19

The Aristocrat to
Quell: Peers, Patriots
and Paineites
1789–1815

The events between the fall of the Bastille in July 1789 and the creation of the French Republic in November 1792 had a shattering impact on the nobility of Europe. They were vilified as idle parasites, the principles which upheld their pre-eminence were denied and derided, and revolutionary ideologues predicted their impending and violent extinction. It was already underway in France, where aristocrats lost their titles, legislative powers, legal and fiscal privileges and often their lands and lives. All this was reported in the British press and the anecdotes of aristocratic émigrés provided often lurid evidence of the malice and cruelty of the revolutionary mob. Sans-culottes may not have feasted on the corpses of aristocrats, as some alleged, but it seemed that all which was noble, gracious and honourable in France was being trampled under the ‘hoofs of the swinish multitude’.

These were the words of an Irishman, Edmund Burke, a Whig MP and one-time Parliamentary proponent of American liberties. He had followed events in France with growing dismay and was disturbed by the purblind and, he believed, dangerous acceptance of revolutionary doctrines in Britain. In November 1790 he published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was intended as a warning to those naive spirits who had talked themselves into believing that the Revolution was the first stage in a humane and rational remaking of the world. Rather, Burke contended that it was a concentrated, vindictive and sacrilegious offensive against civilisation. Parallels then being drawn between conditions in pre-revolutionary France and Britain were false and mischievous, as were direct comparisons between the French noblesse and the British aristocracy.

Embedded in Burke’s political and philosophical analysis was a heartfelt, eloquent obituary for the French aristocracy. Marie Antoinette’s mistreatment by the Paris mob was proof of the terminal decay of the chivalric spirit that had once animated generations of noblemen. No French peer had drawn his sword for his Queen, leaving Burke to conclude that ‘Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience’ which had been the quintessence of chivalry. Nevertheless, Burke’s encounters with individual French noblemen had revealed ‘men of a high spirit’ and ‘a delicate sense of honour’ who were ‘tolerably well bred . . . humane, and hospitable’. Their behaviour towards the ‘inferior classes’ was affable and more familiar than that of their British counterparts, and, as landlords, they were no worse than Britain’s landowners.¹

The value of the aristocracy was simple and inestimable. ‘Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.’ It was also, Burke believed, a living expression of the historic continuity of society, that thread which bound the present to the past. ‘Nobility,’ Burke argued, ‘forms the chain that connects the ages of a nation.’ Later, he expanded on this theme when he praised the benefits of the uninterrupted ownership of land. ‘The idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and . . . of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement.’ History and the advance of civilisation were processes of organic and natural growth; whatever survived and flourished did so because it had grown out of what had gone before and had been tested by time. The existence of an aristocracy both illustrated and validated Burke’s theory of history.

There were pragmatic reasons for the preservation of aristocracy. In Britain, it was the sheet anchor of a legislature that contrasted favourably with the new French National Assembly. On one hand, there was a Parliament ‘filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in civil, naval and political distinction’. On the other, was a body dominated by ‘obscure provincial advocates’ and, most frightening of all, ignorant men often ‘immersed in hopeless poverty’ who regarded ‘all property, whether secular or ecclesiastical with no other eye than that of envy’.

Burke’s Reflections sold nineteen thousand copies in England within a year. It was a seminal vindication of those ancient truths and customs which had always been a ‘compass to govern us’. Burke’s conclusions were also prophetic, for he had diagnosed France as infected by an uncontrollable collective lunacy. Its symptoms were soon self-evident: the declaration of a republic, the trial and execution of Louis XVI, massive confiscations of aristocratic and church lands, and the abolition of God. Expansionist war was integral to the new French order (as it was to Nazi Germany) and Revolutionary armies invaded the Low Countries and the Rhineland, where they established republics on the French model.

Revolutionary sympathisers in Britain answered Burke robustly. The proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was among the first with, in 1790, her Vindication of the Rights of Men and set the tone for much of what followed. Aristocrats were ‘petty tyrants’ who oppressed the weak (she cited the Game Laws) and Burke had disregarded the ‘silent majority of misery’ in his account of the condition of the French people.² Perhaps the most trenchant and certainly the most widely read riposte to Burke was Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man which appeared in two parts in 1791 and 1792, the second appearing shortly before the author’s indictment for treason.

