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

by Lawrence James

  The loss of game rights appeared to be the thin end of a wedge that would be driven into the rights of property in general. An Irish peer, Lord Oranmore and Brown denounced the game legislation as arbitrary confiscation which transferred to tenant farmers ‘the property of another class’.30 Equally disturbing was the Irish Land Act of 1881, which allowed the state to dictate rents. Landlords faced further vexation (and possible losses) from the radical ‘Three-Acres-and-a-Cow’ agitation which proposed creating smallholdings for labourers with land taken from rural estates. This movement sank without trace, but Liberal crofting laws confirmed the widespread fear that landlords’ legal rights were in jeopardy. The 1885 election saw a severe jolt to rural deference when newly enfranchised farmworkers swung to the Liberals.

  Aristocratic morale sagged in the early 1880s, although Gladstone reassured Queen Victoria (1837–1901) of his unwavering faith in the ‘hereditary principle’. Some peers were unconvinced. The otherwise taciturn fourth Earl of Carnarvon got the jitters and invested in lands in Canada and Australia in case the ‘times should grow bad’, so that his family could ‘make a new home across the seas’.31 Lord Salisbury’s reaction to uncertain times was aggressive, for he recognised that the new tenor of Liberalism gave Conservatives and the aristocracy an opportunity to find friends. When Gladstone had described his Irish land statutes as measures to appease the ‘land hunger’ of the Irish peasantry, Salisbury responded tartly. If land hunger justified what was tantamount to confiscation of aristocratic estates, would ‘house hunger’, ‘consols hunger’ and ‘silver plate hunger’ be used to justify the expropriation of middle-class property?32 It was a telling point and was not lost on the middle-class owners of villas in the expanding suburbs of London and other large cities; their property meant as much to them as mansions and acres of the aristocracy meant to their owners.

  The charismatic, bold and pugnacious Lord Randolph Churchill MP, the second son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough and father of Winston, was prepared to go further. In the Commons he mercilessly harried Gladstone (it was said that he treated him as a telescope, drawing him out, seeing through him and shutting him up), and at public meetings across the country he preached his new creed of Tory Democracy. ‘Give it ’em hot, Randy,’ shouted one listener, and Churchill did.33 His Conservatism was patriotic, populist and sympathetic to reform. In the words of Churchill’s admirer Lord Charles Beresford MP, the Tories ‘must go with the people . . . organise and guide the masses and not treat them as scum as the Tories had so often have done’.34 The aristocracy was at the heart of Lord Randolph’s vision; in 1884 he portrayed the Lords as a ‘bulwark of liberty and civil order’ which rendered invaluable services to the nation. There were distinct echoes of Disraeli’s Young England idealism of forty years before with its dream of peers leading the people.

  Churchill’s friend the Liberal Lord Rosebery saw in him a fusion of the aristocratic and the bohemian who brought to politics the ‘keen enjoyment of an undergraduate on the fifth of November’.35 This was about right, but the qualities which endeared Churchill to Rosebery disturbed Salisbury, who instinctively despised demagoguery, even the Tory brand. Nevertheless, he had to admit Lord Randolph to his Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer, but in 1887 a quarrel over naval estimates led to his resignation. It was a flourish which failed, and Lord Randolph drifted into the political wilderness. The Conservative succession was open to Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour, whom Churchill had once nicknamed ‘Posslethwaite’ on account of his diffidence.

  The career of Lord Randolph Churchill is one of the great might-have-beens in the history of the aristocracy. In just over five years he had attempted to revitalise Conservatism as a positive rather than negative political force, and proved that an aristocrat could master the new demotic politics and inspire the masses. He scared the Liberals and the stuffier elements in the Conservatives, who were always uncomfortable with genius, particularly if it was wayward. Salisbury and the spirit of ‘safety first’ prevailed; he won elections in 1886, 1895 and 1900, which, among other things, confirmed the resilience of the aristocratic principle in which he had so much faith.

