15

Public Character: The
Aristocratic Century
1714–1815

Selecting a single phrase to sum up a hundred years of diverse human achievements is a tricky business and the result can never be wholly satisfactory. One recent historian plumped for ‘aristocratic century’ and another characterised the period as Britain’s ‘ancien régime’, which links it with the absolutist monarchies of Europe.¹ These titles seem apt for a book about the nobility, although it should be remembered that the British ancien régime emerged in 1815 as secure and confident, in contrast to its Continental counterparts, which had been severely shaken by the French Revolution and the wars it spawned.

There are valid alternatives. It can be called the age of revolutions (agricultural, industrial, American and French), or of wars (too many to list), or of intellectual and scientific enlightenment, all choices that remind us just how much happened and changed during this century. The age might also be named after the trio of Hanoverian Georges whose reigns it almost spans. Unlike that of their predecessors, their freedom of action was confined by the Glorious Revolution, which left them passive if not always contented bystanders rather than active makers of history. This was left to their aristocratic ministers and Parliaments.

What is beyond doubt is that the aristocracy did enjoy an astonishing ascendancy in public life thanks to those networks of obligation and reciprocity, which, together with adroit Parliamentary and electoral management, kept it in power. Equally remarkable was the capacity of the nobility to convince people that its monopoly of power was indispensable, that the aristocracy was the keystone of the nation. ‘How long do you think the Constitution and liberties of the country would survive the loss of public character in the aristocracy?’ the MP Thomas Creevey asked his patron the Duke of Norfolk in 1818. The Irish writer Thomas Moore compared the peerage to ‘a breakwater between the people and the throne, in a state of double responsibility – to liberty on one side, and authority, on the other’.²

Moreover, and this seemed an impregnable argument for its champions, the system worked to the nation’s advantage. This was why, in 1791, the new Constitution for Upper and Lower Canada included provisions for governors to appoint life members to the upper chambers of the legislature, making them in effect the counterpart of the House of Lords. It was even suggested that the King might confer ‘Hereditary Titles of Honour’ on these lawmakers.³ An aristocracy was integral to what, in 1830, Wellington praised as the ‘most efficient legislative body in the world’, which, for all its eccentricities, had presided over unprecedented prosperity and Britain’s emergence as the first global superpower.⁴

All this was true. Aristocratic politicians had overseen the transformation of Britain into a commercial, industrial and maritime power and contrived and implemented the strategies which facilitated imperial expansion in the Caribbean, North America (where Canada was kept and the future United States lost), India, Australasia and South Africa. A landowning nobility was glad to do all within its power to promote the enrichment of the nation and encourage the capitalist enterprises that made this possible. The aristocracy also accommodated the interests of commercial lobbyists, of whom the most influential were investors in the East India Company and the West Indies plantocracy and its accomplices in the slave trade. Other lesser pressure groups whose voices were heard and heeded in Parliament pleaded for private bills for new canals, turnpikes, docks and agricultural enclosures.

Between 1688 and 1815 Parliament passed over fourteen thousand laws framed to facilitate and regulate investment, manufacturing and shipping. The generation of wealth occupied the greater part of Parliament’s time; in 1784 parliamentary committees were investigating petitions from, among others, Nottingham shopkeepers seeking legislation to enforce the collection of small debts, ropemakers seeking closer supervision of their trade and licensed peddlars and hawkers from Staffordshire seeking protection from outsiders. Unlike its French counterpart, the British ancien régime took very good care of entrepreneurs and manufacturers.

Aristocratic ministers were also concerned with the health of money markets. These were now inextricably linked with the state through the Bank of England, founded in 1693, which controlled the money supply, and the National Debt, which had been launched in 1696 to finance what turned out to be over a hundred years of intermittent wars. Investors loaned money to the government which guaranteed the value of the stock (consols) and paid annual dividends. The soundness of public credit became a yardstick for the economic health of the country; political mischances and crises shook money markets, as they did in 1797 when consols briefly plummetted. As governors of an industrious and flourishing nation, the nobility were like a self-perpetuating board of a company who were expected to listen to the shareholders and deliver the dividends.

