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

by Lawrence James

  Such precautions were very wise. In 1878 the third Earl of Leitrim was ambushed by a gang who shot his secretary and coachman and fatally wounded him before beating him about the head; the murderers fled and may have found their way to America. Leitrim was a wayward and tough landlord who, shortly before his death, was in the process of throwing out eighty tenants. Once, he had ordered the massacre of his tenants’ goats after they had chewed his recently planted saplings, and when some tenants mistakenly ploughed up some pasture, he forced them to replace it sod by sod. Despite his seventy-two years and white whiskers, he was rumoured to be a virile lecher who seduced innocent Catholic servant girls. A ‘mob of the lowest type’ congregated at his funeral, cursed him as ‘an old ruffian and heretic’ and tried to seize his coffin.18 Folk legend claimed that Leitrim’s assassin had been the father of one of the girls he had led astray, a tale which was repeated in a doggerel ballad of his last hours:

  It being the 2nd of April this old debauchee left his den

  He left bailiffs, bums and harlots in the castle of Lough Rynn –

  To Makem and Kincaid [his servants] he gave a hellish bawl

  Saying we’ll tumble down the cabins in County Donegal.

  Leitrim was the moustachio-twirling demon-king of landlords. His assassination and that of Viscount Mountmorres in September 1880 were spectacular coups in the terrorist campaign which followed a sequence of disastrous harvests in the 1870s. The statistics reveal the scale of the crisis: between 1879 and 1882 evictions rose fourfold to over five thousand a year and writs for the recovery of rents to over twenty thousand.19 What police files described as ‘agrarian outrages’ increased from 863 in 1879 to 2,590 in 1881.20 Many of these crimes were directed against landlords or tenants who had taken over the holdings of evicted farmers, but some were the upshot of familial antipathies and inter-family feuds of the sort which Zola described in his bleak novel on contemporary French peasant life, La Terre.21

  What was most terrifying about the agrarian crisis of the 1870s was the mass resistance led and coordinated by the Land League, which had been founded in 1879. Roughly half its members were farmers and their sons, while the rest were labourers and the proprietors of small businesses in country towns who were victims of the knock-on effect of the recession. The League’s clandestine activities were arson, cattle maiming and intimidation, most famously the ostracism of Captain Charles Boycott, a landlord and agent for Lord Erne. No local man or woman would have any dealings with Boycott and no labourers could be found to tend his land and livestock. League solidarity was matched by official muscle: Protestant labourers from Ulster guarded by troops and police harvested his crops.

  The League’s legitimate activities were tiding over evicted tenants with handouts, and paralysing the legal system by hampering the auctions of goods distrained by landlords for non-payment of rent.22 Criminal prosecutions were hampered by obstruction and the ‘canvassing’ of jurors, who were sometimes seen carousing with the accused before his trial.23 The Irish aristocracy was under siege and, viewed from the terrace of the country house and from London, Ireland seemed to be lurching into anarchy.

  The Irish aristocracy had no firm friends beyond the Protestant voters of Ulster. Before the 1870 Ballot Act, landlords had been able to win limited popular support at elections through threats and bribes. Now they had to stand by and watch Parnell’s Home Rule Party sweep the polls with backing from the Land League. All that was left for landowners of all ranks was to fall back on a traditional expedient and appeal for help from Westminster in the form of fresh coercion laws and reinforced garrisons.

  Gladstone preferred placebos to more astringents. He fervently believed that God had called upon him to bring peace to Ireland by eliminating two historic Irish grievances: the status of the Protestant Church of Ireland and the system of land tenure. Neither measure was to the taste of the Irish or the British aristocracy. The 1869 Irish Church Disestablishment Act, which removed the privileges and some of the estates of the Irish Anglican Church, was denounced in the Lords as confiscatory and, therefore, a threat to every form of property. Many peers faced personal losses, for Irish livings provided employment for younger sons and many were well paid. Alarm bells rang and 325 peers attended the debate, the greatest number present since the repeal of the Corn Laws. A spirit of defiance flared and then was dampened by Lord Salisbury, who argued that however outrageous in principle, the bill did reflect the sentiments of voters in the recent election. Paradoxically, some of the cash paid in compensation for the Church of Ireland’s assets was placed in a fund that issued mortgages to straitened Irish landowners.24

