The transformation of Britain’s nineteenth-century governing classes has long been the subject of sustained debate. Some historians describe a shift from a ‘class society’ dominated by the aristocracy to a ‘professional society’ led by experts, while others stress that the pan-British territorial aristocracy remained wealthy and politically influential until the early twentieth century, even though the old fortunes, landed estates, and attitudes to wealth declined by the First World War.Footnote 1 Disagreement has also centred on the openness of the elite: for some, the British aristocracy admitted relatively few newcomers compared with its continental counterparts; for others, it was relatively open despite its small size in comparison with the Russian and German aristocracies.Footnote 2 The British integrated Indian nabobs, businessmen, industrialists, newspaper moguls, wealthy American heiresses, and the Irish and Scottish peerages.Footnote 3 In this view, scholars have shown that the aristocracy adapted to new forms of wealth and class distinction, blurring earlier oppositions between industry, gentlemanly capitalism, and finance.Footnote 4 By the turn of the century, the British aristocracy became less dependent on the state as a provider for its younger sons – the inverse of what was occurring in Prussia and Russia.Footnote 5 Taken together, these debates suggest not only the persistence of aristocratic power but also the gradual melding of aristocratic, professional, and middle-class groups within a reconfigured governing elite.
Given its role as a refuge for the younger sons of the aristocracy and gentry, focusing on the treasury department allows us to examine the interconnections between a segment of the British governing classes and the professionalization of the nineteenth-century state. This public establishment played a key role in the latter process – broadly defined according to contemporary standards as expert knowledge, standardized entry requirements, fixed promotion ladders, training, codes of conduct, and examinations – through its officials, superintendence of public establishments, and growing regulation of appointments, promotions, and pensions.Footnote 6 Historians claim that professionalization began to transform the British Civil Service since the mid-nineteenth century with significant impacts on the composition of the state. Some scholars consider that reforms strengthened the ties between the upper classes and the higher positions of the service, reinforcing mechanisms of social closure based on educational standards.Footnote 7 By contrast, others claim that an increasingly intellectual, middle-class civil servant, educated at public schools and Oxbridge, had replaced the ‘patrician professional’ by the early twentieth century.Footnote 8 This article suggests a more complex transition of the governing classes. A new cohort of middle-class civil servants did replace the ‘patrician professionals’ by the early twentieth century. But this renewal happened at the beginning of the career for the generation entering the service since the 1870s, not in the high-ranking positions of the treasury and other public departments attained later in life which remained the preserve of the aristocracy and the gentry until 1914.
During this period of social change and expansion of global capitalism, a new administrative elite rose to the high-ranking positions of this public establishment and the British Civil Service following reforms from the 1850s onwards. The introduction of open competition (1870), promotion by merit (1856), the consolidation of clerical grades (1876), the marriage strategies adopted by aristocrats who populated the Civil Service, and the creation of the civil division of the Order of the Bath (1847) modified career structures, renewed and existed alongside long-standing demarcations of class and kinship in the British state, rather than replacing them with new markers of occupational status based on ideas of merit alone. Under public service ideals that were increasingly regarded as more legitimate than the claims of family lineage and patronage, these processes in bureaucratic promotions and honours systems enmeshed with familial networks to produce the new administrative elite. In fact, several treasury clerks became, if not the wealthiest, some of the most powerful men in Britain, intimately connected with chancellors of the exchequer, MPs, and prime ministers.
A systematic analysis of the social and familial life of 116 treasury clerks (Appendix A, see https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X25101258), occupying the highest ranks of the department and the Civil Service from 1847 to 1914, offers a different perspective on the development of the nineteenth-century state and the transformation of its governing classes.Footnote 9 An investigation of this sample based on the treasury arrangement and appointment nooks preserved at The National Archives in Kew, as well as official papers, manuscript archives, probate records, memoirs, newspapers, and censuses, provides the most complete exploration to date of the treasury’s upper ranks during the period under study – although information is uneven across clerks – and helps illuminate new stories of this new administrative elite. Previous scholarship has rightly underlined that public schools and Oxbridge were a key marker of merit, social distinction, and networks among nineteenth-century civil servants.Footnote 10 My analysis draws on these arguments but develops them further by arguing that the consolidation and cohesion of the new ‘administrative elite’, that is, the men who attained the top positions in the treasury and from there moved to other public establishments from 1847 to 1914, was also the result of transitions in their life cycle and family life.Footnote 11 Instead of conceptualizing the formation of this new administrative elite exclusively in terms of administrative reform, career advancement based on individual merit, educational networks, or the result of connections with cabinet officers – as hitherto has been commonplace – I will show that treasury clerks’ marriage ties, familial networks, and intergenerational support sustained their careers, families, and status during middle life and old age.
Overall, few scholars have studied the professionalization of the British state from the vantage of a social history perspective, exploring the ordinary operations of the state, its working spaces, or the people who ran the administration at different levels.Footnote 12 Existing scholarship which takes an administrative approach to the study of the treasury and Civil Service has provided the foundations of our understanding of reforms and public departments, building its interpretations on the frameworks of the nineteenth-century state: merit, neutrality, and efficiency.Footnote 13 My research engages critically with these concepts and sees them along with institutional structures as central elements of the professionalization of the British state, but it will examine the nineteenth-century administrative elite in the treasury through the lenses of the life cycle, family, and class. Apart from recasting the ascent of this group in broader social terms, this approach produces significant insights into the development of the nineteenth-century state and the transformation of its governing classes.
Firstly, it expands the traditional scope of the nineteenth-century professions and the upper classes by bringing both historiographies into fruitful dialogue. Historians of the professions have predominantly focused on the middle classes, even in cases where new social and cultural histories have expanded the range of enquiry into emergent careers and women’s professional development.Footnote 14 On the other hand, historians of the aristocracy have mostly based their studies on landed families, their economic practices, the peerage, and a limited number of counties, though works on the gentry have recently burgeoned.Footnote 15 By examining aspects of the familial and social life of the new administrative elite in the treasury, I show that gentry and aristocratic, younger sons who joined the ranks of the professions, do not easily fit into compartmentalized histories of the aristocracy or the middle classes. The nexuses between layers of the aristocracy, professions, and gentry provides a more elastic image of social class in Victorian Britain, thus complicating clear-cut divisions or transitions of the governing classes in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 16
Secondly, this article aims to refine our understanding of class in the Civil Service and Victorian Britain by revealing how dependent occupational and professional status was on transitions in personal life over the life course.Footnote 17 Focusing on the treasury underlines that the title of ‘clerk’ in the Victorian period covered a wide range of positions. The category of the salaried worker who ascended fixed ladders of promotion and benefited from a pension system encompassed clerks from the aristocracy, middle classes, and working classes. Yet, despite participating in the same institutionalized model of professional merit (appointments, promotions, clerical grades, and honours), the family forms, lifestyles, intergenerational support, and marriage patterns of treasury clerks were dissimilar to those of clerks of different socio-economic standing.
