The Proud Tower (6 page)

Distinction might also be won by a famous “whip” like Lord Londesborough, president of the Four-in-Hand Club, who was known as a “swell,” the term for a person of extreme elegance and splendor, and was renowned for the smartness of his turnouts and the “gloss, speed and style” of his carriage horses. The carriage horse was more than ornamental; he was essential for transportation and through this role his tyranny was exercised. When a niece of Charles Darwin was taken in 1900 to see Lord Roberts embark for South Africa, she saw the ship but not Lord Roberts “because the carriage had to go home or the horses might have been tired.” When her Aunt Sara, Mrs. William Darwin, went shopping in Cambridge she always walked up the smallest hill behind her own carriage, and if her errands took her more than ten miles the carriage and horses were sent home and she finished her visits in a horsecab.

But the true passion of the horseman was expressed in the rider to hounds. To gallop over the downs with hounds and horsemen, wrote Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in a sonnet, was to feel “my horse a thing of wings, myself a God.” The fox-hunting man never had enough of the thrills, the danger, and the beauty of the hunt; of the wail of the huntsman’s horn, the excited yelping of the hounds, the streaming rush of red-coated riders and black-clad ladies on sidesaddles, the flying leaps over banks, fences, stone walls and ditches, even the crashes, broken bones and the cold aching ride home in winter. If it was bliss in that time to be alive and of the leisured class, to hunt was rapture. The devotee of the sport—man or woman—rode to hounds five and sometimes six days a week. It was said of Mr. Knox, private chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, that he wore boots and spurs under his cassock and surplice and “thought of horses even in the pulpit.” The Duke’s family could always tell by the speed of morning prayers if Mr. Knox were hunting that day or not.

Mr. Henry Chaplin, the popular “Squire” in Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet, who was considered the archetype of the English country gentleman and took himself very seriously as representative in Parliament of the agricultural interest, took himself equally seriously as Master of the Blankney Hounds and could not decide which duty came first. During a debate or a Cabinet he would draw little sketches of horses on official papers. When his presence as a minister was required at question time he would have a special train waiting to take him wherever the hunt was to meet next morning. Somewhere between stations it would stop, Mr. Chaplin would emerge, in white breeches and scarlet coat, climb the embankment, and find his groom and horses waiting. Weighing 250 pounds, he was constantly in search of horses big and strong enough to carry him and frequently “got to the bottom of several in one day.” “To see him thundering down at a fence on one of his great horses was a fine sight.” On one occasion the only opening out of a field was a break in a high hedge where a young sapling had been planted surrounded by an iron cage 4 feet 6 inches high. “There were shouts for a chopper or a knife when down came the Squire, forty miles an hour, with his eyeglass in his eye seeing nothing but the opening in the hedge. There was no stopping him; neither did the young tree do so, for his weight and that of his horse broke it off as clean as you would break a thin stick and away he went without an idea that the tree had ever been there.”

The cost of being a Master who, besides maintaining his own stable, was responsible for the breeding and upkeep of the pack was no small matter. So extravagant was Mr. Chaplin’s passion that he at one time kept two packs, rode with two hunts and, what with keeping a racing stud, a deer forest in Scotland and entertaining that expensive friend, the Prince of Wales, he ultimately ruined himself and lost the family estates. On one of his last hunts in 1911, when he was over seventy, he was thrown and suffered two broken ribs and a pierced lung, but before being carried home, insisted on stopping at the nearest village to telegraph the Conservative Whip in the House of Commons that he would not be present to vote that evening.

George Wyndham, who was to acquire Cabinet rank as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1902, was torn like Mr. Chaplin between passion for the hunt and duty to politics. In Wyndham’s case, the duty was not untinged by ambition, since he had every intention of becoming Prime Minister. As he likewise wrote poetry and had leanings toward art and literature, life was for him full of difficult choices. A sporting friend advised him against “sacrificing my life to politics and gave Harry Chaplin as a shocking example of whom better things were expected in his youth.” It was hard not to agree and prefer the carefree life when gentlemen came down to breakfast in their pink coats with an apron tied on to protect the chalked white of their breeches, or when on a Christmas night, as Wyndham described it, “we sat down thirty-nine to dinner” and thirty hunted next day. “Today we are all out again.… Three of us sailed away [fifty lengths in front of the nearest followers]. The rest were nowhere. We spreadeagled the field. The pace was too hot to choose your place by a yard. We just took everything as it came with hounds screaming by our side. Nobody could gain an inch. These are the moments … that are the joy of hunting. There is nothing like it.”

