But what was the good of son or grandchild now?  He had nothing to hand down to them but the barren title, the old estate, and wealth safely invested in urban land and financial enterprises which his stockbroker recommended.  Titles, estates, and wealth were but shadows without the vitalising breath of power.  Cotton-spinners, boot-finishers, purveyors of food at popular prices could now possess such things, and they appeared to enjoy them.  There were people, he believed, satisfied with comfort, amusements, rounds of visits, social ambitions, and domestic or luxurious joys.  But for a Runnymede thus to decline would be worse than extinction.

For six centuries the Runnymedes had served their country.  Edward I had summoned one of them to his “model Parliament,” and the present lord could still spell out a word or two of the ancient writ that hung framed in the hall at Stennynge, with the royal seal attached.  Two of his ancestors had died by public violence (one killed in battle, fighting for the Yorkists, who Lord Runnymede inclined to think represented the Legitimist side; the other executed under Elizabeth, apparently by mistake), and regretting there were not more, he had searched the records of the Civil Wars and the ’Forty-five in vain.  But never had a Runnymede failed in Parliament, or the Council of the King, as he preferred to call it; and their name had frequently appeared among the holders of subordinate but dignified offices, such as the Mastership of the Buckhounds, to which special knowledge gave an honourable claim.

Trained from his first pony in political tradition, and encouraged by every gamekeeper to follow the footsteps of his ancestors, Lord Runnymede had inevitably taken “Noblesse oblige” as his private motto.  But of what service was nobility if its obligations were abolished?  He sometimes pictured with a shudder the fate of the surviving French nobility—­retaining their titles by courtesy, and compelled to fritter away their lives upon chateaux, travelling, aeroplanes, or amatory intrigues, instead of directing their wisdom and influence to the right government of the State.  The guillotine was better.  He could not imagine his descendants without a House of Lords to sit in.  Without the Lords, he was indeed the last of the Runnymedes, and upon the scaffold he might at least die worthy of his name.

Compromise he despised as the artifice of lawyers and upstart politicians.  It had been a dagger in his heart to hear his leader speaking of some readjustment between the two Houses as inevitable.  He denied the necessity, unless the readjustment augmented the power of the Lords.  Planting himself on Edward I’s statute, he had vehemently maintained the right of the Lords to control finance, though he was willing to allow the commercial gentlemen in the Commons the privilege of working out the figures of national income and expenditure.  He now regarded the threatened creation of Peers as a gross insult to public decency.