Menageries, renamed ‘safari parks’, proved equally popular in the second part of the twentieth century. Lions and later other creatures drew visitors to the Marquess of Bath’s house at Longleat and the Duke of Bedford established a zoo at Woburn in Bedfordshire. As leisure and tourist industries expanded, the aristocracy responded to the tastes and interests of their predominantly middle- and working-class customers. There were funfairs, specialist museums, newly designed and spectacular gardens, occasional pop concerts (such as at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire) and spectacles such as tournaments. Country houses became the backdrop for corporate conferences, weddings, concerts and advertising promotions. At Kelburn in Ayrshire the Earl of Glasgow and his son Viscount Kelburn achieved a delightful coup de théatre by inviting Brazilian graffiti artists to paint the walls of the castle, to quite stunning effect.
Modern visitors to houses and parks had been preconditioned as to what to expect by television. Popular series such as Upstairs Downstairs, which traced the parallel lives of the families of the master and his servants during the early part of the century, perennial adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels and P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, as well as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited have reconstructed the world of the aristocracy. Many were filmed in aristocratic houses. The latter was shot at Castle Howard and in 1984 visitors were invited to ‘see the real thing’ in an advertisement headed ‘Revisit Brideshead’.29 Fiction replaced reality: a mansion built by a historic family was now the seat of a fictional one, Waugh’s Flytes.
There was also a new tendency to emphasise the duality of the country house with visitors being conducted through the servants’ quarters, kitchens and laundries as well as the state rooms. Every house had its shop, often marketing products which suggested its past ambience, particularly brands of preserves and chutneys whose labels indicated that their recipes had once been concocted for exclusive use of the aristocracy and gentry. Garden centres also proliferated to satisfy the demands of what had become one of the most popular pastimes in the country.
Sporting estates secured a fresh and valuable lease of life. They were now status symbols purchased by the super-rich who had made fortunes in the City. Those who could not afford to buy shoots could rent them and fishing rights. In the boom time of 1990, it was estimated that bagging a deer would cost a corporate shooter £30,000 and landing a salmon, £13,000, figures that fell by over a half when the City went through a sticky patch.30 Providing game for fund managers led to tensions in some areas, particularly Scotland. Here, gamekeepers were regularly charged with killing rare protected predators, including eagles and kites. Making shooting profitable was apparently an imperative which overrode even the law; on one estate owned by a City figure locals blamed ‘imported’ English gamekeepers ordered to rear large numbers of grouse.31 Defenders of grouse shooting claimed it annually provided £10 million for the Scottish economy. On occasions, aristocratic landowners themselves played host to paying shooting parties. (An anecdote from the 1980s claimed that one noble host joined a party of paying guns and, irritated by the enthusiasm of his dogs, shouted, ‘Get down! Get down!’ Several of the waiting businessmen went down on their knees.)
What is significant about corporate lawyers paying large amounts to pot grouse and the rest of the public paying to visit country houses is that both are seeking to share the aristocratic experience. In the broadest sense, the aristocratic sector of the leisure industry was driven by a nostalgia for a past which has been sanitised to make it attractive and marketable. The paying gun bringing down a pheasant was part of an aristocratic sporting tradition which was reproduced in the paintings and prints which hung on the walls of country houses. The visitors who wandered through them caught a glimpse of a distant and glamorous world. Yet, my experience of walking through these places is that many tourists are excited by evidence such as toys and a television set which suggest that the house is still inhabited by a family. Continuity is often emphasised by guides who talk familiarly and affectionately about present owners.
Tourism has guaranteed that the aristocracy remains part of the fabric of national life. Popular curiosity about the actual lives of aristocrats, past and present, has also been satisifed by individual and family biographies with a distinct preference for eccentric subjects. The six Mitford girls, daughters of the second Lord Redesdale, have generated a thriving literary industry, not surprisingly since their lives have embraced, among other things, an elopement, conversion to Communism, and high melodrama in the form of Unity’s manic passion for Hitler and attempted suicide.
Roughly until 1980, the misdeeds, misadventures and trivial activities of real aristocrats remained the stock-in-trade of newspaper gossip columns, but their perceived interest to readers has diminished rapidly. Of course the drug-taking and bad driving of peers still make headlines, but now they compete for attention with a new class: celebrities. They are actors, actresses, pop musicians, television personalities, models, self-promoters and sportsmen and -women, particularly footballers, and nearly all have lower-middle- or working-class backgrounds. Like some aristocrats in the past, many modern celebrities have convinced themselves that they are beyond the law and the older moral conventions, including good manners. To use a not altogether defunct expression, celebrities are mostly ‘vulgar’, yet some spend their fortunes on acquiring rural properties and the trappings of squiredom.
