The xenophobes were mistaken. There is abundant evidence which suggests that many dedicated followers of fashion did not shirk their public duties and were not uncaring landlords. Consider the career and interests of James, seventh Earl of Findlater, a Scottish landowner who took the Grand Tour in the company of the neoclassical painter Colin Morrison. He made several extended visits to Paris and Brussels between 1776 and 1784 and between 1790 and his death wandered across central Europe. During this time and because of financial strains, Findlater worked in Dresden as an architect and had his plans published in Les Plans et Desseins tirés de la Belle Architecture, which appeared in Paris in 1798.24 His medical bills indicate either fragile health or hypochondria, although his payments for food and wine indicate a stalwart appetite. There is the distinct likelihood that he was a homosexual, so that his absences abroad were a means to avoid prosecution for what was then a capital offence.
Findlater was clearly a nobleman of taste attuned to current fashions. During a visit to Bath in 1783 he purchased a ‘superfine’ blue coat, ‘fine ostrich feathers’, ‘pomade au jasmin’, a ‘brown Canadian fox muff’ and a swansdown puff for applying powder to his face, and, in Paris, he bought quantities of gold and silver silk. In Bath he dined on English food (eel pie) and foreign (an ‘Italian’ cutlet and chicken fricassee). He subscribed to British Magazine and Les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres et des Artes.25
Findlater also fulfilled his responsibilities as a landowner. He invested in the development of his estates, the construction of a local canal and the rebuilding of the harbour at Banff in Moray. When in Scotland, he gave between seven and eleven shillings a week to the poor. Findlater also funded what was in effect a free health service for his tenants and labourers, paying a local surgeon for their treatment. During 1785 and 1786 the bill came to fifty-three pounds and covered, among other things, quinine, a ‘mercurial purge’, expectorants and ‘extirpating a cancerous tumour’.26 It was a remarkable and humane service and a signal reminder that the pursuit of fashion did not obliterate the traditional social duties of a nobleman.
In 1782 Findlater paid twelve guineas for a pair of fine duelling pistols.27 It was a large sum, but it provided protection for the Earl’s person (Lord North’s carriage had been attacked by a pair of mounted highwaymen near Gunnersbury in 1774) and his honour.28 Gentlemen of all ranks continued to believe that their honour and public reputation demanded that they submitted to tests of courage if these were in any way slighted. By the mid-eighteenth century pistols had become the commonest weapon. Between 1760 and 1820 there were 170 duels which resulted in sixty-nine deaths, and there was an unknown number of confrontations which ended in apologies.29 Prosecutions were infrequent, and during this period there were eighteen trials, fourteen convictions for manslaughter and murder, and just two hangings.
The law was broadly tolerant of duelling. The jurymen in the Macnamara case accepted the plea that the duel was the only way in which the accused could have upheld his honour as an officer and gentleman. The prevailing opinion was expressed in a newspaper editorial of 1789, which accepted that the duel was ‘a remnant of chivalry’, but it was a ‘necessary evil which operates to preserve a proper order in that part of society where laws would be ineffectual’. It was impossible for juries and judges to comprehend the nuances of the arcane code of honour in which the ‘insult of a frown’ or the ‘malignity of emphasis’ were grounds for a challenge. Moreover, the duel protected ‘female innocence’ and preserved ‘the decorum of familiar intercourse, and the respectability of honour’.30
Newspapers and their readers were fascinated by the causes and outcomes of duels. Affronts to honour varied enormously from the trivial to deliberate provocation: ‘allegations of effeminacy’ led to a challenge in 1731, whilst ‘marks of rudeness’ including picking teeth and lounging at a table with his feet in the challenger’s face led to another in 1777.31 One duel in 1824 was a consequence of a squabble over billiards and another concerned ‘unjustifiable assertions’ against a gentleman’s sister, which compelled him to travel from Madras to issue the challenge.32 The voyage was worth it, for his shot shattered the thigh of his sister’s traducer.
