The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (16 page)

Later Churchill wrote: “The old world in its sunset was fair to see.” It doesn’t seem very fair to us. In their portraits titled Victorians, particularly the men, seem to be oozing complacency and self-esteem, wholly indifferent to the fact that 30 percent of the inhabitants of their capital city were undernourished while they feasted, at a typical lunch for six, on cold pheasant, a brace of partridges, a pair of roast fowls, steak, salmon, and a choice of two soups. As late as 1940 Clare Boothe Luce, though an anglophile, fumed: “Sometimes they are so insolent, so sure of themselves, so smug, I feel as though it would do them good for once to be beaten.” But by then they had become an anachronism, and the brightest among them knew it. To put them in context is to see them against the background of nineteenth-century Eurasia. From the Barents Sea to the Mediterranean, from the Rhine to Vladivostok, monarchs not only reigned but ruled through bewildering hierarchies of grand dukes, archdukes, princelings, and other hereditary nobles—twenty-two dynasties in Germany alone. The masses having accepted the saddles and bridles, threadbare commoners also sang about God making men high and lowly. It was, James Laver writes, “probably the last period in history when the fortunate thought they could give pleasure to others by displaying their good fortune before them.” Bagehot wrote: “The fancy of the mass of men is incredibly weak; it can see nothing without a visible symbol…. Nobility is a symbol of mind.” So ingrained was the habit of forelock-tugging that by 1875, when Trollope wrote
The Way We Live Now,
that society accepted the exploitation of titles by impecunious nobles who sold their prestige by consenting to serve as directors of businesses in wobbly shape.
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This did not declass them. Their social status was their birthright, and nothing could deprive them of it. Even if a peer committed murder, he was entitled to a trial by the House of Lords, and if sentenced to the gallows he was hanged with a silken rope. Of course, most of the upper class was merely related to peers. Given primogeniture, with all property going to the eldest son, including the title, the patriciate was heavily populated with younger sons who had inherited nothing and usually entered the navy, army, church, or diplomatic corps—the traditional order of preference. (Two generations passed before a descendant became a commoner. The firstborn son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough was his heir. The second son was called Lord Randolph Churchill. Randolph’s wife was Lady Randolph Churchill.
Their
son was simply Mr. Winston Churchill.) Yet all retained the life-style of the aristocracy. Characteristically, members of the upper class never lifted an unnecessary finger. It was said of Lady Ida Sitwell that she not only did not know how to lace up her own shoes; she would have been humiliated by the knowledge. Churchill’s cousin, the ninth duke, while visiting friends and traveling without his valet, or “man,” complained that his toothbrush didn’t “froth properly.”
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He had to be told gently that toothpaste had to be applied to the brush before it would foam. His man had always done that, and he hadn’t realized it. Winston himself lived ninety years without once drawing his own bath or riding on a bus. He took the tube just once. His wife had to send a party to rescue him; helpless, he was whirling round and round the tunnels under London. And all his life he was dressed and undressed by someone else, usually a valet, though during one period by a secretary in her twenties. There are those among his friends who believe that this sort of thing taught him how to use people properly.

It was during the London “Season”—from the Queen of Charlotte’s Ball in mid-spring to the Goodwood races in midsummer—that the great peers were to be found in their town houses. These were surrounded by barbered gardens, high walls, and gates manned by gatekeepers who fought off beggars and other street people. Sometimes they shot them. This aroused neighbors, who knew their station but believed a line should be drawn short of homicide. Actually, the very sites of many of the huge homes were outrageous. In Mayfair, Belgravia, Marylebone, and St. Pancras, streets maintained at public expense had been included within such walls, which meant that fire engines were blocked and buildings burned down. All attempts at legislation outlawing this extraordinary practice were defeated in Parliament.

