“Society was small and homogeneous and its sine qua non was land. For an outsider to break in, it was essential first to buy an estate and live on it, although even this did not always work. When John Morley, at that time a Cabinet minister, was visiting Skibo, where Mr. Andrew Carnegie had constructed a swimming pool, he took his accompanying detective to see it and asked his opinion. “Well, sir,” the detective replied judiciously, “it seems to me to savour of the parvenoo.”
In the “brilliant and powerful body,” as Winston Churchill called it, of the two hundred great families who had been governing England for generations, everyone knew or was related to everyone else.
Since superiority and comfortable circumstances imposed on the nobility and gentry a duty to reproduce themselves, they were given to large families, five or six children being usual, seven or eight not uncommon, and nine or more not unknown. The Duke of Abercorn, father of Lord George Hamilton in Salisbury’s Government, had six sons and seven daughters; the fourth Baron Lyttelton, Gladstone’s brother-in-law and father of Alfred Lyttelton, had eight sons and four daughters; the Duke of Argyll, Secretary for India under Gladstone, had twelve children. As a result of the marriages of so many siblings, and of the numerous second marriages, everyone was related to a dozen other families. People who met each other every day, at each other’s homes, at race meetings and hunts, at Cowes, for the Regatta, at the Royal Academy, at court and in Parliament, were more often than not meeting their second cousins or brother-in-law’s uncle or stepfather’s sister or aunt’s nephew on the other side.
When a prime minister formed a government it was not nepotism but almost unavoidable that some of his Cabinet should be related to him or to each other. In the Cabinet of 1895 Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary for War, was married to a sister of Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary for India, and Lansdowne’s daughter was married to the nephew and heir of the Duke of Devonshire, who was Lord President of the Council.
The country’s rulers, said one, “knew each other intimately quite apart from Westminster.” They had been at school together and at one of the two favored colleges, Christ Church at Oxford or Trinity College at Cambridge. Here prime ministers — including Lords Rosebery and Salisbury, at Christ Church, and their immediate successors, Mr. Balfour and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, at Trinity — were grown naturally.
The forcing house of statesmanship, however, was Balliol, whose mighty Master, Benjamin Jowett, frankly spent his teaching talents on intelligent undergraduates “whose social position might enable them to obtain high offices in the public service.”
Christ Church, known simply as The “House,” was the particular habitat of the wealthy and landed aristocracy. During the youth of the men who governed in the nineties, it was presided over by Dean Liddell, a singularly handsome man of great social elegance and formidable manner who had a daughter, Alice, much admired by an obscure lecturer in mathematics named Charles Dodgson.
Activities at the “House” were chiefly fox-hunting, racing, a not too serious form of cricket and “no end of good dinners in the company of the best fellows in the world, as they knew it.” When such fellows in after life wrote their memoirs, the early pages were thick with footnotes identifying the Charles, Arthur, William and Francis of the author’s school days as “afterwards Chief of Imperial General Staff” or “afterwards Bishop of Southhampton” or Speaker of the House or Minister at Athens as the case might be.
Through years of familiarity they knew each other’s characters and could ask each other favors.
When Winston Churchill, at twenty-three, wanted to join the Sudan expedition in 1898 over the firm objections of its Commander-in-Chief, Sir Herbert Kitchener, the matter was not beyond accomplishment. Winston’s grandfather, the seventh Duke of Marlborough, had been Lord Salisbury’s colleague under Disraeli, and Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister listened amiably to the young man and promised his help. When it turned out to be needed on short notice, Winston had recourse to the Private Secretary, Sir Schomberg McDonnell, “whom I had seen and met in social circles since I was a child.” Winston found him dressing for dinner and on the errand being explained, “ ‘I’ll do it at once,’ said this gallant man, and off he went, discarding his dinner party.”
In this way affairs were managed. The mold in which they were all educated was the same, and its object was not necessarily the scientific spirit or the exact mind, but a “graceful dignity” which entitled the bearer to the status of English gentleman, and an unshatterable belief in that status as the highest good of man on earth.
As such, it obligated the bearer to live up to it. In every boy’s room at Eton hung the famous picture by Lady Butler of the disaster at Majuba Hill showing an officer with uplifted sword charging deathward to the cry of “Floreat Etona!” The spirit instilled may have accounted for, as has been suggested, the preponderance of bravery over strategy in British officers.
Yet to be an Etonian was “to imbibe a sense of effortless superiority and be lulled in a consciousness of unassailable primacy.” Clothed in this armor, its wearers were serenely sure of their world and sorry for anyone who was not of it. When Sir Charles Tennant and a partner at golf were preparing to drive and were rudely interrupted by a stranger who pushed in ahead and placed his own ball on the tee, the enraged partner was about to explode.
