William Pitt and national revival

by J. Holland Rose

This select aristocracy was preserved from some of the worst evils incident to its station by healthful contact with men and affairs. The reversion of its younger sons to the rank of commoners prevented the formation of the huge caste of nobles, often very poor but always intensely proud, which crusted over the surface of society in Continental lands; and again, the infusion of commoners (generally the ablest governors, soldiers, and lawyers of the age) preserved the Order from intellectual stagnation such as had crept over the old noblesse of France. Both the downward and the upward streams kept the mass free from that decay which sooner or later besets every isolated body. Nor did the British aristocracy enjoy those flagrant immunities from taxation which were the curse of French social and political life.

But let us view this question in a more searching light. Montesquieu finely observes that an aristocracy may maintain its full vigour, if the laws be such as will habituate the nobles more to the perils and fatigues, than to the pleasures, of command.[14] In this respect the British aristocracy ran some risk of degeneration. It is true that its members took an active part in public business. Their work in the House of Lords was praiseworthy. The debates there, if less exciting than those of the Commons, bear signs of experience, wisdom, dignity, and self-restraint, which were often lacking in the Lower House. The nobles also took a large share in the executive duties of the State. Not only did they and their younger sons fill most of the public offices, including the difficult, and often thankless, diplomatic posts, but they were active in their counties and on their estates, as lords-lieutenant, sheriffs, and magistrates. The days had not yet come when “Society” fled from the terrors of the English winter. For the most part nobles spent the parliamentary vacations at their country seats, sharing in the duties and sports which from immemorial times had knit our folk into a compact and sturdy whole. Yet we may question whether the pleasures of command did not then far exceed its perils and fatigues. Apart from the demoralizing struggle for higher honours, there were hosts of court and parliamentary sinecures to excite cupidity and encourage laziness. The rush after emoluments and pleasure became keener than ever after the glorious peace of 1763, and a perusal of the letters addressed to any statesman of the following age must awaken a doubt whether public life was less corrupt than at the time of Walpole.

Then, again, in the making and working of laws, the privileges of the nobles and gentry were dangerously large. Throughout the eighteenth century those classes strengthened their grip both on Parliament and on the counties and parishes. Up to the year 1711 no definite property qualification was required from members of Parliament; but in that year a law was passed limiting the right of representing counties to those who owned land worth £600 a year; and a rental of half that sum was expected from members of boroughs. This was equivalent to shutting out merchants and manufacturers, who were often Dissenters, from the county representation; and the system of pocket boroughs further enabled landowners to make a careful choice in the case of a large part of the members of towns. Again, the powers of the magistrates, or justices of the peace, in the affairs of the parish, were extraordinarily large. A French writer, M. Boutmy, computes them as equalling those of the préfet, the conseil d’arrondissement, the maire, the commissaire de police, and the juge de paix, of the French local government of to-day. Of course the Shallows of Pitt’s time did not fulfil these manifold duties at all systematically; for that would be alien to the haphazard ways of the squires and far beyond their talents. Local despotism slumbered as much as it worked; and just as the Armenians prefer the fitful barbarities of the Turks to the ever-grinding pressure of the Russian bureaucracy, so the villagers of George III’s reign may have been no more oppressed than those of France and Italy are by a system fruitful in good works and jobs, in officials and taxes. On this point it is impossible to dogmatize; for the Georgian peasantry was dumb until the years after Waterloo, when Cobbett began to voice its feelings.

The use of the term “despotism” for the rule of the squires is no exaggeration. They were despots in their own domains. Appeals against the rulings of the local magistrates were always costly and generally futile. It was rare to find legal advisers at their side; and the unaided wits of local landowners decided on all the lesser crimes (many of them punishable with death at the assizes) and the varied needs of the district. With the justices of the peace it lay to nominate the guardians of the poor and “visitors,” who supervised the relief of the poor in the new unions of parishes resulting from Gilbert’s Act of 1782. The working of the Draconian game-laws was entirely in their hands, and that, too, in days when the right of sporting with firearms was limited to owners of land worth £100 a year. Finally, lest there should be any community of sentiment between the bench and the dock, at the oft-recurring trials for poaching, the same land and money test was applied to all applicants for the honoured post of magistrate. The country gentlemen ruled the parish and they virtually ruled the nation.[15] The fact was proclaimed with characteristic insolence by the Lord Justice Clerk, Macqueen of Braxfield, in his address to the jury at the close of the trial of Thomas Muir for sedition, at Edinburgh in August 1793: “A Government in every country should be just like a Corporation; and in this Country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation upon them? What security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their property on their backs and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye. But landed property cannot be removed.”[16] The Scottish nobles, especially in the Highlands, still claimed extensive rights over their vassals; and several of them made patriotic use of these powers in raising regiments during the great war with France. Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, is the best known example of this feudal influence.[17]

