Edward Augustus Freeman

“ In short, the shutting out of the old nobility was, if not the formation of a new nobility, at least the formation of a new privileged class. For a certafin class of citizens to be condemned, by virtue of their birth, to political disfranchisement is as flatly against every principle of democracy as for a certain class of citizens to enjoy exclusive rights by reason of birth. ”

“ The nobility is no longer all-powerful; it may be constrained to admit within its own body members for whose presence it has no wish. Where this power exists the nobility is no longer in any strictness an aristocracy; it may have great privileges, great influence, even great legal powers, but it is not the real ruling body, like the true aristocracy of Venice. ”

“ And, if no government on earth ever fully carried out the literal meaning of aristocracy as the rule of the best, these civic mobilities come nearer to it than any other form of government. They do really seem to engender a kind of hereditary capacity in their members. Less favourable than either monarchy or democracy to the growth of occasional great men, they are more favourable than either to the constant supply of a succession of able men, qualified to carry on the work of government. ”

“ In England nobility is apt to be confounded with the peculiar institution of the British peerage. Yet nobility, in some shape or another, has existed in most places and times of the world’s history, while the British peerage is an institution purely local, and one which has actually hindered the existence of a nobility in the sense which the word bears in most other countries. Nor is nobility the same thing as aristocracy. ”

“ It is in these aristocratic cities, of which Venice was the most fully developed model, that we can best see what nobility really is. It is in these only that we can see nobility in its purest form-nobility to which no man can rise and from which no man can come down except by the'will of the noble class itself. In a monarchy, where the king can ennoble, this ideal cannot be kept. Nor could it be kept in the later nobility of Rome. ”

“ These represent the three classes of mankind according to old Teutonic ideas-the noble, the simple freeman and the bondman. The kingly house, where there is one, is not a distinct class; it is simply the noblest of the noble. For, as almost everywhere else, this Teutonic nobility admits' of degrees, though it is yet harder to say in what the degrees of nobility consisted than to say in what nobility consisted itself. ”

“ Where they did not exist, as in America, everything has made it more and more impossible that they should arise. And, as modern changes have commonly attacked the power both of kings and of nobles, the common notion has come that kingship and nobility have some necessary connexion. It has seemed as if any form of nobility was inconsistent with a republican form of government, while nobility, in some shape or other, has come to be looked on as a natural, if not a necessary, appendage to a monarchy. ”

“ They were not a nobility or a privileged class as long as there was no less privileged class to distinguish them from. Their exclusive possession of power made the commonwealth in which they bore rule an aristocracy; but they were a democracy among themselves. We see indeed faint traces of distinction among the patricians themselves, which may lead us to guess that the equality of all patricians may have been won by struggles of unrecorded days, not unlike those which in recorded days brought about the equality of patrician and plebeian. ”

“ In a word, the growth of the peerage hindered the existence in England of any nobility in the continental sense of the word. The esquires, knights, lesser barons, even the remote descendants of peers, that is, the noblesse of other countries, in England remained gentlemen, but not noblemen-simple commoners, that is, without legal advantage over their fellow commoners who had no jus imaginum to boast of. There can be no doubt that the class in England which answers to the noblesse of other lands is the class that bears coat-armour, the gentry strictly so called. ”

“ But in the more strictly political yiew monarchy and nobility are strongly opposed. Even the modified form of absolute monarchy which has existed in some Western countries, while it preserves, perhaps even strengthens, the social position of a nobility, destroys its political power. Under the fully-developed despot isms of the East a real nobility is impossible; the prince raises and thrusts down as he pleases. It is only in a commonwealth that a nobility can really rule; that is, it is only in a commonwealth that the nobility can really be an aristocracy. ”

“ They held whatever privileges or advantages have attached in different times and places to the rank of nobility or gentry. In England indeed a variety of causes hindered nobility or gentry from ever obtaining the importance which they obtained, for instance, in France; But perhaps no cause was more important than the growth of the peerage. That institution at once set up a new standard of nobility, a new form of the nobility of office. The peer—in strictness, the peer in his own person only, not even his children—became the only noble ”

“ They are differences which seem to be inherent in the difference between a republic and a monarchy, but which it would be truer to say are inherent in the difference between a body of men packed close together within the walls of a city and a body of men-if we can call them a body scattered over a wide territory. The member of a civic nobility is more than a member of an order ”

“ The noble of the large country, on the other hand, the rural noble, as he commonly will be, is a member of an order, but he is hardly a member of a corporation; he is isolated; he acts apart from the rest of the body and wins powers for himself apart from the rest of the body. He shows a tendency-a tendency whose growth will be more or less checked according to the strength of the central power-to grow into something of a lord or even a prince on his own account, a growth which may advance to the scale of a German elector or stop at that of an English lord of a manor. ”

“ A court seems more natural where a chain of degrees leads gradually up from the lowest subject to the throne than when all beneath the throne are nearly on a level. And from one point of view, that from which the kingly house is but the noblest of the noble, kingship and nobility are closely allied. ”

“ But nobility is not necessarily a political term; the distinction which it implies may be accompanied by political privileges or it may not. Again, it is sometimes thought that both nobility and aristocracy are in some special way connected with kingly government. To not a few it would seem a contradiction to speak of nobility or aristocracy in a republic. Yet, though many republics have eschewed nobility, there is nothing in a republican, or even in a democratic, form of government inconsistent with the existence of nobility ”

