On 8 June 1769, Thomas Parsons went on a day trip. The twenty-five-year-old worked in the business of his father, Robert Parsons, in the city of Bath. The Parsons were stone carvers specializing in ornamental vases and statues. Theirs was a viable if demanding business and a high-end one, with a clientele of wealthy locals as well as villa and country-house owners stretching across the south of England. On that June day, Thomas Parsons with his mother and father and another family got in a carriage to travel the fifteen miles to Bowood in Wiltshire, the house of William Petty, second earl of Shelburne. Born in 1737, Shelburne was then thirty-two years old, very rich and already politically prominent. The earl was one of the Parsons's customers.
Thomas Parsons kept a journal in which he wrote of that day:
we were drove thro’ his Lordship's fine Estate down to the House … we alighted and inquir'd for a Person to show us the Gardens &c, and, while the rest were looking at the Leopard [in the earl's menagerie], My Father spoke to the head Servant, who carried in his name to my Lord – he was desir'd to walk in and soon afterwards I was call'd – his Lordship told us that the Vase we sent 4 Years ago was still unpacked – and talked of more Ornaments wanting – he was very obliging – order'd breakfast, dinner and what else we wanted.Footnote 1
One thing wanted was a view of the interior of the house, and, for a spell that he found frustratingly brief, Thomas Parsons looked at the earl of Shelburne's growing picture collection and made mental notes on paintings which he later transcribed to his journal.
This was an ephemeral scene, but it nonetheless bore the stamp of some significant larger historical patterns. What, for example, made this interaction possible? The scene was premised on eighteenth-century England's social hierarchy, the position of the aristocracy, and the particular forms of domestic expenditure that were among its many expressions of power and aspiration.Footnote 2 The scene was also premised on a dynamic industrial and commercial sector that expanded to meet the desires of consumers of many sorts for well-designed and well-made goods.Footnote 3 However, the Parsons came to Bowood not on business, but rather to see what was happening at Bowood, where both the house and the gardens were in dynamic transition. Robert Parsons, the father, brought not only his son, Thomas, but his wife, and they travelled with another family who were not involved in the business at all. This was an instance of what has been called ‘polite tourism’.Footnote 4 Thus, the scene was also premised on the cultural capacities and ambitions of ordinary middling people: their literacy, curiosity, and varied intellectual and cultural aspiration.Footnote 5
If it is easy enough to understand why this visit to Bowood took place, what made the episode possible, in the sense of explaining how the participants carried this incident off, is another matter. What made it possible for the earl and the artisans to have an exchange that Thomas Parsons deemed ‘obliging’?
The interaction between Shelburne and the elder Parsons was partly a business one. The purchase of a stone vase for exterior use was a tiny element of a large and expensive ornamental programme Shelburne was pursuing at Bowood. The Parsons were purveyors of items of taste to a man of taste.Footnote 6 The fact is that Shelburne, though immensely wealthy, was under some short-term fiscal embarrassment in the later 1760s.Footnote 7 Aristocrats were often in debt, and a certain negligence in the settling of accounts was hardly unknown among them.Footnote 8 Parsons may have been using the day trip implicitly to remind Shelburne of an unpaid bill or that he was available to supply more vases. The earl did indicate that he might need more vases, and, a month after the Parsons's visit, the bills for both the earlier ‘Antique Jarr’ (delivered in 1765) and a new order for ‘a Sun dial Pedestal’ were paid.Footnote 9
Robert Parsons's attempt to see the earl may certainly have had instrumental motivations, but making his presence known at the estate was not only that. It was also an act of respect. Business relations are social relations, and social gestures are folded into business practice.Footnote 10 Knocking at the door was a kind of offering, the first move in a small episode of multiple and mutual exchange. Shelburne responded in kind, though he was under no obligation to do so: he had on hand intermediaries who could have dealt with Parsons. Shelburne's willingness to converse with the stone carver was a voluntary and reciprocal gesture of respect. As will be seen, Shelburne had a propensity for such social generosity.
That an exchange of regard was taking place is confirmed by the fact that Thomas Parsons was invited in, to join his father and the earl. Clearly, the interaction between Shelburne and Robert Parsons was not strictly business. Otherwise, there would have been no reason for the earl to invite the younger Parsons indoors. One can only speculate, but it is likely that this was a further element of polite exchange between the earl and Robert Parsons, with the latter wanting to show off his accomplished son. Thomas provided classically inspired designs for the Parsons's vases and also pursued a personal cultivation in a number of literary, artistic, and intellectual ways.Footnote 11 The earl may have been flattering the father's pride by inviting in the son. However the father may have responded to this gesture, Thomas Parsons found the interaction, in his word, ‘obliging’. One thing that ‘obliging’ meant, in eighteenth-century parlance, was ‘pleasing’. But it also suggests the way being pleased was associated with the creation of a debt and the cultivation of loyalty. It suggests the way mutual courtesies created ties, ‘bonds of civility’ as they have been called.Footnote 12
There were other elements of exchange on Shelburne's part, beyond the conventional offer of food. Tellingly, he allowed his visitors to look at the paintings in the house. Clearly, Shelburne had noted and was addressing the younger Parsons's will to cultivation. Parsons had trained himself to draw and design by reading books and looking at objects where he found them.Footnote 13 The earl's invitation was a precious, if brief, opportunity.
This episode can be read as a multi-faceted exchange, involving both material and psychological elements. Parsons's brief account suggests the complex orchestration of everyday discourse, in which expressions of fact, belief, and sentiment are subtly moulded by what we think our interlocutors want and expect to hear.Footnote 14 While the exchange involved what we might think of as instrumental aims, it also involved less immediately goal-oriented mutual consideration.