  It is a commonplace that the mid-Victorian period witnessed the ‘triumph’ of the middle classes. This is true up to a point, but their new eminence also allowed the nobility plenty of scope to exercise the very considerable remains of its old influence. The British aristocracy had adapted well to a new world, unlike the Irish, which found itself increasingly detested and isolated.

  23

  Revolvers Prominently

  Displayed: The

  Downfall of the Irish

  Aristocracy

  The Irish aristocracy failed to stay afloat in the nineteenth century. A far less sturdy craft than its British counterpart, it drifted, capsized and finally sank under the weight of its own debts. Its fate drew few tears from the mass of the Irish people. They lived in a predominantly agricultural country which staggered from one economic crisis to another, each caused by demography, primitive husbandry, low investment and landowners largely concerned with preserving a fragile solvency.

  It was calculated in 1841 that a thousand Irish men and women produced enough food for fourteen hundred, including themselves. In England the same number fed four thousand.1 Given the rapid rise in Ireland’s population (over 8 million according to the 1841 census) and the absence of manufacturing industries to absorb the surplus, a Malthusian catastrophe was a matter of time. It occurred between 1846 and 1849, when successive failures of the potato crop led to a famine and epidemics of typhus and dysentery. One and a quarter million died and during the next thirty years a further 2.75 million emigrated. Amazingly, this demographic upheaval made very little difference to Ireland’s economic problems.

  Aristocratic reactions to stagnant agriculture varied. There was a sense of resignation mingled with despair, such as that expressed by Lord Dufferin, who, in 1874, complained to a fellow peer that ‘An Irish estate is like a sponge, and an Irish landlord is never so sick as when he is sick of his property.’ Dufferin’s cure was to sell out and simultaneously rid himself of a liability and wipe out the huge debts he had run up in his glittering career as diplomat and proconsul.2 By the last two decades of the century other noblemen were doing the same. A few aristocrats were cushioned against unreliable Irish revenues by their mainland estates. Mineral rights from Durham coal mines provided ballast for the Marquesses of Londonderry who owned over 27,000 acres, mostly in Ulster.

  Investment offered landowners an opportunity to escape from a precarious existence, but few possessed the necessary reserves of capital. For those who did the results were disheartening. In 1823 James Hamilton, a young, idealist Scotsman with a taste for Protestant theology, inherited 20,000 acres in Donegal. Appalled by the backwardness of his farms (many tenants had neither ploughs nor carts), he invested £20,000 in improvements which yielded him an extra £200 in rents, a paltry 1 per cent return.3 At all levels, landlords were constrained by tight budgets and were always in danger of sliding into insolvency because of accumulated, long-term debts known as ‘encumbrances’. These encompassed mortgages, marriage settlements and allowances to widows, children and outlying relations. Over generations, encumbrances spiralled to alarming levels; in 1852 one nobleman with £6,500 a year in rents had obligations that totalled £106,000. When he disposed of his Irish lands for £676,000 in 1887, the sixth Duke of Leinster had encumbrances of £292,000, including annuities of £154,000 to his offspring.4

  A landlord’s outgoings were fixed and unavoidable. To meet them, he could remortgage his property, which, of course, compounded his long-term difficulties. Or, and this was the commonest alternative, he could jack up rents, squeeze tenants in arrears and evict those who could not pay. There was never a shortage of potential tenants. They faced the same problems as their landlords, but on a smaller scale. Farms varied in size from eight to twenty or more acres, their leases were short-term and could be terminated by their landlord
s at will. There was no incentive for improvements, for, until the 1870 Land Act, farmers were never compensated for any investment they might have made. Subsistence farming was common, and, for those who rose above it, margins were tight. Inevitably, there were rancorous disagreements as to what was a ‘fair’ (i.e. affordable) rent, and tempers flared and violence often followed.