“Don’t be angry with him,” Sir Charles soothed. “Perhaps he isn’t quite a gentleman, poor fellow, poor fellow.”
This magic condition was envied and earnestly imitated abroad by all the continental aristocracy (except perhaps the Russians, who spoke French and imitated nobody). German noblemen relentlessly married English wives and put on tweeds and raglan coats, while in France the life of the haut monde centered upon the Jockey Club, whose members played polo, drank whiskey and had their portraits painted in hunting pink by Helleu, the French equivalent of Sargent.
It was no accident that their admired model was thought of in equestrian terms.
The English gentleman was unthinkable without his horse.
Ever since the first mounted man acquired extra stature and speed (and, with the invention of the stirrup, extra fighting thrust), The Horse had distinguished The Ruler from The Ruled.
The man on horseback was the symbol of dominance, and of no other class anywhere in the world was the horse so intrinsic a part as of the English aristocracy.
He was the attribute of Their Power.
When a contemporary writer wished to describe the point of view of the county oligarchy it was equestrian terms that he used : They saw Society, he wrote, made up of “a small select aristocracy born booted and spurred to ride and a large dim mass born saddled and bridled to be ridden.”
In 1895 The Horse was still as inseparable from, and ubiquitous in, upper-class life as The Servant, though considerably more cherished. He provided locomotion, occupation and conversation; inspired love, bravery, poetry and physical prowess. He was the essential element in racing, the sport of kings, as in Cavalry, The Elite of War.
When an English patrician thought nostalgically of youth, it was as a time “when I looked at life from the saddle and was as near Heaven as it was possible to be.” The gallery at Tattersall’s on Sunday nights when Society gathered to look over the horses for the Monday sales was as fashionable as the opera.
People did not simply go to the races at Newmarket; they owned or took houses in the neighborhood and lived there during the meeting. Racing was ruled by the three Stewards of the Jockey Club from whose decision there was no appeal. Three Cabinet ministers in Lord Salisbury’s Government, Mr. Henry Chaplin, the Earl of Cadogan and the Duke of Devonshire, were at one time or another Stewards of the Jockey Club. Owning a stud and breeding racehorses required an ample fortune. When Lord Rosebery, having married a Rothschild, won the Derby while Prime Minister in 1894, he received a telegram from Chauncey Depew in America, “Only Heaven left.” Depew’s telegram proved an underestimate, for Rosebery won the Derby twice more, in 1895 and 1905.
The Prince of Wales won it in 1896 with his great lengthy bay Persimmon, bred at his own stud, again in 1900 with Persimmon’s brother Diamond Jubilee, and a third time, as King, in 1909 with Minoru. As the first such victory by a reigning monarch, it was Epsom’s greatest day. When the purple, scarlet and gold of the royal colors came to the front at Tattenham Corner the crowd roared; when Minoru neck and neck with his rival battled it out at a furious pace along the rails they went mad with excitement and wept with delight when he won by a head. They broke through the ropes, patted the King on the back, wrung his hand, and “even policemen were waving their helmets and cheering themselves hoarse.”
Distinction might also be won by a famous “whip” like Lord Londesborough, president of the Four-in-Hand Club, who was known as a “swell,” the term for a person of extreme elegance and splendour, and was renowned for the smartness of his turnouts and the “gloss, speed and style” of his carriage horses.
The Carriage Horse was more than ornamental; he was essential for transportation and through this role his tyranny was exercised.
When a niece of Charles Darwin was taken in 1900 to see Lord Roberts embark for South Africa, she saw The Ship but not Lord Roberts “because the carriage had to go home or the horses might have been tired.” When her Aunt Sara, Mrs. William Darwin, went shopping in Cambridge she always walked up the smallest hill behind her own carriage, and if her errands took her more than ten miles the carriage and horses were sent home and she finished her visits in a horsecab.
But the true passion of The Horseman was expressed in The Rider to Hounds. To gallop over the downs with hounds and horsemen, wrote Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in a sonnet, was to feel “my horse a thing of wings, myself a God.” The fox-hunting man never had enough of the thrills, the danger, and the beauty of The Hunt; of the wail of the huntsman’s horn, the excited yelping of The Hounds, the streaming rush of red-coated riders and black-clad ladies on sidesaddles, the flying leaps over banks, fences, stone walls and ditches, even the crashes, broken bones and the cold aching ride home in winter. If it was bliss in that time to be alive and of the leisured class, to hunt was rapture. The devotee of the sport—man or woman—rode to hounds five and sometimes six days a week.
It was said of Mr. Knox, private chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, that he wore boots and spurs under his cassock and surplice and “thought of horses even in the pulpit.” The Duke’s family could always tell by the speed of morning prayers if Mr. Knox were hunting that day or not.
