The Proud Tower (5 page)

At private dinner tables draped in smilax, with a footman behind each chair, gentlemen in white tie and tails conversed with ladies in clouds of tulle over bare shoulders, wearing stars or coronets in their elaborately piled hair. Conversation was not casual but an art “in which competence conferred prestige.” At the opera, made fashionable by its most energetic patroness, Lady de Grey, Nellie Melba sang love duets in her pure angelic soprano with the handsome idol Jean de Reszke. In the Royal Box glowed a vision in low-cut velvet, Lady Warwick, with “only a few diamonds on her Mephistophelian scarlet dress” and a scarlet aigrette in her hair. A battle array of lorgnettes was raised to see what Lady de Grey, her rival as London’s best-dressed woman, was wearing. Afterwards at Lady de Grey’s parties, called “Bohemia in tiaras,” the guests might include Mme Melba herself and the Prince of Wales and—before his fatal year of 1895—Oscar Wilde. Every night there were political receptions lasting till midnight or dances continuing until dawn. At the top of a sweeping curve of staircase the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Londonderry, the two arbiters of Society, glittering in diamonds, received a brilliant stream of guests while a major-domo in a stentorian orgy of titles announced, “His Grace … Her Highness … The Right Honorable … Lord and Lady … His Excellency the Ambassador of …” and down in the lamplit square a footman bellowed for some departing Lordship’s carriage.

Society was divided into several sets whose edges overlapped and members mingled. At the head of the “fast,” or sporting, Marlborough House set was the cigar and paunch, the protruding Hanoverian countenance finished off by a short gray beard, the portly yet regal figure of the Prince of Wales. Eclectic, sociable, utterly bored (as was everyone who suffered under it) by the dull monotony of the royal regimen prescribed by his widowed mother, the Prince opened his circle of the nobility to a variety of disturbing outsiders, provided they were either beautiful, rich or amusing: Americans, Jews, bankers and stockbrokers, even an occasional manufacturer, explorer or other temporary celebrity. Professionally the Prince met everybody: among his personal friends he included some of the country’s ablest men, such as Admiral Sir John Fisher, and it was an unkind canard to say he never read a book. True, he preferred Marie Corelli to any living author, yet he read Lieutenant Winston Churchill’s first book,
The Malakand Field Force
, with “the greatest possible interest” and kindly wrote the author an appreciative note saying he thought “the descriptions and language generally excellent.” But on the whole, in his circle, intellectuals and literary people were not welcome and brains not appreciated, because, according to Lady Warwick, Society, or this section of it, “did not want to be made to think.” It was pleasure-loving, reckless, thoughtless and wildly extravagant. The newcomers, especially the Jews, were in most cases resented, “not because we disliked them individually, for some of them were charming and even brilliant, but because they had brains and understood finance.” This was doubly disturbing because society most particularly did not want to think about making money, only about spending it.

On the right of the sporting set were the “Incorruptibles,” the strict, reactionary, intensely class-conscious long-established families who regarded the Prince’s circle as “vulgar” and themselves as upholding the tone of Society. Each family was encircled by a tribe of poorer country cousins who appeared in London once or twice a generation to bring out a daughter, but otherwise had hardly emerged from the Eighteenth Century. On the left were the “Intellectuals,” or “Souls,” who gathered in worship around their sun and center, Arthur Balfour, nephew of Lord Salisbury and the most brilliant and popular man in London. As a group they were particularly literate, self-consciously clever and endlessly self-admiring. They enjoyed each other’s company in the same way that an unusually handsome man or woman enjoys preening before a mirror. “You all sit around and talk about each other’s souls,” remarked Lord Charles Beresford at a dinner in 1888. “I shall call you the ‘Souls,’ ” and so they were named. An admiral of the Navy and vivid ornament of the Prince of Wales’s set, Lord Charles was not himself one of the Souls, although he had married an unusual wife who wore a tiara with her tea gowns and was painted by Sargent with two sets of eyebrows because, as the painter briefly explained, she
had
two sets, a penciled one above the real.