Reports of the incidents which culminated in duels added to a perception of the world of fashion as amoral and self-indulgent. Gambling for high stakes, adultery, fornication, drunkenness and violence seemed endemic amongst the bon ton. A joke of 1754 alleged that the difference between prostitutes and ‘fine ladies’ was that the first had a ‘trade’ and that the second lived by smuggling.33 At a ball in 1789, two young ladies were admiring the dress of men and one whispered behind her fan, ‘I am for the undress – what say you?’ ‘I see we are certainly sisters,’ her companion answered, ‘for I was just thinking of the same thing.’34 The louche and purblind pursuit of pleasure led towards decadence and effeteness. It was epitomised by ‘exquisites’ like Lord Dallas in Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, who was ‘quite thorough bred though full of conceit’. His conversation passed effortlessly from the ‘nature of love’ to the beauty of the Greek language and the ‘insipidity of all English society’.35
During the first two decades of the nineteenth century the excesses of the bon ton came under increasing censure and what had once been tolerated or ignored was now being challenged and condemned. During the French wars radicals castigated aristocratic extravagance and found themselves in an alliance of convenience with right-wing patriots. In 1800 the Anti-Jacobin railed against the ‘depravity of the age’, which was manifest in the behaviour of theatre audiences. There were ‘horrible outrages of modesty, the most obscene language, and the most indecent conduct’ in the lobbies and the boxes, where richer patrons sat.36
There were suggestions that the antique codes of honour which sanctioned duelling needed revision to bring them in line with modern reason.37 What moral or logical justifications were there for one section of society to claim immunity from laws which were framed for the whole community? Furthermore, the aristocracy’s resort to duelling set an appalling example to those who looked to it for leadership; in 1810 the Gentleman’s Magazine was disturbed by reports of duels fought by shopkeepers.38 Submission to the ‘cruel and false principles of his class’ drive the gentleman to commit murder argued the Evangelical William Wilberforce in an appeal designed to remind the upper levels of society of their Christian duty.39 Better known for his campaigns against the slave trade and slavery, Wilberforce devoted almost as much energy to persuading the landed classes to reform their lives according to Christian doctrines.
For Wilberforce, perceived aristocratic licentiousness and hedonism set a bad example to the rest of society which looked upwards for moral guidance. Traditional duties were neglected: in 1818 the writer and caricaturist George Cruikshank wrote that ‘Dame Fashion’ was subverting the nobility:
For one rout – for one year she shuts her gate on the poor,
Then the box at the opera, shar’d with a few,
Makes her give up, in church the old family pew.40
There were parallels between the criticism of the aristocracy’s moral failings and assaults on its political power. Both were integral to the ‘old corruption’ which reformers wanted to uproot and both were products of middle-class ideologies which rejected the ‘wisdom of our ancestors’.
There was a paradox here, for the middle class remained in thrall to aristocratic taste. The eighteenth-century consumer revolution had witnessed an increasingly prosperous middle class spending its disposable income on carriages, clothes, furniture, silver and tableware, and clothes which copied styles then in favour with the nobility. Retailers advertised themselves as suppliers of goods or provisions to the ‘nobility and gentry’ to tempt middle-class customers. Middle-class women could pore over prints of the latest Paris fashions in the Lady’s Magazine and instruct the local sempstress to reproduce them. The results could be paraded at social gatherings whose rituals were aristocratic in form, but which had been commercially
organised. A new breed of impresarios organised concerts and masquerades which charged for admission. The beau monde was often present at these entertainments and rubbed shoulders with lesser creatures. Even the ‘impures of Marylebone’ attended a public masquerade at the Pantheon in 1786, mingling with ‘people of fashion’ who maintained ‘that kind of reserve usual for them at guinea masquerades’.41