Making sense of the Parsons's role in this episode raises some significant questions: how did self-respecting Bath artisans, who happened to be dissenters as well, develop the tools to contribute to this obliging performance; or how did the younger Parsons, who spent most of his days in what he called the ‘manual labour’Footnote 15 of stone carving, develop an interest in painting? Paul Langford has provided general answers to such questions. In his pioneering work on politeness in the eighteenth century, Langford has tended to identify the prestige of politeness with the prominence of the middling. Their behaviours may have been inspired by those of their genteel betters, but also served to consolidate and express their own collective ambitions for improvement and social mastery.Footnote 16 Likewise, Thomas Parsons's own politeness – his concern with genteel manners as well as his pursuit of taste and refinement – is like that of the characters discussed in Philip Carter's work on polite masculinity; for, though lower on the social scale than Dudley Ryder, John Penrose, and James Boswell, Parsons's will to master his body and mind and to present himself persuasively as a gentleman was much like theirs.Footnote 17
Langford and Carter are less relevant in considering the aristocratic mode of politeness demonstrated by Shelburne at Bowood in 1769, and his role should not be taken for granted. Of course, the only evidence for this meeting is from the viewpoint of Thomas Parsons, for whom, no doubt, the interaction was far more noteworthy than it was for Shelburne. Shelburne's thoughts on such interactions were infrequent. Late in life, he reflected that hospitality was ‘a very powerfull assistant’ and that the judicious distribution of small gifts and payments ‘pays the best Interest, and gives more satisfaction of any expenditures, after that of Hospitality and Decency’. Nor, in his view, was money alone important in relating to people in towns where he had a political interest. He thought it best ‘never to offend or be easily offended, and to avoid distinctions’ (emphasis in the original), and he concluded that his physical presence in face-to-face contact was much more valuable and effective than was the use of agents and surrogates.Footnote 18
Nonetheless, Shelburne's sociability, as reported by others, does fall into a pattern. The episode with the Parsons can serve as a point of departure for examining Shelburne's relations with others and the way his manners fitted with both his idea of what it was to be an aristocrat and his efforts to conform to this idea. Shelburne's obliging behaviour with the Parsons was not an isolated episode. On this occasion, and on others of which we have reports, Shelburne sought to create easy and satisfying social relations. Indeed, he had a reputation for politeness, though, as will be evident, this trait did not always gain him praise. Such politeness can partly be explained by his personal history. Though he entered public life about 1760 with some key assets, he also had a number of impediments, both perceived and real. His sense of deficiency spurred efforts over the course of his life to develop and sustain his aristocratic being. A noteworthy feature of these efforts was his politeness, which helped him fulfil his expectations of the role of the aristocrat in modern society.
One reason to investigate Shelburne's aristocratic self-formation is that he was a complex and significant, though arguably unsuccessful, figure whose life has been relatively little studied. There is much more to understand about him.Footnote 19 Studies of Shelburne tend to justify themselves teleologically, by reference to the future success (or failure) of the political and administrative reforms that he advocated.Footnote 20 Indeed, the attention to Shelburne as a reformer has rather obscured his simultaneous efforts to make good his aristocratic status. Why was this important reforming figure so concerned with his aristocratic reputation? Were reform and status assertion conflicting impulses or were they closely linked components of his historical character? I will show that, for Shelburne, the aristocrat's capacity to facilitate social intercourse contributed to the general good, helping to refine society's members and to serve as a milieu for improving initiatives: the aristocrat was not a brake on progress but its facilitator.
Another reason to examine Shelburne is that he was hardly unique among aristocrats in displaying politeness. As is well known, Philip Dormer Stanhope, the fourth earl of Chesterfield, sought to shape first his son and then his godson in an aristocratic mould by endlessly reflecting upon the importance of manners. Though manners were less intrinsically valuable than moral virtue and knowledge according to Chesterfield, manners were also the essential means of making moral virtue and knowledge effective in the world.Footnote 21 All human society depended on bare civility, but, for Chesterfield, politeness was a fundamental aristocratic competence, which his letters to his protégés sought to develop. Politeness was the art of pleasing and thus of advancing one's own interest in the context of satisfying that of others.Footnote 22 Of course, ‘others’ were a varied lot: like many writers in the courtesy tradition, Chesterfield was aware that polite manners were sensitive to social context and manifested differently with superiors, equals, and inferiors.Footnote 23
What of Chesterfield's own manners? Mary Lepell Hervey, Lady Hervey, herself a worldly observer, thought Chesterfield among the politest people of the age.Footnote 24 Though his domestic political career was characterized by a claim to patriotic virtue, he spent much of his life as a diplomat where the arts of pleasing were essential.Footnote 25 The summit of his career was his brief tenure after the 1745 rebellion as lord-lieutenant of Ireland where, along with his pragmatism and acuity, his complaisance, grace, and lightness of touch contributed to his success.Footnote 26 Samuel Johnson thought Chesterfield a proud man but proceeded to acknowledge a paradox central to aristocratic politeness: ‘The quintessence of pride is a condescension that passes as democratic, and the supreme gesture of aristocracy is the scorn of asserting itself.’Footnote 27
To be sure, not all aristocrats were polite. Some had the reputation of being haughtily distant (Charles Seymour, sixth duke of Somerset), or obsessed with their personal or familial importance (Richard Grenville-Temple, second earl Temple), or almost outlandishly unsociable (James Lowther, earl of Lonsdale). Others were morally bankrupt (Laurence Shirley, fourth earl Ferrers, or Frederick Calvert, sixth baron Baltimore). However, such examples are balanced by other instances, such as Charles Watson-Wentworth, second marquess of Rockingham, who had a reputation not just for virtue but for personal charm.Footnote 28 In fact, like Shelburne, many aristocrats were clearly recognized as fluctuating in their behaviour on a spectrum from beneficent politeness to unsociable egoism. William Bentinck, third duke of Portland, deployed an array of comportments, from the aloof to the familiar. However, like Thomas Parsons with the earl of Shelburne, Humphrey Repton was most impressed by Portland's complaisance at their first meeting: ‘There was a natural spirit of benevolence in him, which shewed itself in all he said or did … From this source sprang that genuine politeness which is not satisfied with wishing to see others comfortable, but extends itself to the act of making them so.’Footnote 29
