Aristocracy Class Leisure Notes

British Aristocracy and Class Revision

David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale, 1990).

• Who are the British elite?

• (I) Land

  • Small landowners

    • Local village squire or the rentier, owns between 1,000 – 10,000 acres.

  • Middling proprietors

    • 750 families, with estates ranging from 10-30,000

  • Territorial magnates

    • 250 families

      • < 30,000 acres of land

      • Generate more than 30,000 a year all are millionaires

    • Pinnacle of this group:

      • Duke of Dorset,, Derby, Devonshire

        • Worth over 75,000 a year.

    • An economic elite that are the wealthiest and own most of the land.

      • Benefit from the Industrial Revolution

        • 1840 – 1870

          • Agricultural value goes up.

• (II) Status

• Monopolise titles

  • In 1880s, there were 580 peers, of whom 431 were hereditary members of the House of Lords, by virtue of possessing UK peerages.

• Legal privileges

  • Only they used settlement and entail over heirlooms, houses, titels and estates.

  • Middle Classes

    • Split their money equally, do not practice primogeniture.

• Education

  • Oxbridge

• Leisured class

  • They had no occupation

• Marriage

  • Endogamous

• A British phenomenon

  • Scotland and Ireland are absorbed into this system.

• (III) Power

• Until 1880

  • Parliament was effectively a landowner’s club.

    • As late as 1860s, 1/3 of Commons is filled by no more than 60 families.

  • Monopolise the central offices.

• Popular sanction

  • Aristocrats were expected to govern, people accept their right to rule.

• Land = wealth (reliable and stable asset), status (ownership conferred celebrity) and power (over locality, county and nation).

  • Wealth, status and power are closely entwined.

    • 450 peers own 2,000 acres

• Don’t overstate?

  • ‘poor dukes’ exist but majority are actually loaded.

  • Of the 29 richest men in the country, 12 were dukes in 1883.

  • Duke of Westminster becomes a Marquis purely because of his Olympian wealth.

• Wealth and Power

  • It was from the landed elite that men were recruited for local and national leadership.

  • The virtue of having land boasted a duty to compete for access to offices and public services.

• Smaller elite

  • Primogeniture, not splitting.

• Self-conscious?

  • NO

  • Often don’t know how much land, wealth they actually possess

    • Lord Derby

      • In 1870s asks for a government ownership inquiry and is shocked to see how much land they owned.

  • Varied experience

    • Marginal landowner makes 1,000 a year, compared to Duke of Westminster’s, 290,000.

    • Ireland, Scotland and Wales

      • A religious divide between owners and tenants.

  • YES

  • They ultimately knew they belonged to the British landed establishment.

    • Joseph Schumpeter

      • They boasted a ‘simplicity and solidity of social and spiritual position’.

  • They believed they were God’s elect superior.

  • History

    • Saw themselves in partnership with the elites before them splashed out in pages of Debrett and Burke.

    • They planted tees that only their descendants would see in full splendour

    • They granted building leases for 99 years for their grandchildren.

• (IV) 1880s: The Troubled Decade

• Features

  • Collapse of agricultural economy

    • Land was no longer the safest, securest form of wealth generation

  • Creation of plutocratic, prodigious fortunes in business, industry and in finance.

  • Rise of people’s politics

    • Passing of Third Reform Act (1884-5) democratises the country, wresting power from the gentry into the hands of the people.

    • Demand for leasehold enfranchisement.

    • Wales

      • Rural unrest culminates in a tithe war.

    • Scotland

      • Crofters rebel against their landlords.

    • Ireland

      • Demands to abolish ‘landlordism’ and pressure for Home Rule.

  • Landed power eroded

    • London high society is diluted

      • Vulgar international plutocrats, American multimillionaires, Jewish adventurers who ‘buy their way in’.

      • Peerage gets given to men of non-landed background and honour system is no longer territorially based

        • This is in accommodation for an imperial and domestic non-patrician bureaucracy.

  • Evidence of worry

  • January 1883, Lord Salisbury’s Quarterly Review article

    • Attacks evils of unbridled democracy which seemed to strangle the noble, patrician rule + attack the H of Lords in an orgy of despoliation.

  • W.H Mallock

    • The Old Order Changes

      • Warned that while the aristocracy ‘may not yet be buried’, it is but…dead’.

    • Carew

      • An aristocrat who, at the age of just 35, feels he has outlived his time.

Chapter 2: The Embattled Elite

• An assault on the landed interest.

  • Third Reform Act (1884-5)

    • Creates a new, different representational structure for the whole Great Britain, in suburbs were the working-class electorate possessed the dominant voice.

  • People’s Budget (1909)

  • Land Question

  • First World War

• 1883

  • Corrupt Practices Act

    • Curbs power of local constituency notable to spend sums of money on election campaign.

• 1884-5

  • What changes here?

    • Just note here that the Third Reform Act was not simply the product of a Downing Street compromise. Reform was on the agenda, many believed since as early as 1880 [Disraeli said something to this effect] and in January 1884, 240,000 delegates from every trade union waited upon Gladstone himself.

  • Electorate increase 3 million 6 million.

  • Redistribution

    • 150 small boroughs were abolished and redistributed to some larger towns.

  • Single member constituencies.

  • Significance

    • The majority of the electorate is now working class.

  • Lords reject the Bill

    • There is great public protest; 1,500 public meetings were held and one monster rally in Hyde Park.

• Attacks on the House of Lords

  • Salisbury negates this to an extent

    • ‘referendal theory’

      • House of Lords necessary to protect the people’s liberties.

      • But

        • Unconstitutional

          • H of L has never been able to ‘dissolve’ the H of Commons

        • Ties the Lords to the people if they are protecting the people, they should do as the people say (i.e. between 1909-1911).

• 1892

  • Gladstone re-elected.

• 1893

  • The House of Lords throw out Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill by an enormous majority...

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