A Schoolboy's Guide To War

Anthony Seldon and David Walsh: Public Schools and the Great War - The Generation Lost

The New Criterion, October 1, 2014

Richard Ropner (Harrow), Royal Machine Gun Corps

On August 3, 1914, twenty-two of England’s best public school cricketers gathered for the annual schools’ representative match. The game ended the following evening. Britain’s ultimatum to Germany expired a few hours later. Seven of those twenty-two would be dead before the war was over. Anthony Seldon and David Walsh’s fine new history of the public schools and the First World War bears the subtitle “The Generation Lost” for good reason.

Britain neither wanted nor was prepared for a continental war. Its armed forces were mainly naval or colonial. The regular army that underwrote that ultimatum was, in the words of Niall Ferguson, “a dwarf force” with “just seven divisions (including one of cavalry), compared with Germany’s ninety-eight and a half.”

Britain’s more liberal political traditions, so distinct then—and now—from those of its European neighbors, had rendered peacetime conscription out of the question, but manpower shortages during the Boer War and growing anxiety over the vulnerability of the mother country itself led to a series of military reforms designed to toughen up domestic defenses. These included the consolidation of ancient yeomanry and militias into a Territorial Force and Special Reserve. The old public-school “rifle corps,” meanwhile, were absorbed into an Officers’ Training Corps and put under direct War Office control.

Most public schools signed up for this, and by 1914 most had made “the corps” compulsory. Some took it seriously. Quite a few did not. Stuart Mais, the author of A Public School in Wartime (1916), wrote that Sherborne’s prewar OTC was seen as “a piffling waste of time . . . playing at soldiers” that got in the way of cricket. Two decades later, Adolf Hitler cited the OTC to a surprised Anthony Eden (then Britain’s foreign secretary) as evidence of the militarization of Britain’s youth. It “hardly deserved such renown,” drily recalled Eden (in his unexpectedly evocative Another World 1897–1917), “even though the light grey uniforms with their pale blue facings did give our school contingent a superficially Germanic look.”

And yet this not-very-military nation saw an astonishing response to the call for volunteers to join the fight. By the end of September 1914 over 750,000 men had enlisted. But where were the officers to come from? A number of retired officers returned to the colors, and the Territorials boasted some men with useful experience, but these were not going to be close to sufficient numbers. The army turned to public-school alumni to fill the gap. In theory, this was because these men had enjoyed the benefit of some degree of military training, however inadequate, with the OTC, but in truth it was based on the belief of those in charge, themselves almost always former public schoolboys, that these chaps would know what to do. Looked at one way, this was nothing more than crude class prejudice; looked at another, it made a great deal of sense. In the later years of the war, many officers (“temporary gentlemen” in the condescending expression of the day) of humbler origins rose through the ranks, but in its earlier stages the conflict was too young to have taught the army how best to judge who would lead well. In the meantime, Old Harrovians, Old Etonians, and all those other Olds would have to do.

To agree that this was not unreasonable implies a level of acceptance of the public school system at its zenith utterly at odds with some of the deepest prejudices festering in Britain today. British politics remain obsessed with class in a manner that owes more to ancient resentments than any contemporary reality. A recent incident, in which a columnist for the far left Socialist Worker made fun of the fatal mauling of an Eton schoolboy by a polar bear (“another reason to save the polar bears”), is an outlier in its cruelty, but it’s a rare week that goes by in which a public school education is not used to whip a Tory cur, as David Cameron (Eton) knows only too well.

Under the circumstances it takes courage to combine, as Seldon and Walsh do, a not-unfriendly portrait of the early twentieth-century public schools (it should be noted that both men are, or have been, public schoolmasters) with a broader analysis that implies little sympathy for the sentimental clichés that dominate current British feeling—and it is felt, deeply so—about the Great War: Wilfred Owen and all that. It is not necessary to be an admirer of the decision to enter the war or indeed of how it was fought (I am neither) to regret how Britain’s understanding of those four terrible years has been so severely distorted over the past decades. Brilliantly deceptive leftist agitprop intended to influence modern political debate has come to be confused with history.

Oh! What a Lovely War smeared the British establishment of the 1960s with the filth of Passchendaele and the Somme. Similarly, the caricature of the war contained in television productions such as Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) and The Monocled Mutineer (1986) can at least partly be read as an angry response to Mrs. Thatcher’s long ascendancy. Coincidentally or not, the late 1980s also saw the appearance of The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-School Ethos by Peter Parker. For a caustic, literary, and intriguing—if slanted—dissection of these schools’ darker sides, Parker’s book is the place to go.