Reacting to this social phenomenon, Tom Blofeld, a Norfolk squire and proprietor of a tourist attraction in Norfolk, feels obliged to shed ancestral instincts. ‘It’s a meritocratic, democratic world now. Being an ordinary geezer gets you a lot of opportunities, whereas being a toff doesn’t corner you in some way,’ he observed in May 2008.32 Yet, at the same time, a journalist contemplating the recent success of two Old Etonians, Boris Johnson and David Cameron, regarded disparingly by the Left as ‘toffs’, wondered whether the time had come for such creatures to regain their ‘birthright’ of leadership.33
Noblesse oblige has not completely faded away. Blofeld’s life is dedicated to maintaining his estate to pass on to his heirs, and other peers strive towards the same end. Others have had to make their own living, like Lord Lichfield, the photographer. Some fell by the wayside; in 1984 there were eleven peers who earning their livings in humble but useful occupations, including a policeman, a bus conductor and a municipal gardener.34 Given that there were nearly eight hundred hereditary peers, this number was remarkably small.
In purely Darwinian terms, the twentieth-century aristocracy had shown extraordinary flexibility and a capacity to adapt to circumstances. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who attached a popular motor museum to his Hampshire house, attributed this general success to breeding. ‘It is fashionable to dismiss, as irrelevant, breeding and background in human beings,’ he wrote in 1970. ‘But when you compare the difference in price of a pedigree bull or stallion, and that of an equally fine but non-pedigree animal . . . it can run into thousands of pounds.’35 This was perhaps a riposte to the gibe made two years before in the Commons by William Hamilton, who observed: ‘As a method of ensuring quality, the hereditary principle is rather less selective than the methods adopted on a stud farm.’36 Lord Lichfield concurred: an ancestor who had gained a title for his exploits at sea gave him no automatic right to ‘speak in public on important issues’.37
Hereditary and life peers continued to do so until 1997. In that year New Labour secured power with a large majority and the promise to regenerate and modernise the nation and its system of government. One of its targets was the Aunt Sally of the old Labour party, the House of Lords. The first offensive was undertaken in 1998 with a bill to expel four hundred hereditary peers, leaving a token ninety-five who had to be elected by their fellows. It was probably more than coincidence that the trimming of the hereditary peers was accompanied by a successful campaign to outlaw fox-hunting, which was widely supported by rank-and-file Labour supporters, for whom men and women on horseback were symbolic of a feu
dal past. Aristocrats hunted, but their preferred sport was shooting. One outcome of this skirmish in the class war was the Countryside Alliance, which defended fox-hunting and complained of the government’s indifference to rural issues.
The debate on remaking the Lords followed predictable lines. Defenders of the Lords repeated the argument that it acted as a brake on the Commons and could, in some circumstances, reflect public opinion more accurately than a chamber in which MPs were constrained and hustled by party whips. The peers stood between the country and an elected dictatorship. Many peers were fulfilling what they sincerely believed to be a public duty incumbent on them because of their family traditions. According to Lord Arran, these men and women ‘asked for nothing . . . other than their offspring should be allowed to serve in the same selfless way’ as their ancestors had.38
In the Commons, the former Prime Minister Sir John Major stressed the independence of the peers and wondered whether this could be reproduced in a yet-to-be devised replacement chamber. New Labour ministers reiterated Tom Paine’s taunt about hereditary judges and poet laureates, and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, expressed amazement that the country had for so long tolerated a chamber which gave hereditary peers the right to ‘sit and vote’ on the making of laws.39
By a bizarre paradox, the period in which the future of the Lords was in jeopardy witnessed a massive inflation of peerages. Tony Blair created 376 life peers between 1997 and 2007, just under the total made by Mrs Thatcher and John Major during their eighteen years in office. Nearly all New Labour’s peers were from those sections of society already over-represented in the Commons: the law, the media, corporate bigwigs and professional politicians. Some were ‘people’s peers’ (a Blairite invention) who had been nominated by the public and finally chosen by one of the Prime Minister’s friends. The result was more of the same thing: Lord Brown, the Chief Executive of British Petroleum, Lady Howe, the wife of a Tory Foreign Secretary, and Sir Claus Moser, a merchant banker. No wonder Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary who broke ranks with Blair over the invasion of Iraq, drolly observed in 2004 that the House of Lords had shifted ‘from the fifteenth-century principle of hereditary to the eighteenth-century principle of patronage’.40 George III would have envied Blair’s powers of patronage. Many of these men and women, hungry for power, often interconnected by marriage, friendship and blood and based in London, were intrinsically hostile to the Lords and the hereditary peers in particular, more than half of whom had rural backgrounds and many of whom had had a greater experience of the world than any professional politician. The nineth Duke of Buccleuch who died in 2007 was an expert on forestry and had served throughout the war as an ordinary seaman.
The everyday work of the Lords continues, now largely undertaken by life peers and peeresses. A handful have their own blogs, which, in the spring of 2008, revealed that during the past year over eight hundred thousand people had corresponded with members of the Lords. Individual peers were performing their public duties in the manner of their predecessors: one had helped expose government subterfuge over British Aerospace’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia and between seventy and eighty had listened to the debate over the Treaty of Lisbon, during which a former European Union mandarin, Lord Williamson, explained some of the more arcane legal matters. Other busied themselves with humdrum committee work.41
Who or what will replace these men and women? In his In Defence of Aristocracy of 2004, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne played a modern Burke, emphasising the enlightened disinterest of the hereditary peers and contrasting the spirit of noblesse oblige with the modern plutocrat’s selfishness and philistinism. The extinction of the Lords would create a vacuum in public life and a dangerous one, for proposals were in hand to supersede it with a chamber in which the nominees of the party in power would dominate. The old Tory poodle would be New Labour’s lapdog.