Noblemen and their sons were actively engaged in British commercial and colonial enterprises. They commanded the fleets and armies which secured markets, saw off French, Dutch and Spanish interlopers and conquered territories in North America and India. Their courage and tenacity gave a lustre of martial glory and kudos to the aristocracy, for victorious generals and admirals were ennobled. Sometimes, as with Lord St Vincent or Lord Nelson of the Nile, their titles incorporated their triumphs. Such men formed a new, heroic branch of the nobility, which was exalted as a collective example of a new national spirit.⁵ It was a compound of pugnacity, resolve and fortitude. All were shown in different ways by George Anson, who earned his barony commanding fleets in the Caribbean and Pacific (taking one around the world), and George Brydges, who was created Lord Rodney after he had restored British naval supremacy in the Caribbean at the Battle of the Saintes in 1782.

Nelson had dreamed of joining this noblesse d’épée: on the eve of his attack on the French fleet in Abukir Bay in 1798, he declared: ‘Before this time tomorrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.’ By then, what had started life as a royal mausoleum was being colonised by the marble statues of aristocratic admirals and generals, often accompanied by lively carvings of their victories. There were other forms of immortality. Patriotic landlords named their inns after national heroes such as John Manners, Marquess of Granby, a dashing eighteenth-century cavalry general always portrayed bareheaded on inn signs since he had once lost his wig galloping at the French.

Comparisons were made between these heroes and their Roman counterparts, who, like them, held that service to the state was the highest expression of the virtue latent in men of honour and birth. George III (1760–1820) was displeased when Benjamin West chose to portray General Wolfe and his soldiers in contemporary uniforms rather than Roman armour. Nonetheless, The Death of General Wolfe (he died fighting the French in Canada in 1759) appealed to patriots who purchased prints of the scene, as they did the portraits of victorious generals and admirals. Reports of their exploits helped kindle that sense of unity and national pride which were the key components of a new and intoxicating abstraction, Britishness.

There was a paradox in all this. An amazingly successful protomodern commercial and industrial state and its sophisticated military and naval resources were controlled by a landed aristocracy which owed its dominance to a mastery of the old political arts of power-broking and wire-pulling. The complex system and its components of patronage, kinship and bribery have been dissected by Sir Lewis Namier, who concluded that they alone explain the maintenance of aristocratic power. Walpoles, Townshends, Pelhams, Stanhopes, Cavendishes, Russells, Campbells and Yorkes intrigued, made and broke promises, flattered and politely bullied kings and scattered largesse to win elections and secure majorities in Parliament. The terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ became meaningless; all that now mattered was distributing rewards to the right people at the right time. As the first de facto Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who held the office from 1721 till 1742, cynically remarked, every man had his price.

In fact it was never so neat and tidy. Modern reassessments of eighteenth-century politics indicate a significant, residual attachment to traditional loyalties and habits of mind. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, published in 1749, Squire Western damned his sister for a Whig and mocked her metropolitan pretensions, and she responded with contempt for his bucolic boorishness. These caricatures and their comic exchanges were not inventions and must have struck some chords with Fielding’s readers. The backwoodsman Western was clearly a Tory at home in a new Country Party, a loose combination united by its distrust of court venality and Whig chicanery. If he had chosen to enter Parliament, Western might have sat alongside ‘independent’ country squires, a small but influential body that grandee power-brokers ignored at their peril.

The politically engaged aristocracy formed a close-knit circle whose members were connected by blood, upbringing and education. Of the twenty-six prime ministers who held office between 1714 and 1832, seventeen had been to either Eton or Westminster. Their reputations as the kindergartens of successful politicians attracted aristocratic parents who now preferred public schools to private tutors. By 1800 over two-thirds of the nobility was sending its sons to these establishments, with Eton far and away the favourite choice.⁶ For the past fifty years, it had become the custom for Eton’s most promising alumni to present portraits of themselves to hang in the provost’s lodgings. Among the likenesses were one Whig politico (Charles James Fox) and a Tory governor-general of Bengal (Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington).

