The Years of Endurance Read Free Page B

in pensions to every poor family in the neighbourhood. If such great ones liked formality, they dined like Lord Darnley with Chaplain and Tutor in their appointed places, or shot like the Marquis of Abercorn in the ribbon of the Garter: if they preferred obscurity, they enjoyed that too like that easy-going member of the Beauclerk tribe who was " filthy in his person and generated vermin."
    They did as they pleased. The world was their pa rk and pleas aunce, and they never doubted their right to make themselves at home in it. " Mr. Dundas ! " cried the Duchess of Gordon to the Home Secretary at an Assembly, " you are used to speak in public— will you call my servant"; Lord Stafford paid a later Home Secret ary a private retaining fee of £2000 a year to do his accounts. 1 And if they chose to be naughty, naughty they were: his Grace of Norfolk—"Jockey of Norfolk"—who looked like a barrel and reeled like a drunken faun, broke up a fashionable dance he was attending by ringing the church bells and distributing cider to a mob under the ballroom windows to celebrate a false rumour that a fellow " Radical " had won the Middlesex election.
    Because they enjoyed life and seldom stood deliberately in the way of others doing the same, they were popular. They took part in the nation's amusements and mixed freely with their neighbours. They were healthy, gregarious and generous, and had little fear in their make-up. They governed England without a police force,
     
    1 " If I were a great nobleman I should come at once to a distinct understanding with my steward, auditors, etc., that they should upon no account take places in the Cabinet under pain of not being received again in my service, since such a practice, if encouraged, might occasion to me great loss and hindrance of business."—John Ward to Mrs. Dugald Stewart/ Oct., 1809, Letters to Ivy, 85.
     
    without a Bastille and virtually without a Civil Service, by sheer assurance and personality. When the Norfolk Militia refused to march to a field day unless a guinea a man were first distributed, their colonel, William Windham, strode up to the ringleader and, calmly ignoring their oaths and raised muskets, carried him to the guardhouse, standing at the door with a drawn sword and swearing to the rude and liberty-loving mob about him that while he lived the man should not go free.
     
    Wishing to be primi inter pares and not solitary despots, the higher aristocracy merged imperceptibly into the country gentry. The Marquis of Buckingham in his white pillared palace at Stowe was only the first gentleman in Buckinghamshire, the social equal if political superior of the Verneys, Chetwodes, Drakes, Purefoys and other humbler squires. They went to the same schools, sat round the same convivial tables, rode together in the hunting field and took counsel with one another at Quarter Sessions. In each family the elder son was t he independent lord of his own li ttle world whether it was a couple of thousand homely acres or a broad province such as fell to the lot of a Fitzwilliam or a Northumberland. The younger sons and their younger sons after them quickly shaded off into the general body of lawyers and clergymen, Navy and Army officers, bankers and merchants. Proud blood and breeding flowed in a broad unimpeded current through the nation's veins.
    So did the desire to live well: to dine and hunt and lord it like an elder son. The English, despite inequalities of wealth and status, preserved a remarkable unity of social purpose. Even in their most snobbish occasions—an d in their veneration for the " quality " they were snobs to a man—there was something of a family atmosphere. On the Continent, where noble blood was a fetish and caste a horizontal dividing line, a nobleman's house tended to be a vast barracks rising out of a desert and set against a cowed background of miserable hovels in which ragged creatures of a different species lived an animal, servile existence. But in