Older than fox-hunting, the oldest role of the horseman was in war. Cavalry officers considered themselves the cream of the Army and were indeed more notable for social prestige than for thought or imagination. They were “sure of themselves,” wrote a cavalry officer from a later vantage point, “with the superb assurance that belonged to those who were young at this time and came of their class and country.” In their first years with the regiment they managed, by a daily routine of port and a weekly fall on the head from horseback, to remain in “that state of chronic numb confusion which was the aim of every cavalry officer.” Polo, learned on its native ground by the regiments in India, was their passion and the cavalry charge the sum and acme of their strategy. It was from the cavalry that the nation’s military leaders were drawn. They believed in the cavalry charge as they believed in the Church of England. The classical cavalry officer was that magnificent and genial figure, a close friend of the Prince of Wales, “distinguished at Court, in the Clubs, on the racecourse, in the hunting field … one of the brightest military stars in London Society,” Colonel Brabazon of the 10th Hussars. Six feet tall, with clean and symmetrical features, bright gray eyes and strong jaw, he had a moustache the Kaiser would have envied, and ideas to match. Testifying before the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1902 on the lessons of the Boer War, in which he had commanded the Imperial Yeomanry, General Brabazon (as he now was) “electrified the Commission by a recital of his personal experiences in hand to hand fighting and his theories of the use of the Cavalry Arm in war.” These included, as reported by Lord Esher to the King, “life-long mistrust of the weapons supplied to the Cavalry and his preference for shock tactics by men armed with a Tomahawk.” Giving his evidence “in a manner highly characteristic of that gallant officer … he drew graphic pictures of a Cavalry charge under these conditions which proved paralyzing to the imagination of the Commissioners.” They next heard Colonel Douglas Haig, lately chief Staff officer of the cavalry division in the South African War, deplore the proposed abolition of the lance and affirm his belief in the
arme blanche
, that is, the cavalry saber, as an effective weapon.

At home in the country, among his tenants and cottagers, crops and animals, on the estate that dominated the life of the district of which “The House” was the large unit and the village the small, on the land that his family had owned and cultivated and rented out and drawn income from for generations, the English patrician bloomed in his natural climate. Here from childhood on he lived closely with nature, with the sky and trees, the fields and birds and deer in the woods. “We were richly endowed in the surpassing beauty of the homes in which we were reared,” wrote Lady Frances Balfour. The stately houses—Blenheim of the Dukes of Marlborough, Chatsworth of the Dukes of Devonshire, Wilton of the Earls of Pembroke, Warwick Castle of the Earls of Warwick, Knole of the Sackvilles, Hatfield of the Salisburys—had three or four hundred rooms, a hundred chimneys, and roofs measured in acres. Others less grand often had been lived in longer, like Renishaw, inhabited by the Sitwells for at least seven hundred years. Owners great and small never finished adding on to or altering the house and improving the landscape. They removed or created hills, conjured up lakes, diverted streams, and cut vistas through their woods finished off by a marble pavilion to fix the eye.

Their homes proliferated. A town house, a family estate, a second country home, a shooting box in a northern county, another in Scotland, possibly a castle in Ireland were not out of the ordinary. Besides Hatfield and his London house on Arlington Street, Lord Salisbury owned Walmer Castle in Deal, the Manor House at Cranborne in Dorsetshire, his villa in France, and if he had been a sporting man, would have had a place in Scotland or a racing stud near Epsom or Newmarket. There were 115 persons in Great Britain who owned over 50,000 acres each, and forty-five of these owned over 100,000 acres each, although much of this was uncultivatable land in Scotland whose income yield was low. There were some sixty to sixty-five persons, all peers, who possessed both land over 50,000 acres and income over £50,000, and fifteen of these—seven dukes, three marquesses, three earls, one baron and one baronet—had landed incomes of over £100,000. In all of Great Britain, out of a population of 44,500,000, there were 2,500 landowners who owned more than 3,000 acres apiece and had landed incomes of over £3,000.