Finally, historians have emphasized the variety and porousness of family formations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 18 Moreover, recent histories of nineteenth-century Britain and the British empire also demonstrate that families and their kinship ties had a pivotal role in the development of commercial networks, imperial companies, businesses, emigration, politics, poor relief, and industry.Footnote 19 By building on some of these insights, my research on the new administrative elite shows that Civil Service careers rested on different kinds of family formations, intergenerational support, and patronage networks enlarged through marriages and kinship ties. Family networks served to sustain the status and careers of treasury clerks as much as – or more than – individual achievements and continued to be central in a period of increasingly bureaucratic models, ideals, and structures. These findings help to demystify the idea of the self-made man, nuance professional mythologies of merit, and question the emphasis on individualism and the nuclear conjugal family as a feature or enabler of modernization of British society.Footnote 20
The first section shows how marriages granted coherence and may have conceded career advancement opportunities to the rising administrative elite. The second explores how married life – rooted in households, neighbourhoods, and lifestyles – further consolidated the status of high-ranking treasury clerks and how intergenerational support proved key to achieve this. In the third section, I explore the domesticity and family formations of the new administrative elite to illuminate how their status, security, and comfort was dependent on familial practices.
I
The treasury department was the most important public department in late nineteenth-century Britain. It possessed both controlling and executive functions.Footnote 21 By the 1850s, a new ethos of fiscal and public morality, notably advocated by William Gladstone as chancellor of the exchequer, infused the department, and gave it new powers in accounting and auditing. This financial and administrative expertise became a trademark of the new administrative elite that dominated the Civil Service.
The treasury was a select and hierarchical establishment composed of diverse kinds of permanent and temporary clerks, accountants, messengers, and female typists.Footnote 22 This was a small department compared to the thousands of officers of the Post Office or the Inland Revenue. Right before the First World War, when the Civil Service had reached more than 172,000 men and women, the entire staff of the treasury numbered about 140 officials, of which 25 were part of the administrative staff.Footnote 23 Decades later, Sir Andrew McFaydean, a retired treasury clerk, recalled that when he entered the department in 1910 people used to wear top hats and tails, and ‘the relationship of colleagues was very much that of a rather select club’.Footnote 24
A small body of treasury clerks, organized into five to six divisions, carried out the department’s most important duties: drafting and revising minutes, communicating with public departments, governments, and imperial officials, and dealing with more complex financial and revenue matters. These men were the core of the new administrative elite of the treasury who rose to the highest ranks of the department and other public establishments superintended by the former, notably those connected with revenue and finance. The frequency of promotion from treasury offices to high-ranking positions in the Mint department, the national debt office, the inland revenue, the customs, and the post office was the result not only of personal relationships developed in the department but also the governments’ and treasury’s intention to build a tradition of financial expertise flowing into its superintended establishments.Footnote 25
British historiography has so far explained the consolidation of this peculiar administrative elite by their close connections to cabinet officers and their educational backgrounds.Footnote 26 Indeed, it was a close-knit social group, brought together by a manly Oxbridge and public school education. These connections situated the career of treasury clerks in a broader context of social relationships, which were central to their interactions, status, and professional identities.Footnote 27 However, my analysis draws on these arguments but develops them further by showing that the status and consolidation of the rising administrative elite was also the result of transitions in their life cycle and family life. To begin with, marriages remained an important avenue for social status and professional development in the late nineteenth century.
The years 1864–5 had been some of the most important in treasury clerk Charles Fremantle’s life. He had risen in his Civil Service career since his appointment in 1853, notably as private secretary to successive patronage secretaries to the treasury.Footnote 28 But his professional achievements were only one aspect of his life expectations in middle life. On 29 April 1865, this thirty-year-old Eton and Oxford educated treasury clerk, and third son of Sir Thomas Fremantle of Swanbourne House, married Sophia Smith, the youngest daughter of the late Abel Smith of Woodhall Park, Hertfordshire, at St Peter’s Church, Eaton Square, London.Footnote 29
Treasury marital histories such as this one show that the development of professional careers in the British Civil Service took place against a broader background of family and class expectations. By setting up their own home in middle life, upper-class Victorians expected in return love, respectability, independence, comfort, the fulfilment of religious and gender ideals, the persistence of their lineages, and the transmission of wealth and properties.Footnote 30 Like Fremantle, other upper-class members of the new administrative elite longed for married life and met their future wives at society balls in London, country houses, and dinner parties, which had united the governing classes, provided an arena for political struggle and patronage, and acted as a marriage market for love and the reproduction of family alliances.
Such paths were not paved with roses. The family correspondence of treasury clerk Charles Fremantle shows that the road to manhood was full of obstacles and quite often the result of family negotiations of love, status, and material resources.Footnote 31 In 1864, Fremantle was seen by his future mother-in-law, Frances Anne Smith (née Calvert), daughter of General Sir Harry Calvert, 1st Bart., and Caroline Hammersley, as a ‘black sheep’ for his religious views. ‘Mummy is to see the latter this afternoon at Abel’s suggestion, & disabuse her mind of the idea that I am looked upon as a black sheep in the family’, Fremantle told his father.Footnote 32 This predicament almost ruined his engagement with his beloved Sophia Smith. The Fremantles’ and Smiths’ six-month marital negotiations epitomize the instability of status and masculine identity for a middle-aged gentry younger son. Luckily for Fremantle, his mother and his brother-in-law played a pivotal role in changing Mrs Smith’s mind.Footnote 33 While his title was that of ‘clerk’, Fremantle’s social life diverged significantly from the contemporary stereotypes of the lower-middle-class Victorian clerk. Instead, his upper-class engagement with Sophia represented the social roots of the new administrative elite then emerging.
