Britain 713
vented, still required an income from landed property of £300 a year for the bur-
gesses, and of £600 a year for the knights, that is the members who sat for coun-
ties. In the House of Commons elected in 1790 (and the one elected in 1796 was
much the same) there were 85 baronets and 121 peers (of Ireland) or sons of peers.
Three- fifths of the 558 had had fathers or other close relatives previously in the
House. No less than 278 had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and 115 at
Eton. Eighty- five were career officers in the army or navy, and 41 others held tem-
porary commissions. Over a fifth, that is, while essentially gentry, could be thought
of as military personages, while there were 72 lawyers, 27 bankers, and another half
hundred whose economic interests were primarily commercial.^6
It was a point of strength in the British system, in Parliament and elsewhere,
that men of agricultural and commercial wealth could meet and act together, and
that both forms of wealth were often possessed by the same individuals. There was
less tension than on the Continent between elites of different kinds. The elites of
birth, rank, wealth, and fashion, of government, the church, and the army and navy,
of the universities, the law and the learned professions, if not actually all drawn
from the same circles, all merged into a generalized upper class. The upper class
was not rigidly exclusive; capable persons of modest origins could occasionally
reach high positions, in return for acceptance of the upper- class scheme of values.
The result was to strengthen the aristocracy, and to deprive the truly common
people of an effectual leadership. Precisely because it had avoided the crude dual-
ism of noblesse and roture, England was of all countries the most successfully aris-
tocratic. If the idea of equality seemed in England especially shocking and non-
sensical, it was because what some called inequality, and others a due subordination
of ranks and orders, was seen not merely as social necessity, but as an adornment of
civilized society, interesting and warmly attractive in itself.
England was the only one of the leading European monarchies, before 1792,
which had for a dozen years been a republic itself, and in which a king had been
tried and executed, and a significant democratic movement had once developed.
Resemblances between the French Revolution and the Puritan Revolution and
Commonwealth are evident enough to twentieth- century historians. In the 1790’s
they were mainly perceived by conservatives, especially those who were not En-
glish; Mallet du Pan saw, in the “doctrines” of the French Revolution, a lot of “sto-
ries drawn by Rousseau from the filth of the English republic.”^7 In England these
events had disappeared from the center of consciousness. The name of Cromwell
stood as a sign of evil ambition, and the word “Leveller” survived as a term of re-
proach. The names of Milton and Algernon Sydney might be invoked as symbols
of classical republicanism and antique virtue, as in Wordsworth’s great sonnets of
- But the actual politics of the Puritan Revolution had been put out of mind.
It was not for the Dissenters, in their unsuccessful efforts to obtain equality of
political rights, to revive memories of a regicide past. Few English “Jacobins,” in all
probability, had ever heard of John Lilburne. Their historical imagination, like that
of Thomas Jefferson, dwelt by preference on King Alfred or even Hengist and
6 G. P. Judd, Members of Parliament 1734–1832 (New Haven, 1955), 79–89.
7 J. Mallet du Pan, Corr. pol. pour servir à l ’ hist. du républicanisme français (Hamburg, 1796), XIX.