Chapter 43: The Decline of the Gentry
With the rise of capitalism, industrialization, and liberal economic policies, the relative power of the old, landed aristocracy was waning. And to fill their place was a nouveaux riche bourgeoisie.
Sources for this episode include:
Alderson, Simon. “The History Behind Cliffe Castle Park...” Cliffe Castle Park Conservation Group. http://www.cliffecastlepark.org.uk/history.html
Crossen, Cynthia. “Why Sumptuary Laws, Despite a Rich History, Never Lasted Very Long.” Wall Street Journal. 15 Jun 2005.
Ferguson, Niall. The Accent of Money: A Financial History of the World. Penguin Books. 2008.
Ferguson, Niall. The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets. Volume I (1798-1848). Penguin Books. 1999.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1962.
“Morrison, James (1789-1857), of Balham Hill, Surr. and The Pavilion, Fonthill, nr. Hindon, Wilts.” The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832. Edited by D.R. Fisher. 2009
Janssens, Paul. “Processes of Social Decline among the European Nobility.” University of Tübingen. Sept 2014. https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-5797
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell. 1776.
Spring, David, and Eileen Spring. “The Fall of the Grenvilles, 1844-1848.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2, 1956, pp. 165–190.
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Full Transcript
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By 1847, Richard Grenville – the 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos and a major Tory politician – was out of options. Over the past eight years, he had more than quadrupled his debts, which now totaled the then-unthinkable sum of £1 million. (That’s more than $127 million in modern terms.) At this point, he was effectively forced into bankruptcy, as his 23-year-old son took over his considerable estates and gradually auctioned them off.
Born into a noble family in 1797, Buckingham had always been an extreme spendthrift. At age 21 he began his career in Parliament, representing Buckinghamshire in the House of Commons while he waited to succeed his father in the House of Lords. As early as 1828, his father’s agents had to have a sit-down with him about his expenses. Between his time in school and his early married life, Grenville had racked up £50,000 of debt, thanks in part to the high interest rate of 9% at which he was borrowing. This was in spite of the fact he was receiving an extremely generous allowance of £6,000 a year from his father.
The family bailed young Grenville out of the jam, but four years later, he was back, asking his mother for money. As the only daughter of another duke, a lot of the family’s money was hers, and she had a lot of say over its management. She refused to help her son, causing him to have “alternately wheedled and bullied, pleaded and stormed.”
So, by the time his father died, and he took over the estates as Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Grenville had amassed about £200,000 of debt. And from there, as Duke, he really let go of any financial inhibitions he may have had.
It’s not clear where all the money was going, exactly. He certainly bought a good deal of land, as did his father – land, it turned out, which wasn’t very profitable. And we’ll get to the reasons why in this episode. It was also, partially, because he was spending money wooing people as he climbed the political ladder, getting the prestigious role as Lord Privy Seal briefly from 1841 to 1842 during the Peel government.
But most of that money must have been going to luxury items, to lavish entertainment, expenses for maintaining hunting game on his land, and lawsuits. And, of course, as he tried maintaining this lifestyle, he had to bounce around from moneylender to moneylender, and had to keep paying higher and higher interest rates.
Helping him with his borrowing was an obscure solicitor named Augustus Manning, who Buckingham preferred to his own agents who, you know, wouldn’t have let the problem get so out of control. This way, he could bury his spending addiction without anybody noticing.
Perhaps they should have noticed.
In 1844, Buckingham threw a massive party for his son’s coming of age. It went on for about a week at their estate at Stowe, where they held several public dinners and speeches, sports, hunting, fireworks, and a fancy ball. By this point, Stowe had become a legendary estate, with a great park, a famous library, and a great treasure of art. This was in addition to the estates in Bucks, Somerset, Middlesex, Cornwall, Hampshire, Ireland, and Jamaica, as well a town house in Pall Mall.
Yet these 52,000 acres only produced about £66,000 of income annually – far less than what Buckingham was spending annually.
