“In this
stylish and provocative book, the eminent historian David Cannadine brings his
characterisitc wit and acumen to bear on the British aristocracy, probing
behind the legendary escapades and indulgences of aristocrats Such as Lord
Curzon, the Hon C.S. Rolls (of Rolls Royce), Winston Churchill, Harold
Nicolson, and Vita Sackville -West, and changing our perceptions of them - transforming
wastrels into heroes and the self-satisfied into tthe second-rate. Cannasine
begins by investigating the land-owning classes as a whole during the last two
hundred years, describing their origins, their habits, their increasing debts,
and their involvement with the steam train, the horseless carriage, and the
aeroplamne. He next focuses on patricians he finds particularly fascinating:
Lord Curzon, an unrivaled ceremonial impresario and inventor of traditions;
Lord Strickland, part English landowner and part Mediterranean nobleman, who
has both an imperial proconsul and prime minister of Malta; and Winston
Churchill, whom Cannadine sees as an aristocratic adventureer, a man who has
burdened by more than he benefited fromhis family connections and patrician
attitudes. Cannadiine then moves from individuals to aristocratic dynasties. He
reconstructs the extraordinary financial history of the dukes of Devonshire,
narrates the story of the Cozwns-Hardys, a Norfolk family who playeda
remarkably varies part in the life of their country, and offers a controversial
reapraisal of the forebears, lives, work, and personalities of Harols Nicolson
and Vita Sackville-West- a portrait, notes Cannadine, of more than a marriage.”
Aspects of
Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain
DAVID
CANNADINE
Copyright
Date: 1994
Table of
Contents (pp. vii-viii)
INTRODUCTION:
Aspects of Aristocracy
INTRODUCTION:
Aspects of Aristocracy (pp. 1-6)
The essays
collected here have been accumulating during the last sixteen years, and were
completed before, during and after the period when I was primarily concerned
with writingThe Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy(1990). Some were
attempts to sort out particular problems which I needed to get clear before
tackling the larger survey; some sought to look in more detail at an individual
or a dynasty than was possible in a general and generalised account; and some
were written out of curiosity and for pleasure, and for no other reason.
Assembled together, these occasional pieces cover the (...)
PART ONE:
PROCESSES AND PROBLEMS
1 The
Making of the British Upper Classes
1 The
Making of the British Upper Classes (pp. 9-36)
During the
last ten years or so, it has become commonplace to argue that between the
restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the First World War,
something called the ‘old regime’ survived and persisted in England much more
successfully than was previously supposed.¹ Instead of stressing, as had an
earlier generation of scholars, the inexorably declining aristocracy, the
inevitably rising middle class, and the proletariat actively making itself in
the furnace-fire of the Industrial Revolution, historians have become
increasingly impressed by the resilience of the traditional landowning elite,
by the weaknesses and divisions of the bourgeoisie( ...)
2
Aristocratic Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century
2
Aristocratic Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century (pp. 37-54)
During the
1950s, while the ‘storm over the gentry’ raged and thundered, there took place
another debate about the British landowning classes, more genteel and thus less
well known. Its chief protagonists were Professors David Spring and F.M.L.
Thompson, and the subject of their disagreement concerned the origins, extent,
and consequences of aristocratic indebtedness in nineteenth-century Britain. In
a pioneering and provocative article, Professor Spring drew attention to the
‘widespread financial embarrassment’ and the ‘heavy indebtedness’ which he
believed were ‘often to be found among the older landed families’ during the
first half of the century, resulting from heavy and (...)
3 Nobility
and Mobility in Modern Britain
3 Nobility
and Mobility in Modern Britain (pp. 55-74)
In
traditional western societies, the horse was the very emblem of aristocratic
wealth, power and status. ‘All pre-eminence’, an Arab emir noted of the Franks,
‘belongs to horsemen. They are in truth the only men who count. Theirs is to
give counsel; theirs to render justice.’¹ For more than a millenium, this
remained the case: the ownership of horses was largely confined to the
patrician elite, their dependants and their servants. From the Norman Conquest
to the nineteenth century, an English gentleman who did not possess a safe seat
in the saddle was almost a contradiction in terms. The breeding(...)
PART TWO:
INDIVIDUALS IN CONTEXT
4 Lord
Curzon as Ceremonial Impressario
4 Lord
Curzon as Ceremonial Impressario (pp. 77-108)
The last
quarter of the nineteenth century and the years before the First World War
witnessed a remarkable flowering of ceremonial and spectacle in Europe and the
United States, and throughout those parts of the globe where the great powers
held sway. Though they were novel pageants in many ways, self-consciously
planned and developed, the aim of those who stage-managed them was to create
feelings of security, cohesion and identity, in an era of anxiety, uncertainty
and social dislocation. As a result, old rituals were refurbished, and new
traditions were invented, in the churches, in the armed services, in schools(...)
