Pity the Poor Patricians

...Others joined the boardsof companies as ornamental figureheads...

...Cannadine devotes much attention to World War II, which he views as having delivered the death blow to the surviving aristocracy...

...They invested what remained of their fortunes in wild schemes, wrote tiresome novels, or piled updebts...

...In his conclusion he calls the parallelism "an extraordinary coincidence" and leaves it at that...

...The Foreign Service permitted aristocrats to continue their privileged life at the public's expense...

...Certain eccentric patricians of the next generation, however, turned to parties of the extreme Right and Left...

...the Countess of Mar, a saleswoman for British Telecom...

...As Cannadine has it, the aristocracy reached the acme of its power in the 1870s...

...In England, too, the landed classes, facing reduced earnings and higher taxes, could not avoid liquidating much real property plus precious gems and paintings...

...Some sought to retain their estates by alio wing hoi polloi to tramp through their august homes for a fee...

...The one Civil Service branch to retain its genteel tone was the Foreign Service...

...David Cannadine will have none of Churchill's lament for a departed Golden Age...

...If nothing else, it points to the intellectual limitations and emotional constrictions of the epigones of a class that had ruled an Empire...

...Cannadine's splendid narrative of decline and fall will no doubt win some of its readers overto Gibbon's view that "the generality of princes, if they were stripped of their purple and cast naked into the world, would immediately sink to the lowest rank of society without a hope of emerging from their obscurity...

...Hewould not stoop...

...Many, Cannadine tells us, became déclass...

...Now Lansdowne House and Devonshire House have been turned into hotels, flats and restaurants...

...Still others, hoping to recreate their lost world of privilege, emigrated to exotic countries like Kenya: "In 1921 Lord Errol began a community in the White Highlands known as 'Happey Valley...

...But for all his thoroughness, Cannadine is never boring...

...Those who refused to abandon politics took refuge in either the Tory Party or—because of its hostility to new wealth—the Labor Party...

...Not surprisingly, incompetent ambassadors were legion...

...The few hundred great families who had governed England for so many generations and had seen her rise to the pinnacle of her glory, were inter-related to an enormous extent by marriage...

...The shotgun had a pernicious effect as well...

...Lord Castlerosse served as a gossip columnist for Lord Beaverbrook...

...He knew what was wise and fair and true...

...Furthermore, during the War years public opinion was steadily moving to the Left, a trend that culminated in Churchill's unexpected defeat in the first postwar election in 1945...

...In addition, Cannadine is silent on the allied tendency toward anti-Semitism, evident in several of the statements quoted above...

...In the end, the Lords were forced to accede both to the budget and to a Parliament Bill severely clipping the prerogatives of the Upper House...

...In telling their story he has provided the first comprehensive narrative of the astonishingly rapid (and peaceful) demise of the British aristocracy...

...As John Bright put it, hightoned diplomats seemed always to be "where society is most pleasant and the climate most agreeable...

...How did aristocrats adjust to this baneful new world and to the erosion of their wealth and status...

...he honored many men who were undeserving and inappropriate...

...Yet his is by no means a hostile account...

...he allowed blatant touting to be blessed with official approval...

...In Ireland the magnificoes had been selling off land since the 1900s...

...Lloyd George sniffed that such men were "no more than the scent of perfume on a pocket handkerchief...

...Edward Wood, for instance, could not stomach kissing babies and shaking hands...

...he did not conquer...

...Their sacrifices were largely in vain, though, as far as restoring the influence of their class went...

...A more comprehensive question that Cannadine leaves aside is the relation between Britain's decline and that of its aristocracy...

...The automobile, for example, was a noisy irruption into the pastoral calm of the countryside, transforming the grand estates into "places to entertain in, rather than to live...

...In the Prologue to this magisterial work he declares that his intention is to "rescue the British upper classes from the endless (and mindless) veneration ofposterity...

...Many from the privileged classes were temperamentally unsuited for the new age of democratic politics...

...Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn Contributor, "Commentary," "National Interest" In A Roving Commission: My Early Life, Winston Churchill wistfully recalled the halcyon era when "I gave myself over to the amusements of the London Season...

...Moore characterized the electoral process as "one of the most ghastly nightmares that can happen...

...When the House of Lords rejected his People's Budget, one that imposed higher taxes on the landowners —at rates we would consider fairly moderate today—Lloyd George, speaking at Newcastle, asked by what right "five hundred men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, should override the judgment...

...He seems to have left no page of Burke's Peerage untumed, and to have dredged up and searched out every record of aristocratic activity...

...In those days English society still existed in its old form...

...Of the Mitford sisters, for instance, Unity and Diana became Fascists, Jessica a Communist...

...They felt the Great War might allow them to "demonstrate conclusively that they were not the redundant reactionaries of radical propaganda," but rather chivalric crusaders...

...Wedded to his indefatigable scholarship are an elegant style and unfailing wit...

...He did not like it...

...Cannadine follows biographer Robert Skidelsky in portraying Oswald Moseley and his black-shirted Fascists as a virulent expression of the marginalized aristocracy's contempt for democracy and concomitant attraction to authoritarian trappings...

...The currency of titles was being debased in Britain itself once democracy reached the Order of the Garter and the Thistle...

...But surely, had the rot in the upper echelons of society not set in before the 1880s, a class that was confident of itself might have weathered the storms of modernity and spared Britain some of the agony of its decline...