Seldon and Walsh offer a more detailed and distinctly more nuanced description of how these schools operated, handily knocking down a few clichés on the way: There were flannelled fools aplenty, but there was also the badly wounded Harold Macmillan (Eton), “intermittently” reading Aeschylus (in Greek) as he lay for days awaiting rescue in a shell hole. Aeschylus was not for all, but a glance at the letters officers wrote from the front is usually enough to shatter the myth of the ubiquitous philistine oaf. There was much more to the public schools than, to quote Harrow’s most famous song, “the tramp of the twenty-two men.”

But however harsh a critic he may be (“that men died for an ethos does not mean that the ethos was worth dying for”), Parker is too honest a writer not to acknowledge the good, sometimes heroic, qualities of these hopelessly ill-trained young officers and the bond they regularly forged across an often immense class divide with the troops that they led. “I got to know the men,” wrote my maternal grandfather Richard Ropner (Harrow, Machine Gun Corps) in an unpublished memoir half a century later, “I hope they got to know me.” In many such cases they did. It is tempting to speculate that such bonds (easier to claim, perhaps, de haut than en bas) may have been more real in the eyes of the commanders than of the commanded, but there is strong evidence to suggest that there was nothing imaginary about them. Men died for their officers. Officers died for their men.

My grandfather owned a set of memorial volumes published by Harrow in 1919. Each of the school’s war dead is commemorated with a photograph and an obituary. It is striking to see how frequently the affection with which these officers—and they almost all were officers—were held by their men is cited. Writing about Lieutenant Robert Boyd (killed at the Somme, July 14, 1916, aged twenty-three), his company commander wrote that Boyd’s “men both loved him and knew he was a good officer—two entirely different things.” This subtle point reflects the way that the public school ethos both fitted in with and smoothed the tough paternalism of the regular army into something more suited to a citizen army that now included recruits socially, temperamentally, and intellectually very different from that rough caste apart, Kipling’s “single men in barricks.”

The public schools relied heavily on older boys to maintain a regime that had come a long way from Tom Brown’s bleak start. This taught them both command and, in theory (Flashman had his successors), the obligations that came with it. That officers were expected both to lead and care for their men was a role for which they had thus already been prepared by an education designed, however haphazardly, to mold future generations of the ruling class. Contrary to what Parker might argue, these schools had not set out to groom their pupils for war. But the qualities these institutions taught—pluck, dutifulness, patriotism, athleticism (both as a good in itself and as a shaper of character), conformism, stoicism, group loyalty, and a curious mix of self-assurance and self-effacement—were to prove invaluable in the trenches as was familiarity with a disciplined, austere, all-male lifestyle.

There was something else: The fact that many of these men had boarded away from home, often from the age of eight, and sometimes even earlier, meant that they had learned how to put on a performance for the benefit of those who watched them. A display of weakness risked transforming boarding school life into one’s own version of Lord of the Flies. That particular training stayed with them on the Western Front: “I do not hold life cheap at all,” wrote Edward Brittain (Uppingham), “and it is hard to be sufficiently brave, yet I have hardly ever felt really afraid. One has to keep up appearances at all costs even if one is.” It was all, as Macmillan put it, part of “the show.”

There are countless examples of how stiff that upper lip could be, but when Seldon and Walsh cite the example of Captain Francis Townend (Dulwich), even those accustomed to such stories have to pause to ask, who were these men?: “Both legs blown off by a shell and balancing himself on his stumps, [Townend] told his rescuer to tend to the men first and said that he would be all right, though he might have to give up rugby next year. He then died.”

Pastoral care was all very well, but the soldiers also knew that, unlike the much-resented staff officers, their officers took the same, or greater, risks that they did. This was primarily due to the army’s traditional suspicion that the lower orders—not to speak of the raw, half-trained recruits who appeared in the trenches after 1914—could not be trusted with anything resembling responsibility, but it also reflected the officers’ own view of what their job should be. And so, subalterns (a British army term for officers below the rank of captain), captains, majors, and even colonels led from the front, often fulfilling, particularly in the case of subalterns, a role that in other armies would be delegated to NCOs. The consequences were lethal. Making matters worse, the inequality between the classes was such that officers were on average five inches taller than their men, and, until the rules were changed in 1916, they always wore different uniforms too. The Germans knew who to shoot. The longer-term implications of this cull of the nation’s elite may have been exaggerated by Britons anxious to explain away their country’s subsequent decline, but the numbers have not: some 35,000 former public schoolboys died in the war, a large slice of a small stratum of society.

