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

by Lawrence James

  Yet mastery of the electoral apparatus did not mean that aristocratic politicians were cocooned from outside pressures, whether from voters or boroughmongers seeking favours, or, on occasions, the masses. Even an ostensibly tame MP could disregard the wishes of his patron. In 1795 William Bontine, who had been elected as member for Dunbartonshire through the influence of the Tory third Duke of Montrose, told his patron that he could no longer ‘satisfy’ his conscience by voting for Pitt’s repressive domestic policies. He resigned and the Duke gracefully accepted, acknowledging Bontine’s ‘delicate and nice sense of honour’.34

  The will of the masses expressed itself in various and sometimes unnerving ways. That ‘liberty’ which the aristocracy boasted was under its protection was also a slogan which could bring noisy and belligerent mobs on to the streets. They regularly appeared throughout the century to protest against genuine and perceived encroachments on ‘liberty’, which included excise duties, militia drafts and proposals for Catholic emancipation. In the early 1760s Londoners demonstrated on behalf of John Wilkes, a radical journalist and politician, and against highhanded government censorship of the press. Citizens everywhere had the right to petition the Crown and the number and content of their petitions served as a rough barometer of public opinion. Noblemen, and for that matter the Crown, were regularly exposed to often savage criticism and ridicule in newspapers and pamphlets and by cartoonists.

  From the 1760s onwards there was evidence of growing disquiet about the glaring faults in the electoral system. It was being reduced to a form of calculus in which party managers totted up the number of seats available, assessed the costs of acquiring them and haggled with their owners. The result was stability and (the loss of America aside) effective government, but the reputation and tone of Parliament were being blighted. This worried Pitt, who, in 1785, proposed a bill concocted, in his own phrase, to secure a ‘right balance’. The new equilibrium would require thirty-six rotten boroughs voluntarily to surrender their rights in return for compensation, and their members to be allocated to new seats in areas of expanding population. Privately, Pitt hoped that this measure would keep ‘nabobs and peculators of all descriptions’ out of the Commons and so, indirectly, reinforce the ascendancy of the landed interest.35

  Lord North would have none of this. The Constitution was an ‘ancient, venerable, substantial fabric’ which was about to be vandalised by ‘decorating it with modern frippery’. Antiquity was the yardstick of soundness and North was confident that the ‘guardians of freedom’ would always find their way into the Commons.36 The old order was saved by 248 votes to 174. What was significant in terms of the future was that North and his allies regarded the present Constitution as immutable and permanent. So too was the ascendancy of the nobility, or so it seemed.

  16

  A Fair Kingdom: Fame,

  Taste and Fashion

  The aristocrats who dominated eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain were highly visible public figures, whose daily lives and conduct were under constant scrutiny. Forever changing, aristocratic aesthetics offered the middle orders a guide as to what was desirable, proper and, therefore, worth imitating. Ordinary people were not only allowed to inspect the houses of noblemen, they were able to peer into their intimate lives through the prism of the press. Between about 1680 and 1710 a highly significant but little noticed revolution occurred in Britain: the emergence of newspapers as a force in political and social life. In 1714 2.5 million newspapers were printed in London and the provinces, and titles and circulations soared during the next hundred years.

  The aristocracy provided journalists with a vast amount of copy which was avidly read, mostly by men and women of the middle class. Newspapers printed routine announcements as to which peers were arriving in London, Bath and later Brighton, and there were lists of aristocratic births, marriages, illnesses and deaths with appropriate details. In January 1758 the London Public Advertiser announced the death of the sixth Duke of Hamilton from an ‘inflammation of the bowels’, and reported a wedding in which the bride was ‘a beautiful young lady with a handsome fortune and every other gratification necessary to render the married state happy’.1 Such material obviously appealed to the bon ton, who were eager to keep abreast of metropolitan gossip.2

  High-life scandal was soon established as a press staple, although editors always had to be circumspect, or risk a challenge or a horse-whipping. In 1824 the ‘Fashionable Herald’ column of Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (which relished this kind of story) announced that: ‘Lord ++++ is given to understand that Lady ++++ has been called “a person of doubtful character by Sir +++++”’.3 Sexual innuendo, often coyly written, was very popular, although it was only fully intelligible to a limited circle. Outsiders drew their own conclusions, tutted and enjoyed the frisson of sharing in part the secret lives of their betters.

