In Defence of Aristocracy

I can remember quite clearly when I was made aware that it was not part of everybody else’s life. The parents of a fellow pupil at my prep school had taken me out and in the course of the outing my friend’s father, who was in the rag trade, had waxed indignant about a Neville Chamberlain Budget. Always anxious to find some precociously grown-up subject to write about to my mother in my weekly letter home, I passed on this conversation, mentioning in particular the father’s objection to a tax rise that would hit the retail trade particularly hard, only to receive a long handwritten letter – the first and the last – from the Governor himself. Sadly, I haven’t kept the text, but its gist left a lasting mark. The Chancellor’s job, he emphasized, was not to please the rag trade, or any other private interest, but rather to take care of the nation’s solvency. A good Budget was almost by definition an unpopular Budget. He went on to cite his friend Walter Lippmann’s view that it was a government’s job to tax, conscript, command and prohibit, punish, and balance the budget, none of which responsibilities could usually be safely fulfilled without offending many individual members of the public. Inevitably, the conflict between the public interest and the private interest was most acute in time of war, when the balance had to be got right between the public interest in victory and the private interest of millions of mothers and fathers that their boys should return home alive; but in peacetime, too, there could be almost equally agonizing conflicts and he instanced his own recent duty at the Bank of England to take actions in the national interest that had inflicted cruel suffering on the unemployed.

Very recently, in Louis Menand’s excellent book The Metaphysical Club – mostly about late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American philosophers – I came across a ruling of the famous American Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was also one of my stepfather’s correspondents, and its chilling note had such a familiar ring that I am sure it was also included in that letter. Certainly it is in its spirit and comes in the course of a 1927 opinion by Holmes about a Virginian law permitting the involuntary sterilization of mentally incompetent persons. Menand rightly describes it as Holmes’s most ‘notorious opinion’* and it went as follows:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may well call upon the best citizens for their lives.† It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices.

Whether or not that was the same quotation as the one recommended to me by my stepfather I shall never know; but, if not, it was certainly another equally stupefying.

And then at about the same time, as if to pile Pelion on Ossa, the critic John Davenport – whose war work was to teach English at Stowe for the duration – recommended me to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, wherein I came across a passage that included the following quotation from Boethius:

If any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease, which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance, having some such disease, she were found to be with child, she with her brood were buried alive: and this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted [my italics].

To which Burton had added:

A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used amongst Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now, by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost, free from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had.

It was a heady brew. Clearly somebody, ‘lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted’, had to do the nation’s dirty work; had to authorize difficult and sometimes cruel actions for the common good; had to be on the side of realism against sentimentality; had to resist giving way not only to every grievance (which was relatively easy) but also to manifestly worthy causes as well; had to rub society’s nose in the painful realities of keeping a great nation on course. No less clearly, careerist politicians – whose careers depended on retaining popular favour – were the last people who could be relied upon to grasp these nettles. So who were these indispensable somebodies who had to bear these public burdens? The inference from my stepfather’s letter was unavoidable: those indispensable somebodies most definitely included me.

I don’t remember being in the least pleased by this realization, still less proud. It seemed, at first, a terrifying prospect. All my schoolboy inclinations at Stowe were inclined towards private pleasures – particularly the pleasure of burying my head in a book – and against team spirit, which was the boarding-school idea of public duty. The last thing I wanted – at any rate in these early years – was to be made a prefect. Neither did I want to forgo the protection that the prefects – or at least the decent ones – provided the weak and cowardly (i.e. me) against the bullies.* So I wanted the best of both worlds: authority figures who at one and the same time both protected me and left me alone; who came to my aid in emergencies but otherwise allowed me to mind my own business. Officious busybody prefects who kept an eye on one all the time were more a liability than an asset. But unofficious prefects who noticed what was going on from a corner of the eye were the opposite. Even more to be desired were the few older boys who turned down the office of prefect but were natural authority figures on the side of justice and order requiring, by virtue of strong individual character, no official badge of office. Those paragons, however, are always very few on the ground and, not being among them, I did eventually accept being made a prefect, because one of that office’s privileges was frequent contact with the great founding headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, who exercised authority with the lightest of reins in the manner of a connoisseur who appreciates quality and style in all its forms, as much in the dilettante aesthete who refuses to play games as in the captain of the school rugger XV who refuses to do anything else. He believed a well-ordered boarding school should not aim to turn out leadership material of a uniform sort but quality material for every different walk of life – quality top dogs and quality bottom dogs, quality politicians and quality voters, and even quality revolutionaries. ‘Don’t talk of a ruling class,’ he would say. ‘Call it a quality class, a class that contributes to the good society just as much by ‘‘being’’ as by ‘‘doing’’.’

