ABSTRACT
CHAPTER 1 England, 1603-40 - The Upper Class,' Its Life, Culture, and
THE division in English society most nearly corresponding The to that chasm which on the continent divided the nobles English from the remainder of mankind, was not nobleman and com-gentry moner, but gentle and simple. For the English Lords were little more than a section of the gentry enjoying certain political privileges; they were, for all purposes of life and intercourse, still part of the larger society which they claimed to lead.1 1be laws of duel, and the other obligations of noblesse, belonged in England to all families of landowners who could show their coat-of-arms. Thus the class who wore swords and had the right to demand satisfaction of an Earl, included persons who differed from each other greatly in income and in manner of life. There exist today several widely different popular conceptions of the English country gentleman in the Stuart epoch, whether it be a vision of the high-souled and cultivated Puritan squire of the type of Hampden and Hutchinson, or of his brother the Cavalier, or Macaulay's portrait of the bucolic Tory squire of the period after the Restoration, growling over his ale at the foreign proclivities of James n or William III, in the broadest a~ent of the countryside. The truth is that throughout the whole Stuart epoch essential differences of wealth and manners divided the gentry into not a few distinctive kinds. Z
In respect of religion and politics there was indeed a greater variety among the landowners under James and Charles I than was to be found after 1660. It was only the events of the Great Rebellion that created a standard type of squirearchical
opinion. The country gentleman, if he did not belong to the strong minority of Catholic squires, adhered to no separate party in Church or State; the Englishman was not yet a creature of politics and denominations. The leaders and representatives of the landed class, and therefore presumably a large section of that class itself, were more concerned to resist the encroachments of the Crown than to support its sovereignty, which had not then been called in question; and the Puritan temper, which inspired many of their own number, alarmed and disgusted them less than the novelties which Laud was introducing into their Church.
