Too much in Arcadia

The century or so before the Civil War, the era of the Tudors and early Stuarts, did not think well of itself. Contemporaries lamented the decline of social responsibility in the nobility and gentry, the erosion of honour and virtue, the spread of enclosures, the parasitism and arrivisme of wealth, and the emptiness and falsity of its display. The picture has often been endorsed in later generations, from both the traditionalist Right and the anti-aristocratic Left, but Adam Nicolson has an altogether happier image of the period. There flourished, he tells us, a ‘communal wisdom’, ‘in which principles of hierarchy and of mutuality were deeply embedded’. Its ‘heart’ or ‘heartland’ — favourite words of his — is to be found where the centre of his book lies: at Wilton House, the Wiltshire home of the Earls of Pembroke that was built and rebuilt during the period, and in the lovely array of downs and valleys and farms of the neighbouring Pembroke estates.

I fear that Nicolson, in studying a ‘dream of perfection’, has done some imagining of his own. Other favourite words are ‘organic’ and ‘organism’. He celebrates the ‘organic unity’ and ‘organic integrity’ of a society ‘alive with a sense of jointness, of a joint enterprise between the different connected parts of the social organism’. Admittedly the ideal often collided with realities of suffering or cruelty or injustice. By the Civil War, in any case, the ‘mechanisms’ of the ‘organism’ were not being ‘properly oiled’, and ‘the mutuality had gone’. But the price England paid is evident in the 18th century, when great estates had ‘lost’ their social ‘soul’. The countryside was turned into mere décor and was dressed in ‘a Savile Row suit’.

I don’t know where he gets all this from.