“ As new settlers came, as the people of conquered towns were moved to Rome, as the character of Romans was granted to some allies and forced upon some enemies, this plebs, sharing some but not all of the rights of citizens, became a non-privileged order alongside of a privileged order. As the non-privileged order increased in numbers, while the privileged order, as every exclusive hereditary body must do, lessened, the larger body gradually put on the character of the nation at large, while the smaller body put on the character of a nobility. ”

“ But, what is of far greater importance, there never arose at Athens any body of men which at all answered to the nobililas of Rome. We see at Athens strong signs of social distinctions, even at a late period of the democracy; we see that, though the people might be led by the low-born demagogue-using that word in its strict and not necessarily dishonourable meaning their votes most commonly fell on men of ancient descent. ”

“ That the English peerage does not answer to the true idea of a nobility will be seen with a very little thought. There is no handing on of privilege or pre-eminence to perpetual generations. The peer holds a great position, endowed with substantial powers and privileges, and those powers and privileges are handed on by hereditary succession. ”

“ His remoter descendants have no advantage of any kind over other people, except their chance of succeeding to the peerage. The remote descendant of a duke, even though he may chance to be heir presumptive to the dukedom, is in no way distinguished from any other gentleman; it is even possible that he may not hold the social rank of gentleman. This is not nobility in the true sense; it is not nobility as nobility was understood either in the French kingdom or in the Venetian commonwealth. ”

“ Nowhere else did nobility so distinctly rise out of wealth, and that wealth gained by commerce. In the original island territory of Venice there could be no such thing as landed property. The agricultural plebeian of old Rome and the feudal noble of contemporary Europe were both of them at Venice impossible characters. The Venetian nobility is an example of a nobility which gradually arose out of the mass of the people as certain families step by step drew all political power into their own hands. The plebs did not gather round the patres, neither were they conquered by the palres ”

“ By this change power is not granted to every citizen, but it is put within the reach of every citizen. No man can change his forefathers, but the poor man may haply become richer. The Athenian εὐπατρίδαι, who were thus gradually brought down from their privileged position, seem to have been quite as proud and exclusive as the Roman patricians; but when they lost their privileges they lost them far more thoroughly, and they did not, as at Rome, practically hand on many of them to a new nobility, of which they formed part, though not the whole. ”

“ The nobility of France, keeping the most oppressive social and personal privileges, had been shorn of all political and even administrative power; the tyrants of the people were the slaves of the king. In Poland sixty thousand gentlemen, rich and poor, famous andPoland. obscure, but all alike gentlemen, rode out to choose a king by a unanimous vote, and to bind him when chosen by such conditions as they thought good. Those sixty thousand, like the populus of Rome, formed a narrow oligarchy as regarded the rest of the nation, but a wild democracy among themselves. ”

“ We see that men of birth and wealth often allowed themselves a strange licence in dealing with their low-born fellow-citizens. But we see no sign of the growth of a body made up of patricians and leading plebeians who contrived to keep office to themselves by a social tradition only less strong than positive law. We have at Athens the exact parallel to the state of things when Appius Claudius shrank from the thought of the consulship of Gaius Licinius ”

“ The way in which nobility has arisen in different times and places is very various, and there are several nations whose history will supply us with examples of a nobility of one kind giving way to a nobility of another kind. The history of the Roman commonwealth illustrates this perhaps better than any other. ”

“ Nobility thus implies the vesting of some hereditary privilege or advantage in certain families, without deciding in what such privilege or advantage consists. Its nature may differ widely according to the causes which have led to the establishment of the distinction between family and family in each particular case. ”

“ The Great Council of Venice, the curiae of Rome, were each of them the assembly of a privileged class, an assembly in which every member of that class had a right to a place, an assembly which might be called popular as far as the privileged class was concerned, though rigidly oligarchic as regardedrthe excluded classes. But, close as the likeness is, it is merely a superficial likeness, because it is the result of opposite causes working in opposite directions. It is like two men who are both for a moment in the same place, though their faces are turned in opposite ways. ”

“ The nobility which was thus formed at Venice is the very model of a civic nobility, a nobility which is also an aristocracy. In a monarchy, despotic or constitutional, there cannot in strictness be an aristocracy, because the whole political power cannot be vested in the noble class. But in the Venetian commonwealth the nobilityThe nobility of Venice and aristocracy. ”

“ There may or there may not be a power vested somewhere of conferring nobility; but it is Definition. essential to the true idea of nobility that, when once acquired, it shall go on for ever to all the descendants or, more commonly, only to all the descendants in the male line of the person first ennobled or first recorded as noble. ”

“ Italian cities nobility had an origin and ran a course quite unlike the origin and the course which were its lot at Venice. The nobles of many cities were simply the nobles of the surrounding country changed, sometimes greatly against their will, into citizens. Such a nobility differed far more widely from either the Roman or the Venetian patriciate than they differed from one another. ”

“ A series of struggles raised this new people, the plebs, to a level with the old people, the populus. The gradual character of the process is not the least instructive part of it. There are two marked stages in the struggle. ”

“ This again was not at the outset an exclusive right of the crown; it was common for a leader in battle to grant to someone not of his family, who had specially distinguished himself, the right to bear the whole or part of his coat of arms, differences or undifferenced. ”

“ It is a minority, a minority strictly marked out by birth from other members of the commonwealth, a minority which seems further, though this point is less clearly marked, to have had on the whole the advantage in point of wealth. When we are first entitled to speak with any kind of certainty, the non-privileged class possess a 'certain share in the election of magistrates and -the making of laws. ”