5 Lord
Strickland: Imperial Aristocrat and Aristocratic Imperialist
5 Lord
Strickland: Imperial Aristocrat and Aristocratic Imperialist (pp. 109-129)
It is a
commonplace of history that between 1877, when Queen Victoria was proclaimed
Empress of India, and 1947, when the Raj came to an end, to the King-Emperor’s
great regret, relations between the British monarchy and the British Empire
were fundamentally transformed. Less well known, but no less important, were
the changes that took place, during the same period, in the relations between
the British aristocracy and the British Empire. At a time when the future for
landed estates in Britain – and, more especially, Ireland - seemed increasingly
uncertain, many of the greatest grandees sold off some of(...)
6 Winston
Churchill as an Aristocratic Adventurer
6 Winston
Churchill as an Aristocratic Adventurer (pp. 130-162)
In his
early twenties Winston Churchill was briefly the heir to one dukedom, and over
half a century later, on his retirement from public life, he declined his
sovereign’s offer of another.¹ This double connection with the highest rank in
the British peerage may not have been his greatest claim to fame, but it
certainly makes him unique among British Prime Ministers, and it forcibly
reminds us that Churchill himself was in C.P. Snow¹s words, ‘the last
aristocrat to rule – not just preside over, rule – this country’. It was at Blenheim
Palace that he took the two most(...)
PART THREE:
THE DYNASTIC PERSPECTIVE
7 The
Landowner as Millionaire: The Finances of the Dukes of Devonshire
7 The
Landowner as Millionaire: The Finances of the Dukes of Devonshire (pp. 165-183)
Who were
the wealthiest landowners in the United Kingdom between the Battle of Waterloo
and the Battle of Britain? Many names were suggested by contemporaries. In 1819
the American Minister David Rush recorded that the ‘four greatest incomes in
the kingdom’ belonged to the Duke of Northumberland, Earl Grosvenor, the
Marquess of Stafford, and the Earl of Bridgewater, each of whom was reputed to
possess ‘one hundred thousand pounds, clear of everything’.¹ Forty years later,
another foreign observer, the Frenchman H.A. Taine, visited the House of Lords
where the principal peers present were pointed out to me, and named, with(...)
8
Landowners, Lawyers and Litterateurs: The Cozens-Hardys of Letheringsett
8
Landowners, Lawyers and Litterateurs: The Cozens-Hardys of Letheringsett (pp.
184-209)
Although
never distinguished for its large number of great estates, the county of
Norfolk may justly be regarded as one of the most aristocratic in the land.¹
England’s premier duke draws his title from the shire, and England’s premier
baronet resides in the county at Raveningham. The great houses of Blickling,
Felbrigg, Raynham, Houghton and Holkham are vivid reminders of the wealth,
power and prestige once enjoyed – and in some cases still enjoyed – by
Norfolk’s traditional territorial elite. The leading part taken by Sir Robert
Walpole, by ‘Turnip’ Townshend and by Coke of Holkham in the agriculural
revolution(...)
9 Portrait
of More Than a Marriage: Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-west Revisited
9 Portrait
of More Than a Marriage: Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-west Revisited (pp.
210-241)
Harold
nicolson and Vita Sackville-West were two very remarkable people; but that is
no reason for regarding them as having been more remarkable than they actually
were. Yet since their deaths – she in 1962, he in 1968 – they have received an
excessive amount of deferential attention and ahistorical celebration,
especially from the ‘bedint’ bourgeoisie, the very class of people that they
themselves most despised. They have been more biographied than many of their
greater contemporaries.¹ Their diaries and letters have been published and
re-published at indulgent length.² Their private lives have been described and
televised in excessive and(...)
CONCLUSION:
Beyond the Country House
CONCLUSION:
Beyond the Country House (pp. 242-246)
It would
clearly be unconvincing to suggest that the rather random accumulation of these
essays over the years gives this book a coherently-articulated message beyond
that of aristocratic diversity and (I hope) historiographical liveliness. But
there is an underlying argument which each of these chapters in some ways
illuminates, however obliquely, and it might be helpful to make it more
explicit by way of conclusion. There is no better means of doing so than by
quoting from one of Mark Girouard’s most recent writings. ‘I am’, he observes,
‘depressed by the mixture of snobbery and nostalgia which forms so large(...)
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