In Defence of Aristocracy

Two

The English aristocracy is perhaps the most liberal that has ever existed, and no body of men has ever, uninterruptedly, furnished so many honourable and enlightened individuals to the government of a country.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, volume i

Thus our democracy was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic in the world.

Macaulay

I, at least, would rather have been governed by Lord Shaftesbury than Mr Cobden, by the gentlemen of England than by the Gradgrinds or Bounderbys of Coketown. There was something picturesque about his thick headiness, something monumental about his complacency. Compare him with the elegant trifler who was the gentleman of the ancien regime, or the rigid disciplinarian whom the German aristocracy provided, and he shines in comparison. He was often capable of a generous gesture. He was frequently tolerant, there could be about him a fine quixotism which was difficult not to admire. He threw up odd men of genius like Byron and Henry Cavendish, statesmen of public spirit like Lord John Russell and Hartington; he would found great galleries and establish the British Museum. He was very costly, and, in the mass depressing and dull. Yet, through it all, he always had the saving grace of a sense of humour . . . Nor is it certain that we shall replace him by a more admirable type . . . The gentleman scourged us with whips. We must beware lest our new masters drive us to our toil with scorpions.

Harold J. Laski, the famously left wing Professor of Politics at the London School of Economics, in his The Dangers of Being a Gentleman, Basis Books, 1940

This essay will show: (1) why the aristocratic tradition peculiar to Britain, owing more to manners than to law, more to a religion of good behaviour than to any ideology, and most of all to a particular set of aristocrats at a particular moment in English history, is integral to the spirit of our English constitution; and (2) how getting rid of that tradition is not going to be at all like unburdening the body politic of a heavy handicap, and therefore facilitating its progress into the new millennium, but much more akin to the extraction of an essential organ without which it can no longer healthily survive: as potentially divisive and anarchic in its consequences as was France’s violent liquidation of its aristocracy in 1789, from which she did not recover balance and cohesion until Charles de Gaulle, after two empires, three revolutions and four republics, reunited the nation and restored its sanity in 1945, over a century and a half later.

A generation ago, such alarmism would have seemed absurdly pessimistic. Shortly after the last war my old tutor, Herbert Butterfield, the distinguished historian, published a little book called The Englishman and his History, in which he wrote: ‘When the aristocracy were sent to the laundry the dye ran out into the rest of the washing,’ by which he meant that the aristocratic tradition could be, and indeed so far had been, faithfully transferred to and absorbed by the natural aristocrats without pedigrees rising from below. This was true at the time of writing. Even Old Labour seemed quite happy – or at least resigned – to conform to this tradition. A passage in Aneurin Bevan’s* fine autobiography is very revealing in this respect. As a radical young miner in a South Wales colliery between the wars ‘his concern’, he wrote, ‘was with one practical question: where does power lie in this particular state of Britain? And how can it be attained by the workers?’ His answer was ‘Parliament: a sword pointed at the heart of property’.

In theory Bevan was right. Parliament could indeed act as a sword pointed at the heart of property. For Parliament unquestionably does have absolute power; more power than might be dreamt of by a totalitarian dictator – everything short, as some wag put it, ‘of the power to turn man into woman’, and even that limitation may soon be overcome. But in practice, this omnipotent institution, because the men operating it were either born into or had become part of an aristocracy whose conventions, manners, proprieties, and, above all, comforts discouraged – like all confident aristocracies – any ruthless use of centralized power, almost never did show cold steel, at least in peacetime, as Bevan soon discovered when he actually became an MP and encountered for himself the true spirit of the House of Commons. At first he thought he was in church:

The vaulted roofs and stained-glass windows, the rows of statues of great statesmen of the past, the echoing halls, the soft-footed attendants and the whispered conversation, contrast depressingly with the crowded meetings and the clang and clash of hot opinions he has just left behind in his election campaign. Here he is, a tribune of the people, coming to make his voice heard in the seats of power. Instead, it seems he is expected to worship; and the most conservative of all religions – ancestor worship.

The ‘clang and clash’ of opinion; too much of that was indeed what the spirit of the constitution was designed to avoid, and has succeeded in avoiding, give or take a few tense moments, for more than three hundred years. As for ancestor worship, Bevan was spot-on: the spirit of our constitution most certainly does involve ancestor worship, and very rightly so. Even Bevan, in his own idiosyncratic way, paid these ancestors the supreme compliment of emulation by eventually transforming himself, as Jonathan Rose tells us in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, into ‘a natural aristocrat’ who came to suspect that democracy would eventually destroy ‘legitimate [as well as illegitimate] superiority’. I remember, as a young journalist, in an interview with Bevan in the late 1950s over a tankard of champagne at the Café Royal, telling him that he was the simulacrum of Charles James Fox, one of the greatest of all of the eighteenth-century Whig grandees. His reaction was to grin from ear to ear, not even demurring when I went on to quote W. H. Mallock’s dictum that ‘only through aristocracy does a civilized democracy know itself’.

The trouble is that today’s political generation, as much among the ranks of the New Conservatives as of the New Labourites, are the first to have had no political education, the history of English statecraft having been eliminated from the curriculum on the grounds of its being too elitist, too much about top dogs who give the orders and not enough about bottom dogs who receive them. So our new rulers know only social history, which concentrates either on class, ethnicity, family, women, children, or universal history and/ or local history:* none of the kinds of history, that is, likely to inspire the best and brightest of the current generation to walk in the footsteps of Chatham, Palmerston, Canning, Disraeli, Gladstone, and all the other parliamentary giants, most of whom they will never have heard of except through entertainment-level TV history, or TV programmes like Reputations specifically intended to knock these idols off their pedestals and expose their feet of clay.

What a change from former times. For nearly half a millennium the dream of English youth of the political class was fixed and focused on the House of Commons – ‘a modified, socialized arena for battle, drive and dominion’, as Sir Lewis Namier put it. Now, however, that story, which used to make a career in Parliament or in public life the highest dream of every schoolboy worth his salt, has been largely erased from memory. When Robin Day, a contemporary of mine, died recently, the obituarists could not understand why his successful life on screen had been no consolation for his failure to get into Parliament. In their eyes, to be a TV inquisitor was by far the more glamorous and envied vocation. And so indeed it has become, which is why Jeremy Paxman can get away with assuming all politicians from the start to be guilty rather than innocent, to be dishonourable rather than honourable gentlemen. How could it be otherwise? For without a knowledge of political history MPs are indeed like the rest of us – deserving of ridicule and censure. Only to those with a knowledge of English political history do they become larger than life figures: not because of their individual merit – by no means always conspicuous – but because of the impressive history of the office they hold.

As for the hereditary members of the House of Lords, their fate is worst of all, since not only is the current generation ignorant of their history but also of the very principles on which their authority rested. This no-go area in public knowledge and imagination leaves a deplorable gap in public debate. For whether we like it or not, the English aristocracy most certainly did play an essential role in forging and shaping Britain’s parliamentary institutions, and indeed in shaping almost all our great national institutions, including the Labour Party; so central a role that the venerable traditions they established have long survived the dissolution of the wealth, power, and status of the dukes, earls, and lords who originally called them forth; so central a role that those politicians who now want, using a new detergent called modernization, to rub out once and for all every trace of the true-blue dye, will find it difficult to do so without unravelling – pursuing Butterfield’s metaphor – ‘the historic garment itself’.

Here, let me make use of Michael Oakeshott’s historical abridgement*

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