  Aristocratic entertainments were regularly reported, often in a grotesquely obsequious prose. Four hundred guests turned up for a ball held by the Countess of Galloway in June 1800, and readers of The Oracle heard how she and her daughters ‘displayed all the assiduities of which warm hospitality and good breeding are susceptible in the first rank’. These ladies were all but outshone by the ‘youth and beauty’ of the Marchioness of Donegal, whose ‘elegant’ dress was worn with ‘much grace and dignity’.4

  The fictional counterpart of this type of reporting was the ‘silver fork’ novel mostly written by and for women, which enjoyed a large readership. They were picaresque high-life adventures, and their content and mildly scandalous flavour was caught by a 1785 puff for Anna, or the Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, ‘written from real life’ by ‘a lady’ and dedicated to Princess Charlotte, George III’s daughter; its chapter headings included ‘The Kept Mistress’, ‘Immaculate Peer’ and ‘Masquerade Adventure’.5 Levées, salons and grand balls were the background to Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, which appeared anonymously in 1816. The ‘world of fashion’, she believed, was ‘like a fairy kingdom’ whose inhabitants’ wit, manners and sophistication had made them perfect. Amusement and an ‘incessant hurry after novelty’ dominated their lives and relationships.6 Her readers wanted to enter this magic world and Lady Caroline was a well-qualified guide. She was an earl’s daughter who had married Lord Melbourne, the future Whig Prime Minister, was divorced and subsequently became the mistress of Lord Byron and, it was rumoured, the Duke of Wellington.

  Those outside this enchanted domain of handsome lords, demure beauties, gossiping peeresses, witty badinage and self-indulgence were drawn towards it like moths to a candle, an illumination provided by the press and silver fork novels. Some writers warned their impressionable younger readers that the world of the bon ton was an amoral hothouse whose pleasures were artificial and unsatisfying. This was the message of A Sentimental Journey, written by ‘a Lady’ and serialised in the Lady’s Magazine in 1773. Her heroine wisely wonders whether ‘politeness’ is a poor substitute for ‘humanity’ and, after an assembly, decides that the ‘Trifling elegancies of high life too frequently make us forget what is essential to happiness.’7

  The real or imagined ambience of society and those eager to break into it brings us close to the familiar modern world of ‘celebrity’. In essence, it was an eighteenth-century invention and was then called ‘fame’. Fame was the goal of the vain and ambitious outsider, and it was as brittle and transient as modern celebrity. As Dr Johnson tartly observed:

  Unnumber’d Suppliants crowd Preferment’s Gate

  Athirst for wealth and burning to be great,

  Delusive Fortune hears th’incessant call,

  They mount, they shine, evaporate and fall.

  Fame required press coverage and aristocratic patronage. Both were extended to the mistresses of peers, beautiful girls, often from nowhere, who thrived on notoriety. In 1758 the Public Advertiser contrived what must have been the first photocall when it arranged for a famous courtesan, Kitty Fisher, to fall from her horse i
n Hyde Park to reveal her thigh and perhaps more (knickers were then not worn) to watching crowds.8 A nobleman’s mistress attracted press attention and secured status for herself and her keeper. On arriving in Paris, gentlemen undertaking the Grand Tour felt immediately obliged to take one of the ‘Filles D’Opera’ into their protection.9

  In the same year, the necessities of the fashionable aristocrat were enumerated as membership of White’s Club (celebrated for gambling), horses at Newmarket and ‘an actress in keeping’.10 When ordering his wife’s portrait from Joshua Reynolds, the second Lord Bolingbroke instructed the artist ‘to give her the eyes of Nelly O’Brien [a well-known courtesan], or it will not do’.11

  Reynolds would have known what was expected from him. He was a tireless and unashamed self-promoter and a toady to the aristocratic patrons who helped him. Speaking with his Devon burr and having gained the fame he had craved, Reynolds told young painters that they would never succeed as artists unless they secured public fame. ‘I never saw so vulgar and so familiar a forward fellow,’ sneered one aristocrat, but his fellows were glad to have Reynolds portray themselves, their wives and mistresses.