For treasury clerks, as for other members of the British upper classes, marriage was an important step in manhood but also a key marker of status.Footnote 34 Initial objections such as those of Mrs Smith’s to Fremantle’s marriage with her daughter suggest that family lineage and religious views were at stake for upper-class families joining the ranks of the rising administrative elite. Thus, treasury clerks’ marital histories suggest the need to depart from understandings of class as an economic category, occupational category, or subjective identity alone, though all have relevance for thinking about the nineteenth century.Footnote 35 The newspapers and private letters I have analysed do not suggest a simple evolution from hierarchical conceptions of rank to binary and tripartite categories of class.Footnote 36 Social standing was a relational phenomenon that rested on overlapping hierarchies but was also elastic throughout the life cycle.Footnote 37
Newspapers, for example, replicated a conception of class based on the lineage family when discussing treasury clerks’ marriages in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 38 Depending on the notoriety of the couple, marriage records positioned them in middle age as belonging to ‘high life’ or as members of ‘ancient families’. One example, among many, is Sir Charles Rivers Wilson’s marriage to Beatrice Mostyn on 9 November 1895. The Morning Post underlined their families’ lineages and the select gathering of relations, friends, and presents. The newspaper notably highlighted Beatrice’s pedigree: the daughter of the 6th Baron Vaux of Harrowden and the Honourable Mrs Mostyn, of Cadogan Gardens.Footnote 39 Years earlier, at St George’s Church Hanover Square in 1855, the marriage of Alexander Young Spearman, eldest son of Sir Alexander Spearman, 1st Bart., and Jane Campbell, with Mary Anne Betha, daughter of Sir Alexander J. Bailey, Bart., of Glanusk Park and Rangoed Castle, was reviewed by the newspapers as another ‘marriage in high life’. ‘After the ceremony, Sir Joseph and Lady Bailey gave a splendid déjeuner in Belgrave-square, and at four o’clock the bride and bridegroom started in a handsome travelling-carriage for the Continent’, the Hereford Journal commented.Footnote 40
Marriages were, above all, a marker of status, masculinity, and morality for most treasury officials regardless of their professional development. This surfaces more clearly when we contrast it with attitudes to bachelorhood. Newspapers represented the civil servant bachelor as living a life lacking in comfort, subject to temptation, as neglecting family duties, and prone to leisure leading to low amusements, bars, unsuitable clothing, and disreputable company.Footnote 41 The married man, by contrast, was portrayed as a polite, dutiful, and domestic ‘gentleman’ who stayed away from music halls, brothels, and casinos. Although modern British historians have recognized that there is neither a hegemonic masculinity nor a linear transition between masculine norms, they do acknowledge the existence of multiple hierarchical masculinities.Footnote 42 In particular, recent scholarship has rejected the notion that middle-class men embraced a general ‘flight from domesticity’ as a widespread trend in British society.Footnote 43 While it may be certain that a significant – albeit unquantified – number of men pursued imperial adventures and thus gravitated toward a militaristic and robust hypermasculinity, a considerable number of treasury clerks remained unmarried, lived with their families, and frequented London clubs, where they encountered alternative forms of masculinity and domesticity, as I will show later in this article.
Yet, moralized and emasculated depictions of bachelorhood may have been one of the reasons – alongside love, family imperatives, the reproduction of life, material resources, and value systems – why treasury officials walked down the aisle. From my sample of 116 treasury clerks, only 21 remained single.Footnote 44 This predominance is consistent with a Civil Service report of 1850 on 8,000 officers which stated that of every 10 clerks, 5 were married at the age of twenty-eight, 8 a decade later, 9 two decades later, and 8 remained married at the age of fifty-eight.Footnote 45
From 1847 to 1914, the rising administrative elite’s marriages and offspring reflected the changing composition of the nineteenth-century British aristocracy and gentry. Some treasury clerks reinformed these upper-class connections. Based on the analysis of data (newspapers, genealogies, and censuses) for 75 married treasury clerks and their wives, I found that 21 upper-class treasury clerks (26.66 per cent) married women from similar backgrounds (peerage and gentry), as shown in Appendix B.Footnote 46 One example, among many, is George William Hervey. He was the eldest son of Lord William Hervey, third son of the 1st marquess of Bristol, and Cecilia Mary, the youngest daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Freemantle, GCB.Footnote 47 By marrying Emily Dora Pelham Clinton, daughter of Lord Charles Pelham Clinton, on 9 February 1881, he intertwined his aristocratic lineage with that of the duke of Newcastle.Footnote 48
Many treasury clerks, however, did not marry into these privileged backgrounds. Indeed, treasury clerks’ familial histories provide a lens through which to study the intermingling of sections of the old and new professions with the peerage, gentry, and middle classes. The wedding of Charles Barrington, grandson of the 2nd Earl Grey and the 5th Viscount Barrington, illustrates the fusing of the upper classes with segments of the middle classes.Footnote 49 Barrington ended up marrying Mary Sellon, the middle-class daughter of Captain Gore Sellon from the 21st Bengal Native Infantry.Footnote 50 Her brothers were part of the English provincial middling sorts: one was a silver smelting manager in Barton-upon-Irwell while another was a medical practitioner in Southampton.Footnote 51 Despite marrying Mary, Barrington still enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle in London, living in 13 Morpeth Mansions, Westminster, with a parlour maid, housemaid, and cook.Footnote 52 As the century progressed, Barrington’s experience seems to have been more common among his colleagues. Among the 75 married treasury clerks in my sample, 19 (25.33 per cent) and their wives represented a range of social backgrounds, spanning the peerage, gentry, and middle classes. Finally, 19 middle-class men (25.33 per cent) married women from similarly middle-class backgrounds, as indicated in Appendix B.Footnote 53
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the career paths of the administrative elite’s offspring also reveal the imbrication of Britain’s upper, professional strata with the middle classes. The reshaping of the lower ranks of the aristocracy can, in fact, be traced through the highest offices of the reforming state. Within this setting, the family histories of treasury clerks display two particularly telling patterns: on the one hand, the alliances forged through marriages; on the other, the prospects in life chosen by children. Some families bound themselves more closely with the country’s middle classes through marriage. Stephen Spring-Rice, a treasury clerk and grandson of the 1st baron of Monteagle, married Julia Fitzgerald, daughter of Sir Peter Fitzgerald, 1st Bart. Yet, his descendants illustrate a broader spectrum of connections: part of his offspring married into the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ of the country.Footnote 54 One of his daughters, for instance, married the third son of Charles Booth, the celebrated industrialist and social reformer.Footnote 55 Moreover, while some of the treasury clerks’ children remained within the Civil Service or entered the established professions, others embraced careers more characteristic of the middle classes, as I show in Appendix C. The range was striking: John Kempe’s daughters became college tutors and art students; George William Hervey’s aristocratic sons chose farming in Canada or clerical work in a London insurance office; and John Pycroft Collier’s children pursued paths as architects, solicitors, and land agents.Footnote 56
