THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE OLD SQUIRES. T HE present writer has never
known any member of the family, he has never seen their house, and he has never lived in Warwickshire, yet it is with deep regret that he reads the announcement that the Lucys, of Charlecote, pressed by the times, are offering their estate for sale. Scores of other landowners are doing the same thing, but this is a notable break in the continuity of our history. Most of the squires of England, respectable or even dignified as they are, are unknown outside their counties—at least, as squires—but this family has well-wishers throughout the world. In the farthest West of America, in the most remote settle- ments of Australia, on South African plateaus, in Indian stations, wherever indeed the English language is spoken, there are a few who remember, and remember with pleasure, that the descendants of Mr. Justice Shallow, the squire who arrested Shakespeare for deer-stealing, still occupy their old domain, still possess it may be, some of the very trees against which the poet leaned as he watched the deer leap past. The incident was a curious incident from which to have derived a kind of fame ; but it has so chanced to the Lucy family, and there is scarcely a place on earth where some one might not feel, as he reads the an- nouncement, that a link with Shakespeare will, for the English people, have been broken when the sale is complete. So little do we know of the personality of Shakespeare— of all literary personalities the most interesting—that the continuity of Charlecote in the hands of a family which he certainly knew, seems to make him a little more real to the imagination. It helps us to feel that he did not live so long ago, or in a world very different from the existing one, that he was born among people just like ourselves, that he looked upon scenes which can hardly have been changtd, that he must have felt when, by a few words, he avenged himself for ever, and yet, in avenging himself, left upon his victims a cachet of dignity, very much as we feel ourselves. Men are learning to contemn such links with the past, or to quote them only as evidences of the superiority of the present ; but we cannot but think that the links have still their value. It is only, to begin with, from the past that we can gain experience, and experience teaches us all at least as much as that variety of day-dreaming which Radicals love,—day-dreaming of a world which may never come, and which, if it does come, we feel assured, they will regard with a bitter sense of disappointment. There is no one among us who would not be the better if he could get the country life of the Elizabethan time deeply into his conscious- ness, and acquire from it some of that strong calm which was the special note of its most fruitful mind. The continued existence of the Lucys in Charlecote helps to the needful comprehension of the Shakespearian age, and we wish, there- fore, most heartily that they could have escaped the usual fate of their order, and have lasted another three hundred years at least, still in possession of their old park, still never rising, as the Lucys have never risen, above their position as squires, and never sinking, as hitherto they have never sunk, in any way below it. It is a poor wish, the ambitions and the discontented will alike say, but those recurrent genera- tions of unchanging gentlefolks, who did nothing, but simply were, held the place of features in the social landscape, and kept its identity intact. We do not know that a yew-tree ever does anything except exist; but its existence helps us to realise what has been visible on that very spot, while genera- tions of flitting human beings have passed away without record. Is it so purely good that every hill should be con- cealed, as Box Hill will shortly be, in bricks and mortar, every valley be swept bare by a flood, which, even if it fertilises in the end, makes everything ugly for the time? We would not sacrifice the happiness of the people to pre- serve an old family or an old institution, but if they can coexist, that which is old may, merely by its continuance, impart to progress something of that mellowness and quiet which, we are bound to say, it is so apt to lack. We suppose the American millionaire, who will probably buy Charlecote- certainly will buy it if its sellers have worldly wisdom enough to advertise the sale across the Atlantic—will revivify the neighbourhood, but he will spread around him also unrest, and that sense of incongruity amidst which beauty disappears.
