The Years of Endurance Read Free Page A

placeholders, more than equal to their own hereditary chamber in status but subject to their social and territorial influence. In this they showed their shrewdness. For the English people did not like the appearance of power.
    Nor did these supremely fortunate creatures exercise power for its own sake—these Russells and Grenvilles, Cavendishes, Talbots and Howards with their scores of thousands of acres, their hereditary tides and offices, their State sinecures and pensions for their younger sons and cousins and retainers. 1 Dur ing their rule they evinced littl e desire to oppress their fellow-subjects. Such activity was alien to their character. They sought honours and riches with avidity and retained them with firm grasp, securing their continued enjoyment
     
    *At the beginning of George Ill's reign there were only 174 British peers.
     
    by elaborate entails on their elder children. But they valued them almost entirely for what they brought in freedom and ease to themselves. They extended and improved their domains and cheated the King's Exchequer for the glorious privilege of being independent. This they achieved on a scale formerly unknown to any society.
     
    The countryside was dotted with their lovely palaces and noble avenues, the fields and woods of the whole kingdom were open to their horses and hounds, the genius of man, past and present, was brought to decorate their houses and gardens, to fill their libraries with the masterpieces of the classical and modern mind in bindings worthy of them, to cover their walls with paintings and tapestries, and adorn their tables with exquisite silver and porcelain. Theirs was an ample and splendid design for living. Nor was it a purely material one. For such was the subtlety of their intelligences that they instinctively refused to be chained by their possessions and comforts. They encouraged freedom of expression and diversity of behaviour, preferring a vigorous existence and the society of their equals to a hot-house tended by serfs. They sent their sons to rough, libertarian schools where strawberry leaves were no talisman against the rod 1 and afterwards to the House of Commons where men used plain words and likewise suffered them. And if by their English law of primogeniture they transmitted to their firstborn a wealth and freedom equal and if possible superior to their own, the same law endowed their younger sons with incentive and scope for action and adventure. They left the doors of opportunity open.
    Nor did they ignore nature. They made no extravagant attempt to secure exclusive privilege for their blood, but frankly recognised the principle of change. They were realists. Though possessing almost unlimited power, the English aristocracy never attempted to make itself a rigid caste. The younger sons of a Duke or Marquis were by courtesy entitled Lords; the younger sons of a Viscount or Baron, Honourables, There their transmitted dignities ended. Save for the eldest male their grandchildren were all commoners with the same prefix as groom and gamekeeper. Kinship with the great, though a social asset, was no defence to breach of the law: a man might be hanged though he were cousin to a Marquis with
     
    1 At Harrow the Duke of Dorset was always beaten twice, once for the offence and once for being a Duke.
     
    80,000 acres. The great lords looked after themselves and their immediate kin: they refused to endanger their privilege by ex tending it too widely.
     
    Within the confines of their sensible ambition there was no limit but the laws they made to their personal power and enjoyment. When Lord Plymouth, passing through a country town, took a fancy to an itinerant Punch and Judy show—a novelty to him—he bought it, proprietor and all. The Duke of Devonshire, a quiet man who gave no trouble to any one, kept house at Chatsworth for a hundred and eighty persons, killed on an average five bullocks and fifteen sheep a week for their sustenance and paid £ 5 a year