Aristocracy, Agriculture and Liberalism: the Politics, Finances and Estates of the third Lord Carrington

Abstract

Politicians in the 1880s believed they were introducing ‘democracy’ into Britain and many feared the – possibly revolutionary – challenge it posed to the existing social and political orders. Historians have for some time recognized that the aristocracy continued to play a significant role in each until at least the First World War. The peers' social hegemony, strong institutional position and relative economic security were a formidable combination. Few would now accept Ensor's view that the 1880s witnessed the beginning of ‘the economic dethronement of the landowners’, and that ‘political headship [could not] long survive economic defeat’. The durability of the late-Victorian aristocracy remains, however, a phenomenon more frequently asserted than examined. The peerage was the sum of its individual members; yet the few ‘micro’ studies hitherto published have concentrated on the ‘aristocracy of the aristocracy’ – the elite of wealth and power, mainly dukes, within the peerage. We know little of the mass of peers who were far less favourably placed, suffered real financial difficulties, but whose tenacity and continued sense of purpose were crucial to the peers' ability to survive.