English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  But surely The English Constitution still has something of value to teach us about the way we are governed. Its brilliance and charm have never ceased to attract later generations, and if Bagehot lives today, this little book is what makes him live. Yet those who have not previously read it or who come back to it after a long gap will, I think, be astonished by its relentless snobbery and its obsessive contempt for and fear of the lower orders. ‘The masses of Englishmen are not yet fit for an elective government,’ we are told. We need a visible symbol of personal authority in the shape of the monarchy, because ‘the fancy of the mass of men is incredibly weak and can see nothing’ without it. ‘The lower orders, the middle orders, are still, when tried by what is that standard of the educated “ten thousand”, narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious.’ So it is vital to preserve the mystery of monarchy, for fear of undeceiving the mob. ‘We must not let daylight in upon magic’ – itself a magical phrase which, unaccountably, Prochaska omits. Basically, the proles have to be conned into thinking that they are actually governed by the Queen herself, or they would not suffer themselves to be governed at all. Bagehot doesn’t contemplate the possibility that, even among that educated ten thousand, there might be quite a few who would also find in the monarchy a symbol of their shared history and culture and hence see the Queen not only as the focus for their allegiance but also as the source of legitimate authority which is entitled to command their obedience. For Bagehot, all this is mere flummery which, by a happy accident of history, enables the middle class to get on with the actual business of ruling – the ‘efficient’ part of the constitution as opposed to the ‘dignified’ part, that distinction which is the book’s most memorable legacy.

  Bagehot shows little sense of or interest in constitutional structure. All he is interested in is power, and what he tells us – this is his groundbreaking insight – is that power resides with the majority in the House of Commons and nowhere else, and this is what is so good about the system, for ‘the interlaced character of human affairs requires a single determining energy; a distinct force for each artificial compartment will make but a motley patchwork, if it live long enough to make anything. The excellence of the British constitution is that it has achieved this unity; that in it the sovereign power is single, possible and good.’ Checks and balances are for the birds, or the Americans. Any separation of powers can only be a source of weakness. For Bagehot, writing in 1865, the agonies of the American Civil War had shown that republics were intrinsically weaker than monarchies. The vulgar and benighted Americans had persuaded themselves that their constitution was a work of providential genius, but in truth it was an outdated document which had turned out to be woefully inapplicable to modern conditions.

  We don’t have to wait for the twentieth century to see how short-sighted Bagehot was. Only two years after The English Constitution began to be serialized in the Fortnightly, Disraeli managed to get the Reform Act of 1867 through, and all Bagehot’s comfortable premises were overturned. He never revised the book, but he did write a preface for the second edition of 1872. And what a remarkable transformation of attitude we find in it. Gone is the cheerful confidence of the high Victorian age, in which science and reason would conquer all, and free trade and Mr Babbage’s calculating machines would bring prosperity and leisure to an ever-expanding middle class. All at once we find ourselves lapped in the apprehensive gloom of the later Victorians. Bagehot’s own high colour and high spirits seem to be fading too. His health, never strong though he kept up a hearty front, had been declining for years and he was carried off by pneumonia in the spring of 1877. By the end, he seems to belong with the sad sages in the Watts room. The modern world takes him aback, he had not bargained for it and he doesn’t care for it. That ‘marvel of intelligible government’ which the English had had the luck to stumble on was not turning out to be as robust as he thought. He saw it as futile to imagine that the enlargement of the electorate would improve the system. He didn’t shrink from saying that ‘I am exceedingly afraid of the ignorant multitude of the new constituencies’.

  But even these fresh apprehensions do not represent a settled state of mind. He looks around a few years after Disraeli’s thunderbolt and sees, to his relief and surprise, that ‘Thus far, my fears that the working classes would take all the decisions to themselves – would combine as a class and legislate for their class interests – have not been realised . . . In the main, things go on much as before. The predominance remains as yet where it ought to be: in the hands of leisure, of property and of intelligence.’

  So Bagehot ends his sadly shortened life in a mixture of funk and bewilderment. He really has no more idea than anyone else how things are going to pan out. He can offer no rational prognosis for the long-or even medium-term future of the British constitution. This mental paralysis surely arises from his failure to examine the structure and history of those arrangements with any sustained seriousness. What he offers us is a charming snapshot, coloured by his own prejudices and fears. The English Constitution is the first selfie. His confusion is compounded by the fashionable Social Darwinism that slips into his later writings, notably in Physics and Politics. It is surprising to see a man so proud of his cool and sceptical temper swallowing great gulps of Herbert Spencer. The fittest survive, the losers deserve to lose. ‘The majority of the “groups” which win and conquer are better than the majority of those which fail and perish.’ That is the way the world improves. We have to discard ‘the mistaken ideas of unfit men and beaten races’. Bagehot has few tears to shed for the losers. ‘I confess to having little compassion for the toiling masses of unknown men, whose lives are mired in misery and pain.’ He attributes this to the terrible strains his mother’s long-term insanity had placed on her only son. ‘I sometimes feel that each of us is born with a measure of compassion, which is easily exhausted in this suffering world.’ Bagehot can at least claim to have been a pioneer of compassion fatigue. This isn’t just an unattractive way to look at the progress of the human race. It was also apparently contradicted by the experience of the 1860s and 1870s, for who were coming out on top but the lower classes, those very people who were ‘clearly wanting in the nicer part of those feelings which, taken together, we call the sense of morality’? The unfittest were not only surviving but triumphing, and of course there were too many of them, for like many such pessimists, Bagehot worried about the over-breeding of the underclass.