  In 1843 W. S. Trench, the land agent for the Marquess of Bath, was beaten up by a mob at Carrickfoss after he had refused to lower rents on his master’s estates to levels agreed by neighbouring landlords. He got away with bruises, but, a few years before, a landlord had been shot by an assassin who had been hired by one of his tenants with a grudge. Trench found the corpse in a field and noticed the looks of ‘triumphant satisfaction’ on the faces of the ‘peasants’ working nearby. A reward of £1,500 tempted an informer to name the murderer, but the jury ignored his evidence, and the accused was acquitted. Solidarity was already a weapon which could frustrate the laws upon which landlords depended.5

  *

  Trench’s employer the Marquess of Bath occupied the upper reaches of the hierarchy of Irish landowners. According to a survey of 1873, he possessed 23,000 acres which were valued at nearly £20,000. Bath was one of the sharks, but there plenty of minnows, squireens with properties worth £500 or less, who just qualified for the status of ‘landed gentry’. Trench, who had properties of his own, fell into this category. En masse, he and the rest of Ireland’s landowners have been demonised in the raw version of subsequent nationalist history as outsiders who were rapacious, heartless and absentee, a gibe made by Sir Robert Peel and repeated by Disraeli.

  This last was untrue: the 1873 survey shows that absentees and birds of passage made up less than 20 per cent (517) of Irish landowners and that the rest (2,439) were residents, either on their own estates or elsewhere in the country. The exiles included peers who were public servants in England or abroad. Nearly all Irish landlords were native-born and 42 per cent were Protestant and 43 were Catholic.6

  Headcounts may scotch the myth of an absentee aristocracy, but they give no indication of where the loyalties of the Irish nobility lay, or, more importantly, the extent to which Irish peers engaged in the life of the nation beyond collecting rents, hunting foxes and attending functions at the court of the Viceroy in Dublin. Some did serve as non-executive servants of the administration as Lords Lieutenant, Poor Law guardians and justices. There were never enough landowners to fill rural benches, and so in many districts the government had to appoint stipendaries, mostly former officers and lawyers. Watching one of these resident magistrates in action in 1881, a journalist thought them abrupt and lacking the gentle paternalism of the English squire.7

  Relations between peers and the people were inevitably soured by the continual war of attrition between tenants and landlords. By vigorously enforcing their legal rights, landowners became predators in the popular imagination, symbols of Ireland’s subjugation and the impotence of its people. During the 1893 Commons debate on Home Rule, a Tory MP predicted that Irish self-government would lead to all landowners being treated as ‘robbers’. A nationalist MP riposted that ‘it did not lie with the Irish landlords to speak of robbery’, drawing cheers from his colleagues.8

  The antecedents of the Irish aristocracy remained an impediment to its assimilation. Its members were Protestants, the descendants of outsiders who had secured their lands by force. The eighteenth-century ‘ascendancy’ had been preserved by garrisons of British troops who upheld laws passed in Dublin by a Parliament filled with Protestant gentry and peers. In 1798 the old polity nearly disintegrated under the pressure of a popular nationalist insurrection which received French assistance. As in the 1640s and 1690s, the Irish landowning elite was rescued by the British army.

  In return for its survival, the aristocracy forfeited its old political power. In 1801 it agreed to the Act of Union, which dissolved the Dublin Parliament and transferred its legislative powers to Westminster. Self-emasculation was made less painful by the anaesthetic of bribery: Ireland’s former lawmakers were given titles, promotions to English peerages and a million pounds in backhanders. Prestige remained attached to the ownership of land, but not political power.

  Catholic emancipation had been promised in 1801, but the offer was withdrawn when George III announced that it would compromise his coronation oath. Catholics got what they wanted in 1829, in the form of the Catholic Relief Act, not as a favour from Westminster, but as a result of mass agitation which threatened to make Ireland ungovernable. This success was a signal lesson for the Irish people which was applied throughout the rest of the century: disciplined and directed, the collective will of the Catholic majority could gain concessions. Insurrections in the 1798 style were tried in 1848 and by the revolutionary Fenian movement of the 1860s, but they were contained by the police and the army. Yet old fears of mass insurgency remained strong. In the spring of 1878, when a war with Russia seemed imminent, the Chief Secretary to the Dublin government warned that the outbreak of hostilities would be a signal for popular insurrection.9

