Aristocracy: Theory and Practice 43
“There is no more certain maxim of politics,” observed Robert Walpole in 1719,
“than that a monarchy must subsist either by an army or a nobility; the first makes
it a despotic, the latter a free, government.”^1 He was explaining his opposition to
the Peerage Bill, then before Parliament, by which the earls of Stanhope and Sun-
derland and others of the Whig magnates intended to restrict the creation of new
peers. By making the peerage more strictly hereditary, the great Whigs hoped to
prevent control of the House of Lords by the King or his advisers. They wanted no
repetition of what Queen Anne had done a few years before. She had simply added
enough new men to the Lords to make that house agree with her on the ratifica-
tion of the treaty of Utrecht. Walpole, as a commoner and country gentleman, had
no desire to see the Lords put out of reach of influence by the crown, or by the
crown’s chief minister, as he soon became. But he did not doubt the utility of a
strong body of nobles, to serve as “a balance against the democratic part of our
constitution, without being formidable to the monarchy itself.”
In the same year, 1719, the duke of Saint- Simon, peer of France, as haughty a
nobleman as ever trod the halls of Versailles, was seriously alarmed. A plan was
afoot to abolish the proprietary character of seats in the French parlements. The
Regent, alarmed at the revival of the Parlement of Paris since the death of Louis
XIV, was considering the creation of a new system of courts, in which property in
office and hence hereditary position should have no place. The Regent wanted a
parlement that would agree with him, and since it was the proprietary and heredi-
tary nature of their seats that enabled the magistrates to resist, he proposed to buy
back their offices from them. This was enough to arouse Saint- Simon. Normally
the first to scorn such inferior nobles as owed their nobility to government service
or outright purchase by their own grandfathers, Saint- Simon now rushed to the
defense of the parlementaires. They were, he said, a useful “check” or “barrier”
against the pretensions of the papacy and the usurpations of the King.^2
The Peerage Bill failed to pass, and the power of creating new peers remained in
the British crown. The Prince Regent’s ideas for abolishing property in judicial of-
fice came to nothing, and the French parlements remained predominantly heredi-
tary. But in both countries the same response had been aroused. A commonplace
of eighteenth- century political thought had been stated: that nobility was a neces-
sary bulwark of political freedom. Whether in the interest of a more open nobility,
as with Walpole, or of a more closed and impenetrable nobility, as with Saint-
Simon, the view was the same. Nobility as such, nobility as an institution, was
necessary to the maintenance of a free constitution.
MONTESQUIEU, REAL DE CURBAN, BLACKSTONE, WARBURTONHere, in the remarks of two practical observers, lay the germ of the thought of
Montesquieu, a nobleman of the ancient stock who had inherited a seat in the
1 Walpole quoted by W. S. Holdsworth, “The House of Lords 1689–1783,” in Law Quarterly
Review, XLV (1929), 449.
2 Saint- Simon, Mémoires, X X XVI, 308–9.