Hard knocks accompanied hard study. Public schools were disorderly, virtually self-governing republics in which the masters exercised a spasmodic and often brutal authority that their pupils sometimes violently resisted. A bloody-minded spirit flourished alongside respect for public duty, and during the latter part of the eighteenth and first of the nineteenth centuries there was a spate of public school insurrections, including three at Eton. George Nugent-Grenville, the future Marquess of Buckingham and a cabinet minister, and Viscount Petersham were among the rebels in 1768. Petersham’s father Lord Harrington ordered his son to submit. ‘Sir, I shall be damned if I do,’ responded the boy. ‘And I will be damned if you don’t,’ answered Harrington. ‘Yes, my lord,’ riposted his son, ‘but you will be damned whether I do or not.’ This was true enough, for Harrington was a celebrated rake who preferred ‘the lowest amusement in the lowest brothels’ to his domestic and public duties.⁷ A year after, he purchased his son a commission in the Coldstream Guards.

The hurly-burly of the public school life fostered independence and self-assurance, qualities which distinguished Lord Palmerston, whose ministerial career began in 1809 and ended in 1865, when he was at the start of his third term as Prime Minister. Soon after leaving Harrow in 1800, ‘Pam’ praised the public schools as ‘a nation in miniature’ where the boy who took the lead in games and ‘enterprises . . . for mischief or amusement’ was the one destined to ‘distinguish himself at the head of an army or a council’. Over forty years later he confided to his brother that a minister’s peevishness was the outcome of his never having had ‘the wholesome buffeting of a public school’.⁸ ‘I owe my spirit of enterprise to the tricks I used to play in this garden,’ Wellington told Etonians during his visit to the school in 1818.

Boys learned how to survive in a robust, competitive world, while their parents fretted about their intellectual progress and the likelihood that idle sons would drift into the sexual vices for which public schools had become notorious. In 1784, Charles Jenkinson, first Earl of Liverpool, urged his fourteen-year-old son Robert, the second Earl and a future Prime Minister, to stick at his Homer and Virgil and ‘apply yourself to algebra and mathematics’ so as to ‘acquire a habit of reasoning closely and correctly on every subject’. The Jenkinsons were in the foothills of the political world and hoped to ascend higher, and so Charles reminded his son that his family ‘look forward with anxiety to the figure you will hereafter make in the world . . . and in the character you bear’.⁹

At sixteen Robert Jenkinson undertook the next aristocratic rite of passage and proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, the college of choice for noblemen’s sons, where they wore a distinctive gold-laced nobleman’s gown and dined with the college fellows as of right. He left after the usual two years, having shown what his tutor considered an alarming preference for ‘general ideas’ rather than close textual analysis. Jenkinson was already immersed in the world of politics, challenging his father’s support for the slave trade. He also cultivated what he called ‘a few particular people’ whom he liked and whose political sympathies he shared, and his companions included future ministerial colleagues and an adversary, George Canning.

Attachments and sometimes antipathies made at school and university bound together the often overlapping aristocratic networks which dominated political life. Jenkinson also acquired his nickname ‘Jenky’, which has a schoolboy or undergraduate ring to it, as did those of other contemporary grandees. The Prince Regent called the Duke of Norfolk ‘Jockey’, while Henry Addington, the first Lord Sidmouth, was ‘Doctor’ on account of his father’s profession, and Lord Grenville was inexplicably ‘Bogy’.¹⁰

Nicknames were a novelty in the everyday discourse of politics. They could be heard at court levees, balls, masquerades, over card tables, at race meetings, cricket matches and in coffee houses, in fact anywhere where the rich and powerful enjoyed themselves. In his diary for October 1731, John Perceval, first Earl of Egmond, recorded coffee house discussions which ranged over religion, metaphysics, ancient statutes, the ‘antiquity of Parliament’, and a recently published gloss on Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.¹¹ Over seventy years after, Creevey described an evening’s conversation with the Duke of Norfolk which wandered ‘from the bawdy to the depths of politics’.

Political conversation encompassed persiflage, anecdote, rumour and speculation as well as hard-nosed horse-trading over the dispersal of power and patronage. Ultimately, all political activity focused on the crucial business of persuading men how to vote, either in Parliament or at provincial polling booths. Astute electoral management at both levels explained both the progress and durability of Thomas Pelham-Holles, first Duke of Newcastle, who was a Secretary of State between 1724 and 1754 and Prime Minister between 1754 and 1756, and, with William Pitt the Elder, between 1756 and 1762.

