Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [21]
In their luxurious and lavish world, self-indulgence was the natural law. Notable eccentrics like the nocturnal Duke of Portland and bad-tempered autocrats like Sir George Sitwell and Sir William Eden were merely representatives of their class in whom the habit of having their own way had gone to extremes. But for the majority it was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease and to make life for the great and wealthy as uninterruptedly pleasant as possible.
The lordly manner was the result. When Colonel Brabazon, who affected a fashionable difficulty with his r’s, arrived late at the railroad station to be informed that the train for London had just left, he instructed the station master, “Then bwing me another.” Gentlemen who did not relish a cold wait at a country station or a slow journey on a local made a habit of special trains which cost £25 for an average journey. There were not a few among them who, like Queen Victoria, had never seen a railway ticket. Ladies had one-of-a-kind dresses designed exclusively for them by Worth or Doucet, who devoted as much care to each client as if he were painting her portrait. “So as to be different from other people,” the English-born beauty, Daisy, Princess of Pless, had “a fringe of real violets” sewn down the train of her court dress, which was of transparent lace lined with blue chiffon and sprinkled with gold sequins.
Fed upon privilege, the patricians flourished. Five at least of the leading ministers in Lord Salisbury’s Government were over six feet tall, far above the normal stature of the time. Of the nineteen members of the Cabinet, all but two lived to be over seventy, seven exceeded eighty, and two exceeded ninety at a time when the average life expectancy of a male at birth was forty-four and of a man who had reached twenty-one was sixty-two. On their diet of privilege they acquired a certain quality which Lady Warwick could define only in the words, “They have an air!”
Now and then the sound of the distant rumble in the atmosphere caused them vague apprehensions of changes coming to spoil the fun. With port after dinner the gentlemen talked about the growth of democracy and the threat of Socialism. Cartoons in newspapers pictured John Bull looking over a fence at a bull called Labour. Most people were aware of problems without seriously imagining any major change in the present order of things, but a few were deeply disturbed. Young Arthur Ponsonby saw every night along the embankment from Westminster to Waterloo Bridge the “squalid throng of homeless, wretched outcasts sleeping on the benches,” and broke with the courtier tradition of his father and brother to become a Socialist. Lady Warwick tried to smother nagging doubts about a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure in “recurrent fits of philanthropy” which she indulged in from “an impelling desire to help put things right and a deep conviction that things as they were, were not right.” In 1895, on reading an attack by the Socialist editor Robert Blatchford in his paper the Clarion on a great ball given at Warwick Castle to celebrate her husband’s accession to the title, she rushed in anger to London, leaving a house full of guests, to confront the enemy. She explained to him how during a hard winter when many were out of work the Warwick celebrations provided employment. Mr. Blatchford explained to his beautiful caller the nature of productive labour and the principles of Socialist theory. She returned to Warwick in a daze of new ideas and thereafter devoted her energy, money arid influence to propagating them, to the acute discomfort of her circle.
Lady Warwick was a straw, not a trend. As a nation, Britain in 1895 had an air of careless supremacy which galled her neighbors. The attitude, called “splendid isolation,” was both a state of mind and a fact. Britain did not worry seriously about potential enemies, felt no need of allies and had no friends. In a world in