Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present
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The impudence and depredations of the Blacks were localised, but Walpole made them the excuse for legislation which extended the coercive power of the state to protect property and its owners everywhere. The Black Act made deer stealing, cattle maiming, illegally cutting down trees, extortion and blackmail hanging offences. More crimes, including arson in coal mines, were later added to this list. All were already criminal, but henceforward property was guarded by the gallows. The law, the panic which had triggered it and the hugger-mugger manner of its journey through Parliament are uncannily reminiscent of recent anti-terrorist legislation. Those whom the Black Act protected sometimes found its implementation distasteful, and in 1734 Thomas Paget, the son of a peer and a keen sportsman, wrote:
Poor rogues in chains but dangle to the wind,
While rich ones live the terror of mankind.6
The Black Act was an ineffective deterrent against poachers. Anecdotal evidence indicated that poaching and the clandestine trade in game were rising. Paget’s kinsman and scourge of Staffordshire’s poachers, Henry Paget, the ninth Earl of Uxbridge, calculated from his local intelligence sources that his estates, including Cannock Chase, harboured at least eight hundred who could be named, and twice that number who were anonymous. Among those who came within his keepers’ view were two labourers who had killed three deer and were hanged in 1744 under the terms of the Black Act.
It was easier to measure the extent of poaching in the next century when the state’s bureaucracies compiled statistics on just about every form of human activity. The results were chilling for landowners. In 1817 over a thousand poachers were gaoled, and, thirty years later, one-seventh of all convictions were for offences against the Game Laws and the tally of imprisoned poachers had nearly trebled. Forty-two keepers had been murdered between 1833 and 1842 and others suffered terrible injuries.7 On one December’s evening in 1843 a keeper patrolling near Speckley in Oxfordshire accosted a well-known poacher and set his bulldog Spring on the man after he produced a gun barrel from beneath his jacket. Spring mistook his target and attacked the poacher’s dog, leaving its owner free to bludgeon the keeper with the gun barrel, breaking his arm and cracking his skull. He was later arrested, tried and sentenced to twenty years transportation.8
Just about every landowner joined the offensive against poachers. In 1756 the Society of Noblemen and Gentlemen for the Preservation of Game was formed with the aim of prosecuting poachers and closing the black market in game. The society retained the sharpest lawyers, including a former Attorney-General, Sir Fletcher Norton (‘Sir Bull-Face-Double-Fee’), and announced its successes in the press.9 Individual noblemen adopted their own measures, not all of them coercive. In 1756 Lord Weymouth employed an agent to procure the enlistment of a notorious poacher, and, in 1776, the fourth Duke of Queensberry accepted a bond of one hundred pounds from an obviously prosperous gang who promised to keep off his lands.10 Presumably this immunity did not extend to his neighbours’ coverts. The sixth Duke of Bedford, a radical Whig, was lenient towards a poacher from his own household since he ‘had been a good servant and . . . very zealous in the discharge of his duty’.11 This exemplary devotion did not extend to the Duke’s rabbits.
Magistrates adjusted sentences according to the youth and previous character of the accused, so that a callow novice might escape with a five-shilling fine. Exile and hard labour in Australia awaited poachers who resisted arrest. Three were transported for seven years in 1820 after an exchange of shots and cudgel blows when a gang of seventeen poachers had been ambushed by nineteen keepers in Cainhoe Park near Ampthill in Bedfordshire.
