Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (9 page)

Shooting (largely the killing of game birds such as pheasant), the other field sport that is seen as peculiarly British, became popular for the same reason as hunting. It required skills, in this case precision, patience, nerve, perfect hand-and-eye. With the development, from the eighteenth century, of increasingly better shotguns, there was also the pleasure of using beautifully-designed equipment and the great English gunmakers – Purdey, and Holland and Holland – were seen as leading the world in this form of technology. The driven shoot involved a group of men – the ‘guns’ – being positioned in a line at certain distances apart, perhaps behind some sort of cover. Servants or locals, called beaters, would then begin walking toward them across country or through woods making a noise and a disturbance, to drive birds into the air in the direction of the guns. Because these birds were not wild but had been bred in numbers by gamekeepers within the local woods, there would be a great many of them (King George V killed more than a thousand in a single day – though this was roughly a quarter of the total ‘bag’ – on his estate at Sandringham). Those doing the shooting needed concentration and accuracy to bring them down. They also needed more than one shotgun to do so. They would therefore have a pair of these guns. While they used one, a servant acting as loader would prepare the other and have it ready for them to exchange. This was a job often undertaken by a gentleman’s valet.

Some wildlife was difficult to breed in semi-captivity. The grouse live don the open moors of Yorkshire or the Scottish Highlands. It was shot in the same manner by men largely hidden from sight behind waist-high ramparts of turf or heather. The season for this sport began, and begins, on the twelfth of August (‘the glorious twelfth’ – restaurants still vie to have grouse on the table as quickly as possible after the season starts). The sport was so popular among aristocrats, millionaires and parliamentarians that the social season ended with the start of grouse-shooting and the upper class, more or less en masse, travelled northward to enjoy the autumn on the open moors. Amid the mountainous Scottish landscape they could pursue another hunting ritual – the stalking and shooting of stags. This was the most difficult of field sports. It involved getting as close as possible to one of these noble beasts without being seen or smelled, and waiting with utmost patience for the moment at which to fire a single shot (there would usually be no opportunity for a second). The work was largely done by a local gamekeeper, who would advise and, if necessary bully, the stalker into position and ensure he kept still and quiet. To crawl on one’s belly across a rough landscape and then lie, perhaps for hours, among the rocks and rain and midges, knowing that unless one had the ability of a sniper this effort might be wasted, would not strike everyone as pleasurable. Nevertheless it was another chance for British gentlemen to throw off their sedentary lifestyle and engage in battle against nature.

The Industrial Revolution had produced, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a larger number of rich people than there had ever before been in Britain. As was natural in a nation that had always followed its aristocracy, these new arrivals wanted all the trappings of gentility – schooling in the right places, marriage into the class above, and the traditional symbols of status that represented security and commanded respect. Of these, a country house was seen as the most essential. Its surrounding acres, implying long-established status, could represent even greater prestige than the house itself. There was thus a huge increase in the number of country seats, and in the ranks of the rural landowners who occupied them, appeared at local events, and sought the traditional posts as Lord-Lieutenant and Member of Parliament. It is ironic that the middle classes in transition should have aped so assiduously the lifestyle and the trappings of a social class whose political influence was, at that very moment, losing ground to the bourgeoisie, but as the industrial and commercial magnates assumed greater power and influence, they largely succeeded in integrating, though it commonly took three generations to do so. It was thought necessary for the children of the man who founded the fortune to have grown up with the right education, and therefore with the right friends, marriage connections and leisure pursuits, before
their
children could be on equal terms with older families.

It should not be forgotten that religion too played an important role in the reshaping of the nineteenth-century aristocracy and gentry, which had until the end of the Regency been known for their wildness and self-indulgence. Two things had changed the moral climate; one was a gradually spreading religious revival that had originated with the ‘Clapham Sect’ surrounding the MP William Wilberforce and his friends, and which had focused originally on agitation to abolish slavery. The early decades of the century became a time of conspicuous piety and domestic virtue, and this state of affairs, given periodic boosts by further Christian revivals and the cult of respectability, continued for decades, well into the second half of Victoria’s reign.

The second element originated with the Queen herself. In 1837 the last of the unpopular Hanoverian monarchs, William IV (King since 1830), was succeeded by an eighteen-year-old girl. Demure and dutiful, she was naturally a stark contrast to the older men who had been her predecessors, and the Court over which she presided became a radically different place. With her marriage to Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1840, the Royal Family became ‘role models’ for domestic virtue, characterized by unimpeachable morals, earnest adherence to duty and the dutiful pursuit of knowledge. Albert’s inspired leadership in establishing the Great Exhibition, and the national museums that were built with the profits from it, demonstrated the serious tenor of their lives.

As is well known, Victoria and Albert were devoted to each other and to their children (they were to have nine), in a manner that was highly unusual among ruling families or even aristocrats at a time when marriages were often arranged. Because Society took its cue from the Royal Court, domestic virtue and family life became fashionable, and largely remained so for the rest of the century. Not only the Queen’s outlook and behaviour but that of the bourgeoisie – whom she and her husband resembled in their attitudes and values – became the accepted norm. The great families became duller and worthier, and to some extent their homes reflected this, though such conformity was often only skin-deep.

The architectural fashion for baronial castles, with all their connotations of pride and power, gave way to the ‘Tudorbethan’ manor (a combination of Tudor and Elizabethan, though Elizabeth had of course been a Tudor). The originals of such houses, as we have seen, represented a step forward in a land that was by then safe enough not to need drawbridges or battlements, and the replicas, copying the architectural language of that time, sought to represent the characteristics perceived as belonging to that time: prosperity, hospitality, comfort and national ascendancy. The reigns of Elizabeth (1558–1603) and her cousin and heir James I (1603–25) represented another ‘golden age’ in the history of the English country house. Genuine examples of such buildings were a hallowed feature of the landscape. The revival of these forms was a conscious attempt not only to imply long lineage but to link the present with a previous era of greatness.

