What Milner and Harcourt treated as a purely administrative adjustment was revealingly seen by Gladstone as the ‘most radical’ measure of his lifetime (he was eighty-five). His successor as Prime Minister, the liberal Lord Rosebery, disapproved of a tax which, he imagined, was a direct assault against the landed order.8 Other peers agreed and, in 1895, asked the new Conservative government to abolish death duties. Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister for the third and final time, refused because, while his party was favourable to the aristocracy as an institution, over-generosity towards its members was an electoral handicap. Middle- and working-class voters would never be moved by the sufferings of hard-up peers.
Pessimistic landowners remained bitter about a tax which, they convinced themselves, had been deliberately designed to harry them to extinction. In 1913 the editor of Burke’s Landed Gentry fulminated against the ‘vicious and crushing burden of taxation’ which had been ‘dictated by a hatred of landowners rather than the necessities of imperial finance’. As a result, ancient families were being driven off their estates and land had ceased to be ‘the criterion of social status’.9 Death duties then stood at 15 per cent, and, by 1919, they had doubled. This increase prompted the ninth Duke of Marlborough to protest that they were a ‘social and political’ stick whose sole purpose was to chastise the aristocracy. Death duties contributed what he amazingly considered to be mere bagatelle (£33.5 million, or the cost of five battleships) to a national revenue of £1,213 million.10 The Duke had missed the point. The prodigious costs of the war effort had driven up all forms of taxation and simultaneously caused inflation; everyone was paying more and the richest simply paid most. In 1918 the eighth Duke of Northumberland netted £23,890 from mineral revenues of £82,450.11
Impositions placed on an already devalued resource, land, were bound to erode aristocratic capital and incomes. In 1930 the eleventh Duke of Leeds sold off lands to cover the death duties on his father’s estates, and further sales were needed to fund divorce settlements in 1948 and 1955.12 Divorces were unpredictable hazards, unlike the agricultural recession or death duties, which could be overcome through shrewd financial management, economy and exploitation of alternative sources of income through investment in stocks and the acquisition of directorships. Peers on the Board added lustre to a company and enhanced its trustworthiness.
Prestige could be marketed in other ways. Peers chased the affections of American heiresses whose fathers were hungry for the glamour and status which foreign titles gave to new money. On the marriage of his daughter Jennie to Lord Randolph Churchill in 1873, her father Leonard Jerome, a New York financier, gave the couple funds which provided an annual income of £3,000.13 Churchill’s cousin, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, steered his dynasty out of insolvency through his marriage in 1895 to Consuelo Vanderbilt, the daughter of the American shipping tycoon William Vanderbilt. Even without transfusions of American capital, the flexible, imaginative and prudent could stay afloat; the eleventh Duke of Bedford increased his annual revenues from £264,000 to £320,000 between 1895 and 1910.14
Other peers survived, flourished and, for all their croaking about imminent beggary, seemed to have plenty of spare cash for the upkeep of their houses and to pay for lavish entertainments, the wages of legions of servants, that novel and highly popular luxury the motor car, and the indulgence of whimsies. The sixth Duke of Portland owned eight seats scattered across England and Scotland and a house in Grosvenor Square, and at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire he arranged to have several tennis courts dispersed in the grounds so that he could play at any time of day without having to endure the glare of the sun. In 1901, retrievers with good pedigrees were being sold for between thirty and forty guineas with exceptional dogs fetching a hundred or more, the average annual salary for a junior clerk or schoolteacher.15 After the 1909 budget, the eighth Earl of Harrington indignantly declared that its new taxes would so impoverish him that he was having to contemplate selling his hounds. Press reports of this sacrifice drew laughter from Liberal and Labour voters.
*
Lord Harrington’s dilemma also drew a chuckle from ‘Charlie’ Carrington, first Lord Carrington and future Earl of Lincolnshire. An affable and witty peer, he was something of a rarity for his times: a Liberal aristocrat. His career as an administrator, courtier and politician illustrate a strange paradox of this period. While the constitutional powers of the House of Lords were being called into question, individual peers with a political vocation were still making easy entrées into the world of high politics and diplomacy assisted by their families and friends. Aristocratic patronage had receded, but not completely disappeared.