The men of the Souls all followed political careers and nearly all were junior ministers in Lord Salisbury’s Government. A leading member was George Wyndham, who had written a book on French poets and an introduction to North’s
Plutarch
and after serving as Mr. Balfour’s Parliamentary Private Secretary was named Under-Secretary of War in 1898, despite Lord Salisbury’s reluctant remark, “I don’t like poets.” George Curzon, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs and soon to be appointed Viceroy of India, was another Soul, as was St. John Brodrick, a later Secretary for War. Both were heirs to peerages who staged a vain protest against their anticipated fate of enforced removal to the House of Lords. Others were the Tennant connection: Alfred Lyttelton, a champion cricketer who was to become Colonial Secretary and who had been married, before she died, to Laura Tennant; Lord Ribblesdale, who was married to Charlotte Tennant; and the uninhibited third sister, Margot, whose marriage to the outgoing Liberal Home Secretary, Mr. Asquith, was attended by two past prime ministers, Mr. Gladstone and Lord Rosebery, and two future ones, Mr. Balfour and the groom. A particularly admired member was Harry Cust, heir of the Brownlow barony, a scholar and athlete with a blazing wit who on sheer reputation alone, with no previous experience, was asked across the dinner table to be editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
; he accepted on the spot and served for four years. Flawed by a “fatal self-indulgence” with regard to women—to whom he was “irresistibly fascinating”—his public career suffered and never fulfilled its early promise.

Society was small and homogeneous and its
sine qua non
was land. For an outsider to break in, it was essential first to buy an estate and live on it, although even this did not always work. When John Morley, at that time a Cabinet minister, was visiting Skibo, where Mr. Andrew Carnegie had constructed a swimming pool, he took his accompanying detective to see it and asked his opinion. “Well, sir,” the detective replied judiciously, “it seems to me to savour of the parvenoo.”

In the “brilliant and powerful body,” as Winston Churchill called it, of the two hundred great families who had been governing England for generations, everyone knew or was related to everyone else. Since superiority and comfortable circumstances imposed on the nobility and gentry a duty to reproduce themselves, they were given to large families, five or six children being usual, seven or eight not uncommon, and nine or more not unknown. The Duke of Abercorn, father of Lord George Hamilton in Salisbury’s Government, had six sons and seven daughters; the fourth Baron Lyttelton, Gladstone’s brother-in-law and father of Alfred Lyttelton, had eight sons and four daughters; the Duke of Argyll, Secretary for India under Gladstone, had twelve children. As a result of the marriages of so many siblings, and of the numerous second marriages, everyone was related to a dozen other families. People who met each other every day, at each other’s homes, at race meetings and hunts, at Cowes, for the Regatta, at the Royal Academy, at court and in Parliament, were more often than not meeting their second cousins or brother-in-law’s uncle or stepfather’s sister or aunt’s nephew on the other side. When a prime minister formed a government it was not nepotism but almost unavoidable that some of his Cabinet should be related to him or to each other. In the Cabinet of 1895 Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary for War, was married to a sister of Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary for India, and Lansdowne’s daughter was married to the nephew and heir of the Duke of Devonshire, who was Lord President of the Council.

The country’s rulers, said one, “knew each other intimately quite apart from Westminster.” They had been at school together and at one of the two favored colleges, Christ Church at Oxford or Trinity College at Cambridge. Here prime ministers—including Lords Rosebery and Salisbury, at Christ Church, and their immediate successors, Mr. Balfour and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, at Trinity—were grown naturally. The forcing house of statesmanship, however, was Balliol, whose mighty Master, Benjamin Jowett, frankly spent his teaching talents on intelligent undergraduates “whose social position might enable them to obtain high offices in the public service.” Christ Church, known simply as the “House,” was the particular habitat of the wealthy and landed aristocracy. During the youth of the men who governed in the nineties, it was presided over by Dean Liddell, a singularly handsome man of great social elegance and formidable manner who had a daughter, Alice, much admired by an obscure lecturer in mathematics named Charles Dodgson. Activities at the “House” were chiefly fox-hunting, racing, a not too serious form of cricket and “no end of good dinners in the company of the best fellows in the world, as they knew it.”

When such fellows in after life wrote their memoirs, the early pages were thick with footnotes identifying the Charles, Arthur, William and Francis of the author’s school days as “afterwards Chief of Imperial General Staff” or “afterwards Bishop of Southhampton” or Speaker of the House or Minister at Athens as the case might be. Through years of familiarity they knew each other’s characters and could ask each other favors. When Winston Churchill, at twenty-three, wanted to join the Sudan expedition in 1898 over the firm objections of its Commander-in-Chief, Sir Herbert Kitchener, the matter was not beyond accomplishment. Winston’s grandfather, the seventh Duke of Marlborough, had been Lord Salisbury’s colleague under Disraeli, and Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister listened amiably to the young man and promised his help. When it turned out to be needed on short notice, Winston had recourse to the Private Secretary, Sir Schomberg McDonnell, “whom I had seen and met in social circles since I was a child.” Winston found him dressing for dinner and on the errand being explained, “ ‘I’ll do it at once,’ said this gallant man, and off he went, discarding his dinner party.” In this way affairs were managed.

