Domiciled aristocrats would have been tolerated in America, but they would not have received the automatic respect they had grown accustomed to at home, and they would have had virtually no political clout, for the colonial assemblies had no provision for hereditary legislators. The political and social ethos that was developing in North America diverged from that in Britain. The differences were already clear by 1768, when General Guy Carleton, the Governor-General of Canada, predicted that: ‘The British form of government will never produce the same fruits as at home, chiefly because it is impossible for the dignity of the throne, or the peerage [my italics] to be represented in the American forests.’ Where land was plentiful and cheap, it could not have the same prestige as in Britain. Moreover, those who settled it adopted an egalitarian mentality. Carleton also noted that elected local assemblies inclined towards ‘a strong bias to republican principles’ and the people’s ‘independent spirit of democracy’ was incompatible with ‘submission to the Crown’.11
For most immigrants, the process of colonisation was one of liberation. In 1786, Anna Gillis, a Gaelic poetess lately arrived in Canada, celebrated her new freedom and that of her fellow colonists from Knoydart on the west coast of Scotland.
We got farms of our own
with proprietary rights from the king,
and landlords will no more oppress us.12
The final line says it all: North America offered prospects of economic independence and with it chances of individual advancement that were lacking at home. Since the early seventeenth century, the colonies had been populated by fortune seekers, refugees from Anglican intolerance and smaller numbers of debtors, petty criminals, vagrants, prostitutes and royalists and Jacobite prisoners of war. The ambitious, discontented and unwanted coalesced into a society which evolved its own values and rules appropriate to a fiercely competitive world in which individuals were free to find their own level in society. Advancement depended solely upon enterprise, intelligence and hard graft.
These qualities bestowed dignity and commanded respect. Yet the social superiority and pretensions of, say, a Virginian tobacco planter were the consequence of his own industry rather than his birth. Unlike the British nobleman, he owed his place in the world to his achievements, not his ancestry. The Virginian called himself ‘esquire’, but his standing in the world was gauged by the number of slaves he owned, rather than a dependent tenantry. Nor did the planter, or, for that matter, any other rich colonial feel bound by custom or family obligation to pass his estate intact to his eldest son. On the whole, Americans had no truck with primogeniture and entails, those legal contrivances essential for a permanent aristocracy.
Both were considered unjust and were abolished by the Continental Congress in 1779. This act had been strongly urged by Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers and a future president. He believed with equal passion in the rights of property (he was a well-to-do planter and slave owner) and in the right of everyone to be fairly rewarded for their labour and the application of natural talents. Primogeniture and entails prevented this; they enriched the eldest at the expense of his siblings, and reduced their capacity to progress upwards in the world. American law encouraged the continual fragmentation of estates and discouraged drones, whom Jefferson saw as harmful to the republic. In 1786, when serving as ambassador in France, he was outraged by the way in which the aristocracy allowed so much land to be ‘idle in the pursuit of game’.13 Visiting America in the 1830s, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the absence of primogeniture allowed wealth to circulate ‘with inconceivable rapidity’ and that ‘it is rare to find two succeeding generations in full enjoyment of it’.
The American spiritual frame of mind was never conducive to the idea of aristocracy. A large proportion of immigrants, particularly in New England, were dissenters who preserved their traditional antipathy towards Anglicanism and its hierarchy. Neither put down deep roots in the colonies; there were no bishops and few parsons to preach obedience and non-resistance. In 1717 Lord Baltimore, the proprietor of Maryland, attempted to instal Anglican ministers in the colony, but was frustrated by the colonial assembly. A Whig lawyer remarked in the 1750s that ‘the body of the people are for an equal toleration of protestants and utterly averse to any kind of ecclesiastical establishment’.14 During the 1775–6 campaigns, Colonel Lord Rawdon Hastings disdainfully noted the prevalence of dissenters in the American army. They were ‘ignorant bigots’, he told his uncle, the Earl of Huntingdon, and he found the ‘godly twang’ of the ‘Yankees’ discordant.15 Moreover, Americans were purblind to the niceties of war as waged by gentlemen. In 1775 General Sir Thomas Gage complained to Washington about the maltreatment of prisoners of war forced to work ‘like Negro slaves’. Such brutality diminished ‘the glory of civilised nations’ which had endeavoured to make ‘humanity and war . . . compatible’.16 American officers cared little for this accommodation of opposites and, in 1780, General Lord Cornwallis again appealed for kinder usage of prisoners. ‘I have always endeavoured to soften the horrors of war,’ he added, reflecting a view common among senior British commanders.17 There were dissidents, including Hastings, who convinced themselves that the amateur soldiers of Congress and their civilian supporters would quickly throw in the sponge if treated with the utmost severity. Some aristocrats quietly sympathised with the rebels; Richard Fitzpatrick, the son of an Irish peer and officer in the Guards, regretted having to fight a war against men who had ‘justice and truth on their side’.18
While some of their brothers-in-arms ignored the proprieties which theoretically restrained British generals, American officers quickly adopted the essentially aristocratic codes of personal honour of their British and French counterparts. Duelling was one result, and it became embedded in the culture of the revolutionary and then the regular army of the United States. Gentlemanly honour was consonant with individual equality, a point made by Albert Johnson, a future Confederate general, in 1845 after he had vindicated his reputation with his troops by fighting a fellow officer. ‘Manly virtue was integral to democracy,’ he declared.’19