  Reynolds was a member of the Dilettanti Society, which had been founded in 1734 to distil and define the elements of taste. Aristocratic collectors rubbed shoulders with artists and together they drank wine, examined works of art (chiefly classical) and endeavoured to create and promote a scientific and absolute rationale for connoisseurship.12 It was synonymous with taste and exclusive to collectors who had studied and discussed shade, colour and form. When the aristocratic connoisseur evaluated a painting, he talked with authority; knowledge separated him from the mere collector who hoarded indiscriminately. His rooms were crammed not just with works of art, but curios and natural history specimens which intrigued or amazed onlookers, but had no aesthetic merit. Typical were the stuffed birds, fossils, shells from the cabinet of ‘a gentleman under misfortune’ which were auctioned at his creditors’ request in 1785.13

  The informed pursuit of beauty had close affinities with the pursuit and possession of beautiful women. Italian mistresses were among the trophies of the Grand Tour and aristocratic mothers rightly feared that their charms would prepare their sons for lives of vice and indolence.14 Two leading Dilettanti, the fourth Earl of Sandwich and Sir Francis Dashwood Bt., were infamous rakes and the connection between dissipation and connoisseurship was lampooned by Thomas Rowlandson’s The Connoisseurs, painted about 1800. Clinical aesthetic judgement and sexual voyeurism are linked by three connoisseurs peering at a painting of a voluptuous Susanna surprised by the peeping elders. The trio clearly desire to possess both the image and the person of Susanna.15

  Rowlandson’s satire on the motives of the connoisseurs was a symptom of a new public attitude towards art which was critical of its dominance by the nobility. The essentially aristocratic absolutism of taste belonged to that ancien régime of the mind and spirit which had been overthrown in France in 1789. There, significantly, the royal collection in the Louvre was opened to every citizen in 1793. In Britain art was largely hidden from view in private collections. Artists were under the thumb of the Royal Academy, an exclusive and intensely conservative association of established figures, which had close links with the aristocratic connoisseurs who flocked to its annual exhibition held early in May.

  Benjamin Haydon called it a ‘despotism’ which resembled a ‘House of Lords’ without a Commons or a King. The Academy’s outlook was patrician and haughty as the painter John Henning recalled. As a young artist in 1810 he had asked permission of the seventh Earl of Elgin to draw the marbles from the Parthenon which he purchased from the Turkish government. The Earl refused because Henning had no recommendation from an academician. ‘My Lord,’ he protested, ‘I cannot understand why noblemen or gentlemen should dare not allow an individual to draw or model from the works of art in their possession.’ This was the ‘popery of art’ and a form of slavery. As for the Royal Academy, it represented a ‘selfish spirit of exclusion’. Elgin, who had once been blackballed by the Dilettanti, warmed to Henning’s spirit and relented.16

  The ‘selfish spirit of exclusion’, the rigid orthodoxies of taste and the veneration of the Classical retarded creativity, and private collections hid genius from the public. Hennings’s feelings blended with that wider movement for political and institutional reform which was then gathering momentum. The aristocracy’s grip on taste and the arts reflected its political dominance and was, as Hennings’s choice of the words ‘popery’ and ‘slavery’ implied, autocratic and unjust.

  Wider questions emerged: was art like a rotten borough, a possession over which the owner had an unqualified right? Did the aristocracy have the same monopoly of wisdom in connoisseurship as it did in politics? These issues were raised in a symbolic contest fought in 1816 over the future of the Elgin Marbles. A mainly Tory Parliamentary committee was appointed to assess the ‘merits and value’ of the sculpture and it decided in favour of what today would be called ‘art for the people’. Its report claimed that Elgin’s collection would ‘improve our national taste for the Fine Arts and diffuse a more perfect knowledge of them throughout this Kingdom’. The Times concurred and hoped the Marbles would both inspire native artists and stimulate the taste of the public once they were in the British Museum, which, since 1810, was legally bound to admit anyone ‘of decent appearance’.

