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

by Lawrence James

  Magnificence was the mirror of status and wealth. Of course the aristocracy had already been mentally conditioned to absorb the concept of magnificence: it had been present in the courts of the medieval and Tudor monarchs. There is a familiar ring to the analysis of magnificence written in 1614 by Wotton, the diplomat and purveyor of art to the aristocracy. Prudently, he cited James I’s favourite George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, as the greatest exemplar of magnificence. He had ‘a fine and unaffected politeness’ and had the capacity ‘to sift a question well, and supply his own defects by drawing unto him the best interests of experience and knowledge’. He was, Wotton thought, ‘more magnificent’ than Elizabeth’s favourite Essex, who, revealingly, had never built or adorned a great house of his own.19

  Buckingham did both. His London seat, York House, possessed a gallery which contained the Duke’s recently acquired art collection, which included del Sartos, Titians, Raphaels and Tintorettos. All were status symbols, a quick fix of magnificence for an arriviste aristocrat who wanted instant recognition as a collector. He was no cognoscenti, for, unlike Charles I or Arundel, Buckingham knew little if anything about the nuances of style and techniques of the painters he collected.20

  Even if he placed rarity and its concomitant cost above all else, Buckingham was helping to establish an aristocratic tradition of collecting works of art which lasted until the late nineteenth century, when the money for such luxuries began to run out. The international culture of the aristocracy survived too, although its presence in the courts of James I and Charles I had provoked criticism. Xenophobia and religious bigotry combined in allegations that the aristocracy had become effete and unwarlike (this would be disproved in 1642) and that its taste in art was subversively Popish.21 Malevolent Puritan philistinism combined with the poverty of exiled royalist peers led to the sale and dispersal of several large collections, including Charles I’s. (Some of Arundel’s sculpture found its way into the Ashmolean Museum and many of Hamilton’s paintings passed via the Habsburg collections to the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna.)

  The Grand Tour was thus established as an aristocratic rite of passage. The fruits of breeding needed watering and care and it provided both. In 1693 John Locke likened the Grand Tour to the careful polishing which transformed the uncut diamond (virtue) into the perfect jewel, and for that reason it was the only proper conclusion to a humanistic education.22 Italy remained the ultimate goal, but more and more time was spent in France learning what was considered the purest form of French in the Loire valley towns, and testing fluency in the salons of the noblesse in Paris, where the acolyte was introduced to the arts of polite and witty conversation. Instruction in riding and swordsmanship balanced intellectual fine tuning with muscular accomplishments.

  The love affair between the aristocracy and the classical and Renaissance imagination continued to be consummated in Italy. Old aesthetic preferences remained strong, with eighteenth-century noblemen favouring ‘history’ (i.e. narrative) paintings that depicted historical and mythological scenes which illustrated moral and philosophic themes. Hercules’s choice between virtue and vice was popular, so too were dramatic deaths like that of Cleopatra. Copies of celebrated works were acceptable: Houghton Hall in Norfolk has a bronze of the Vatican Laocoön that was purchased by Sir Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford.

  Tastes confirmed by the Grand Tour were catered for in London’s art market, which expanded swiftly after the 1680s. It supplied what its patrons wanted: material imported from the Continent. Native artists were dismayed and complained. In 1737 the painter and satirist William Hogarth grumbled about the arrival of shiploads of ‘dead Christs, Holy Families, Madonnas and other dismal subjects’ on which the names of Italian masters had been written. Gullible buyers were beguiled by the dealer’s patter. ‘Sir, I find you are no connoisseur – That picture, I assure you, is in Alesso Boldovinetto’s second best manner, boldly painted and truly sublime, the contour gracious; the air of the head in the high Greek taste, and a most divine idea it is.’23

  Hogarth was making a case for British artists whose work, portraits apart, were then despised by noble patrons. There were other criticisms of the aristocracy’s mania for foreign tastes and manners, and these increased in intensity as notions of British nationalism began to infiltrate the general consciousness. In the 1770s the Macaroni Club, whose young members had all made the Grand Tour, attracted satirists who denounced them as un-English and unmanly, two attributes which were synonymous in the patriotic imagination. In one lampoon a macaroni declares that he is distinguished in society by the odour of his face powder, a French concoction to which he has added a strong hint of violet.24 Vapid dandies with mincing gestures were widely suspected of homosexuality, still, in the popular imagination, an Italian pastime.

