by Philipp Blom
To all but his most fabulously wealthy hosts, in fact, Edward was nothing less than a liability. To avoid incurring his displeasure, the owners of the country’s great houses had to keep a constant stock of gingerbread, French patisseries, bath salts and exotic aubergines in case the King should decide to descend upon them, in which case a vast expenditure must follow. His personal entourage included more than a dozen people - including an Arab boy to prepare his coffee. Dinner for His Majesty was generally no fewer than twelve courses, including such light entrées as Cotelettes de bécassines à la Souvaroff (snipe stuffed with foie gras and served in Madeira sauce). The hefty King, just five feet seven inches tall, weighed over 16 stone (102 kg).
A jolly monarch: King Edward VII.
If the dinners were ruinously opulent, the shooting parties were even more expensive. It was out of the question, of course, simply to let the hunters go out in search of prey. This was Edwardian England, after all; prey was to be provided, and in prodigious numbers. On one Norfolk estate just thirty-nine birds had been killed in 1821, yet by Edward’s day the number had risen to 5,363. Such vast numbers had to be bred, and released into the wild for the occasion. Lord de Grey, a famously fast shooter who had allegedly once had seven dead birds in the air simultaneously, boasted that in his fifty-six-year career he had personally shot 250,000 pheasant, 150,000 grouse and 100,000 partridge - a proud average of more than twenty-five birds a day. Animals, too, were reared for the hunt, and shot by the hundred, if not the thousand, during a single weekend by gun-toting aristocrats and their rich middle-class imitators. Not many hosts could afford this kind of lavishness for long, even for their King.
Steam Turbines and the Defeat of the Nobility
If ‘Edward the Caresser’ was a famous philanderer and alarmingly greedy house guest, his louche vulgarity was nonetheless symptomatic of a long decline which had begun even during his mother’s reign: the decline of the apparently still splendid European aristocracy, the hierarchical and social backbone of every monarchy across the Continent. Despite the English King’s behaviour, this had nothing to do with royal manners or mismanagement on the part of the governing classes. Rather, it reflected the underlying economic circumstances of the time. Since time immemorial, the power of Europe’s aristocracies had been based on their land, which allowed them to raise armies and construct great palaces, or simply to bankroll a leisured life in the country or at court. The wealth of the land, and the idea of a social structure ordained by God, were the two great key-stones of aristocratic rule. But within the previous three decades, both had been fatally undermined.
Until the 1870s, noblemen had managed to preserve real power everywhere in Europe, with the exception of France (where the Revolution had swept them away already) and the small nations of republican Switzerland and the Netherlands. The latter, though nominally a kingdom, had never had a strong aristocracy, at least in part, and significantly, because it simply was not large enough in area to sustain a substantial landed class. Together with the high aristocracy of Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia, it had been the British nobles who had preserved the greatest land-based wealth, and unlike their Habsburg and Russian counterparts, the great families of Britain had succeeded in keeping power concentrated in very few hands. This had been mainly owing to the British law of primogeniture, which allowed all titles and possessions to pass to the family’s eldest son, while daughters and younger sons received only non-hereditary courtesy titles, and importantly, no land. Whereas in Austria-Hungary or Germany, for instance, all the children of a duke would themselves be dukes and duchesses, and family lands would generally be divided between them, later to be recombined by strategic marriages, in an ever-changing patchwork of ownership, in Britain the nobility had remained a small and wealthy group. Burke’s Peerage of 1880 recorded some 580 British peers, three quarters of whom owned 1,000 hectares of land or more. In stark contrast to this, Prussia alone could count some 20,000 titled families in 1800, while by 1914 Russia had more than 250,000. In Hungary and Poland, between 10 and 15 per cent of the population belonged to the nobility.
The aristocrats of Britain had defended their pre-eminence for centuries. The apparently swift ending of their rule, and of that of many of Europe’s hereditary patricians, came not from the cannon’s mouth, during the Great War, but earlier and quite peacefully from across the seas. Those with ears to hear the bell tolling distantly might have recognized the humming of new ships’ turbines, making it possible to cross the Atlantic, and indeed the whole globe, faster and more cheaply. They might have heard the sounds of steady advances in agricultural technology in the American Midwest, or the grunts of the longshoremen heaving American or Russian grain onto the fast new ships.
With the invention of refrigerated ships (the first, the SS Elderslie, was constructed in 1884), meat and dairy products from New Zealand, Australia and Argentina opened this British market to international competition. With less than a third of its workforce in agriculture, Britain was the only European country to elect not to protect its farmers and landowners by import tariffs; in consequence, the new cheap goods hit the country’s land economy with full force. By 1905, Britain was importing 60 per cent of its basic foodstuffs and 80 per cent of its grain. The global market had become a reality: not just its benefits, which had long been clear to the British, the world’s pre-eminent producers and salesmen for a century or more, but now its disadvantages. For the British landed classes, this development was devastating. A domestic market that had for so long been certain, protected by geographical barriers and unchallenged by other producers, had melted away within little more than a decade, and its profits too. Land as the power base of the aristocracy had been all but destroyed. By 1900, some 14,000 estates had been mortgaged, with only 2,800 of their owners managing to keep up their repayments. Between 1903 and 1909 alone, Britain’s aristocrats sold 9 million acres of land.