That county’s coverts were then in a virtual state of siege. The sixth Duke of Bedford took the lead and attempted to reassert the authority of the law (and landowners like himself) by offering rewards of one hundred pounds to informers and recruiting ‘active and intelligent’ local constables to track down suspects. They undertook their sleuthing in a carefree manner, treating suspects in pubs and charging the bills (one of fifty pounds) to the Duke. Excusing this extravagance, the constables alleged that they were securing the goodwill of the locals, which was essential if they were to identify poachers and uncover their plans.12
Regular keepers, who could earn as much as forty pounds a year, were by reason of their occupation unloved and isolated figures within their communities. Some took backhanders, others turned a blind eye to poaching, and all took precautions. Giving evidence in the 1847 trial of a man who had murdered his colleague, a Northumberland gamekeeper told the jury: ‘My dog is between a Newfoundland and bloodhound; he is very large, but I do not know how savage he is . . . he has been trained to scent a man.’13
In all likelihood, the quarry tracked by this fearsome hybrid would have been a professional or semi-professional poacher. He was a businessman (one gang of Suffolk poachers had a bank account) dealing in a contraband commodity which always commanded a good price. In the 1820s a hare fetched two shillings and a brace of pheasants three shillings and sixpence. These were tempting sums when farm labourers seldom earned more than seven shillings a week; a night’s poaching could bring in the equivalent of a month’s earnings. Forget the sentimental image of the poacher as a poor man risking his freedom to find food for his starving family. He was more likely to have been (and still is) a ruthless entrepreneur working the black market and making a better living than he could in regular employment. John Banks, indicted at Chester in 1859 as accessory to the slaying of a keeper, had a criminal record which stretched back twenty-seven years and included charges of poaching, assaults on keepers and attempted murder. He was one of a gang armed with guns and cutlasses, and two of his partners were found guilty of murdering a keeper and hanged.14 There no was romance in the world of poaching.
For the aristocracy and gentry, the enforcement of the Game Laws was the defence of their legitimate property rights, their prestige in the countryside and the sovereignty of the law. On a personal level, they were protecting what gave them infinite pleasure: hunting was still the aristocracy’s prime source of diversion. It was enjoyed to the full by Joseph Addison’s country squire Sir Roger de Coverley, who, in the pages of The Spectator, chased hares at least twice a week. Addison found the exercise invigorating:
I must confess the brightness of the weather, the cheerfulness of everything around me, the chiding of the hounds, which was returned upon us in a double echo, from the neighbouring hills, with hallowing of the sportsmen and the sounding of the horn, lifted my spirits into a most lively pleasure, which I freely indulged because I was sure it was innocent.15
Sir Roger’s mental vigour was the consequence of his hunting, which was an antidote to over-indulgence at the table and the sedentary inertia of public duty. Although heavily engaged in politics, the second Duke of Richmond was always reluctant to go to London during the hunting season. Rather, he preferred the sheer joy of a day’s ride across the downs and was indifferent to how the chase ended. He once confessed to the pleasure of having been thwarted by ‘a true gallant Sussex fox’.16
It must have been a resourceful animal, for Richmond’s Charlton Hunt was celebrated and attracted a galaxy of huntsmen; seventeen peers attended one meet in 1743. Hunting of all kinds was an opportunity for fellowship and the quality of sport provided was a measure of a nobleman’s standing among his equals. From the mid-eighteenth century greater resources than ever were concentrated on game preservation and it became common to supplement stocks with hand-reared and semi-tame pheasants and partridges. An artificial abundance of game was essential for the now fashionable ‘battues’ in which beaters flushed out birds which were shot by lines of guns. In 1800 a day’s bag of eighty pheasants and forty partridges and hares was considered excellent; a hundred years later tallies were in the hundreds, even thousands. Colonel Thomas Wood, MP for Brecon and a sportsman of the old school, thought these massacres deplorable. They were, he told the Commons in 1819, ‘as different from English hunting as French gentlemen were from English gentl
emen’.17
Maintaining stocks of pheasants, which the Colonel claimed were ‘as tame as chickens’, was expensive for landowners and burdensome for their tenants. Calculations based on about four hundred acres of the Duke of Rutland’s estates revealed an annual loss of £916.18 Tenant farmers bore the brunt of these depredations by creatures that the law forbade them to kill. Yet game preservation served an economic function, or so its supporters alleged. They repeatedly argued that while in essence the Game Laws were selfish, they were invaluable to the rural economy since the persecution of poachers helped drive the poor towards lawful and productive employment.
