The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

cabs: none of this disqualified a man or woman from the gentry. Sir John Fastolf, the fifteenth-century Norfolk gentleman whose name Shakespeare borrowed for his fat, drunk, cowardly and mendacious knight, was in fact an ex-soldier who bought himself a pub in Southwark (the Boar’s Head, which may be why Shakespeare chose him) and ran a shipping line taking Norfolk pork to European markets. As the central organ of the English body politic, the gentry from its origins was flexible, founded on the principle that its members were adapting and adjusting to changing circumstances. No revolution was required for this to happen. This flexible class lay at the foundations of English culture and its long history of liberty and independence.

      Younger children of the nobility sank into the gentry and younger children of the gentry sank into the urban middle class. This threat of failure, of losing the status into which you had been born, recurs in this book as one of the central motivators of the gentry class. A gentleman whose status was not guaranteed was necessarily active, engaged with the world, adaptive and open to change. Any exaggerated respect for the past and your lineage was an inflexibility that would threaten your fortunes.⁷

      This is the mirror image of the modern English idea of a gentleman as someone to whom dignity and a ramrod morality were the foundations of his life. But the long career of the English in the world is not explicable if stiffness was their governing characteristic. One member of the gentry after another in this book recognized that openness was the key and when travelling abroad they noticed the difference in social structure. The situation in France and Italy, Thomas Fuller, the church historian, wrote in the mid-seventeenth century, was ‘like a die which hath no points between cinque and ace – nobility and peasantry’. In England, he went on, ‘the temple of honour is bolted against none who have passed through the temple of virtue’.⁸ England was a place which could congratulate itself on allowing high social standing to anyone who qualified for it through his achievements or education, and through his qualities as a person, not what his ancestry said he was.

      This distinction became a cliché and by the nineteenth century antiquaries had begun to establish just how much better the English system was. Sir James Lawrence, writing his paper On the Nobility of the British Gentry Compared with Those on the Continent in 1824,⁹ told his appreciative audience that in Germany, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Denmark the children of all members of the nobility had titles. In France, Spain and Portugal only the eldest male heir was officially titled but all descendants were nevertheless considered noble. In England, the gentry were, as everyone knew, ‘the nursery garden from which the peers are usually transplanted’¹⁰ but they were not nobles themselves. Hence the nature of English society. Lawrence computed that in 1798 9,458 families in England were entitled to bear arms, adding the aristocracy and the gentry together, compared with Russia where there were 580,000 nobles, Austria 290,000 (men only), Spain 479,000 and France (in 1789) 365,000 noble families.

      The English gentry, in this light, were the great exchange medium of the culture, where high ideals could interact with the harder and more demanding pressures of a fierce and competitive world. And this turns another easy assumption on its head. The gentry are largely associated with land and landed estates, which is where they invested most of their wealth. In fact, at the gentry’s late medieval origins, it was the growing dominance of London that was the key engine in their creation. Between 1420 and 1470, it was a version of London English that became the language of cultivated people. The connectivity which London provided – a market in marriageable girls, among many other commodities – was the means of getting on. London and Westminster were the centres of power, the law and money, in whose combined gravitational fields all future wellbeing lay. Every family in this book gravitated there in the end and gentry that could not thrive in London were unlikely to thrive at all.

      The American historian Ellis Wasson has analysed the source of wealth of new entrants to the English gentry, defining that elite as those families which had three members or more elected as MPs, or went on to gain a peerage.¹¹ The pattern he has uncovered reveals that those entering the governing class from a background of land represented about 50 per cent of the new entrants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they were on a dropping trend, declining to less than a fifth in Georgian and Victorian England. Very few indeed at any time entered on the proceeds of office, on money picked up around the skirts of government. A steady supply of lawyers always fed the gentry, varying between about a fifth and a quarter. Business was there from the beginning, and remained on a nearly consistent upward trend, from a quarter of all new entrants in the late Middle Ages and rising to nearly 70 per cent in Victorian England. This was a confirmation of both the original and the growing openness of the English gentry. It was never a closed landowners’ club. As Wasson says, ‘founders of parliamentary families came from almost every conceivable type of background’.

      Grocers, fishmongers, merchant tailors, privateers, shipbuilders, tanners, wine merchants, drapers, goldsmiths, coal fitters, ironmasters, army victuallers, mercers, silk merchants and gunpowder manufacturers all succeeded in entering the elite.¹²

      But there are paradoxes, arguments and irresolutions here because, despite all this talk of openness, it was also a class obsessed with blood, honour and lineage. In large parts of its mind, but not consistently, the gentry was anxious about the respectability of trade. For the early eighteenth-century etiquette specialist Geoffrey Hickes, the key distinction gentry had to learn was the ‘Difference between Prudence and Trading’.¹³ One was all right – gentry should attend to the management of their estates – the other certainly was not. Three hundred years earlier, in July 1433, William Packington Esquire – esquire being a gentry title, the rank just below knight, significant at least until the end of the nineteenth century – who was then Controller of the English garrison at Bayeux, was having a drink in a Bayeux pub with another Englishman he knew called Thomas Souderne. After plenty of wine, and quite a lot of chat, Souderne told Packington that he ‘was no sort of gentleman’ but had been a haberdasher in England where he had ‘porté le pennier’. Packington murdered him on the spot, lunging across the pub table with his dagger and killing Souderne with ‘un seul cop’ in the chest.¹⁴ There were limits to what one could put up with.

      So was gentrydom a question of blood or of qualities? There was an everlasting blurring of these categories and the anonymous author of The Institucon of a Gentleman, published in 1555, saw around him examples of both ‘Ungentle Gentles’ – people who had the qualifications to be gentry but did not come from a gentry background – and ‘Gentle Ungentles’, the bad sons of old families. How to categorize them? The ungentle gentle of 1555 was

      he which is born of a low degree, [but] by his virtue, wyt, pollicie, industry, knowledge in lawes, valiancy in armes, or such like honest meanes becometh a welbeloved and high esteemed manne, preferred then to a great office … euersomuch as he becommeth a post or stay of the commune wealth and so growing rich, doth thereby auance the rest of his poore line of kindred: then are the children of suche one commonly called gentleman, of which sorts of gentlemen we have nowe in Inglande very many, wherby it should appeare that vertue florisheth among us. These gentlemen are now called upstarters, a term lately invented by such as pondered not the groundes of honest meanes of rising or coming to promocion.¹⁵

      Acreages of the gentry story are contained within that paragraph. No one should deny a hardworking person of ‘virtue and wit’ the chance to rise in the esteem of the world. But plenty of people looked down on them and despised them for the poverty of their origins. Teams of novelists were still mining this theme in the twentieth century. But the sixteenth-century author was no democrat before his time. His understanding of the gentry world was fuelled by a powerful vision of it as a moral community. There were people who had risen into the gentry of whose means of ascent he did not approve:

      The new sorte of menne which are runne oute of theyre order and from the sonnes of handycraftmen have obteigned the name of gentlemen, the degree of Esquiers, or title of Knightes, [who] get landes neyther by their lerning nor worthines achiued, but purchased by certeyn dark augmentacion practices, by menes whereof, they be called gentlemen … These be the right upstartes.¹⁶

      Just as constantly, though, over the passing centuries, other warnings were doled out by the old to the young. Lineage was not enough: you had to earn your