Roughly eleven percent of those who fought in the British army were killed, but, as Seldon and Walsh show, the death rate among former public schoolboys (most of whom were officers) ran at some eighteen percent. For those who left school in the years leading up to 1914 (and were thus the most likely to have served as junior officers) the toll was higher still. Nearly forty percent of the Harrow intake of the summer of 1910 (my grandfather arrived at the school the following year) were not to survive the war. Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War (2010) by John Lewis-Stempel is an elegiac, moving, and vivid account of what awaited them. Lewis-Stempel explains his title thus: “The average time a British Army junior officer survived during the Western Front’s bloodiest phases was six weeks.”

To Lewis-Stempel, a fierce critic of those who see the war as a pointless tragedy, the bravery and determination of these young officers made them “the single most important factor in Britain’s victory on the Western Front,” a stretch, but not an altogether unreasonable one, and he is not alone in thinking this way. The British army weathered the conflict far better—and far more cohesively—than did those of the other original combatants, and effective officering played no small part in that.

Lewis-Stempel attributes much of that achievement to the “martial and patriotic spirit” of the public schools, a view of those establishments with which Parker would, ironically, agree, but that is to muddle consequence with cause. Patriotic, yes, the schools were that, as was the nation—being top dog will have that effect. But, like the rest of the country, they were considerably less “martial” than Britain’s mastery of so much of the globe would suggest. A public school education may have provided a good preparation for the trenches, but it did not pave the way to them. That so many alumni came to the defense of their country in what was seen as its hour of need ought not to form any part of any serious indictment against the schools from which they came. That they sometimes did so with insouciance and enthusiasm that seems remarkable today was a sign not of misplaced jingoism, but of a lack of awareness that, a savage century later, it’s difficult not to envy.

And when that awareness came, they still stuck it out, determined to see the job done. Seldon and Walsh write that “It was the ability . . . to endure which underpinned the former public schoolboys’ leadership of the army and the nation.” Perhaps it would have been better if they had had been less willing to endure and more willing to question, but that’s a different debate. To be sure, there was plenty of talk of the nobility of sacrifice—and of combat—but, for the most part, that was evidence not of a death wish or any sort of bloodlust, but of the all too human need to put what they were doing, and what they had lost, into finer words and grander context.

And that they clung so closely to memories of the old school—to an extent that seems extraordinary today—should come as no surprise. These were often very young men, often barely out of their teens. School, especially for those who had boarded, had been a major part of their lives, psychologically as well as chronologically. “School,” wrote Robert Graves (Charterhouse), “became the reality, and home life the illusion.” And now its memory became something to cherish amid the mad landscape of war.

They wrote to their schoolmasters and their schoolmasters wrote to them. They returned to school on leave and they devoured their school magazines. They fought alongside those who had been to the same schools and they gave their billets familiar school names. They met up for sometimes astoundingly lavish old boys’ dinners behind the lines, including one attended by seventy Wykehamists to discuss the proposed Winchester war memorial. The names of three of the subalterns present would, Seldon and Walsh note, eventually be recorded on it.

So far as is possible given what they are describing, these two authors tell this story dispassionately. Theirs is a calm, thoroughly researched work, lacking the emotional excesses that are such a recurring feature of the continuing British argument over the Great War. That said, this book’s largely uninterrupted sequence of understandably admiring tales could have done with just a bit more counterbalance. For that try reading the recently published diaries written in a Casualty Clearing Station by the Earl of Crawford (Private Lord Crawford’s Great War Diaries: From Medical Orderly to Cabinet Minister) with its grumbling about “ignorant and childish” young officers arousing “panic among the men [with] their wild and dangerous notions.”

Doubtless the decision by Captain Billy Neville (Dover College) to arrange for his platoons to go over the top on the first day of the Somme kicking soccer balls is something that Crawford would have included amongst the “puerile and fantastic nonsense” he associated with such officers. Seldon and Walsh, by contrast, see this—and plausibly so—not as an example of Henry Newbolt’s instruction to “Play up! play up! and play the game!” being followed to a lunatic degree, but rather as an astute attempt by Neville to give his soldiers some psychological support. “His aim was to make his men, who he knew would be afraid, more comfortable.” Better to think of those soccer balls than the enemy machine guns waiting just ahead. Nineteen thousand British troops were killed that day, including Neville. He was twenty-one.

