The Power and the Glory:

Life in the English Country House Before the Great War

By Adrian Tinniswood

Basic Books 2024

Historian Adrian Tinniswood’s new book, The Power and the Glory: Life in the English Country House before the Great War, works very smoothly as a bookend to his popular and well-received 2016 book The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939. If the early book was an epilogue, this new one is prologue, with the whirlwind of death and disillusionment of the First World War serving as the climax in both cases. 

The war looms over this new book, casting its shadow back in time over sculpted lawns and glittering ballrooms. The reader, tempted to intoxication by the colorful, exotic stories Tinniswood infallibly unearths from old newspapers, regional histories, and, charmingly, old issues of Country Life, can’t ever quite forget what the people in those stories don’t know, the desperate carnage that’s coming. As Tinniswood tellingly notes, it’s the red wound of battlefield loss that will sound the death knell of the world he’s describing. “The war memorials on countless village greens, the stained-glass tributes in countless country churches, were reminders of oss at a time when no reminders were needed,” he writes. “For many, it wasn’t the war which marked a change; it was a death, the death of a father or a son or a brother.” As he notes, there are many kinds of endings.

But the bulk of his smart, understatedly witty book tries its best to ignore that terminal point. He serves up countless stories of country house vicissitudes, from gardens to household chapels to upstairs-downstairs dynamics, to variations inspired by the Raj, and even to that bane of stately piles, the house thief, who was described in two species by the law enforcement of the time: dinner thieves, who used ladders to access and ransack bedrooms while the household was at dinner, and “first-sleep” thieves, who struck right after everyone had gone to bed, when it was supposed that sleep was heaviest. Different country houses used different measures to defend against such thieves, from bars on the windows to butlers sleeping next to the bouillon. And then there was the oldest defense of all:

Keeping a dog or two on the premises was a good idea. But letting the Hound of the Baskervilles loose in the grounds at night had its drawbacks. “The dog with a penchant for human throats is likely to get you more troubles than the burglaries he will prevent” … The best advice was to keep a yapping terrier actually in the house …

(The quote is, of course, from Country Life)

As with The Long Weekend, the consistent strength of this book is Tinniswood's skill at spotlighting characters; for a book highlighting places, these pages are most memorably full of people. Readers meet faded standard-bearers of the old landed aristocracy, land-grubby politicians of all stripes, and of course the strongest element of the country house set in this period: aristocratic families marrying wealthy American heiresses, with the cascade of misfortunes that usually ensued. At every turn in these stories, Tinniswood is modulating the drip of melodrama perfectly, as in the story of American merchant banker JS Morgan's granddaughter Mary, raised in a lovely Hertfordshire mansion and married to Lewis Vernon Harcourt, son of a distinguished Liberal politician and, eh, colorful character in his own right:

Lewis – Loulou to his friends – was also a sexual predator with a collection of child pornography and what one of his victims described as an “ungovernable sex desire for both sexes.” When rumours began to circulate about his activities in the years after the First World War, he took an overdose of a sleeping draught and was found dead in his bed at 69 Brook Street, the town house his father-in-law had bought back in the 1880s. Whether or not Loulou was a “typical Englishman” we can perhaps let America decide.

In 1877 Henry James toured a picturesque old country house in Shropshire, rhapsodized over its rain-soaked garden, and pronounced the place, and by easy extension the whole concept, as “a modern Eden.” In The Power and the Glory, the Fall is coming but not yet arrived, and in Tinniswood's earlier book, the last glowing embers of the interwar years can still host a Wodehousian idyll or a Brideshead elegy. Combined with his 2021 book Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II, they make a very pleasing if melancholy trilogy.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News