism had been grafted on to the traditions of sport. The aristocratic principle of leadership remained strong and was justified by A. G. Steel, the captain of England’s Test XI in 1904. ‘Amateurs have always made, and always will make, the best captains; and this is only natural. An educated mind, with the logical power of reasoning, will always treat every subject better than one untaught.’ The seventh Lord Hawke, who captained Yorkshire between 1880 and 1910 and led teams on several Empire tours, believed that it would be a ‘black day’ for national prestige if a professional ever captained a touring team.30

  Lord Hawke was one of the heroes of a nation that had become infected by a sports mania to which the aristocracy succumbed with energy and enthuasiasm, which was not surprising given its muscular traditions. While peers squared up to the political challenges of 1910 and 1911, many found abundant time to engage in sport and be photographed doing so for the aristocracy’s house magazine, The Tatler. The diehard Lord Willoughby de Broke (‘a very skilful game shot’) poses with his shotgun and the fifth Marquess of Conyngham (‘the best-known sportsman in West Ireland’) maintains his family tradition by wading thigh deep in a river with his stick in hand in pursuit of otters. The marriage of the eighty-one-year-old Lord Suffield (‘a famous cross-country rider [who] once won every race on the card at an Irish point-to-point’) to a colonel’s widow is celebrated by a picture of the pair standing with their bicycles. The fifth Earl Lonsdale, a racing peer and master of the Cottesmore Hunt, kicks off a charity football match and elsewhere are pictures of peers and peeresses at race meetings, hunts, shooting parties, the Henley regatta and Cowes week. The Tatler’s regular ‘Varsity Notes’ are wholly devoted to the achievements of Oxford and Cambridge sportsmen. The overall impression is that undergraduates spent all of their time in pursuit of blues, which many did.

  Looking at these images, one could be forgiven for concluding that the sporting life was now the only one for a large swathe of the nobility. Of course, peers had always engaged in sport, often fanatically and for a valid reason. Since the Renaissance, they had been urged to achieve a balance between the athletic and the intellectual which was vital for men destined by birth and custom to lead in peace and command in war. The latter prerogative had survived into the twentieth century, the former had not. Yet the new dispensation and the depleted chances of attaining the highest offices had not deterred young peers from embarking on political careers. In these circumstances, pre-eminence in the world of sport offered a compensation, insofar as the aristocracy remained integrated within the fabric of national life and enjoyed a degree of popularity. Of course, there were political peers who had a sporting reputation; Lord Rosebery’s three Derby winners and Arthur Balfour’s enjoyment of golf and motoring did them no harm.

  At the same time, the early twentieth century’s aristocracy’s passion for sport was an indication that the decline in its public responsibilities allowed its members greater time for leisure. As always, field sports loomed large; the trio of ‘huntin’, shootin’ and fishin” which appear so often in Who’s Who entries became synonymous with the aristocracy and gentry and also retired officers, diplomats and colonial officials. During the political crises of 1910
and 1911 Punch cartoonists depicted peers as ermined and coronetted figures incongruously wielding shotguns on grouse moors.

  Then and afterwards, field sports defined the aristocracy, in particular, its most conservative elements. An addiction to field sports emphasised the nobility’s isolation from the middle classes who watched cricket and played tennis, golf and rugby, although these had a strong aristocratic following, and the working classes who were addicted to football. By the second half of the century, all were subject to increasing commercialisation and became ‘products’ to be marketed to the masses through television. The pass once defended by Lord Hawke and those of his mind was finally and symbolically sold in 1963 when the MCC abolished the distinctions between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’ and agreed to the razor manufacturer Gillette’s sponsorship of the novel one-day cricket tournament.

