In England, it is doubtful that anyone in the peerage would be at the bar. Even the squirarchy was too good for trade or the professions of medicine and law, generally. One either managed one's estate, went into the Army, or went into the Church. A few might have made a career in the upper echelons of civilian government. You are quite wrong about the universities, by the way. It was commonplace for students to come from the middle classes, especially the well- to- do, in both Britain and America. Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, all had been to university, and all were in the middle class.
I am not quite sure what you are driving at. All manner of things were alienating the colonists, but there is a general drift, which is that the rights that had been ceded the several colonies to autonomy were being increasingly undermined, and the colonies were increasingly pawns in imperial policies. Remember, Edmund Burke, who sharply opposed the French Revolution, basically sided with the Americans. You seem to be determined to suggest that the Revolution was bogus, and the Founders a bunch of fat cats who used patriotic slogans to secure their fortunes. Could be, I guess, but after all that I have read (I am rereading DeToqueville in French, currently), I find it difficult to swallow. There is enough to criticize, like the persistence of slavery or the treatment of the Indian, to need to make stuff up. |