His mother was still unwilling to help, as were his in-laws. Now that his son, Lord Chandos, was of age, he wanted to salvage whatever he could of his inheritance by shoring up the family’s finances. To these ends, he began selling off resources from the estates, including timber, and he began raising rents.
The duke was furious at his family, but his agents managed to convince him the reforms were needed. Buckingham agreed to mortgage the family estates and go along with his son’s reforms to start paying back the debt. But when nearly half a million pounds came in from the mortgage, only £200,000 of it was used for debt payments. The rest of it went to Buckingham’s “own mysterious purposes.”
Realizing his father had a problem that was beyond his control, Lord Chandos proposed the duke hand over his life insurance policy and, in exchange, he’d assume the burden of the family’s debts.
Buckingham protested at first but, at last, relinquished in 1847. Forced to give up everything to his son, he would have to live off a modest pension. In the years that followed, the Duchess of Buckingham left him. In a rare move that required an Act of Parliament, the couple divorced.
The downfall of the Grenville family was extraordinary, especially in terms of the scale of loss. But it was not altogether unique. Other landed aristocratic families were beginning to fall on hard times. And it was a sign of what was to come.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 43: The Decline of the Gentry
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Some quick administrative notes before we begin.
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Okay, so waaay back in Chapter 1 I told you how by 4000 BC, in the Fertile Crescent, some people were wearing colorful clothing and jewelry as status symbols which demonstrated their wealth. Well, as the years went on, this helped promote a new social construct of class. Those who belonged to the upper classes could afford to wear fancier clothes and jewelry.
But occasionally, in different times and different places, wealth and class didn’t necessarily line up neatly. People considered “lower-class” would sometimes build up enough wealth to buy fancy clothes and jewelry, or a bigger house, or other status symbols. And often times, the rulers of these societies would view it as threatening to the social structures of said societies, and by extension, to the stability of said societies.
And when that happened, they would introduce and enforce something called “sumptuary laws.” Sumptuary laws could disincentivize and even prohibit certain consumer spending on extravagancies. England’s Elizabeth I was a particularly notable promoter of sumptuary laws, “decrying the social confusion that resulted when the ‘meanest’ were ‘as richly appareled as their betters.’” Over the years, her Parliament sent her numerous bills dictating exactly what kind of clothing – with how much material using how many colors – could be worn by people of varying ranks, titles, professions, and sexes.
Many of these laws were repealed by her successor, James I. And as the British Empire entered the 18th Century, they became less and less relevant to modern life. During the so-called Industrious Revolution that preceded the Industrial Revolution, consumer spending picked up, as individuals were purchasing all kinds of fashionable clothing and luxury goods for their homes.
During this same century, the rise of liberalism led sumptuary laws to fall in popularity. Adam Smith was especially critical of the way kings and the gentry spent so much of their wealth on unproductive luxury goods and then prohibited others from engaging in the same commerce: “They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of the subjects never will.”
The liberal founding fathers of the Unites States, meanwhile, were quick to slam Virginia delegate George Mason at the Constitutional Convention, when he suggested states should be allowed to pass sumptuary laws to control their citizens’ “manners.”
By the 19th Century, sumptuary laws were basically a thing of the past. The British nobility still had their peerage titles, their seats in the House of Lords, and a number of privileges that came with their rank. Protecting them were the forces of “old corruption” and the Corn Laws, protecting their estates from having to compete with foreign food markets. Plus, they were able to tap the new county banks to secure mortgages to enlarge their holdings, create some labor efficiencies, and introduce new agricultural tools and techniques to improve their incomes. The Royal army and navy, meanwhile, effectively barred non-aristocrats from becoming officers.
But just like the sumptuary laws, many of those laws and customs protecting the gentry would go by the wayside. By the end of the First Industrial Revolution, the Great Reform Act had given the bourgeoisie greater political power, the Corn Laws were repealed, and many landholders were forced to sell their property to canal companies and railway companies. By the start of the Second Industrial Revolution, further reforms expanded political power to the working classes and updated the tax code to the benefit of manufacturers.