Crawford was a hard-headed, acerbic, and clever Conservative, but occasionally his inner curmudgeon overwhelmed subtler understanding, as, maybe, did his location behind the lines, fifteen miles from where these officers shone. Nevertheless, one running theme of his diaries, the luxuries that some of them allowed themselves (“yesterday a smart young officer in a lofty dogcart drove a spanking pair of polo ponies tandem past our gate”) touches on a broader topic—the stark difference in the ways that officers and men were treated—that deserves more attention than it gets in Public Schools and the Great War. Even the most junior officers were allocated a “batman” (a servant). They were given more leave, were paid a great deal more generously, and, when possible, were fed far better and housed much more comfortably than their men. Even in a more deferential age, this must have rankled. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Parker dwells on this issue in more detail than Seldon and Walsh, but, fair-minded again, agrees that what truly counted with the troops was the fact that “when it came to battle [the young officers’] circumstances were very much the same as their own.”

They died together. And they are buried together, too, not far from where they fell. As the founder of the Imperial War Graves Commission explained, “in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the officers will tell you that, if they are killed, they would wish to be among their men.”

A century later, that’s where they still are.

Richard Ropner - Random Recollections (unpublished - 1965)

Red Dawn

Robert Service: Spies and Commissars - The Early Years of the Russian Revolution

The Weekly Standard, February 4, 2013

Russian Civil War Monument, Archangel, Russia, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

When everything changes, what should be done?

Over 30 years after Ayatollah Khomeini lit the Islamic fire, the West is still fumbling its way to a proper response. Imagine, then, the challenge posed by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. A key partner in the Allied war against Germany had just been hijacked by a fanatical cult intent on remaking the world, and the world had no clue what to do in reply.

That’s the background to this fine new work by Robert Service, a distinguished historian of Soviet communism perhaps best known for his biographies of Lenin and Trotsky, two monsters brought to unusually vivid life in these pages. Here’s Trotsky, flirting with Clare Sheridan (Winston Churchill’s embarrassing first cousin, as it happens) as she sculpts his bust in the Kremlin, and there’s Lenin, “shortish, pedantic and impatient. With his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat, he seemed at times like an angry Sunday preacher.”

This is a deftly drawn book, illuminated by the author’s eye for detail, ear for a good quote, and nose for a ripping yarn.

And what a yarn it is. The ancien régime is no more. We are given a quick look at the deposed and imprisoned Czar Nicholas, the most prominent, if far from the most important, of all the “former people” (to borrow the chilling Bolshevik phrase), reading “Turgenev .  .  . [and] anti-Semitic tracts.” Meanwhile, the armies of his kinsman, the Kaiser, are tearing chunks off what once was the Russian Empire, before dissolving into confusion after defeat on the Western Front.

All is flux. The territory controlled by the Bolsheviks shrinks and grows in a mirror image of the tides of a vast, bloody, and chaotic civil war, and the Kremlin’s efforts to export its revolution to Warsaw and beyond. National independence movements rise and fall. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania get clean away (for now), Ukraine and Georgia are not so lucky. Hovering uncertainly on the fringes are troops dispatched to Russia by its erstwhile allies in the hope that they might somehow reverse the worst of the revolution. They were never able to do so.

Service gives an excellent overview of this bewildering series of conflicts, and of the dawn of revolution as a whole, but this is just the frame for his picture of a country where nothing was as it had been and everything was up for grabs. Older, more genteel techniques of influencing events no longer worked. Traditional diplomacy was dead.

But both Russia and its revolution were too big to ignore. Although foreign governments may have dithered, some of their citizens did not. It is around their stories that Service shapes his narrative. The Bolsheviks might have thought that they were steering immense, impersonal, and unstoppable historical forces, but the new world that they created was so fluid and so fragile that the individual could, and did, make a difference.

There were the true believers—early fellow travelers not just along for the ride but eager to speed it on its way—such as the American journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant, and, more equivocally, the Briton Arthur Ransome. Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, ended up an honored corpse beneath the Kremlin walls; Bryant, his widow, was subsequently married (for a while) to the man later appointed the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Ransome became a much-loved children’s writer (Swallows and Amazons and similarly wholesome fare) and a less-loved husband of one of Trotsky’s former secretaries.

Not so idealistic, but in some ways no less credulous, were the prospectors among the rubble, the entrepreneurs and con men who saw the collapse of Russian capitalism as a business opportunity. And then there are the real heroes of this book, the remarkable band of (mainly) British or British-sponsored adventurers who did what they could to overturn Bolshevik rule.