Newcastle was a maestro who exploited the avarice, vanity and ambition of those whom he persuaded to beef up the Whigs in the Commons and Lords. Survival depended on strings pulled in London and in the provinces, where indifferent or uncommitted voters had to be petted. Newcastle worked in tandem with Charles Lennox, second Duke of Richmond, whom he counted ‘his best and dearest friend in all the world’. Together, they seduced the voters of Sussex, where both owned substantial estates.

Every social occasion was turned to political advantage. In 1733 Newcastle urged his friend to sound out the feelings of the Sussex gentry whenever they gathered for the assizes and races at Lewes. Personal contact was vital and so, in 1737, Richmond attended the Lewes races in person to charm the electors. Meanwhile, his steward spied on the Tories, who were using a race meeting at Steyning to select their candidate for Chichester. Another of Richmond’s agents strolled among spectators at cricket matches, testing opinion. But it was Richmond’s presence which won hearts: squires, substantial farmers and anyone who had a forty-shilling freehold were flattered by the personal attention of the first man in the county and a celebrated sportsman.

Patience, good humour and a resilient liver were vital for canvassing. Newcastle once shrank from attendance at the Lewes races and assizes, for he was ‘not at all fond of a week’s drunkenness’. Nevertheless he had to abase himself, show warmth and affability towards social inferiors and heartily join in the alcoholic revels which Hogarth portrayed in his sequence of election paintings. Sussex Whigs sang:

Then fill your glass. Full let it be
Newcastle drink while you can see
With heart and voice, all voters sing
Long live great Holles – Sussex king.¹²

Voters expected bribes as well as beanfeasts. Richmond described the borough of New Shoreham as ‘a new whore that is anybody’s for their money’, and a place where, thankfully, ‘that ugly word conscience is not known’. New Shoreham succumbed to sweetners, and excise posts procured from Whitehall were scattered among leading townsmen. Tom Baker, a Chichester chandler and ‘chief pillar of the dissenters’, understood the game when he pledged his vote and powers of persuasion in return for Richmond’s pressure on the trustees of St Thomas’s Hospital to secure his son a position as a surgeon there.¹³ Small men did favours for great and vice versa. In 1754 Newcastle gave the novelist Laurence Sterne the archdeaconry of York in return for his costly endeavours in expelling ‘Popish seminaries’ from the city.¹⁴ The political nexus demanded that grandees in Westminster helped and were helped by chandlers, schoolmasters, farmers and the growing number of urban businessmen who had acquired a forty-shilling freehold.

With so many applicants for favours, clashes were inevitable and ministers had to judge precisely the political consequences of satisfaction or disappointment. In 1759 Newcastle was faced with rival requests for the governorship of Dunbarton Castle. One was from Lord Eglinton, who raised the matter at Lewes races, the other from General Campbell, a kinsman of the fourth Duke of Argyll. Honour was at stake and the Duke became ‘very violent’ when Newcastle hinted that he favoured Eglinton. He bluntly warned the Prime Minister that a slight to the Campbells would have bruising repercussions for the Whigs in Scotland.¹⁵ Argyll prevailed, as his family usually did.

Titles and promotions within the peerage were incentives for lobby fodder in both houses. Approving a peerage for one MP, Newcastle noted that he was ‘faultless and one of the best supports I can have in the House of Commons’. John, second Viscount Bateman, was an Irish peer who sat for Woodstock in Oxfordshire and deserved the post of Lord of the Admiralty because he was a ‘most useful man who does not speak’ and had the goodwill of his uncle, the Duke of Marlborough.¹⁶ Bateman’s mute services obtained him posts within the royal household, first as Treasurer and then Master of the Buckhounds. He was at home in George III’s court, for ‘he possessed that mediocrity of talents, which forms the best recommendation to royal favour’.¹⁷ The Tory Bateman was dependable in the Lords where he faithfully supported Lord North’s ministry. When it fell in 1782, Bateman forfeited his sinecure, since it was customary for posts in the royal household to be redistributed when governments changed.

