Historians tend to overlook peers like Glasgow, preferring to concentrate on more august figures who filled ministries and regularly declaimed in the Lords. Contemporaries were not so dismissive. In 1868, the Tory Saturday Review noted approvingly that a considerable section of society warmed to the aristocracy simply because so many were dashing sportsmen. Men who read ‘sporting journals’ and bet on ‘dark horses’ loved peers, whom they associated with ‘a “jolly” enjoyment of life’ and a ‘reckless prodigality of money’.9
This goodwill offset the animosity towards the aristocracy expressed by ‘disappointed doctrinaires and unsuccessful politicians’. The author had in mind predominantly middle-class liberals and radicals impatient with the hesitant pace of reform under Palmerston, who served twice as Prime Minister and dominated mid-century political life. ‘Pam’ believed that the nation was prospering as never before because it had achieved social unity and a political equilibrium in which the aristocracy was a vital makeweight.
Radical Liberals disagreed. They wanted to extend the franchise to include the better off working classes and to remove the influence of the aristocracy over appointments to the civil service and army, which they considered unjust and an encouragement to inefficiency. Ample proof of this was provided during the winter of 1854–5, when the logistics and medical services of the army in the Crimea fell apart. Radicals blamed aristocratic commanders, notably Lords Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan who owed their rank to purchase, connections and nepotism. Cardigan was said to have paid £10,000 for command of the 11th Hussars and spent a similar sum annually on their gorgeous uniforms. He was a reactionary Tory, a duellist, a magnet for a scandal and showed a swaggering contempt for social inferiors and middle-class morality. His qualities made him an aristocratic hate figure in the press, not that he gave a damn.10 Battlefield blunders of men of Cardigan’s stamp were compounded by bureaucrats who owed their posts to patronage.
Early in 1855 Palmerston praised Cardigan and the system he had come to embody. ‘Talk to me of the aristocracy of England,’ he challenged the Commons. ‘Why, look at that glorious charge of cavalry at Balaklava – look to that charge, where the noblest and wealthiest of the land rode foremost, followed by heroic men from the lowest classes in the community, each rivalling the other in bravery.’11 The Charge of the Light Brigade had taught Britain a lesson in social cohesion and the value of the aristocracy. This was already understood by the middle classes; throughout the war, the newspapers had been full of stirring reports of the exploits, wounds and heroic deaths of well-born young officers who set their men examples of selfless courage.
Palmerston had bought time for the aristocracy. His death in 1865 marked the beginning of a cascade of electoral reforms over the next twenty years which transformed the political landscape. Reform and redistribution acts, the introduction of a secret ballot and the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act created a democracy in which nearly two-thirds of adult males had the vote and were theoretically free to use it without external pressure. Democratic politics required the tightening of party discipline within and beyond Parliament and nationwide party machines whose local agencies registered voters, managed elections and helped choose candidates who would dance to the party’s tune.
Where did this leave the Lords? It remained integral to public life; it was a watchdog which could bark and, in exceptional circumstances, bite, although it preferred not to. Biting meant throwing out laws passed by the Commons and, in theory, approved by the electorate. This impotence disturbed Lord Robert Gascoyne-Cecil MP, the younger son of the second Marquess of Salisbury, who succeeded his father in 1868. He was the rising star of the Tories, a pessimistic intellectual and a mordant political journalist who believed that the aristocratic principle was central to Conservatism. Mass politics frightened him: ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse,’ he once said, ‘and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ In the same vein, he observed that ‘The use of Conservatism was to delay changes till they become harmless’.12 Scientific innovation was another matter; during the 1870s Salisbury was one of the first peers to have his house lit by electricity and possess a telephone.