While a small British expeditionary force gathered in the far north, His Majesty’s irregulars set to work in Moscow. At least three of them—Sidney Reilly, Paul Dukes, and George Hill—could, notes Service, “have supplied inspiration for James Bond.” No martinis, but in just one paragraph we read about Reilly’s involvement with Yelizaveta. And Dagmara. And Olga. We also read about that clever and unconventional thrill-seeker, Robert Bruce Lockhart, designated “Head of the British Mission” and the ideal agent-diplomat for a place where the rules of diplomacy had broken down. Between romances, Bruce Lockhart plotted coups. And the Britons were not alone: Uncle Sam was represented by the more staid, but not ineffective, “Information” Service, run by the marvelously named Xenophon Dmitrievich de Blumenthal Kalamatiano, a one-man tribute both to American’s melting pot and its enterprise.

If all this sounds like the stuff of John Buchan, only more so, that’s because it is. This is a story with room for Latvian riflemen, Czech Legionnaires, and a Polish Women’s Death Battalion; for failed revolutions across Europe, for conspiracies and spies, and for the daredevil aviator Merian Cooper, one of the American volunteers in an air squadron that helped Poland beat off Bolshevik invasion. (“Coop” was shot down but escaped after 10 months of Soviet captivity. A decade-and-a-half later, he coproduced, cowrote, and codirected King Kong.)

For all the tales of derring-do, however, it’s impossible to read this book without sadness and frustration. This was a tragedy that could have been cut short. Winston Churchill, a minister in the British government during this period, argued for more to be done against the Reds. He understood what his cousin Clare Sheridan did not: that this terrible infant revolution needed to be “strangled in its cradle.” Not for the last time in his career, too few listened until it was too late.

To some Western leaders, Bolshevism was a spasm that would pass. Russia’s counterrevolutionary armies—the Whites—would prevail with just a little support from the West; or maybe Bolshevism, an onslaught on human nature itself, would simply collapse, or be overthrown in its own heartlands. Others, not unreasonably, feared that their own, already war-weary peoples would be driven to revolt by the prospect of participating in what many were bound to see as a bosses’ crusade against a bright, brave experiment. So, denied the outside assistance that might have made a difference, the Whites were overwhelmed, beaten by an enemy that, in the end, proved more cohesive and determined than they were. The undersized and ultimately irrelevant Allied detachments—primarily French, Japanese, American, and British—slunk home from their beachheads, but the Western statesmen told themselves not to worry: Trade would blunt Leninist rigor, and a cordon sanitaire of new East-Central European states would keep Bolshevism confined to its birthplace.

Less than a quarter of a century later, the Red Army was in Berlin. As for His Majesty’s irregulars, most resumed lives of quieter distinction, but the (probably) Ukrainian-born Sidney Reilly (né Rosenblum) continued to fight. Lured back to the Soviet Union in an elaborate sting operation, he fell into the hands of the secret police, and, like millions to come, was killed.

The Iciest Apparatchik

John Bew: Castlereagh - A Life

The New Criterion, January 1, 2013

There is a statue of Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) in Westminster Abbey, but the inscription on his grave nearby has, with perfect melancholy symbolism, worn away. With the exception of the Irish, who forget nothing, Castlereagh is usually remembered, if at all, only for fighting a duel with a cabinet colleague and for committing suicide with a penknife, the sole British foreign secretary to have done so, by that or any other method.

Mainstream historians who prefer to run no risks might add that Castlereagh was a wicked reactionary, author of the policies that generated the insults that have kept his name alive in literature, if nowhere else. Byron labeled him an “intellectual eunuch”—a sneer made all the more cutting by his target’s childlessness—and rejoiced at his suicide: “Here lie the bones of Castlereagh/ Stop, traveler, and piss.”

Shelley, not to be out-Michael Moored, had this to say in the aftermath of the bloody suppression of calls for parliamentary reform:

I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Henry Kissinger, however, is something of a fan.

Castlereagh, with Metternich, was the subject of Kissinger’s first book, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822. It is long out of print, but at least it gave him the billing he deserved. That’s unusual: Looking through the extensive bibliography at the end of John Bew’s fine new life of Castlereagh, it’s striking to see how few books published in the last century include his subject’s name in their titles. The title of one of those that do—C. J. Bartlett’s Lord Castlereagh: The Rediscovery of a Statesman (1969)—is itself an indication of fame that has passed into shadow.

Castlereagh was one of the architects of Britain’s victory over Napoleon and, at the Congress of Vienna and thereafter, a creator of the system that helped shape that continent for a century—the Concert of Europe. He was simultaneously the Foreign Secretary and the Leader of the House of Commons for a decade. Dublin-born, he played a prominent role in the suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798. Two years after that, he was instrumental in forging a formal union between Great Britain and his homeland. Sic transit gloria and all that, but his current obscurity seems overdone. Shelley, the author of “Ozymandias,” might have approved, but Mr. Bew evidently does not.

