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

by Lawrence James

  Yet despite their misgivings, the Tory peers stuck with the Salisbury doctrine and acquiesced to unpalatable legislation only because it reflected the will of the country. Nicknamed ‘Mr Balfour’s poodle’, the Lords cavilled at, but finally let through child benefits, old-age pensions and, in 1906, the Trade Disputes Act, which gave astoundingly generous legal immunities to trade unions. A Licensing Bill was rejected in 1908 to remind the Liberals that the poodle had teeth.

  These teeth were drawn, painfully, after a protracted war of political and constitutional attrition which began in the spring of 1909 and ended in the summer of 1911. The dramatic events of the conflict have been vividly described in George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, which interprets the behaviour of the most reactionary peers as the fulfilment of a kind of death wish. Certainly, during the final phase of the struggle several lords adopted the metaphors of the battlefield, calling themselves ‘diehards’, the nickname of the 57th Regiment, which chose to continue fighting the French at the Battle of Albuera in 1811 when the odds were heavily against them. Stubbornness paid off and the French were beaten.

  The war consisted of two interconnected campaigns; the first against the new taxes proposed in Lloyd George’s 1909 budget, and the second against the 1910 Parliament Bill, which effectively abolished the Lords’ right to veto legislation. In both contests, the Lords presented itself to the country as its only defence against what Lord Selborne called a ‘single-Chamber tyranny’ and the first victims of confiscatory ‘socialism’. ‘Except for the protection of your Lordships’ House’, declared Lord Knaresborough, ‘property is far safer in Turkey than it is in the United Kingdom.’28 There was nothing novel about these claims, save that now they were put to the test of public opinion in the elections of January and December 1910.

  The People’s Budget of 1909 followed an old fiscal principle which stretched back to the land taxes of the eighteenth century and beyond: the extraction of the largest sums from those who could afford to pay them. Lloyd George faced an emergency: he needed £13.5 million to cover new welfare benefits and additional battleships to keep Britain ahead of Germany in the naval race. Duties on tobacco, alcohol and petrol went up and there were rises in income tax and death duties. There were also contentious innovations. A supertax of sixpence in the pound was introduced for the twelve thousand taxpayers with annual incomes of over £5,000, which raised £1 million, or the cost of one Dreadnought. New impositions were levied on the current capital value of undeveloped land and, where applicable, the unmined minerals which lay underneath.

  The rich were squeezed, not as severely as they would be during the war, but hard enough to raise an outcry from sections of the aristocracy as intense in its fury as those which had greeted the Reform Bill and the repeal of the Corn Laws. Why? Certainly, individuals ended up paying more, including, ironically, those peers who had been demanding more battleships. To judge by the histrionics and bouts of hysteria which punctuated debates over the budget and the future of the Lords, more was at stake than higher tax bills, galling though these were. For the past eighty years the peerage had seen its political powers whittled away and had, on the whole, been content to cooperate in the governance of a democratic state. Now the aristocracy had been ordered to be an accomplice in what pessimists believed was its deliberate impoverishment, contrived by socialists and their Liberal fellow-travellers. Then, to cap it all, the peers were asked to assist in their political suicide by surrendering the remnants of their old legislative influence. Henceforward, titles would be devalued and their owners exiled to the periphery of politics.

  Paradoxically, many of the peers who made the most noise were backwoodsmen who had rarely, if ever, attended the Lords and had, through their extended absences, voluntarily confined themselves to the margins of politics. Nevertheless, they would fight for the ancient, defining privilege of their caste. The diehards were able to do so for there was no counterpart of the Duke of Wellington or Salisbury, who had died in 1903, on hand to deploy their authority and prestige in the interests of caution and pragmatism. The Tories had split in 1904 over whether to abandon free trade in favour of taxing foreign imports and allowing imperial products to enter the country duty-free. Balfour had wavered and his influence over the party was fragile. Lord Lansdowne, the party’s leader in the Lords, carried little weight with his fellow peers, although he was a wise man who, in 1916, would have the courage to question whether Britain’s losses in the First World War would ever be offset by gains.