Thanks in part to these reforms – and in part to the growing comparative value of manufacturing – the value of land fell throughout the 19th Century. But at the outset of the century, the Napoleonic Wars gave the gentry a false sense of economic security. The wars had created a great inflation of food prices, with the price of wheat doubling during these years. As a result, many aristocrats – like the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos – had borrowed money to invest in more land or to improve their estates with drainages or enclosures. As in Buckingham’s case, these investments didn’t tend to pay off. Another example was the Dukes of Devonshire, who wound up spending roughly half their annual incomes on interest payments.
And then came the repeal of the Corn Laws.
In the 50 years that followed, grain prices fell from a peak of $3 a bushel to just 50 cents. Rates of return on rural property fell from 3.65% in 1845 to 2.51% 40 years later.
So, these are among the developments of the First Industrial Revolution which would slowly eat away at the power of the British aristocracy over the course of the next hundred years.
Continental aristocrats faced a similar downward trajectory, though not always for the same reasons. While the repeal of the Corn Laws was a uniquely British event, the British aristocracy did not face the same kind of pressures that Continental aristocrats faced in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
If you’ll remember back to Chapter 21 of the podcast, you’ll recall that the Third Estate of the Estates General – that is, the commoners – turned their body into a National Assembly in July 1789. Meanwhile, in the countryside, peasants had started resisting all facets of feudal authority. They refused to pay taxes, tithes, and rents. They destroyed noble properties and set fires to the records demonstrating who owed what to who.
Then on the night of August 4th, one of the political clubs of the National Assembly hatched a plan to put a dent in feudal traditions, but that plan quickly spiraled out of control, and soon enough they voted to eliminate practically all traditional privileges and feudal rights of the nobility. This included noble hunting rights, tolls and tithes, and the last vestiges of serfdom.
In the months that followed, many liberal nobles gave up their titles, including our old friends, the Duc d‘Orleans and the Marquis de Lafayette. And then in June 1790 those titles, as well as all other status symbols of hereditary nobility, were banned anyway.
Rather than accept this, a lot of nobles decided to leave France, and these émigrés spread across Europe and even to America. After Napoleon wrapped up the revolution and created his empire, well, he created his own nobility, made up of all sorts of folks, but especially his meritocratic military officers.
After the restoration of the Bourbons, these new nobles were awkwardly mixed together with the old nobles. It was well known that, around 1840, roughly half of all French nobles came from families that had been commoners prior to 1789.
Plus, it’s not like the old nobles could get their lands back all that easily. After the revolutionary government had seized the lands, they sold them off. And even the restored Bourbons were freaked out about the implications of taking those lands away from their new owners to return to the old.
These duel revolutions – the Industrial Revolution and French Revolution – similarly affected the nobility of the Austrian Netherlands. First France invaded and annexed the land. Then Napoleon’s legal code was introduced, dismantling many vestiges of feudalism. And then Lieven Bauwens and William Cockerill introduced mass manufacturing (shout out chapter 22!) further disrupting the economic order.
Those noble families who became impoverished under these circumstances were not restored when the hard times passed. But those noble families that survived the duel revolutions in the Austrian Netherlands – which, by this point, will be called Belgium – would continue to survive the 19th Century.
In Prussia too, the Napoleonic legal code had shaken up the old order. Landholders became landowners, as feudal traditions gave way to capitalist agricultural practices. And they could start selling parcels of land off when they needed to, slowly leading to a decline in their dominance over the land.
And across Europe, the nobility would also see a decline in their political dominance, because in both Britain and Napoleonic France, the state bureaucracies were increasingly prioritizing merit over station at birth. Competitive examinations for civil servants became the favored way of ensuring competent governance.