After having beaten the British, former American officers attempted to preserve their elevated wartime status by banding together in the Order of Cincinnati. Membership was confined to former officers, their sons and collateral male heirs who would wear a blue riband and medal.20 This was later superseded by a more impressive gold eagle which resembled the insignia of a European order of knighthood. These proposals stirred up press hysteria: the republic was about to be subverted by a crypto-aristocracy. One New England journalist predicted that each member of the Order would think himself ‘a peer of the realm’ and another was shocked that Americans could be so easily ensnared by the ‘ostentatious’ trappings of nobility. A third denounced the Order as ‘contrary to the spirit of free government’ and several states outlawed it.21
The squall of protests which followed the formation of the Order of Cincinnati suggests that some Americans feared that their new republican culture needed protection from insidious notions of aristocracy. In 1788 this apprehension was expressed in the federal constitution, which placed a perpetual veto on the introduction of hereditary privileges and titles. They were un-American insofar as they denied the ideals of nominal equality for white males and limited democracy (property ownership alone defined the politically active citizen) embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that the ‘aristocratic element’ had always been weak in America and, fifty years after independence, had virtually no influence in the politics of the republic.22
Had de Tocqueville toured America in the 1850s, he would have detected an atavistic inclination towards distinctively aristocratic fancies among the plantocracy of the southern, slaveowning states. Its members of both sexes read the medieval novels of Sir Walter Scott and aped the romantic world he had depicted. The southern gentleman was a man of exquisite manners; he possessed the honour of a knight; fought duels to defend his ow
n and any lady’s reputation; he carried a sword at assemblies; and rode well. Southern pseudo-chivalry was a cultural expression of a growing political and economic rift between the North and South. The northerners were bourgeois moneybags who cared for nothing but profit and were numb to the finer feelings which animated gentlemen.
Defeat in America had tarnished the prestige of the British political establishment. George III, his ministers and generals had blundered and their ineptitude had deprived the nation of a valuable commercial asset and lowered its international standing. Americans had lost faith in monarchy and constitution, and reformers at home were sympathetic since, like the rebels, they were denied representation. After the war, conservatives argued that American democracy was shallow and transient. Aristocracies were indispensable for a sophisticated state and so, as the economy of the United States expanded, an aristocracy would naturally emerge.23
It did not. The minority of Americans who had repudiated monarchy and the aristocratic principle in 1776 were also rejecting the doctrines which for so long had justified them as the best way for states to be governed. The rebels were not only at war with an obdurate King, but with that historic wisdom stretching back to Aristotle which justified the authority of all kings and aristocrats. They and the accumulated dogma which justified them were incubi which had to be exorcised.
This was the opinion of Jefferson, whose vision of the ordering of the new republic profoundly influenced its early development. He believed that the United States represented a fundamental break with the past and its dusty ideologies, which were stumbling blocks to human progress and happiness. The truth of this was self-evident since in Europe (and Britain) the veneration of ancient ideas and forms had produced infirm, corrupt and unfair societies. America would be different since reason had liberated its people from the oppression of history, leaving them free to evolve in dynamic and wholly new ways.
The infancy of the American republic proved that a nation could flourish without an aristocracy and do so spectacularly. Its progress inspired British reformers; the United States was a beacon for radicals and an example of what could be achieved if a country discarded the lumber of the past which conservatives venerated as ‘the wisdom of our ancestors’. ‘America offers a glorious instance of a successful democratic rebellion,’ declared the radical journal The Gorgon in 1819, which every ‘aristocrat would gladly blot from the memory of mankind’.24
In the same year, Percy Shelley wrote admiringly that, unlike Britain, the United States ‘constitutionally acknowledges the progress of human improvement’. Americans had turned their backs on what Shelley considered the mistakes of history and made themselves ‘a free, happy and strong people’. Their condition contrasted favourably with that of the bulk of his countrymen suffering under a heartless and antiquated system.25
19
The Aristocrat to
Quell: Peers, Patriots
and Paineites
1789–1815
The events between the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 and the creation of the French Republic in November 1792 had a shattering impact on the nobility of Europe. They were vilified as idle parasites, the principles which upheld their pre-eminence were denied and derided, and revolutionary ideologues predicted their impending and violent extinction. It was already underway in France, where aristocrats lost their titles, legislative powers, legal and fiscal privileges and often their lands and lives. All this was reported in the British press and the anecdotes of aristocratic émigrés provided often lurid evidence of the malice and cruelty of the revolutionary mob. Sans-culottes may not have feasted on the corpses of aristocrats, as some alleged, but it seemed that all which was noble, gracious and honourable in France was being trampled under the ‘hoofs of the swinish multitude’.
