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

by Lawrence James

  It was hoped that their proven wisdom, experience and talents would reinvigorate the Lords and give weight and dynamism to its debates and committees. One life peer, Robert Boothby, a talented Tory maverick, thought that his kind were ‘gingering the whole thing up, and keeping it up to date, and making it better’. A broad base was a stronger one, he added. ‘I mean, you have all sorts of people, Sainsbury, Crowther, God knows who, who are the rulers of industry . . . you have all the retired Chiefs of Staff who know a hell of a lot about it all [who] can speak with much more authority than any member of the House of Commons could hope to.’5 Such luminaries also existed among the hereditary titles, who at the time –1970 – included a retired bus driver, Lord Teviot. Between 1958 and 1978 nearly five hundred life peerages were granted, and recipients included academics, scientists, entertainers, former trade unionists, worthies from local government and charitable organisations and the inevitable contingent of superannuated politicians and party hacks.

  Hereditary peers remained in what had become a hybrid assembly. Their value and virtues were remembered by one life peer, William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times. The old aristocracy were ‘reserve troops of common sense’, many had had military careers and roots in the countryside, and all were conscious of their families’ historic traditions, which qualified them to serve as a ‘sort of grand jury of the nation’.6 This was exactly how the fourth Marquess of Salisbury had justified the existence of the Lords in 1933, when he proposed a relaxation of the restrictions on the chamber’s veto. ‘The hereditary principle is woven into the public life of the nation,’ he declared, and, one day, it might fall to the independent-minded peers to protect the liberties of the nation from a House of Commons in which the majority party ruled by diktat. Or, more pertinently, from a coup of the sort which Hitler had recently accomplished in Germany.7 This was a well-worn argument that would be resuscitated whenever the existence of the Lords was called into question.

  Yet, when Salisbury was defending the Lords, at least fifteen peers, including a quartet of dukes, openly discarded conventional politics and the historic principles which underpinned them by embarking on a brief but intense flirtation with the radical right. Many had fallen under the spell of a dashing but essentially meretricious political adventurer, Sir Oswald Mosley. He was a baronet and a rich landowner whose British Union of Fascists, founded in 1932, was an ostentatiously classless party (the blackshirt uniform obliterated social distinctions) dedicated to national rebirth. Its organisation and objectives were modelled first on Mussolini’s Fascism and, later on, Hitler’s Nazism. British Fascists hated Jews and Communists and proposed submission to a monolithic state as the prime duty of all citizens.

  The history of the aristocratic engagement with British Fascism and its Italian and German prototypes has been thoroughly uncovered and dissected by Richard Griffith and Stephen Dorril. What emerges is a picture of a knot of peers adrift in an uncongenial world, united by paranoia, pessimism and panic. All blamed the misfortunes of their times and class on an immensely powerful but clandestine Judaeo-Bolshevik global conspiracy which could be thwarted only by Fascism and Nazism. Mosley exploited this nightmare version of modern history; he had charisma, intimate connections with aristocratic circles and, for all his populism, was an aristocrat at heart. He had been ‘reared in upper-class society and had become accustomed to giving orders because of [his] personal wealth and social position’, thought Herbert Morrison, who had worked alongside Mosley when he had been a prominent figure in the Labour Party.8

  Mosley, Mussolini and Hitler offered bewildered and frightened aristocrats the prospect of a world in which their status and property would be secure from Red revolution and gave a validity to private prejudices, chiefly anti-Semitic. When they met, the second Lord Redesdale was captivated by Hitler’s dynamism and will, and Lady Redesdale told her daughter Jessica that the ‘Socialists want everyone to be poor.’9 Another admirer of Hitler, the second Duke of Westminster (‘Bend Or’) was a host to fantasies about the subversion of Britain by Jewish ‘gold’ and spent the first nine months of the war demanding an immediate peace with Nazi Germany. That Casanova of Kenya’s ‘Happy Valley’, the twenty-second Earl of Erroll, was mesmerised by Mosley, and, when he returned to the colony, he promised his fellow settlers that he would introduce Fascism to East Africa. Amazingly, he listed its ingredients as ‘complete religious social freedom’, ‘no dictatorship’ and a self-supporting Empire which would not ‘trade with the dirty foreigner’.10