The decline of the patrician ideal, the development of new professions, and the expansion of global capitalism and the British empire, with the City of London as its pumping heart, amplified the professional options available to the rising administrative elite and its offspring. In old age, treasury clerks themselves used their professional expertise and social backgrounds to ensure a productive retirement as directors of financial and industrial boards, local authorities, and JPs, sometimes strengthening the ties between segments of the aristocracy and finance, the central government and the localities, the metropole and the British empire.Footnote 57 At the age of sixty, Charles Fremantle – now known as Sir Charles W. Fremantle KCB – knight of the Order of the Bath and member of the treasury’s emergent administrative elite, retired from the office of deputy-master of the Royal Mint (1870–94) after twenty-four years in office, and moved seamlessly into financial boards and charities.Footnote 58 His children, now independent, merged aristocratic backgrounds with careers in finance. Ronald, for example, became a stockbroker, and was living in 1901 at 22 Sloan Court, London, a near neighbour of his father.Footnote 59 This interweaving of aristocracy and gentry, on the one hand, and the middle classes, on the other, was only part of the picture. Several treasury families sustained their aristocratic connections through their siblings, daughters, and sons. Sir Charles Lister Ryan’s eldest daughter, Madelaine, for instance, married the Honourable Arthur Elliott (MP for Roxburghshire), second son of the 3rd earl of Minto – illustrating the persistence of such kin ties.Footnote 60
By situating the rising administrative elite in their social world, we also get insights into how the development of their careers may have relied on marriage and kin ties. Social life and connections were as pivotal as professional aptitude to treasury clerks in the new administrative elite. The narrative of the self-made man alone is not relevant to explaining how treasury clerks rose and identified within the higher ranks of the department and the Civil Service. In contrast to the mythical open competition introduced in 1870, the reform of promotions did not produce landmark events. Examinations were not required to rise in the career. Thus, a combination of promotion by merit, character, and connections – mainly understood in the form of public schools and Oxbridge links and friendships with prime ministers and chancellors of the exchequer – proved crucial to career advancement, cohesion, and identities.Footnote 61 This is a relatively well-known story. Yet, censuses and treasury papers also suggest that some of these men may have benefited from family connections in later stages of their career as well. In this context, kin ties could still play an important role within the reformed British state and Victorian society, despite its increasing bureaucratization. Marriages improved the career prospects of treasury clerks through the patronage networks they offered and, at the same time, granted the rising administrative elite further social cohesion.
In such a small department, the close-knit social world that treasury clerks shared and inhabited sometimes became so intimate that six intermarriages took place over the nineteenth century, as indicated in Appendix D. Like the families who formed an ‘intellectual aristocracy’, the new administrative elite also had clusters of familial networks within and across departments.Footnote 62 I have been able to trace twenty family connections within the treasury from 1847 to 1914, as shown in Appendix E. Thus, stepfathers and brothers-in-law shared treasury desks for several years. Intermarriages were significant in indicating how the administrative elite cultivated kinship and professional ties.
Herbert Murray, among other examples, helps to suggest that the rise of treasury clerks outside the department may have been the product of the interplay of professional merit but also family connections. Murray spent the first decade and a half of his treasury career as a third- and second-class clerk. His rise to higher offices took place only after he had occupied the office of private secretary (1866–8) to the Prime Minister Lord Derby, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Benjamin Disraeli in 1868. In 1870, Sir Ralph Lingen (permanent secretary to the treasury) promoted him to a first-class clerkship. What followed shortly after were the promotions to higher offices of superintended departments by the treasury: treasury remembrancer and paymaster general in Ireland (1871–2), secretary to the customs (1882–7), its deputy-chairman (1887–90), and its chairman (1890–4).Footnote 63
Murray’s promotions, however, did not happen in a vacuum. He married Charlotte Arbuthnot, daughter of Charles Arbuthnot, once patronage secretary to the treasury, and cousin to George Arbuthnot, the famous auditor of the Civil List, who had married his daughter Augusta to another treasury clerk, Vernon Delves-Broughton.Footnote 64 By marrying Charlotte, Murray became related to the Arbuthnots, one of the most important treasury families in the nineteenth century. It is perhaps an accident, more research needs to be done, but his appointment as private secretary to the earl of Derby coincided with the death a year earlier of George Arbuthnot, the famous auditor of the Civil List, and his cousin-in-law, in 1865.Footnote 65 By 1866, Murray had shared the treasury with relatives but also with friends from Eton, such as Stevenson Blackwood, Charles Ryan, Reginald Welby, and Charles Rivers Wilson, all part of the rising administrative elite.Footnote 66
One last example that may suggest the significance of marriages for treasury clerks’ professional development is the career of Richard Mills. In 1863, he married Alice Anderson, the daughter of Mary Whiteside of Frognal, Hampstead, and Sir William Anderson, principal clerk of the finance division (1854–65) and auditor of the Civil List (1865–7) in the treasury, who became assistant comptroller and auditor of the exchequer and audit department (1867–72).Footnote 67 Whether Anderson was acquainted with Mills or his family beforehand remains unclear, but his recommendation to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston proved successful in 1855.Footnote 68 Mills worked under Anderson’s supervision for nine years, four of them as his son-in-law. His career progressed rapidly under Anderson’s wing. During that time, he managed to secure for his younger brother, Edwin, a second-division clerkship in the treasury.Footnote 69 In 1859, Mills was promoted to accountant (1859–72) in the finance division, chaired by Anderson.Footnote 70 Like his father-in-law, he became part of the new administrative elite and their careers mirrored each other. Mills also became assistant comptroller and auditor of the audit department (1888–96) and rose to comptroller of the exchequer and auditor general of public accounts (1896–1900).Footnote 71 Additionally, he received the companionship of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1893 and became a knight commander (KCB) in 1901.Footnote 72
II
Treasury clerk Charles Fremantle’s engagement letters with Sophia Smith illustrated his longing for love and domesticity. Yet, marriages were only the initial expression of family life. In 1864, we find Fremantle house hunting in Kensington and buying carpets. The new administrative elite’s houses, neighbourhoods, and lifestyles helped to consolidate this powerful group and expressed further differences in material culture, sociability, and domesticity in contrast with inferior clerical grades.