These were the words of an Irishman, Edmund Burke, a Whig MP and one-time Parliamentary proponent of American liberties. He had followed events in France with growing dismay and was disturbed by the purblind and, he believed, dangerous acceptance of revolutionary doctrines in Britain. In November 1790 he published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was intended as a warning to those naive spirits who had talked themselves into believing that the Revolution was the first stage in a humane and rational remaking of the world. Rather, Burke contended that it was a concentrated, vindictive and sacrilegious offensive against civilisation. Parallels then being drawn between conditions in pre-revolutionary France and Britain were false and mischievous, as were direct comparisons between the French noblesse and the British aristocracy.
Embedded in Burke’s political and philosophical analysis was a heartfelt, eloquent obituary for the French aristocracy. Marie Antoinette’s mistreatment by the Paris mob was proof of the terminal decay of the chivalric spirit that had once animated generations of noblemen. No French peer had drawn his sword for his Queen, leaving Burke to conclude that ‘Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience’ which had been the quintessence of chivalry. Nevertheless, Burke’s encounters with individual French noblemen had revealed ‘men of a high spirit’ and ‘a delicate sense of honour’ who were ‘tolerably well bred . . . humane, and hospitable’. Their behaviour towards the ‘inferior classes’ was affable and more familiar than that of their British counterparts, and, as landlords, they were no worse than Britain’s landowners.1
The value of the aristocracy was simple and inestimable. ‘Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.’ It was also, Burke believed, a living expression of the historic continuity of society, that thread which bound the present to the past. ‘Nobility,’ Burke argued, ‘forms the chain that connects the ages of a nation.’ Later, he expanded on this theme when he praised the benefits of the uninterrupted ownership of land. ‘The idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and . . . of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement.’ History and the advance of civilisation were processes of organic and natural growth; whatever survived and flourished did so because it had grown out of what had gone before and had been tested by time. The existence of an aristocracy both illustrated and validated Burke’s theory of history.
There were pragmatic reasons for the preservation of aristocracy. In Britain, it was the sheet anchor of a legislature that contrasted favourably with the new French National Assembly. On one hand, there was a Parliament ‘filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in civil, naval and political distinction’. On the other, was a body dominated by ‘obscure provincial advocates’ and, most frightening of all, ignorant men often ‘immersed in hopeless poverty’ who regarded ‘all property, whether secular or ecclesiastical with no other eye than that of envy’.
Burke’s Reflections sold nineteen thousand copies in England within a year. It was a seminal vindication of those ancient truths and customs which had always been a ‘compass to govern us’. Burke’s conclusions were also prophetic, for he had diagnosed France as infected by an uncontrollable collective lunacy. Its symptoms were soon self-evident: the declaration of a republic, the trial and execution of Louis XVI, massive confiscations of aristocratic and church lands, and the abolition of God. Expansionist war was integral to the new French order (as it was to Nazi Germany) and Revolutionary armies invaded the Low Countries and the Rhineland, where they established republics on the French model.
Revolutionary sympathisers in Britain answered Burke robustly. The proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was among the first with, in 1790, her Vindication of the Rights of Men and set the tone for much of what followed. Aristocrats were ‘petty tyrants’ who oppressed the weak (she cited the Game Laws) and Burke had disregarded the ‘silent majority of misery’ in his account of the condition of the French people.2 Perhaps the most trenchant and certainly the most widely read riposte to Burke was Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man whic
h appeared in two parts in 1791 and 1792, the second appearing shortly before the author’s indictment for treason.
Paine’s counterblast elaborated on the themes of his shorter pamphlet, Common Sense, of sixteen years before. Its lengthier successor denounced monarchy, aristocracy, the Constitution and the Church of England as fraudulent and oppressive. Paine urged his readers to purge their minds of the accretions of mumbo-jumbo which had justified these institutions and look to America and France to learn how a nation could be fairly and honestly governed in the interests of all. At various stages, he engaged Burke head-on. The ‘Quixotic age of chivalry nonsense’ and the aristocracy were about to perish, victims of a preordained sequence of governments. The age of ‘priestcraft’ had vanished, that of ‘conquerors’ was passing and that of ‘reason’ was imminent.
The British aristocracy and the French noblesse were the same species with the same selfish instincts and habits. Paine dismissed the notion of a hereditary lawmaker ‘as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or a hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate’.3 (This gibe was resurrected by Jack Straw, the New Labour Home Secretary, during the debate on the future of the Lords in 1998. Echoes of Burke were heard in the Lords when the life peer Lord Cobbold praised the ‘traditions, pageantry and mystique of a seven-hundred-year-old institution that is part of the fabric of the country’.)4
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 23