  The third Lord Brocket fawned over Nazi bigwigs, whom he invited to his houses in Hertfordshire and Hampshire, attended Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations in 1939 and deluded himself that he was an invaluable link between the leaders of Britain and the Third Reich. During the Blitz it was rumoured that he lit fires on his Hertfordshire estates to guide German bombers.11 James Lees-Milne summed up this buffoon as ‘a fundamentally nice man’ but ‘stupid’.12

  From the standpoint of this book, the importance of Brocket and his kind lies not so much in their political opinions, but in the fact that they ingenuously imagined that their status gave them public credibility, particularly between September 1939 and May 1940, when they joined Mosley in calls for an accommodation with Hitler. The government kept these peers under intelligence surveillance, but they were not treated as a serious threat and none was interned, unlike Mosley and his wife Diana, a daughter of Lord Curzon and lifelong devotee of Hitler. Nevertheless, when he flew to England in May 1941, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party, imagined that he would find peers sympathetic to a peace with Germany, but then he was probably three-parts mad.

  If this episode revealed anything, it was the sheer lack of influence of men like Westminster, Redesdale, Brocket and Erroll, and, indeed, it may have been an awareness of their impotence which had propelled them into the un-English politics of Fascism, with its intolerance, bombast and violence. Although the Fascist peers stressed their patriotism, none had ever expressed it through a conventional political career in an established party or as a crossbencher in the Lords. Their attachment to Germany during a national emergency was a rejection of their duty to the state and its political ideals and institutions. In this respect, they were taking their cue from a kindred spirit Edward VIII (1936), who had abandoned his birthright when he abdicated. As Duke of Windsor, he revealingly wrote in the spring of 1940 that Britain urgently needed a purge of the ‘old lot of politicians and much of our out-of-date system of government’.13 These were treasonous sentiments, which Mosley would have applauded, but they were enticing for those aristocrats who found themselves stranded on the periphery of politics and out of step with their times.

  To these disappointments were added a visceral anti-Semitism which permeated the upper classes between the wars. Jews were vilified as flashy and pushy arrivistes with a knack of enriching themselves at a time when the aristocracy was grumbling about an often exaggerated downturn in their fortunes. As ever, old money resented new, but what made the anti-Semitic ramblings of figures like Westminster so odious was that they continued long after Hitler’s persecution of Germany’s Jews had become public knowledge.

  In terms of the political history of the peerage, the behaviour of a handful of right-wing extremists was a reminder that aristocratic power, as it had been understood in the past, was now moribund. After 1918, peers who chose a political career could no longer expect to attain the highest offices of state; since 1902 no peer has served as Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Minister of Health, though there have been four titled Foreign Secretaries and one Minister of Defence. Six of the ministers in Churchill’s wartime coalition were peers, which was about average for the past forty years. All held junior and unglamorous offices, with the exception of the Canadian newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, who oversaw aircraft production during 1940.

  An unwritten constitution had now acquired an unwritten protocol which demanded that the prime minister was alway
s a Member of the Commons. It was invoked in May 1940 by Lord Halifax when he stood down in favour of Churchill, although the truth was that the peer regarded the prime ministership with apprehension and considered himself temperamentally unfitted to provide the leadership needed in wartime.

  Churchill, grandson of the Duke of Marlborough, was supremely confident that he had all the necessary qualities. He was forthright, cocksure, pugnacious and possessed a patrician sense of public duty, a faith in his own talents and judgement, and an emotional attachment to his country. Churchill was deeply conscious of his illustrious ancestry (he wrote a life of the first Duke of Marlborough) and, born in 1874, he had the mindset of a Victorian aristocrat with a birthright to rule. This made him the last representative of a tradition of leadership which stretched back through Palmerston to Wellington and beyond to the Whig and Tory grandees of the eighteenth century. Yet Churchill was distrusted and disliked by the Conservative aristocracy, because of his apostasy in 1904 and subsequent, often savage assaults on the Lords during the 1910 and 1911 crises. In May 1940 many peers would have preferred one of their own kind, Halifax, who, although a dull dog, was solid and reliable.14 Churchill’s finest hour was also that of the old aristocratic ideal, although, paradoxically, he later refused a dukedom and remained fiercely proud of being a commoner and a Member of the Commons.