There were those resourceful enough to survive, of course. They sold half their estates, reduced their debt and invested in shares, thus fuelling the engine of their downfall. A vast proportion of British investments went into lucrative new enterprises abroad, particularly in the United States, South America and Russia, thereby unwittingly helping the competition to build up an efficient and modern agricultural and industrial base while factories in Britain still operated with the mid-Victorian machinery that had once made the country great, but was obsolete now and unable to keep up with the rising pace of technological development on the international market.
If life after the slump of income from the land could be perilous for the landowning families, death often meant ruin. Death duties, introduced by the Liberal government in 1894, were initially calculated at 8 per cent of inherited wealth, but by 1909 they had risen to 15 per cent. (By 1919 they would escalate to 40 per cent.) For an already indebted family hanging on precariously with a declining income, a death in the family could be simply the last straw: ‘Between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one a position, and prevents one from keeping it up,’ as Lady Bracknell summarizes with inimitable aplomb in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.
While the sale of assets enabled economic survival for some, it was also a blow for the aristocracy’s identity and self-confidence. ‘A man does not like to go down to posterity as the alienator of old family possessions,’ Lord Aylesbury ruefully remarked in 1911. Some peers unwilling to go this way married themselves out of trouble by hitching their old names to new, often American wealth. The later British prime minister Lord Rosebery became Mr Hanna de Rothschild; the Duke of Marlborough espoused Consuelo Vanderbilt; Lord Randolph Churchill famously married Jenny Jerome, the daughter of a New York financier, who shocked London society not only by her sassy independence, but also by sporting an elegant tattoo of a snake around her wrist. The allure of wealth made inroads on the Continent, too. In 1895
the fashionable French Count Boni de Castellane married the American Anna Gould, who brought with her not only beauty but also a useful £3,000,000 dowry, which the Count spent on a lifestyle so fabulously lavish - including the construction of a pink marble palace in the centre of Paris - that his wife found it necessary to divorce him after just three years, to rescue what was left of her fortune. (The Count eventually died in penury, leaving behind him a literary grace note, his book The Art of Living Poor.) One of the Vanderbilt girls accepted the Hungarian Count Széchenyi.
Novelists were quick to see the dramatic and comic potential of these matches. Thomas Mann’s Royal Highness (1909) mocks the union of a German prince and an American heiress in an affectionate if somewhat presumptuous portrait of his own marriage to a wealthy Jewish woman, casting the writer as prince of literature. The British-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill used the same theme in his 1893 novella Merely Mary Anne.
Rates of Dissolution
On the Continent, the aristocratic classes of different countries unravelled at different speeds. French nobles like the Comte de Castellane, or the sprinkling of dukes and princesses so fashionable in Paris society, had not been a political force since 1789, and resistance to republican and secular values and capitalist society came mainly from the Church. While most liberal, secular-minded Frenchmen had supported Dreyfus, practically all the Catholic factions (priests, political parties and the press) had condemned him in a sustained and ugly campaign marked by nationalist, antisemitic, and anti-republican sentiments directed against the ‘Judaeo-Masonic’ Republic.
In 1901 the radical president Emile Combes rolled up the heavy artillery. Using an obscure law against ideological assemblies, he decreed the dissolution of ten thousand Catholic schools (all promptly reopened with republican teachers in charge) and many monasteries and convents, most famously the monastery of Grande-Chartreuse, founded in 1084, near Grenoble in eastern France, where peasants responded to the 1902 eviction order by erecting burning barricades on the roads. The army was obliged to take axes to the monastery gates to break them down. The monks left singing and flanked by a cortège of weeping parishioners.
The Dreyfus case had catalysed the century-old battle between Church and Republic and brought it to a swift conclusion, in December 1905, with the passing of the law on the separation of Church and State. Now Church establishments were not only suddenly deprived of funds, but their very roofs would have to be rented back from the state. Neither spontaneous rioting nor a papal encyclical in 1906 could do anything to turn back the clock: the power of the Church in France was broken, its teachers expelled from the Republic’s schools, its monasteries closed, its organizations all but bankrupt. The radical, republican bourgeoisie had vanquished its old enemy, and it capped its triumph on 13 July 1906 (the eve of the anniversary of the Revolution) with a full exoneration and reinstatement of the now gaunt but still dignified Captain Dreyfus.
Despite the dreams of socialists, anarchists and many members of the bourgeoisie, there was almost no possibility of breaking the hold of nobility and Church in Russia. Tsar Nicholas II was convinced that his power rested on these two pillars alone and went to great lengths to stifle democratic tendencies. The Tsar’s medievalist, mystical vision of society was dazzling enough to blind him to the country’s problems, but in reality his aristocracy was largely bankrupt. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had left many landowners at a loss: unable or unwilling to implement better administration and more efficient farming methods, they rapidly ran up crippling debts and were forced to sell out to the new money. ‘With the abolition of serfdom, we soon fell into the category of landowners who did not have the means to live in the manner to which their circle had become accustomed,’ noted Prince G. E. Lvov (1861-1925), who was to become, in 1917, Russia’s first democratically elected prime minister.