His book is designed “to challenge [the] image of Castlereagh as an unthinking reactionary,” and also, I suspect, to restore this forgotten giant to the prominence that he deserves—for good or bad—in Britons’ understanding of their own past. Bew succeeds on the first count and, aided by his formidable storytelling skills, deserves to do no less on the second. Intricate descriptions of Castlereagh’s political and diplomatic maneuverings are inevitable, and they come with their longueurs. But these are more than offset by a sensitive, sympathetic and lively depiction of the man as well as the politician, and of a family that included the Bizarro Castlereagh: his half-brother, “Fighting Charlie,” a proto-Flashman in the George MacDonald Fraser style, whose louche exploits act as a jangling, ribald refrain to his older sibling’s infinitely more stately waltz.

Bew has an eye for the entertaining detail, and he depicts a time and a place impossibly remote and startlingly close. Popular resentment over “tales of ostentation and obscene wealth” that emerged from the seemingly endless series of international conclaves reminds us that the distance from Vienna and Aix-La-Chapelle to Turtle Bay, Davos, and Brussels is not so great after all.

And then there are this book’s more profound contemporary resonances. Europe is now again in disarray, a global revolutionary movement—this time Islamic (how the philosophes would have despaired)—is on the march. New powers are asserting themselves with little respect for the rules of the post-1945 game. Castlereagh would have recognized the picture, and, with his Hobbesian view of humanity, would not have been terribly surprised. As he would have understood, the United States, Britain’s successor as top dog in the pound, has to work out a response, a process that must first involve deciding what foreign policy is for.

About that, Castlereagh had few doubts by 1814. After the expense, danger, and disruption of the Napoleonic wars, the national interest defined (as it always should be—coldly, clinically, and with practical amorality) lay in the maintenance of a peaceful Europe that left Britain free from danger and its trade from disruption. Sharper than the treaty makers at Versailles a century later and too coolly rational to be interested in revenge, he blocked plans to impose a harsh, inherently destabilizing settlement on the defeated France. What he wanted—and what he got—was the creation of a continental balance in which no one power predominated. If that meant going along with a despot or two, so be it. Stability was its own reward. Extreme reaction was potentially as unsettling as “political experiment and popular delirium,” and no less to be discouraged. Attempts by Russia’s increasingly bizarre Czar to recruit Britain into a monarchical Holy Alliance intended to impose a cross-and-scepter anticipation of the Brezhnev doctrine on Europe was rejected. “Mysticism and nonsense” said Castlereagh, as, indeed, it was.

Those are not the words of an unreconstructed reactionary. On the contrary, Castlereagh was, Bew proves, a man of the Enlightenment, but without illusion. He had little time for the stupidities of the ancien régime, but he also witnessed revolutionary France (“that pile of ruins”) first hand. Chaos, he saw, was rarely a friend of liberty, progress, or prosperity. He would have cast a cold eye over the Arab Spring. Change, he accepted, could be for the good, but the best chance of it to work out that way would be for it to be incremental, gradual, and cautious—sometimes, as in the case of his careful support for the abolition of slavery, excruciatingly so. With Castlereagh, calculation and principle walked hand-in-hand.

Thus, the formal absorption of Ireland into a greater (comfortably Protestant) United Kingdom would, he thought, smooth the way to the Catholic emancipation that Castlereagh (to use American terminology, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian) regarded both as a worthy objective and an essential element in the anchoring of John Bull’s other island. George III disagreed. Perhaps losing America was not enough. Catholic emancipation was delayed for another three decades, further poisoning a well that Castlereagh had already done his bit to pollute.

For when Ireland rose in rebellion in early 1798, Castlereagh went along with, and then presided over, a ferocious response which was shocking even then, and for which he bears more responsibility than Bew appears willing to admit. Cornwallis (yes, that Cornwallis) arrived in June that year to take charge, and quickly grasped that the extreme brutality was self-defeating and adopted a more moderate course. Castlereagh again went along, impressing Cornwallis with his loyalty to the new line. As Bew demonstrates, Castlereagh could be the chilliest of apparatchiks, but he was no sadist. The excesses had been distasteful. Worse, they were counterproductive, an unforgivable flaw to this supremely pragmatic man.

He himself was never to be forgiven for them, either in Ireland or by a growing army of liberal critics outraged first by Castlereagh’s behavior in Ireland, and then by his support for a Europe in which Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Bourbon, and Romanov were free to dash both the hopes of the Enlightenment and the dreams of smaller nations. The abuse thrown at him would have been all too recognizable to George H. W. Bush (not to speak of his son), a lesser master of Realpolitik, but a skilled player of the diplomatic game nonetheless, whose resemblances to Castlereagh include an inarticulacy that was a gift to his opponents, mercilessly used. Castlereagh’s heavy-handed opposition to political reform at home (with its echo of earlier Irish horrors) and acid reluctance to lend even verbal assistance to liberal crusades abroad, such as Greece’s struggle against Ottoman rule, only sharpened his critics’ sense that their bogeyman was on the wrong side of history. Similar sentiments put him on the wrong side of historians too. And they wrote him out of the script.

