ABSTRACT
For many hundreds of years Britain had been ruled by a tiny elite who owned most of the wealth, made all the important decisions and exercised exclusive class power. It was not to be expected that this privileged position would be surrendered easily, and despite the industrial revolution and the widening of the franchise the aristocracy continued to dominate political and social life until the end of the nineteenth century. Radicals like Joseph Chamberlain might thunder against the Conservative leader, Lord Salisbury, that he spoke only for a class ‘who toil not, neither do they spin’ (30 March 1883), but that class demonstrated great resilience and powers of survival in claiming to represent the national interest. It was a ruling class which was landed, hereditary, wealthy and leisured; it was also very small, interrelated, and exclusive. Yet it could be entered or joined by outsiders under certain conditions. It maintained values and codes of behaviour which were envied and emulated; it was the arbiter of taste, manners and refined living. Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which this aristocracy, belonging almost completely to a pre-industrial, even feudal, age, not only survived but continued to flourish in the vastly altered conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