  It seems something of a mystery that Bagehot should endure as an icon of sagacity. No doubt his role as the founding deity of the Economist must have a good deal to do with it, not simply because of the worldwide success of that journal but because its prosperity enabled it to finance elaborate publication of Bagehot’s work and because his editor St John-Stevas and his biographer Alastair Buchan were long associated with the paper. And the cocksure, worldly-wise tone of its columns is a living memorial to Walter Bagehot.

  The one exception to the uncritical reception comes from a writer whose only connection with Bagehot was that he happened to live near his home town of Langport, Somerset. Prochaska doesn’t mention C. H. Sisson’s The Case of Walter Bagehot (1972) among the list of books he has consulted, but it is an acerbic and indispensable corrective to the excessive worship of the Greatest Victorian. Nobody could have been less like Bagehot than Charles Sisson, a modest, understated man equally distinguished as a poet and a civil servant. Sisson understood the deep springs of allegiance and the poetry of public service. No other critic has pinpointed the unconscious philistinism, the underlying money worship, the breezy swank which made Bagehot such a legend in his lifetime and such a warning to ours.

  When people talk about the toxic influence of journalism, they generally mean the salacious intrusions and excesses of the tabloids. If he had been around today, Bagehot would have subscribed to Hacked Off. In his own time, he was grateful that ‘our newspapers do not lift the veil of private life; they do not tell the inner weakness of public men or the details of their “
habit as they live”.’ Thank heavens, for ‘an incessant press dealing with real personalities would sicken its readers and would drive sensitive men from public life.’ Alas, readers’ stomachs and the sensibilities of would-be public men have turned out to be made of tougher stuff.

  But the higher journalism that Bagehot did so much to pioneer is not without its downside. For again and again, it has turned out to be the higher journalism, as practised by, say, the Economist, the BBC and The Times, which has been deaf to the deeper passions of men and failed to grasp the enduring force of attachment to nationality and religion and the unquenched thirst for equality. The most potent resentments at work in Europe today are those provoked by inequality, mass immigration and the incursions of the European Union. And they are precisely those with which the elite media are most reluctant to engage. We can be sure, I think, that Bagehot too would have pooh-poohed these concerns as outdated prejudices of the coarse, contracted masses. He tells us, quite early on, that he had resolved as a young man ‘to take this world lightly’. The trouble is that so many people will insist on taking it seriously.

  LORD ROSEBERY: THE PALM WITHOUT THE DUST

  The schoolmaster William Johnson is remembered for three things, although not under that name. He wrote the most famous of all translations from Greek lyric verse, ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’; he wrote the words of the ‘Eton Boating Song’; and in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.’ Ten years later, Johnson was sacked for fondling one pupil too many and changed his name to Cory. After his death, Warre-Cornish published his old friend’s letters and journals. Unfortunately, the collapse of Rosebery’s administration after only fifteen months was all too fresh in people’s minds and Johnson/Cory’s verdict stuck. No other prime minister in British history has surrendered power quite so limply, none more ignominiously except Anthony Eden after Suez.

  Like Eden, Rosebery was a golden boy (both were made foreign secretary at the age of thirty-eight). Adoring crowds followed him throughout his career. Leo McKinstry in this excellent new biography makes a case for him being the first modern celebrity (but what about Nelson?). The music halls rang to the words: ‘Nearly everyone knows me, from Smith to Lord Rosebery, / I’m Burlington Bertie from Bow.’ His daughter Peggy’s wedding drew crowds almost as big as for the Queen’s jubilees. Thousands of spectators wore primroses as a gesture to the family name. The London Evening News printed its afternoon editions on primrose paper. Margot Asquith said that ‘when the Prince of Wales went up the aisle, he was a nobody compared to Rosebery.’ Until 1951 the Scottish football team would often turn out in primrose and rose hoops, the racing colours of Rosebery, who was their honorary president. Long after his ill-fated premiership, well-wishers from Edward VII downwards wanted him to come back and could not stop wondering what he would do next. In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, one of the first questions the sceptical journalist asks the Time Traveller is: ‘These chaps here say you have been travelling into the middle of next week! Tell us all about little Rosebery, will you?’