It is vain, of course, to contend with a decree of destiny, and that families should lose their visibleness seems to b
decreed by some inexorable law. One does not see why, if a family can endure in one place unchanged in rank for two hundred years—and of this there are a. thousand examples— they should not endure for two thousand, and yet, in Europe at least, that never happens. With the possible exception of the Massimi of Venetia, whose pretensions are at least supported by an unbroken tradition, there is not one family in Europe which can assert, without ridicule, that -it has been clearly visible among its fellows from a period before the Christian era. Nevertheless, the ancient families cannot be proved all to have perished, and, reasoning -from analogy, it is a little unreasonable to suppose they have all done so. The law of sterility, which is supposed to operate against the great and luxurious, has not destroyed the line of the Mikados, or of the Indian " Children of the Sun," or of the Jewish Kohenaim, or of the humble Celts, who in corners of Europe display every day the nature of ancestors whose history is lost in the night of time. But always in Europe some blow falls, be it from what the Irishman called a "hereditary custom of having no children," or from violent dispossession, or from the operation of economic laws, and slowly or suddenly the family drops under and disappears. The practice of selling estates in England has never ended, and better antiquarians than ourselves could, we think, prove that in such sales there has been a certain periodicity, and that at times decided mainly by economic causes, though occa- sionally by political movements, there have been widely ex- tended changes in the ownership of the soil, and conse- quent visibleness in society. Not individual families, but entire strata of families, have "gone under," and have been replaced by new ones. That happened in the early crusading times, during the Wars of the Roses, in the reign of Elizabeth, in the early days of the House of Hanover—when city wealth began to breed—just before the Great War, when the landed class was wretchedly poor, and it is happening again now. Nobody notices or cares much, but we fancy the process is going on over an extraordinary area. No week passes without its new list of estates, with great houses on them, for sale, and, as the squires only sell under accumu- lated pressure, and necessarily at the very worst time for selling—for if the time were a good one they could hold on—a sale generally implies ruin, and the loss of visibleness to the family which sells. This is not, we admit, invariably the case, precautionary sales by men who distrust the future and are tempted by liberal offers being numerous, but in the majority of instances the family disappears, it may "'be to the Continent, it may be to the Colonies, it may be, and most frequently is, to the cities where there are chances, and where the broken race under new circumstances and with -a new kind of training often flourishes again. There are -plenty of purchasers, though for economic reasons they pay -usually low prices—the uncompleted sale of Savernake was a marked exception, but then that is a sort of principality—and they assume, and possibly, if Radicalism fails, as we think it will fail, in its effort to defy arithmetic, they will keep, much of the position of the old possessors. They are, we notice, almost invariably men of the cities flying from the dreary 'bustle of the mart, the factory, and the ship-yard ; they pos- sess the surplus means which will enable them to tide over the present depression—it cannot last for ever in a country where thirty millions of people are standing on less than fifty-nine thousands of square miles—and they will probably remain in dignity and ease for the regular period, which we take to be about three centuries, when the unknown law at work will operate again, and send whole strata of them once more into the obscurity which we call disappearance. That is the rule, and -contention, even literary contention, against natural laws is futile ; but we venture to hope that even six hundred years hence a few of the new families of to-day will be found to have survived. Their permanence, their monotony of life, the quietness and fastidiousness which will have grown upon them, will, while it weakens many of them, have improved the type of the rest, and so have greatly benefited civilisation. The English world owes much, though voters do not think so now, to that ideal which we make concrete when we speak of an English gentleman. The new gentry will differ greatly from the old, will have much more, we fancy, of what we may call the Medicean type among them ; but though they will raise Art to too high a place in life, they need not be the worse for that. One wonders if any one of
them will ever come like the old squire of Charlecote in con- tact with a Shakespeare, and derive from that momentary touch a kind of immortality which, though not the best kind, or even a good kind, has, as we have before said, in the case of the Lucys affixed a kind of badge of honour to their names. The world, and not merely Warwickshire, knows that when Shakespeare was alive they were personages visible above the ruck.
We suppose the Lucys, like the rest of their class, have failed to keep any records. That is, to our minds, one of the strangest facts of family history. There must be, at least, a thousand families in England, who, for centuries past, have expected to continue existing, to be fairly safe, and in enjoy- ment of leisure, to be well informed, and to be in all ways figures in English life, yet no family among them all has striven to record continuously the events, and the social changes, and the political driftings of the world around them. Such a record, kept even by one great county family for the past three hundred years, would now be invaluable ; but no family, though many have preserved a hereditary taste for literature, has made the attempt to keep it. A few of them have kept their accounts, a few more their letters, and one or two valuable records of prices, but none have kept a true record of passing history on the plan, let us say, of the "Annual Register," jotting down always the news they heard, and once a year reducing it to order. The trouble need not have been great, for they had always clerks about, and chaplains, and ladies sick with want of com- pulsory occupation ; and`yet they never attempted a work which would have preserved them from even the chance of oblivion. Individuals among them did something of the kind, their records, however, usually being lost or burnt, or allowed to rot; but no race ever did, and it is the work of a race, not of an individual, for which the world now sighs. Imagine if every Lucy since Shakespeare had recorded, or induced his chaplain to record, month by month, and year by year, what he heard and said and knew of the life around him, even if it were only the life of Warwickshire ! Think of the bidding among the great libraries and the publishers of two continents for those precious records,—why, they would almost be worth Charlecote at an auction! No family has, however, had the foresight to make the effort, and it is now almost too late, for unless a race happened to stand for a hundred years close to the centre of affairs—the owners of Woburn and Chats- worth have done that—their records would hardly be so valuable as those which the newspapers may, and probably will, succeed in preserving. We do not envy the historian with a file of the Times for the nineteenth century before him ; but still, if he gives his life to it, he will know a great deal, and, except as regards the motives of action, his knowledge will not, if he collates the evidence, be very grossly inaccurate. The literary opportunity of the county families has, in truth, been missed; but still, we cannot but think that if they could continue, something of charm would be preserved for our social life.
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