As for how Stowe was different from, say, Eton, I think JF would have replied along the following lines: that whereas Eton had seen its function as that of civilizing primarily the sons of the old ruling class, and only secondarily the sons of the nouveaux riches whose parents wanted their offspring ‘aristocratized’, Stowe saw its function as that of turning out humane and gentrified meritocrats who would not take it for granted, or give the impression that they took it for granted, that they were ‘born to rule’. What JF wanted, in short, was the Etonian spirit in a more egalitarian frame, or, as he put it, ‘Etonians in grey flannels rather than in the archaic white tie and tails’. One was never left in doubt at Stowe that competitive individualism and equality of opportunity were the waves of the future; but neither was one left in doubt that it was the duty of an Old Stoic to ride these waves not just to his own personal advantage, but also to the advantage of the nation as a whole. Oblige, yes: JF tried hard to instil that; but he was rather less emphatic about noblesse. A gentrified or patrician meritocracy, not unlike the Wasp ascendancy on the East Coast of America, was JF’s ideal, which to some extent he achieved in such Old Stoics of my generation as Noel Annan,* Robert Kee, Tony Quinton, and, quintessentially, the figure of Nicko Henderson, the most relaxed, informal, and least stuffy top English Ambassador ever.

Put like that, my stepfather’s idea of public duties seemed to me rather less frighteningly high-powered and much more acceptably low-key, especially after – at the instigation of Stowe’s charismatic history tutor, Bill McElwee – reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s great classic Democracy in America. For Tocqueville gave a commonsensical, un-Hobbesian rationale to the ideal of aristocracy: not so much as a body of superior beings bred to exercise power over the people but as a body of men whose dignified and leisured circumstances made them most likely to exercise power in the public interest, mainly because, in their case, the public interest and the private interest – by reason of the aristocracy’s greater stake in the country – was so nearly indistinguishable. ‘Among aristocratic nations’, Tocqueville wrote,

a man almost always knows his forefathers and respects them; he thinks he already sees his remote descendants and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter, and he will frequently sacrifice his own personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him [my italics].

Tocqueville’s was a down-to-earth utilitarian justification for aristocracy – ‘that it worked’. In France, where aristocracy had been degraded by the French monarchy, aristocracy led to revolution; in England, where the aristocracy had degraded the monarchy, aristocracy led to order and justice. The English aristocracy, he wrote, ‘is perhaps the most liberal that ever existed and no body of men has ever uninterruptedly furnished so many honourable and enlightened individuals for the government of a country’.

In the light of what we now think we know about the lamentable state of the English ruling class in the 1920s and 1930s, Tocqueville’s idealistic assumption about its merits may indeed seem quite ludicrously out of date. Certainly today’s conventional wisdom has it that the golden chivalry of England was all mown down while leading their men into battle in the Great War, leaving only the dross behind. Nobody who has read the socialite Chips Channon’s interwar diaries, which give a picture of hedonistic irresponsibility and self-indulgence in high places of almost Nerolike proportions, would be inclined to doubt this; and Evelyn Waugh’s famous interwar novel Vile Bodies confirms that impression. So does Edward VIII’s pathetic abdication, usually portrayed as the prime example of that age’s spirit of irresponsible hedonism. In my recollection, however, that decadent impression is profoundly misleading. For surely, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now recognize that the truly remarkable aspect of the abdication was not the King’s irresponsible hedonism but the Establishment’s revulsion – strong enough to force him off the throne – against his irresponsible hedonism. Both my old Catholic family and my new Norman family circles played prominent parts in this reaction. It was my uncle Edmund Fitzalan, for example, who helped persuade Stanley Baldwin that the King would have to abdicate and my stepfather Montagu Norman who exercised the same kind of pressure – not that he actually needed much pressure – on Neville Chamberlain. If one wants an example of how a well-functioning Establishment can serve the public interest, the despatch of Edward VIII provides it in spades. But that is only one small illustration of how, in my recollection, the achievements of the governing class in the 1920s and 1930s, at any rate on the home front, have not yet received their fair share of acclamation.