  Yet, ironically, since the early nineteenth century, the Scottish aristocracy had been perfectly happy to rent out its shooting estates, often for large sums.31 Economic survival came first, although, on the eve of grouse-shooting season in 1911, The Tatler was saddened by the fate of ‘some of the Scotch landowners’ who had been ‘turned out of their castles to make room for the shooting tenants’. There was, however, consolation, since the Dukes of Richmond, Atholl, Sutherland and Buccleuch could still afford to maintain their ‘great shootings’ for themselves and their guests. Economic forces intruded and, within seventy years, the owners of just about every Scottish shooting estate had become entrepreneurs selling the right to shoot their game to the highest bidder, who was often a moneybags who had made money in the City. It was revealing that the new rich of the late twentieth century wished briefly to enjoy the pleasures of the Edwardian aristocrat, but then new money has always adopted the spending habits of old.

  22

  The Surrender of

  Feudalism to Industry:

  The Mid-Victorian

  Peerage 1846–87

  Henry Manners, fifth Duke of Rutland, believed that the Reform Act had been a calamitous break with the past. Unable to reverse the course of history, he could comfort himself by recreating the distant glory of an aristocracy whose future now seemed uncertain. He rebuilt Belvoir Castle in a self-consciously backward-looking style, Regency Gothic. The result was an enchanting piece of romantic medievalism in the same spirit as Scott’s novels and border ballads. Turrets, crenellations and vaulted passages remind us that the Manners were an ancient family of the kind Scott venerated. In 1815 he had confessed that his ‘aristocratic prejudices are much hurt by the decay of the ancient nobility of Britain’.1

  Belvoir’s architecture and Scott’s imagination idealised the Middle Ages. Each evoked a world of chivalry in which a gallant and humane aristocracy had exercised a benevolent power over a happy and grateful peasantry. There was a political element in this atavism which forms the theme of Benjamin Disraeli’s Young England novels, Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred (1844–47). Each was an appeal to the younger generation of noblemen to revive feudal paternalism and rescue the nation from a cold-hearted and rapacious plutocracy, which, he believed, was the beneficiary of the Reform Act. Bonds of feudal obligation and mutual respect between aristocracy and people would replace the inhuman cash nexus of capitalism. An alliance between the nobility and the masses would politically marginalise the middle class and its arid philosophies of profit and usefulness. Rutland’s eldest son, Lord John Manners MP, was converted to Disraeli’s vision, but his level-headed father and most other peers thought it fanciful.

  The Duke was, however, a paternalist of the old school when it came to hospitality. Every year, Belvoir was the setting for lavish and exuberant celebrations of Rutland’s birthday on 4 January. Charles Greville was a regular guest and in 1838 he slipped away from the main party to watch the festivities in the servants’ hall, now used for wedding receptions and conferences. A duke’s grandson and a stiff Tory, Greville was heartened by what he saw. There were nearly a hundred of his host’s servants full of bounce and food, raising their glasses to their master. He was most struck by a toast made by the head coachman, a man ‘of great abdominal dignity’ in the flaxen wig which denoted his office. Greville wished that this spectacle could have been seen by ‘the surly radical’ who ranted about ‘the selfish aristocracy who have no sympathies with the people’.

  Would, he wondered, the middle-class, Benthamite creed of ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ be advanced by the ‘destruction of all the feudality’ represented by this merriment? Or would ‘abstract political rights’ compensate for ‘all the beef and ale and music’ which gave the servants such joy, even for a short time? Greville thought not and the following day he was delighted to witness a ball to which over two hundred ‘tenants, shopkeepers, valets and abigails’ had been invited.2

  Greville had witnessed the reality of what would become the Arcadia of romantic Tory imagination and, for that matter, later romantic novelists in which buxom milkmaids curtseyed and apple-cheeked yokels touched their forelocks to kind-hearted squires. This rural world and its essentially hierarchical patterns of human relations was familiar to the aristocracy and it survived. In 1880, Earl Percy, heir to the sixth Duke of Northumberland and MP for North Northumberland, assured the Commons that the old rustic order was alive (as his election proved) and deserved their admiration. ‘Country gentlemen were the most respected and respectable class in the country,’ he claimed, for they had ‘the interests of the people at heart, took part in sports and directed the local affairs of their districts, thus showing they were of use and influence’.3 This was, of course, a view from the top, uttered in opposition to a drastic revision of the Game Laws, but it should not be forgotten that social change in Victorian Britain was a slow and uneven process in which the rural universe lagged behind the urban.

