ABSTRACT
The aristocracy was the ruling class. A minority were pre-selected by birth and inherited wealth to social eminence, plutocracy and power, and were predestined to life-long respect, deference and obedience. Such notions are hard to stomach today. They offend our most heartfelt principles and preconceptions. In an age founded on merit and equal opportunities, means tests and the redistribution of wealth, already committed to universal access and inclined increasingly towards positive discrimination, they are literally incomprehensible. Private health-care and public schools advantaging individuals are deplored alongside anything harking of privilege, elitism, inheritance or wealth. We don’t kowtow to anyone, tug the forelock, or say ‘sir’. Nobody condescends to us or patronises us. Relegating the majority ‘to the permanent disdain of their more honourable superiors’ is no longer acceptable.1 How then can we today engage with a culture where such wrongs were not merely tolerated, but were valued, prioritised and, indeed, were unquestionable? We misunderstand that culture whenever we allude to the ‘simple if vicious purpose’ behind the aristocratic monopoly of hunting, presume that ‘members of the ruling class were in general men of arrested intellectual development’, or assert that ‘upper class brutality … is what defines the upper class’.2 We accept that aristocrats believed their ‘social advantages were rightfully imparted by inheritance rather than performance’ only on the cynical basis that they had an eye for the main chance and wished to maintain the system that privileged them.3 But such values were not confined to the aristocracy. They were widely held. Bishop Russell, who rose from obscurity on intellectual merit, agreed with Aristotle that ‘noblesse is virtue and ancient riches’ and that ‘the politic rule of every region well ordered stands in the nobles’.4 As in so many cultures ‘leadership properly lies with those who enjoy an innate, special claim to it’.5 The term aristocracy originally denoted not merely an elite, but the rule of
the best. Copious fifteenth-century evidence located the aristocracy within the maior et sanior pars (greater and wiser part). Aristocracy is another concept to which we must acclimatise ourselves. It was a fact of life – a natural fact of life – as beyond question as the God-given social hierarchy itself.