In Great Britain, for example, followers of Jeremy Bentham successfully pushed for merit examinations for the Home and Indian Civil Service, much to the chagrin of the aristocracy who were used to being the de facto holders of such offices. In France, administrators were drawn from a competitive national body of scholarship winners.
And as the gentry slowly declined in relevance throughout the 19th Century, a rising bourgeoisie would gradually fill their place.
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Now, I don’t want to give you the false impression that the gentry became obsolete in the 19th Century. It wasn’t until the years between the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions – in the 20th Century – that the dramatic fall was seen. (And we can get to the reasons for that dramatic fall later.)
Scholars debate when exactly the cracks began to appear in the power of Europe’s gentry. I suppose ever since militaries converted from horse-mounted warriors to cannons in the 14th Century, the gentry’s power started to wane. Many scholars believe that the development of modern finance and capitalism, in the years that followed, played a role too.
But nobody can debate that the Industrial Revolution was a major milestone in the long downward spiral.
As I mentioned before, among the grand estates held by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos was Stowe House, a massive neo-classical manor with a columned portico flanked by two large wings. It had been in his family since the 16th Century. Over the centuries it had been visited by prime ministers, diplomats, and kings. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson stopped there during their tour of English gardens in 1786.
Those great gardens of Stowe had been landscaped by the legendary William Kent and his protégé, a young Lancelot Brown.
Brown would go on to consult on gardens across England, always telling his clients their properties had “capability” for improvement. This earned him the nickname “Capability” Brown. By the time he died in 1783, Capability Brown had contributed to the landscapes of well over a hundred estates held by the traditional landed gentry, including those at Addington Palace (the old summer residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury) and Highclere Castle (better known to us as the house from Downton Abbey.)
Such grand country manors had been getting more and more popular among the gentry of 17th and 18th Century Europe. And with the changing economic environment of the 19th Century, they started to be coveted by some of the newly rich bourgeoisie.
Among Capability Brown’s landscapes was that at Basildon Park, a stone Palladian house in Berkshire. Built for Sir Francis Sykes in the 1770s, the home was passed down to his grandson, also named Sir Francis Sykes, 3rd Baronet.
But by the late 1820s, the 3rd Baronet was facing serious financial problems. As a result, he was forced to put the house on the market. It finally sold in 1838 at just 3% under the asking price. The buyer was a self-made millionaire named James Morrison.
Born in 1789, Morrison was the son of an innkeeper in Hampshire. After his parents both died in his early teenage years, he bounced around staying with various relatives until he wound up with some in London. There, he worked in his extended family’s haberdashery. He then married the daughter of a successful London draper and became his new father-in-law’s business partner.
Morrison was an incredibly talented merchant, making rapid sales that kept the company busy and growing. He also invested in land and other enterprises, including Robert Owen’s New Lanark Mills. Much like the railroad builder George Stephenson (shout out chapter 30!), Morrison was self-educated. He would go on to become a Whig MP.
That a totally New Man like James Morrison could join the ranks of the gentry was not unnoticed in these days. And he wasn’t alone. He was following in the footsteps of guys like Sir Richard Arkwight and the elder Sir Robert Peel – father of the prime minister – who started out as textile manufacturers and bought their ways into the landed elite. Then there were the Rothschilds, who didn’t just use their fortunes to become barons, but Jewish barons – something unthinkable in European history.
Another of these capitalists to pull his way into the aristocracy was Henry Isaac Butterfield. Born in 1819, Butterfield’s ancestors had been traditional textile weavers in Yorkshire. With the capital from his father’s small wool stapling outfit, Butterfield was able build a successful trade and manufacturing business with his brothers, exporting woolen cloths which were mass-produced at their mill.
At the end of the First Industrial Revolution, Butterfield bought the house known as Cliffe Hall, northwest of Leeds. Built in the 1820s and 30s, Cliffe Hall had been designed by architect George Webster in a gothic revivalist style. Butterfield didn’t just appreciate this architecture, he added to it, building a tower and installing a griffin motif, which he also adopted as his heraldic crest. He then renamed the house, “Cliffe Castle.”