  This decision was a reverse for the Dilettanti, who wanted the Marbles to have been placed on the market for private collectors. This principle of delivering art to the people was further advanced a few years later, when Lord Liverpool and Sir Robert Peel backed plans for the National Gallery, whose exhibits would include works bought from aristocratic collections. Inviting the people to discover and enjoy art was a Tory concession which did not directly compromise the aristocratic principle. Paintings and sculpture were still private property at the disposal of their owners, but now the state competed with collectors when they came up for sale.

  The preferences and influence of aristocratic taste remained. John Constable, who wanted to paint landscapes, complained about commissions for portraits and the tendency of patrons to be swayed by the fashions of France. In 1823 a friend predicted that ‘English boobies, who dare not trust their own eyes, will discover your merits when they find you are admired in Paris.’ Constable made compromises, but Benjamin Haydon refused to and discovered painfully that potential patrons did not recognise his unique genius. In consequence he spent most of career teetering on the brink of insolvency. In 1829 he wrote enviously of the young Edwin Landseer, whose portraits of animals and children secured abundant commissions, riding on his ‘blood horse’ (thoroughbred) with the ‘airs of a man of fashion’. Haydon consoled himself that he had not surrendered to the ‘vices of fashion’.17

  Haydon’s use of the word ‘fashion’ is instructive: ‘a man of fashion’ indicates social status and the ‘vices of fashion’ refers to prevailing, if ephemeral, addictions. The nature and manifestations of eighteenth-century fashion and how and why it changed have been extensively analysed.18 From the point of view of this history what matters is that the rest of the world was on the whole content to follow whatever found favour with the aristocracy from styles of dress to musical taste. Political ascendancy went hand in hand with cultural ascendancy and both were challenged in the next century.

  Aristocratic cultural power was demonstrated in 1728 when only the determined influence and financial backing of the Duchess of Queensberry secured the first production of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which broke with convention and verged on the subversive. A ‘prodigious concourse of nobility and gentry’ gathered for the first night and applauded generously when the curtain fell. Gay was delighted and confessed to Jonathan Swift his amazement at and gratitude to the Duchess’s ‘brave spirit’ and ‘goodness’.19

  Aristocrats dictated musical taste, although they disagreed passionately over the merits of one composer or style over another. In 1720 half o
f the twenty directors of the Royal Academy of Music were peers, some of whom, like the first Earl of Egmont, were keen amateur players. He was devoted to Handel’s music, the popularity of which was ‘convincing proof of our national taste’ according to a newspaper of 1754.20 Over ten years before he had abandoned composing ‘Italian’ operas which had been favoured by the nobility, but which upset patriots. In 1737 a newspaper deplored the ‘vast sums of money’ paid to Italian performers for a decadent form of entertainment. ‘The ancient Romans . . . did not admit of any effeminate music, singing and dancing on their stage, till luxury had corrupted their morals and the loss of liberty followed soon after.’21

  Xenophobes of the John Bull tendency feared that noblemen paying thousands of pounds to hire and listen to famous Italian castrati were a symptom of impending moral collapse. The aristocracy’s infatuation with foreign, particularly Italian novelties was unpatriotic: they drained the country of money and encouraged the physical and moral ennervation of the nation’s leaders. Solid, British sustenance was scorned by men of fashion, who ‘regale on macaroni or piddle with an ortolan’ and judge the quality of a meal by its cost rather than its constituents complained a journalist in 1754.22 Tenants languished while their landlord trifled with alien frivolities. They were spurned by the new squire of Harpswell in Lincolnshire and his tenants were grateful:

  Their consequence some may presume they advance,

  By learning the capers and vapours of France;

  Home-bred and home-fed, what we tenants admire,

  Is the true English spirit display’d in our Squire.23

  This young fellow (reminiscent of Goldsmith’s Squire Lumpkin) had clearly not made a Grand Tour.