It was a dreary life for the real Aristocrats

OUR love-affair with the aristocracy grows apace.

Record numbers of the population visit the great country houses, where they are as interested in the kitchens and in the photographs of the current Earl and Countess of Wherever and their children, as in the classical or palladian architecture, the medals, coins and Roman busts brought back by an 18th century ancestor.

For I would guess that the chief interest of the visitors is in how the aristocracy actually lived, their day-today domestic and family arrangements. That is presumably why the BBC has lavished GBP 5million on the story of the Lennox sisters, the four daughters of the second Duke of Richmond a story told enjoyably by the historian Stella Tillyard in her book, Aristocrats. The series is really ministering to a public taste for costume drama - for, as well as living in impossibly grand and beautiful houses, 18th century aristocrats wore amazingly expensive clothes. Male court dress, for instance, cost the equivalent of at least GBP 20,000 at current prices. At the same time we can see them as just like us. Stella Tillyard says of the Lennox sisters: "What makes the story seem so modern is that their voices sound so contem-porary Emily had 22 children, of whom 12 died before she did, which isn't modern at all. But when she talks about them, it could be you or me talking about our children." Well, perhaps. But what modern woman would submit to the horror of 22 pregnancies? (Queen Anne had at least 17 pregnancies, all the babies but one dying in infancy. She consoled herself by drinking brandy, covertly, from a teapot.) Much of the responsibility for the present fascination with aristocrats falls on Evelyn Waugh's most flawed novel, Brideshead Revisited. Waugh portrayed an astonishingly dull, Old Catholic noble family - exactly the sort of people he would have sent up hilariously in his earlier novels - and treated them solemnly as "heritage". He thought he was writing an elegiac farewell to an ancient English tradition - which is why what he achieved was essentially sentimental, costume drama, which was perfect for television. BUT dull is what even the grandest aristocratic life must have been. Four thousand letters of the Lennox sisters have survived, which in itself suggests they must have had time on their hands. Here is one of poor Emily's: "So much for linen. Now as to politics, I long to hear some account of today's transactions in the House of Commons." Oh dear! I know that the level of debates in the Commons was higher then than it is now. But one does feel sorry for Emily, trying to take her pleasures where she could. The truth is that the life of a nobleman living on his estates must have been extremely boring. It revolved around hunting, shooting and fishing, the rent-rolls of the tenants and a bit of local politics. It was by recognising this truth that Louis XIV was able to establish an absolute monarchy in France. He enticed the nobility to abandon their dreary lives - and magnificent chateaux - in the French provinces to live instead in constricted lodgings at Versailles, where he established his new court. They found being at the centre of things, and the sophistication of Versailles, irresistible. So they soon lost all local influence and became the hangers-on of the Sun King. And what was life like at Versailles? It was a round of empty ceremonies, where the most tiny gesture became part of a ritual. The French diarist, Saint Simon, learned nothing at Versailles except an obsession with hats. He notes Louis XIV's way with his hat: "For ladies he took his hat off completely, but to a greater or less extent; for titled people, half off, holding it in his hand or against his ear some moments, more or less marked. For the nobility he contented himself with putting his hand to his hat." The Duke of Orleans coped with the stupefying boredom of it all by always reading the most indecent passages of Rabelais at Mass, and spending much of his spare time in experiments to raise the devil. The first English Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, entertained his neighbours in his palatial country house, Houghton Hall, in the grandest style. But what this seems to have boiled down to was enormous eating and drinking bouts, and conversation that was either the minutiae of politics or monotonously obsessive bawdy. True there was a high ideal that underlay the lives of the aristocracy and also of the gentry. Good breeding and politeness, and the benevolence and culture they implied, were the mark of the gentleman. And English aristocrats - unlike their French contemporaries - wanted to be thought of as gentlemen. The reality, though, was often rather different. Here is the wife of a gentleman in Georgian England describing the manners of her husband: "The gentleman came home near 12 at noon and Sans Ceremony went snoring to a clean bed - where he farted and stunk like a Pole Cat." That was not his only charming habit: "Most exceedingly Beastly so to a degree never saw him worse - he had made water into the fire." By the time of Robert Walpole's son, Horace, manners had become more refined. But this often meant that a gentleman had to put up with absurdities while keeping a resolutely straight face. Walpole describes a scene in which a young man apologises to "a ridiculous old woman" for coming straight into the drawing room after riding, without having troubled to change his clothes. "Oh do not trouble yourself," she replies. "I can as well spy the gentleman through buckskin breeches as through silk and satin!" We are all middleclass now, so we do not easily understand a life in which breeding is valued above intelligence, leisure above any sort of gainful employment, and good manners above what we now call "sincerity". THE 18th century Earl of Chesterfield wrote and published a set of "Letters to his Son" instructing him how an aristocrat should behave. They amount to a recipe for flattering the small vanities of others so as to keep them sweet, in order to acquire influence in the world. That good middleclass intellectual, Samuel Johnson, described the Letters as inculcating "the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master". Men like Johnson, who value the life of the mind, will never understand the aristocratic ideal. The Victorian critic, Matthew Arnold, opined: "Upon the whole earth there is nothing so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of the upper class." Hunting, shooting, fishing, adultery, and marrying heiresses - this is how the life of the aristocracy came to be seen by the rising middle class. And they saw it as stul-tifyingly boring. On the other hand, if it really is so dull, why are so many of us be sitting in darkened rooms watching it all being celebrated on the small screen? * John Casey is a Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge -

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