  Questions as to whether the nobility somehow lost their Englishness by two- to five- year excursions across Europe belong in the next chapter. What is certain is that the prolonged contacts with the Continent were an antidote to insularity and facilitated a flow of ideas between Britain and Europe and confirmed the aristocracy as part of an international culture. The classical preferences of the nobility permeated the middling orders (or, as they were known by 1800, the middle class) since the great houses and the artwork they housed were open to middle-class inspection whenever their owners were absent. The visitors liked what they saw and were eager to buy copies. Paintings were reproduced by printmakers for general sale and Josiah Wedgwood’s potteries provided fine copies of the medallions and basalt work whose originals could be seen in country houses. Eighteenth-century middle-class consumerism rested on the assumption that aristocratic taste was infallible.

  Magnificence remained desirable. In his influential anatomy of the sublime and beautiful, first published in 1757, Edmund Burke insisted that the ‘great of dimension’ was an element of the sublime in architecture. ‘A great profusion of things which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificence,’ he concluded, vindicating past and present aristocratic taste.25 It was reproduced in the façades of the grand terraces which were constructed in cities and larger towns to house the richer members of the middle class. In London, Bath, Bristol and Leeds lawyers, bankers and merchants occupied houses with collonaded parapets and decorative Corinthian columns and set in rows. Their collective frontage resembled a nobleman’s country house, and sometimes they were set around grassy squares planted with trees which were suggestive of rural parks. Magnificence had been adapted for those rising up the social ladder.

  15

  Public Character: The

  Aristocratic Century

  1714–1815

  Selecting a single phrase to sum up a hundred years of diverse human achievements is a tricky business and the result can never be wholly satisfactory. One recent historian plumped for ‘aristocratic century’ and another characterised the period as Britain’s ‘ancien régime’, which links it with the absolutist monarchies of Europe.1 These titles seem apt for a book about the nobility, although it should be remembered that the British ancien régime emerged in 1815 as secure and confident, in contrast to its Continental counterparts, which had been severely shaken by the French Revolution and the wars it spawned.

  There are valid alternatives. It can be called the age of revolutions (agricultural, industrial, American and French), or of wars (too many to list), or of intellectual and scientific enlightenment, all choices that remind us just how much happened and changed during this century. The age might also be named after the trio of Hanoverian Georges whose reigns it almost spans. Unlike that of their predecessors, their freedom of action was confined by the Glorious Revolution, which left them passive if not always contented bystanders rather than active makers of history. This was left to their aristocratic ministers and Parliaments.

  What is beyond doubt is that the aristocracy did enjoy an astonishing ascendancy in public life thanks to those networks of obligation and reciprocity, which, together with adroit Parliamenta
ry and electoral management, kept it in power. Equally remarkable was the capacity of the nobility to convince people that its monopoly of power was indispensable, that the aristocracy was the keystone of the nation. ‘How long do you think the Constitution and liberties of the country would survive the loss of public character in the aristocracy?’ the MP Thomas Creevey asked his patron the Duke of Norfolk in 1818. The Irish writer Thomas Moore compared the peerage to ‘a breakwater between the people and the throne, in a state of double responsibility – to liberty on one side, and authority, on the other’.2

