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By Root 1145 0

thick with footnotes identifying the Charles, Arthur, William and Francis of the author’s school days as “afterwards Chief of Imperial General Staff” or “afterwards Bishop of Southhampton” or Speaker of the House or Minister at Athens as the case might be. Through years of familiarity they knew each other’s characters and could ask each other favors. When Winston Churchill, at twenty-three, wanted to join the Sudan expedition in 1898 over the firm objections of its Commander-in-Chief, Sir Herbert Kitchener, the matter was not beyond accomplishment. Winston’s grandfather, the seventh Duke of Marlborough, had been Lord Salisbury’s colleague under Disraeli, and Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister listened amiably to the young man and promised his help. When it turned out to be needed on short notice, Winston had recourse to the Private Secretary, Sir Schomberg McDonnell, “whom I had seen and met in social circles since I was a child.” Winston found him dressing for dinner and on the errand being explained, “ ‘I’ll do it at once,’ said this gallant man, and off he went, discarding his dinner party.” In this way affairs were managed.

The mold in which they were all educated was the same, and its object was not necessarily the scientific spirit or the exact mind, but a “graceful dignity” which entitled the bearer to the status of English gentleman, and an unshatterable belief in that status as the highest good of man on earth. As such, it obligated the bearer to live up to it. In every boy’s room at Eton hung the famous picture by Lady Butler of the disaster at Majuba Hill showing an officer with uplifted sword charging deathward to the cry of “Floreat Etona!” The spirit instilled may have accounted for, as has been suggested, the preponderance of bravery over strategy in British officers. Yet to be an Etonian was “to imbibe a sense of effortless superiority and be lulled in a consciousness of unassailable primacy.” Clothed in this armor, its wearers were serenely sure of their world and sorry for anyone who was not of it. When Sir Charles Tennant and a partner at golf were preparing to drive and were rudely interrupted by a stranger who pushed in ahead and placed his own ball on the tee, the enraged partner was about to explode. “Don’t be angry with him,” Sir Charles soothed. “Perhaps he isn’t quite a gentleman, poor fellow, poor fellow.”

This magic condition was envied and earnestly imitated abroad by all the continental aristocracy (except perhaps the Russians, who spoke French and imitated nobody). German noblemen relentlessly married English wives and put on tweeds and raglan coats, while in France the life of the haut monde centered upon the Jockey Club, whose members played polo, drank whiskey and had their portraits painted in hunting pink by Helleu, the French equivalent of Sargent.

It was no accident that their admired model was thought of in equestrian terms. The English gentleman was unthinkable without his horse. Ever since the first mounted man acquired extra stature and speed (and, with the invention of the stirrup, extra fighting thrust), the horse had distinguished the ruler from the ruled. The man on horseback was the symbol of dominance, and of no other class anywhere in the world was the horse so intrinsic a part as of the English aristocracy. He was the attribute of their power. When a contemporary writer wished to describe the point of view of the county oligarchy it was equestrian terms that he used: they saw society, he wrote, made up of “a small select aristocracy born booted and spurred to ride and a large dim mass born saddled and bridled to be ridden.”

In 1895 the horse was still as inseparable from, and ubiquitous in, upper-class life as the servant, though considerably more cherished. He provided locomotion, occupation and conversation; inspired love, bravery, poetry and physical prowess. He was the essential element in racing, the sport of kings, as in cavalry, the elite of war. When an English patrician thought nostalgically of youth, it was as a time “when I looked at life from the saddle and