From my list of 116 high-ranking treasury clerks, 58 of them lived in London as heads of their household – whether married or unmarried – between 1851 and 1911, the start and end years of the period in which censuses were held every ten years. Of all their 111 combined residences that I have managed to trace through the censuses during this period, 82 (73.87 per cent) were concentrated in Marylebone, Chelsea, Kensington, St George Hanover Square, and Westminster, as indicated in Figure 1 and Appendix F. In this context, Figures 2 and 3 give us a more focused spacial sense of this trend and allows us to imagine more deeply their close-knit, domestic world.
Figure 1. Map of treasury clerks’ residences in Kensington, Marylebone, Chelsea, and St George Hanover Square between 1851 and 1911.
Figures 2 and 3. Map snapshots of treasury clerks’ residences in parts of Chelsea, St George Hanover Square, and Marylebone between 1851 and 1911.
Occasionally, blood-related treasury clerks lived close to each other, as the Crafer brothers, Charles and Edwin, in Clapham, or sometimes inhabited the same household, as the Llewelyn Davies brothers, Charles and Theodore, in Westminster.Footnote 73 Most treasury clerks’ neighbours were part of London’s upper and upper-middle classes – they were MPs, doctors, high-ranking civil servants, military officers, merchants, and businessmen. A few lucky treasury clerks also inherited large estates, such as Sir William Gurdon, who after retiring from the treasury to pursue a career in parliament lived with his wife, Eveline Camilla, the second daughter of the 5th earl of Portsmouth, in Grundisburgh Hall before moving to Assington Hall.Footnote 74 Appendix G shows that at some point of their careers, 30 treasury clerks lived in London suburbs and country houses, stretching from Sutton-at-Hone to Suffolk. In contrast to these powerful men, treasury second-division clerks’ domestic structure, living standards, and neighbours matched the lifestyles that historians and Edwardian novelists have attributed to the lower-middle classes.Footnote 75
Work, marriages, and neighbourhoods by themselves did not define the character of this new professional cohort of civil servants. The administrative elite engaged in a range of stereotypically nineteenth-century masculine activities which further reinforced their social standing. In middle life, Roger Wilbraham, Algernon Turnor, Stevenson Blackwood, and Richard Clement continued to engage in the aristocratic leisure of hunting.Footnote 76 Other clerks enjoyed going fishing, though nobody seemed to have loved the sport as much as Charles Barrington, the author of the Seventy years’ fishing (1906).Footnote 77 It is safe to say that this aristocratic and gentry lifestyle contrasts with the generation of clerks entering the treasury between 1890 and 1914, who would rise to the highest ranks of the service in the early twentieth century by priding itself on its urban, intellectual achievements, and upper-middle and middle-class backgrounds.Footnote 78
These activities overlapped with other gentlemanly ones, such as social dinners, visits, and clubs.Footnote 79 Historians of masculinity in Britain have pointed out that social clubs functioned not only as extensions of homosocial spaces, but also as substitutes for or complements of domesticity for many men, particularly bachelors.Footnote 80 The press described the bachelor, Reginald Welby, permanent secretary to the treasury (1885–94), as a delightfully humorous, sociable, and ‘clubbable’ companion: ‘He never married; and it may safely be said that the life of a well-to-do bachelor was one which suited him, and which on the whole he thoroughly enjoyed.’Footnote 81 Every summer, Welby gave a picnic on the Thames to treasury clerks, all of whom were important in consolidating his professional and social status.Footnote 82
Upper-class treasury clerks had been familiar with seasonal mobility over the life cycle due to their educational and professional lives, sociability, illnesses, and family obligations. Other family motivations, such as emotional comfort, mutual care, lowering living costs, and being closer to their kin, pushed treasury clerks to move back to the localities. This was presumably the case of Sir Richard Mills, who moved to Oxted, Surrey, to live in the same town as his brother-in-law, William Anderson.Footnote 83 On the other hand, other treasury clerks retired to the localities in search of peaceful locations. ‘The Borough of Lyme Regis possesses all the essentials for a life of quiet repose. The loveliness of its situation and surroundings is not surpassed by any seaside resort in the Kingdom’, John A. Kempe recalled in his reminiscences.Footnote 84
By moving to the localities and engaging in different occupations following their Civil Service career, the retired administrative elite crossed not only institutional lines but also cultural boundaries. Their integration into new counties tells various stories of provincial integration, identity, power, and class in old age. Kempe seems to have integrated well in Lyme Regis following his retirement after forty-four years in the public service. In his reminiscences, he recalled having a good deal of leisure, only three days of work in London in the committee on local taxation, and wrote for The Times on financial issues. Although he claimed to enjoy a quieter life, he remained active in old age and embraced Lyme Regis’s historic past.Footnote 85
John Robinson, on the other hand, was credited with Buntingford’s public recognition for his poor relief assistance despite not being originally from this locality. Two inmates of the workhouse, who probably enjoyed his annual offering of sausages on New Year’s Eve, attended his funeral ‘and the genuine sorrow depicted on their countenances showed they had lost in him whom they mourned a sincere friend’.Footnote 86 Sir Richard Mill’s death was also lamented in Oxted because it was claimed he had the greatest interest in the parish’s charity, even though he had taken up residence four years earlier.Footnote 87 In contrast, enjoying such a degree of local power and status was not Sir George William Hervey’s experience, even though he was originally from Finchley. While he fulfilled the aspirations of a successful Civil Service career, the former comptroller to the national debt office failed to meet the local newspapers’ expectations. In 1915, his obituary in the Hendon & Finchley Times concluded that he ‘had little or no interest in Finchley affairs, he was rarely seen in local life, and many hence inferred that he was taciturn and reserved’.Footnote 88
In the localities, the sociability of former treasury clerks was the object of gossip in county newspapers under the sections of ‘fashionable’ and ‘society’ life. Treasury clerks had mobile and social lives, including family weddings, funerals, birthdays, and garden parties.Footnote 89 ‘The wedding went off very well this morning. The church was full of Coldstreamers, who cheered lustily as the happy pair went off’, Charles Fremantle said to his father about his brother Arthur’s wedding.Footnote 90 In retirement, their national reputations, achieved through their Civil Service careers and honours, interplayed with a new local dimension in old age. Kempe, who used to dine in London with cabinet officials in middle life, settled into his retirement at Coram Court, Lyme, next to the property of Lord Lister. There, he befriended the leading councilmen of the locality.Footnote 91
These elderly treasury clerks travelled occasionally to visit family members. Gerald Ponsonby, aged seventy-eight, spent his last autumn with his wife at Langford House, near Lechlade, in the house of his nephew, Lord de Manley.Footnote 92 Before dying in 1914, Sir Charles Fremantle celebrated his eightieth birthday at The Old House, Swanbourne, with his siblings, even though the garden party he had planned for the following day was cancelled due to the gravity of national affairs.Footnote 93
Intergenerational support, however, was crucial to this kind of upper-class lifestyle. High-ranking treasury clerks, including those who had married, do not seem to have been wholly independent in the early stages of middle life. The new administrative elite’s memoirs rarely comment on how they afforded rents, holidays abroad, cruises, hunting, public school, and Oxbridge education for their offspring, or buying a house in St George Hanover Square. Treasury clerks’ salaries ranged from £100 to £1,200 a year in middle life as they progressed from third-class clerks to heads of divisions; overall, sometimes too little for certain family obligations and lavish lifestyles. Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century estimates indicate that education at public schools ranged between £220 and £320 a year; education at Oxbridge, meanwhile, could vary between £100 and £200 a year, depending on the student and their lifestyle.Footnote 94 As we will see later, given that they had to provide for large families, it seems unlikely that treasury clerks relied solely on their salaries to support them. On the contrary, private manuscripts, censuses, newspapers, and wills and bequests suggest that these expressions of class standing cannot be fully explained by the male breadwinner’s or self-made man’s mythologies alone.
