VII.
SOCIAL EQUALIZATION.
It was a characteristic saying of Talleyrand that no one could conceive how pleasant life was capable of being who had not belonged to the French aristocracy before the Revolution. There were, no doubt, in the case of that great man's congeners some legal and constitutional prerogatives which rendered their condition supremely enviable; but so far as splendour, stateliness, and exclusive privilege are elements of a pleasant life, he might have extended his remark to England. Similar conditions of social existence here and in France were similarly and simultaneously transformed by the same tremendous upheaval which marked the final disappearance of the feudal spirit and the birth of the modern world.
The old order passed away, and the face of human society was made new. The law-abiding and temperate genius of the Anglo-Saxon race saved England from the excesses, the horrors, and the dramatic incidents which marked this period of transition in France; but though more quietly effected, the change in England was not less marked, less momentous, or less permanent than on the Continent. I have spoken in a former chapter of the religious revival which was the most striking result in England of the Revolution in France. To-day I shall say a word about another result, or group of results, which may be summarized as Social Equalization.
The barriers between ranks and classes were to a large extent broken down. The prescriptive privileges of aristocracy were reduced. The ceremoniousness of social demeanour was diminished. Great men were content with less elaboration and display in their retinues, equipages, and mode of living. Dress lost its richness of ornament and its distinctive characteristics. Young men of fashion no longer bedizened themselves in velvet, brocade, and gold lace. Knights of the Garter no longer displayed the Blue Ribbon in Parliament. Officers no longer went into society with uniform and sword. Bishops laid aside their wigs; dignified clergy discarded the cassock. Coloured coats, silk stockings, lace ruffles, and hair-powder survived only in the footmen's liveries. When the Reform Bill of 1832 received the Royal Assent, the Lord Bathurst of the period, who had been a member of the Duke of Wellington's Cabinet, solemnly cut off his pigtail, saying, "Ichabod, for the glory is departed;" and to the first Reformed Parliament only one pigtail was returned (it pertained to Mr. Sheppard, M.P. for Frome)—an impressive symbol of social transformation.
The lines of demarcation between the peerage and the untitled classes were partially obliterated. How clear and rigid those lines had been it is difficult for us to conceive. In Humphrey Clinker the nobleman refuses to fight a duel with the squire on the ground of their social inequality. Mr. Wilberforce declined a peerage because it would exclude his sons from intimacy with private gentlemen, clergymen, and mercantile families. I have stated in a previous chapter that Lord Bathurst, who was born in 1791, told me that at his private school he and the other sons of peers sate together on a privileged bench apart from the rest of the boys. A typical aristocrat was the first Marquis of Abercorn. He died in 1818, but he is still revered in Ulster under the name of "The Owld Marquis." This admirable nobleman always went out shooting in his Blue Ribbon, and required his housemaids to wear white kid gloves when they made his bed. Before he married his first cousin, Miss Cecil Hamilton, he induced the Crown to confer on her the titular rank of an Earl's daughter, that he might not marry beneath his position; and when he discovered that she contemplated eloping, he sent a message begging her to take the family coach, as it ought never to be said that Lady Abercorn left her husband's roof in a hack chaise. By such endearing traits do the truly great live in the hearts of posterity.
In the earlier part of this century Dr. Arnold inveighed with characteristic vigour against "the insolencies of our aristocracy, the scandalous exemption of the peers from all ignominious punishments short of death, and the insolent practice of allowing peers to vote in criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath." But generally the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a childlike cheerfulness. The high function of government was the birthright of the few. The people, according to episcopal showing, had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. The ingenious author of Russell's Modern Europe states in his preface to that immortal work that his object in adopting the form of a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son is "to give more Weight to the Moral and Political Maxims, and to entitle the author to offer, without seeming to dictate to the World, such reflections on Life and Manners as are supposed more immediately to belong to the higher orders in Society." Nor were the privileges of rank held to pertain merely to temporal concerns. When Selina Countess of Huntingdon asked the Duchess of Buckingham to accompany her to a sermon of Whitefield's, the Duchess replied: "I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding."
The exclusive and almost feudal character of the English peerage was destroyed, finally and of set purpose, by Pitt when he declared that every man who had an estate of ten thousand a year had a right to be a peer. In Lord Beaconsfield's words, "He created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill." This democratization of the peerage was accompanied by great modifications of pomp and stateliness in the daily life of the peers. In the eighteenth century the Duke and Duchess of Atholl were always served at their own table before their guests, in recognition of their royal rank as Sovereigns of the Isle of Man; and the Duke and Duchess of Argyll observed the same courteous usage for no better reason than because they liked it. The "Household Book" of Alnwick Castle records the amplitude and complexity of the domestic hierarchy which ministered to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland; and at Arundel and Belvoir, and Trentham and Wentworth, the magnates of the peerage lived in a state little less than regal. Seneschals and gentlemen-ushers, ladies-in-waiting and pages-of-the-presence adorned noble as well as royal households. The private chaplain of a great Whig duke, within the recollection of people whom I have known, used to preface his sermon with a prayer for the nobility, and "especially for the noble duke to whom I am indebted for my scarf"—the badge of chaplaincy—accompanying the words by a profound bow toward his Grace's pew. The last "running footman" pertained to "Old Q."—the notorious Duke of Queensberry, who died in 1810. Horace Walpole describes how, when a guest playing cards at Woburn Abbey dropped a silver piece on the floor, and said, "Oh, never mind; let the Groom of the Chambers have it," the Duchess replied, "Let the carpet-sweeper have it; the Groom of the Chambers never takes anything but gold."