Butterfield wasn’t just using his millions to buy himself a big mansion. He was deliberately using his fortune to create the appearance of nobility. Living in a castle and designing heraldry allowed him to project the façade of noble lineage. It suggested that his wealth was tied to his heritage – that, like other aristocrats, he was descended from the landed warrior elite, rather than poor woolen weavers.
In fact, there were a great many ways in which the industrialists, bankers, and other nouveaux riche capitalists sought to emulate the traditional aristocracy. As Eric Hobsbawm put it, “The wives of enriched Cheshire drapers would become ‘ladies’, instructed by the numerous books of etiquette and gracious living which multiplied for this purpose from the 1840s.”
These aspirational endeavors were similar on the Continent, where wealthy and career-minded parvenus worked to break into the worlds of national service and intellectual clubs and salons. The French bourgeoisie, in particular, sought to mimic their country’s aristocratic culture – including their literary and romantic pursuits – in ways the Puritan British bourgeoisie would not have.
Again, from Hobsbawm:
“Thus the marked preoccupation of French prose literature with subtle psychological analyses of personal relationship (which can be traced back to the seventeenth century aristocratic writers), or the formalized eighteenth century pattern of sexual campaigning and advertised lovers or mistresses, became an integral part of ‘Parisian’ bourgeois civilization. Formerly kings had official mistresses; now successful stock-jobbers joined them.”
When huge numbers of the nobility fled in the French Revolution, the cooks from their country estates and Paris hotels lost their jobs. With no one to serve, they instead established high-end public restaurants like the Café Anglais and the Café de Paris, where later the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie would eat side-by-side in the early 19th Century.
Like Morrison and Butterfield, wealthy continental capitalists also bought themselves country estates. Across Europe, the Rothschilds bought and built some of the most beautiful chateaus and villas to be found. And at these houses they would entertain guests – especially politicians they wished to cultivate – with lavish dinners, balls, and hunts.
But country manors like these had traditionally been the epicenters of the old, feudal estates. The Rothschilds, by contrast, had little-to-no interest in agriculture on their lands. As Carl von Rothschild warned his brothers, “Often these estates bring in not more than two per cent.” They invested in their estates not for the rents, but for the status.
To these ends, they also invested in the traditional honors – seeking entry into the orders and offices in which the aristocracy could distinguish themselves. This way they were also able to don uniforms for special events like coronations. Salomon von Rothschild got medals to put on his uniform when he received the Order of St. Vladimir from the Tsar in 1822, and James de Rothschild got to don the Knight’s Cross of the French Legion of Honour.
Not that they took it all too seriously. Carl joked that the Coat of Arms they had to produce was “part of the racket.” James joked of the uniforms that “if you go to see a Minister here, you must always be made up as if to visit your bride.” And because many of these orders had strong Christian overtones, with medals in the shape of crosses, the Jewish family did need to have a conversation about it beforehand. (In fact, Amschel always refused to accept them.)
Yet the Rothschilds – like other nouveaux riche social climbers – were not readily accepted into the upper echelons all that easily. When James introduced his wife to the Duc d’Orleans, unprompted, it was seen as distasteful. Same as when he referred to Count Potocki by his Christian name, Stanislas. He was throwing the best dinners in Paris, which the French aristocrats were delighted to attend, but when they showed up, they would ridicule him, together, behind his back.
Nathan, meanwhile, seemed to care very little what the old aristocracy thought of him. There are countless stories of him shocking his gentile guests with his boorish behavior. On at least one occasion, he bragged to them about how much the dinner they just ate cost him. During a conversation about music, he jangled some change in his pocket and said, “That’s my music!”
In this new world of possibilities – and the upending of the traditional socio-economic order that went with it – a slew of writers began exploring the topics of class, and money, and labor. And we’re going to talk more about them – and they many ways that capitalism and industrialization shaped the culture of the early 19th Century – next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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