THE END OF A GREAT ESTATE

Abstract

T | HE 'Chandos clause' in the i832 Reform Act, which contemporaries believed delivered up the counties to Tory electoral domination, still has its place in the history books. Its author, Richard Plantagenet TempleNugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, has virtually none. This is a pity, not because his political career is especially significant, although the activities of the Farmers' Friend particularly in influencing and organizing other Members of Parliament might repay investigation; but because his financial affairs are of exceptional interest. In his own time he earned wide notoriety through spectacular financial ruin and utter collapse, culminating in the sale of most of his landed property and personal effects in the course of I 848. It is something of this renown which deserves to be recaptured. Aristocratic indebtedness has attracted considerable attention from historians of many periods in late years, both because of its importance to the proper understanding of the economy of landownership, and because of its possible effects on aristocratic political and economic policy.' If serious debt was sufficiently widespread to be characteristic of the landed aristocracy as a class, or of a considerable section of it, we would rightly expect to see its influence reflected in the political and economic life of the country. In the nineteenth century, the preservation and enhancement of the value of the land which had to carry these debts would then rank as one of the principal interests at stake in the Corn Law controversy. We would expect to find a social and political revolution caused by extensive land transfers made under the pressure of debt, and failing to detect this would justifiably assume that a successful effort to stave off ruin by increasing incomes from land ought to take its place in any general interpretation of the process of economic growth, as part of the great landowners' contribution to that expansion. Eagerness to reach these realms of general speculation has tended to obscure the difficulties of making the first assumption. An array of impressive figures of debts has been taken as sufficient proof. Debts, however, require careful handling as evidence: they may as easily indicate increasing prosperity as increasing adversity, intelligent use of available resources as wayward misappropriation. It would be as unwise to conclude that all aristocrats were in a precarious situation because all had some debts as to say that all governments or all manufacturers were on the verge of bankruptcy because they had large national debts or operated largely on credit. It is common ground that there were several different sources of debt among the landed families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not all of which were of equal importance in causing serious financial embarrassment. Until