It was an intensely difficult period. In the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, the raw passions of democracy, inflamed both by totalitarian temptations from the far Left as from the far Right, were threatening to burn the house down. If Britain’s parliamentary democracy was to have a chance of surviving, it had to come up with an alternative that could also catch the public’s imagination. That is what the great conservative leader and Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, succeeded in doing long before Roosevelt did something of the same order with his New Deal in the United States. In a whole series of speeches of incomparable eloquence, both inside and outside Parliament, Baldwin sought to link patriotic pride to the uniquely English set of gentlemanly rules and conduct towards others.* He appealed to the best of the working class and the best of the industrialists to prove to the world that in the self-sacrificial, altruistic ideal of the English gentleman, unique to this country, lay the only safe way forward. As a result of English history, he argued, a unique system of mutual obligations and duties had been evolved that could and must be called upon to help the country escape the looming horrors of class war. Let the best among the working-class leaders and among the industrialists defy Marx by showing that in England both were capable, like true aristocrats, of behaving nobly, not so as to facilitate the dominion of one particular class but in the interest of serving the country as a whole. Baldwin’s constant evocation of England’s rural arcadia was not due to any sentimentally nostalgic desire to put the industrial clock back. How could it be, given his own ironmaster’s background? No, it was due to his belief that in the pre-industrial centuries some unique quality of trust had been engendered that could once again be enlisted to see the nation through difficult and dangerous times. Class war, socialism, fascism were un-English ideas, only suitable, if suitable at all, for foreign countries unlucky enough not to have developed the English gentlemanly habits of conciliation and compromise that would see us through the problems of the twentieth century, just as they had seen us through the problems of previous centuries. Greedy acquisitiveness was the enemy wherever it reared its ugly head, particularly, of course, among the rich. Baldwin abhorred ‘the hard faced millionaires who had done well out of the war’. In fact it was he who coined the phrase, not Keynes, and he hated ostentatious displays of wealth. The word ‘service’ was central to his discourse, especially the service owed by the rich, the privileged, and the well educated, who were repeatedly adjured to put human rights before the rights of property. Britain was, in one of his phrases, ‘a noble democracy’. Even if industrialists and trade union leaders everywhere else knew only how to behave like ‘robber barons’, in Britain at least they could be relied upon to behave like Christian gentlemen. That was the ideal he preached and, in his courteous treatment of Labour Party leaders and trade union leaders, also practised, according them a public respect he went out of his way not to accord to many of the industrialists.

Montagu Norman agreed with every word. He, too, believed that the wealthy classes should place love of country before money; that wealth involved stewardship; that industrial employers should aim to act as trustees for the whole community; and, above all, that employees were only as good as their employers. He, too, deplored managers and directors who were interested primarily in their salaries and fees – people we now call fat cats – and refused to have them at his table, believing that flaunting vulgar ostentation offered revolutionaries their best justification.*

Like most public-school boys of the period, at any rate those at the public schools, I was deeply affected by Baldwin’s great speeches, one of which I was taken to hear in a packed and enthusiastic Albert Hall. Collections of his speeches were presented as school prizes and bishops used quotations from them as a text for their sermons. His main theme was very simple: that instead of looking abroad for grand new ideologies to solve the problems of the twentieth century, all classes should instead buckle down, in the time-honoured way, to do their duty, which, of course, is what, when the war came, most of them did. So whatever can be said by way of criticism of Baldwin for not attending to the country’s material rearmament, nobody can justly deny him the credit for carrying out an exercise in moral rearmament quite unparalleled in the nation’s history.

W. H. Auden’s jibe about the 1930s being a ‘low dishonest decade’, therefore, does not at all accord with my own recollection. I remember it as a decade when the concept of duty* was stretched to cover pretty well everything; when selfishness was regarded as the mark of the beast, the root of all moral failure; when altruism was held to be the root of all virtue; and when, under Baldwin’s spell, those aspiring to govern were adjured to dedicate themselves, if not to the service of God, then with all the more fervour to the service of their fellow men. Rereading these speeches today – dismissed at the time by intellectuals of the Right and the Left as impractical and unrealistic – I have to say that they seem to have stood the test of time far better than the writings of those same intellectuals, which now read like the ravings of madmen. In any case, if the 1930s really were such a ‘low and dishonest decade’, one question has to be asked. How did it come to pass that of all the countries that lived through those years, Britain, alone among the great European powers, escaped relatively unscathed from the corrosions of fascism and communism and went into the war against Hitler so relatively united and with such relatively high national morale? While Churchill’s courageous oratory was certainly part of the answer, the Baldwin balm was also a blessing beyond price.