It is true that, during Shelburne's life, a moral critique of aristocracy as a class was evolving. From the 1770s, aristocratic excess and vice became a standing topic of criticism and satire in public culture, issuing in the 1790s in outright attacks on the institution of aristocracy and all its appurtenances.Footnote 30 Moreover, in the same period, a discourse of ‘class’ was developing that, in some of its formulations, sought to shift the moral centre of society from the aristocracy to something called ‘the middle class’.Footnote 31 (The fact that, as will be seen, Shelburne himself could speak this language suggests that moral reform was neither necessarily unaristocratic nor anti-aristocratic.) From such standpoints, aristocratic politeness was either non-existent or symptomatic of moral vacuity. However, as Amanda Goodrich has demonstrated, the critique of the aristocracy was answered not only by Burkean ‘conservatism’ but by a variety of arguments that identified aristocrats as protagonists in the evolution of polite and commercial modernity.Footnote 32
Langford sees this process as involving a kind of submission of the aristocracy to the demands of a growing middle class, a process in which dominance slowly shifted its centre of gravity.Footnote 33 In Michael McCahill's words, Langford suggests ‘that standards of middle-class “politeness” began to permeate the nobility. The effect of this transformation was to make the group more open to other orders, more inclined to religion and to public participation, both in terms of their support for charities and their involvement in public affairs.’ McCahill doubts this, and this article uses the case of Shelburne to argue that aristocrats had aristocratic reasons to be polite.Footnote 34 Of course, some people thought that politeness was the natural endowment of aristocrats: it simply went with being an aristocrat. At the beginning of the century, Henry Felton wrote to John Manners, Lord Roos and future third duke of Rutland, that
Persons of Your Lordship's Quality have so fine a Turn, so genteel an Air from their Breeding, and courtly Conversation in every Thing they write or speak, that it giveth an inimitable Grace to their Words and Compositions, and I never knew a Nobleman equal in Learning to other Men, but he was superior to them in the Delicacy and Civility of his Style.Footnote 35
At the same time, Felton acknowledged that ‘the fairest Diamonds are rough till they are polished’. The earl of Chesterfield's letters to his son and godson demonstrate how much work it in fact took to make a born aristocrat a polished specimen.
Shelburne's life can be seen, among other ways, as a continuing effort to polish himself and fulfil a specifically aristocratic set of ambitions. Shelburne conformed to contemporary doctrines and usages of politeness in both its key registers. Politeness was, for one thing, a programme of cultivation: it referred to kinds of social, intellectual, and cultural mastery, ranging from physical comportment and dancing to writing and knowledge to aesthetic judgement and creativity. Such activities constituted an array from which individuals developed a personal range of accomplishment. Throughout his life, Shelburne was committed to continuing his intellectual and political education and to achieving cultural mastery. However, politeness was also an approach to social relations, a way to mediate the differences so evident in human interactions and to mitigate social anxiety and disharmony.Footnote 36 This is the focus of this article: the way that Shelburne sought, with varying success, to master polite sociability.
Shelburne's sociability reminds us that aristocratic dominance was achieved and maintained through many means, including mastery of politeness. Dominance is not the same thing as domination, and aristocratic hegemony in eighteenth-century Britain was not any simple kind of imposition. For all the contention in eighteenth-century Britain, this was a society that broadly acquiesced in aristocratic dominance.Footnote 37 As E. P. Thompson wrote memorably, ‘ruling-class control in the eighteenth century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power’. Thompson had a specific idea of how this hegemony worked: ‘To define control in terms of cultural hegemony is not to give up attempts at analysis, but to prepare for analysis at the points at which it should be made: into the images of power and authority, the popular mentalities of subordination’.Footnote 38 Much historical interpretation is aligned with Thompson's argument, emphasizing aristocratic distance and withdrawal.Footnote 39
It is clear, however, that there are many other points of analysis at which cultural hegemony can be illuminated: not just the poles of dominance and submission but also the points of contact and interaction, such as the one between Shelburne and the Parsons. Obviously, aristocrats were involved in regular interactions with non-aristocrats and they learned and knew different codes prevailing in varying settings.Footnote 40 While withdrawal aptly describes their behaviour in certain contexts, their dominance was premised on intense engagement with the surrounding society in a whole range of other contexts. Dominance was shored up by visibility – to be sure, at times, at a distance, but often in face-to-face contacts. Some of this social mixing was traditional: the degree to which the landed withdrew from rural communities and ceased to provide traditional hospitality can be exaggerated.Footnote 41 In any case, the evolution of rural activities, such as fox-hunting, horse-racing, and cricket, encouraged social solidarity through mixing.Footnote 42 The ascendancy of parliament, consequent on the 1688 revolution, made the cultivation of political interests in boroughs and counties more demanding than it had been previously.Footnote 43 As members of the House of Lords, aristocrats were lobbied, and, given their own economic interests and regional commitments, they themselves lobbied others.Footnote 44 Participating in economic opportunities and developments meant having a presence in improvement trusts and other initiatives.Footnote 45 The many new sites of social and cultural leisure in towns created a terrain of mixed company, the navigation of which was unavoidable.Footnote 46
Becoming and being an aristocrat took work, and the nature of this work evolved as society evolved: to retain mastery, aristocrats adapted to changes in society. Maintaining distinctions was of the very essence in this society of ranks. However, under eighteenth-century conditions, the performance of distinction often involved that ‘voluntary humiliation’, that ‘voluntary submission to equality with inferiours’, which, according to Samuel Johnson, defined ‘condescension’.Footnote 47 Complaisance to inferiors affirmed social differences at the same time that it mediated them, helping to mitigate the potentially disruptive effects of distinction in a hierarchical order. However, as the case of Shelburne shows, it also facilitated collaborative endeavour, harnessing the talents available in a diverse society.
