Though the Victorian gentlemanly ideal was ostensibly universally applicable and attainable by any man who undertook to train himself according to the precepts of chivalry, there was a tacit understanding that gentlemen of birth were a cut above all other gentlemen, even if the latter were also public-school-educated and looked and acted like real gentlemen. A gentleman made inevitably lacked the total self-confidence of a gentleman born, for no amount of training could act as a substitute for a good family tree and the self-assurance which followed from it. A gentleman made was always aware, and so were all other gentlemen around him, that he was second class at best.
True gentility was determined by the possession of the right sort of blood, as the Latin word genus implies, and the idea that greatness is attendant on birth goes back to the beginnings of the notion of aristocracy itself. Founders of great lineages throughout history have been the natural leaders of their community.
As a family establishes its territorial influence, its power over an area tends to become hereditary and be perceived as a right. Authority thus comes to be seen as ‘innate’, the quality of high-born men who are called upon to rule and who are marked off from the low-born by their capacity for disinterested public service. (Powis 1984: 20, 48, 69). The highest form of service is the service of the state and this the aristocracy claimed as their exclusive right and privilege until challenged in the nineteenth century by the rising middle class.
Nevertheless, the age-old belief that it was the quality of the blood that allotted a man a place among the rulers did not lose its appeal. It was partly due to the aristocracy’s willingness in the second half of the century to share power with commoners in order to cling to it longer and partly due to the romantic veneration of tradition on the part of the newcomers to their ranks who, though not to the ‘manor’ born, aspired to the standards of living and behaviour which would mark them off as belonging to the privileged elite. They were willing to put aside their materialism which had made their rise possible and embrace the chivalrous idea of selfless service, the hallmark of the aristocratic class.
The British aristocracy had avoided revolution in the nineteenth century by co-opting into their ranks the able and the discontented from the classes below, but at the cost of the erosion of their own power base. The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, 1884 and 1885 had gradually transferred power from the landowners and farmers to the townspeople and industrial labourers. But, paradoxically, as their actual hold on power weakened, their hold on popular imagination grew. As P. Mason has pointed out, admiration for the ruling class and the ideals its members were thought to stand for could have been one of the cementing factors of society in Britain before 1914:
Social difference was never so great as at the time of the Liberal government of 1906. To many of the upper and middle classes the measures that government
and in particular Lloyd George’s budget (the “people’s budget” of 1909 to carry out an ambitious scheme of social reform, to be financed by a land tax, increased death duties and a supertax on incomes over £ 3,000 – P. R.) seemed to mark the end of an age – as indeed they did – and the beginning of an end to inequality and privilege. But the taste of the day showed an astonishing nostalgia for aristocratic rule. (1982: 11)
Part of the attraction here for the lower classes was the presumed universality of the gentlemanly code of honour and the prospect of social ascent:
One reason why the idea of the gentleman was so widely accepted was that no one was quite sure who was a gentleman and who was not. There was no closed caste and a great many people used the term in such a way that it did not exclude themselves – or at least what they hoped their sons might become. There was thus a wide range of professional people and of those who would now be called white collar workers who identified themselves with the upper classes in the sense that they hoped to join their ranks. The typical middle-class Englishman was a snob; he loved a lord. He did not think he could become a lord but he did think his son might become a gentleman. He would very likely have put himself in a slightly higher social bracket than a detached observer might have thought fitting and for that reason he felt he was on the same side as the ruling classes.
(ibid.: 9)
Mason speaks about Englishmen but his statement can well be extended to include anglicized Scots like Buchan, who has been frequently and offhandedly blamed for careerism and snobbery, or in M. Green’s memorable phrase, for his
“susceptibility to the company of the elect” (1990: 86).
A conservative and a romantic, Buchan was definitely drawn to the romance of the past, a characteristic shared by many of his fellow countrymen, not least his great example, Sir Walter Scott. No matter how humble their station in life, Scots through ages have loved to trace their ancestry back to a great nobleman, even if the connection is hardly tenuous. This can be to a large extent ascribed to the Celtic clan system which in the Scottish Highlands survived well into the nineteenth century and was only destroyed by capitalist agriculture. The relationship between the chief and the clan members was paternalistic, that of a stern and all-powerful father to his children from whom he expected absolute loyalty. In the Lowlands the clan system had disappeared earlier but the old ties of loyalty and pride in ancestry still held. Buchan’s son William has remarked:
Because of the clan system, which exists in the Lowlands also, although in a different form from the Highlands, there are few Scots who cannot claim a connection, however far-fetched, with some noble or at least long-established family. This is one of the reasons for the abiding Scottish passion for genealogy, for noting and collating relationships into the farthest reaches of cousinage.