By the early nineteenth century, the harsh pragmatism and the harsher realities of the implementation of the Game Laws were stirring consciences. The moral and intellectual climate was changing; Evangelicalism emphasised an active, compassionate Christianity which expressed itself in concern for the weak and poor, and there were strands in Romanticism which attributed sentience to animals. In his 1794 poem ‘To a Young Ass’, Coleridge addresses the creature as one of ‘an oppressed race’, and, like Rousseau, Shelley advocated vegetarianism as a positive way of reducing the cruel exploitation of animals.
An equivocal reflection on this theme appears on George Stubbs’s Freeman, the Earl of Clarendon’s gamekeeper, with a dying doe and hound, painted in 1800 towards the end of a life in which he had painted many stirring hunting scenes. Against a sombre woodland background, the keeper is poised to cut the throat of a wounded and wide-eyed doe, while his hound seems about to intercede. We do not know whether the creature is the victim of a poacher or of a cull. The dapper keeper stares impassively at the onlooker as he performs his duty to his master, who commissioned the picture.19 Yet, there is a disconcerting quality to what otherwise might be another celebration of the world of hunting, for our sympathies (and perhaps those of the hound) are directed towards the stricken doe. And yet contemporary sportsmen would have seen merely a very minor, everyday episode in the perpetuation of their pleasure.
It was concern for the human victims of game preservation that led to a Parliamentary challenge to the Game Laws in 1819; it was delivered by Thomas Brand, a Whig MP and landowner. He wanted to jettison the underlying principle of the legislation so that all species of game would be treated as ‘the property of the person on whose lands it was found’. Henceforward, tenant farmers would be permitted to kill game on their own property. While Brand’s supporters condemned the present laws as ‘vicious and tyrannical’ and ‘odious’, others rushed to their defence. Thomas Bankes, possessor of sixty thousand acres in Dorset and MP for the rotten borough of Corfe, warned that a relaxation of the Game Laws would lead to a free-for-all and the extinction of all the game in the country, which is what had happened in France after the Revolution. Sir John Shelley, a Corinthian dandy and gambler, predicted that if gentlemen were denied their sport, Bonaparte would be vindicated and Britain would indeed become ‘a nation of shopkeepers’.
William Wilberforce was in a quandary. As a Tory he was bound to uphold the law, although he feared that sending poachers to county gaols or flogging them compromised the moral standing of the magistracy, ‘who constituted the glory and honour of our domestic government’. Wilberforce the Evangelical humanitarian was further distressed by oppressive statutes which punished poachers for merely following the natural, economic laws of supply and demand.20 The bill passed two readings, which says something for the strength of disquiet about the Game Laws in a predominantly landowning and Tory Commons, but it died during its committee stage. It is highly unlikely that the Lords would have agreed to forfeit a legal privilege at a time when their monopoly of political power was under attack. Amelioration came slowly and in the teeth of opposition from the beneficiaries of the Game Laws. In 1827 spring guns were banned, and in 1831 dealing in game under licence was permitted. Rural opinion was turning against the Game Laws. After the murder of a keeper by poachers on the Earl of Coventry’s estate at Croome in Worcestershire in 1844, the coroner’s jury protested against ‘the continuation of laws so immoral in their tendency, so fruitful in crime and so destructive of human life’.21
18
A Gang of Ruffians:
Americans and
Aristocracy
‘No kind of government is so mischievous as aristocracy,’ Benjamin Towne warned readers of the Pennsylvania Evening Press in November 1776. He advised citizens of the fledgling American republic to reject a model for a state legislature that included a chamber ‘something like a House of Lords’ where, it was hoped, ‘wisdom will forever reign’. History suggested the opposite; British peers, once the militant ‘guardians of liberty’, had had their freewill and nerve sapped by corruption. The guard dogs of liberty in 1688, the aristocracy was now the lap dog of George III. Why else had the House of Lords consistently voted to deny Americans their rightful liberties as Britons?1 In fact, roughly a third of the Lords had been sympathetic towards the colonists’ grievances, but what mattered was that in the rebel imagination the aristocracy had been and was an accessory to George III’s despotism.