In London the upper classes had their stylized rituals, most of them frivolous. Every morning after breakfast processions of victorias—low four-wheeled carriages with folding tops—debouched from the West End and trotted along Park Lane, gay harnesses tinkling and erect postilions wearing uniforms, glistening high boots, and varnished, high-crowned hats. Daughters were presented at court; the ladies,
en grande toilette,
wore three ostrich feathers in their hats if married, two feathers if not. Wasp-waisted, their gowns off the shoulder, skirts voluminous and rustling, the debutantes would be waited upon by uniformed members of the Corps Diplomatique, Gentlemen of the Household in full court dress, and Yeomen of the Guard in scarlet and gold. The fathers of the girls being brought out would be absent, loitering in their clubs: the Athenaeum, White’s, the Carlton, the Reform, and the rest. They did not care to be “seen” then. But the sexes did mingle on other public occasions. Everyone enjoyed the royal enclosure at Ascot, gorging on champagne, strawberries, and lobster mousse. And—rowing being considered manly—it was rather a good thing to turn out for the Henley Regatta. Dress there was about as informal as it ever got for that class. Ladies appeared in blouses and long linen skirts; their husbands, in straw boaters, blazers, and flannels.

The best club in London was Parliament, which, by no coincidence, held its key sessions between Easter and August—in effect, the Season. At the time of Winston Churchill’s birth, MPs were not only unpaid; they were expected to contribute generously to charities in their constituencies. So the upper class controlled both the Lords
and
the House of Commons. B. Cracroft, analyzing the House in his
Essays on Reform,
found that 326 members were patricians, including 226 sons or grandsons of peers, and a hundred others “connected with the peerage by marriage or descent.” Over a hundred more belonged “substantially to the same class,” which meant that three out of every four MPs were linked to each other and to the older generation in the Lords by blood as well as by conservative outlook. Between a third and a half of all cabinet members were from the upper house—six of Disraeli’s thirteen ministers, five of Gladstone’s fourteen. As we have seen, their hold on key posts in the Empire was even greater. Every viceroy of India was a peer by inheritance. In
Little Dorrit
Dickens wrote caustically of the Barnacle “clan, or clique, or family, or connection” that “there was not a list, in all the Circumlocution Office, of places that might fall vacant anywhere within half a century, from a Lord of the Treasury to a Chinese Consul, and up again to a Governor-General of India, but, as applicants for such places, the names of some or every one of these hungry and adhesive Barnacles were down.”
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So the opening of Parliament, or a heralded debate in the Commons, was not unlike a family reunion. Broughams, landaus, barouches, victorias, and hansoms tingling their unmistakable bells clattered over the cobblestones of New Palace Yard and drew up in front of the Westminster Hall entrance. Men in striped trousers and frock coats descended carrying bulky red leather boxes stuffed with state papers, then disappeared into lobbies brightened by flaring gas jets. In the Strangers’ Dining Room wives and daughters awaited them, wearing flowing skirts of tulle and hats as large as the displays at the Chelsea Flower Show. Gossip was exchanged, outcomes predicted, Liberals scorned by Tories or Tories by Liberals—it scarcely mattered, since their interests and social positions were virtually identical. The mighty seemed completely secure. Yet there were those who worried. Macaulay had warned against “the encroachments of despotism and the licentiousness of democracy.” Bagehot said “sensible men of substantial means are what we wish to be ruled by” and cautioned that “a political combination of the lower classes… is an evil of the first magnitude…. So long as they are not taught to act together there is a chance of this being averted, and it can only be averted by the greater wisdom and foresight in the higher classes.” The Queen, alarmed, let it be known that “a democratic monarchy is what she will never belong to.”
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Skittish patricians held their breath when the franchise bill of 1884 swept away 216 seats in rotten boroughs and increased the electorate. One man in five now had the vote—but at the next election the Conservatives were returned to power, with Lord Salisbury succeeding Disraeli. Salisbury was eminently a patrician of his time. A descendant of the two Cecils who had been Elizabeth I’s and James I’s chief ministers, he was a towering, massive man—acerbic, gauche, preoccupied, disdainful, and possessed of a penetrating intellect. He declined to live at 10 Downing Street, preferring his own more elegant London home, in the chapel of which he prayed each morning upon arising. He suffered spells of depression which he described as “nerve storms.” It was Salisbury’s firm belief that only uncontentious legislation should be brought before Parliament. If it was controversial, England wasn’t ready for it.