Income taxes were not payable on incomes under £160 and in this category there were approximately eighteen to twenty million people. Of these, about three million were in white-collar or service trades—clerks, shopmen, tradesmen, innkeepers, farmers, teachers—who earned an average of £75 a year. Fifteen and a half million were manual workers, including soldiers, sailors, postmen and policemen and those in agricultural and domestic service who earned less than £50 a year. The “poverty line” had been worked out at £55 a year, or 21
s
. 8
d
. a week, for a family of five. Indoor servants slept in attics or windowless basements. Agricultural laborers lived in houses for which they paid a shilling a week, and worked with scythe, plow and sickle in the fields from the time when the great horn boomed at five o’clock in the morning until nightfall. When their houses leaked or rotted they were dependent on the landlord for repairs, and unless the landlord took care of them when their earning power came to an end, they went to the workhouse to finish out their days. Estate servants—grooms, gardeners, carpenters, blacksmiths, dairymen and field hands—whose families had lived on the land as long as its owners, gave service that was “wholehearted and passionate.… Their pride was bound up in it.”

With the opening of the grouse season in August, and until the reopening of Parliament in January, the great landowners engaged in continuous entertainment of each other in week-long house parties of twenty to fifty guests. With each guest bringing his own servant, the host fed as many as a hundred, and on one occasion at Chatsworth, four hundred extra mouths while his house party lasted. Shooting was the favored pastime and consisted in displaying sufficient stamina and marksmanship, assisted by a loader and three or four guns, to bring down an unlimited bag of small game flushed out of its coverts by an army of beaters. From county to county and back and forth into Scotland, their trail marked by thousands upon thousands of dead birds and hares, the gentry were constantly on the move: for shooting with the Prince at Sandringham, for hunting (in blue and buff instead of scarlet coats) with the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds in Wiltshire, for deer stalking amid Scottish lochs and crags and trackless forests (“Keep doon, Squire, keep doon”—his ghillie whispered to Mr. Chaplin, forced to crawl into the open to come within shooting distance of his stag—“ye’re so splendidly built about the haunches I’m afeert the deer will be seeing ye”), for Christmas parties and coming-of-age parties and occasional time out at Homburg and Marienbad to purge satiated stomachs and allow the round to begin again.

Morning was the gentlemen’s time on the moors; ladies came down to breakfast in hats and at afternoon tea reigned in elaborate and languorous tea gowns of, it might be, “
eau de Nil
satin draped with gold-spangled
mousseline de soie
and bands of sable at hem and neck.” Formal dinners followed in full evening dress. All day, herds of servants glided silently about, bringing early morning tea and
The Times
, carrying up bath water and coal for the fireplaces, replenishing vases daily with fresh flowers, murmuring “His Grace is in the Long Library,” sounding gongs at meal times and waiting up to uncorset Her Ladyship for bed.

Each guest at the house parties had his name on a card fitted into a brass frame on his bedroom door and a corresponding card beside the bell indicator in the butler’s pantry. In assigning rooms the recognized, if unacknowledged, liaisons had to be considered. As long as the partners in these intramural infidelities did nothing to provoke a public scandal by outraged wife or cuckolded husband, they could do as they pleased. The overriding consideration was to prevent any exposure of misconduct to the lower classes. In that respect the code was rigid. Within the closed circle of the ruling class the unforgivable sin was to give away any member of the group; there must be no appeal to the Divorce Court, no publicity that would bring the members as a class into disrepute. If, regrettably, a husband refused absolutely to be complaisant and threatened action, all the arbiters of Society, including, if necessary, the Prince of Wales (despite his own hardly faultless record), rallied to stop him. He must not, they reminded him, sacrifice his class to such exposure. It was his duty to preserve appearances and an unsullied front before the gaze of the vulgar. Subdued, he would obey, even at the cost, in the case of one couple, of not speaking to his wife except in public for twenty years.