  This lack of leadership was soon apparent. Immediately after the budget peers moaned about imminent poverty in silly ways which suggested how far they were isolated from the rest of the world. The sixth Duke of Buccleuch publicly announced a programme of retrenchment by withdrawing his annual payment of a guinea to Dunfermline Football Club. The sixth Duke of Portland declared that his new tax bill would compel him to sack a thousand servants and so save a thousand pounds a week. Lord Carrington thought this an ‘idiotic’ gesture which showed how miserably Portland paid his servants. Liberal propaganda made much of such asinine pleading.29

  Among the beneficiaries was Lloyd George, whose contempt for the peerage was well known and passionate. In 1908 he had told a meeting in Liverpool that the Lords were ‘stuff bottled in the Dark Ages . . . not fit to drink, cobwebby, dusty, muddy, sour’.30 When, by the summer of 1909, it was clear that his budget would be rejected by the Lords, he allowed his invective a free run. In July, he addressed a meeting of working men at Limehouse in the East End. Ignoring barracking by suffragettes, he reminded his listeners of how the seventh Duke of Northumberland had sold a plot of land needed for a school for over eight hundred times its current rateable valuable. ‘If it is worth £900, then let him pay taxes on £900!’

  The money was desperately needed, he continued:

  . . . when the Prime Minister [Asquith] and I knock at the doors of these great landlords and say to them: ‘Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their lives, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?’ They scowl at us. ‘We say only a halfpenny, just a copper’. They retort: ‘You thieves!’

  ‘With your help,’ he concluded, ‘we can brush the Lords like chaff before us.’31

  Lord Curzon hit back. At Oldham, lecturing in a monotone, as he usually did to any audience, he praised the ancient virtues of ‘illustrious dynasties such as the Cavendishes and Cecils’, and repeated the French historian Ernest Renan’s conclusion that ‘all civilisations [have] been the work of aristocracies’.32 Catcalls suggested that his middle- and working-class listeners were unconvinced. Soon afterwards, Winston Churchill, then President of the Board of Trade, riposted that it been the upkeep of aristocracies that had been the chief work of all civilisations. Lacking comparable wits in their own camp, peers resorted to mindless rage. The ninth Duke of Beaufort dreamed of placing Lloyd George and Churchill ‘in the middle of twenty couple of doghounds’.33

  Tempers flared and civilities were suspended. In January 1910 Carrington’s wife Lily found herself seated next to a Tory admiral, who said to her: ‘How can you allow your husband to be a member of this blackguard government?’ ‘Don’t be an ass and go on eating your dinner,’ was her reply.34 Her husband noted that Churchill and Lloyd George were ‘much abused in society’. ‘Look at those wicked Cabinet Ministers!’ Lady Londonderry declared at one of her receptions. ‘We can turn them out.’35 Similar expressions of pique were heard in clubs, messes, salons, parties and wherever else diehard Tories congregated.

  Passions intensified once it was clear that the Lords would lose. The two elections of 1910 confirmed the Liberals in power, although their majority depended on the support of Labour and Home Rulers. Liberal losses had been heaviest in the predominantly middle-class seats in London and the South-East, which suggests that Tory arguments
about the safety of property had disturbed those sections of the electorate which had something to lose. Nevertheless, Lloyd George believed that he had the mandate of the middle classes, whom, he was confident, shared his resentment against all landowners.36

  The January 1910 election compelled the Lords to back down and pass the budget, that of December 1910 indicated that the country would accept limitations on their power. As the Conservative MP Austen Chamberlain concluded, the electorate had voted ‘against the Lords and also against all landlords’.37 Liberal election posters portrayed the peers as ermined and coroneted dotards, plutocrats hugging moneybags labelled ‘unearned increment’, and young boobies.