Commercialisation made art less exclusive and less reclusive. The mushroom growth of the print industry after 1750 meant that the banker or the surgeon could acquire engraved copies of Old Masters and fashionable modern painters such as Reynolds. Living artists got the reproduction fees, which made them less dependent on aristocratic patrons, and the middle-class collector could create his own private gallery.42 Commercialisation infiltrated the world of music. The fourth Earl of Abingdon had been the patron of Haydn’s proposed but later abandoned visit to London in 1782, but it was a professional impresario, Johann Saloman, who organised his concerts during the early 1790s. Their press advertisements carried the usual formula ‘For the Nobility Gentry’, but many others clearly attended, for Haydn was delighted to find that he had established a ‘credit with the common people’.43
The nature of musical performances was very gradually changing. They had always been social occasions at which the fashionable gathered to meet and converse with familiar friends, although this did not mean that they were inattentive audiences.44 This custom had disappeared by the middle years of the nineteenth century, when the aristocracy’s attendance at operas and concerts declined. Middle-class listeners replaced them and tended to concentrate solely and intensely on the music.45
A different kind of earnestness pervaded the middle class’s attitude to visual art, which laid a heavy emphasis on didactic instruction and moral worth. In 1849 the Art Union, which had been formed to mass produce and sell prints to the middle class, was offering The Death of Boadicea, The Fall of Satan and Richard II and Bolingbroke. In the same year, in an analysis of the utilitarian functions of art, a critic referred to its capacity to ‘strengthen the bonds of the social order’ and its ‘moral and social value’.46 This was a long way from the spirit and vision of the Dilettanti, although their principles still animated an older generation of noblemen. In 1845 Wellington told Benjamin Haydon that the aristocracy did not want ‘High Art’, rather it desired ‘first-rate specimens’, by which the Duke meant Old Masters.47
The moral ethos of society was being transformed, slowly and in accord with the temper of the middle classes. The new mood was apparent at Queen Victoria’s court, and after a stay at Windsor in 1838 Charles Greville disapprovingly noted an absence of ‘the sociability which makes agreeableness of an English country house’ and a lack of room for ‘guests to assemble, sit, lounge and chatter’.48 Public antipathy to duelling intensified. In 1842, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel responded by adding clauses to the Articles of War which outlawed it, insisted that officers who fought duels were cashiered and withdrew pension rights from the widows of officers killed in duels.
One stalwart of the anti-duelling movement had been Lord Lovaine MP, who was also a fierce supporter of strict Sabbath observance. Evangelicalism had permeated the aristocracy and with it philistinism. During the 1857 debate on the Obscene Publications Bill, two older peers, Lords Brougham and Lyndhurst, wondered whether many Renaissance paintings might be liable to prosecution. The former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Campbell, was unmoved and horrified by the idea of rich collectors possessing such corrupting material.49 The bill became law and its passage was a significant token of the loss of aristocracy’s influence over matters of social conduct. There was some hankering after the old ways: in 1881 Lord Randolph Churchill challenged Lord Hartington to a duel after he had called him ‘vile, contumacious, and lying’. Hartington apologised.50
17
We Come for
Pheasants: Peers and
Poachers
Poaching remained a constant irritant for the aristocracy. It was both theft and an insolent disparagement, for only the aristocracy and gentry were permitted to kill game. This privilege was confirmed by the 1671 Game Act, which restricted the taking of game to landowners with estates valued at over £100 a year (freehold) and £150 (leasehold). Wealth accumulated through trade or investment was conspicuously disregarded, and a lawyer with thousands in government stocks committed a crime if he snared a rabbit or potted a pheasant. This mandate was defended and enforced by the nobility and gentry and resented by the rest of society. The war of attrition between poachers and landowners intensified during the eighteenth century and was punctuated by increasingly bloody skirmishes.
Faced with an upsurge of poaching in 1779, a despairing Wiltshire peer suggested that the culprits, who were ‘idle fellows’, were corralled, dragged to the nearest recruiting sergeant and drafted as reinforcements for the army in North America.1 It was a solution typical of the times: crime would be reduced by exporting criminals and putting them to good use. It did not work: America was lost, and, like the rest of the country, Wiltshire continued to be plagued by poachers.
