I am reading Barbara W. Tuchman's "The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914", 1966.
There are many things that can be said about the book, the first that has struck me is the land holdings of the wealthy in Britain at the end of 19th century.
"...In the “brilliant and powerful body,” as Winston Churchill called it, of the two hundred great families who had been governing England for generations, everyone knew or was related to everyone else. Since superiority and comfortable circumstances imposed on the nobility and gentry a duty to reproduce themselves, they were given to large families, five or six children being usual, seven or eight not uncommon, and nine or more not unknown. The Duke of Abercorn, father of Lord George Hamilton in Salisbury’s Government, had six sons and seven daughters; the fourth Baron Lyttelton, Gladstone’s brother-in-law and father of Alfred Lyttelton, had eight sons and four daughters; the Duke of Argyll, Secretary for India under Gladstone, had twelve children. As a result of the marriages of so many siblings, and of the numerous second marriages, everyone was related to a dozen other families. People who met each other every day, at each other’s homes, at race meetings and hunts, at Cowes, for the Regatta, at the Royal Academy, at court and in Parliament, were more often than not meeting their second cousins or brother-in-law’s uncle or stepfather’s sister or aunt’s nephew on the other side. When a prime minister formed a government it was not nepotism but almost unavoidable that some of his Cabinet should be related to him or to each other. In the Cabinet of 1895 Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary for War, was married to a sister of Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary for India, and Lansdowne’s daughter was married to the nephew and heir of the Duke of Devonshire, who was Lord President of the Council.
The country’s rulers, said one, “knew each other intimately quite apart from Westminster.” They had been at school together and at one of the two favored colleges, Christ Church at Oxford or Trinity College at Cambridge..."