  He had it all and was famous for having it all. As a young man touring America, he was said to have boasted that he had three ambitions: to marry an heiress, to win the Derby and to become prime minister (McKinstry can’t decide whether this story is apocryphal – after all, Rosebery was supposed to have been speaking at the Mendacious Club in Washington). He overfulfilled his programme, winning the Derby three times and marrying not just any old heiress but Hannah de Rothschild, who brought him Mentmore, that vast treasure house in the Vale of Aylesbury, designed by Paxton of Crystal Palace fame on much the same scale and brimming with booty from Versailles and the Doges’ Palace. According to Henry James, Hannah was ‘large, coarse, Hebrew-looking, with hair of no particular colour and personally unattractive’ (ah, the exquisite sensibility of the novelist), but he had to concede that she was good-natured, sensible and kind, and the twelve years she and Rosebery had together were the happiest of his life. She died of typhoid in 1890. Rosebery was never quite the same and never married again.

  Was he gay? McKinstry doesn’t think so; others do and go on about it, though without much reliable evidence, since the principal witnesses for the gay thesis are the notorious forger and fantasist Edmund Backhouse and the homophobe Lord Queensberry, who tried without success to rope him into the Wilde scandal. Rosebery might have married Princess Victoria, Edward VII’s shy middle daughter, if her parents had not objected so violently – the only occasion on which he was found to be not grand enough. But then again he might not. My guess is that, in later life anyway, he would have preferred a book and a decanter to sex of any sort. Those who believe that hypersensitivity to personal criticism is proof of homosexual leanings have not met enough politicians. Apart from Mentmore, Rosebery also had Dalmeny, a Victorian Gothic palace on the Firth of Forth, plus the ancient fortress of Barnbougle in its grounds, which he restored and used as a retreat from his weekend guests (one weekend he appeared at Dalmeny only once, to fetch a penknife from the library); the Durdans, a much-loved low rambling lodge at Epsom for the racing; a town house in Berkeley Square; a fabulous villa on the Bay of Naples; and a couple of large shooting lodges in Norfolk and Midlothian. When his horse Ladas II was running in the Derby, he hired a special train to bring the colt and his attendants from Newmarket to Epsom. When the horse won, the crowd went wild. The next day at the Durdans Lord Rosebery stood on his head on the hearthrug.

  In short, Rosebery was spoilt. Everyone said he was spoilt. Margot Asquith, who had once been in love with him, said: ‘Selfish is too small a word for him. His selfishness is colossal . . . He cannot get away from himself.’ Rosebery wallowed in this reputation, challenging his friends to say whether they thought him a spoilt child and recording in his diary instances of his indulgences: ‘Did a selfish thing for dinner. Drank some ’48 claret alone.’ At the same time, like many sybarites, he was drenched in self-pity, deploring the emptiness of a life of pleasure and, looking back, saw his existence as a dark tunnel. Simplicity of life was the only answer, but one not adopted at Mentmore, where, as that waspish paedophile Loulou Harcourt claimed, ‘truffles seem to be treated here much as potatoes elsewhere.’

  It was not just that Rosebery had always had his own way and ‘never learned to obey’, as A. G. Gardiner put it in his famous pen portrait. He also had a suspicious, prickly nature and bore grudges for an eternity. After Lewis Carroll reported him to the dean of Christ Church for bunking off a maths lecture, Rosebery refused to read Alice in Wonderland for nearly thirty years. Of these traits, too, he was well aware. In claiming (mendaciously?) never to have had the slightest ambition to be prime minister, he asserted: ‘I realised long ago, in 1895, my unfitness for office. I am not sufficiently pliant, patient or accommodating.’ He held a celebration dinner at the Durdans every year on the anniversary of the vote which brought his government down. The fact that his administration fell on such a trivial issue as whether the army had sufficient reserves of cordite (which it had) shows how feeble was its will to survive.

  True, he had difficult colleagues: Gladstone by now querulous, rambling, half-blind, looking like a witch in his dark goggles, ‘that crazed old man Merrypebble’, as the Queen called him; Lord Granville, alternately known as ‘Pussy’ or ‘Granny’, whose bladder was so weak he had to have a chamberpot kept in the cabinet room; Sir William ‘Jumbo’ Harcourt, bullying, umbrageous, foul-tempered, egged on by his endlessly conspiring son Lewis, ‘Loulou’, when he was not chuckling over his collection of child pornography, said to be the largest in the country. Then there was the Queen, who in old age was less inclined than ever to acknowledge that she was supposed to be a constitutional monarch: ‘I urged Lord Rosebery not to bring too many matters before the cabinet as nothing was decided there and it would be be
tter to discuss everything with me and Mr Gladstone.’ She repeatedly conspired with Lord Salisbury to unseat the Liberals. As for the speech from the throne, she refused point-blank to read out Rosebery’s proposals for disestablishing the Church in Scotland and Wales. What a crew. But then cabinets are always full of duds and malcontents and intriguers, and any prime minister who hopes to survive must simply push on regardless. But Rosebery could do nothing regardless. The strains of office made his chronic insomnia insupportable without vast doses of morphine, not to mention draughts of porter in the middle of the night. Even then he could not sleep and would go for midnight drives, first by carriage and later by car, knocking up his chauffeur at all hours. It is piquant to think of those two drugged insomniacs, Archie Rosebery and Marcel Proust, simultaneously barrelling through the night, comforted by the moonlight and the scent of the blossom in the hedgerows.