Aristocratic distrust of the masses was ingrained according to another Philadelphia journalist, Thomas Paine. A former Suffolk corsetmaker, he had drifted through various occupations, emigrated and in America discovered an audience for his pent-up grievances. He also found a knack of addressing artisans and labourers in a language they understood. Paine gave a pungent form to sentiments which they felt, but could rarely articulate. His polemic pamphlet Common Sense first appeared early in 1776 and went through twenty-five editions in a few years. It was a caustic denunciation of monarchy with sideswipes at aristocracy.
Paine attacked his enemies where they were weakest. He stripped kings and the noblemen of their ancient mystique. He probed history to expose its flawed foundations: the modern peer was merely the descendant of the ‘principal ruffian of a gang of ruffians’ who had clawed his way to authority over his fellows; while George III owed his throne to a ‘French bastard’ who had conquered England with ‘an armed banditti’. Overlordship, gained disreputably, perverted its inheritors: ‘Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent.’2
Paine’s readers included many humble rank-and-file soldiers who were then risking their lives in a war against George III’s armies, and who hoped that a political revolution might mutate into a social one. Everyone knew that there was no hereditary aristocracy in America, but there was a groundswell of apprehension that the rich planters, merchants and lawyers who had orchestrated the opposition to George III’s taxes and framed the Declaration of Independence were aristocrats at heart. ‘Men of rank’, warned a Paineite convert, secretly desired to impose ‘the system of Lord and Vassal . . . common in Europe’.3
This was partly true. Many ‘men of rank’ had convinced themselves that it was in the best interests of the republic to preserve the colonial hierarchy based upon property and general esteem. The representatives of the colonies who assembled in the Continental Congress had no wish to upset the existing social fabric. In 1776 it decreed that all officers in the American army were to be addressed as ‘esquire’ or ‘gentleman’ and were legally bound to uphold the ‘character of an officer and gentleman’ and could be dismissed if they did not.4 Early in 1777, and after defeats around New York, Congress proposed to invest officers with an ‘Order of Independency’ with a green riband for ‘knight companions’ as ‘a spur’ to their efforts in the field.5 General Washington was addressed as ‘Your Excellency’, and the Marquis de la Fayette, the commander-in-chief of French forces in America, was amused to find that senior American commanders soaked up flattery and expected ‘more respect’ than an emperor.6 Americans were susceptible to aristocratic charm; in 1780 Philadelphians were struck by ‘the politeness and manners’ of blue-blooded French and German officers serving as advisers to the Continental army.7
There had always been an ambivalence towards rank in American society. On one hand, there
was a faith in abstract equality, and on the other, a wish to live within an orderly, stratified world in which outstanding talent and industry were publicly honoured. Colonial society had always been layered, and there was an abundance of rich men who expected deference and believed that their property and success gave them the wisdom to rule others. The poorer colonists would have recognised a de facto aristocracy, and subsequent historians have treated the wealthiest planters in the southern colonies and the commercial elites of the northern as a functioning aristocracy in terms of their political sway and social dominance.
A visitor to Virginia in the 1740s was impressed by the ‘dignity and decorum’ of the Williamsburg court sessions, where gentlemen justices assembled in a court room decorated with portraits of the royal family and former governors.8 There were acute social tensions in North Carolina in the 1760s when poor, backcountry farmers clashed with the planters, lawyers and businessmen who had a stranglehold on the legislature. These murmurings echoed the protests against the English aristocracy and gentry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, like them, were silenced by force.9 The egalitarianism implicit in the Declaration of Independence did not change attitudes; a patrician Philadelphian reviled the soldiers of the republic as ‘in general damned riff-raff – dirty mutineers and disaffected’.10 In Maryland, the architects of the state’s new constitution laid down stiff property qualifications for electors and office-holders.
Colonial America was proof that a hierarchy could exist without a hereditary aristocracy at its apex. British noblemen did visit the colonies, but they were birds of passage like the colonial governors who departed when their term of office ended. There was no point whatsoever in a peer settling in the colonies; he was cut off from London and the sources of political power in the Lords and royal patronage. Those aristocrats to whom the Crown had granted swathes of the American wilderness preferred to stay at home and leave the management of their windfalls to agents, or sell up to residents.