Paine’s counterblast elaborated on the themes of his shorter pamphlet, Common Sense, of sixteen years before. Its lengthier successor denounced monarchy, aristocracy, the Constitution and the Church of England as fraudulent and oppressive. Paine urged his readers to purge their minds of the accretions of mumbo-jumbo which had justified these institutions and look to America and France to learn how a nation could be fairly and honestly governed in the interests of all. At various stages, he engaged Burke head-on. The ‘Quixotic age of chivalry nonsense’ and the aristocracy were about to perish, victims of a preordained sequence of governments. The age of ‘priestcraft’ had vanished, that of ‘conquerors’ was passing and that of ‘reason’ was imminent.

The British aristocracy and the French noblesse were the same species with the same selfish instincts and habits. Paine dismissed the notion of a hereditary lawmaker ‘as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or a hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate’.³ (This gibe was resurrected by Jack Straw, the New Labour Home Secretary, during the debate on the future of the Lords in 1998. Echoes of Burke were heard in the Lords when the life peer Lord Cobbold praised the ‘traditions, pageantry and mystique of a seven-hundred-year-old institution that is part of the fabric of the country’.)⁴

Burke and Paine had opened a still unresolved debate on the legitimacy and usefulness of the aristocracy. Both writers deployed reason to powerful effect, but Burke laced his arguments with emotional appeals to the imagination. Paine’s mindset was that of a man utterly convinced of his own rectitude, and his tone was often captious and doctrinaire. He loved statistics and used them to reveal how taxes were syphoned into royal and aristocratic pockets.

Most important of all in terms of the future nature and course of British politics, Paine had compiled a text that gave a rational coherence to a hitherto inchoate sense of frustration and injustice felt by humble men and women. They were dissatisfied by the status quo and now they knew exactly why, and what needed to be changed. Mentally armed by Paine, his readers were ready to repudiate the past and their superiors’ veneration of a wisdom which had been contrived to keep them in perpetual subordination. Paine’s historical process was not evolutionary in the Burkean sense, but revolutionary. Its goal was that liberation of mankind which, he imagined, had been accomplished in the United States and was underway in France.

Paine won converts, but he lost the debate. It was halted by Pitt’s emergency wartime legislation passed between 1794 and 1799, which silenced political debate and drove Paineites underground. The establishment remained physically secure, although prone to occasional spasms of bad nerves brought on by rumours of phantom revolutionary conspiracies. Burke had provided intellectual security through an ideology which reinforced the status quo and confounded its enemies. Yet Paine’s ideas had not been extinguished; they survived to provide ammunition for future generations of radicals and, in time, socialists. Moderates harnessed Paine’s logic to arguments for franchise reform and extremists worked to fulfil his vision of democratic republic. All shared his rejection of the aristocratic principle as bogus and moribund.

*

The Rights of Men and Reflections on the Revolution in France were the opening salvos in a war of pamphlets and speeches. It became increasingly one-sided after George III’s proclamation against sedition in May 1792 and the French Republic’s declaration of war on Britain the following February. The war was more than another Anglo-French military contest of the kind that had been fought for the past hundred years. It was a struggle for national survival in which Britain was defending its Constitution and liberties from an ideological offensive. Addressing the Commons in 1794, George Canning reminded his listeners that defeat would mean their replacement by a ‘Corresponding Society or a Scotch Convention’ and submission to the will of some satrap of the French Committee of Public Safety.⁵ This was happening on the Continent where indigenous quislings were assisting French armies of occupation.

War transformed Paine’s followers into a potential fifth column. Their corresponding societies (there were about ninety in 1795) and the Edinburgh convention of radicals referred to by Canning were placed under intelligence surveillance. Henry Dundas told Canning that it was his duty as a Secretary of State to spy on anyone ‘meditating mischief and sedition’ and so his agents had penetrated corresponding societies and kept him forewarned of their plans. Some of the intelligence gathered was used for prosecutions under the new anti-sedition laws.

Moderate government supporters in Parliament wondered whether the legislation was too severe and if the threat of subversion had been deliberately inflated by ministers. Perhaps so, but domestic economic problems, including poor harvests and food shortages, generated outbreaks of restlessness which could easily have been exploited by Paineite agitators.

