l6 ENGLISHSAGA

Monarque, Revolutionary Tribune and Military Empire.

They had almost untrammelled power; they gambled,
hunted, drank and whored, they feared no man, they did what
was good in their own eyes, yet they did it with some measure of
moderation and restraint. In this they differed from other
tyrants and were like the ancient Athenians. By the time our
chapter of English history begins, they were already past their
prime and starting to decline. One sees them in the tell-tale
pages of Mr. Creevey: with their rentals multiplied out of all
measure by improved agriculture and urban expansion,1 but
already divorced by their staggering wealth from that close
contact with reality and their humbler fellow citizens which
had enabled their forebears to obtain power. Their ruling passion
was the chase. Their tragedy was that they were getting spoilt
by their own excessive wealth and power. Such a one was the
great Lambton of Durham—a man who in his lightning moods
beat his footmen, insulted his guests and declaimed against the
very privileges which enabled him to do these things with
impunity. He was called King Jog having once remarked that a
man could always "jog along" on £70,000 a year.

At its best the ruling caste was exemplified in the Duke of
Wellington. The younger son of a music-loving, dilettante lord,
a colonel at twenty-four and a major-general at thirty-three,
privilege—unasked and unsought—had enabled him To turn a
forlorn Iberian adventure into one of the most glorious chapters
of British military history, to fling back the hordes of advancing
Revolution and humble Napoleon himself on the field of Water-
loo. All this had happened before his forty-seventh year; since
then he had served his country as selflessly in the senate as in the
field. Now at the age of seventy-one he was the greatest public
figure in the nation. Without any of the arts that sway popular
opinion—which he unreservedly despised—he had accustomed
himself from his earliest years to a fearlessness in speech that took
the form of a literal and uncompromising truth on every occasion.
Eight years before at the time of the Reform Bill—a measure he
had opposed in the teeth of popular frenzy on the grounds that
sooner or later it must lead to a suicidal scramble for power—he
had had his windows broken by the very mob who a little while
before had acclaimed him as the victor of Waterloo. But he was

1Those of the Shakerleys, a typical north country family, increased tenfold between
1760 and 1830. . ,