I
As a young man in the 1760s, Shelburne rose quickly to public prominence. He began life with many assets. He was born William Fitzmaurice in 1737. The Fitzmaurice family were Irish landowners who for centuries had enjoyed immense holdings in south-western Ireland and, as barons of Kerry, a political dominance to match. His mother's side had attained eminence much more recently: Shelburne's maternal grandmother was the daughter of William Petty (1623–87), who rose from modest Hampshire origins, parlaying an administrative career in Ireland into a vast fortune based on estates in England and Ireland. Contingencies of birth and death led to Shelburne's father, John Fitzmaurice, unexpectedly inheriting in 1751 the fortune of the Pettys, sacrificing only his name to ‘Petty’. In 1753, he received the Irish earldom of Shelburne, and in 1760, he was raised to the peerage of England as Baron Wycombe. His son, now named William Petty, was educated primarily by private tutors though he spent a brief spell at Christ Church, Oxford. He entered the army by the age of twenty, distinguishing himself at Minden in 1757 and Kloster Kampen in 1760. With his father's death in 1761, he became the second earl of Shelburne, though it was as Baron Wycombe that he took his seat in the House of Lords.
At twenty-four, he was titled and wealthy, with a good mind, a martial reputation, and ample political ambition.Footnote 48 In the decades that followed, Shelburne used his energies to develop and fill out his claim to be an aristocrat. He was a successful dynast, tying himself closer through marriage to the English aristocracy.Footnote 49 He acquired and developed his homes as pronouncements of his wealth, authority, and taste.Footnote 50 He exercised cultural leadership through collecting – manuscripts, paintings, antique marbles.Footnote 51
Of course, being an aristocrat had a political dimension. The eighteenth-century British aristocracy was saturated with senatorial models linking dominance with leadership, service, and duty.Footnote 52 Shelburne wished to be a great statesman. He was also a realist, using his wealth to create political interests in that most concrete form, parliamentary seats that he could control. He inherited considerable influence at Wycombe in Buckinghamshire and came to dominate the two seats at Calne in Wiltshire.Footnote 53 But Shelburne spent most of his political career in opposition. From the middle of the 1760s, he was the chief political heir of the elder William Pitt, and was soon associated with reformers and radicals: Shelburne became ‘the patron of almost all the precursors of nineteenth-century radicalism’.Footnote 54 He was moderate in his attitude toward John Wilkes in the late 1760s, and in the early 1770s Shelburne took up Richard Price's proposal that dissenting clergy be released from the obligation to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. As the issue of North America came to dominate politics, Shelburne was critical of Lord North's administration and urged a variety of expedients to conciliate the Americans (all short of granting independence). From the winter of 1779–80, Shelburne aligned himself with the causes of both administrative (or ‘economical’) and parliamentary reform.
When North's long-enduring administration finally ended in 1782, Shelburne was in the new ministry of the marquess of Rockingham, and, when Rockingham died a few months later, Shelburne himself became first minister. Most of his energy during his brief period in this capacity went to negotiating peace terms with the Americans; he had little time for the reforms he had endorsed. In any case, Shelburne was quickly forced from office by the unexpected alliance of Lord North and his erstwhile opponent, Charles James Fox, who were themselves soon out-manoeuvred by the king when the younger William Pitt became first minister. Out of office, Shelburne had to console himself with elevation in the peerage as the marquess of Lansdowne. His political career was effectively over, though he remained active and vocal in the House of Lords, where, in the 1790s, he attacked the war with France and the government's assault, as he saw it, on the liberties of the subject. Thus, within a later eighteenth-century frame of reference, Shelburne occupied a position at the reformist end of the spectrum.
Shelburne's reformism was consistent with his aristocratic identity because reform had not yet assumed an anti-aristocratic character. Reform was debated in parliament precisely because it had aristocratic supporters, although they differed on which measures in which doses were appropriate. The aristocracy was broadly wedded to the moderate tenets of whig ideology, including the idea of the balanced constitution, in which crown, Lords, and Commons were meant to collaborate for the public good, each checking and preventing any undesirable arrogation of power by the others.Footnote 55 Before the 1790s, the target of political reform was consistently the crown, as expressed in a resolution, passed by the Commons in 1780, ‘that the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished’. The man who proposed the resolution and who engineered its celebrated passage was John Dunning, one of Shelburne's closest allies, sitting for Shelburne's pocket borough at Calne.Footnote 56 In short, it was assumed that the main domestic menace to British liberty was the power of the crown to subvert the independence of parliament. Almost no one thought of doing without the aristocracy. It is not surprising, then, that Shelburne should combine reformism with the pursuit of his aristocratic status and identity. What is noteworthy is the role that sociability and politeness played in this pursuit and the way, in Shelburne's conception, they conduced to a reformist orientation.
Shelburne's manners were played out in a wide web of social, political, and cultural relationships that was usual for an aristocrat. However, unlike many aristocrats, Shelburne surrounded himself with a cast of characters that was, broadly though not restrictively, reformist, cosmopolitan, and intellectual in character.