Occasionally, the hidden enemy broke cover. Paineite partisans appeared among the sailors tried after the Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797. One, a member of the London Corresponding Society, told his shipmates that ‘he had traced history and could not discover any one good quality belonging to him [George III]’. A ringleader at the Nore had foretold that the mutiny ‘shouldn’t end until the head is off King George and Billy Pitt’. ‘Damn and bugger the King! We want no king!’ declared another mutineer.⁶ Posters appeared in Lewes in 1795 calling upon militiamen to defy their officers and ‘join the Rage, the Aristocrat to quell’.⁷ In 1812 an anonymous Huddersfield Luddite warned a local mill owner that his fellow machine-breakers would overthrow the ‘Hanover tyrant’ with the help of Napoleon and create ‘a just republic’.⁸

Had all these angry men read Paine? Some clearly had, for court martial evidence indicated that agitators discussed his ideas with their illiterate shipmates, not all of whom were sympathetic. The Huddersfield Luddite knew his Paine, but were his comrades driven by an urge to remake the nation? The answer is ‘No’. Like the sailors, the Luddites and nearly everyone who protested at this time were denouncing (and sometimes punishing) scapegoats rather than declaring war on the political system from which their authority was derived. Their targets were sadistic officers, heartless Poor Law bureaucrats, modernising industrialists who substituted machines for men in the name of efficiency and farmers and grain merchants who added to the miseries of the poor by playing the market in times of shortage. Lords were more likely to be troubled by burglars and highwaymen than protesting mobs.

They did, however, suffer defamation by Paineite polemicists, whose pamphlets depicted the nobility as rapacious, overbearing and extravagant. These enemies of the people built ‘elegant dog kennels’ and turned arable land into pasture for their hunters, while ‘the honest and labouring poor’ endured privation. The nobility was also decadent; one strait-laced Paineite (and many were) castigated the aristocracy as ‘the detestable patrons of boxers and strumpets’.⁹

Open Paineites were a fragmented minority united only by their exclusion from conventional politic life; they embraced intellectuals like Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle; they were urban professional men, shopkeepers, craftsmen and artisans, in short the kind of people Burke had identified as the malign impetus behind the French Assembly and its levelling policies. There were also nonconformists, but their enthusiasm for radicalism was shaken by the militant atheism of the French Republic. Most Paineites favoured political reform through persuasion, although a minority called for an armed revolution. Internal disagreements, lack of an efficient national organisation, and, after 1793, official persecution combined with popular, patriotic hostility combined to neuter the radical movement. Nonetheless, a handful of covert Paineites from Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’ revealed their existence through isolated acts of individual defiance to authority, either by public outbursts or through clandestine handbills.

But the aristocracy was in no immediate danger. Its political authority was unshaken; of the fifty-two men who held ministerial office between 1783 and 1815, forty were peers. Paradoxically, the threat from below actually strengthened the power of the aristocracy, the Crown and the Anglican Church. Each was a beneficiary of a deluge of propaganda written to convince Britons that their Constitution gave them freedom, wealth and domestic harmony. As Lord Mulgrave reminded the Lords in 1794: ‘This war which has been declared against us is not an ordinary war, it is a war for the annihilation of our laws, our liberties, our prosperity, our civilisation and our religion.’¹⁰

What had more or less been taken for granted in the past now had to be vindicated through reason coupled with appeals to old-fashioned patriotism, including Francophobia. Paine’s comparison of the French and British aristocracies were invidious, claimed one loyalist pamphleteer, for the French noblesse had been ‘ignorant, proud and tyrannical’. By contrast, the Lords was filled with the ‘best men’ in a nation who were not, as Paine had alleged, effeminate, degenerate ‘drones’.¹¹ The peerage was manly and athletic (witness their prowess in the hunting field) and many lords had reached their eminence through their intelligence and industry.

A considerable effort was made to portray the nobility as an elite of ability, rather than birth. Loyalist literature insisted that the word ‘aristocracy’ did not describe a system of government in which power was held exclusively by a rich minority. Rather, the aristocracy was just one, admittedly very important element in a Constitution that was of universal benefit. A few loyalist hacks edged towards the idea that the peerage represented a meritocracy, and attempted to redefine the aristocracy as a broad elite which contained everyone who created wealth, including traders and manufacturers.

Arguments along these lines were made to win over the middle classes, who had to understand that any assault against the aristocracy and their lands was a general attack on property as a whole.¹² Revolution endangered factory owners, farmers and shopkeepers as well as noblemen. The anti-sedition laws supplemented the work of government propagandists; any slander or libel directed against the aristocracy was criticism of the Constitution and liable for prosecution.

