The Years of Endurance (3 page)

To the island State, which with scarcely half France's pop
ulation took up her gage of battl
e, had come during the past century the most astonishing prosperity. Divided a century before by violent political and religious controversies which on more than one occasion had degenerated into civil strife, she had achieved enduring unity with the Revolution of 1688. This had placed a Dutchman and later a dynasty of German princes on the throne, but had given the real direction of the kingdom to the greater owners of land. Wiser than the Stuarts they had overthrown, they exercised power by shunning its outward forms. They governed in the King's name and legislated thr
ough an assembly of country gentl
emen, lawyers and placeholders, more than equal to their own hereditary chamber in status but subject to their social and territorial influence. In this they showed their shrewdness. For the English people did not like the appearance of power.

Nor did these supremely fortunate creatures exercise power for its own sake—these Russells and Grenvilles, Cavendishes, Talbots and Howards with their scores of thousands of acres, their hereditary tides and offices, their State sinecures and pensions for their younger sons and cousins and retainers.
¹
Dur
ing their rule they evinced littl
e desire to oppress their fellow-subjects. Such activity was alien to their character. They sought honours and riches with avidity and retained them with firm grasp, securing their continued enjoyment

*At the beginning of George Ill's reign there were only
174
British peers.

by elaborate entails on their elder children. But they valued them almost entirely for what they brought in freedom and ease to themselves. They extended and improved their domains and cheated the King's Exchequer for the glorious privilege of being independent. This they achieved on a scale formerly unknown to any society.

The countryside was dotted with their lovely palaces and noble avenues, the fields and woods of the whole kingdom were open to their horses and hounds, the genius of man, past and present, was brought to decorate their houses and gardens, to fill their libraries with the masterpieces of the classical and modern mind in bindings worthy of them, to cover their walls with paintings and tapestries, and adorn their tables with exquisite silver and porcelain. Theirs was an ample and splendid design for living. Nor was it a purely material one. For such was the subtlety of their intelligences that they instinctively refused to be chained by their possessions and comforts. They encouraged freedom of expression and diversity of behaviour, preferring a vigorous existence and the society of their equals to a hot-house tended by serfs. They sent their sons to rough, libertarian schools where strawberry leaves were no talisman against the rod
¹
and afterwards to the House of Commons where men used plain words and likewise suffered them. And if by their English law of primogeniture they transmitted to their firstborn a wealth and freedom equal and if possible superior to their own, the same law endowed their younger sons with incentive and scope for action and adventure. They left the doors of opportunity open.

Nor did they ignore nature. They made no extravagant attempt to secure exclusive privilege for their blood, but frankly recognised the principle of change. They were realists. Though possessing almost unlimited power, the English aristocracy never attempted to make itself a rigid caste. The younger sons of a Duke or Marquis were by courtesy entitled Lords; the younger sons of a Viscount or Baron, Honourables, There their transmitted dignities ended. Save for the eldest male their grandchildren were all commoners with the same prefix as groom and gamekeeper. Kinship with
the
great, though a social asset, was no defence to breach of the law: a man might be hanged though he were cousin to a Marquis with

¹
At Harrow the Duke of
Dorset was always beaten twice,
once for the offence and once for being a Duke.

80,000 acres. The great lords looked after themselves and their immediate kin: they refused to
endanger their privilege by ex
tending it too widely.

Within the confines of their sensible ambition there was no limit but the laws they made to their personal power and enjoyment. When Lord Plymouth, passing through a country town, took a fancy to an itinerant Punch and Judy show—a novelty to him—he bought it, proprietor and all. The Duke of Devonshire, a quiet man who gave no trouble to any one, kept house at Chatsworth for a hundred and eighty persons, killed on an average five bullocks and fifteen sheep a week for their sustenance and paid
£
5
a year in pensions to every poor family in the neighbourhood. If such great ones liked formality, they dined like Lord Darnley with Chaplain and Tutor in their appointed places, or shot like the Marquis of Abercorn in the ribbon of the Garter: if they preferred obscurity, they enjoyed that too like that easy-going member of the Beauclerk tribe who was " filthy in his person and generated vermin."

They did as they pleased. The world was their pa
rk and pleas
aunce, and they never doubted their right to make themselves at home in it. " Mr. Dundas ! " cried the Duchess of Gordon to the Home Secretary at an Assembly, " you are used to speak in public— will you call my servant"; Lord Stafford paid a later Home Secret
ary a private retaining fee of
£2000 a year to do his accounts.
¹
And if they chose to be naughty, naughty they were: his Grace of Norfolk—"Jockey of Norfolk"—who looked like a barrel and reeled like a drunken faun, broke up a fashionable dance he was attending by ringing the church bells and distributing cider to a mob under the ballroom windows to celebrate a false rumour that a fellow " Radical " had won the Middlesex election.

