The Gentry: Stories of the English
Prize-winning author Adam Nicolson tells the story he was born to write – the real story of England. It is the gentry that has made England what it was and, to a degree, still is. In this vivid, lively book, history has never been more readable.We may well be ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, but for generations England was a country dominated by its middling families, rooted on their land, in their locality, with a healthy interest in turning a profit from their property and a deep distrust of the centralised state. The virtues we may all believe to be part of the English culture – honesty, affability, courtesy, liberality – each of these has their source in gentry life cultivated over five hundred years. These folk were the backbone of England.Adam Nicolson’s riveting book concentrates on fourteen families with a time-span from 1400 to the present day. From the medieval gung-ho of the Plumpton family to the high-seas adventures of the Lascelles in the 18th-century, to more modern examples, the book provides a chronological picture of the English, seen through these intimate, passionate, powerful stories of family saga. The families have been selected from all over the country and range from the famous to the unknown. Some families are divided by politics , such as the one who took different sides in the Reformation; others destroy their inheritance through reckless gambling or investments . All of them are vivid depictions of the life and code of the gentry, and have left deep archives of family papers which the author has been able to use, often for the very first time.THE GENTRY is first and foremost a wonderful sweep of English history. It presents a convincing argument on what has created the distinctive English character but with the sheer readability of an epic novel.
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Adam Nicolson
The Gentry
Stories of the English
For my daughters
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Introduction: Ungentle Gentles
Part I: The Inherited World 1410–1520
1410s–1520s
Survival
The Plumptons, Plumpton, Yorkshire
Part II: In the Renaissance State 1520–1610
1520s–1580s
Discretion
The Throckmortons, Coughton, Warwickshire
1580s–1610s
Control
The Thynnes, Oxford, Beaconsfield, Wiltshire, Shropshire and London
Part III: The Great Century 1610–1710
1610s–1650s
Steadiness
The Oglanders, Nunwell, Isle of Wight
1630s–1660s
Withdrawal
The Oxindens, Denton, Kent
1660s–1710s
Honour
The le Neves, Great Witchingham, Norfolk
Part IV: Atlantic Domains 1710–1790
1710s–1750s
Dominance
The Lascelles, Yorkshire, Barbados, Richmond and London
1730s–1790s
Courage
The Pinckneys, Wappoo and Charleston, South Carolina, and Richmond, Surrey
Part V: The Failing Vision 1790–1910
1790s–1840s
Fecklessness
The Capels, London, Brussels and Lausanne
1780s–1910s
Fantasy
The Hugheses, Kinmel, Denbighshire and Grosvenor Square, London
Part VI: The After-Life 1910–2010
1890s–1950s
Renunciation
The Aclands, Killerton, Devon and Holnicote, Somerset
1950s–2010s
Continuity
The Cliffords, Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire
Conclusion: Return of the Native
Notes
Acknowledgements
Searchable Terms
Other books by Adam Nicolson
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
Ungentle Gentles
No country has described itself so intimately and for so long as this one. The English have been the great self-recorders and England has preserved more of what its people have written about themselves than anywhere else on earth.>1 Inevitably, millions of English men and women have lived with no record of their existence but the writings of the self-recordists – the literate, the scholarly and the litigious, lovers and haters, accountants, manipulators, the worried and the triumphant, the gossips, the distant friends, people separated by business or ambition – have often been kept by their descendants. That is why the English gentry are such an intriguing world to explore: they both wrote and kept, and because of what they kept they are the most knowable English there have ever been. They may well be the most knowable people that have ever lived. Only governments and navies have been so careful about their own past.
Over the six centuries this book covers, the gentry wrote their lives down. Most of their documents, it is true, have disappeared. Often only one side of a correspondence remains. Sometimes a sequence breaks off without explanation. Sometimes there is nothing but the recording, yet again, of the properties owned, the debts incurred, the credit given. Individual families take up tens of shelf-yards with their title deeds. But alongside that, quantities of letters and journals have also found their way to the great public repositories with which this country is blessed: not only the National Archives in Kew and the British Library in St Pancras, but the strings of County Record Offices, all of which are stuffed with heartstoppingly vivid and unregarded treasures.
The people who appear in this book wrote in private and the experience of their words on the written page remains mysteriously private. When you sit at a desk in Exeter or Newport, in Norwich or Bangor, with their words in front of you, there is no discreet mulberry-coloured rope holding you away from them. There is no glass over the pictures, no Please Don’t Touch. The young men and women, the paterfamilias and the desperate nephew, the estate steward and the indigent younger brother, are all there with you in the room. Each letter or journal entry articulates its moment, not only in its words but in its physical form, the hurry or care with which it is written, the sense of politeness or intimacy, or rage. The unfolding of a letter from an envelope always seems to me like the opening of time itself. Nearly always they wrote on beautiful, handmade paper, in now fading brown ink, occasionally in blood, sometimes with a lock of hair folded up in a twist of the paper, once in these stories with the hair glued to the paper with a blob of sealing wax, sometimes in tears, when big blurring puddles have fallen on the ink. In one passage in this book, a grieving father wrote with his own tears, his silvery grey words now scarcely legible on the page.
In part, this book is a journey around that manuscript England, poking about in the national attic, but twinned to paper is another substance just as central to the life of the gentry and in constant dialogue with it: earth. This is a book about land, or at least about the meeting of land and paper. There is nothing mysterious or mystical about this. For most of English history, land was the principal means of production. Land was the national industry. Even as late as 1730,>2 three-quarters of the population derived their livelihood from it and half was directly engaged in farming. By 1800 that proportion had dropped to a third, by 1850 to a fifth, by 1900 a tenth, by 1970 a fortieth and by 2000 a hundredth. Our distance from the realities of land is the biggest obstacle we have in empathizing with the past. We no longer have an intuitive understanding of the centrality of the cultivated earth to the life systems of England, land not only as a way of growing food but for the gentry a source of income, in the form of rent, or the sale of produce grown and sold; and as a supremely secure asset, safer than houses. For the seventeenth-century political theorist James Harrington, ‘the Foundation of Property be in Land: but if in Money, lightly come, lightly go’.