In 1868, the year he entered the Lords, Salisbury was anxious about its future. He regretted its ‘slavery’ to the Commons, feared that it might wither away from disuse, and wanted to revitalise it by ennobling men from diverse but not necessarily landed backgrounds, something he achieved as Prime Minister after 1886. A regenerated Lords could enlarge its influence by ‘interpreting the deliberate wishes of the nation’.13
The 1880 election confirmed Salisbury’s pessimism. The Liberals won and showed signs of lurching towards the left, although the new generation of radical MPs were restrained by the Whig peers who dominated William Gladstone’s cabinet. This situation offered advantages to the Tories, and an opportunity for the Lords to reclaim their old reputation for independence despite the inbuilt majority of Conservative peers. They and their party were now what one journalist called ‘a safeguard against the fatal rashness of popular movements, and against the disregard of justice which popular excitement would sometimes, in haste, drive us’.14 ‘Justice’ embraced the abstract rights of property which some radicals and Irish Home Rulers were bent on eroding. All property owners could look with confidence to the Lords as their natural allies.
As the Lords contemplated a new political role, most peers were beginning to feel the pinch. Land had remained the prime source of wealth for the mid-Victorian aristocracy; in the 1870s nine out of ten British millionaires were landowners, with 180 peers owning estates of over 10,000 acres. These statistics did not mask the facts that the overall wealth generated by industry and commerce had outstripped that produced by agriculture and that land was no longer a stable asset.
This seismic shift in the British economy had been politically confirmed in 1846 by the repeal of the Corn Laws. This had been a bitter experience for the aristocracy, for it both confirmed the constitutional demotion of the Lords and hurt their pocket books. Superficially, the debate over whether to continue to impose duties on imported wheat was about economics, but the arguments of the protagonists transformed it into a symbolic struggle between industrial and agricultural interests. Town and factory were ranged against countryside and farm. Early in 1846 the Sussex branch of the Agricultural Protection Society assembled at Brighton (there were two dukes and three earls present) to hear the fifth Duke of Richmond call upon landowners, farmers and labourers to unite. He spoke ‘as a landowner, as a farmer and a member of the aristocracy’ and warned that if the Corn Laws were repealed, then estates would fall ‘under the hammer’ and rural communities would become destitute.15
As in 1832, the aristocracy was isolated and divided. Whigs and Liberals favoured repeal, as did the Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and his personal supporters. Adherents of the Anti-Corn Law League believed that the country was behind them. Since 1839 it had waged a large-scale, national campaign in the press and through public meetings and pamphlets, all of which were lavishly funded by northern and Midlands businessmen and manufacturers. They hoped that without the Corn Laws bread prices would stabilise at a low level which would keep down wages. The League also opened a second front against the Game Laws.
Using their Lords majority, the Tory peers resisted. Lord Gage predicted that agricultural revenues would plummet. More than money was at stake, he continued, for the opponents of the Corn Laws included Quakers, Baptists and Unitarians, whom Gage identified as ‘known and suspected’ enemies of the Crown, the aristocracy and the state.16 Jeremiads and hyperbole were the Tory lords’ only weapons in a rearguard action which was discreetly terminated by the Duke of Wellington. He persuaded the Lords not to provoke a constitutional crisis by blocking a measure which was backed by the Commons, Queen Victoria and the vast majority of her subjects. The Duke’s prestige prevailed, and the Conservative Party disintegrated, with the Peelites trooping off towards the Whig benches and the pr
otectionist rump under the fourteenth Earl of Derby and Disraeli wandering off into the political outback. The Conservatives did not win another general election until 1874.
The inability of the aristocracy to save agriculture led to minor tremors in the countryside. In 1851, the Tory Lord Newark, the heir of Earl Manvers, had a rough time contesting South Nottinghamshire against a local solicitor, W. H. Barrow, who called himself the farmers’ candidate. His platform was ‘a good price for the farmer and cheap food’ and local landowners treated him as a direct challenge to their traditional influence. ‘We are opposed by four Dukes, six other peers, nearly the entire body of the squirearchy and most of the clergy,’ boasted Barrow, ‘but we can win.’ And he did.17
Barrow’s balance of cheap food and fair prices was impossible to achieve. Agricultural profit margins had always been narrow, although, thanks to the Corn Laws, the economic future for farming had seemed bright. Between 1815 and 1846 the Dukes of Northumberland and Newcastle had invested over half a million pounds in the extension and improvement of their estates. Like every other landowner, they were cushioned against periodic poor harvests by the Corn Laws, which inflated the price of home-grown grain whenever a dearth occurred. Even so, their rent rolls were never wholly protected; whenever yields fell below par, landlords were driven to make rent reductions.