In one of those little paragraphs that illumine the era,
The Times,
reporting on a public trial, noted that “Viscount Raynham, MP, and other gentlemen present were accommodated with seats on the bench.”
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Given the system, it is unsurprising that the judge moved over for men whose social rank was equal to, or more likely greater than, his own. The key word is “gentlemen.” What was a gentleman? Even then the term was inexact, and it has been the despair of sociologists ever since. Some cases were easy. Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days
was almost an archetype. In 1872 he lived in Burlington Gardens, in the house at No. 7 Savile Row—flats didn’t become respectable till the mid-1870s—and he was a member of the Reform Club. His financial independence permitted him to be indifferent to public opinion (though not to his conscience and his fellow gentlemen) and his arrogance and eccentricity arose naturally from his absolute security. Other cases were marginal. You could be a gentleman in one place but not in another. In a small community the word would be applied to a physician, a lawyer, a country squire, a master of foxhounds, or just a man who had a little money and good manners. In London, or in the great country homes, that wasn’t enough. Samuel Smiles to the contrary, the mantle did not fall upon every responsible, brave, selfless Englishman. If gentlemen were those who were treated as such—the best definition—the standards were usually higher than that.

The high-born and members of the landed gentry were gentlemen by birthright. Stupidity—even illiteracy—did not disqualify them. But they were exceptions. It was generally understood that a “gentleman’s education” meant Oxford or Cambridge, admittance to which was still largely limited to public-school boys. During their heyday, roughly from Waterloo to the outbreak of World War I, the self-contained public schools were the ruling class’s boot camps. Their autocratic headmasters, Church of England clerics, taught austerity, loyalty, honor, and the virtue of “service.” Theoretically this meant serving those not lucky enough to see the inside of a public school; in practice it came down to defending the established order. Since the tuition exceeded the annual income of the huskiest workman, the pool of applicants was limited, as it was meant to be, to the affluent. The teaching of Latin and Greek was thought useful in disciplining young minds, but the playing fields were at least as important. The Duke of Wellington had said that the schools should produce the kind of youth who could go straight from his sixth form to a convict ship and, with the help of two sergeants and fifteen privates, transport a shipload of convicted criminals to Australia without incident. Thomas Arnold of Rugby told his faculty: “What we must look for… is, first religious and moral principles; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability.” At Harrow it was said that a boy might spend fifteen hours a week at cricket or, if he took “every opportunity,” twenty hours. Sports were believed to be peculiarly suitable to the building of character. A small boy learned to submit to the authority of older boys because they were physically stronger than he. As he moved up through the higher forms, it was reasoned, he himself matured and became a “natural ruler,” a self-reliant gentleman, disciplined by what Irving Babbitt later called the “inner check.” Thus, though his family may have had no aristocratic connections, he joined the gentry and was accepted as a member of the ruling class. Merchants couldn’t make it, but their sons could.
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In a revealing aside, John Buchan wrote: “In the conventional sense, I never went to school at all.” In fact, he had received an excellent education in a Glasgow day school, but socially that didn’t count. Yet Buchan rose to become Lord Tweedsmuir, governor-general of Canada. So it was possible to bypass the Etons and Harrows. Even an American could do it; in 1879 Henry James dined out 107 times. There were a thousand little ways, some of them extraordinarily petty, by which one gentleman identified another. One’s vocabulary was important. Mantelpieces were “chimney-pieces,” notepaper was “writing paper,” mirrors were “looking glasses.” But there was a catch. If you worried about such things, your concern showed, and you were dismissed as a swot. The true gentleman emanated a kind of mystique. He always belonged wherever he was. If he was intellectual he did not hide it; in
Paracelsus
Browning had told him: “Measure your mind’s height by the shadow it casts.” And somehow he always recognized his equals, whatever the circumstances or attire. When two strangers meet in
Doctor Thorne,
Trollope says of one: “In spite of his long absence, he knew an English gentleman when he saw one.” Even penury was no obstacle. At the end of Trollope’s
Last Chronicle of Barset
Josiah Crawley meets Archdeacon Grantly. The archdeacon is about to become Crawley’s daughter’s father-in-law. Crawley is wearing seedy clothes and “dirty broken boots.” He is suspected of being a thief. He is quirky and perverse. But he was a scholar at Oxford and has “good connections,” and when he apologizes because he is too impoverished to provide a dowry, the archdeacon replies: “My dear Crawley, I have enough for both.” Crawley says: “I wish we stood on more equal grounds.” Rising from his chair, the archdeacon tells him: “We stand on the only perfect level on which such men can meet each other. We are both gentlemen.” Crawley, also rising, replies: “Sir, from the bottom of my heart I agree with you. I could not have spoken such words; but coming from you who are rich to me who am poor, they are honourable to the one and comfortable to the other.”
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