The Proud Tower Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Privy Council, and on retirement a peerage, were to be won. The Privy Council, made up of 235 leaders in all fields, though formal and ceremonial in function, was the badge of importance in the nation. A peerage was still the magic mantle that set a man apart from his fellows. Cabinet office was highly coveted and the object of intense maneuvering behind the scenes. When governments changed, nothing so absorbed the attention of British society as the complicated minuet of Cabinet-making. Clubs and drawing rooms buzzed, cliques and alliances formed and reformed, and the winners emerged proudly wearing fortune’s crown of laurel. The prize required hard work and long hours, though rarely knowledge of the department. A minister’s function was not to do the work but to see that it got done, much as he managed his estate. Details such as decimal points, which Lord Randolph Churchill when Chancellor of the Exchequer shrugged aside as “those damned dots,” were not his concern.
    The members of Lord Salisbury’s Government, of whom the majority, though not all, enjoyed inherited land, wealth or titles, had not entered government for material advantages. Indeed, from their point of view, it was right and necessary that public affairs should be administered, as Lord Salisbury said, by men unaffected “by the taint of sordid greed.” A parliamentary career—which was of course unsalaried—conferred, not gain, but distinction. The House of Commons was the center of the capital, of the Empire, of Society; its company was the best in the kingdom. Ambition led men there as well as duty; besides, it was the expected thing to do. Fathers in Parliament were followed by sons, both often serving at the same time. James Lowther, Deputy Speaker of the House from 1895 to 1905 and afterward Speaker, came from a family which had represented Westmorland constituencies more or less continuously over six centuries. His great-grandfather and grandfather each had sat for half a century and his father for twenty-five years. The representative of a county division in Parliament was usually someone whose home was known for seventy miles around as “The House,” whose family had been known in the district for several hundred years and the candidate himself since his birth. Since the cost of candidacy and election and of nursing a constituency afterward was borne by the member himself, the privilege of representing the people in Parliament was a luxury largely confined to the class that could afford it. Of the 670 members in the House of Commons in 1895, 420 were gentlemen of leisure, country squires, officers and barristers. Among them were twenty-three eldest sons of peers, besides their innumerable younger sons, brothers, cousins, nephews and uncles, including Lord Stanley, heir of the sixteenth Earl of Derby, who, after the Dukes, was the richest peer in England. As a junior Government Whip, Stanley was obliged to stand at the door of the Lobby and bully or cajole members to be on hand for a division, though himself not allowed inside the chamber while performing this duty. It was as if he were, wrote an observer, “an Upper Class Servant.” To see “this heir to a great and historic name and a vast fortune doing work almost menial” was testimony both to a sense of political duty and the allure of a political career.
    The ruling class did not grow rulers only. It produced the same proportion as any other class of the unfit and misfit, the bad or merely stupid. Besides prime ministers and empire-builders it had its bounders and club bores, its effete Reggies and Algies caricatured in Punch discussing their waistcoats and neckwear, its long-legged Guardsmen whose conversation was confined to “haw, haw,” its wastrels who ruined themselves through drink, racing and cards, as well as its normal quota of the mediocre who never did anything noticeable, either good or bad. Even Eton had its “scugs,” boys who, in the words of an