The Proud Tower Read Online Free PDF

Etonian, were “simply not good form … and if not naturally vicious, certainly imbecile, probably degenerate.” Though a scug at Eton—not to be confused with “swat,” or grind—could as often as not turn out to be a Privy Councillor thirty years later, some were scugs for life. One of Lord Salisbury’s nephews, Cecil Balfour, disappeared to Australia, over an affair of a forged check, and died there, it was said, of drink.
    Despite such accidents, the ruling families had no doubts of their inborn right to govern and, on the whole, neither did the rest of the country. To be a lord, wrote a particularly picturesque exemplar, Lord Ribblesdale, in 1895, “is still a popular thing.” Known as the “Ancestor” because of his Regency appearance, Ribblesdale was so handsome a personification of the patrician that John Singer Sargent, glorifier of the class and type, asked to paint him. Standing at full length in the portrait, dressed as Master of the Queen’s Buckhounds in long riding coat, top hat, glistening boots and holding a coiled hunting whip, Sargent’s Ribblesdale stared out upon the world in an attitude of such natural arrogance, elegance and self-confidence as no man of a later day would ever achieve. When the picture was exhibited at the Salon in Paris and Ribblesdale went to see it, he was followed from room to room by admiring French crowds who, recognizing the subject of the portrait, pointed out to each other in whispers “ ce grand diable de milord anglais .”
    At the opening of Ascot Race Week when Lord Ribblesdale led the Royal Procession down the green turf, mounted on a bright chestnut against a blue June sky, wearing a dark-green coat with golden hound-couplings hanging from a gold belt, he made a sight that no one who saw it could ever forget. As Liberal Whip in the House of Lords, an active member of the London County Council and chief trustee of the National Gallery, he too took his share of government. Like most of his kind he had a sense of easy communion with the land-based working class who served the sports and estates of the gentry. When the Queen presented J. Miles, a groom of the Buckhounds, with a medal in honor of fifty years’ service, Ribblesdale rode over from Windsor to congratulate him and stayed “for tea and a talk” with Mrs. Miles. As he himself wrote of the average nobleman, “the ease of his circumstances from his youth up tends to produce a good-humored attitude.… To be pleased with yourself may be selfish or it may be stupid, but it is seldom actively disagreeable and usually it is very much the reverse.” Despite a tendency of the Liberal press to portray the peerage as characterized “to a melancholy degree by knock-knees and receding foreheads,” the peer still retained, Ribblesdale thought, the respect of his county. Identifying himself with its interests and affairs, maintaining mutually kindly relations toward his tenants, cottagers and the tradesmen of his market town, he would have to seriously misconduct himself before he would “outrun the prestige of an old name and tried associations.” Yet for all this comfortable picture, Ribblesdale too heard the distant rumble and thirty years later chose for the motto of his memoirs the claim of Chateaubriand: “I have guarded that strong love of liberty peculiar to an aristocracy whose last hour has sounded.”
    Midsummer was the time when the London season was at its height and Society disported and displayed itself in full glory. To a titled visitor from Paris it seemed as if “a race of gods and goddesses descended from Olympus upon England in June and July.” They appeared “to live upon a golden cloud, spending their riches as indolently and naturally as the leaves grow green.” In the wake of the Prince of Wales followed a “flotilla of white swans, their long necks supporting delicate jewelled heads,” who went by the names of Lady Glenconner, the Duchess of Leinster and Lady Warwick. The