To mention George H. W. Bush is to remember that pragmatism taken too far can be the opposite. Stasis is not always stability, sticking to the rules is not always the best policy, and precedent is not always a good substitute for imagination. It’s easy to imagine that Castlereagh, iciest of statesmen, would have abandoned the Shia of Southern Iran, and, for that matter, turned up in Kiev to advise Ukrainians to stay within their crumbling Soviet home. But to argue, as the caricature would have it, that, had not overwork and stress—there are other, more exotic explanations—driven him to suicide, Castlereagh would undoubtedly have encouraged the Concert of Europe to keep playing an unchanged tune in rapidly changing times is to underestimate the subtlety and cleverness of a man, who for all his failings, has been sold short for too long.

After this book, there’s no excuse for that.

Downhill from Here

Marcus Scriven: Splendour & Squalor

The Weekly Standard, January 2, 2012

Henry Paget

Anglophobes or egalitarians still looking for confirmation that the English aristocracy is no longer what it was may find Marcus Scriven’s Splendour & Squalor the most satisfying read since whatever it was that Sarah Ferguson last wrote.

These are well-told tales of well-born ruin to savor, complete with grubby interludes, penny ante crises, and tawdry finales that all combine to make a wider, and even more conclusive, point about the decline of the old social order: The aristocratic fiascos of the 20th century are those of a shrunken and shriveled caste. They simply cannot compete with the epic follies of Britain’s gloriously ignoble noble past, tantalizing flickers of which illuminate the introduction of Scriven’s marvelously off-kilter chronicle.

England’s older generation set the bar high, and would, in many ways, have been better suited to Scriven’s wry tastes than the later 20th-century dross to which he has dedicated his efforts. Scriven’s four aristocrats furnish him with squalor, certainly, but not so much in the way of splendor. For an example of the latter we have to turn to the past, making do with glimpses of exotics such as Henry Cyril Paget (1875-1905), the 5th Marquess of Anglesey, the “dancing Marquess” who scandalized an earlier era and brings his own peculiar glamour to Scriven’s introduction. His was a whirling, twirling saga of madness, camp, narcissism, waste, and style. The misfires of the more modern noblemen to whom Scriven’s book is devoted come across, by comparison, as distinctly damp squibs.

Anglesey devoted himself to his wardrobe, walking sticks, jewelry, yachts, cars, and, as his sobriquet would suggest, dancing. He converted the family chapel into a theater and “commissioned .  .  . a production of Aladdin, for which he pioneered ‘the Butterfly Dance,’ a solo which he alone performed,” both in the former chapel and then on tour. He died in Monte Carlo, after running up spectacular debts, a blow to a distinguished lineage made no easier to bear, as Scriven notes, by “doubts over his legitimacy,” a blurred hallmark he shared with Edward FitzGerald (1892-1976), the 7th Duke of Leinster, serial husband and serial bankrupt, who is first of the scapegraces to feature in the main section of Scriven’s roll of dishonor.

Disappointingly, perhaps, for some of his relatives, there were no such worries about the paternity of Angus Charles Drogo Montagu (1938-2002), the eventual 12th Duke of Manchester, and the least interesting of Scriven’s far from fantastic four. The dullard second son of one of the many branches of an ancient family, he had few skills, a demanding sense of entitlement, and a fondness, when he could get it, of the high life and repeat marriage (he managed four wives, equaling Leinster’s haul). This would have been tricky in more capable hands, but when combined with a love of alcohol, a yen for gambling, a nose for a bad deal, and resources that were generally as modest as his talents, the consequences tended to be messy, and included a spell in an American prison after one of his “bits of business” went wrong.

Scriven, a deft writer, makes what he can of Drogo’s dreary decline. No Icarus, Montagu aimed low, and landed lower, scrabbling for survival while failing to take advantage of the breaks that came his undeserving way. He was a man with little to commend him, and yet, such was the lingering appeal of a title, the mere fact of his persuaded a surprising number of people to throw some bones his way. He was recruited by fraudster and law firm alike to lend the sheen of his forebears to their business. The state chipped in, too. As the senior peer he eventually became, Montagu was entitled to play legislator (which was of no interest) in the House of Lords and to be paid whenever he turned up (which was), facts that may lead some readers to sympathize with Tony Blair’s purge of almost all the hereditary element from Britain’s upper house. That would be a mistake. Manned as of old, the House of Lords was too obviously and indefensibly archaic to be taken seriously. Dominated these days by cronies, stooges, bien-pensant worthies, and burnt-out grandees, it has become a more subtle, and thus more effective, insult to democracy.