If caught, these poachers would have found themselves fighting Americans, whom a British intelligence report had described as infected by doctrines of ‘levellism’ which endowed all men with ‘equality as to birth, fortune and independence’.2 There was no hereditary aristocracy in the colonies, which, in 1776, had repudiated George III’s sovereignty. American law treated slaves as private property, but not deer, hares, rabbits, partridges and pheasants, while French Game Laws were as exclusive as Britain’s and as heartily detested. Welcoming the revolution in France in 1789, a Salisbury newspaper editor noted approvingly that: ‘Our Gallic neighbours are about to establish the right of farmers and tenants to kill game on their own grounds. May our landed interest go and do likewise.’3 Nothing was further from its mind, and during the next twenty years further Game Laws were approved by Parliament with little or no debate. The urgent need to protect game transcended partisan politics and united all but a handful of landowners.
The widespread defiance of the spirit behind the Game Laws is just one of a number of loosely connected forms of resistance to the idea of aristocracy and its social and political manifestations during the last two quarters of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries. American and French revolutionaries vilified the aristocratic principle as irrational and unjust, and specifically excluded aristocracies from the new social and political orders they constructed. American and French constitutional experiments appealed to some within that growing section of British society, the middle class.
Denials of the aristocratic principle were rooted in the thinking of the European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its conclusions were invoked in 1776 by the American Declaration of Independence, which employed the laws of ‘nature and nature’s god’ to vindicate the assumption that all men were ‘of separate and equal station’. The Constitution of the new republic outlawed the creation of a hereditary, titled elite; talent and endeavour dictated an American’s place in the world, not ancestry. An alternative social structure had been born, which won converts in Britain, where its advocates argued that it compared favourably with their own, and was refreshingly free from the corruption which Americans believed irredeemably blighted the old world of hereditary princes and noblemen.
Similar claims were made for the egalitarian and democratic order which emerged (briefly) in republican France after 1792, in which monarchy, aristocracy and the God who sanctioned both were successively abolished. The Rights of Man supplanted the will of God, and this substitution was applauded by British radicals who suspected that the nation’s vaunted liberties and Constitution were a fig leaf which barely concealed an aristocratic dictatorship.
Poachers were not inspired by philosophical abstractions. Their impulses were visceral and rested in a belief that every man had a God-given right to catch, eat or sell all wild creatures. The poacher did not want to remake the
world, he just wished to be left alone to do as he pleased. Yet he was a subversive with a contempt for the law, the legitimate rights and pleasures of the nobility and gentry, and he went abroad armed and at night. When apprehended, poachers insisted, often truculently, that they were exercising their natural rights. ‘My men, what are doing you there?’ a Norfolk squire shouted to a band of nocturnal intruders in his plantation. ‘You bugger, we come for pheasants and pheasants we’ll have them,’ was their reply.4
The squire was backed by a formidable armoury of legislation. In 1707 trading in game was forbidden and throughout the next century the penalties for poaching increased in severity. Fines spiralled and recidivists faced six months in gaol and a whipping, and further terrifying deterrents appeared after 1770. Mantraps which splintered shin bones and spring guns which discharged grapeshot on interlopers were deployed in fields and woodlands. In 1803 the Ellenborough law made an assault on a gamekeeper a capital crime.
Most intimidating of all was the 1723 Black Act, an emergency measure passed hastily and undebated by landowners on the verge of hysteria. Its cause was the ‘Blacks’, a name given to loose associations of audacious and well-armed criminals, chiefly poachers of deer, who operated on horseback in the forests of Berkshire and Hampshire. Sir Horace Walpole’s Whig ministry detected undercurrents of sedition and with the flimsiest evidence branded this ‘lawless, riotous sort of people’ as covert Jacobites bent on insurrection.
In fact, the Blacks were concerned with taking deer rather than power and were apolitical, preying on landowners of all persuasions. In 1722 gangs of Blacks made two mass raids on the deer parks of the Whig first Earl of Cadogan. Cadogan was a graceless Irishman who had squeezed a fortune out of his services as quartermaster to Marlborough’s army. His fellow victims included the crypto-Jacobite Earl of Arran and Thomas Pitt, the grandfather of the prime minister and an artful nabob who had invested some of his Indian treasure in an estate at Swallowfield in Berkshire.5
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