Loyalism prevailed. By 1800 that stout-hearted curmudgeon John Bull had been persuaded that the House of Lords was an essential part of that bulwark which protected him, his family, his home, his tankard of ale and plate of roast beef from Gallic predators and their homegrown accomplices. Furthermore, Burke’s prognosis as to the final outcome of the revolution had been correct. Frenchmen had lapsed into a prolonged madness and placed themselves in the hands of a gang of demagogues and atheists without education, honour or possessions of their own; the elevation of the jealous had been accompanied by a slide into depravity. In 1799, the Anti-Jacobin described Paris under the Consulate as ‘the most filthy place in Europe’ and its rulers as slaves to ‘luxury, dissipation and debauchery’.¹³ Ultra-loyalists argued that France could only be brought to its senses by the full restoration of its ancien régime.¹⁴

Its political ascendancy secured, a confident aristocracy threw itself into the war effort with varying degrees of enthusiasm. An overwhelming majority of peers backed the Tory-dominated coalitions which ran the country between 1793 and 1815. Noblemen commanded armies and fleets and represented Britain at the courts of the Continental powers, cajoling emperors, kings and princes into alliances, usually with pledges of subsidies. Diplomacy was traditionally an aristocratic art practised by men of breeding and fine manners who understood the protocols of courts and spoke French fluently with men of their own caste.

Not all peers marched in time to the strident drum of patriotism. A rump of seventy or so Whig followers of Charles James Fox remained on the opposition benches and undertook a guerrilla campaign against soaring wartime taxation and strategic miscalculations. Foxite Whig peers stayed true to their party’s libertarian traditions and condemned Pitt’s sedition laws as encroachments on the liberties of Britons. The watchdogs of liberty barked loudly during the Lords debate on the 1795 Treasonous Practices and Seditious Meetings Bill. The fifth Duke of Bedford echoed Paine by invoking the long history of ‘oppression’ imposed by the aristocracy on the people of France, and reminded peers of the ‘profligacy and extravagancy’ of the Bourbon court. Crushing legitimate and lawful protests under the colour of national security was a ‘remedy worse than the disease’ argued the eleventh Duke of Norfolk. The bill was carried by a huge majority, but Bedford and Norfolk joined with eleven like-minded lords to issue a formal statement that ancient rights were now in jeopardy.¹⁵

Bedford may have made surreptitious approaches to populist radical groups, a flirtation with treason which might explain why his private papers were burned after his death in 1802.¹⁶ Norfolk’s proclaimed his views boldly. At a party celebrating Fox’s birthday in 1798, he proposed a toast to ‘Our sovereign, the Majesty of the People’, which prompted his immediate sacking as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding. In a perverse way (which neither they or he would have appreciated), these peers were justifying Burke’s faith in the independence of the aristocracy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the nobility were zealously promoting the war effort in the provinces. Everywhere they took the lead in coaxing their countrymen to fight to preserve their freedom and immersed themselves in every form of activity contrived to boost national morale. Aristocrats financed and attended public celebrations of unity which were orchestrated to prove that patriotism transcended social divisions. After the naval victory of the Glorious First of June in 1794, the Earl of Aberdeen headed the list of subscribers to a fund for the widows and orphans of men killed in the battle with a gift of ten guineas. Below were the names of Aberdonian lawyers, merchants and shopkeepers who subscribed between two guineas and five shillings each. A few months later, the local newspaper reported that Aberdeen’s leading citizens were ‘vying’ with local lairds in their efforts to raise a regiment of volunteers.¹⁷ What better proof could there be that the aristocracy and the middle class were of the same spirit and resolve.

On the ideological front, aristocrats joined forces with Anglican clergymen to beef up loyalist organisations, of which the largest and most boisterous was the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, founded in 1792. Some of its members sponsored drunken, popular street parties in which patriots burned effigies of Paine (he had successively fled to France and the United States), smashed the windows of radicals and sometimes manhandled them.

