Yet victory had come at a price. The Liberal government had lost its majority and was dependent on Irish support for its survival. That backing was dependent on the introduction of a Home Rule bill that was bound to be controversial. Moreover, the struggle had roused the anger of the ‘die-hard’ Tories, who had much of the aristocratic establishment behind them. ‘When the king wants loyal men,’ one of them commented after the Lords vote, ‘he will find us ready to die for him. He may want us. For the House of Lords today voted for revolution.’
8
What happened to the gentry?
In the announcement of the Lords vote, the Tory ‘die-hards’ sensed the demise of the landed gentry’s political pre-eminence. After the 1906 election, neither the Commons nor the cabinet was dominated by the territorial aristocracy. The five lawyers who sat on Asquith’s front bench attested to the new power of the professional classes. Following the introduction of MPs’ salaries in 1911, their political influence would increase. In local politics, too, the power of the landed interest had diminished. While Justices of the Peace, Lords Lieutenant and high sheriffs still tended to be drawn from the gentry, they could no longer determine local government elections, and they rarely stood as candidates themselves. It was the burgeoning middle class who now dominated in the English counties. As the state extended in scope and power, country society retreated. Now that local politics demanded administrative competence, how could it be regarded as an aspect of noblesse oblige?
Outside the political sphere, the territorial aristocracy had been declining for decades. In 1873 the publication of an official inquiry into English landownership had revealed that all of England was owned by less than 5 per cent of its population. This finding appalled the increasingly powerful middle classes, and landed privilege was attacked on several fronts. The gentry’s patronage in the professions was significantly reduced when the purchasing of army positions and ecclesiastical benefices was prohibited by law, and examinations were made compulsory. Open competition for places in the legal professions and the civil service soon followed; the amateurish aristocratic ethos that pervaded these occupations had been dispelled by the beginning of the new century.
The late-nineteenth-century agricultural depression further weakened the gentry. The value of land was the same in 1910 as it had been in 1880, during which period rents had fallen by around 40 per cent in the south and east of England. And then there were the death duties imposed by Liberal governments, and denounced by Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895): ‘Between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death,’ she declared, ‘land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.’ Many of the gentry decided to sell off their estates as a result. The additional land taxes that were introduced as part of the ‘People’s Budget’ led to the closure of even more country houses – an unprecedented 800,000 estates were put on the market between 1909 and 1914. Yet even before this surge in sales, the age in which the ‘great house’ had dominated the countryside had come to an end.
The demise of the landed gentry did not eliminate the aristocracy as a whole. After 1890, spectacularly wealthy members of the middle class had been permitted to enter the peerage. In the late nineteenth century the amalgamation of small, family-owned businesses had created corporations whose owners became almost unimaginably rich. Brewers, cotton and metal magnates were now as wealthy as landowners, and they demanded recognition from the establishment. Among the new Edwardian peers, representatives of finance, industry and commerce were dominant.
Many older aristocrats disapproved of the arrival of the new men, with some dismissing them as ‘plutocrats’. They had, it was said, made their money as a result of Victorian commercial and imperial expansion, and now had no other interest than in spending it ostentatiously. Punch magazine caricatured the group as vulgar, ignorant, greedy and obsessed with golf and motor cars. The gentry feared the plutocrats might ‘adulterate’ their caste, fears that were sometimes informed by anti-Semitism; the Tory ‘die-hard’ Lord Willoughby de Broke lamented the ‘contamination’ of old English stock by ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘Levantine’ finance. The anxiety, however, was prompted largely by unadulterated snobbery. ‘The rushing flood of ill-gotten gold has overflown its banks and polluted the crystal river of unreproved enjoyment,’ remarked a member of the Russell family. Existing members of the elite criticized new recruits as a means of displaying their pedigree, and disguising the fact their ancestors had also once been social climbers. Other aristocrats believed that upper-class society had been shrewd in swallowing the new millionaires, just as it had assimilated middle-class politicians such as Asquith and Baldwin. Had society not done so, these ‘keen-witted, pushing, clever and energetic’ men might, in Lady Dorothy Nevill’s view, have overthrown the social order.
The recently minted nobles, however, had no intention of dismantling the gentry. They acquired the landed estates that were coming onto the market, married into the gentry and supported the Tories. The nouveau riche press barons all sided with the old party of land, the crown and the Church, and that party’s power in the country was vastly extended through newspapers such as the Daily Mail. As one historian of the aristocracy, F. M. L. Thompson, observed, ‘The old order concentrated on the preservation of the power of property, manipulating the machinery of political democracy through mass ignorance, prejudice and apathy to delay the spread of social equality … for as long as possible.’
Like the Tory party, the City of London became an emblem of the marriage of convenience between the old and new aristocracies. Many of the gentry invested the money they had made from the sale of their lands in stocks and shares, sometimes following the advice of recently ennobled financiers. Over the Edwardian era, the value of their investments rose much faster than inflation. Younger members of the older aristocratic families even entered the City as stockbrokers, conferring ‘respectability’ on a profession previously regarded as middle class. Here was a thoroughly English revolution – a great change had taken place in society so that its fundamental structure might remain the same.
9
Car crazy
‘On Sunday morning, along the Kennington Road,’ Charlie Chaplin recalled of his early-twentieth-century adolescence, ‘one could see a smart pony and trap outside a house, ready to take a vaudevillian for a ten-mile drive as far as Merton or Norwood.’ In 1900 horses were the most common means of travel and the roads were relatively uncrowded, with railways carrying livestock as well as long-distance travellers. Within a decade, however, transport had changed rapidly, in every sense of the word.
The horses were first overtaken by bicycles with inflated tyres, which had been invented in the late 1880s by John Boyd Dunlop. The new tyres made bicycles far more comfortable to ride, and by 1900 ‘cyclemania’ was everywhere. Its leading lights were seen riding in the parks, the men in suits and boaters, the ladies sporting loose knickerbockers under their billowy dresses. At first cyclists were barred from Hyde Park, and confined to the less fashionable public gardens. Conservative aristocrats objected to the sight of unchaperoned ladies racing up and down Rotten Row in revealing knickerbockers, yet soon cyclists infiltrated every part of the city.