Quarrel with the King (31 page)

 

T
he long arc the Pembrokes had traced from the 1520s had now returned to earth. Their status had gone, and the family was deep in debt; the fourth earl's horribly convoluted estate took five years to sort out. The executors' accounts survive at Hatfield. Friends, neighbors, and relations all came crawling out of the woodwork with promissory notes
and obligations at dice or cards. The bills came in. Most of the earl's London pictures were sold to pay off the creditors. Connoisseurs toured the rooms to inspect them. Lands were mortgaged and jewels pawned. Valuers picked their way through the great rooms in Durham House, the Cockpit at Whitehall, Baynard's Castle, Wilton, and Ramsbury.

But this was more than a personal catastrophe. The world had changed, and the central place in the workings of England that the Pembrokes had occupied for so long was no longer available to them. The England they had known was now broken. Their conservative revolt against the crown had in turn released huge revolutionary energies in the country, which had swept away their old dreams of a renewed and potent nobility. England, infused with these dreams of radical and universal freedom, was now for ten years to be subjected to a brutal military dictatorship that the threat of freedom had summoned from the republican authorities.

In this fierce and polarized world, the balance and organic integrity of Arcadia could be little but a forgotten memory. Only the ex-royalists, savagely fined by the new regime and creeping back to their damaged and neglected estates in the depths of the country, could turn to the consolations of poetry and the beautiful, quiet life, a wan and defeated ghost of what the Arcadian dream of a good country had once been. The quarrel with the king was over because the king was dead. But as Clarendon had predicted, the status of the earls who had indulged in this quarrel for so long collapsed with the king they had finally and so catastrophically opposed. The old world had gone, and England would never be the same again.

T
HE
D
ESTRUCTION OF
D
OWNLAND
S
OCIETY
1650–1830

T
he crown was restored in 1660, but not everything was restored with it. England could scarcely go back to the system or the mentality on which the prewar country had once relied. The war itself had been too deep and disturbing a rupture. There was no going back. The earls of Pembroke each in turn became the man of his moment: restoration rakes (one a multiple murderer), eighteenth-century connoisseurs, army officers, and conservative politicians. But around them, in the chalkland valleys they owned, as elsewhere, a disaster unfolded.

The Anglican divine Richard Baxter wrote a homily in 1691 on
The condition of poor farm tenants
. “The old custom was,” Baxter wrote nostalgically, “to let lands by lease for lives or for a long term of years, and to take a fine at first and a small yearly rent afterward, and so when a man, with his marriage portion, had taken a lease he lived comfortably afterward and got somewhat for his children.” That is the air of retrospective regret for a land of lost content. The pattern of human rela
tionships had been folded into the habits of the land. The wife's dowry had paid the fine with which the couple entered into the copyhold, and the man's life's labor prepared for his children to do the same.

“But now in most countries,” Baxter continued, meaning in most parts of England, “the custom is changed into yearly rack-rents,” meaning not only that custom itself was over and done with, but also that the new annual rents were equal or nearly equal to the value of what the land could produce in the year. His subtext went far deeper into moral outrage. The new rents had been racked, bent, stretched, and strained to the point where they were no longer morally legitimate.

“The poor tenants are glad of a piece of hanged bacon once a week,” Baxter told his gentlemanly audience, the grandsons of those who had read John Norden's treatise on mutuality as the essence of state management at the beginning of the century,

The change from copyhold to leasehold and rack rent, which began in earnest in the seventeenth century and would continue until deep into the nineteenth century, was the deepest possible transformation of the
social fabric of England. Where people before had, as Baxter implies, eaten their own produce, now their produce amounted to a single thing: money. The yeomen copyholders became what Baxter was already calling in the 1690s “the poor enslaved husbandmen” of England.

Few landlords, he said, “scruple raising rents to as much as they can get, when poor men, rather than beg and have no dwelling, will promise more than they can pay; and then, with care and toil, make shift as long as they can.” The idea of a balanced community, of mutuality in rights and obligations, of control of the government of the manor through the custom of the manor: all that had been collapsed into a simple cash deal. If you could pay the rent, you could stay on the land. If you couldn't, you couldn't. The natural drift of such a system was the replacement of an integrated copyhold community with a monopolistic landlord and a gang of rightless, dependent, impoverished tenants. Huge noncommunal farms would have on their margins scatterings of paupers' cottages, precisely the pattern that developed in these valleys in the nineteenth century.

In the period covered by most of this book Arcadianism was essentially a political idea, an idealism intended to embrace the whole of society. In the eighteenth century, that wholeness disappeared and Arcadianism lost its social dimension. In the making of the great eighteenth-century parks, and in the taste for the refined Meissen figures or Fragonard prettinesses, there was no political or social freight. The pink-cheeked shepherdess and her satin-suited swain, set in the smoothed contours of the English landscape school, was a slick of suavity, the most expensive wallpaper ever devised. Arcadia in the eighteenth century became décor, not a hope for society. Its money-cushioned languor became a commodity to be bought, an accessory to market success, not a criticism of individualism, market, or state. This eviscerated Arcadianism became effete, the symbol of everything against which the hunger of the Romantics for a vivid reality
would react. Eighteenth-century Arcadia had lost its soul and become the country in a Savile Row suit, decorated with hermitages and tree clumps that were no more than pale, polite ghosts of their great Renaissance forebears.