  The 1870 and 1881 Land Acts were bitterly contested within the Lords as official intrusions into the freedom of landlord and tenant to make agreements, and, in the case of the second law, the imposition of official tribunals with the authority both to define and enforce a ‘fair’ rent. Landlords complained that they were the victims, and some were. The perhaps crazily optimistic land agent Samuel Hussey, who had paid £80,000 for an estate in 1879 (the year of a calamitous harvest), later alleged that the 1881 Land Act reduced his rents by a third. It was too much and he soon sold out at an overall loss.25

  Others followed his example and received official encouragement. Between 1885 and 1903 successive Liberal and Conservative governments passed laws which made it easier for landowners to sell out by providing loans for Irish tenant farmers to buy their holdings. Critics cynically but reasonably concluded that the state was subsidising inefficient husbandry and that taxes were being delivered straight into the pockets of peers who had manifestly failed to manage their estates competently. The all-but-holy doctrines of free-market competition had been suspended in Ireland, while in the rest of the country landowners and farmers were left to face the agricultural recession alone. Yet, by seemingly rewarding failure, the British government had ended the land war and secured comparative peace in Ireland.

  Moreover, the policy of financing a transfer of land had helped the Irish aristocracy to shed its estates relatively painlessly. As the Spectator percipiently commented in 1893, ‘the immense majority’ of British and Irish peers ‘would be just as well off without Ireland, as with it’.26 Nonetheless, Irish peers and their Unionist sympathisers in the Lords were dismayed by the cold indifference of the Conservatives, who seemed as willing as the Liberals to satisfy the demands of the Irish tenantry at the expense of their landlords. After the 1887 Land Act, the Marquess of Waterford had told Prime Minister Lord Salisbury that he would rather be ‘killed by my enemies than tortured slowly by my friends’.27 His friends gave a further twist to the thumbscrew in 1898, when the Irish Local Government Act terminated aristocratic influence in the countryside and delivered it to Ireland’s middle classes. There were no objections from the House of Lords.

  Opposition to Home Rule united Irish and British peers. They had been denied the chance to make their feelings known in 1886 when a mass defection of Liberals scuppered Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill. In 1893 he tried again, and the measure was debated at tedious length in the Commons before being passed only with the support of Home Rule MPs. Old, aristocratic Ireland was represented by David Plunket QC, third son of Lord Plunket, kinsman of several senior Protestant clerics and Unionist MP for that stronghold of Protestantism, Trinity College, Dublin. He prophesied that self-government would mean the ‘certain doom’ of all Irish landlords and the ‘speedy and complete ruin of their country’.28

  His fears were echoed in the Lords. The prospect of Home Rule had aroused aristocratic passions to a pitch equal in intensity to those generated by Parliamentary reform and the Corn Laws. Then, the numbers attending the Lords had soared, with backwoodsmen flocking to London to uphold the immediate interests of all their kind. This phenomenon was repeated at the end of August 1893 when grouse moors, yachts and race meetings were abandoned and, in the words of Herbert Asquith, Gladstone’s Home Secretary, ‘strange and unfamiliar figures’ appeared at Westminster.29 Out of t
he 545 peers eligible to vote, 460 turned up to kill Home Rule.30

  They did so in a brief, one-sided and intemperate debate watched from a crowded gallery. One after another the Irish representative peers denounced the measure, some quoting opinions they had heard in their homeland. Lord Muskerry, who proudly claimed that he was a resident landlord, alleged that everyone with a stake in Ireland opposed self-government. Others predicted economic stagnation and a nation variously enslaved to ‘American-Irish Fenians’, the ‘mob’, the Catholic clergy, or the ‘illiterate voters of Kerry or Clare’. There was anger that the proposed Irish legislature would lack a hereditary and, therefore, ‘independent’ element.31 Forty-one peers voted for the bill and 419 against, including more than half the peers ennobled by Gladstone.