Noblemen also patronised more sedate festivities. At one, held at Frogmore, near Windsor Castle, on a sunny day in July 1800, George III and Queen Charlotte together with lords and ladies attended a grand fête champêtre devised by Princess Elizabeth. She wanted her father’s subjects to have a jolly time and, as they did so, reveal to the world that here was a truly united kingdom in which there was harmony between Crown, peers and people. Guests were entertained by a tightrope walker, dancers dressed as gypsies, and musicians. Many of the performers were men from the Staffordshire militia, one of whom sang a riposte to Paine:

When republic doctrines are everywhere found, Sir
And levelling principles so much abound, Sir
Let each son of Liberty, joyfully sing, Sir
Long to reign over us, God save the King, Sir.

As evening approached, the royal party and the peers and peeresses withdrew for dinner and a ball held in a converted barn.¹⁸ These and similar events were reported in the local and national press.

Many of the younger noblemen at Frogmore would have been in uniform. They were fulfilling the historic duty of all gentlemen, irrespective of their rank. Its nature and manifestations were outlined by Captain James Macnamara RN in his trial at the Old Bailey in 1803. He was accused of murdering a cavalry officer whom he had fatally wounded in duel which his personal honour and public reputation as an officer had compelled him to fight. ‘When called upon to lead others into honourable danger,’ he told the jury, ‘I must not be supposed to be a man who had sought safety by submitting to what custom has taught others to consider a disgrace.’ Macnamara’s innate courage and leadership was in his blood, instinctive and beyond analysis. ‘It is impossible to define . . . the proper feelings of a gentleman; but their existence has supported this happy country for many ages, and she might perish if they were lost.’ Two famous titled admirals, Hood and Nelson, testified to Macnamara’s character, which was evident to the journalists covering the case, who were impressed by his confident bearing and ‘manly’ appearance. He was acquitted.¹⁹

Throughout the war the British people learned as never before of how men of Macnamara’s stamp conducted themselves in battle. The London and provincial press reprinted official despatches which vividly described acts of heroism by individual, named officers. One, which appeared in 1814, may attest for hundreds of others. During the capture of the French frigate Clorinde, Lieutenant Foord of the Marines had been mortally wounded in the thigh by grapeshot, ‘gallantly leading his men’.²⁰

If Macnamara was to be believed, and on the whole the nation accepted his analysis of the ingredients of leadership, Foord’s men followed him because they respected him as a gentleman and, therefore, a man of courage and honour. So too was Nelson, whose death and funeral saw an outpouring of national grief more heartfelt and intense than that later expressed at the obsequies of Princess Diana. Nelson was joined in the national pantheon of heroes by another equally audacious commander, Lord Thomas Cochrane, the eldest son of the tenth Earl of Dundonald (and the historic model for Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey). Differences in status did not matter unduly – Nelson was the son of a parson – what really counted was that they were both gentlemen.

Gentlemen of all ranks were kept busy at home. In July 1792 France had called for the levée-en-masse, which transformed every able-bodied male citizen into a soldier of the Republic. War was democratised and huge armies materialised, full of volunteers whose idealism compensated for their lack of training and discipline. Between 1797 and 1798 and 1803 and 1805 these mass French armies threatened to invade Britain. The response was a carefully controlled form of the revolutionary levée, which involved mobilising, arming and training about a quarter of a million men. It was a potentially risky enterprise, given the groundswell of sedition and recurrent economic distress, which was why Pitt’s government turned to the nation’s landowners, who could be relied upon to be loyal and uphold the political and social status quo.

Lord Lieutenants supervised the enlargement of the county militias and appointed their officers. In a signal display of its faith in the aristocracy’s loyalty and influence, the state licensed individual peers to raise volunteer regiments of infantry (fencibles) and troops of light cavalry (yeomanry) and nominate their officers. This devolution of military power meant that a large section of the nobility took responsibility for the deployment of troops for external and internal security and the creation of a reservoir of soldiers for service overseas. Political animosities were suspended; at least one yeomanry troop was raised by a Whig nobleman who objected strongly to Pitt’s obduracy and wartime taxation.²¹

Paradoxically, an outwardly modern state was adapting an essentially medieval expedient. The local prestige of the nobility, its networks of kinsmen and dependants, and ingrained habits of deference combined with the new popular affection for George III and the cash bounties provided by the Treasury produced a formidable army. In 1804 it was calculated that there were about four hundred thousand men under arms, two-thirds of them volunteers and militia.²²