Shelburne had an inner group of close political associates (at least through the 1780s), of whom Isaac Barré and John Dunning were most prominent. They occupied parliamentary seats in his interest and spoke in the Commons on his behalf.Footnote 57 Beyond them was a broader group of persons with reforming interests. Two outstanding examples of these are James Townsend and John Sawbridge, both of whom began as Wilkites, then founded the reform-minded Constitutional Society, and, ultimately, became mayors of London.Footnote 58 These individuals shaded into a group whose reforming interests were embedded in wider patterns of observation and reflection, men such as Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, and Benjamin Franklin. Others were there on the basis of intellectual credentials alone: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon.Footnote 59 Even Samuel Johnson enjoyed his hospitality.Footnote 60 Shelburne's interest in the economy and technological progress led him to other connections. In the 1760s, he took a well-reported trip to Birmingham where he met the entrepreneurial elite of the town (including the manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the printer John Baskerville) and formed a lasting relationship with Samuel Garbett, an industrialist but also, with Shelburne's support, a commercial lobbyist.Footnote 61
Shelburne's network had an unusually cosmopolitan reach. He had political informants in London and around the nation, in Ireland and North America and on the continent. From the 1760s, Shelburne made regular trips to the continent. In Paris, he picked up a number of key associates. The most important and personally influential was the philosophe André Morellet, but Shelburne also had an extensive correspondence with Étienne Dumont and contact with Malesherbes, the comte de Mirabeau, and many more.Footnote 62 Shelburne's building projects and artistic interests put him in contact with a different strand of personnel including Robert Adam and Lancelot Brown and a series of great designers, a mix of foreigners and Britons, who worked on his houses, including Francesco Pannini, C. L. Clérisseau, F. J. Bélanger, Joseph Bonomi, and Giovanni Battista Cipriani. Gavin Hamilton in Rome furnished him with his marbles. We might think of the Parsons of Bath as the very bottom of that particular chain of connection.
Shelburne also had significant relations with women. He knew Elizabeth Robinson Montagu whose neighbour he was, for a while, on Hill Street in Mayfair. Both of his wives were well educated and accomplished and, with other female relatives, seem to have played a role in this sociability.Footnote 63 However, a different female influence may have had a major impact on him. On his several visits to Paris, especially in the early 1770s in the wake of his first wife's death, he found easy access to salons. He appears to have visited Madame Geoffrin's most consistently, but he also corresponded with the marquise du Deffand and knew Deffand's continuator, mademoiselle de Lespinassse.
Something of this salon mentality may have rubbed off. He once wrote Morellet that he was happy to be ‘governed’ by madame Geoffrin.Footnote 64 The issue of female governance was important in the self-representation of Parisian salons,Footnote 65 and Shelburne picked up on the idiom. Shelburne's enterprises in intellectual sociability were not as disciplined as Parisian salons or as Mrs Montagu's Hill Street conversazioni.Footnote 66 However, they developed a quasi-institutional reputation. A contemporary, Nathaniel Wraxall, called Shelburne's Berkeley Square residence ‘at once the centre of a considerable party, as well as the Asylum of taste and science’. Wraxall went on to write that Shelburne ‘wanted no external quality requisite to captivate or conciliate mankind. Affable, polite, communicative, and courting popularity, he drew round him a number of followers and adherents … Splendid and hospitable at his table, he delighted his guests by the charms of his conversation and society.’Footnote 67 Shelburne's web of connection was sustained by many things, but one was his manners. His propensity to gather others around him was animated and sustained by that art of social relations known as politeness.
II
Samuel Johnson thought Shelburne ‘a man of coarse manners’.Footnote 68 Johnson was opiniated, but it cannot be denied that Shelburne's public reputation was very mixed. He himself acknowledged that he was a man with ‘a temper’, which he traced to his Fitzmaurice forebears struggling to maintain order at the Irish edge of civilization.Footnote 69 Shelburne could be testy and he did not suffer easily those he deemed fools.Footnote 70 However, the usual and striking complaint about his manners was not a lack of politeness but rather a deformation of it.
Politeness itself had a mixed reputation in the eighteenth century. It was a key term of legitimation, but it was constantly liable to criticism as ungenuine and insincere. The virtues of affability and complaisance were seen to transmogrify easily into the vices of flattery and unctuousness; politeness could be associated with servility and unreliability.Footnote 71 All of these accusations became standard motifs in characterizations of Shelburne. One point of origin for them was Shelburne's role, very early in his career (before his association with the elder Pitt), as an intermediary between Lord Bute and Henry Fox in 1762 and 1763: in exchange for Fox's support in the Commons, Bute was willing to satisfy Fox's long-standing request for a peerage on the understanding that Fox would relinquish the office of paymaster-general. However, this condition got obscured in the negotiations, and Shelburne the intermediary got blamed for the misunderstanding. Shelburne's contribution to the episode was captured in the phrase ‘pious fraud’. In time, his alleged hypocrisy and treachery associated him with ‘the Jesuitical’ in many of its manifestations.Footnote 72 The alternation of ‘violence and flattery’ in Shelburne was reported by George Rose, who, as a junior secretary in the Treasury worked closely with Shelburne during his ministry: ‘I had experienced very uncomfortable feelings from the temper and disposition of Lord Shelburne; sometimes passionate and unreasonable, occasionally betraying suspicions of others entirely groundless, and at other times offensively flattering. I have frequently been puzzled to decide which part of his conduct was least to be tolerated.’Footnote 73