Like every other Prime Minister, North had to bargain with an increasing number of peers who, by inheritance or through investment, owned so-called pocket boroughs, constituencies in which the voters were, metaphorically at least, in their landlord’s pocket. In many instances there were only a handful of voters and in a few (the rotten boroughs) none at all. Where they existed, voters had to be cherished: at Newark in Nottinghamshire each received half a ton of coal at Christmas and at East Retford in Nottinghamshire each received an annual twenty guineas. Truculence did occur and was stamped on. In Yorkshire in 1807 Malton voters defied Lord Fitzwilliam, who retaliated with evictions and raised rents, which did the trick, for next year they returned his candidate.¹⁸ Alcohol induced compliance and gratitude, and in Westminster, where nearly every adult male had a vote, £2,285 (brandy was two shillings a bottle, beer a penny a pint.) was spent by Newcastle on tavern bills in 1754.¹⁹

Tractable constituencies were valuable assets and were bought and sold. In 1787 Lord Egremont paid £40,000 for Midhurst in Sussex, and in 1812 the sixth Duke of Bedford paid £32,000 for Camelford.²⁰ The number of boroughs owned by aristocrats rose sharply from 156 in 1747 to 207 in 1784, which represented nearly 40 per cent of the Commons. The aristocracy was tightening its grip on the legislature in the face of a growing challenge from India and West Indies moneybags who were buying up seats and, by 1790, had a block of forty-five members keeping an eye on the East India Company’s interests. They were a force to be reckoned with, for there were enough of them to play havoc with ministerial majorities.

Inflation hit the borough market as more and more colonial Midases sought seats in the Commons. Politics became increasingly expensive; Newcastle was compelled to sell off estates worth £200,000 to meet the debts he had run up sustaining the Whigs in power.²¹ Leaders chasing Commons’ majorities were forced to haggle with boroughmongers competing in a seller’s market. In 1774 Lord Edgecombe demanded £15,000 for his five Cornish seats, but Lord North knocked him down to £12,500, which was the going rate. The Prime Minister considered Viscount Falmouth had been ‘rather shabby’ by accepting the standard price, but asking for payment in guineas (worth one pound and five pence) for his six Cornish seats, thus slipping an extra 5 per cent onto the final bill.²²

Hugh Boscawen, second Viscount Falmouth, was notoriously greedy: at a levee he had once asked Pitt the Elder to recommend him for the Garter and was refused. Furious, Falmouth warned the Prime Minister that: ‘I bring in five votes who go with the ministry in the House of Commons; and if my application is disregarded, you must take the consequence.’ Pitt remained obdurate and quoted a Roman proverb: ‘Optat Ephippia Bos piger’ (‘as much as the lazy ox wishes to be saddled’). Ignorant of Latin, Falmouth asked where it came from and what it meant. On hearing it was from Horace, he presumed, to the amusement of everyone present, that the words had been uttered by the contemporary dilettante Sir Horace Walpole.²³

Falmouth was a dunce, but he was acutely conscious of the immense prestige attached to the pale blue ribbon of the Garter. It and the orders of the Thistle, founded in 1703, and St Patrick, founded in 1783, were tokens of special royal favour which created an elite within the peerage, immediately recognisable by the ribbons and badges worn in the Lords and on public occasions. Like titles, these honours required ministerial recommendation, which made them counters in the political game. George I (1714–27) and his son George II (1727–60) acquiesced, not always graciously, but they had the compensation of the civil list, a payment annually endorsed by Parliament to cover the Crown’s private expenses. In 1760 it stood at £800,000.

George III chafed against the constraints that had bound his predecessors. Wilful and dogmatic, he was guided by an atavistic philosophy of kingship and cast himself as the ‘patriot King’, an honest patriarch dedicated to the welfare of his subjects and above the venality and bickering of partisan politics. George considered Parliamentary debates exercises in fruitless verbosity. Old ideas were briefly brought out of mothballs, and Pitt the Elder was perturbed to hear a royal chaplain preach on the doctrine of non-resistance.²⁴ Others may have been amused, although there were plenty of MPs and peers who were glad to indulge the royal fancies and harvested the rewards which came the way of the King’s ‘friends’. An axis of Whigs, Tories, apolitical country squires and officials of the royal household (whom George called his ‘household troops’) kept the biddable mediocrity of Lord North in power from 1770 to 1782.