But noble birth comes with an old, dangerous magic. Montagu used his to beguile, but was beguiled himself. It gave him both a sense of entitlement, and obligation, too. He could afford neither. No matter. Appearances mattered: “A duke must be seen to behave like a duke.” His tips were generous, his hospitality was lavish, and his pockets were emptied.

No British book on hereditary catastrophe would be complete without the Hervey family, long the poster boys for disorderly DNA, and Scriven gives starring roles to two of them, while scrupulously noting that if there was a “bad” gene, it was unusually recessive. The unorthodoxies of various 18th-century Herveys (including homosexuality, promiscuity, “exhibitionism of a specialist kind,” sadism, murder, and—impressive in a bishop—something close to atheism) were followed by a century in which they were, despite the “discordant” tendency of their Irish cousins to emigrate to Canada, “very nearly the embodiment of aristocratic virtue.”

The same could not be said of the dysfunctional duo at the heart of Scriven’s narrative, Victor Hervey (1915-1985), the 6th Marquess of Bristol, and his son John (1954-99), the 7th. The heir to a vast fortune, Victor went in for conventional aristocratic misbehavior—extravagance, brutal violence, reactionary politics, pathological snobbery, invented Ruritanian uniforms, absurd business ventures, immoderate matrimony, and immoderate drinking—with considerable enthusiasm. He then added flourishes that were all his own, including crooked Finnish arms deals, jewel theft, and episodes of fraud.

Of all the wreckage that Victor created, however, the most disastrous was his eldest son, John. Starved of paternal affection and kept away from his mother (Victor had moved on to another wife), this poor little rich boy’s upbringing was doubtless made more confusing by its toxic mixture of neglect, luxury, and frequent reminders of his elevated social status, a cocktail that cannot have left him well-equipped to deal with the temptations that the age of disco put in his way. The money was there, the drugs were there, and in the Dionysian interlude between the waning of traditional sexual morality and the waxing of AIDS (gene or no gene, John was one of the gay Herveys), playtime was what you could make of it.

But John’s was a compulsive hedonism, with not a lot of joy about it, marked by boorish displays of excess, sporadic stints in jail, and the humiliations of addiction. In the end, the money was exhausted, and so was his health. His life ended after only 44 years. It’s hard to believe that it was much fun while it lasted.

And was his aristocratic birth at least partly to blame? John could be a caricature of rampaging nobility—bullying, destructive, and arrogant—yet traces of noblesse oblige hint at a more rounded sense of self. He was kind to his household servants, a kindness that was repaid with devotion. They knew their place, and he knew his. That was in the script, too. He was, or would become, the marquess, and, like his father, he was not shy about proclaiming it with displays of don’t-you-know-who-I-am alien to the patrician restraint that has contributed so much to the survival of the English upper classes. There was a coronet on his bathrobe, his tie-pin,and on the top of his four-poster bed. There were heraldic crests on his slippers and coats of arms on his car.

Perhaps it’s kindest to see John’s doomed, wild ride as containing a strong element of performance. Was this not notably imaginative man, like the hopeless Manchester, merely trying to live up to what he imagined was expected of an aristocrat? Scriven is too disciplined a writer to indulge overmuch in long-distance psychiatry, and doesn’t say. This reticence is a pity: A touch more speculation from this shrewd, perceptive writer would have helped the story along.

In the end, John proved a dud even at debauchery, comfortably outclassed in that respect by the new rock ’n’ roll aristocracy with which he sometimes socialized and probably, at some level, tried to compete. They outdid him in vice, vigor, achievements, and, generally, lifespan. There’s probably some vaguely Darwinian lesson to be drawn from this, but if this book suffers from Scriven’s reluctance to act as a psychiatrist, it gains from his decision not to turn teacher, preacher, or leveler despite the obvious opportunities with which his material has presented him.

The social history that emerges is fascinating, but oblique, only there for those who wish to find it. There are no tiresome leftist tirades against the hereditary principle, no leaden sermons on the need for a sober life; merely dark, but all-too-human tales of privilege and disaster, drolly, drily, and not unsympathetically told, that together conjure up a spectacle as appallingly irresistible as the crash of an extremely expensive car.