The Corn Laws had provided a safety net. The foreboding expressed during the debate on repeal proved correct, but premature. There were rough times; between 1850 and 1852 poor harvests did not drive up bread prices (thanks to imported wheat), but landlords were forced to make rent concessions of up to 10 per cent.18 The problem then and later was that while a landlord had to accept a lower rent, he could not fend off his creditors or suspend mortgage payments and allowances to his dependants.
Agriculture did undergo a recovery, guided and financed by the larger aristocratic proprietors who had the resources to fund investment and adjust their land-management policies. Extended leases, the weeding out of incompetent tenants, investments in modern techniques, the exploitation of new chemical fertilisers and diversification alleviated short-term problems. Surveying the state of farming in 1866, the Edinburgh Review was optimistic; modernisation was working and the great aristocratic landlords were praised for financing improvement schemes which were raising yields.19
Yet progress required ambitious investment programmes which were beyond the resources of most of the nobility. Returns on capital were disappointing, hovering between 1 and 4 per cent, figures that ruled out borrowing on the money markets, which charged annual interest rates of between 3 and 4 per cent. Agriculture was being starved of capital and the symptoms of stagnation began to appear.
There were some areas untouched by scientific husbandry, where farmers stuck to the old ways and went to the wall. In parts of north Wales, tenants were sinking to the level of subsistence farming.20 As ever, there were the natural hazards of agriculture. During 1865 and early 1866 a cattle plague spread across the country and thousands of beasts had to be destroyed. A royal commission investigated the outbreak, chaired by the fifth Earl Spencer; the nobility continued to undertake those unpaid, useful public duties which the state had always expected from them.
The cattle pandemic was a prelude for a series of poor harvests in 1873, 1875, 1876 and, worst of all, 1879. Landlords were driven to remit between 10 and 20 per cent of their rents, and agriculture was plunged into a recession which lasted until the Great War. Corn from the American and Canadian prairies fed the nation, which, by the mid-1880s, was also eating canned and frozen meat from the Argentine and New Zealand. Meanwhile, the aristocracy faced the severest economic crisis in its history with serious liquidity problems and plummeting land values. The value of arable land in south-eastern England fell by nearly 40 per cent and pasture in Scotland and the North-West by 20 and 12 per cent respectively.21 A former asset had become an encumbrance. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Lady Bracknell cruelly summed up the predicament (and embarrassment) of the aristocracy: ‘Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one a position, and prevents one from keeping it up.’
Some peers possessed non-agricultural assets. For the past four hundred years, noblemen had exploited mineral deposits on their lands and urban property, particularly in London and its suburbs. During the eighteenth century, aristocrats had invested in canals, turnpikes and harbour developments which facilitated the distribution of foodstuffs, coal and iron ore.
Railway expansion in the 1830s and 1840s attracted aristocratic capital and lobbying. In 1844, the fifth Earl Fitzwilliam endeavoured to have the London-Edinburgh line routed through Lincoln so that crops grown in his estates could secure fast access to markets in London and the North-East. He also purchased shares in the South Yorkshire Railway which carried coal from his mines.22 Profit was not allowed to interfere with pleasure and Fitzwilliam demanded a small detour in the London-Edinburgh line near Peterborough so that trains would not disturb the foxes in one of his best coverts. Edward Littleton, created Lord Hatherton in 1835, was a Midlands landowner with extensive interests in local canals and railway promotion. Landownership never blinded peers to the potential returns offered by industrial expansion. Four millionaire peers who died between 1830 and 1880 had mineral, transport and urban real-estate interests.23
Nor were aristocrats snobbishly averse to new forms of moneymaking. Hampered by debts, Lord Robert Cecil agreed in 1867 to become executive chairman of the very wobbly Great Eastern Railway for seven hundred pounds a year. It was less than half of what he had been offered, but, unlike so many of his modern counterparts, he had admirably high moral standards. ‘A highly paid chairman’, he told his employers, ‘is a luxury which should be reserved for the return of a good shareholders’ dividend.’ Within a year and after some intensive and rigorous reorganisation, he had turned round the Great Eastern.24
Hitherto, the aristocratic principle had rested on landownership, which, in theory, had given the nobility its political independence. But by 1880 land had been superseded in terms of its gross value by the assets amassed by those engaged in manufacturing and trade. As early as 1856 The Times had suggested that the peerage should be extended to include rich men whose fortunes did not rest on land. Celebrating the peerage given to Edward Strutt, a radical MP with an industrial background, it endorsed a Manchester newspaper’s comment that the Lords should now reflect current economic reality, which was the consequence of ‘the surrender of feudalism to industry’.25 This suggestion was not taken up for thirty years, largely thanks to a lack of political will.