  The rejection of Home Rule was the greatest victory secured by the Lords that century, and the last in its history. It was a signal vindication of Lord Salisbury’s doctrine that the constitutional duty of the peers was to reject laws which enjoyed limited public support, even when they had been passed by the Commons. British voters were bored by Irish issues and resentful of Irish clamour and terrorism.

  Peers and people had been in accord over Home Rule. Having saved the Union and justified its function as a mirror of mainland opinion, the Lords left the Irish peerage to languish, for, like Irish nationalism, their interests had no appeal for voters. Irish landowners either took advantage of government funds and disposed of their estates, or soldiered on as best they could under a legal system which operated against them. Their history during the nineteenth century was a reminder of what they had been and remained: a colonial elite whose roots were shallow and who never entirely secured the goodwill of the natives.

  There were pockets of affection for devil-may-care sporting peers who rode hard. Nearly twenty years ago I had a drink in a village pub in Meath which was decorated with photographs of the lords (including Field-Marshal Lord Roberts), ladies and squires of local hunts of the early 1900s. I was told that each had been a fine horseman, that the hunt had never known better and that the memory deserved to be preserved. Yet British peers never rode to hounds with revolvers in their pockets or visited their tenants armed to the teeth.

  24

  Like Chaff Before Us:

  Hanging on 1887–1914

  We tend to view the world of the late Victorian and Edwardian aristocracy through the prism of the First World War, which both illuminates and distorts. It reveals the super extravagance of a privileged elite which flaunted its wealth in a most flamboyant manner, just as it had done in earlier ages. What makes this period different was the nemesis of 1914; this was a doomed universe. The horrors of the war gave an intensity to the nostalgia of those who survived and, when they recorded their memories, they chose metaphors which suggested an extended, exciting and innocent childhood. Its summers were always warm, its amusements always enthralling and its colours always bright.

  ‘It is difficult to recall the power and riches of the aristocracy in those days,’ wrote Lord Chandos in 1960. He had come down from Cambridge in June 1914 and joined in the tribal rituals of the London season. He watched the yellow carriages of Lords Londonderry and Lansdowne ‘sweep up to Ascot’ with their liveried postillions, and listened to the ‘ripple of elegant conversations’ at balls, and dinner parties in which guests enjoyed ten courses beginning with clear turtle soup and ending with savouries.1 The diplomat Duff Cooper looked back to that year’s season as ‘that last gay summer of a dying age’, while future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan recalled ‘la douceur de vivre’ of his pre-war youth.2

  Those who had tasted its pleasures contributed to the legend of a golden age which is now part of the national historic consciousness alongside Arthur’s Camelot and the ‘Merry England’ that supposedly existed in the pre-industrial age. Fiction enhanced personal memories of the pre-war idyll. There is Noel Coward’s moving 1931 play Cavalcade, which provided the inspiration for the 1970s television series Upstairs Downstairs, which traces the parallel fortunes of a peer and his family and those of his servants. The visually seductive 1971 film version of E. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between reveals both the charm of the aristocracy and its chilling private codes as seen through the eyes of a young boy during the fabulously hot summer of 1900. ‘Queen’s weather’ it was called by Nanny in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, which opened in 1968 and affectionately parodies the reminiscences of those who had lived through this period.

  As we all know, the balls, dinners, shooting parties and carefree badinage abruptly stopped in 1914. The diversions of ‘Society’ reappeared in 1919, but, for a time, their tone was muted by a pervading awareness of wartime losses, which was strongest and most poignant among those who had survived the slaughter. The casualty lists intruded everywhere; as the guns gathered on the moors for the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ in 1919, one sportsman mourned the absence of ‘familiar faces’. There was, he felt, ‘a peculiar charm surrounding one’s recollections of the last Twelfth of 1913 . . . we shall never quite get back to those days – worst luck in many ways’.3 Others who looked back shared this sentiment, which blended with selective memory to create the lost wonderland of the pre-war aristocracy.