The ring of axes chopping down the trees of a minor landed family in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard (1903), in which the mansion and grounds are sold to a vulgar businessman, is the beat of this chapter of Russian history. The few aristocrats flexible enough to try new methods of cultivation, new machines and new crops almost always failed when confronted with the sheer ignorance and stubbornness of their own former serfs, conservative to the core, who preferred to sabotage new methods and destroy machines rather than accept the slightest change, as the enthusiastic modernizer Levin finds to his cost in Tolstoy’s 1877 Anna Karenina.
Prince Lvov himself was a rare success among his aristocratic peers. Having inherited 150,000 roubles of debt, he and his family chose to work on the fields themselves, planting crops such as clover that were not traditional but were well suited to the local soil, reading new works on agriculture and implementing their recommendations, and, for a while, even living like peasants on rye bread and cabbage soup. Initially, the peasants felt sorry for them, regarding them as completely mad, but the family managed to turn the estate around, and after twenty-five years of very hard work all their debts had been paid off and the farm was producing a handsome profit. Lvov had even planted an orchard and was producing apple purée for the Moscow market - as if to refute the grim message of The Cherry Orchard. Most nobles, however, could no more have imagined going without their customary luxuries than they could conceive of eating cabbage soup. Once the serfs’ free labour was no longer available, the fate of Russia’s landowners, as a class, was sealed.
Russia and Britain’s nobles had reason to envy the great families of the Habsburg empire such as the dynasties of Windischgrätz, Waldstein, Harrach, Lobkowitz, Liechtenstein, Esterházy and Palffy, some of whom owned lands the size of entire English counties. The Habsburg empire was largely rural, self-sufficient, and therefore less affected by market fluctuations. Hungary was even exporting grain, and in the globalized world of 1900 it was also the largest provider of grain to beef-exporting Argentina. Hungary’s wide plains, and also its conservative rural social structures, still allowed food to be produced cheaply, a rare counter-example to most European countries, which were by now being flooded by food imports from the New World. The smaller landowners, harder hit by the overall drop in land revenues, were compensated by their Emperor Franz Josef’s ingenious and unique solution: he put them all on his own payroll, not only in the army, but also in government, and particularly in the diplomatic service. A state-subsidized aristocracy may seem a ruinous folly, but in fact, given the circumstances of time and place, it allowed the Emperor to maintain it as a social force.
With the empire threatening to break apart into a collection of nationalist splinter states, and independence movements everywhere looking for leadership, Franz Josef had succeeded in binding the nobility to the Crown, not only by buying their acquiescence but by actively involving them in his policies. Theirs were no ornamental posts: ministers, section chiefs, generals and admirals were on active duty, and the labyrinthine demands of Habsburgian administration and military life ensured that they were kept busy. The ministry of war alone, which absorbed a great proportion of aristocratic bureaucrats, supervised three separate armies: the Austrian, the Hungarian, and the combined Austro-Hungarian forces. And as if this were not enough administrative effort, each of them housed a Babel of languages, all of which the officers were encouraged to learn and all of which were spoken at the ministry. The men of an army unit might be commanded in one language (commands, after all, are linguistically not very complex), but might have another Dienstsprache for technical expressions and a third Regimentssprache for use with other soldiers. Some regiments contained recruits who spoke three different native languages. One of them, containing Hungarians, Germans and Slovaks from a region of high emigration to America, even adopted English as their Kommandosprache . The officers had learned it at school, and the ranks had all picked up an adequate working vocabulary from America-bound friends and family members.
Around the turn of the century, this apparently impossible system worked remarkably well. Within the empire there was broad agreement that it was best (and c
omplicated enough already) to stick with the status quo, even if it meant foregoing the game of global imperial expansion that was being played by the other major powers. The watchword in everything was moderation. ‘Here one was at the centre of Europe, at a focal point of the world’s old axes,’ wrote an acerbically perceptive Robert Musil in his Man Without Qualities.
There was some display of luxury, but it was not, of course, as oversophisticated as the French. One went in for sport, but not in the madly Anglo-Saxon fashion. One spent tremendous sums on the army, but only just enough to ensure that one remained the second weakest among the great powers. The capital, too, was somewhat smaller than all the rest of the world’s largest cities, but it was nevertheless quite considerably larger than a mere ordinary large city. And the administration of this country was carried out in an enlightened, barely perceptible manner, with a cautious clipping of all sharp points, by the best bureaucracy in
Europe, which could be accused of only one defect: it could not help regarding genius and enterprise…unless privileged by high birth or State appointment, as ostentation, indeed presumption.
In the Habsburg empire the situation was kept in hand by the noble art of controlled inertia and spasmodic improvisation, and only a prescient few saw in it the beginning of the inevitable end.