In discussing the expansion of the Lords, The Times insisted that the aristocratic principle ‘corresponds to sentiments so long cherished in the bosoms of Englishmen that they have become part of our nature’. Affection for the nobility did not override deeply felt resentments against the old methods of patronage which the aristocracy continued to practise. They offended the sensibilities and ambitions of the middle class, who believed in the sovereignty of talent and perseverance. These qualities rather than birth or connections had secured the middle class its place in the world. In 1870 Gladstone’s government introduced competitive examinations for the civil service and abolished the purchase of army commissions. The latter provoked some rumblings from the Lords but they subsided when the measure was passed by a royal warrant.
The aristocracy had suffered a limited setback. Vestiges of patronage remained. Ministers retained the right to choose their secretaries, while proconsuls chose their immediate staff and some other appointments. In 1878 Lord Malmesbury invoked ‘old friendship’ when he wrote to the seventh Duke of Marlborough, then Viceroy of Ireland, asking him to secure a resident magistracy for his nephew, who had been invalided out of the Indian civil service. The request was approved.26
Significantly, the Foreign Office was exempt from the new system of recruitment. Upholding the dignity and prestige of Britain abroad was best entrusted to noblemen and gentlemen and
their sons, whose manners and bearing enabled them to move confidently among their own kind at foreign courts. As Lord Robert Cecil cynically commented, all that was required of junior attachés was fluent French and the ability to ‘dangle about at parties and balls’.27
Ornamental diplomats moved up the ladder and, in time, would become responsible for the conduct of Britain’s relations with foreign countries and the governance of its dominions and colonies. In 1883 all ambassadorships (Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, Constantinople and St Petersburg) were held by peers, and there was a large scattering of baronets and younger sons among the secretaries, attachés, consul-generals and legation staff. The Viceroy of India, the Governor-General of Canada and the Governors of Victoria and New South Wales were peers. Whether as an ambassador in Vienna or as Governor-General in Sydney, a nobleman knew how to behave tactfully and with grace, observe the punctilio of precedence and play host at receptions in which he represented the person of the Queen. In 1891 an Australian parliamentarian insisted that his countrymen ‘want English gentlemen to lead society instead of some broken-down or disappointed local politician’.28
While the aristocracy manned the nation’s outposts, its domestic prestige suffered a hard although not unexpected knock. Within weeks of winning the 1880 election, the Liberals introduced the Ground Game Bill which finally overturned the old Game Laws and permitted tenants to hunt hares and rabbits on their own land. Supporters of the measure argued that it was now imperative, given the chronic agricultural recession, although despite this there were sporting landlords who preferred granting ‘large reductions of rent’ to forfeiting their game rights.
These were fiercely upheld by most peers, many of whom were angry that the state should introduce a law that interfered with the essentially private relationship between landlord and tenant. This was ‘outrageous’ thought Lord Elcho, another peer believed that the bill would encourage poachers, and Lord Balfour of Burghleigh feared that it would foster rural idleness, since young men with sporting proclivities would abandon work to shoot hares and rabbits. In support of the bill, the fifth Marquess of Ailesbury argued that it was intolerable for a labourer and his family to go hungry while ‘half-tamed pheasants’ wandered about near his cottage.29 Ninety-four peers voted for the bill, fifty-nine against.
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 29