Mr. Henry Chaplin, the popular “Squire” in Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet, who was considered the archetype of The English country gentleman and took himself very seriously as representative in Parliament of the agricultural interest, took himself equally seriously as Master of the Blankney Hounds and could not decide which duty came first.
During a debate or a Cabinet he would draw little sketches of horses on official papers. When his presence as a minister was required at question time he would have a special train waiting to take him wherever the hunt was to meet next morning. Somewhere between stations it would stop, Mr. Chaplin would emerge, in white breeches and scarlet coat, climb the embankment, and find his groom and horses waiting. Weighing 250 pounds, he was constantly in search of horses big and strong enough to carry him and frequently “got to the bottom of several in one day.”
“To see him thundering down at a fence on one of his great horses was a fine sight.” On one occasion the only opening out of a field was a break in a high hedge where a young sapling had been planted surrounded by an iron cage 4 feet 6 inches high. “There were shouts for a chopper or a knife when down came the Squire, forty miles an hour, with his eyeglass in his eye seeing nothing but the opening in the hedge. There was no stopping him; neither did the young tree do so, for his weight and that of his horse broke it off as clean as you would break a thin stick and away he went without an idea that the tree had ever been there.”
The cost of being a Master who, besides maintaining his own stable, was responsible for the breeding and upkeep of the pack was no small matter. So extravagant was Mr. Chaplin’s passion that he at one time kept two packs, rode with two hunts and, what with keeping a racing stud, a deer forest in Scotland and entertaining that expensive friend, the Prince of Wales, he ultimately ruined himself and lost the family estates. On one of his last hunts in 1911, when he was over seventy, he was thrown and suffered two broken ribs and a pierced lung, but before being carried home, insisted on stopping at the nearest village to telegraph the Conservative Whip in the House of Commons that he would not be present to vote that evening.
George Wyndham, who was to acquire Cabinet rank as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1902, was torn like Mr. Chaplin between passion for the hunt and duty to politics. In Wyndham’s case, the duty was not untinged by ambition, since he had every intention of becoming Prime Minister. As he likewise wrote poetry and had leanings toward art and literature, life was for him full of difficult choices. A sporting friend advised him against “sacrificing my life to politics and gave Harry Chaplin as a shocking example of whom better things were expected in his youth.”
It was hard not to agree and prefer the carefree life when gentlemen came down to breakfast in their pink coats with an apron tied on to protect the chalked white of their breeches, or when on a Christmas night, as Wyndham described it, “we sat down thirty-nine to dinner” and thirty hunted next day. “Today we are all out again. … Three of us sailed away [fifty lengths in front of the nearest followers]. The rest were nowhere. We spreadeagled the field. The pace was too hot to choose your place by a yard. We just took everything as it came with hounds screaming by our side. Nobody could gain an inch.
These are the moments … that are the joy of hunting. There is nothing like it.”
Older than fox-hunting, the oldest role of the horseman was in war. Cavalry officers considered themselves the cream of the Army and were indeed more notable for social prestige than for thought or imagination. They were “sure of themselves,” wrote a cavalry officer from a later vantage point, “with the superb assurance that belonged to those who were young at this time and came of their class and country.”
In their first years with the regiment they managed, by a daily routine of port and a weekly fall on the head from horseback, to remain in “that state of chronic numb confusion which was the aim of every cavalry officer.”
Polo, learned on its native ground by the regiments in India, was their passion and the cavalry charge the sum and acme of their strategy. It was from the cavalry that the nation’s military leaders were drawn. They believed in the cavalry charge as they believed in the Church of England.
The classical cavalry officer was that magnificent and genial figure, a close friend of the Prince of Wales, “distinguished at Court, in the Clubs, on the racecourse, in the hunting field … one of the brightest military stars in London Society,” Colonel Brabazon of the 10th Hussars. Six feet tall, with clean and symmetrical features, bright gray eyes and strong jaw, he had a moustache The Kaiser would have envied, and ideas to match.
Testifying before The Committee of Imperial Defence in 1902 on the lessons of The Boer War, in which he had commanded the Imperial Yeomanry, General Brabazon (as he now was) “electrified the Commission by a recital of his personal experiences in hand to hand fighting and his theories of the use of The Cavalry Arm in War.” These included, as reported by Lord Esher to The King, “life-long mistrust of the weapons supplied to the Cavalry and his preference for shock tactics by men armed with a Tomahawk.”
Giving his evidence “in a manner highly characteristic of that gallant officer … he drew graphic pictures of a Cavalry charge under these conditions which proved paralyzing to the imagination of the Commissioners.”
They next heard Colonel Douglas Haig, lately chief Staff officer of the cavalry division in The South African War, deplore the proposed abolition of The Lance and affirm his belief in the arme blanche, that is, The Cavalry Saber, as an effective weapon.