(1982: 77)
His father’s parents had been Lowlanders on both sides of the family but there was a fond Buchan belief that they could trace their branch of the family back to
the Buchans of Auchmacoy, an ancient house in Aberdeenshire. John Buchan plays down the connection in his autobiography as not having been properly proven but his son has shown how seriously he took the whole matter. In 1895 John’s uncle had applied to the Lyon Court, the highest heraldic authority in Scotland, for leave to use the arms of Auchmacoy. Permission was given, with the qualification that of the two Auchmacoy sunflowers only one was to be used on the Buchan crest. William remembers his father using the heraldic sunflower on his personal things and when he was made a peer on being appointed Governor-General to Canada he retained the sunflower on his coat-of-arms, supported by a stag and a falcon. The Buchans of Aberdeenshire are a numerous and very ancient clan, one of the old ‘tribes of the land’. In 1830 the Lyon Court had recognized the Buchans as descendants of the ancient Celtic Earls of Buchan who had held their lands since time immemorial. (Ibid.: 79) The name Buchan is first recorded around AD 1000 in the Book of Deer. It is either of Brythonic and Scottish Gaelic origin and denotes a cattle-breeding place in both cases. The province of Buchan continues to be a major cattle-farming area and is the home of the Aberdeen Angus breed. (Mackay 2002: 16) Tradition has it that one of the younger sons of the family had gone south to serve King James IV at Stirling and his descendants had settled in Stirlingshire. Though impoverished, they retained their fierce pride in their illustrious lineage and Buchan was probably speaking only half in jest about having felt ‘a proprietary interest’ in the high history of Scotland as a child (MHD 45). As his son observes, awareness of such an inheritance must have given the Buchans a sense of standing apart, of being special, and Buchan’s fondness for the company of people with notable ancestors can be better understood as respect for ancient lineage. He is known never to have interrupted a bore, provided he came from an ancient and notable family. His romantic nature saw not the dull individual in front of him but looked beyond the unprepossessing features of his interlocutor for a glimpse of the glories of the past. To quote William again:
His strong sense of history, coupled with knowledge gained from immensely wide reading, ensured that he could begin a conversation with a stranger and, in no time at all, be immersed in genealogical complexities which the latter, till then, had thought known only to himself. I would see him see through some dull, red-faced man in a tweed suit to his Cavalier ancestor, and see the man’s beefy, discontented, suspicious countenance take on a momentary look of pride and pleasure, as if carried back to braver and simpler things. All that I am saying, really is that JB was a true romantic, his rare failures with other people occurred when he came up against a good intelligence frozen by cynicism, iron-bound by some grievance, or distorted by jealousy. (1982: 49)
In the course of his political career Buchan befriended several prime ministers, presidents and two English kings. He esteemed especially highly the Victorian qualities of King George V, on the occasion of whose Jubilee he wrote a commemorative book, The King’s Grace, to celebrate his reign. He was
appalled by the antics of Edward VIII and was greatly relieved by the latter’s abdication, George VI being more amenable to his conservative tastes. He even got to play the king in real life. For two years he stood in for George V as his representative at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, residing for ten days in 1933 and 1934 at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. As Governor-General he represented the King in Canada and took the dominion to war in his name in 1939.
The nature and qualities necessary for leadership he explored in a number of his books, most poignantly in A Prince of the Captivity, where he tries to find a solution to the problem extremely acute at the time, of what kind of a leader could withstand the rise of fascism and dictatorship generally in Europe. The Courts of the Morning examines the nature of dictatorship on the model of a fictional South American republic. In The Blanket of the Dark the central issue is what makes a good king. Hereditary right to the throne and the abilities needed to govern well are contrasted and the balance tips in favour of ability.
Nevertheless, kingly blood possesses its own special mystique and this Buchan examines lovingly in the collection of interrelated short stories titled The Path of the King.
Before we proceed with the book which traces romantically the descent of royal blood through generations, echoing wonderfully the canons of contemporary historiography, let us look at what Buchan thought worthwhile emphasising about the nature of kingship when he summed up the twenty-five-year reign of George V in The King’s Grace:
Majesty and Grace are in the royal office. Monarchy in some form is universal, for it seems to be a necessary in government. Elsewhere it is elective and temporary, as in republics; or as in dictatorships, enforced and undefined in term.
