5 - The sinews of power: economic

Summary

Few will wish to deny the proposition that wealth contributes to political power. We must therefore try to establish how much wealth, in relation to other groups, the peerage commanded, how that wealth was acquired, and how it could be deployed, for political purposes. We also need to know, if possible, how political power itself contributed to wealth.

These are by no means easy questions. Though it is not hard to obtain guesses of some rentals, and newspapers and magazines were always speculating on the wealth of the departed or the portion of the bride-to-be, estimates of rentals, even if accurate, mean little unless carefully related to debts, obligations and outgoings. The number of such studies is slowly increasing, but so far we have insufficient to quantify. There were large disparities between poor peerage families like the Lincolns, the Warwicks, Montforts and Yarmouths and the great magnates like Bedford, Portland, Devonshire, Bridgwater and Northumberland. Even among the dukes, there were marked differences: neither the Beauclerks, Dukes of St Albans, nor the Fitzroys, Dukes of Grafton, were well endowed with land. When the 2nd Duke of Manchester died in 1739, Mrs Osborn, who had an eye for such things, put the estate at no more than £4,000 p.a., out of which £2,000 a year jointure was to be paid ‘to a young woman [who] may live this fifty year’, and reckoned that the new duke would have, net, no more than £3,000 p.a. Her forecast was almost uncannily accurate: the dowager duchess lived to be eighty and died forty-seven years later.