In many districts the squires received unwelcome but powerful support from “nabobs.” Those decades witnessed a steady flight homewards of Indian officials, for the most part gorged with plunder. They became an appreciable force in politics. Reckless of expense so long as they could enter the charmed circle of the higher gentry, they adopted the politics and aped the ways of their betters; so that many a countryside felt the influence of their greed and ostentation. The yeomen and villagers were the victims of their land-hunger; while the small squires (so says Grose in his Olio of the year 1792) often fell in the course of the feverish race for display. As the Roman moralist inveighed against the influx of Syrian ways into the life of his city, so too might Johnson have thundered at the blending of the barbaric profusion of the Orient with the primal simplicity of the old English life.

For the most part, however, that life still showed the tenacity that marks our race. Certainly in Court circles there were no signs of the advent of commercialism, still less of democracy. The distinctions of rank in England seemed very strict, even to a German, who was accustomed to the formalities of the Hanoverian and Rhenish Courts. Count von Kielmansegge in 1761 noted the precision of etiquette at the State balls: “Rank in England is decided exclusively according to class, and not according to service; consequently the duchesses dance first, then marchionesses, then dukes’ daughters, then countesses. Foreigners had no rank at all in England, so they may not dance before the lords and barons.... For this reason foreigners seldom dance at Court.” It was not etiquette for the King and Queen to dance at the state balls; but, even so, the formalism of those functions must have been pyramidal. The same spirit of formality, fortified by a nice sense of the gradations of rank, appears in the rules of a county club at Derby, where the proceedings seem to have been modelled on the sun and planets, the latter being always accompanied by inferior satellites.[18]

The customs of the beau monde in London were regulated by one all-absorbing preoccupation, that of killing time in a gentlemanly and graceful manner. Fielding, in his “Joseph Andrews,” thus maps out the day of a fop about the middle of the century:

In the morning I rose, took my great stick, and walked out in my green frock, with my hair in papers, and sauntered about till ten. Went to the Auction; told Lady B. she had a dirty face, laughed heartily at something Captain G. said (I can’t remember what, for I did not very well hear it), whispered to Lord ——, bowed to the Duke of ——, and was going to bid for a snuff-box, but did not, for fear I should have had it. From 2 to 4 dressed myself; 4 to 6 dined; 6 to 8 coffee-house; 8 to 9 Drury Lane Playhouse; 10 to 12 Drawing-room.

The sketch of West End life given by Moritz, a Prussian pastor who visited England in 1782, is very similar, but he enters into more detail. He describes fashionable people as walking about all the morning in a négligé attire, “your hair not dressed but merely rolled up in rollers, and in a frock and boots.” The morning lasted till four or five o’clock, then the fashionable time for dinner. The most usual dress in that summer was a coat of very dark blue, a short white waistcoat, and white silk stockings. Black was worn for full dress, and Moritz noticed that the English seemed to prefer dark colours. Dress seemed to him to be one of the chief aims and occupations of our people; and he remarked on the extraordinary vogue which everything French then enjoyed.

One is tempted to pause here and dwell on the singular fact that, at the time when England and France were still engaged in deadly strife, each people should be intent on copying the customs and fashions of the other. The decade of the “eighties” witnessed the growth of “Anglomania” to ridiculous proportions in France; while here the governing class thought it an unfailing proof of good breeding to trick out every other sentence with a French phrase. Swift alone could have done justice to the irony of a situation wherein two great nations wasted their resources in encompassing one another’s ruin, while every day their words and actions bore striking witness to their admiration of the hereditary foe. Is it surprising that Pitt should have used all his efforts in 1786 to bring about an entente cordiale on the basis of the common interests of the two peoples?