  Victorian noblemen continued to perform the same duties as their ancestors had. Greville thought his host Rutland addicted to the common vices of his kind: selfishness and hedonism. Nevertheless, the Duke yielded to ‘duty and inclination’ and took seriously his responsibilities as a guardian of the local Poor Law Union, which collected and dispensed the rates levied to relieve the poor. Every fortnight he visited workhouses, listened to the paupers’ grievances and took them up with his fellow guardians. Henry Fitzroy, fifth Duke of Grafton, visited cottagers on his Suffolk estates, enquired as to their wants, distributed gifts (including blankets) and had a reputation as a lenient magistrate. He was also a staunch Anglican and made sure that all his tenants were as well.4

  Aristocratic vices coexisted with virtues in a society whose tone had become more restrained, godly and earnest. In 1838 Greville was dismayed by the tedium and joylessness of the young Victoria’s court at Windsor. Older peers stuck to the free-and-easy codes of their youth. Greville observed that the sixth Duke of Bedford was a ‘complete sensualist’ who ‘thinks nothing but his personal enjoyments; and it has long been part of his system not to allow himself to be disturbed by the necessities of others’.5 The life of the seventh Earl of Waldegrave, who died aged thirty in 1845, was summarised by an obituarist as one of ‘wild excesses’, details of which ‘adorn the records of the police courts’.6 Other peers succumbed to the new moral severity. The eighth Duke of Argyll was president of the Society for the Encouragement of Purity in Literature, and Lord Robert Grosvenor MP was a notorious killjoy who was hooted by London mobs for his championship of strict observance of the Sabbath.

  Aristocratic eccentricity remained inventive. Alexander, tenth Duke of Hamilton, wore a frogged military jacket, skin-tight trousers and hessian boots and had his hair in a pigtail, which had been the fashion when he had been a young diplomat at the court of Catherine the Great. He was extremely haughty and imagined that he was the rightful King of Scotland, which may explain why he ordered his executors to have his body placed in an ancient sarcophagus imported from Egypt and buried under a huge mausoleum.7

  Hamilton’s quirks were trifling when set alongside the cran
kiness of the fifth Duke of Portland, who died in 1879. Whether because of a fixation with privacy or manic shyness, he withdrew from the world into a vast network of tunnels excavated in and around his house at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire. The largest was over a mile long, wide enough to allow two carriages to pass and lit by skylights in daytime and gas at night. The crepuscular Duke was generous to the workmen who burrowed for him, giving them umbrellas in wet weather and providing donkeys to carry them to and from their labours. His servants were ordered to treat him as if he were invisible and not to look at him as they performed their duties.

  Noblemen were the heroes of the largely male, working and lower-middle class sporting public. One of its heroes, the fifth Earl of Glasgow (1792-1869) was the ideal Corinthian peer, a devil-may-care extrovert who spoke his mind freely and was ‘a liberal supporter of all manly exercises’. His jockeys’ colours of white and red always attracted bets, for Glasgow had a knack of matching suitable bloodlines. Sadly, he failed in his ambition to win the Derby and St Leger, but, as a true sportsman, he always ‘sank all memories of his losses in the sunshine of the next victory’.

  Glasgow was also a ‘plunger’ who lived hard and dangerously. His ‘boon companions’ were the Marquess of Queensberry, Lord Kennedy, Sir James Boswell and Sir John Heron Maxwell who were ‘as rollicking a quintet as ever drained a bottle and drank a toast’. During one bout, Glasgow wagered five-hundred pounds on a midnight coach race between himself and Kennedy and won. The Earl’s interest in the world beyond the stable and covert was negligible, although he did break ranks from the majority of peers by voting to repeal the Corn Laws, perhaps more out of mischief than conviction.8