The Leviathan of Wealth

The Sutherland fortune in the industrial revolution

Eric Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135031855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Published in the year 2006, The Leviathan of Wealth is a valuable contribution to the field of Major Works.

Part One

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Leviathan of Wealth

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I

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The House of Sutherland

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The Sutherland fortune was an unrivalled concentration of aristocratic wealth in the ‘Age of Improvement’. It had been caught up in that unpredicted expansion of the national economy that we now know as the Industrial Revolution. This great and complex process, at once dramatic, cumulative and virtually unprecedented, generated new tensions and pressures in every corner of British life. Rapid economic growth is always a disturbing and often a dislocating experience. Any society undergoing it is committed to continuous change and adjustment. In Britain there was no example to follow, no planners to guide the process, and no specific machinery of government to influence the course of the change. Yet somehow the revolution of the economy was contained, the social framework did not break asunder. Somehow the dislocation of traditional social relationships was minimized.

It is perhaps symptomatic of the gradual nature of social change that, in vital areas of national life, Britain remained an aristocratic country throughout the nineteenth century. Although the relative position of the aristocracy had been undermined by the transformation of the economy, its capacity for survival in an increasingly alien world is a curious historical phenomenon. At the beginning of the twentieth century the landed aristocracy still retained a surprisingly large share of economic resources, political importance and, of course, social esteem. The diminution of landed authority was peaceful, gradual, without revolution.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the Great Governing Families of England¹ lived in a world characterized by unprecedented change and by irksome political questions. One of the greatest of such families, the richest, the most powerful, and the most disliked, was the House of Sutherland—an Anglo-Scottish alliance of aristocratic connections then reaching the zenith of its wealth and power. Of all the tall poppies of British society—including the Dukes of Devonshire, Bedford and Northumberland, the Egremonts and the Rockinghams—the Sutherland family was probably the tallest in terms of both income and acres.

The affairs of the House of Sutherland were inevitably involved in the general metamorphosis of the nation. In contemporary eyes the Sutherland family was mainly associated with three facets of its activities. First, and most conspicuously, the family had become a leader of fashionable society life in London—at Stafford House, the largest and most gorgeous of London's private palaces. The diaries and memoirs of the early nineteenth century speak long and admiringly of the splendid entertainments offered by the Duchesses of Sutherland at Stafford House. As intended, they attracted envious attention. Second, the House of Sutherland endured a rising tide of public wrath and obloquy provoked by the economic policies undertaken on its estates in the extreme north of Scotland. These policies were part of a general movement known as the Highland clearances. The depopulation of the Scottish Highlands generated a substantial body of pamphleteering and polemical literature both then and since; it remains a controversial subject and is likely to continue so. Third, the name of Sutherland was associated with a formidable accumulation of property—territorial and financial. Its wealth was renowned, exaggerated and awed. The 1st Duke of Sutherland was variously described as the richest man in Europe, the richest in England, the most wealthy member of the aristocracy— almost invariably, he has received the sobriquet of ‘Leviathan of Wealth’.

The historical significance of the Sutherland family derives almost entirely from the wealth which gave it power and initiative in many areas of national life. Apart from their inherited privileges the Sutherlands are not especially interesting—they tended to conform to the accepted norms of aristocratic behaviour, they were intellectually rather limited and their political attitudes were largely unexceptional. Yet the history of the family in the early nineteenth century illuminates the economic and social changes of the time, and the response of the aristocracy to these changes. The Sutherland interest involved many aspects of British existence: canals and railways, iron and coal, agricultural improvement and the resettlement of population, political influence and electioneering, social conflict and the role of paternalism in the new society, even literature and fine art.

Most of all, the Sutherland fortune allowed the family to pursue two great and contrasting experiments in the early nineteenth-century economy. One was set in the heart of industrial Britain— the promotion of railway technology in its pioneering phase. The other was located on the periphery, in a distinctly pre-industrial context—it was an attempt to transmit rapid economic growth to a traditional peasant economy in the Highlands.

What were the antecedents of the Sutherland wealth? Vicissitudes of marriage and descent largely determined the course of the familial fortune. Disraeli remarked, without much exaggeration, that the family had made good by its talent for ‘absorbing heiresses’. The most spectacular example of this occurred in 1785 when George Granville Leveson-Gower married Elizabeth Gordon, Countess of Sutherland. It was the prelude to the effective convergence of two ancient families, one English, the other Scottish, and it laid the foundation for the family's social ascendency in the nineteenth century.

On the English side were the Leveson-Gowers, their wealth and position the product of earlier alliances. The Gower element had been settled at Stittenham, Yorkshire, since the time of the Norman Conquest. They remained relatively obscure country squires until the seventeenth century; in 1620 Thomas Gower obtained a baronetcy from James I. He married the daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Leveson—and eventually, in 1689, the properties of the Levesons were joined with those of the Gowers, in the hands of Sir William Leveson-Gower.