Before marrying Sophia Smith, Charles Fremantle, aged twenty-nine, seems to have received the support of his father, Sir Thomas Fremantle (chairman of the board of customs), to cover the cost of the freehold (£600–£3,000) of 11 Beaufort Gardens to start his married life:
My dear Pappy, I ought to have told you yesterday, in addition to the other advantages of the house in Beaufort Gardens, that it is in Kensington Parish (close to the boundary) in which rates are very low. Rates & taxes would be about £26 a year. And one wd. [would] pay rates & taxes for £150 a year. I hope we shall not have to decide about it too quick, but I shall be very cross indeed if we are forced to lose such an opportunity.Footnote 95
Charles Fremantle was not unique in drawing on familial support during middle life. Victorian censuses, newspapers, and wills and bequests demonstrate that other rising treasury clerks received different forms of intergenerational support, which allowed them to sustain upper-class lifestyles and obligations. On certain occasions, a few treasury clerks died before they could inherit, while others were excluded from inheritance by their fathers, who preferred to safeguard the future of their wives and daughters in old age.Footnote 96 Nevertheless, several members of this administrative elite did inherit stock and railway shares, money, furniture, and real estate in different stages of the life cycle.Footnote 97
Frederick À’Court Bergne, aged thirty-two, inherited all the real estate of his father, John Brodribb Bergne of the Foreign Office, except for his furniture and the life income from the residue of his personal property, which formed part of his wife’s legacy and was to be divided between Frederick and his brother John upon her death.Footnote 98 Louis Mallet left his son, Bernard Mallet, aged thirty, all his books, £2,000 and stocks in banks, and real estate in the county of Essex.Footnote 99 In his forties, George Lisle Ryder received a share of one of his uncle’s £33,000 legacy and inherited his father’s property in Kensington where he lived for the next twenty years.Footnote 100 Sir Richard Mills, whom we have already mentioned in the previous section, remained close to his father-in-law until the latter’s death. Mill was one of the executors of his will: Sir William Anderson left his property as a trust in equal shares for the joint benefit of his son William and Alice, Mill’s wife.Footnote 101 In retirement, the new administrative elite also returned to the localities after inheriting family properties. Inheritances forced Sir Charles Trevelyan, aged seventy-two, and Sir Roger Wilbraham, aged sixty-seven, to move from London back to the country to take charge of their family estates.Footnote 102
III
It was at 11 Beaufort Gardens, Kensington (Figure 4), where Sophia Smith gave birth to her first boy in 1866. Her husband, treasury clerk Charles Fremantle, left a note to his own father, Sir Thomas Fremantle, resident at 4 Upper Eccleston Street, London, commenting on the arrival of the new member of the family: ‘All quite well, as yet, thank God!’Footnote 103
Figure 4. Contemporary image of Charles Fremantle’s former home at 11 Beaufort Gardens.
The analysis of treasury clerks’ changing family formations highlights the significance of the family for the new administrative elite, despite Civil Service reform and individual career structures. Indeed, treasury clerks, and their families, were subject to life-cycle accidents, second marriages, family duties, and economic hardships during middle life and old age. This section shows how domesticity and intergenerational support, once again, were key for the status, comfort, and security of the new administrative elite. In the late nineteenth century, the British Civil Service professionalized, and its pension scheme was reformed, amid the lingering support and reproduction of large Victorian families.
Indeed, treasury clerks usually had large families to support. Victorian censuses may under-report illegitimate children, and I am still unable to confirm precise information for 35 of the 116 clerks in my sample. However, for those who had children (55), the average of 4.2 children per marriage suggests that fertility rates did not decline among treasury clerks as they did among other upper- and middle-class Victorians (Appendix H).Footnote 104 This partly explains their anxieties behind rising in career structures, improving their living standards, and the importance of intergenerational support throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.
In this context, the study of treasury clerks’ family formations substantiates the recent scholarship arguing that the nuclear family was neither the predominant nor fixed social formation during the nineteenth century.Footnote 105 By examining 134 censuses of 57 married treasury clerks in middle life (ages thirty to sixty) between 1851 and 1911, I have identified four recurrent patterns of household formation, though these configurations were not immutable and could shift over time:
1. The conjugal childless family, sometimes shared with kin or servants;
2. The nuclear family, no servants;
3. The nuclear household family, included servants;
4. The household family, included kin and servants.Footnote 106
The nuclear household family (61.2 per cent) was by far the most prevalent arrangement, followed by the household family (21.6 per cent) and the conjugal childless family (15.6 per cent), while the nuclear family (1.49 per cent), without servants, appeared only rarely. These figures, however, must remain tentative given the limitations of the sample – a narrow cohort of treasury clerks in mid-life – and are discussed in greater detail in Appendix I.
