An intemperate zone

Two years before the outbreak of the first world war, a Royal Navy officer, addressing an Admiralty enquiry into the disturbing question of lower-deck commissions, ventured the cautionary opinion that it took three generations to make a gentleman. It is hard to know exactly what he meant by that endlessly morphing concept, but if it bore any resemblance to the historical compound of avarice, bad faith, dynastic ambition and family selfishness that dominates the pages of Adam Nicolson’s dazzling narrative, then the one consoling mercy is that it has always taken a good deal less than three to unmake one.

There are gleams of humanity, courage and honour to be found in almost every chapter here — the extraordinary Eliza Pinckney, the melancholy Harry Oxinden, even poor Joan Thynne, so old (40) and so fat, as her loving daughter-in-law told her, that all she was good for was to manure her grubby little dower house — but on the other hand, take the case of Sir William Plumpton. The Plumpton family had held the manor of that name since the 12th century, but it was under Sir William, son of the Sir Robert who had fought at Agincourt, that the family finally came to prominence, rising and falling with the Lancastrian cause in a miniature parody of the convulsive and ruthless age in which they lived.

There was nothing that Sir William would not have done to bolster the Plumpton fortunes — infant ‘heiresses’ flogged off to Yorkist lawyers, a legitimate son and wife squirreled away — but then the gentry world he inhabited was never the cosy haven that tradition and theory have described. For more than 500 years, the theory goes, they have stood between the nobility and the rest of the country, a sort of combined resting place and conduit between the two, a canal lock in the great waterway of national life, smoothly engineered for the safe transportation of the upwardly mobile and the efficient voiding of its failures.