  For the aristocracy, ‘those days’ had been a time of carefree and expensive indulgence in the face of a world consumed by intermittent outbreaks of social discontent and acrimonious political strife. Both contributed to an animus against the rich in general and a prodigal nobility in particular. By 1900 modern class warfare had arrived, and the aristocracy no longer seemed as well integrated into public life as it had been in previous generations. Moreover, by its own, if not everyone else’s estimate it was getting poorer.

  Watching the peers arrive at Westminster in 1893 to scupper the Home Rule Bill, the Liberal Home Secretary Herbert Asquith remarked that their sole qualification to change the course of history was their birth, or, as he expressed it, ‘the accident of an accident’.4 It was a point which could have been made at any time during the past five hundred years, but the fact that the House of Lords was now a satellite of the Tory Party gave Asquith’s gibe a fresh sharpness. Accident combined with a political realignment had turned the second chamber into a partisan assembly which, if its members so wished, could frustrate the will of the electorate and the Commons. Not surprisingly, an increasingly left-wing Liberal Party and, after 1900, the new Labour Party were uncomfortable with this anomaly. In the 1906 election over 3 million men had voted for the Liberal, Labour and Home Rule parties, but at any time their wishes could be overridden by five hundred titled Tories. The aristocracy found itself walking a political tightrope; one misplaced or overconfident step would provide its enemies with the chance either to slice away its remaining constitutional powers, or even abolish them altogether.

  Yet, if the numbers of rich men seeking titles was anything to go by, the prestige of the aristocracy was as high as ever. Between 1837 and 1911 nearly five hundred families were ennobled, more than balancing losses from natural wastage. Since 1886 possessors of non-landed wealth had been crowding into the Lords with one-third of all new titles being awarded to commercial and industrial tycoons. There were financiers (Lord Rothschild), brewers Edward Guinness (Lord Iveagh) and Sir Michael Bass (Lord Burton), newspaper proprietors (Lords Northcliffe and Glenesk), railway and shipping magnates (Lords Brassey, Inverclyde and Nunburnholme), mine owners and industrialists (Lords Swansea, Overtown, Airedale, Ashby St Ledgers and Glenconner), and the armaments manufacturer, Lord Armstrong. By its own desire the plutocracy was merging with the aristocracy.

  The impetus behind this remaking of the Lords was Lord Salisbury. Above all, he wanted to keep the power of the Lords intact so that it could, in an emergency, rein in the Commons as it had done in 1893 over Home Rule. This was a risky stratagem, and Salisbury believed that it could be employed only when the peers were absolutely certain that they reflected national rather than partisan interests. Modern political parties had to be highly sensitive to t
he wishes of minority lobby groups, such as the temperance movement, which then had a stranglehold on the Liberals. In theory, the peers were a counterweight to what the right dismissed as ‘faddism’, but to be effective they had to be representative and reflect interests other than landowning. The new equilibrium between landed and non-landed wealth was already apparent within the Commons. In the 1910 election the Conservatives and Liberals fielded 147 candidates with landed connections and 883 who were either professionals or businessmen.5 The numbers of MPs who were the heirs or younger sons of noblemen continued to fall; there were sixty-seven in 1910 and thirty-three in 1940.6

  Land values and revenues continued to fall. In 1893 a Suffolk squire complained that over the past three years his annual rent roll had fallen from £2,500 to £1,900 and that half his income was consumed by taxes, tithes and interest charges.7 His difficulties with liquidity were multiplied many times and at many levels. Quite simply, British agriculture could not compete in the new global market for food. By 1914 landowners made up just one-third of British millionaires.

  The plight of the aristocracy aroused very little sympathy in the rest of the country. Governments and voters were concerned with more important matters such as the strength of the Royal Navy and the need for tentative welfare legislation. Both demanded increased public expenditure, and if the aristocracy was as rich as appearances suggested, then the time had come to tap its resources, particularly land. In 1894 the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, whose family had owned estates in Oxfordshire since the Middle Ages, introduced death duties. This levy was the brainchild of a late Victorian Widmerpool, Alfred Milner, a bureaucrat whose twin deities were efficiency and the British Empire, and who wished to rationalise the complicated system of inheritance taxes. They were superseded by death duties of 8 per cent which were charged on all estates with a sale value of over 1 million pounds with payments to be spread over several years.