Within the confines of this study, it is hardly possible to treat either education or religion in other than a mechanistic fashion. We are less concerned with the strictly pedagogic achievement of eighteenthcentury education than with its contribution to aristocratic hegemony. In the same way, I do not comment on the quality of religious experience among the upper classes but confine myself to the public and political role of religion. The reader should therefore bear in mind that there is a vital element – perhaps the vital element – missing from the discussion.

In the support the education of the English upper classes gave to their political supremacy, we may identify four aspects. First, their education was intended to fit them for their leading role in society and for their responsibilities in government. One of the arguments which eventually carried the day in favour of a public school rather than a private education was the claim that it was a more appropriate preparation for that public life which was the destiny and duty of the upper classes. Neither the election hustings nor the eighteenth-century House of Commons was a place for faint hearts. Second, the increasingly standardised education encouraged a common attitude and a common sense of purpose. At Eton, Westminster and Winchester, boys read almost exclusively in Latin authors and when they proceeded to university often did little more than read them again. This overwhelmingly classical curriculum was deplored by advanced thinkers. But many members of the upper classes drew from it not only vast personal pleasure, but also a pervasive code of values.