  Moreover, and this seemed an impregnable argument for its champions, the system worked to the nation’s advantage. This was why, in 1791, the new Constitution for Upper and Lower Canada included provisions for governors to appoint life members to the upper chambers of the legislature, making them in effect the counterpart of the House of Lords. It was even suggested that the King might confer ‘Hereditary Titles of Honour’ on these lawmakers.3 An aristocracy was integral to what, in 1830, Wellington praised as the ‘most efficient legislative body in the world’, which, for all its eccentricities, had presided over unprecedented prosperity and Britain’s emergence as the first global superpower.4

  All this was true. Aristocratic politicians had overseen the transformation of Britain into a commercial, industrial and maritime power and contrived and implemented the strategies which facilitated imperial expansion in the Caribbean, North America (where Canada was kept and the future United States lost), India, Australasia and South Africa. A landowning nobility was glad to do all within its power to promote the enrichment of the nation and encourage the capitalist enterprises that made this possible. The aristocracy also accommodated the interests of commercial lobbyists, of whom the most influential were investors in the East India Company and the West Indies plantocracy and its accomplices in the slave trade. Other lesser pressure groups whose voices were heard and heeded in Parliament pleaded for private bills for new canals, turnpikes, docks and agricultural enclosures.

  Between 1688 and 1815 Parliament passed over fourteen thousand laws framed to facilitate and regulate investment, manufacturing and shipping. The generation of wealth occupied the greater part of Parliament’s time; in 1784 parliamentary committees were investigating petitions from, among others, Nottingham shopkeepers seeking legislation to enforce the collection of small debts, ropemakers seeking closer supervision of their trade and licensed peddlars and hawkers from Staffordshire seeking protection from outsiders. Unlike its French counterpart, the British ancien régime took very good care of entrepreneurs and manufacturers.

  Aristocratic ministers were also concerned with the health of money markets. These were now inextricably linked with the state through the Bank of England, founded in 1693, which controlled the money supply, and the National Debt, which had been launched in 1696 to finance what turned out to be over a hundred years of intermittent wars. Investors loaned money to the government which guaranteed the value of the stock (consols) and paid annual dividends. The soundness of public credit became a yardstick for the economic health of the country; political mischances and crises shook money markets, as they did in 1797 when consols briefly plummetted. As governors of an industrious and flourishing nation, the nobility were like a self-perpetuating board of a company who were expected to listen to the shareholders and deliver the dividends.

  Noblemen and their sons were actively engaged in British commercial and colonial enterprises. They commanded the fleets and armies which secured markets, saw off French, Dutch and Spanish interlopers and conquered territories in North America and India. Their courage and tenacity gave a lustre of martial glory and kudos to the aristocracy, for victorious generals and admirals were ennobled. Sometimes, as with Lord St Vincent or Lord Nelson of the Nile, their titles incorporated their triumphs. Such men formed a new, heroic branch of the nobility, which was exalted as a collective example of a new national spirit.5 It was a compound of pugnacity, resolve and fortitude. All were shown in different ways by George Anson, who earned his barony commanding fleets in the Caribbean and Pacific (taking one around the world), and George Brydges, who was created Lord Rodney after he had restored British naval supremacy in the Caribbean at the Battle of the Saintes in 1782.

  Nelson had dreamed of joining this noblesse d’épée: on the eve of his attack on the French fleet in Abukir Bay in 1798, he declared: ‘Before this time tomorrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.’ By then, what had started life as a royal mausoleum was being colonised by the marble statues of aristocratic admirals and generals, often accompanied by lively carvings of their victories. There were other forms of immortality. Patriotic landlords named their inns after national heroes such as John Manners, Marquess of Granby, a dashing eighteenth-century cavalry general always portrayed bareheaded on inn signs since he had once lost his wig galloping at the French.

  Comparisons were made between these heroes and their Roman counterparts, who, like them, held that service to the state was the highest expression of the virtue latent in men of honour and birth. George III (1760–1820) was displeased when Benjamin West chose to portray General Wolfe and his soldiers in contemporary uniforms rather than Roman armour. Nonetheless, The Death of General Wolfe (he died fighting the French in Canada in 1759) appealed to patriots who purchased prints of the scene, as they did the portraits of victorious generals and admirals. Reports of their exploits helped kindle that sense of unity and national pride which were the key components of a new and intoxicating abstraction, Britishness.