In Scotland, the ancient bonds of blood and customary obligation to clan and chieftain were thoroughly and sometimes cynically exploited. Of the twenty-nine officers of the Duke of Sutherland’s Fencibles, twelve were from his extended kin. In 1800 a supplicant for the promotion of Alexander Cameron in Lord Seaforth’s volunteers listed his qualification as experience of soldiering, his ‘genteel’ demeanour and the fact that he was a ‘cousin once removed’ to Seaforth.²³

Cameron was seeking advancement in what could easily have been mistaken for a feudal host, had it not been for the cut of its uniforms and its modern weapons. In 1797 the government had authorised the Dukes of Atholl, Montrose and Argyll and the Earls of Aberdeen and Gower to raise sixteen thousand volunteers organised into nine brigades, each commanded by a nobleman or some other figure high in the clan hierarchy. Below them were Highlanders recruited from the circle of clans and septs traditionally attached to their colonel. Macnabs, MacGrigors and Menzies served under Atholl’s command, as their ancestors had under his ancestors.²⁴ All shared the atavistic bonds of common ancestry and inherited obligations.

There were limits to the Highlanders’ patriotism and endurance. Reports of colossal losses of soldiers in the West Indies from indigenous fevers had a baleful effect on recruitment and triggered a spate of mutinies among Highland militiamen and volunteers. All involved fears of posting abroad and the defiance of local figures of authority, noblemen, lairds and ministers of the Kirk.²⁵ Revealingly, they were accused of having betrayed their paternal responsibilities by deceiving the clansmen. Elsewhere in the country, men refused to join the militia because service was an intrusion into their time or out of indifference to the threat of invasion.

Lassitude was strongest in districts, often urban and industrial, where the influence of landowners and parsons was weakest. This was unsurprising thought one ultra-conservative commentator. The ‘proprietors of the soil’, their tenant farmers and labourers were natural patriots and monarchists. Their loyalty was unshakeable, unlike that of manufacturers, tradesmen and artisans, who were rootless creatures with no real stake in the kingdom.²⁶

At every level, command was entrusted only to those with a ‘real stake’ in the nation. All volunteer officers had to be gentlemen with a landed income of at least fifty pounds a year. Exceptions were allowed in the case of militia officers. Faced with a dearth of qualified candidates, the third Duke of Richmond grudgingly agreed to give a commission in the Sussex militia to a keen Lewes ironmonger, although he would have preferred ‘an independent gentleman’. Necessity also persuaded the nobility to admit poachers to their units on the pragmatic grounds that they would prove excellent skirmishers.²⁷

Sussex poachers-turned-sharpshooters joined detachments raised from the tenants and servants of the county’s five leading peers. Units included a battery of horse artillery partly funded by Richmond, and the Petworth Yeomanry recruited and commanded by the third Earl of Egremont, who was more interested in the arts and agriculture than amateur soldiering. Nonetheless, he performed his public duty and, like so many aristocratic yeomanry commanders, simultaneously upheld his prestige and satisfied his vanity by designing and paying for the uniforms of his troops. The Petworth yeomanrymen wore green jackets, white waistcoats, blue cloaks trimmed with scarlet and Tarleton helmets with bearskin crests; Egremont’s was distinguished by a large scarlet feather. Basic funding and arms came from the government; muskets, bayonets, sabres and pistols supplied to the Leicestershire militia and yeomanry are now attached to the walls of Belvoir Castle.

In 1804 Egremont’s dashing horsemen were ready to repel Napoleon’s Grande Armée, which was mustering at Boulogne for a seaborne invasion of the south coast. The nature of the war against France had changed dramatically. Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself Emperor of France and, like Hitler, he believed that conflict was natural to the human condition. Again like Hitler, Bonaparte intended to create a subordinate Europe of cowed monarchs and puppet kingdoms kept in line by the threat of force, ruthlessly applied. Britain’s new adversary was a godsend for official propaganda; Britons were repeatedly told, and on the whole believed, that they were fighting not only to save their own liberties, but to rescue Europe from the grip of a bloodthirsty tyrant who was indifferent to the suffering he inflicted.

Bonaparte’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808 gave a welcome substance to this view of the conflict. British forces under Wellington were the liberators of Spain and Portugal, nations which had been overrun by Bonaparte’s military machine but retained their spirit of independence. By the close of 1813, the French were expelled from Spain and the poet laureate Robert Southey celebrated a victory for freedom that would inspire the rest of the world.