The tentative revival of the Crown’s executive power foundered because of George’s pigheadedness. Its fruits were humiliating reverses in America, the temporary loss of British maritime supremacy in the Atlantic and Caribbean which led to an invasion threat in 1779, and spiralling levels of taxation. George convinced himself it was all the fault of the Whig opposition, whom he accused of fomenting rebellion in America and hampering his ministers at home. The decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781 confirmed what was already clear: Britain could not suppress the colonists. A ministry whose justification was to continue fighting collapsed and North resigned.

George III became entangled in serpentine manoeuvres to exclude his old enemies from office, turning in 1783 to the Tory William Pitt the Younger. The patriot King swallowed his disdain for partisan politics and, through flagrant intervention, sustained the minority ministry of Pitt until the general election of 1784. George converted the uncommitted with peerages: Edward Eliot was made Lord St Germains in return for delivering his two Cornish boroughs and their quartet of MPs to Pitt.

George III’s excursions into factional politics transformed the aristocracy. Keeping Pitt in office required a steady flow of creations, and between 1780 and 1800 the total of peers soared from 189 to 267. Arrivistes now predominated in the Lords, where four-fifths of its members had titles less than a hundred years old. Old blood was scandalised. ‘There are so many Lords made, that I can hardly spit out of my coach without spitting on a Lord,’ exclaimed the Duchess of Queensberry in August 1784.²⁵

A bandwagon was rolling and the ambitious quickly jumped on to it. Snobbery, vanity and anxieties over status compelled men to beg for titles, often blatantly and sometimes without success. In 1796, Sir James Graham Bt. pleaded with Henry Dundas, the Secretary for War, for a safe government constituency, reminding his friend that ‘my sole object for coming into Parliament would be to obtain a peerage’.²⁶ His hopes were raised in 1798 when, with ministerial backing, he was elected for Ripon in Yorkshire, which he represented for the next nine years. Graham was asthmatic, which may explain why he never spoke in debates, but his silent support for successive ministries did not merit a peerage.

Another loser in the scramble for titles was James Stewart, the seventh Earl of Galloway, a Tory, a Lord of the Bedchamber and Lord Lieutenant of Wigtonshire. Here he enjoyed ‘some consequence’ as he told Pitt and Dundas, but his kudos had been dimmed in 1793 when his nominee had been beaten in the county election. Only his elevation to an English peerage and with it a guaranteed seat in the Lords would restore his prestige.²⁷ Over the next two years, he anxiously scanned the annual lists of creations and promotions in the belief that Pitt would heed his pleas. The Prime Minister did not, aware perhaps that this vain nobleman’s son had backed the opposition candidate for Kirkcudbright. The disappointed Galloway died in 1806 from gout of the stomach.²⁸

Graham and Galloway possessed large estates, but now acreage was beginning to count for less when it came to creating peers. Many new lords, including the naval commander Lord Collingwood and Lord Ellenborough, a former Lord Chief Justice, had little land. Looking back from the 1840s, the romantic Tory Benjamin Disraeli saw the separation of the aristocracy from the land as a blow to its ancient mystique. In his novel Sybil (1845), he castigated Pitt for giving titles to ‘second-rate squires and fat graziers’ and to bankers and businessmen whom ‘He caught . . . in the alleys of Lombard Street and clutched . . . from the counting houses of Cornhill.’ A few of these ‘mushroom’ lords were uncomfortable about their lack of the wherewithal to keep up their positions. On the eve of Trafalgar, Thomas Hardy, Nelson’s Flag Captain, confided to the Admiral that ‘his want of fortune’ would make it difficult for him to maintain the baronetcy which, he rightly guessed, he would soon be awarded.²⁹

No such embarrassment was allowed to disturb Wellington: after each of his major victories in the Peninsula he leapfrogged up the peerage from Viscount Wellington of Talavera to Duke of Wellington in five years. A financial award was attached to each title, culminating with £400,000 with which to buy estates sufficient to uphold the ‘dignity’ of his dukedom.³⁰