  There was a paradox in all this. An amazingly successful protomodern commercial and industrial state and its sophisticated military and naval resources were controlled by a landed aristocracy which owed its dominance to a mastery of the old political arts of power-broking and wire-pulling. The complex system and its components of patronage, kinship and bribery have been dissected by Sir Lewis Namier, who concluded that they alone explain the maintenance of aristocratic power. Walpoles, Townshends, Pelhams, Stanhopes, Cavendishes, Russells, Campbells and Yorkes intrigued, made and broke promises, flattered and politely bullied kings and scattered largesse to win elections and secure majorities in Parliament. The terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ became meaningless; all that now mattered was distributing rewards to the right people at the right time. As the first de facto Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who held the office from 1721 till 1742, cynically remarked, every man had his price.

  In fact it was never so neat and tidy. Modern reassessments of eighteenth-century politics indicate a significant, residual attachment to traditional loyalties and habits of mind. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, published in 1749, Squire Western damned his sister for a Whig and mocked her metropolitan pretensions, and she responded with contempt for his bucolic boorishness. These caricatures and their comic exchanges were not inventions and must have struck some chords with Fielding’s readers. The backwoodsman Western was clearly a Tory at home in a new Country Party, a loose combination united by its distrust of court venality and Whig chicanery. If he had chosen to enter Parliament, Western might have sat alongside ‘independent’ country squires, a small but influential body that grandee power-brokers ignored at their peril.

  The politically engaged aristocracy formed a close-knit circle whose members were connected by blood, upbringing and education. Of the twenty-six prime ministers who held office between 1714 and 1832, seventeen had been to either Eton or Westminster. Their reputations as the kindergartens of successful politicians attracted aristocratic parents who now preferred public schools to private tutors. By 1800 over two-thirds of the nobility was sending its sons to these establishments, with Eton far and away the favourite choice.6 For the past fifty years, it had become the custom for Eton’s most promising alumni to present portraits of themselves to hang in the provost’s lodgings. Among the likenesses were one Whig politico (Charles James Fox) and a Tory governor-general of Bengal (Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington).

  Hard kno
cks accompanied hard study. Public schools were disorderly, virtually self-governing republics in which the masters exercised a spasmodic and often brutal authority that their pupils sometimes violently resisted. A bloody-minded spirit flourished alongside respect for public duty, and during the latter part of the eighteenth and first of the nineteenth centuries there was a spate of public school insurrections, including three at Eton. George Nugent-Grenville, the future Marquess of Buckingham and a cabinet minister, and Viscount Petersham were among the rebels in 1768. Petersham’s father Lord Harrington ordered his son to submit. ‘Sir, I shall be damned if I do,’ responded the boy. ‘And I will be damned if you don’t,’ answered Harrington. ‘Yes, my lord,’ riposted his son, ‘but you will be damned whether I do or not.’ This was true enough, for Harrington was a celebrated rake who preferred ‘the lowest amusement in the lowest brothels’ to his domestic and public duties.7 A year after, he purchased his son a commission in the Coldstream Guards.

  The hurly-burly of the public school life fostered independence and self-assurance, qualities which distinguished Lord Palmerston, whose ministerial career began in 1809 and ended in 1865, when he was at the start of his third term as Prime Minister. Soon after leaving Harrow in 1800, ‘Pam’ praised the public schools as ‘a nation in miniature’ where the boy who took the lead in games and ‘enterprises . . . for mischief or amusement’ was the one destined to ‘distinguish himself at the head of an army or a council’. Over forty years later he confided to his brother that a minister’s peevishness was the outcome of his never having had ‘the wholesome buffeting of a public school’.8 ‘I owe my spirit of enterprise to the tricks I used to play in this garden,’ Wellington told Etonians during his visit to the school in 1818.