  Churchill was right: twentieth-century political life revolved around the Commons. This was why in 1960 the ambitious Anthony Wedgwood Benn disclaimed the peerage he had inherited on the death of his father, Lord Stansgate. After three years of legal quibbling the hitherto cast iron laws of inheritance were relaxed and Wedgwood Benn remained a ‘Mr’ and an MP. A trickle of similar renunciations followed, most notably that of Alec Douglas-Home, fourteenth Earl of Home, who abandoned his title before becoming Prime Minister in 1964. A hereditary title was now a handicap for an ambitious young politician.

  For all the occasional sparkle of its debates and its benches filled with talented and experienced men and women, the mid-century House of Lords was essentially a passive institution. It could suggest, amend and plead for the reconsideration of bills, but, in the event of an impasse, it could merely delay their implementation for a year. It grew and grew, so that by 1979 there were 1,150 peers of whom 408 were nominally Conservatives, 151 Labour and 42 Liberal and the rest cross-benchers.15 The old Tory predominance remained, and the Lords was still what it had been a hundred years before: the Tory party’s poodle. It was, therefore, a potential embarrassment to a Party which went to great lengths to project itself as modern, democratic and representative of the interests of every section of society. For this reason, the Conservative leadership endeavoured to keep its dog on a tight leash to forestall a clash with a Labour Party which could easily provoke a ‘peers versus people’ contest.

  Sometimes the dog growled. In 1949 the Lords dragged their heels over the nationalisation of steel, and in June 1968 it gave a defiant bark. The peers rejected Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s implementation of United Nations sanctions against the technically rebellious former colony of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). There was widespread sympathy with the white settlers (‘in Rhodesia you are dealing with men, not with the helots of a discredited dictatorship’) and anger that the United Nations was meddling in Britain’s affairs. The Conservative leader in the Lords, Lord Carrington, urged the peers to accept a measure which fulfilled Britain’s international obligations as a member of the United Nations.16 His party was bounding ahead in the opinion polls, and was disinclined to become embroiled in a contest over the future of the Lords.

  This episode gave the Labour government the opportunity to introduce the first ever bill to abolish the Lords. There were two debates, the first in June, when the quirky Willie Hamilton (notorious for his sniping at the royal family) introduced a private member’s bill for the immediate abolition of the chamber and titles. In November, and on the government’s initiative, the Commons discussed how the Lords might be replaced. These debates were not welcomed by Wilson, who, while presenting himself and his party to the voters as catalysts for the long-overdue modernisation of Britain, would have preferred to leave the Lords alone.17 After his resignation in 1976 he became Lord Wilson of Rievaulx.

  Wilson’s caution displeased the left of his party. Hitherto, Labour had been in a vague way committed to the dissolution of the Lords, but pragmatism had always intervened: what, if anything, would replace the chamber? As one MP observed, quoting Hilaire Belloc:

  Always keep a hold of nurse,

  For fear of finding something worse.18

  Nurse’s qualifications were ridiculed by Hamilton. His rant included sneers at peers’ deafness, senility – which infuriated older Labour MPs – and eccentricity. Over the past thirteen years, the tenth Duke of Atholl had spoken on the Game Laws, birds’ eggs and grey squirrels (which, as a countryman, he presumbly knew something about) and then Rhodesia!19 Such men were invaluable; the late Lord Borthwick felt that his veterinary training enabled him to speak with authority in debates concerning animals. At the time there were no former vets in the Commons.

  Replacing the Lords presented many hurdles. The Liberal MP and future party leader Jeremy Thorpe warned that if the new chamber was elected, it could challenge the Commons. A nominated chamber would be a dangerous extension of government patronage and the party in power could easily secure a permanent majority by packing it with placemen and toadies. Most prescient were the comments of Sir Dingle Foot, a Labour jurist. The new Lords would strengthen ‘a class of professional politicians who have no other occupation but politics’ while the present system filled the Lords with ‘men from all walks of life who can speak from first-hand experience, men from the services, the law, banking, industry, agriculture, the shop floor and the mine’.20 The Conservative MP Enoch Powell saw the Lords as ‘an intrinsic part of the national tradition of the government of the country’. Taking a purely pragmatic view, the Tory Lord Lambton, the eldest son of the Earl of Durham, argued that there was nothing to be gained from arguing over the future of the Lords since the peers had effectively lost their political power in 1832. He later renounced his father’s title to stay in the Commons.

