BOOKS 
Aristocrats: Power, Grace and Decadence – Britain’s Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present
By Lawrence James
Little, Brown £25 438 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20
Aristocrats, especially British aristocrats, tend to arouse strong emotions – from righteous hatred and contempt to the sort of rueful obsession evinced in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. David Lloyd George, prime minister from 1916-1922, showed surprising talent as a wine writer when he described the Lords as “stuff bottled in the Dark Ages ... not fit to drink, cobwebby, dusty, muddy, sour”. At the other extreme, the statesman Edmund Burke characterised the nobility as “the Corinthian capital of polished society”.
Lawrence James, following on from his widely praised histories of the British Raj and the middle class, attempts to give a non-ideological view of an amazingly resilient stratum of society (far more resilient than its equivalents in continental Europe), which perhaps can only be viewed dispassionately now that its power has waned close to the point of irrelevance.
The subtitle gives away a certain admiration for the class that either bullied or manipulated English society for several hundred years. But if this is essentially a defence of the aristocracy, and its role as a buffer between overweening monarchy or executive power and the people, it is one that paints the nobility with all its warts.
In fact the blue bloods in James’s narrative spend more time behaving badly than conducting themselves well. Admirable peers, such as the 7th Earl of Findlater, who funded a free health service for his tenants and labourers, are outnumbered by brutal medieval ruffians and later delinquents such as Lord Ernest Vane-Tempest, who beat up a fellow officer of the 4th Hussars because of “his peculiar English and pronunciation of the letter h”.
It is relatively easy to lambast such vain idiots but more difficult to argue for the generally benign influence of aristocrats. The heart of the book concentrates on the surprising effectiveness of the British peerage during the 18th and 19th centuries, when it might have dwindled into insignificance, as industrial muscle took over from landed privilege.
In fact, British aristocrats retained a startling amount of governmental and constitutional clout and even more symbolic influence. Aristocrats filled the highest offices of state. More importantly, according to James, apart from the occasional reactionary blip, they generally guided the country in a pragmatic, mercantile direction. At the same time they set the tone of society, with their near-obsession with sport, gaming and country houses (plus ça change), and often admirable patronage of the arts. Not only that, but they fostered other aristocratic castes in the colonies.
This heyday coincided with the flourishing of the Whig peerage. Enlightened Liberal peers such as Earl Grey, Lord John Russell and the second Earl of Minto were the exception rather than the rule in a class that has more often worn reactionary colours in its long history. More typical peers were figures such as the pessimistic conservative Lord Salisbury, who believed that “whatever happens will be for the worse”.
Defences of aristocracy can never rely on pure, cold reason. They require the poetic imagination of a Burke. James is no poet but he has a gift for illustrating points with memorable examples and writing generally pithy prose (a shame, then, that the book appears sloppily edited, with several ungrammatical sentences). And he leaves us with two interesting thoughts. The past 10 years have seen a strange revival of, if not aristocracy, then the House of Lords as a brake on executive excess. In the same period, celebrities have taken over from aristocrats as role models and gossip fodder and we can certainly ask whether the aristocrats were not, on the whole, preferable.
