preposition; but it long lived on wherever Latin or French
was used. And before long nobility won for itself a distinguishing
outward badge. The device of hereditary coat-armour, a growth
of the 12th century, did much to define and mark out the noble
class throughout Europe. As it could be acquired by grant of
the sovereign, and as, when once acquired, it went on from
generation to generation, it answers exactly to the jus imaginum
at Rome, the hereditary badge of nobility conferred by the
election of the people. Those who possessed the right of coat-armour
by immemorial use, or by grant in regular form, formed
the class of nobility or gentry, words which, it must again be
remembered, are strictly of the same meaning. They held
whatever privileges or advantages have attached in different
times and places to the rank of nobility or gentry. In England
indeed a variety of causes hindered nobility or gentry from ever
obtaining the importance which they obtained, for instance,
in France; But perhaps no cause was more important than
the growth of the peerage. That institution at once set up a
new standard of nobility, a new form of the nobility of office.
The peer—in strictness, the peer in his own person only, not
even his children—became the only noble; the ideas of nobility
and gentry thus became divorced in a way in which they are
not in any other country. Those who would elsewhere have been
counted as the nobility, the bearers of coat-armour by good
right, were hindered from forming a class holding any substantial
privilege. In a word, the growth of the peerage hindered the
existence in England of any nobility in the continental sense
of the word. The esquires, knights, lesser barons, even the
remote descendants of peers, that is, the noblesse of other countries,
in England remained gentlemen, but not noblemen—simple
commoners, that is, without legal advantage over their fellow-commoners
who had no jus imaginum to boast of. There can
be no doubt that the class in England which answers to the
noblesse of other lands is the class that bears coat-armour, the
gentry strictly so called.[1] Had they been able to establish and
to maintain any kind of privilege, even that of mere honorary
precedence, they would exactly answer to continental nobility.
That coat-armour has been lavishly granted and often assumed
without right, that the word “gentleman” has acquired various
secondary senses, proves nothing; that is the natural result
of a state of things in which the status of gentry carries with it
no legal advantage, and yet is eagerly sought after on social
grounds. If coat-armour, and thereby the rank of gentry, has
been lavishly granted, some may think that the rank of peerage
has often been lavishly granted also. In short, there is no real
nobility in England; for the class which answers to foreign
nobility has so long ceased to have any practical privileges that
it has long ceased to be looked on as a nobility, and the word
nobility has been transferred to another class which has nothing
answering to it out of the three British kingdoms.[2] This last
class in strictness takes in only the peers personally; at the
outside it cannot be stretched beyond those of their children
and grandchildren who bear the courtesy titles of lord and lady.
No attempt has been here made to trace out the history of nobility in the various countries and, we must add, cities of Europe. All that has been attempted has been to point out some general truths, and to refer to some specially striking instances. Once more, it must be borne in mind that, while it is essential to the idea of nobility that it should carryFrance. with it some hereditary privilege, the nature and extent of that privilege may vary endlessly. In the 18th century the nobility of France and the nobility of Poland alike answered to the very strictest definition of nobility; but the political positions of the two were as broadly contrasted as the positions of any two classes of men could be. The nobility of France, keeping the most oppressive social and personal privileges, had been shorn of all political and even administrative power; the tyrants of the people were the slaves of the king. In Poland sixty thousand gentlemen, rich and poor, famous andPoland. obscure, but all alike gentlemen, rode out to choose a king by a unanimous vote, and to bind him when chosen by such conditions as they thought good. Those sixty thousand, like the populus of Rome, formed a narrow oligarchy as regarded the rest of the nation, but a wild democracy among themselves. Poland, in short, came nearer than any kingdom or country of large extent to the nature of an aristocracy, as we have seen aristocracy in the aristocratic cities. The chief power of the state was placed neither in the prince nor in the nation at large; it was held by a noble class. The kingly power in Poland, like the ducal power at Venice, had been so narrowed that Poland, though she still kept a king, called herself a republic no less than Venice. And whatever was taken from the king went to the gain of the noble order. But the nobility of a large country, even though used to act politically as an order, could never put on that orderly and legal character which distinguishes the true civic patriciates. It never could come so nearly as a civic patriciate could to being something like the rule of the best in any sense of those words.
The tendency of modern times has been towards the breaking down of formal hereditary privileges. In modern commonwealths, above all, they have been thought to be essentially inconsistent with republican institutions. The truth of the matter is rather that the circumstances of most modern commonwealths have been unfavourable to the preservation, and still more to the growth, of privileged bodies. Where they existed, as in Switzerland, they have been overthrown. Where they did not exist, as in America, everything has made it more and more impossible that they should arise. And, as modern changes have commonly attacked the power both of kings and of nobles, the common notion has come that kingship and nobility have some necessary connexion. It has seemed as if any form of nobility was inconsistent with a republican form of government, while nobility, in some shape or other, has come to be looked on as a natural, if not a necessary, appendage to a monarchy. And as far as regards the social side of kingship this is true. A court seems more natural where a chain of degrees leads gradually up from the lowest subject to the throne than when all beneath the throne are nearly on a level. And from one point of view, that from which the kingly house is but the noblest of the noble, kingship and nobility are closely allied. But in the more strictly
- ↑ This statement is mainly interesting as expressing the late Professor Freeman’s view; it is, however, open to serious criticism. Coat-armour was in itself not necessarily a badge of nobility at all; it could be, and was, worn by people having no pretensions to be “gentlemen,” and this is true both of England and the continent. In its origin it was a mere personal mark of distinction, in the primary sense of this word. No “grant” was necessary; it was assumed by all and sundry who had occasion to use it, though a reasonable convention forbade one man to assume the device of another. Later arose the custom of granting arms as a mark of personal favour or gratitude. This again was not at the outset an exclusive right of the crown; it was common for a leader in battle to grant to someone not of his family, who had specially distinguished himself, the right to bear the whole or part of his coat of arms, differences or undifferenced. On the other hand, many undoubted “gentlemen” never assumed arms at all. The claim of the heralds to make “gentry” depend on the bearing of coat-armour, and the right to this depend on grant or recognition by themselves as officers of the crown, is of comparatively late growth. See further the article Gentleman.—W. A. P.
- ↑ Compare e.g. the social:conditions of Great Britain and Germany. In German there are two classes of nobility: (1) the hoher Adel, members of the mediatized, formerly sovereign families, who rank as the equals in blood (ebenbürtig) of the royal houses of Europe; (2) the niederer Adel, to which every one having the no biliary prefix von belongs. In England “presentation at court” is the privilege of no particular class as such; and the wives of ministers of the crown, even if of quite humble origin, are “commanded” to court functions with their husbands. The strictness of the principle of admission or exclusion differs at the various German courts, and has tended to be modified by the growth of a new aristocracy of wealth; but a single instance known to the resent writer may serve to illustrate the fundamental divergence, of German (a fortiori Austrian) ideas from English in this matter. A wealthy publisher of European reputation attended the court of his native town, the capital of a small grand-duchy, in virtue of the honorary title Hofrat; his wife, not being noble, did not accompany him. His elder daughter married a cabinet minister, but, as he was not a noble, this did not confer on her the right to go to court. His younger daughter married a subaltern in a line regiment, belonging to the lesser nobility; as ennobled by marriage (according to the liberal rule of this particular court), she was duly “presented.”—W. A. P.
