The famous Squire Mytton was a man who refused to be educated, but had great courage, with a mania for sport.

He used to arrive at a hunting meeting by jumping over high iron railings on his horse, at the risk of his life.  There is an old print showing him doing this, and killing a dog by landing on it.  He risked his life repeatedly; going out to shoot duck, he would swim his horses across the wide Severn river, and like in the snow, with only his night shirt on, waiting for the dawn when the duck would fly.  He drank six bottles of port every day, and tremendous quantities of brandy in addition. He bought a bear and rode into his own dining-room on it, finally being attacked by it and narrowly escaping serious injury.  Once he deliberately set his own clothes alight, and almost burnt to death.

Gambling and sport were indeed a mania with the sporting squires of England at the end of the 18th century. An example was Squire Osbaldeston, as famous a man as Mytton, who played an unusual cricket match, for a large bet, against Lord Beauclerc. Each was to have only one partner; so it was a team of two on each side. On the day of the match, the Squire was seriously ill, and asked for a postponement. But Lord Beauclerc insisted: “Play or pay”. So, the Squire got up from bed, and played the match though he could hardly walk.  His partner, a marvellously skilful cricketer named Lambert, succeeded in manoeuvring the game so that the Squire did not have to do much. He simply had to be there in his place on the field. They won the match, but immediately afterwards the Squire collapsed, and in fact it nearly killed him.

This same Squire Osbaldeston was often suspected of cheating to win a wager, and he sometimes had to right a duel when accused of swindling an opponent. But he was an expert marksman, and almost always wounded his adversary.

Such were the “gentlemen” of the beginning of the 19th century: they displayed tremendous courage but were not famous either for intellect or for prudence or common-sense. They shot at cats on the house-tops to improve their shooting for duels. They were afraid of nothing, but they had little or no culture. The nucleus of culture among the British gentry no longer held together, after the time of the French Revolution.

But they were not unpopular: some of them became local heroes. Even after a hundred and eighty years, you can occasionally see the name of one of them on some old public house in a country district. And that is a distinction reserved for heroes: there are many pubs called “The Churchill” and “The Nelson”. But in Somerset in the West of England, there are still one or two ancient pubs called “The Mytton”.

Lord Byron called these country gentlemen: “Barbarians”. The nickname stuck, and it is still occasionally quoted. Byron was as brave as they were, but he was also a poet, and they had no respect for poetry. So, they did not like him, and he did not like them.

It is very interesting that two former Jews, Disraeli (who later became Prime Minister), and Karl Marx, both considered the phenomenon. They both realized that the country was coming to be divided into “two nations” (Disraeli’s phrase): the gentlemen and the proletariat. Marx believed that England was heading straight for revolution, and that the gentlemen would be exterminated by revolution. In Disraeli’s novel called Sybil, Lord Marney is in the end lynched by a mob of workers whom he has intolerably provoked.

But Disraeli saw another solution: the gentleman had to be reformed, and must lose the qualification by birth. This was to be done by encouraging everyone to feel that he himself could become a gentleman; to be a gentleman was nothing to do with birth, but was a question of behaviour. And that behaviour was, first of all, self-control, and then honesty, courage, and finally and especially – gentleness and avoiding giving pain, either by a wounding remark or in any another way. The old French influence was represented by a standard Oxford English accent, and a standard style of dressing. These things were all to be learned in the public schools (which were in fact private schools); they were “character factories” in which the raw material, namely, the sons of anyone sufficiently wealthy, including the new industrialists, was worked up into the finished product, namely the “standard gentleman.”.

Nevertheless, the wild individualism of the English gentry of the beginning of the 19th century, which seemed to run crazy in the case of the Mytton type, had a big contribution to make to the present-day notion of the gentleman. It established the tradition that a gentleman must be able to pursue his own idea in absolute disregard of public opinion. In the case of Mytton, it was merely feats of daring, but in many other cases these English “eccentrics” (as they were called) did make a big contribution to society. They were never afraid to stand up and follow what they thought to be right, before all the world, without the least fear of what might be said about them, or done to them. As Mytton and Osbaldeston were willing to risk their lives on a mere sporting contest, these new gentlemen were willing to risk their lives on what they felt to be right. This was enormously valuable as a counter-balance to the current of blind conformity, the naked herd-instinct. We can say that, though in Britain there is a tremendous drive towards conformity – “not making a scene” as it is said,  there are also individuals who will stand up in a crowd and say: “No, I don’t agree with that. I don’t care what you all say, that is wrong.”  A British crowd will respect him for this independence and courage – it appeals to a deep tradition which over-rides the natural herd-instinct which would try to destroy a dissenting voice.

© Trevor Leggett