In Defence of Aristocracy. Peregrine Worsthorne

Robert Kee, Tony Quinton, and, quintessentially, the figure of Nicko Henderson, the most relaxed, informal, and least stuffy top English Ambassador ever.

      Put like that, my stepfather’s idea of public duties seemed to me rather less frighteningly high-powered and much more acceptably low-key, especially after – at the instigation of Stowe’s charismatic history tutor, Bill McElwee – reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s great classic Democracy in America. For Tocqueville gave a commonsensical, un-Hobbesian rationale to the ideal of aristocracy: not so much as a body of superior beings bred to exercise power over the people but as a body of men whose dignified and leisured circumstances made them most likely to exercise power in the public interest, mainly because, in their case, the public interest and the private interest – by reason of the aristocracy’s greater stake in the country – was so nearly indistinguishable. ‘Among aristocratic nations’, Tocqueville wrote,

      a man almost always knows his forefathers and respects them; he thinks he already sees his remote descendants and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter, and he will frequently sacrifice his own personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him [my italics].

      Tocqueville’s was a down-to-earth utilitarian justification for aristocracy – ‘that it worked’. In France, where aristocracy had been degraded by the French monarchy, aristocracy led to revolution; in England, where the aristocracy had degraded the monarchy, aristocracy led to order and justice. The English aristocracy, he wrote, ‘is perhaps the most liberal that ever existed and no body of men has ever uninterruptedly furnished so many honourable and enlightened individuals for the government of a country’.

      In the light of what we now think we know about the lamentable state of the English ruling class in the 1920s and 1930s, Tocqueville’s idealistic assumption about its merits may indeed seem quite ludicrously out of date. Certainly today’s conventional wisdom has it that the golden chivalry of England was all mown down while leading their men into battle in the Great War, leaving only the dross behind. Nobody who has read the socialite Chips Channon’s interwar diaries, which give a picture of hedonistic irresponsibility and self-indulgence in high places of almost Nerolike proportions, would be inclined to doubt this; and Evelyn Waugh’s famous interwar novel Vile Bodies confirms that impression. So does Edward VIII’s pathetic abdication, usually portrayed as the prime example of that age’s spirit of irresponsible hedonism. In my recollection, however, that decadent impression is profoundly misleading. For surely, with the benefit of hindsight, we can now recognize that the truly remarkable aspect of the abdication was not the King’s irresponsible hedonism but the Establishment’s revulsion – strong enough to force him off the throne – against his irresponsible hedonism. Both my old Catholic family and my new Norman family circles played prominent parts in this reaction. It was my uncle Edmund Fitzalan, for example, who helped persuade Stanley Baldwin that the King would have to abdicate and my stepfather Montagu Norman who exercised the same kind of pressure – not that he actually needed much pressure – on Neville Chamberlain. If one wants an example of how a well-functioning Establishment can serve the public interest, the despatch of Edward VIII provides it in spades. But that is only one small illustration of how, in my recollection, the achievements of the governing class in the 1920s and 1930s, at any rate on the home front, have not yet received their fair share of acclamation.

      It was an intensely difficult period. In the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, the raw passions of democracy, inflamed both by totalitarian temptations from the far Left as from the far Right, were threatening to burn the house down. If Britain’s parliamentary democracy was to have a chance of surviving, it had to come up with an alternative that could also catch the public’s imagination. That is what the great conservative leader and Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, succeeded in doing long before Roosevelt did something of the same order with his New Deal in the United States. In a whole series of speeches of incomparable eloquence, both inside and outside Parliament, Baldwin sought to link patriotic pride to the uniquely English set of gentlemanly rules and conduct towards others.* He appealed to the best of the working class and the best of the industrialists to prove to the world that in the self-sacrificial, altruistic ideal of the English gentleman, unique to this country, lay the only safe way forward. As a result of English history, he argued, a unique system of mutual obligations and duties had been evolved that could and must be called upon to help the country escape the looming horrors of class war. Let the best among the working-class leaders and among the industrialists defy Marx by showing that in England both were capable, like true aristocrats, of behaving nobly, not so as to facilitate the dominion of one particular class but in the interest of serving the country as a whole. Baldwin’s constant evocation of England’s rural arcadia was not due to any sentimentally nostalgic desire to put the industrial clock back. How could it be, given his own ironmaster’s background? No, it was due to his belief that in the pre-industrial centuries some unique quality of trust had been engendered that could once again be enlisted to see the nation through difficult and dangerous times. Class war, socialism, fascism were un-English ideas, only suitable, if suitable at all, for foreign countries unlucky enough not to have developed the English gentlemanly habits of conciliation and compromise that would see us through the problems of the twentieth century, just as they had seen us through the problems of previous centuries. Greedy acquisitiveness was the enemy wherever it reared its ugly head, particularly, of course, among the rich. Baldwin abhorred ‘the hard faced millionaires who had done well out of the war’. In fact it was he who coined the phrase, not Keynes, and he hated ostentatious displays of wealth. The word ‘service’ was central to his discourse, especially the service owed by the rich, the privileged, and the well educated, who were repeatedly adjured to put human rights before the rights of property. Britain was, in one of his phrases, ‘a noble democracy’. Even if industrialists and trade union leaders everywhere else knew only how to behave like ‘robber barons’, in Britain at least they could be relied upon to behave like Christian gentlemen. That was the ideal he preached and, in his courteous treatment of Labour Party leaders and trade union leaders, also practised, according them a public respect he went out of his way not to accord to many of the industrialists.

      Montagu Norman agreed with every word. He, too, believed that the wealthy classes should place love of country before money; that wealth involved stewardship; that industrial employers should aim to act as trustees for the whole community; and, above all, that employees were only as good as their employers. He, too, deplored managers and directors who were interested primarily in their salaries and fees – people we now call fat cats – and refused to have them at his table, believing that flaunting vulgar ostentation offered revolutionaries their best justification.*

      Like most public-school boys of the period, at any rate those at the public schools, I was deeply affected by Baldwin’s great speeches, one of which I was taken to hear in a packed and enthusiastic Albert Hall. Collections of his speeches were presented as school prizes and bishops used quotations from them as a text for their sermons. His main theme was very simple: that instead of looking abroad for grand new ideologies to solve the problems of the twentieth century, all classes should instead buckle down, in the time-honoured way, to do their duty, which, of course, is what, when the war came, most of them did. So whatever can be said by way of criticism of Baldwin for not attending to the country’s material rearmament, nobody can justly deny him the credit for carrying out an exercise in moral rearmament quite unparalleled in the nation’s history.

      W. H. Auden’s jibe about the 1930s being a ‘low dishonest decade’, therefore, does not at all accord with my own recollection. I remember it as a decade when the concept of duty* was stretched to cover pretty well everything; when selfishness was regarded as the mark of the beast, the root of all moral failure; when altruism was held to be the root of all virtue; and when, under Baldwin’s spell, those aspiring to govern were adjured to dedicate themselves, if not to the service of God, then with all the more fervour to the service of their fellow men. Rereading these speeches today – dismissed at the time by intellectuals of the Right and the Left as impractical and unrealistic – I have to say that they seem to