Accompanying a smoothing out of the parks was a devastation of rural society. Jump to the end of August 1826, and William Cobbett is riding through the green and gold chalkstream valleys of the Wiltshire Downs. He cannot believe that he is seeing a place of such unparalleled and dreamlike beauty.

It is difficult to think of two people in English history more different than Philip Sidney and William Cobbett, but here they are as one. “During the day I crossed the river about fifteen or sixteen times, and in such hot weather it was very pleasant to be so much amongst meadows and water.” Cobbett's wonderfully expert eye ranged over the stack yards, the barley ricks, the wheat ricks, and hayricks, the enormous barns, some over 250 feet in length, the vast 400-acre fields, the flocks with 4,000 sheep and lambs in them, and the overwhelming abundance of straw:

They might have been, but they weren't, because amid this astonishing fecundity and richness—it was a painting by Constable made flesh—were scenes of such devastating poverty that Cobbett came away sickened and ashamed. The predictions of Richard Baxter had come true. The men and women who lived and worked in these Arcadian valleys were “tormented by an accursed system that takes the food from those that raise it, and gives it to those that do nothing that is useful to man.” These valleys would be the most delicious places on earth

Cobbett turned to the Bible, using the voice of Amos the prophet to excoriate the landlords who had destroyed the communities that had once occupied these valleys:

Norden's idea that community should be based on love had simply disappeared. The parliamentary enclosure movement of the previous century had eroded and, in some places, removed the last rights of the copyholders to keep their animals on what had been the common grazings. The whole idea of communality evaporated. The great landowners, the Pembrokes included, reacquired the commons and gradually
removed the customary rights on them. The families that had been copyholders became landless farmworkers, dependent on the cash wages paid for their labor. What looked like an equality and even liberty in the market was in fact a form of rightlessness.

The wars with France that persisted throughout the long eighteenth century, until 1815, created a falsely inflated market, delaying the recognition of what had happened. After Waterloo, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the catastrophe struck. Prices fell, rents shrank, poverty became usual, the old families of the chalkland valleys failed, and new men entered in their place. Banks called in their loans and landlords their rents. Bankruptcies, seizures, arrests, and imprisonment for debt colored the lives of these villages. Men came to be hired for as little as a week at a time. Many farmers lost everything and even applied for the handouts from a social welfare system that had been devised in the sixteenth century and could not cope with anything resembling this. Any suggestion of continuity, of the custom of the manor, of practices observed “time out of mind” would have been laughed into oblivion. This was the world for which Arcadia was nothing but a prettiness seen from a drawing room window, which made Cobbett feel ashamed.

The presence of the free market in labor and land was nothing new. Many deeds from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries have survived describing the deals conducted by small landowners in and around Wilton. But the growing sense that the market was king—whether in land or labor—became the crucial transformation in early modern England. In the first earl's survey made in 1567 there were twenty-one copyholders in Wilton itself and three free tenants, who could sell their land if they wished. By the time of the survey done for Philip Pembroke in 1631–1632, there were only five copyholders and twenty-two tenants “by indenture,” holding what were effectively modern leases. By 1831 there were two hugely rich farmers in Wilton, both tenants of the earl. Neither did any farmwork himself—too
grand—and both relied for their riches on employed laborers. Not a single man worked his own land. That tradition and that connection had gone. Instead, Wilton had a population of 113 adult male agricultural laborers, the men whom Richard Baxter had called “the poor enslaved husbandmen of England,” and whom Cobbett saw as the “
worst used labouring people upon the face of the earth
.” Almost 500 of such men, rioting in the 1830s against the tithes paid to the church and the introduction of mechanical threshing machines, against the pauperization of their lives, were transported to Tasmania, with men from Wylye, Bishopstone, Bower Chalke, and Ramsbury among them. Fifteen others were hanged. In those figures, and in that conclusion, one can see the death of a communal idea.

Arcadia had been the dream of power. Only the powerful could indulge in its fantasy of wholeness, because it relied in the end on an imposition of authority. It was everything that the world of Adam Smith, and of the triumphant and beneficent market, would not approve. It was, in that sense, also the dream of illiberal beauty, of a calm and richness that emerged not because individuals had been allowed to pursue their individual ends but because they had submitted to a protective authority.

Our modern nostrils quiver and bristle at this idea. Can happiness and contentment really come from such radical limitations on individual freedoms? Can the system really be justified when so few seem to benefit in their silks and gilded rooms and so many are condemned to a life of poverty and drudgery in their small poor houses at the edges of their damp river meadows?

But look at what happened to these villages in the course of the eighteenth century, and the condition to which their inhabitants had sunk by the time Cobbett came to see them. Could one not see their fate as a justification for the earlier social system. It had of course denied rights to the individual. It had favored the coherence of the
community over those rights. It had understood, in an extraordinarily modern way, the need for the ecological balance that Philip Sidney had seen in the grasses growing equally together in an Arcadian lawn.