Carrington’s life had parallels which stretched back to the earliest history of the aristocracy. His birth gave him the responsibility to serve the nation for the general good. As to what form this good might take, Carrington was an open-minded man, sympathetic to the spirit of change and willing to work with it, even when it ran counter to the private interests of his fellow peers. In 1909, when Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ reduced the Tory aristocracy to a mass apoplexy, Carrington praised it in his diary as ‘a bold, liberal and humane’ measure.16
For a man who later developed a strong independence of mind and faith in the future, Carrington’s upbringing had been conventional and predictable. Born in 1843, he proceeded through Eton to Trinity College, Cambridge, to a commission in the Royal Horse Guards and, when he was twenty-two, a seat in the Commons as MP for Wycombe, which was next door to his family seat. Carrington inherited his title in 1869. Soon afterwards, he accosted a newspaper editor who had insulted his late father and horsewhipped him outside the Conservative Club in St James’s. This ‘scoundrel’ was an illegitimate son of the Duke of Buckingham, and he unsuccessfully attempted to prosecute Carrington in a case which ended in a courtroom brawl from which counsel and witnesses emerged bruised and bleeding.17
A young officer of honour and spirit, Carrington was chosen as an aide-de-camp to the Prince of Wales during his tour of India in 1875–6, and, in 1885, he was appointed Governor of New South Wales. In 1890 he returned home, held several offices in the royal household and in 1905 joined the Liberal Cabinet as President of the Board of Agriculture.
Carrington was a member of a small, self-selected group for whom politics remained a legitimate and honourable activity for men of his birth and education. Time and money were at the disposal of the political peer and he began his career well supplied with patrons and potential allies. School and university had thrown him into the company of other young men with identical backgrounds who were also hosts to dreams of power. All had been raised in houses where they overheard the everyday chatter of politics, and afterwards they ritually passed through Eton to Oxford or Cambridge. These were the kindergartens for a nobleman with a political vocation, where he made those contacts and cultivated the friendships that would accelerate his progress. The sixth Marquess of Londonderry, the leader of Ulster’s Unionists, was Arthur Balfour’s fag at Eton and twenty years later was Viceroy of Ireland working in harness with Balfour, the Secretary of State for Ireland.
At university, the athletic life was usually preferred to the intellectual. William Palmer, the heir of the first Lord Selborne hunted, played tennis and cricket and ‘ragged’. Ragging fine-tuned by intoxication distinguished the predominantly aristocratic university dining clubs. What Lord Rosebery called the ‘unifying quality’ of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club was the catalyst for his lifelong intimacy with fellow Etonian Lord Randolph Churchill.18 Churchill was also a member of the Merton Myrmidons who, like the Bullingdon men, dined well, got drunk and afterwards broke windows and bottles. Once he smashed some windows in the Randolph Hotel and, since precedent always mattered to the aristocracy, future generations continued this tradition of drunken vandalism.
It flourished in the Oxford of the 1920s and was described by Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall in 1928:
A shriller note could now be heard rising from Sir Alisdair’s
rooms; any who have heard that sound will shrink at the recollection of it; it is the sound of English county families baying for broken glass. Soon they would all be tumbling out into the quad, crimson and roaring in their bottle-green evening coats, for the real romp of the evening.
Such hearty rituals of youthful aristocratic rebellion stretched back to the eighteenth century and beyond, and they helped to engender a powerful sense of belonging to an exclusive and self-confident caste.
On coming down from university, the Bacchantes calmed down and glided into their political apprenticeships. Kinsmen and family friends provided unpaid posts as private secretaries to ministers, and there was an admittedly dwindling number of constituencies which were still susceptible to pressure from neighbouring landowners. Selborne influence secured the eastern division of Hampshire for William Palmer in 1885. After his father’s death in 1890, he entered the Lords, but very reluctantly because the Commons was now regarded as a more certain route to the highest offices.19 Nevertheless, Selborne held ministerial posts between 1900 and 1905 and between 1915 and 1916.
