This chapter recovers the shifting ways in which landscape occupied the political and aesthetic imaginations of the group of radical liberals with whom Vaughan Williams spent his formative years. This generation of liberals was concerned with bringing the life of the mind directly to bear on the world at hand. It was a worldview that included particular assumptions about the processes of history, the future, and the role of the exceptional individual in the work of social reform, and which was made tangible through an affective relationship with landscape. Walking, cycling, and mountaineering became forms of spiritual exercise within a landscape that was ‘storied’ by family and national histories, and which exhibited the same processes of incremental change that were characteristic of certain liberal approaches to political, legal, and aesthetic reform. The chapter compares Vaughan Williams’s outlook with that of his close friend G. M. Trevelyan in particular, tracing the ways in which both men struggled to adapt their liberal values after the First World War. For Trevelyan, Vaughan Williams, and their liberal intellectual peers, a circumscribed vision of the landscape became emblematic of that feature of English political and legal history that tended towards incremental change, as well as the liberal sense of ‘continuity within change’ that arose as an expression of the importance of personal freedom and of national self-determination.

As well as his many friends in music, Vaughan Williams had some distinguished ones outside it, five notably: all agnostic liberal intellectuals with upper-middle-class backgrounds. He loved and revered Frederic Maitland, historian of medieval law, who (like himself) married into the Fisher family and who seems to have strengthened his sense of the ‘feel’ of the English past. He was on good terms with another historian from the same family, H. A. L. Fisher, who as Britain’s minister for education (1916–22) opened up possibilities for a National Opera and for the inclusion of folk music in school curricula. He collaborated with Gilbert Murray (professor of Greek at Oxford) on finding ways of presenting Ancient Greek tragic choruses on the modern stage, and relished Murray’s ideas about the workings of tradition in the arts. And he had long friendships with two Cambridge notables whom he’d first met when he and they were undergraduates at that university and who later became professors there: the philosopher G. E. Moore and the historian G. M. Trevelyan. He appreciated Moore’s musicality and admired his Principia Ethica, while Trevelyan’s literary taste and concern for English continuities paralleled and arguably influenced his own.