The censuses analysed highlight that servants mattered to treasury families. The respectability and security of the rising administrative elite was not merely rooted in lineage, material culture, or individual careers. The use of domestic service also uncovers differences in clerical lifestyle within the British state and across society. It was another mark of status and domesticity for treasury clerks.Footnote 107 Several members of the new administrative elite employed a large staff of middle-aged and old-aged domestic servants in their households for their comfort, childcare, and status: butlers, nurses, housemaids, lady’s maids, charwomen, cooks, footmen, housekeepers, and kitchen maids. As shown in Appendix J, on average, 37 treasury clerks who are heads of households, aged 30–40, employed 3.4 servants; 35 aged 40–50 recruited 4.6; and 46 aged 50–60 hired 4.58 servants. This census evidence based exclusively on the 60 heads of households between 1851 and 1911 shows that servants – usually on brief contractual relationships – were a constant presence characterizing their upper-class and middle-class domesticity over the life cycle, which increased as treasury clerks progressed in their careers, diversified their incomes, and inherited family wealth.
Such figures further suggest that children were a reliable indicator of domestic service, but they could not predict how many servants treasury clerks employed. For example, Sir Francis Mowatt (permanent secretary to the treasury, 1895–1903), his wife, and their six children were looked after by 11 servants in his 40s, 10 servants in his 50s, and 9 servants in his 60s, when most of his children had left the house in Withdean Hall, Patcham.Footnote 108 In contrast to upper-class treasury clerks, the second-division clerks’ and messengers’ domesticity looks more modest. On average, second-division clerks employed one female servant with few exceptions. Messenger families, on the other hand, rarely employed female servants when their children were young.
In old age, the rising administrative elite’s domesticity presented continuities and changes in comparison with their middle lives. Many still enjoyed the comfort of being served by several domestic servants, including footmen, butlers, cooks, parlourmaids, and housemaids, even though they employed on average one servant less, bringing down the average number to three. This may have been partly the result of their male sons and married daughters becoming independent. More chronic illnesses at this stage of the life cycle, however, pressed them to recruit once again new staff.Footnote 109 Some over seventy, like Sir William Anderson and Sir Herbert Murray, employed nurses to look after their declining health.Footnote 110
Despite advancement in career structures, life was not always stable for members of the new administrative elite. In this context, intergenerational support enjoyed by this administrative elite included cohabitation with parents or in-laws. William Stephenson, for example, lived with his wife and four daughters at his father-in-law’s house at 12 Bolton Row, St George Hanover Square. Years later, he inherited the house.Footnote 111
Unlike some novels or newspaper articles, Victorian censuses show that treasury clerks enjoyed different forms of domesticity as lodgers, living with siblings, or as heads of their households. Bachelors, for example, did not experience the famous flight from domesticity in search of manly imperial adventures at the turn of the century.Footnote 112 Sir James Cole, the grandson of the 1st earl of Enniskillen and nephew of the 1st earl Belmore, reached the higher ranks of the treasury whilst living with his four unmarried sisters in 66 Eaton Place, St George Hanover Square.Footnote 113 The eldest, Florence, remained the head of the household until she died in 1888. At sixty-six years of age, Cole inherited the property and other assets valued at £21,000.Footnote 114 In 1911, the bachelor and treasury clerk Maurice Francis Headlam was still living with his widowed mother and three servants in 5 Cheyne Gardens, Chelsea, London, at the age of thirty-seven.Footnote 115
The course of Christopher Puller’s middle life reveals that treasury clerk bachelors experienced different family formations due to death, sickness, economic insecurity, and their single status. It also suggests that they received from, and gave support to, their siblings when their fathers and mothers died. This family provision was essential for upper-class treasury bachelors aiming to maintain their living standards or navigate the hardships of Victorian society. Puller was another young man coming from the gentry, the fourth son of Christopher Puller (MP for Hertfordshire, 1857–64) and Emily Blake.Footnote 116 In 1861, aged twenty-one, he lived with his parents, four sisters, three brothers, one governess and thirteen servants in 65 Portland Road, Marylebone, London.Footnote 117 In the next twenty-five years, the death of his father, mother, eldest brother, and his brother Charles’s marriage presumably explain his departure from family houses in Marylebone and Youngsbury.Footnote 118 With these changes, Puller experienced new family formations. Three unmarried Puller siblings supported each other financially and emotionally. In 1891, aged fifty-two, he was the head of the household in Gatton Road, Reigate, Surrey, where he lived alongside his siblings Ellen and Frederick, a butler, a cook, and a housemaid.Footnote 119 Only in old age did Puller achieve full independence.
Looking at family formations such as this one provides us with a more complex perspective on the changing conditions of lifestyles in the Civil Service and Victorian society. The new administrative elite experienced the ups and downs of life differently, but intergenerational family support remained key as welfare and ‘wealthfare’ providers in the late nineteenth century.
This was especially true in the case of provisioning for their large family formations, widows, and orphans. Mid-nineteenth-century Civil Service reform reinforced the existing ideas that certain classes were less likely to see the need for state welfare, having sufficient wealth and their own private strategies to provide for elderly family members. On the death of husbands and fathers, aristocratic and upper-middle-class families had devised an array of practices for the security of relatives and kin, including annuities, insurance, and inheritances.Footnote 120 In the 1850s, Sir Charles Trevelyan (assistant secretary to the treasury, 1840–59) suggested these practices were central to their fatherly duties: ‘The plan of life of every official person has been formed upon this supposition; and besides many other fixed outgoings which might be named, he generally insures his life for the benefit of his wife and children to the full extent of his available margin.’Footnote 121 Existing familial practices among those with the most influence in the treasury discouraged the centralization of the state’s activities and functions. Trevelyan argued that the aristocratic classes had more resources to deal with the insecurities of the life cycle than the lower classes.
From 1847 to 1914, pensions reform substantially changed old age and retirement in the British Civil Service. The Superannuation Acts of 1857 and 1859, achieved due to the political mobilization of civil servants, laid the foundations which governed public pensions. The first abolished the former contributory deductions of the superannuation fund established in 1834. The second consolidated a new old-age grading at sixty years, changed pension increments from septennial to annual, defined who a permanent civil servant was, and aimed to make the Civil Service more efficient. However, the exclusion of the civil servants’ widows and orphans from these pension schemes reinforced the interplay between public and private welfare provisioning in Victorian Britain until 1909, when the Superannuation Act of 1909 started to provide some relief to them. The status of treasury officials did not classify them as recipients of either charity or poor relief even though they faced hardship and even downward social mobility.Footnote 122 Thus, treasury officials and other civil servants relied on voluntary associations and familial practices (cohabitation, loans, annuities, inheritances) to counter economic and life-cycle insecurities.