The mold in which they were all educated was the same, and its object was not necessarily the scientific spirit or the exact mind, but a “graceful dignity” which entitled the bearer to the status of English gentleman, and an unshatterable belief in that status as the highest good of man on earth. As such, it obligated the bearer to live up to it. In every boy’s room at Eton hung the famous picture by Lady Butler of the disaster at Majuba Hill showing an officer with uplifted sword charging deathward to the cry of “
Floreat Etona!
” The spirit instilled may have accounted for, as has been suggested, the preponderance of bravery over strategy in British officers. Yet to be an Etonian was “to imbibe a sense of effortless superiority and be lulled in a consciousness of unassailable primacy.” Clothed in this armor, its wearers were serenely sure of their world and sorry for anyone who was not of it. When Sir Charles Tennant and a partner at golf were preparing to drive and were rudely interrupted by a stranger who pushed in ahead and placed his own ball on the tee, the enraged partner was about to explode. “Don’t be angry with him,” Sir Charles soothed. “Perhaps he isn’t quite a gentleman, poor fellow, poor fellow.”

This magic condition was envied and earnestly imitated abroad by all the continental aristocracy (except perhaps the Russians, who spoke French and imitated nobody). German noblemen relentlessly married English wives and put on tweeds and raglan coats, while in France the life of the
haut monde
centered upon the Jockey Club, whose members played polo, drank whiskey and had their portraits painted in hunting pink by Helleu, the French equivalent of Sargent.

It was no accident that their admired model was thought of in equestrian terms. The English gentleman was unthinkable without his horse. Ever since the first mounted man acquired extra stature and speed (and, with the invention of the stirrup, extra fighting thrust), the horse had distinguished the ruler from the ruled. The man on horseback was the symbol of dominance, and of no other class anywhere in the world was the horse so intrinsic a part as of the English aristocracy. He was the attribute of their power. When a contemporary writer wished to describe the point of view of the county oligarchy it was equestrian terms that he used: they saw society, he wrote, made up of “a small select aristocracy born booted and spurred to ride and a large dim mass born saddled and bridled to be ridden.”

In 1895 the horse was still as inseparable from, and ubiquitous in, upper-class life as the servant, though considerably more cherished. He provided locomotion, occupation and conversation; inspired love, bravery, poetry and physical prowess. He was the essential element in racing, the sport of kings, as in cavalry, the elite of war. When an English patrician thought nostalgically of youth, it was as a time “when I looked at life from the saddle and was as near heaven as it was possible to be.”

The gallery at Tattersall’s on Sunday nights when Society gathered to look over the horses for the Monday sales was as fashionable as the opera. People did not simply go to the races at Newmarket; they owned or took houses in the neighborhood and lived there during the meeting. Racing was ruled by the three Stewards of the Jockey Club from whose decision there was no appeal. Three Cabinet ministers in Lord Salisbury’s Government, Mr. Henry Chaplin, the Earl of Cadogan and the Duke of Devonshire, were at one time or another Stewards of the Jockey Club. Owning a stud and breeding racehorses required an ample fortune. When Lord Rosebery, having married a Rothschild, won the Derby while Prime Minister in 1894, he received a telegram from Chauncey Depew in America, “Only heaven left.” Depew’s telegram proved an underestimate, for Rosebery won the Derby twice more, in 1895 and 1905. The Prince of Wales won it in 1896 with his great lengthy bay Persimmon, bred at his own stud, again in 1900 with Persimmon’s brother Diamond Jubilee, and a third time, as King, in 1909 with Minoru. As the first such victory by a reigning monarch, it was Epsom’s greatest day. When the purple, scarlet and gold of the royal colors came to the front at Tattenham Corner the crowd roared; when Minoru neck and neck with his rival battled it out at a furious pace along the rails they went mad with excitement and wept with delight when he won by a head. They broke through the ropes, patted the King on the back, wrung his hand, and “even policemen were waving their helmets and cheering themselves hoarse.”