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By Root 1096 0

who earned less than £50 a year. The “poverty line” had been worked out at £55 a year, or 21s. 8d. a week, for a family of five. Indoor servants slept in attics or windowless basements. Agricultural laborers lived in houses for which they paid a shilling a week, and worked with scythe, plow and sickle in the fields from the time when the great horn boomed at five o’clock in the morning until nightfall. When their houses leaked or rotted they were dependent on the landlord for repairs, and unless the landlord took care of them when their earning power came to an end, they went to the workhouse to finish out their days. Estate servants—grooms, gardeners, carpenters, blacksmiths, dairymen and field hands—whose families had lived on the land as long as its owners, gave service that was “wholehearted and passionate.… Their pride was bound up in it.”

With the opening of the grouse season in August, and until the reopening of Parliament in January, the great landowners engaged in continuous entertainment of each other in week-long house parties of twenty to fifty guests. With each guest bringing his own servant, the host fed as many as a hundred, and on one occasion at Chatsworth, four hundred extra mouths while his house party lasted. Shooting was the favored pastime and consisted in displaying sufficient stamina and marksmanship, assisted by a loader and three or four guns, to bring down an unlimited bag of small game flushed out of its coverts by an army of beaters. From county to county and back and forth into Scotland, their trail marked by thousands upon thousands of dead birds and hares, the gentry were constantly on the move: for shooting with the Prince at Sandringham, for hunting (in blue and buff instead of scarlet coats) with the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds in Wiltshire, for deer stalking amid Scottish lochs and crags and trackless forests (“Keep doon, Squire, keep doon”—his ghillie whispered to Mr. Chaplin, forced to crawl into the open to come within shooting distance of his stag—“ye’re so splendidly built about the haunches I’m afeert the deer will be seeing ye”), for Christmas parties and coming-of-age parties and occasional time out at Homburg and Marienbad to purge satiated stomachs and allow the round to begin again.

Morning was the gentlemen’s time on the moors; ladies came down to breakfast in hats and at afternoon tea reigned in elaborate and languorous tea gowns of, it might be, “eau de Nil satin draped with gold-spangled mousseline de soie and bands of sable at hem and neck.” Formal dinners followed in full evening dress. All day, herds of servants glided silently about, bringing early morning tea and The Times, carrying up bath water and coal for the fireplaces, replenishing vases daily with fresh flowers, murmuring “His Grace is in the Long Library,” sounding gongs at meal times and waiting up to uncorset Her Ladyship for bed.

Each guest at the house parties had his name on a card fitted into a brass frame on his bedroom door and a corresponding card beside the bell indicator in the butler’s pantry. In assigning rooms the recognized, if unacknowledged, liaisons had to be considered. As long as the partners in these intramural infidelities did nothing to provoke a public scandal by outraged wife or cuckolded husband, they could do as they pleased. The overriding consideration was to prevent any exposure of misconduct to the lower classes. In that respect the code was rigid. Within the closed circle of the ruling class the unforgivable sin was to give away any member of the group; there must be no appeal to the Divorce Court, no publicity that would bring the members as a class into disrepute. If, regrettably, a husband refused absolutely to be complaisant and threatened action, all the arbiters of Society, including, if necessary, the Prince of Wales (despite his own hardly faultless record), rallied to stop him. He must not, they reminded him, sacrifice his class to such exposure. It was his duty to preserve appearances and an unsullied front before the gaze of the vulgar. Subdued, he would obey, even