Dynastic as well as personal ambitions continued to propel young aristocrats into politics. Edward Wood, fourth son and eventual heir of the second Viscount Halifax, was told by his father at the age of eleven: ‘You are to get a first class at History at Oxford and do all sorts of grand things.’ At Eton a malformed left hand restricted Edward’s athletic activities to tennis, fives and bicycling, and at Oxford he followed the beagles, caroused with the Bullingdon and managed to get his first. Well satisfied, his father set him new goals: ‘I am quite determined that you are to be Prime Minister and reunite England with the Holy See.’ A seat, Ripon, was procured in 1910 with the assistance of his in-laws, but the reserved and bookish Wood found the rough and tumble of the Commons disconcerting.20
The parental ambitions of the sixth Marquess of Londonderry and his wife were less grandiose than Halifax’s. They wanted their only son and heir, Viscount Castlereagh, to enter the Commons, where he could oppose Irish self-government and keep an eye on the economic interests of the peerage. He had had a career as an ornamental soldier in the Royal Horse Guards (his parents had refused to allow him to serve in the Boer War because his death would terminate the direct Londonderry line) and had undertaken a two-year imperial grand tour. Young noblemen armed with letters of introduction and sporting rifles were now regularly traversing the dominions and colonies to inspect at first-hand the lands they might eventually govern and to absorb the wisdom of their present rulers. An imperial peregrination was also an opportunity for hunting, and so tiger skins and the heads and horns of tropical animals were steadily added to domestic trophies on the floors and walls of country houses.
Castlereagh came home in 1905, and, after some wire pulling, his mama secured him a Parliamentary seat, Maidstone in Kent. It had been ‘a very near thing’ he told her, but the local constituency party ‘like a lord’.21 They got one, and the twenty-six-year-old Castlereagh was elected, despite rumours of chicanery. In the Commons, he banged an Orange drum for his parents and protected Londonderry mineral revenues by opposing the reduction of working hours for miners. These, he warned, would drive up coal prices and were unnecessary since modern conditions made working underground healthier than ever.22
What is fascinating and instructive about the political careers of Carrington, Selborne, Edward Wood and Viscount Castlereagh is how closely they followed the old aristocratic tradition. In the opening years of the twentieth century, a young nobleman could still choose a political career as of right and expect to find himself a few rungs up the ladder of advancement. Thereafter, ascent depended upon experience, hard work and a reputation for steadiness. Too much passion was dangerous, as Lord Randolph Churchill and, for that matter his son Winston, discovered.
Wood inherited his father’s title as Viscount Halifax and between the wars successively served in various junior ministries, as Viceroy of India and then as Foreign Secretary. After Chamberlain’s fall in 1940, he was seriously considered by ultra-Conservatives as an alternative to Churchill as Prime Minister. Castlereagh inherited the Londonderry title and, between 1931 and 1935, held that most modern of Cabinet posts, Minister for Air. He also took an active, and some would have argued sinister part in promoting friendship between Britain and Nazi Germany, which involved fawning over Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The aristocratic political novice was now almost bound to be a Conservative. Since the 1880s the aristocracy as a whole had swung to the right and remained there. The Whig peerage, which had done so much to urge reform and temper the extremes of radicalism, became increasingly distanced from the new Liberalism. Radicals were moving from the fringes to the mainstream of the party and their ideological baggage included programmes for the redistribution of wealth. Some nursed a vindictive animosity against an aristocracy which had become synonymous with the Conservatives. David Lloyd George, a Welsh solicitor first returned to the Commons in 1890, later admitted to having been animated by an ‘elementary revolutionary feeling’. Its strands included a childhood memory of Tory landlords evicting labourers who had voted Liberal.23 Liberal support for Irish and Scottish land redistribution and Home Rule were the last straws, and provided the impetus for the mass defection of the Whig nobility. A rump, including Lord Carrington, remained in the Lords, where there was a permanent Conservative majority of at least two hundred peers.