This has not yet happened. There is no consensus, even within New Labour, as to the form and powers of a new second chamber. In March 2008 an elected chamber was proposed whose members would serve for fifteen years with a third being replaced every five years. This is still a matter of great contention, not least because it would create two potentially rival chambers each with a popular mandate. An American journalist asked whether ‘by moving from an upper chamber of ornery old buffers to one of political grandees, would the Brits be doing themselves a favour?’42 The resolution of the impasse over the Lords may be postponed for some years, not least because politicians are now preoccupied with the chronic recession created by the sudden disintegration of the banking system during the summer and autumn of 2008.
In the meantime, life peers predominate in the Lords and have become imbued by the audacious and independent spirit of their hereditary predecessors. The Lords has again become a bulwark against arbitrary government and the protectors of ancient popular liberties. Over the past four years, peers have treated the government as they once treated overbearing monarchs. Successive cabinets have uncritically succumbed to the alarms sounded by police chiefs, assorted ‘security’ gurus and secret service supremos running scared from real and illusory terrorist threats and whittled away established liberties and legal processes. The Lords have blocked these measures: they have resisted the erosion of the right to trial by jury, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and a bill contrived to suppress freedom of expression in religious matters and the peacetime introduction of identity cards. For good measure, the peers have also swept aside the exemption of MP’s expenses from the Freedom of Information Act, which has led to some disconcerting revelations.
The last ten years has witnessed the strange rebirth of the House of Lords. Its members, overwhelmingly life peers, have somehow unconsciously absorbed the historic independence and vigilance of the old hereditary nobility. Of course, these qualities were often more apparent than real, but there were crucial moments when they were not, and the early twenty-first century is one. Today, the Lords are applying their traditional dispassion and watchfulness to restrain an executive whose inclinations are authoritarian and which tends to dismiss the ancient legal rights and liberties of the individual as hindrances to administrative efficiency. There is nothing new in this: King John and Charles I would have approved of on-the-spot fines and the 2006 Terrorism Act. Nor is there anything new in the House of Lords’ position as the guardian of ancestral freedoms and a defence against tyranny. The power of the hereditary aristocracy may have disappeared, but its sense of public duty remains strong among its modern successor.
Notes
The works referred to here are cited in full in the Bibliography.
Abbreviations
BL = British Library
BodL = Bodleian Library
BP = Blenheim Palace
CP = The Complete Peerage
CPR = Calendar of Patent Rolls
CSP = Calendar of State Papers
DNB = Dictionary of National Biography
HMC = Historic Manuscripts Commission
HP = History of Parliament
ILN = Illustrated London News
LP = Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII
MCO = Magdalen College, Oxford
NA = National Archives
NAS = National Archives of Scotland
NLS = National Library of Scotland
PL = Paston Letters
SR = Statutes of the Realm
Part One: Ascendancy
Chapter 1. A Game of Dice: The Growth of Aristocratic Power
1. Tristram, passim.
2. Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, VIII, 1968, p. 46, p. 51, p. 55, p. 70.
3. Maddicott, pp. 43–5.
4. Sayles (ed.), p. 227.
5. Stonor Letters, I, pp. 116–17.
6. The Lisle Letters, I, p. 585.
Chapter 2. Manners and Virtue: The Cult of Chivalry and the Culture of the Aristocracy
1. Rawcliffe, pp. 29–30, pp. 93–4; Lisle Letters, I, p. 13.
2. Dyboski, R.
, and Arend, M. (eds.), p. 11.
3. Keen, p. 119, p. 122.
4. St John Hope, passim.
5. Sinclair, pp. 87–9.
6. ed. Miller, p. 559.
7. Anglo, I, p. 20.
8. Turville-Petre, pp. 336–7.
9. Westfall, pp. 175–8.
10. Hanna III, p. 897, p. 910.
11. Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, II, p. 34.
12. Both are large and were made in 1401; one is at Dyrham and the other at Chipping Campden.
13. Aldwell, p. 56.
14. MCO, Miscellaneous Manuscripts, 270.
15. HMC, De Lisle and Dudley, I, p. 199.
16. Saul, passim.
17. Virgoe, ‘Some Ancient Indictments’, pp. 254–5.
18. Offord (ed.), pp. 2-4.
19. Smyth, Lives, II, pp. 5–6.
Chapter 3. Their Plenty was Our Scarcity: Resistance.
1. By far the best account is Professor Barry Dobson’s collection of documents; I have relied upon it and his comments.
2. Dobson, p. 258.
3. Owst, p. 301.
4. Fryde, p. 78.
5. Fryde, p. 76, p. 119.
6. Smyth, Lives, II, p. 6.
Chapter 4. Weeds Which Must Be Mown Down: The Wars of the Roses 1450–87
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 37