Now, Britain, now thy brows with laurels bind;
Raise the song of joy for rescued Spain!
And Europe, take thou up the awakening strain . . .
Glory to God! Deliverance for Mankind!

Within months, British, Russian, Prussian and Austrian armies were sweeping across France and at home patriots were awash with self-congratulation. In the Lords, a peer declared that Britain had fought tirelessly ‘for the sake of justice, for the sake of loyalty, for the sake of insulted and tortured humanity’.²⁸ Soon after, ‘Boney’ was on his way to Elba and the Bourbon Louis XVIII was king of France. His restoration was depicted as a flattering moral triumph for the British Constitution. A jubilant Times announced that the allied sovereigns had compelled the new king to accept a constitution based on Britain’s, which gave France the equivalent of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.²⁹ Moreover, the new French senate contained hereditary aristocrats, including diehard émigrés, peers who had been reconciled to Napoleon and some of the marshals he had ennobled, such as Ney and Soult.

In his coup of March 1815 Napoleon, who had escaped from Elba, reinvented himself as the true heir of the Revolution and offered himself to France as a democrat and reformer. Exhausted by war, the French people were largely lukewarm or hostile, and the Emperor reverted to type and attempted to consolidate his power in the only way he knew, by an aggressive war. He was decisively defeated at Waterloo by an allied army commanded by Wellington, who famously remarked that, for all his martial talents, Boney was not and never could be a gentleman.

Waterloo confirmed Wellington as a national hero. His victories were a spectacular vindication of the aristocratic principle in which he fervently believed. Approaching eighty, he explained his philosophy of war:

The British army is what it is because it is officered by gentlemen; men who would scorn to do a dishonourable thing and would have something more at stake before the world than a reputation for military smartness. Now the French piqued themselves on their ‘esprit militaire’, and their ‘honneur militaire’, and what was the consequence? Why, I kicked their ‘honneur’ and ‘esprit militaire’ to the devil.³⁰

It had never been as simple as that. The principle worked because of the sheer force of Wellington’s character. He understood the mind of a gentleman and, when necessary, he used this knowledge to appeal, often caustically, to the consciences of his officers. After the 18th Hussars had been castigated by the Duke for looting and threatened with being sent home in disgrace, one of its officers, Lieutenant Woodberry, was cut to the quick. ‘I want language to express the grief I feel on this occasion,’ he wrote in his journal. He had been a Corinthian dandy who had dreamed of returning to England as a hero and boasting to his Brighton cronies that he was no longer the ‘puppy’ they had once known.³¹ The 18th Hussars continued to serve in Spain and the chastened Woodberry fulfilled his responsibilities as an officer and a gentleman. The second Earl of Portarlington had no second chance. After a distinguished career in the 23rd Light Dragoons, he somehow failed to join his regiment on the morning of Waterloo. He hastily attached himself to a Hussar regiment, fought in the battle and had a horse killed under him. His gallantry did not expiate what men of honour considered a default of duty: he had abandoned his men. Ostracised, he led a life of gambling and debauchery and died in poverty in 1845.³²

The aristocratic principle worked for Wellington because he was a nobleman of remarkable intellect and energy, and a brilliant strategist who had mastered the mechanisms of war. This was why he devoted so much time to logistics and the collection and analysis of intelligence, and favoured officers who shared his sense of public duty and cared for the welfare of their men. Yet Wellington was often hampered by the aristocratic principle. Many times he was driven to protest to his superiors in London about the networks of patronage which promoted officers far beyond their competence and filled administrative departments with negligent drones. In a political career which lasted from 1818 to his death in 1852, Wellington resolutely upheld the aristocratic principle which he embodied in the public imagination. If it appeared to fail, the fault always lay with individuals and never the ideal.

The defeat of France left an imprint on Tory thinking. Britain’s ancien régime with its intricate constitutional and legal checks and balances had been assayed and emerged victorious and stronger than ever. Crown, altar and aristocracy had survived the ideological brickbats of Paine and his adherents. Their perfect state–revolutionary France – had dissolved into anarchy and, in its mutated form under Napoleon, had been trounced. Whigs did not interpret recent events in such uncompromising, triumphalist terms. As the liberal Edinburgh Review argued in 1814, the world and how individuals saw their place in it had been transformed forever by the French Revolution and its aftermath.³³ Moreover, popular wartime patriotism was not necessarily a national endorsement of the political or social status quo.