Other testimonies, however, have a different emphasis. Even Samuel Johnson admitted that, while Shelburne was not the sort of man who should be ‘the head of a nation’, ‘he is a man to be at the head of a Club’.Footnote 74 Johnson appears to be alluding to Shelburne's ability to organize social energies, enlisting the affections and loyalty of others. His problem was usually identified not as paucity of manners but as courtesy in excess. Lady Rockingham told him directly that his ‘extreme politeness is too French’,Footnote 75 and Jeremy Bentham related a story lending support to this complaint. Bentham made Shelburne's acquaintance as early as 1778 though it took time before an invitation to Bowood was received and accepted. On the day in 1781 when Bentham arrived, Shelburne was not home. But later in the day, ‘when my lord came in, he ran up to me, and touched one of my cheeks with his, and then the other. I was even satisfied with it, since he meant it kindly, and since such, I suppose, is the fashion; but I should have been still better satisfied if he had made either of the ladies his proxy.’ Shelburne comes across here as socially affected. However, elsewhere, Bentham testified to a sociability that was ‘obliging’ and gratifying. Bentham wrote: ‘at Bowood I was caressed and delighted … Lord Shelburne raised me from the bottomless pit of humiliation – he made me feel I was something.’ Indeed, Bentham observed that ‘the Master of Bowood … is one of the pleasantest men to live with that ever God put breath into: his whole study seems to be to make everybody about him happy – servants not excepted’.Footnote 76
Before befriending Bentham, Shelburne had convinced Joseph Priestley to live in and around the household, technically as a librarian but actually as an intellectual companion. Priestley – the dissenter, theologian, and natural philosopher – was hardly a likely candidate to serve as house-intellectual in a stately home. Unsurprisingly, his response to living in Shelburne's midst was equivocal, at least as recorded in his autobiographical memoir written near the end of his life. Prior to his time with Shelburne, Priestley thought it obvious that, compared to others, the ‘middle classes of life’ enjoyed not only the most virtue and happiness but also the most politeness because ‘in proportion as men pass more of their time in the society of their equals, they get a better established habit of governing their tempers; they attend more to the feelings of others, and are more disposed to accommodate themselves to them’. Priestley aligned politeness with virtue and benevolence, indicating that it involved regulating the self in relations with others in patterns of sensitivity and mutual acquiescence. Politeness was premised on a certain egalitarianism, which explained why aristocrats were not likely to be polite, for ‘the passions of persons in higher life, having been less controlled, are more apt to be inflamed; the idea of their rank and superiority to others seldom quits them’. Aristocratic upbringing undermined any genuine capacity to accommodate others, even if aristocrats could be trained to appear to be doing so.
However, Priestley suggested that his time with Shelburne made him reconsider this viewpoint, writing:
But when the mind is not hurt in such a situation, when a person born to affluence can lose sight of himself, and truly feel and act for others, the character is so godlike, as shews that this inequality of condition is not without its use. Like the general discipline of life, it is for the present lost on the great mass, but on a few it produces what no other state of things could do.Footnote 77
In other words, Priestley came to see that that there was an aristocratic mode of politeness cum benevolence that could play a particular and distinguished role. The context of the remark implies that Shelburne, though short of ‘godlike’, partook of this exceptional character.Footnote 78 In going so far as to admit that ‘inequality of condition is not without its use’, Priestley was making a significant concession to the aristocratic idiom.
III
Where did Shelburne's propensity to be a polite aristocrat come from? Part of the answer is that, despite his many assets, Shelburne had a number of deficiencies and impediments, real and perceived, for which he strove to compensate. He lacked confidence.Footnote 79
To begin with, Shelburne was reacting against an Irish background that he deemed ‘naturally turbulent, impetuous, and uncivilised’ and that was susceptible to derision by others.Footnote 80 However, his criticism of Ireland crystallized in his dissatisfactions with his own family. While acknowledging their virtues, he described himself as the product of a tyrannical grandfather and an ineffectual father. The grandfather was a man of ‘no Education’, confirmed, in Shelburne's view, by that fact that ‘the great Event of the year was the Almanack, which he would allow no body to read but himself, and serv'd him in the stead of all other Books’. Though Shelburne's father was educated at Westminster and had some experience of France, he was, in his son's jaundiced report, confined by his grandfather to ‘the court’ of Lixnaw, the ancestral home in Kerry, without access to ideas.Footnote 81
Shelburne laced his account of his family with language usually seen in accounts of the development of humanity in eighteenth-century philosophical histories. The grandfather was an atavism of a ‘feudal age’, a private and public tyrant operating a small-scale baronial court. He was a figure of brutality, a trait that Shelburne recognized in his own character; the grandfather embodied honour and justice without lenity or refinement. He ‘kept that barbarous Country in strict subordination’, and he ‘govern'd his own Family as he did the Country. In consequence his Children did not love him but dreaded him. His Servants the same.’ The art of pleasing had not yet been discovered in south-western Ireland. Shelburne presented himself as reacting against backward social tyranny in the name of modern sociability. He suggested that he himself had introduced into the family's moral composition ‘a degree of softness’, which he attributed to ‘self-discipline, good company, and observation of the world’. In addition, Shelburne pointed to the important role of several women in refining his nature, especially his maternal grandmother, Anne Petty, and his paternal aunt, Arbella Fitzmaurice Denny.Footnote 82 Using commonplaces of polite discourse, Shelburne ascribed his own refinement to sociable interaction (especially interaction with women) and edifying worldliness. His worldly moral education constituted a transcendence of his feudal upbringing and aligned him with polite modernity.
One focus of his familial dissatisfaction was his own education, which he described as desultory and ascribed to his father's neglect. For the entirety of his adulthood, he complained about his lack of training and knowledge.Footnote 83 As a teenager, he had been introduced to the fourth earl of Chesterfield and to George Carteret, the second earl Granville, men whose cultivation made a strong impression. The latter especially, who became his father-in-law, combined scholarly knowledge with a love of society, wit, and ease, in a way that provided Shelburne a measure of his deficiencies but also perhaps a model for imitation.Footnote 84 While, as John Cannon has pointed out, Shelburne's education was no worse than that of many aristocrats, his sense of deficiency was powerful and motivated many of his relationships.Footnote 85 He recognized, he wrote, his ‘own situation, and to feel the necessity I was under of repairing lost time’.Footnote 86 In social relationships, he looked for edification; the intellectual cast of his friends and acquaintances was motivated by a desire to compensate for his defective education, as he perceived it.
