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on French poets and an introduction to North’s Plutarch and after serving as Mr. Balfour’s Parliamentary Private Secretary was named Under-Secretary of War in 1898, despite Lord Salisbury’s reluctant remark, “I don’t like poets.” George Curzon, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs and soon to be appointed Viceroy of India, was another Soul, as was St. John Brodrick, a later Secretary for War. Both were heirs to peerages who staged a vain protest against their anticipated fate of enforced removal to the House of Lords. Others were the Tennant connection: Alfred Lyttelton, a champion cricketer who was to become Colonial Secretary and who had been married, before she died, to Laura Tennant; Lord Ribblesdale, who was married to Charlotte Tennant; and the uninhibited third sister, Margot, whose marriage to the outgoing Liberal Home Secretary, Mr. Asquith, was attended by two past prime ministers, Mr. Gladstone and Lord Rosebery, and two future ones, Mr. Balfour and the groom. A particularly admired member was Harry Cust, heir of the Brownlow barony, a scholar and athlete with a blazing wit who on sheer reputation alone, with no previous experience, was asked across the dinner table to be editor of the Pall Mall Gazette ; he accepted on the spot and served for four years. Flawed by a “fatal self-indulgence” with regard to women—to whom he was “irresistibly fascinating”—his public career suffered and never fulfilled its early promise.
    Society was small and homogeneous and its sine qua non was land. For an outsider to break in, it was essential first to buy an estate and live on it, although even this did not always work. When John Morley, at that time a Cabinet minister, was visiting Skibo, where Mr. Andrew Carnegie had constructed a swimming pool, he took his accompanying detective to see it and asked his opinion. “Well, sir,” the detective replied judiciously, “it seems to me to savour of the parvenoo.”
    In the “brilliant and powerful body,” as Winston Churchill called it, of the two hundred great families who had been governing England for generations, everyone knew or was related to everyone else. Since superiority and comfortable circumstances imposed on the nobility and gentry a duty to reproduce themselves, they were given to large families, five or six children being usual, seven or eight not uncommon, and nine or more not unknown. The Duke of Abercorn, father of Lord George Hamilton in Salisbury’s Government, had six sons and seven daughters; the fourth Baron Lyttelton, Gladstone’s brother-in-law and father of Alfred Lyttelton, had eight sons and four daughters; the Duke of Argyll, Secretary for India under Gladstone, had twelve children. As a result of the marriages of so many siblings, and of the numerous second marriages, everyone was related to a dozen other families. People who met each other every day, at each other’s homes, at race meetings and hunts, at Cowes, for the Regatta, at the Royal Academy, at court and in Parliament, were more often than not meeting their second cousins or brother-in-law’s uncle or stepfather’s sister or aunt’s nephew on the other side. When a prime minister formed a government it was not nepotism but almost unavoidable that some of his Cabinet should be related to him or to each other. In the Cabinet of 1895 Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary for War, was married to a sister of Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary for India, and Lansdowne’s daughter was married to the nephew and heir of the Duke of Devonshire, who was Lord President of the Council.
    The country’s rulers, said one, “knew each other intimately quite apart from Westminster.” They had been at school together and at one of the two favored colleges, Christ Church at Oxford or Trinity College at Cambridge. Here prime ministers—including Lords Rosebery and Salisbury, at Christ Church, and their immediate successors, Mr. Balfour and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, at Trinity—were