But hereditary monarchy is not only more enduring than such types, it has a special quality which they can never reach. A king who reigns not by election or a sudden popular impulse but by right, has a sanction behind him which no transient dictator or president can claim. His authority is interwoven with the life and thought of his people. If, as in Britain, his ancestry goes back to our dim beginnings, the office embodies the whole history of the nation. Because it is beyond popular caprice, it is, as I have said, the centre of a nation’s conscious unity, a link between its past and future. It becomes a symbol, which needs no artificial sanctity to give it power. With this firm foundation Britain is enabled to be a bold pioneer in new construction, just as the man who would cast his spear far must first find solid footing. It preserves her from the wastefulness of revolution, and from the futile type of revolution which we call reaction. (KG 137)
It is also of some interest for our purposes to look at what qualities he found praiseworthy in George V whom he knew well and greatly esteemed. He brings out his profound humanity, his simplicity and common touch. He stresses his conciliatory role in the crises which have befallen his people in his reign and his
steadfastness and courage in facing them. He has been a good father to his people and that is his true achievement, for
[t]he power of the Throne lies in what it is: but the authority of the King lies both in what he is and in what he has done. /…/ Leadership does not consist only in a strong man imposing his will upon others. In that sense it has no meaning for a British Sovereign. But in a far profounder sense the King has shown himself a leader, since the true task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, since the greatness is already there. That truth is the basis of all religion, it is the only justification for democracy, it is the chart and compass of our mortal life. (Ibid.: 138)
The kind of greatness Buchan has ascribed to George V informs also the carriers of the royal blood, sometimes against their better judgement, in The Path of the King, the fictional line finding its triumphant climax in Abraham Lincoln, Buchan’s favourite American and ideal democrat. It is also a story of the magnificent destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, and as befits an imperial nation, it transcends the boundaries earthly and spiritual. The collection serves also as a fitting introduction both to the theme of chivalry in his work and the gallery of characters whose virtue is carried in their blood.
Mysteries of the blood (The Path of the King)
Published in the middle of his career (in book form the collection appeared in 1921), it had nevertheless been planned already in 1898 when Buchan was still at Oxford. His Newdigate Prize Poem on the Pilgrim Fathers contains references to it and his list of projected books from the same time includes the title The Path of the King, ”to be begun after taking my degree” (quoted in Adam Smith 1965: 272). The poem, more concerned with the spirit of heroic adventure than the historical voyage, contains lines which could serve as a synopsis of the kind of characters we would encounter in the later book:
No faltering shakes their steadfastness whose ways Lie on the King’s Path to the end of days … Though o’er our path the wrack of battle roll No wars perplex the Sabbath of our soul.
What though the body be a sacrifice To the fierce sun or the inclement skies, The lurking wild beast or the savage king, We are not sad for all their threatening.
Life is not meat nor drink nor raiment fine, But a man’s courage and the fire divine.
(Quoted ibid.: 65)
Buchan’s youth coincided with the high imperial noon of Victoria’s empire when Englishmen’s minds were fired with elevated ideas of their own
greatness. The ‘manifest destiny’ of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ to spread its seed across the globe and open up areas for development which God himself had laid aside for them and which were only temporarily in the custody of the natives, was seen as unfolding daily. The mystique of the ‘blood’ and the high destiny of God’s chosen people fired the empire-builders’ minds with visions of a global brotherhood of Anglo-Saxondom. Imperial visionaries like Cecil Rhodes or Sir Arthur Milner envisioned a world ruled and administered by Britain in close conjunction with her white dominions, not cynically but benevolently, because of all possible ways of government the British one was just the best. That God approved was obvious because no other nation had achieved such greatness in industry and commerce or been so successful in spreading the Word. That God himself was an Englishman, at least in his sympathies, was proved by the marching forward of the Protestant creed, while Catholicism was languishing.
Imperial historiography and popular literature extolled the heroes who had made it all possible. They singled out certain episodes and men who embodied the qualities which had made the ’race’ great. The late Victorians were not unduly rigorous in their terms and where we would now make scrupulous distinction between ‘race’ and ‘nation’, they did not. The words were used interchangeably and when they spoke about the stupendous achievements of the
‘Anglo-Saxon race’, they could have just the ‘English people’ in mind. The Protestant Anglo-Irish and Scotsmen were frequently bracketed with the English, as in the imperial and global context the national distinctions did not seem important, though they might, of course, matter to individuals. Theirs was a subsidiary role anyway because the mastermind of global expansion was English. An important distinction should be made, though, about the catholic Irish and their brethren in the Scottish Highlands. Celtic or Gaelic values did not enjoy such a high esteem as they do today. Poor and backward, dreamy and strange in their loyalties, there seemed nothing they could offer except cheap labour and romantic lost causes. Celtic mysticism looked enervated when compared to Teutonic vigour. Among other things the pre-eminence of the Germanic stock was rather unsettlingly proved by the economic competition and imperial challenge of the united Germany.
When The Path of the King was first published between October 1920 and October 1921 in the magazine Outward Bound, the most dangerous challenger to Britain’s naval superiority, Germany, had just been conclusively beaten. Not only had the Empire won the war. It had also considerably expanded.
Germany’s and Russia’s advance towards India, the jewel in the imperial crown and the raison d’étre of the whole imperial enterprise, had been halted. In Africa Rhodes’ dream of the complete mastery of the continent by people of the British stock seemed no longer an impossible one. But, best of all, after a
Germany’s and Russia’s advance towards India, the jewel in the imperial crown and the raison d’étre of the whole imperial enterprise, had been halted. In Africa Rhodes’ dream of the complete mastery of the continent by people of the British stock seemed no longer an impossible one. But, best of all, after a