Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain (review)

As the British government dismantles the historic House of Lords, and traditional pursuits associated with the landed classes such as hunting are abolished or under attack, an examination of the historical background to these events is to be welcomed. Dr Taylor's aim is not so much to write a book about the decline of the British aristocracy as to search out the roots of opposition to them, to fill what he identifies as a significant gap in the historical literature, looking at the contribution of anti-aristocratic politics to popular radical activity in the generation after the failure of Chartism in 1848. This is a territory he knows well, with his interests in the persistence of independent radicalism in the mid-Victorian years and in outbursts of anti-monarchism during this period. Unfortunately, his attempt to appear relevant defeats his more serious historical aim.

He begins with a case study of Colonel Valentine Baker in which aristocratic debauchery is contrasted with working-class virtue to disclose the moral case against aristocracy, especially as developed in the pages of Reynolds's News. Baker was the embodiment of "many of the correct military and social values" (p.20) of his day. In June 1875 he was accused of attempted rape aboard a train from Hampshire to London, but was found guilty only of indecent and common assault, fined £500 and imprisoned for a year. The verdict and sentence produced outrage among radicals who compared such lenient treatment with what those of a lower social class were accustomed to receive for lesser offences. Attention then moves in the next chapter to the influence of Henry George in England in the early 1880s and the appeal of his arguments for land reform to those who had long objected to the land monopoly; support for George's ideas is linked to the wider radical tradition of attacks on the abuses of landlordism. The movement, it is argued, was neither Liberal nor proto-Socialist but ambiguously occupied an independent ground in posing a radical challenge to the economic power of the landed classes. From the vices of the aristocracy and their control of the land, the argument next passes to a consideration of hunting—opposition to which excited yet more moral outrage among anti-aristocratic radicals. Blood sports gave moral offence to many, and produced an unconvincing justification for the landed monopoly's exclusion of the people from thousands of acres of 'waste' moorland in upland Britain, to which access has only recently been 'restored'. Such moral opposition to the economic and social activities of the aristocracy then provides the context for chapter 4 on the campaign against political privilege in the House of Lords. Aristocracy was an essential part of monarchical display and the exercise of power by the few. Yet, although the Liberal governments of 1868 and 1880 took up aspects of land and parliamentary reform, especially in Ireland, Mr Gladstone resolutely refused to legislate against the power of the House of Lords, however obstructive it was to other Liberal measures of reform. Opposition to the Lords was to remain a part of the extra-parliamentary radical movement as it had been throughout much of the century until parliamentary and popular criticisms of the Lords were briefly united in 1910-1911. In the twentieth century, the aristocracy became a plutocracy, but many of the same criticisms remained—the image of the debauched elite persisted even as the old aristocracy lost its economic power, its houses and its land. Between the wars the aristocracy sank in the sands of nostalgia and right-wing politics, only to be revived after the 1945 as custodian of the national heritage, protector not despoiler of the countryside, the symbol not of debauchery but of gracious living and civilisation.

This is a rich and fertile book, full of provocative ideas. And yet it also disappoints. Nowhere is 'aristocracy' actually defined...