  Tory realists, including Balfour and Lord Lansdowne, began searching for a compromise as an alternative to a fight in which the odds were against the peers. A series of inter-party meetings discussed various formulae, including referendums for contentious bills and restricting the automatic right of a hereditary peer to a seat in the Lords. Nothing emerged and the Parliament Bill went ahead in the spring of 1911. Fearing that it would be defeated in the Lords, Asquith had already sought an insurance policy from Edward VII (1901–10) who, driven by a sense of constitutional duty rather than conviction, pledged himself to create enough peers to offset any majority the diehard Tories could muster. A similar undertaking had been made by William IV in 1832. After Edward VII’s death in May 1910, his son George V (1910–36) unenthusiastically agreed to confirm this guarantee, but only as a measure of last resort, and a list of five hundred potential Liberal peers was drawn up which was said to have included the writer Thomas Hardy. The King was extremely unhappy about having to nearly double the number of peers, but he placed duty before his private sympathies. These were with the diehards; as Lloyd George and Carrington separately discovered, George V was surrounded by courtiers who openly supported the reactionaries in the Lords.38

  The final engagement was marked by all the savagery of a desperate rearguard action. In the Commons, Tories jeered Prime Minister Asquith mercilessly with Lord Hugh Cecil alternating between extremes of clownishness and discourtesy. The latter’s cousin Balfour, sadly observed that: ‘Fragments of the Unionist party seem to have gone temporarily crazy . . . As usual the leading lunatics are my own kith and kin.’39

  This madness infected the Lords, where the ultras were commanded by a blunt-spoken racing peer, Lord Wylloughby de Broke, and a former chancellor, Lord Halsbury. Born in 1823, the son of a Tory newspaper editor, Halsbury was a former Lord Chancellor who sincerely believed that the Crown, Constitution and Union would be endangered if the Lords lost any of its historic powers. A jaunty, pugnacious figure with old-fashioned white side-whiskers, Carrington thought him ‘simply splendid, a rugged, red-faced little Tory’.40 Behind him were the backwoods peers who approached the issues in the spirit of the hunting field. They were all-or-nothing, hard-riding men with no truck for compromise; they were fighting to preserve their hereditary rights even it they seldom chose to exercise them. Nor would they ever meekly surrender the profits of their acres to radicals and socialists.

  After a dramatic fortnight of emotional speeches, threats and a steady haemorrhage of supporters, Halsbury’s diehards went down with their faces to the enemy and the Parliament Bill was passed by a narrow margin. There were vinegary recriminations; Lady Halsbury hissed at renegades from the gallery of the Lords and one defecting peer was hooted and booed as he left the Carlton Club. In the ultra-right-wing National Review, Lord Robert Cecil blamed the ‘Great Betrayal’ on the ‘Whig habit of compromise’ and railed against ‘salaried peers, Radical snobs, Unionist renegades, two time-serving Archbishops and thirteen Bishops – an unlucky number’.41 Lord Selborne thought the Commons was now the ‘tool of a tipsy tyrant’, a reference to Asquith’s drinking, a peccadillo which had been raised by Tory hecklers during the Commons debate on the Parliament Bill.42

  The rump of Tory peers had gambled and lost. With hindsight, they had been defeated in a battle that had been inevitable since the Lords’ rejection of Home Rule eighteen years before. With no Wellington or Salisbury to curb them, the Lords had chosen to fight on unfavourable ground. Their protests against the budget struck voters as mere selfishness. In 1918 Lord Henry Cavendish suggested that all the diehards had really wanted was pleasure and not power. They wanted to retain ‘easy-going extravagance, the fox hunting, the huge slaughter of pheasants, the 60-horsepower motors, the incessant golf of pre-war days’.43

  This was a plausible motive, at least for the backwoodsmen who abandoned the social season’s diversions for the Lords debates in August 1911. A glance through the Tatler for 1910 and 1911 suggests that a high proportion of diehards were manic sportsmen. The bushy-bearded Lord Harrington, who had feared that the new taxes would drive him to get rid of his dogs, was a keen polo player and Master of Foxhounds who ‘after abusing the motor with some violence for many years’ had recently recanted and taken to driving to meets. It was felt that the political crisis had cast a shadow over the season; ‘Glorious’ Goodwood became ‘Gloomy’ Goodwood because the King had been compelled to stay in London and not, as was customary, attend the races.44

  Seeking to preserve their pleasures, the peers had forfeited power. The Parliament Act was not a revolution; it merely confirmed what had been constitutional custom since 1832. Nonetheless, it and the battle over the Peoples’ Budget showed plainly that the political power of the aristocracy had been curtailed for ever and would never be revived. Yet, had the peers taken their stand on Home Rule, then the outcome may have been very different, for it was deeply unpopular in Britain and among the Liberals. As it was, they needed the Irish to beat the peers and, therefore, conceded Irish self-government. In retaliation, the Lords imposed their two-year delaying veto on the third Home Rule Bill of 1912. Tory bile, stirred up during the 1910–11 crises, was redirected towards Ireland. During the next two years the party dallied with treason by backing the Ulster Unionists, who raised and armed a private militia to defy Parliament and fight Home Rule.