Highclere Castle in Hampshire, known throughout the world as the setting for the television series
Downton Abbey
, is not untypical in its history. It is the ancestral home of the Earls of Carnarvon. They have occupied the site since 1679, having bought it from the Bishops of Winchester, who had owned it for many centuries before that. They originally lived in a brick house but in the late eighteenth century decided to create a more modern structure – country houses, as much as clothes, could fall out of fashion, and families did not want to be seen to have outdated tastes. The Regency house that was built on the site was to last less than a lifetime before it too was demolished, to be replaced with the present one.

The new Highclere was started in 1838, the year that the nineteen-year-old Princess Victoria was crowned and thus the beginning of the great Victorian age. It took until 1878 to complete fully. The original architect was Sir Charles Barry, better known for his work on the Houses of Parliament, which were constructed at exactly the same time. Barry worked in the Italianate manner then much in vogue (his Foreign Office buildings in London’s Whitehall are perhaps the country’s best-known example of this) and a square campanile or lookout tower was the most distinctive feature of such designs. Highclere has, of course, such a central tower, though the style of the building is what might be called Houses of Parliament Gothic rather than Mediterranean villa.

It is worth remembering, however, that once a family like the Carnarvons had attained the status of landed or titled aristocracy, there was no guarantee that they would stay there. Indolence or profligacy could easily ruin a fortune, especially among those who gambled heavily. Others could be unlucky with their investments as in the previous century’s ‘South Sea Bubble’. The rise of some families was therefore counterbalanced by the fall of others. Down the centuries there were always country houses or landed estates coming on the market, together with their contents – it was perfectly possible to buy at auction more than enough ancestors to decorate your walls.

One of the most sentimental of Victorian genre paintings captures this notion. R. B. Martineau’s
The Last Day in the Old Home
was painted in 1862 and is now on display at Tate Britain. It was painted at Godinton House (also known as Godinton Park) in Kent, an archetypal English manor that for centuries had been the home of the Toke family. The carved Jacobean fireplace and the bay window Martineau depicted are still instantly recognizable to present-day visitors. In the picture, the paintings and suits of armour are in the process of being packed as the young owner and his son drink a final toast to the house, putting a brave face on the loss of their heritage. His wife looks less sanguine and his mother, in conversation perhaps with the family solicitor, is distraught. This fate will have befallen many families during the Victorian era, for we must remember that agriculture was in almost perpetual decline throughout the reign, and that those who depended upon it for their sole income could be faced with ruin. Had coal been found beneath the ground, as it was by the Earls of Home beneath their Scottish Borders home The Hirsel, perhaps the family could have stayed, retaining their birthright even if their view was spoiled by slag heaps. The young boy who will now not inherit the estate may be more fortunate than he realizes, for he would have been forced to take on further years of struggle and perhaps misery as he tried to keep the estate going, dreading – as his father perhaps did – that he would be the one to let go of it all.

It is always worth remembering that the apparently timeless life of a great country house was not – whatever its inhabitants or the public may have believed – by any means a perpetual state of affairs. Financial ruin could end this agreeable existence remarkably quickly. The loss of heirs through war or illness or accident – for many of these wealthy young men enjoyed risky hobbies such as hunting, motor racing or flying – could bring an end to a family’s tenure when no one was left to carry on. Richard Harpur-Crewe, for instance, who would have inherited Calke Abbey, died of cancer in 1921; Antony, Viscount Knebworth and heir to the 2nd Earl of Lytton, was killed while flying in 1933 with the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. It is important therefore to remember that there was never, for the families concerned, any room for complacency about occupying a country house. Many families may have enjoyed a solid income from their estates, but they were at the mercy of inflation, falling land values and increased taxation. Every generation had to struggle to keep the establishment going, and not the least of their concerns was providing for the servants who lived on their land and worked for them.

Wealth had by now decisively passed from the old aristocracy to the commercial and industrial elite. Their brains and their products had made this ‘nation of shopkeepers’ (Napoleon’s phrase) the wealthiest country in the world. One strength of the British tradition, source of its renewed vigour and continuity, was that the aristocracy was never a closed circle. In many continental countries a man was either born to a title or could never hope for one. In Britain a successful, ambitious man could earn his way in. The upper echelons of society were constantly being replenished. There would often be sniping and sneering by the snobbish (when, for example, in the late nineteenth century there were several ennoblements of wealthy brewers, they became known as ‘the beerage’), but the openness of the ‘best circles’ in Britain was given fresh impetus by the readiness of Albert, Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) to consort with the newly rich.

It became common, in an age when politics was more cliqueish than it is today, to have political house parties – gatherings at aristocratic seats whose owners were Whig or Tory partisans, at which the great men of the age would spend the time between Saturday and Monday discussing the issues of the moment and making decisions that would affect the nation and the Empire. One distinguished stately home – Warwick Castle, the home of the Greville family – hosted such a weekend party in the summer of 1898. A century later the Castle was owned by the Tussauds Group, proprietors of the famous waxworks, and they re-created the 1898 weekend in a series of tableaux, set in the precise rooms in which the guests had slept, dined, played cards and talked politics. The guest of honour was the Prince of Wales, and his son, the Duke of York, was also present. So were Lord Curzon, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, Winston Churchill and the singer Clara Butt, who performed to entertain the guests. Sadly this imaginative and vivid exhibition is no longer there, but it gave, as no other display could have, the perfect picture of a vanished age of opulence and influence.