Aristocratic support was both an advantage and liability for the Conservatives. Lord Salisbury was committed to preserving the power of the Lords as a bulwark against demotic Liberalism, militant trade unionism and the politics of envy. As the poet and novelist Charles Kingsley had once prophesied, the aristocracy would survive because the middle classes would see them as the defenders of ‘every silver fork’ in the country.24 The silverware of the Pooters was safe, Kingsley believed, since the aristocracy was financially independent and, therefore, immune to the sometimes purblind and transient obsessions of ‘public opinion’. This was an argument that had been heard in 1832, and Salisbury believed it still held true.
At the same time, Salisbury needed to deflect criticism of the nobility as an inherently idle and hedonistic elite. The public had to see the peerage as an energetic body of men, working tirelessly and selflessly for the nation. Between six and ten peers served in Salisbury’s Cabinets and that of his nephew and successor Arthur Balfour, and there was a steady flow of lords to embassies and imperial governorships. The ‘new’ imperialism of the 1890s was capturing the public imagination and the aristocracy was working hard to protect and secure an empire which defined Britain as a global superpower. High-minded peers like Lord Curzon, who was Viceroy of India between 1898 and 1904 and 1904 and 1905, were agents of the benevolent paternalism which, so its defenders claimed, defined and justified British imperialism.
The peerage offered the Conservatives practical help. Tory lords contributed to party funds, donations rising from £20,000 in 1880 to £44,000 in 1892.25 In the countryside, the nobility rallied support for the party through its patronage and leadership of the Primrose League (named after Disraeli’s favourite flower), which had been founded in 1883 to promote working- and middle-class Toryism. Within four years, it had attracted half a million members, most enticed by jamborees and summer fêtes held in the grounds of country houses and guided tours of their interiors for weekend excursion parties. Visitors included families from the suburban working and lower-middle classes who were flattered by being entertained by their ‘betters’.
Popular Toryism benefited from the sporting nobility, particularly the owners of racehorses, who enjoyed the goodwill and admiration of the vast numbers of working men who followed the Turf. Moreover, the aristocracy was closely associated with the enjoyment of life; the lord drank his champagne and whisky (one advertisement of the 1890s showed a Highland laird sipping his Dewars in his great hall) and the working man his beer. Liberal, teetotal chapelgoers wanted to deprive both of their pleasures.
Yet the aristocracy gained little in return for its loyalty to Conservatism, beyond the knowledge that the Party would uphold the constitutional rights of the Lords and block Irish self-government. Irish landlords got cold comfort from Tory legislation, death duties were continued and, in 1888, the Local Government Act loosened the centuries-old grip of the aristocracy and gentry on the administration of the countryside through the establishment of common councils.
Rural democracy made slow inroads into old, deferential voting habits. The new county councils elected in 1889 contained 137 peers, twenty-five of whom were chairmen and vice-chairmen. One, Lord Carnarvon, Chairman of Hampshire County Council, was happy to find that the ‘“outsiders” behaved well and showed no disposition to give trouble’. The ‘outsiders’ soon acquired confidence; by 1914 the number of aristocratic county councillors had fallen to ninety-eight, of whom nineteen were chairmen or vice-chairmen.26
The crushing landslide election victory of the Liberals and their Labour allies early in 1906 ended what had effectively been a twenty-year Conservative and Unionist ascendancy. The left was on the march and some peers took fright. According to the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, son of the Prime Minister, the country had suffered ‘a mild attack of the revolutionary malady in Russia and the socialist complaint in Germany and Austria’.27 Tory peers wondered whether this distemper would turn out to be incurable and, if so, what might they expect from a government whose Commons majority included 130 MPs who were members of the Land Nationalisation Society?
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