In old age, the focus of the new administrative elite shifted onto the need to ensure a comfortable retirement, as well as the security of their unmarried daughters, widows, grandchildren, and kin. The retired, administrative elite offered intergenerational support to its relatives in various ways, especially to single daughters and unmarried sisters, the most vulnerable population among the upper classes.Footnote 123 Cohabitation offered the prospect of emotional comfort, security, and companionship, albeit these may have fluctuated.Footnote 124 In 1901, the retired, widower Sir William Gurdon welcomed his widowed niece, Amy Ridley, to Assington Hall to live with him.Footnote 125 Gurdon offered to her not only a beautiful estate and a comfortable living (including a lady’s maid) but also the possibility of sustaining her status by socializing in respectable ways.Footnote 126 Lord Welby, on the other hand, defied contemporary representations of bachelordom as lacking comfort and neglecting familial duties by spending his retirement in the company of his widower sister, Felicia, at 11 Stratton Street, St George Hanover Square, London.Footnote 127
Upper-class treasury clerks’ widows received annuities, inherited properties, and benefited from the support of their offspring and other relatives. In the case of life insurance, a relatively unexplored theme in Victorian Britain, treasury clerks like Stephen Martin Leake were shareholders of these companies and insured their families throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote 128 Gerald Ponsonby, on the other hand, left his residence (3 Stratford Place, Mayfair, London) and furniture upon trust for his wife, Lady Maria Ponsonby.Footnote 129 Sir Richard Mills left his house in Oxted, personal effects, and the residue of his property for life to his widow, Alice.Footnote 130 The census only offers a momentary image, but she was able to provide for her unmarried daughters and three servants.Footnote 131 Widows like her dealt with the challenges of economic insecurity and seem to have helped their families to rise in life in a respectable way. Partly due to the provision of their husbands and kin, they did not seem to have suffered the downward social mobility of middle- and lower-middle-class widows, who advertised in the local press the rooms in their households for rent to make ends meet.Footnote 132
IV
The transformation of nineteenth-century governing classes was at the heart of this article, by focusing on the British treasury department – a refuge for the younger sons of the aristocracy and gentry – from 1847 to 1914. By setting career structures and the professionalization of the Civil Service in the context of the life cycle and social relationships, this article has offered a novel approach to grasp the role of class, the life cycle, and family relations in the modern British state and Victorian society. A question worth asking is if the rising, British administrative elite was unique in the context of other modernizing bureaucracies and elites? The detailed history of late nineteenth-century bureaucracies suggests that in practice, even in modernizing societies, connections have often persisted with important implications. Maurizio Gribaudi’s work on French administration – traditionally, in the literature, a paradigmatic model of professional merit and examinations – shows that patronage, family networks, and social relationships were enmeshed with the state well into the nineteenth century.Footnote 133
Treasury clerks were shaped and brought together not only by excellence in public school and Oxbridge education, the reform of promotion, the clerical division between intellectual and mechanical labour throughout career structures, or by ideas about professional merit and character validated by the state and society. This new administrative elite also relied on family life and connections – notably marriages, intermarriages, and intergenerational family support – for a degree of cohesion and advancement in life. The marital and family histories of treasury clerks suggest that different social hierarchies (administrative gradations, class, and rank) intersected and overlapped to structure the Civil Service. The interplay and tension between these different social hierarchies in middle life imbued status with new meanings and distinctions of wealth and power. At the heart of these negotiated practices featured the gendered expectations of individuals and family formations.
Occupational and professional status was dependent on transitions in personal life and intergenerational support over the life course. The category of salaried employees who advanced through fixed hierarchies of promotion and benefited from a pension system included clerks drawn from aristocratic, middle-class, and working-class backgrounds. Yet, although they shared the same institutionalized framework of professional merit – appointments, promotions, clerical grades, and honours – their family structures, ways of life, intergenerational support networks, and marriage patterns differed markedly between high-ranking treasury clerks and those of a lower socio-economic position. Though not fully homogeneous, the administrative elite was fairly aristocratic, married, had large families, employed numerous domestic servants, enjoyed privileged social connections, usually lived in St George Hanover Square, Chelsea, Marylebone, and Kensington, and were awarded honorific and hereditary honours. In these various settings, new masculinities developed and overlapped, substantiating the findings of those historians that have challenged any idea of linear transition or hegemony.Footnote 134 In practice, these ideals were often not met or shared by everyone, but these cultural representations reproduced by families, the treasury, and communities legitimated the status of the administrative elite.
Treasury clerks, their wives, and their offspring also tell a more hybrid story about the link between the professions and the upper classes in Victorian Britain, one which does not easily fit into compartmentalized histories of the aristocracy or the middle classes. Their marriages and the new professions they chose highlight the various nexuses between layers of the aristocracy, professions, and gentry, providing a more elastic image of social class in Victorian Britain, thus complicating clear-cut divisions or transitions of the governing classes in the late nineteenth century.
If historians of Britain and the British empire have increasingly demonstrated that families and their kinship ties had a pivotal role in the development of commercial networks, imperial companies, businesses, emigration, politics, poor relief, and industry, my research on the new administrative elite shows that Civil Service careers rested on different kinds of family formations, intergenerational support, and networks enlarged through marriages and kinship ties. The structure of Civil Service pensions, for example, shows that the family retained agency to secure the welfare of their widows, unmarried daughters, and other relatives. Inheritances and annuities, based on large family networks rather than nuclear families, proved crucial ‘wealthfare’ practices to sustain treasury clerks as much as – or more than – individual achievements and continued to be central in a period of formation of bureaucratic models, ideals, and structures across Britain and Europe.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material (Appendices A–J) for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X25101258.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the journal’s editor and to the two anonymous reviewers for their stimulating comments, which helped me refine this article. I also wish to thank Christina de Bellaigue, Margot Finn, William Whyte, and Joanna Innes for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this text. My thanks go as well to Laura Hederich, who prepared the London maps showing the residences of the treasury clerks on the basis of my archival data. Needless to say, none of them is responsible for my interpretations or for any remaining errors of judgement.
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