As in previous periods when the aristocracy underwent rapid expansion, there was backbiting about a perceived devaluation of the peerage as a whole. It was already stratified, with English peers taking precedence over Scottish, who were allowed only sixteen representatives in the Lords, and both took precedence over Irish, who had none. The theatre of power required the strictest observation of protocols with everyone in their proper places in public processions, which offered plenty of opportunities for grumbling over slights. In 1733 some English lords believed that Irish peers were no more than commoners, and they were incensed by George III’s Queen’s kissing the hands of Irish countesses but not those of English viscountesses.³¹

Always fussy about the minutiae of court punctilio, George III protested in 1776 when it was proposed that Irish peers might be given English lord lieutenantcies.³² When, in 1806, one Irish peer, Lord Mornington, was offered an Irish marquessate for having enlarged British territories in India, he was furious. ‘There was nothing Irish or Pinchbeck in my conduct,’ he declared and, therefore, he expected ‘nothing Irish or Pinchbeck in my reward’.³³ His amour propre was satisfied with an English title, Marquess Wellesley, but his political ambitions were hampered by his libido. As Foreign Secretary between 1809 and 1812 he devoted more time to his mistresses than to his duties; his younger brother remarked that castration might be the only way to save his career.

Wellesley joined an aristocracy at the apex of its political supremacy. Its future seemed assured, for over the past fifty years it had engrossed more and more political power. The steady acquisition of pocket and rotten boroughs, corruption and private non-aggression pacts were making the nobility less and less answerable to the electorate. In the 1761 election only one-fifth of seats were contested.

Yet mastery of the electoral apparatus did not mean that aristocratic politicians were cocooned from outside pressures, whether from voters or boroughmongers seeking favours, or, on occasions, the masses. Even an ostensibly tame MP could disregard the wishes of his patron. In 1795 William Bontine, who had been elected as member for Dunbartonshire through the influence of the Tory third Duke of Montrose, told his patron that he could no longer ‘satisfy’ his conscience by voting for Pitt’s repressive domestic policies. He resigned and the Duke gracefully accepted, acknowledging Bontine’s ‘delicate and nice sense of honour’.³⁴

The will of the masses expressed itself in various and sometimes unnerving ways. That ‘liberty’ which the aristocracy boasted was under its protection was also a slogan which could bring noisy and belligerent mobs on to the streets. They regularly appeared throughout the century to protest against genuine and perceived encroachments on ‘liberty’, which included excise duties, militia drafts and proposals for Catholic emancipation. In the early 1760s Londoners demonstrated on behalf of John Wilkes, a radical journalist and politician, and against highhanded government censorship of the press. Citizens everywhere had the right to petition the Crown and the number and content of their petitions served as a rough barometer of public opinion. Noblemen, and for that matter the Crown, were regularly exposed to often savage criticism and ridicule in newspapers and pamphlets and by cartoonists.

From the 1760s onwards there was evidence of growing disquiet about the glaring faults in the electoral system. It was being reduced to a form of calculus in which party managers totted up the number of seats available, assessed the costs of acquiring them and haggled with their owners. The result was stability and (the loss of America aside) effective government, but the reputation and tone of Parliament were being blighted. This worried Pitt, who, in 1785, proposed a bill concocted, in his own phrase, to secure a ‘right balance’. The new equilibrium would require thirty-six rotten boroughs voluntarily to surrender their rights in return for compensation, and their members to be allocated to new seats in areas of expanding population. Privately, Pitt hoped that this measure would keep ‘nabobs and peculators of all descriptions’ out of the Commons and so, indirectly, reinforce the ascendancy of the landed interest.³⁵

Lord North would have none of this. The Constitution was an ‘ancient, venerable, substantial fabric’ which was about to be vandalised by ‘decorating it with modern frippery’. Antiquity was the yardstick of soundness and North was confident that the ‘guardians of freedom’ would always find their way into the Commons.³⁶ The old order was saved by 248 votes to 174. What was significant in terms of the future was that North and his allies regarded the present Constitution as immutable and permanent. So too was the ascendancy of the nobility, or so it seemed.