  Irish causes found no champions among the aristocracy. Home-grown, charismatic leaders took command of populist movements. Daniel O’Connell, a Catholic barrister, led the agitation for Catholic emancipation in the 1820s and, afterwards, the repeal of the union. A Protestant squire, Charles Stewart Parnell, did the same for land reform and Home Rule. Popular pressure for self-government, which gained momentum in the 1870s, unnerved the peerage and for good reason, for it was expected that an independent Irish Parliament would set the interests of tenants over those of landlords. Moreover, there would be no place for an aristocracy in this assembly in which the Lords would be replaced by an elected senate. For thirty years a mere tenth of its members would be peers sitting as of right, but this concession could mask the reality that Home Rule equalled extinction for the Irish peerage, a fact often overlooked.

  A handful of landowners backed the restoration of the Irish Parliament. Sir Rowland Blennerhassett Bt. and his cousin Rowland Ponsonby Blennerhassett sat as Home Rule Members for Kerry, where they were returned unopposed in 1880. Sir Rowland owned a middle-sized estate and spoke up for tenant farmers during the 1881 Land Act debate, locking horns with Viscount Castlereagh, an Ulster Tory who defended the right of landlords to negotiate rents without interference from the government.10

  Castlereagh was the eldest son of the fifth Marquess of Londonderry and represented a recent shift in Irish political alignments which favoured the aristocracy, at least in Ulster. The province’s farmers had far greater legal protection than their counterparts in the south, and the Protestant majority there had become disturbed by the growth of the Home Rule Party, which by 1880 had eighty MPs. In the simple language of the famous slogan, ‘Home Rule’ would be ‘Rome Rule’, an equation which united Ulster’s peers and people. Aristocrats like Londonderry allied themselves to the working- and lower-middle-class Orange lodges to create Unionism, a potent political cocktail whose ingredients were Toryism, anti-Catholicism and a readiness to fight a civil war to prevent home rule.11 Interestingly, some conservative Catholics led by the Duke of Norfolk were worried that self-government would inflict godless ‘Jacobinism’ on Ireland.12

  Like Irish Protestants, the Irish aristocracy was convinced that it would be thrown to the wolves when Ireland obtained self-government. Recurrent economic and political crises had driven the Irish nobility into the protective arms of the British state and its administration in Dublin. This controlled a formidable apparatus of coercion. In the front line was the Royal Irish Constabulary, a gendarmerie armed with carbines, bayonets and swords which grew in numbers after every outbreak of disorder and terrorism. By 1880 it totalled 12,600. No statistic better illustrates the scale of Irish disaffection than the proportion of policemen to the rest of the population: in England this was 1 to 455, in Ireland 1 to 194.13

  Even so, the police frequently had to be stiffened by troops and naval landing parties. During the 1852 Coun
ty Clare election, troops were needed to escort a party of farmers who had pledged their votes to their landlord. The procession was ambushed at Sixmilebridge and several of the assailants were shot. This incident was soon commemorated in a ballad which revealingly compared Queen Victoria’s redcoats to Cromwell’s Ironsides.14 Both shared a common purpose: the perpetuation of a political and economic system that was forever tilted in favour of England, Protestantism and all landowners. Just as there was a continuity of injustice, there was another of resistance. At Kildare early in 1881 tenants of the Duke of Leinster publicly burned one of his landlord’s new leases on the blade of a pike that had been brandished during the 1798 uprising.15

  This gesture of defiance was performed in the presence of soldiers summoned to forestall a riot. In the same year, soldiers were guarding landlords’ agents enforcing warrants on defaulting tenants, and sailors and marines were landed at Castletown to protect bailiffs carrying out evictions.16 Landowners and their representatives travelled armed. Robert Eyre White, a cousin of the Earl of Bantry and owner of 16,000 acres in Cork, rode abroad with ‘two or three revolvers prominently displayed in his belt’, dared his tenants to shoot him and compelled some to give three cheers for the Queen. Similar bravado was shown by another land agent, Townsend Trench, a keen cyclist (and inventor of a tubeless tyre), who practised his marksmanship by freewheeling downhill, throwing plates in the air and firing at them with his revolver.17