The support of the ruling classes for the Chamberlain policy of appeasement is much more difficult to cast in a good light. But here again, from my particular viewpoint, it did not strike me then, and it does not strike me now, as in the least ‘low’ or ‘dishonest’ in the ordinary sense of those words. My stepfather, who had a won a DSO in the Boer War, stood foursquare behind Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, not out of weak unwillingness to face up to the reality of war – his long talks in Berlin and London with Dr Schacht, Hitler’s economic adviser, had dissolved all illusions on that score – but rather out of an equally strong determination to be realistic about the consequences for Britain of going to war with Hitler. His charge against Churchill was that while he was telling the British people the truth about the gravity of the former reality, he was grossly deceiving them about the gravity of the second, which could not fail, he believed, to be the end of Britain as a great and independent power, win or lose the war. Going to war could well be Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, Norman used to say, but for Britain it would be the beginning of the end. Like Robert Fossett, the fictional hero of Christopher Hollis’s book, The Death of a Gentleman – which came out in 1943 – Norman always ‘shuddered at the folly of those who talked as if a war would be merely a matter of beating Hitler, and that then, that evil removed, the world would go on its comfortable way of progress, like a man who has had an aggravating tooth removed at the dentist. Starting a war was much more like starting a glacier. The world was full of disruptive, nihilistic forces, and, once the ice began to move, none could say how far it would travel, nor what at the last would survive its catastrophe.’ In Norman’s view, therefore, the appeasers were not a lot of unpatriotic poltroons, as against the Churchillians who were patriotic statesman willing to grasp nettles. Rather the opposite. It was the appeasers who were grasping the most frightening nettle of all, which was that the only way for Britain to survive as a great power, and the only way for the old conservative Europe to survive, was to avoid a war with Hitler, even if this did involve paying the horribly high price of abandoning Eastern Europe and the Jews to a terrible fate. Of course in the light of Churchill’s victory in 1945, appeasement did come to seem shamefully defeatist. But surely, in the light of what we know of the decline and disintegration of Britain in the last half of the twentieth century, and its likely disappearance to all great effects and noble purposes, except as foot soldiers in an American army, in the first half of the twenty-first century; and in the light, moreover, of what, in spite of Churchill’s war, did happen to the Jews and to the East Europeans, one can now see that the appeasers were not acting out of cowardice but out of a kind of sober courage, by comparison with which Churchill’s eagerness to embrace war begins to seem almost irresponsibly vainglorious.*

Another difficulty for the reputation of the appeasers is that, because they were in power in the 1930s, they are still associated in the public mind with the decadence of high society in that decade. In fact, however, the leading appeasers – Baldwin, Chamberlain, Norman, and others – much less deserved to be tarred with that brush than many of the anti-appeasers, like the financially greedy Churchill, the unashamedly lecherous Duff Cooper, and the almost brazenly dishonest Robert Boothby. The difficulty here is that the true muscle of the 1930s ruling class did not frequent high society, did not go to grand balls or Belgrave Square parties. Hence the erroneous impression that the space at the top of the tree in the 1930s was entirely filled by social butterflies. If Norman had kept a diary, however, it would have given a very different and more impressive picture, as my brother and I have good cause to remember. For his public service standards, and those of his whole world, were Spartan to a fault, or to what my brother and I judged to be a fault. No luxuries were tolerated, and strict economies enforced. So when I became keen on riding at my preparatory school, and wrote asking for riding boots, my mother sent me a pair of her own – far too pointed at the toe for my comfort – with the raised heels sawn off. And such was the importance placed on not disturbing the Governor’s concentration on his public duties that we were kept out of his way during school holidays in a country cottage of our own, with our own butler and cook – more fun in theory than in practice, since our mother, who shared her second husband’s priorities, was seldom present. In fact, domestic felicity and family life seldom got a look-in.

Born into an upper-middle-class banking family of long standing and educated at Eton – which, unlike my father, he hated – and at King’s College Cambridge, Norman dedicated all his waking hours to the City of London, living austerely, almost ascetically, and eschewing wine, women (until he met my mother) and song so as to be able to give his all to his work. He was, at all times, a pillar of rectitude, imposing on the City the highest standards of integrity. The idle-rich, Chips Channon kind of society appalled him and he deplored the loving attention given by the media to this debauched minority, rightly regarding their antics as obscenely objectionable at a time of mass unemployment brought about very largely, of course, by his own tight fiscal policies, harshly imposed, he always believed, in the long term ‘public interest’.

His own life, as I say, was exemplary in this regard. Whereas most bankers went to the City in chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces, he travelled by tube from Notting Hill Gate to the Bank, causing quite a sensation by so doing. Indeed the spectacle of this tall figure with a Charles I beard, season ticket tucked into the ribbon of his silk hat worn at a jaunty angle, descending into the underground at 8.30 a.m. sharp and ascending thirty minutes later at the Bank – where the buses were held up to allow the Governor to cross Threadneedle Street – became almost as much of a tourist attraction as the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace. His hobby was to design and build furniture in the Art Deco style, and although he inherited two country houses, he occupied only a garden cottage in one, where he made a point of coming down to dinner in slippers and bare feet and eating simple fare. When the Second World War came, almost nothing had to change. Even in peacetime, we were already living, by choice, on a war footing.