  After 1911, the politically active peers lost heart. Early in 1914, and after a career in the Commons, the twenty-sixth Earl of Crawford was dismayed by what he discovered when he took his seat in the Lords. ‘The atmosphere . . . is so soporific, spreading to atrophy . . . that it is hopeless to arouse vital interests in its members.’45 The peers may have been in a coma, but they were not quite dead.

  25

  Dangers and Honours:

  War, Empire and the

  Aristocracy

  During the elections of 1910 Tory propaganda urged voters to remember the debt owed by the nation to generations of aristocrats who had won the battles which had enlarged the British Empire and who had governed it wisely. One postcard showed a South African hillside covered with the gravestones of peers who had died in the recent Boer War. In the foreground is Lloyd George, disguised as a policeman, slinking away from a meeting in Birmingham at which he had provoked a riot by speaking in favour of the Boer cause.

  Heroic and honourable self-sacrifice for the greater Britain was starkly contrasted with the poltroonery of Lloyd George, (then) a notorious Little Englander. Victories in South Africa and on other imperial frontiers over the past ninety years had affirmed the validity of the aristocratic principle in the services at a time when it was being challenged in the civilian world. The culture of the army and navy was blatantly aristocratic in that it regarded gentle lineage as a prime qualification for leadership and exalted stringent codes of personal honour. Gentlemen cherished honour while the money-obsessed middle classes cherished profits and dividends, or so Lord Elcho claimed in 1855 when he told the Lords that no businessman would purchase a commission for his son since it was an investment unlikely to yield any return.1 Frugal and financially astute peers made no comment.

  Honour distinguished the officer in his own and his equals’ eyes. A cavalry colonel accused of cowardliness by a mere trumpeter after the Battle of Chillianwala (now Pakistan) in 1849 shot himself
rather than endure public disgrace. The redemption of an officer condemned as a coward formed the narrative of A. E. W. Mason’s best-selling 1902 novel The Four Feathers, which sees the hero undergo self-imposed, gruelling tests of courage and stamina to regain his honour in the manner of a medieval knight.

  As ever, honour defined the gentleman and the terms ‘officer’ and ‘gentleman’ remained synonymous. The proprieties of the mess or wardroom and their rules of conduct were those of gentlemen. Officers who flouted them were ostracised and humiliated, sometimes harshly. In 1854 Cornet Thomas Ames of the 4th Hussars was knocked about by his fellow officers, forced to eat pabulum and had his moustaches clipped. The Times was appalled and asked why ‘wealthy and titled libertines’ were allowed to drive ‘a man of different disposition’ out of his regiment? One of Ames’s tormentors, Lord Ernest Vane Tempest, fourth son of the third Marquess of Londonderry, replied. His victim’s ‘peculiar English and pronunciation of the letter “h”’ had been obnoxious to his brother officers. Poor Ames clearly had not mastered the languid, lisping drawl of the mid-Victorian upper class.2

  The middle classes might wince at this snobbishness, but they were prepared to tolerate the aristocratic values of the armed forces. Lord Palmerston explained why in 1855. He warned the Commons that if the aristocracy ever shrank ‘from partaking in the dangers and honours of the battlefield and fatigues of the campaign’ then the nation would fall.3 Britain and its Empire remained secure because the ancient martial traditions of the aristocracy were enjoying a fresh and extremely vigorous lease of life. The proof was as clear as the print in newspapers which reported the advance of imperial frontiers. By 1849 the conquest of India had been completed, between 1840 and 1860 British fleets and armies had browbeaten China into accepting the doctrines of free trade, and, from 1879 onwards, large swathes of Africa were conquered and subjugated. All these operations had been undertaken by soldiers and sailors invariably led by the younger sons of peers and squires and Anglican clergymen. Each campaign produced a crop of stirring exploits which were detailed in the newspapers and the illustrated weeklies.