As an Irishman in England, Shelburne was making his way in a climate in which he was perceived as both foreign and arriviste. He early on got the reputation of being an upstart. For his evident courage in the German theatre of the Seven Years War, he was awarded the rank of colonel and the post of aide-de-camp to the king at the end of 1760. Unfortunately, Shelburne was rewarded ahead of Lord George Lennox, brother of the duke of Richmond; this seriously rankled the duke who resigned his post in the Royal Bedchamber.Footnote 87 Two years later Shelburne was being considered for a ministerial post, but George Grenville wrote to Lord Bute detailing the objections to such a promotion on the grounds not only of his youth and inexperience, but also of the recentness of the family's elevation to the English peerage: ‘The envy and jealousy of the old Peers, many of whom are already trying to band together, must naturally be excited to the highest pitch by a distinction of which, in most of its circumstances, there is, I believe, no example in our history.’Footnote 88 Shelburne's origins and the speed of his rise were hard for other aristocrats to swallow (though his hostility to the old whig guard also played a part). He was a victim of the haughtiness of others.
Shelburne's marginal status as newcomer and Anglo-Irish may help to explain the vigour of his aristocratic endeavours. By pursuing cultivation, he would transcend his background, demonstrating an equality with more established English aristocrats. His lack of acceptance also helps to explain the contrarieties of his personality. The sense of unjustified exclusion prompted his temper, impatience, and, if George Rose is to be believed, occasional paranoia. However, this same sense may have expressed itself in a desire to please. His politeness sought to convert exclusion or marginality into acceptance and seems to have often helped to create social bonds through mutually gratifying reciprocity, even if his excesses sometimes reduced him to undignified ingratiation.
IV
However, Shelburne's efforts at politeness may have aimed at more than overcoming deficiencies and impediments. They helped him understand the role of aristocracy in a modern society, the vocation of the aristocrat.
For all his reforming energies, Shelburne did not doubt the place of aristocracy in society and polity. Rather, he entertained a classic view of the aristocratic class as free mediators between king and people.Footnote 89 Like his contemporaries, he thoroughly embraced the balanced constitution, casting the House of Lords as the guardian of liberty against both the encroachments of the crown and the corruption of the Commons. In late 1781, he argued that the House of Lords had a role as important in the constitution as the House of Commons in guarding the rights of the people; the aristocracy comes into its own, he maintained, when the Commons is corrupt.Footnote 90 Beyond such constitutional thinking, Shelburne used the vocabulary of independence, disinterest, leadership, and the common good to legitimate the role of aristocracy.Footnote 91
It is true that Shelburne expressed respect for the middling orders, echoing the view already noted in Priestley. Shelburne wrote that in England, morals
are much oftener to be met with among the middling classes, who are obliged to be active and diligent to make their own and their children's fortune, than among the higher classes, whose fortunes are made and who have no motive for exertion except ambition, which may be one case in a hundred.
He lamented the fact that Ireland had no middle class.Footnote 92 However, Shelburne was also alert to the deficiencies of the ‘middling classes’. That active and diligent pursuit of fortune, so laudable compared to aristocratic listlessness, was, from a different perspective, a source of disruption and even corruption: it implied lack of independence and lack of disinterest. While Shelburne could say that ‘no man respected the manufacturers more than he did’, he also said that they were ‘fallible, with prejudices, and subject to err, particularly where they were blinded by personal interest … there was always the personal bias to be guarded against, in conversing or in treating with them’.Footnote 93 While Shelburne could maintain that commerce was ‘the great support of the British nation’,Footnote 94 he also saw it as a source of corruption:
the influence of the crown was not the only influence which tended to bring this nation to slavery, destruction, and ruin; nor was the all-powerful effects of corruption confined to parliament; the whole mass of the people were corrupted, or corruptible. The nation was composed of buyers and sellers.Footnote 95
Even the farmers, who centre everything ‘in their never ceasing pursuit of gain, are incapable of comprehending any thing beyond it’.Footnote 96 Of the professions, he wrote: their ‘employment is to rob every Country, and if left to themselves, [they] naturally produce Upstart Manners and a total want of Principles’.Footnote 97
The role of the aristocracy was to keep the interests and biases of the active part of the population in check – a role that became impossible if the gentleman was too closely or intently engaged in commerce.Footnote 98 The positive side of this negative check was the aristocratic ability, having inherited rather than having to make a fortune, to transcend interest for the sake of the general good. Moreover, for Shelburne, the aristocracy could exercise a positive role precisely sponsoring and facilitating those active inclinations of non-aristocrats. Whatever impediments aristocrats often suffered from their self-centred upbringing, Shelburne allowed, as Priestley had, that the exceptional aristocrat had much to offer. In a particularly salient passage, he offered a notable explanation for the function of aristocracy. He was reflecting on the situation of Ireland, where of course he had large holdings, and on the frequent complaint that landlords were so often absentees. He dismissed the usual diagnosis that absenteeism simply drained the country of wealth. Rather, he wrote,
the real evil is, that the absence of the rich proprietors retards civilisation, the progress of manners, and many liberal improvements; for though the rich may in some respects set a bad example, yet upon the whole they soften and liberalise, excite industry, and make society by bringing men together, who polish themselves.Footnote 99
Rather less reluctantly than Priestley, Shelburne embraced the position that ‘inequality of condition is not without its use’. Shelburne identified the aristocracy as an important sponsor of the sort of sociability that was often hailed in the eighteenth century: the conversation that refined and edified, the intellectual and social collisions that polished.Footnote 100 By organizing a conversational regime of complaisance, the aristocrat forwarded the fortunes of cultivation and improvement. Thus, Shelburne placed aristocracy firmly on the side of modernity. Like many contemporaries, Shelburne saw no antagonism between the institution of aristocracy and a modern polity. In this way, to be a reformer was a perfectly obvious thing for an aristocrat to be.