...Told that Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen might be the next ambassador, TR saltily asked, "How can a man with a name like that ever get his personality across the country...

...Bythe 1930s," writes Cannadine, "the Civil Service, the law, the church, and the Armed Services were no longer outworks of patrician power and propertied privilege, as they had been only 50 years before...

...which was barred to administrators, businessmen and Jews, and was the center of much riotous, bibulous and promiscuous living...

...Today, Lord Teviot is a bus conductor...

...The leading figures of Society were in many cases the leading sportsmen on the Turf...

...he raised too much money, which was for his own use...

...Cannadine's chronology suggests Churchill was indulging in nostalgic reverie when he evoked the tag end of the century as England's Antoninian age...

...Not only was parvenu wealth thrusting its way into society, not only were vulgar American brides marrying their way into the aristocracy, but inventions were also subverting the aristocratic way of life...

...Several of them would have been blackballed by any respectable London club...

...Indeed, the diminution in numbers accelerated their decline as a political force...

...At the conflict's close the valiant aristocrats had to cede domination of Parliament to "the hardfaced men, who looked as if they had done well out of the war, as Stanley Baldwin described them...

...and Lord Grey, the proprietor of achain of sexshops...

...and Stafford House has become the ugliest and stupidest museum in the world, in whose faded saloons Socialist Governments drearily dispense the public hospitality...

...they viewed the whole business as beneath their dignity...

...This was in part due to the widespread belief that an aristocratic upbringing and classical education were the ideal credentials for diplomatic duties...

...andhe bestowed these baubles indiscriminately on friend and foe alike...

...He would not go through the laborious, vexatious and at times humiliating processes necessary under modem conditions to bring about these great ends...

...of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country...

...With their often vast estates, the British patricians towered over their peers across the Channel...

...Cannadine neglects Lytton Strachey's colorful advice in the Preface to Eminent Victorians that the prudent historian will "row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity...

...The aristocratic state of mind and its consequences are perhaps best captured by Churchill's verdict on Lord Roseberry in Great Contemporaries: "One had to face the caucus, the wirepuller and the soap-box...

...It was a brilliant and powerful body, with standards of conduct and methods of enforcing them now altogether forgotten...

...After the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, the government forced the great landowners to sell their holdings to the state, which in turn sold them to the public...

...Nor could the impoverished aristocrats count on earning a living as professionals...

...Everywhere one met friends and kinsfolk...

...Others simply gave up the attributes of class...

...One contemporary (and rather snobbish) critic pouted: "Gentlemen received titles whom no decent man would allow into his house...

...It doomed traditional hunting by enabling plutocrats to go on wild shooting sprees—and that, Lord Winterton complained, meant "eating too many bigmeals, meetingtoo many rich Jews, and shooting too many fat pheasants...

...He could not do it...

...Following the rise of the middle class—abetted by the new use of competitive examinations—these professions stopped serving as sinecures for the sons of the landed gentry...

...A notable gap in Cannadine's treatment is the failure to discuss the vein of appeasement running through the aristocracy...

...He would not try...

...Sir Cecil SpringRice, the British ambassador to theUnited States during World War I, "refused to counter German propaganda, and was known as 'thesilent Ambassador.'" Theodore Roosevelt attempted to put a stop to the parade of aristocratic panjandrums passing through Washington...

...one had to stand on platforms built of planks of all descriptions...

...Not since the Wars of the Roses," writes Cannadine, "had so many patricians died so suddenly and so violently...

...For this spellbinding orator, the unrestricted power of the landed gentry was at the heart of the country's ills...

...The advent of war in Europe seemed to give the grandees a chance to resuscitate that faith...

...The Third Reform Act of 1884-85, significantly broadening the franchise, was a shot across the bow...

...Prohibitive taxes imposed by the subsequent Socialist regimes, together with public ridicule of the aristocracy, made the outlook for the remaining patricians bleak...

...Meanwhile, the peerage was finding it more and more difficult to hold on to its wealth...

...J.T.C...

...Consistent with this alienation from the main currents of English life, many aristocrats found little to criticize in Hitler and Mussolini...

...This was land reform on par with Bolshevik Russia," comments Cannadine with some exaggeration...

...Their ancient power had rested on land...

...In his novel The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro evokes its flavor with great acumen...

...As in World War I, thepeople who came out on top were the "trade union [leaders], the technocrats, and the businessmen, who established and consolidated their position as part of a broader and more diverse ruling class...

...In a very large degree every one knew every one else and who they were...

...Honors were uninhibitedly showered on contributors to political parties, a practice Cannadine attributes to Lloyd George: "He gave out too many titles and ignored the royal prerogative...

...What is more, their selfish polemics against the measure ensured that the traditional belief "in their unique position as the responsible and hereditary custodians of the national interest was gone forever...

...Worse was soon to come, in the person of the fiery David Lloyd George...

...In an illuminating chapter entitled "The Politics of Paranoia," Cannadine argues that the death of the Whig Party set many aristocrats loose from their political moorings...

...Cannadine's aristocracy is made up not only of pitiable misfits, but also of noble failures unable to accommodate themselves to the demands of modern times...

...A decade later, though, they were sliding, their position menaced by the parallel collapse of agriculture and the rise of industry, both fostering the conditions for mass democratic politics...