I’ve just finished reading The Cousins by Max Egremont. It’s about two members of the English gentry, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham, who were both politically active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The impression you get of the gentry in the book is largely positive. Being part of the tradition of a landed estate, and having a good education and time for leisure, seems to have made the gentry both more cultivated and more genuinely conservative than the upper class we have today.

Blunt, as I’ve noted already, was spoiled in his politics (and looked on as a renegade by other members of his class) by his naive willingness to identify with the “other” rather than his own countrymen. Yet, even Blunt at times expresses the conservative spirit of the gentry, as when he wrote that preparing a history of his estate,

“has been a labour of love with me, for in my view of things the individuality of a landed estate is hardly less real than that of a kingdom, and equally deserves the loyal respect and reverence of those who shall come after.”

Unlike his cousin, Wyndham was a supporter of the Empire. He rose to become a cabinet member in Arthur Balfour’s government, but resigned in 1905. It was at this time that his politics became more distinctly conservative, in part because he began to self-consciously uphold the traditionalist values of his own class.

In 1904 he took the step of warning, in his Rectorial address at Glasgow, of the dangers of cosmopolitanism. By April 1905 he was confessing that “My sympathies are more and more with the real Tories,” with the gentry “whether of territorial birth or literary distinction” being the standard bearers of this real Tory tradition across Europe.

Then in 1906 the Conservative Party split on the issue of imperial preference. Wyndham had become a supporter of imperial preference, but Winston Churchill was one of the defectors who went over to the liberals because of his commitment to free trade.

The divided Conservative Party suffered a massive defeat at the elections of 1906. But this defeat drew forth a ringing defence of the Tory traditions of the gentry from George Wyndham. Imagine the following ever being uttered by a modern politician:

“I would rather sweep a gutter than be Winston Churchill ... I am an incorrigible Tory! Never more so than now. I am glad to go on fighting. I do not believe that we are going to forget the Past and foreswear the Future. The Church and the Realm are great spirits urging me on ... I am glad we are so soundly beaten. We have shed our Financiers and Brewers. We stand, by our names and breeding, for a tradition of one thousand years. We know how to fight and we know how to love and we KNOW. We are the tried steel of our race. I have never felt more confident in my ideals than now. I love the crowd and the aristocracy of my land. I detest cosmopolitans. I will suffer for my church. I will fight for the Empire of English thought that is to be. It is good to feel this.”

Wyndham was forced to live up to this fighting declaration when the Liberals sought to undermine the financial position of the gentry by levying new taxes on land ownership and when the Liberals moved against the veto powers of the House of Lords.

The Liberals narrowly won these battles but it’s to Wyndham’s credit that there was a real resistance to these measures, rather than another passive acceptance by the gentry of their own demise.