Because they enjoyed life and seldom stood deliberately in the way of others doing the same, they were popular. They took part in the nation's amusements and mixed freely with their neighbours. They were healthy, gregarious and generous, and had little fear in their make-up. They governed England without a police force,

¹
" If I were a great nobleman I should come at once to a distinct understanding with my steward, auditors, etc., that they should upon no account take places in the Cabinet under pain of not being received again in my service, since such a practice, if encouraged, might occasion to me great loss and hindrance of business."—John Ward to Mrs. Dugald Stewart/ Oct., 1809,
Letters to Ivy,
85.

without a Bastille and virtually without a Civil Service, by sheer assurance and personality. When the Norfolk Militia refused to march to a field day unless a guinea a man were first distributed, their colonel, William Windham, strode up to the ringleader and, calmly ignoring their oaths and raised muskets, carried him to the guardhouse, standing at the door with a drawn sword and swearing to the rude and liberty-loving mob about him that while he lived the man should not go free.

Wishing to be
primi inter pares
and not solitary despots, the higher aristocracy merged imperceptibly into the country gentry. The Marquis of Buckingham in his white pillared palace at Stowe was only the first gentleman in Buckinghamshire, the social equal if political superior of the Verneys, Chetwodes, Drakes, Purefoys and other humbler squires. They went to the same schools, sat round the same convivial tables, rode together in the hunting field and took counsel with one another at Quarter Sessions. In each family the elder son was t
he independent lord of his own li
ttle world whether it was a couple of thousand homely acres or a broad province such as fell to the lot of a Fitzwilliam or a Northumberland. The younger sons and their younger sons after them quickly shaded off into the general body of lawyers and clergymen, Navy and Army officers, bankers and merchants. Proud blood and breeding flowed in a broad unimpeded current through the nation's veins.

So did the desire to live well: to dine and hunt and lord it like an elder son. The English, despite inequalities of wealth and status, preserved a remarkable unity of social purpose. Even in their most snobbish occasions—an
d in their veneration for the "
quality " they were snobs to a man—there was something of a family atmosphere. On the Continent, where noble blood was a fetish and caste a horizontal dividing line, a nobleman's house tended to be a vast barracks rising out of a desert and set against a cowed background of miserable hovels in which ragged creatures of a different species lived an animal, servile existence. But in England even the costliest mansion soon mellowed into something cosy and homely: more modest, more human than anything dreamed of by Polish count or German baron. French princes and princesses at Versailles built themselves sham cottages in their grounds and dressed up as shepherds and shepherdesses to feed their starved palates on homely pleasures: in England simplicity, with sturdy mien and broad bucolic joke, was never far off. The cottage, snug and thatched with its porch, oven and tank and its garden warm with peonies and rambler roses, stood four-square against the mansion gates. In
The Deserted Village
Goldsmith, by describing what sweet Auburn had been before the east wind of enclosure struck its Christian polity, idealised yet painted from a still living model the English hamlet as our forebears knew it. It was something common to England alone:

" How often have I loitered o'er thy green,

Where humble happiness endeared each scene!

How often have I paused on every charm,

The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,

The never-failing brook, the busy mill,

The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill,

The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,

For talking age and whispering lovers made."

The thing that first struck foreigners about England was its look of prosperity. "As always," wrote the young Comte de la Rochefoucauld of a Norfolk journey in
1784,
" I admired the way in which in all these little villages the houses are clean and have an appearance of cosiness in which ours in France are lacking. There is some indefinable quality about the arrangement of these houses which makes them appear better than they actually are." The English perpetually emulated the good living of their richer neighbours. The larger farmers rode three or four times a week with the squire's harriers, kept a decanter of wine on the sideboard to impress strangers, and a neat parlour wainscoted in oak and furnished with good mahogany. In the same county every weaver's house had its flower garden and grandfather clock and a good open fire round which on winter evenings rosy-faced wives and children sat with beaming faces spinning wool. Houses were still cheap: a good cottage could be built for
£
50
,
and William and Dorothy Wordsworth in
1797
were able to rent an ancient mansion in Somerset with a deer park for
£
30
a year and live there very handsomely on a
legacy
of
£900.

Poverty there often was and i
njustice—in many cases and even
districts harsh, bleak and grinding. With the coming of large-scale enclosure in the seventeen sixties and seventies they began to increase fast, for the new methods of farming and land tenure brought wealth to the few but debasement and suffering to the many. But in
1789
the process was still comparatively young. Though men were everywhere being dispossessed by mysterious parliamentary and legal processes beyond their understanding of rights their forebears had enjoyed, the countryside as a whole retained the air of well-being that had pervaded it for the past hundred years. The landless householder was still the exception rather than the rule. The predominant type, soon to become a minority, was the cottager who laboured three or four days a week on his richer neighbour's land and two or three on his own, who worked far longer hours than his descendant to-day but did so with a freedom of method now unknown. He still regarded the larger farmer who was beginning to be his employer as an equal: had lived in his house in his bachelor days as an unmarried farm servant, had perhaps aspired to his daughter, and had shared his bread and cheese at the long oaken board and drunk his home-brewed beer or cider round his winter ingle-nook. In an unenclosed village he farmed three or four acres of his own in the common fields, holding them by a tenure—a copyhold or perhaps a lease for the longest survivor of three or more lives—which made him something more than a cap-touching tenant dependent on another man's will and gave him social rights founded on the needs and affections of human nature.

Such men could afford to feel independent: they were. "If you offer them work," wrote an improving farmer, " they will tell you that they must go to look up their sheep, cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound or, perhaps, say that they must take their horse to be shod that he may carry them to the horse-race or a cricket-match." It was, indeed, this independence
¹
that caused their better-to-do neighbours to disregard them in their attempt to enlarge their