The Levesons were a Staffordshire family. They had ‘acquired great riches’ in the sixteenth-century wool trade and invested heavily in land in the Midlands—particularly in land thrown on the market during the reign of Henry VIII. Trentham, which was to be the main landed seat of the family, had been an Augustinian priory before the dissolution. A Royalist family, the Levesons suffered during the Civil War, but recovered sufficiently by the end of the seventeenth century to rebuild their house at Trentham.²

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the family possessed three landed estates—in Yorkshire (Stittenham), Salop (Lilleshall), and Staffordshire (Trentham). The rise of the Leveson-Gowers had begun. In 1865 they were described as ‘the luckiest of the great English families. They have risen within 250 years from simple country baronets into the greatest… territorialists in Great Britain.’ The same authorities commented that ‘the source of their dignity has been a succession of lucky alliances … The pedigree, though curiously uncertain, is by no means a bad one as English nobles go.’³

The accretion of wealth and dignity proceeded during the eighteenth century. Sir John Leveson-Gower (1675–1709) became a peer in 1702. He was ennobled when Queen Anne needed a Tory majority in the Lords to impeach the Duke of Portland. He became Baron Gower of Stittenham. His wife was the daughter of the Duke of Rutland, who furnished a portion of £15,000. Their son began his political life as a Jacobite, but changed his allegiance to the Hanoverians. In 1746 he was created Viscount Trentham and Earl Gower, his reward for loyalty in raising a regiment to confront the Jacobite Rebellion. He died in 1754, considerably richer than his father had been.

Thus far his family had achieved an earldom, good connections with other aristocratic families, a consolidated position in Staffordshire politics, and a respectable territorial establishment. The foundations of a great Whig family were being laid. The luck of the Leveson-Gowers was not confined to felicitous marriages and political adroitness. In 1720 Lord Gower was involved in the select circle of men who perpetrated the South Sea Bubble affair. Gower apparently made one of the largest gains—he sold out before the Bubble burst and took a reported profit of £64,000. He had certainly bought £20,000 worth of stock and it is probable that he sold it at a profit of 300 per cent.⁴

In 1754 Granville Leveson-Gower (1721–1803) succeeded as the 2nd Earl Gower. In political history he was the most celebrated and important of the Leveson-Gowers. In a turbulent and rather erratic political career he was for many years Lord Privy Seal and President of the Council. In the early part of the reign of George III he was a member of the ‘Bedford Group’—he was connected by marriage to the Dukes of Bedford and Bridgewater, and the Earls of Galloway and Carlisle. He was described as ‘a boon companion, with the best cook in London, a man whose sweetness of nature made him a power in the Cabinet’. In 1768 the Bedfords felt that Gower ought to be prime minister,⁵ and in 1771, after the death of Bedford, Gower took over the leadership of the remnants of the Bedford group.

The ‘Gower Party’ was an influential grouping and was held together largely by family connections. In October 1778 Gower resigned from North's government; he told the king that there was ‘a want of activity, decision, or subordination in every department’, particularly in the administration of the American War and of Irish affairs. Only a coalition, he declared, could avoid the ‘impending ruin’—‘no man of conscience could any longer’ sit in the Cabinet. He remained at the centre of political affairs, but his ambitions were limited. He was willing to form the centre of a union of political interests, but had little desire for leadership. It is said that he ‘had sufficient resolution’ to refuse the post of prime minister on the fall of Shelburne in 1783, but he joined Pitt's Cabinet in the following year. In 1786 he became 1st Marquis of Stafford—another reward for political services.⁶

In the latter part of his life Stafford withdrew from political affairs, although he maintained a very considerable electoral influence. His wife said of him, ‘he loves his own place in the country, is a great farmer, likes his ease, is in very good circumstances, and happy at home.’ He was thrice married. His second marriage was immensely important for the future advance of the family fortunes. In 1748 he married Lady Louisa Egerton, the eldest daughter of Scroop, and favourite sister of the heirless Duke of Bridgewater. He began the connection with the Canal Duke which later developed into a major involvement in the evolution of the transport sector of the British economy. Stafford fathered four children by this marriage. When the Duke of Bridgewater died in 1803 he left the profits of his famous canal to Stafford's first son. It was a most lucrative inheritance. The 1st Marquis of Stafford died in the same year.

The recipient of the canal profits was George Granville Leveson-Gower (1758–1833), Lord Trentham, Earl Gower, and (in 1803) 2nd Marquis of Stafford. He was created 1st Duke of Sutherland in the year of his death. He was ‘a dull, nervous man with a large, beaky nose and a prim mouth’, a man generally thought to have been dominated by his brilliant wife. Educated at Westminster and Oxford, he cultivated his taste for classical scholarship, philology, botany and chemistry. As a young man he was noted for his shyness and lack of interest in politics. On Burke's advice he was sent to learn French at Auxerre and he travelled abroad for two years. In 1778 he entered the Commons where he represented Staffordshire seats until he went to the House of Lords in 1798.⁷

In 1790, at the age of thirty-two, and without previous diplomatic experience, he became ambassador to Paris, only quitting with the hurried withdrawal of the embassy in 1792. During that distraught period his wife became a close friend of Marie Antoinette, to whom she sent clothes when the Queen was imprisoned. Their eldest son was a playmate of the Dauphin. On his retur...