  This debate turned out be academic, for the government dropped the bill in April 1969. Labour was in no position to embark on what might be a prolonged constitutional wrangle over an issue which excited little public interest. The party was trailing miserably in the opinion polls (only 24 per cent favoured it) and was distracted by economic problems. Its supporters may have been disappointed; in the 1977 Labour conference 6.2 million voted for abolition of the Lords, but, given the dominance of the trade union block vote, this was no reflection of opinion within the country. The House of Lords would survive for a further twenty years.

  In terms of economic survival, the aristocracy was doing rather well in the 1960s. Land values had risen since the war and stood at an average of £240 an acre in 1967. A 54,000 acre estate in Gloucestershire produced a rent roll of £15,000 for Lord Bathurst.21 By 1984 English prices were £2,000 an acre, Scottish between £300 and £1,700 and in Wales roughly £1,000.22 Agriculture was now flourishing, although its recuperation and present health had been achieved only through injections of state and then European Union subsidies.

  The late twentieth-century prospects for agriculture would have amazed landowners of sixty years before. Between 1918 and 1924 between 6 and 8 million acres had been sold, prompting predictions that the old landed aristocracy would soon become extinct.23 Sales of paintings and town and country residences confirmed this bleak picture. Between 1920 and 1938 over one hundred country houses were demolished by owners who could no longer afford to maintain them, and then and later there were protests against the destruction not of the properties of the individuals, but the ‘national heritage’. There were similar outcries when peers sold outstanding works of art, the assumption being that they were integral to the country’s culture and therefore never to be sold abroad. The sums raised w
ere invariably used to pay death duties, or for investment.

  Between the wars, a handful of peers, including the eleventh Duke of Manchester and the seventh Duke of Montrose, purchased estates in Kenya’s Happy Valley and Rhodesia. There, they and other aristocratic exiles could make money, live in a truly patrician manner with legions of cheap servants and enjoy all the sybaritic indulgences of their recent forebears. Those provided by Happy Valley were listed by Evelyn Waugh as fights, adultery, arson, bankruptcies, card-sharping, insanity, suicides, even duels’.24 The flavour of life in Happy Valley is vividly described in James Fox’s White Mischief, published in 1980, who reminds us that the proprieties were never entirely abandoned. When the Prince of Wales was dining at the Muthaiga Club, one rake offered him cocaine and was bundled out of the room. The man who had done the evicting remarked afterwards: ‘Well, there is a limit even in Kenya, and when someone offers cocaine to the heir to the Throne, something has to be done about it, particularly when it is between courses at the dinner table.’ Murder was added to the vices of Happy Valley in 1941 when the twenty-second Earl of Erroll was shot. Sir Jock Delves Broughton Bt., one of the many husbands Erroll had cuckolded, was tried for the murder and acquitted. He returned to England and shot himself, bringing the episode to an appropriately melodramatic conclusion.

  Regency England under the sun was also an agreeable alternative to post-1945 austerity Britain under Labour. ‘Seldom have I witnessed gentry living in such squalor even in post-war days,’ Lees-Milne wrote after visiting one country house in Wiltshire in 1948. Elsewhere, he encountered a field marshal’s wife polishing the silver and stairs, abandoned gardens and rooms covered with dustsheets.25

  Paid employment offered relief to many peers. The number of aristocratic directors rose from 167 in 1896 to 232 in 1920 and has increased steadily since.26 During the 1950s a knot of peers with financial and social foresight were actively engaged in the funding and creation of local commercial television stations.27 Another form of showmanship was now attracting more and more peers: the imaginative exploitation of their country houses and parks. Since the eighteenth century, many houses and parks had been open to the public when their owners were away and interiors could be inspected on payment of a small charge to the housekeeper. In the 1730s up to five hundred local people a day visited the second Duke of Richmond’s menagerie at Goodwood in Sussex. They were amazed by, among other beasts, an armadillo, a lion, wolves, bears, vultures, a ‘woman tiger’, a ‘Greenland dog’ and cassowaries.28