This passage also provided a legitimation for Shelburne's own sociability, a gloss on his sociable patterns: the collecting of interesting persons in order to let them edify him and each other in a progressive way. Indeed, his aristocratic sociability was an instrument of reform in that his hospitality provided occasions for assembling, organizing, and deploying reformist energies. Nathaniel Wraxall described the scene at Shelburne House towards the end of Lord North's administration:
There, while Dunning and Barré met to settle their plan of action, as Members of Parliament on the Opposition Bench in the House of Commons; Jackson, who likewise sat in the same assembly, for New Romney, and the variety of whose information had acquired him the name of ‘Omniscient Jackson’, furnished every species of legal or general knowledge. Dr Price and Mr Baring produced financial plans, or made arithmetical calculations, meant to controvert and overturn, or to expose those of the first Lord of the Treasury: while Dr Priestley … prosecuted, in the midst of London, his philosophical and chemical researches.Footnote 101
Like an eighteenth-century conversation piece in painting, Wraxall's description shows the co-ordinated though discrete activities of individuals in a specific setting. It depicts the mediating effects of sociable and conversational practice, with Shelburne at the centre as organizer and animator.
V
In the summer of 1799 (or thereabouts), there was, as there had been in June 1769, a knock on the door of Bowood, the home of the man, at this point, known as the marquess of Lansdowne.
I approached the house, through a lodge and park, which inspired awe and wonder; I rang the bell to the domestic part of the premises with hesitation and doubt; I asked incoherent questions about the Marquess, the house, &c.: the porter was perplexed and called the footman, who consulted the valet, and he appealed to the butler, who good-naturedly construed my meaning and wishes, and introduced me to his noble master, who was seated in a well-filled and spacious library, and who appeared to my dizzy vision like something superhuman.Footnote 102
The visitor was John Britton, born in 1771, a fairly local fellow, brought up in a minute agricultural community (Kington) in the vicinity of Chippenham in a setting marked by, in his words, ‘illiteracy’ and ‘innocent rusticity’. An uncle who had made something of himself in London arranged for Britton to come to London, where he spent three years as an apprentice amid the barrels and bottles in the basement of the Jerusalem Tavern in Clerkenwell. In his Autobiography, Britton told how he became fully literate and better educated, beginning with reading The Lady's Magazine and leading, by way of Defoe and Bunyan, to Isaac Watts on morals, Benjamin Martin on science, Chesterfield on manners, and The Philosophical Magazine for the rest. At the Jerusalem, he penned an essay which he submitted to The Attic Miscellany (1789–92), beginning a literary career.Footnote 103 Aided by some chance contacts, Britton had the bright idea of a book on The beauties of Wiltshire, which was what brought him to the marquess's door. ‘I had been led to consider the marquess as naturally high, stern, and haughty to strangers … Fortunately, I found him very different from anticipation, for he was bland, courteous and affable.’ Britton was ‘indulged and honoured with nearly an hour's most exciting converse’ before Shelburne arranged for him to be provided accommodation, books, and maps about Bowood and a tour of ‘the house, the pleasure-grounds, the cascade, the park and other objects’.Footnote 104 Had Lansdowne repulsed him, Britton reported, The beauties of Wiltshire, published in 1801, would not have taken shape.Footnote 105 Nor perhaps would have the twenty-seven volumes of The beauties of England and Wales that followed The beauties of Wiltshire over the next two decades.
This incident nicely echoes the episode involving Parsons discussed at the outset. Like Parsons, Britton was an ordinary person from an unpromising background whose trajectory was supported by self-education, ambition, and the kindness of others. Here again, we see Shelburne's politeness in action. When Parsons visited Bowood, it was in a state of radical expansion and elaboration. By the time Britton visited, it was a monument fit for inclusion in The beauties of Wiltshire and other topographies and guides.Footnote 106 The construction of Bowood and his other houses was a long-term project of Shelburne's. So was Shelburne himself.
Shelburne's politeness was a competence, allowing him, over many decades, to get along with diverse persons, animating and co-ordinating their energies. He had a strong desire to please, which is at the heart of the polite personality. As some of his contemporaries noted, this desire could misfire, undermining trust. It is clear that he had more success with his social subordinates than with his aristocratic equals. However, as others attested, Shelburne's art of pleasing could create social comity, allow inclusiveness, and animate energies. Shelburne's polite habits arose, in part, from his own vulnerabilities, but they gained legitimacy and energy from public doctrines about the refining power of sociability.
Shelburne's politeness is striking and helps us to understand something about aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Obviously, Shelburne's is only one case and, in some ways, a quite particular one. However, it was incumbent on all aristocrats to exert themselves to sustain and augment their status. Aristocracy was an array of ranks. Viewed from below, this array was foreshortened into a monolithic mass; but, viewed from within, the differences among ranks mattered and stimulated active pursuits of status much like that seen in Shelburne's career. In this pursuit, withdrawal, haughtiness, and aloofness had their limits. Aristocratic dominance was maintained and strengthened by engagement with the surrounding society. The meeting of the earl of Shelburne and the artisan from Bath suggested the kinds of interaction that figured in the lives of aristocrats generally. In such interactions, condescension in its eighteenth-century practice was not a performance of hauteur but a tool for finding and negotiating common ground in a deeply hierarchical order. Condescension fortified hierarchy not by the assertion of difference but by its temporary suspension.
