Marquess of Salisbury

I

Introduction

Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), British statesman, three times Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland (1885-1886, 1886-1892, and 1895-1902). He served simultaneously as foreign secretary in most of his prime ministerships, in that capacity establishing a European reputation in foreign courts and chancelleries. He was Britain’s last prime minister to lead a government from the House of Lords. During his years in office British rule in a partitioned Africa was extended across large parts of the continent, although he was little concerned with the motivations and aspirations of people on the spot (see Scramble for Africa; British Empire). Salisbury does not figure in most collections of essays on great Victorians, although in 1999 his most recent biographer, Andrew Roberts, chose the phrase “Victorian titan” as part of the title of his book. Salisbury survived Queen Victoria by 20 months.

II

Salisbury’s Lineage and Early Life

Born on February 3, 1830, at Hatfield, the family estate of his branch of the Cecil family, Robert was the second son of the second Marquess, in direct line from William Cecil, Lord Burghley, trusted administrator of Queen Elizabeth I, and his son Robert, 1st Earl of Salisbury. The Duke of Wellington was the 19th-century Robert’s godfather.

Robert was educated—and bullied—at Eton, which he left early, and at Christ Church, Oxford, the university of which he became chancellor in 1870, serving it in that capacity until his death. He treated it as he treated the Church of England and the Hatfield estate as related parts of his heritage. Although he lived long, he was unhealthy in his youth and in 1851 was sent off on a long voyage round the world, traversing both the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn and seeing for himself parts of South Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand, a rare and informative experience. On his return he was strong enough physically to take up politics and was elected unopposed as Member of Parliament for Stamford, a handsome town where there were great Cecil tombs and a strong Cecil influence (Burghley House is nearby). In the House of Commons his maiden speech was made in opposition to a bill proposing reform of the government of Oxford University.

His early marriage to the highly intelligent daughter of a celebrated judge drove him for financial reasons into a remarkably prolific career as a writer. The greatly admired pieces he wrote anonymously for the Saturday Review, founded by his brother-in-law, and the well-established Quarterly Review, were characterized both by candour and by authority. When his older brother, even less healthy than he, died in 1865 Robert became heir to the 2nd Marquess, who died three years later, and moved to the House of Lords. Before that he had made his first political mark in 1866, serving in the Conservative administration of the 14th Earl of Derby as secretary for India and resigning from it in 1867 when Derby and Benjamin Disraeli proceeded with a sweeping parliamentary reform bill that, in his opinion, abandoned every constitutional safeguard that they had hitherto insisted upon. Sceptical of all “leaps in the dark”, he associated democracy not with reform but with violence.

Once in the House of Lords, however, Salisbury was fully aware of the limitations on its constitutional power, and after the general election of 1874, when Disraeli was returned to power under the new franchise, he returned to the office of secretary for India, moving to the Foreign Office from 1878 to 1880 and working closely thereafter with Disraeli, whom he had totally mistrusted in 1867. As his foreign secretary, Salisbury accompanied Disraeli to the Congress of Berlin in 1878, at which Russia was prevented from dominating the Balkans as it seemed to be seeking to do after its victory in the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War. In the longer run, through many tribulations and in the face of the rise of Balkan nationalism, the Treaty of Berlin that was signed at the Congress maintained European peace for the rest of Salisbury’s life (see British Foreign Policy Since 1800). A by-product was the British acquisition of Cyprus, which was to create many difficult problems long after his death. A hailed “peace with honour” was followed by an unpopular Afghan War (1878-1880), prompted by anxiety about Russian ambitions to challenge British rule in India.

Disraeli, who had been created Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876, lost the general election of March 1880 and died in April 1881. Before the dramatic general election of 1886 Salisbury, who had become Conservative leader of the House of Lords in 1881, served for seven months in 1885-1886 as prime minister in a stopgap Conservative minority government. The successor Liberal Party government, led by William Gladstone, quickly fell on the issue of Irish home rule, which Salisbury and sections of the Liberal Party felt would ruin England as well as Ireland. In 1886 Salisbury’s Conservatives won a convincing majority on their own: they included substantial numbers of what he himself called “Villa Tories”, dwellers in city suburbs who were an increasing source of party strength. Salisbury learned by experience how important for political success party machinery was coming to be. He also learned how important it was to deliver public speeches. He took full advantage of the split in the Liberal Party, and after a brief spell of Liberal government rule from 1892 to 1895, at the general election of 1895, where he campaigned in coalition with Liberal Unionists, there were Unionist gains in almost all parts of the country. In London 53 Unionists were returned and only 8 Liberals.

III

A Man of Power?

The Liberals remained out of government until 1906, but during his last coalition ministries Salisbury was feeling the weight of his years, and some of his ministers seemed to have a greater power to shape events than he had. In particular, his colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, was responsible for the key decisions in South Africa that culminated in the Boer War (1899-1902), a war that was difficult to fight and that Salisbury had feared. It was initially a popular war, however, and Salisbury’s last general election victory was at the “khaki election”, held during the war in October 1900. The strident note in British politics alarmed the aged prime minister. Again the Liberals, whose even more aged ex-prime minister Gladstone had died in 1898, fared badly. Salisbury served as one of the pallbearers at his funeral. He had made political concessions to the Liberal Unionists in 1888, when he introduced and carried a Local Government bill establishing county councils, and in 1890 the first Housing of the Working Classes Act was passed. Urban housing interested him less than rural agriculture, but he made an effort to identify policies relating to both. Elementary education was made free in 1891. Ten years later a consolidating Factory and Workshop Act was made law. In the House of Lords, where his authority was undiminished, Salisbury contemplated and proposed introducing a number of life peers (appointed members of the House of Lords whose titles are not hereditary).

The world map which concerned Salisbury during his last years included places as far apart as Venezuela, China, and Japan, as well as Africa. Believing that Britain had no natural allies and no natural enemies, he was still prime minister (though not foreign secretary, having resigned from this post two years previously) in 1902, when Britain signed its first peace-time alliance—with Japan. There were far more realignments to follow in the years leading up to World War I.

IV

Salisbury’s Place in History

Shy by nature and driven neither by personal ambition nor a desire to make news, Salisbury was sceptical about the achievements of some of his colleagues and reticent about his own. The latter were, as he well knew, strictly limited. The world, he knew, would change. He had a strong sense of duty, but he used the word more sparingly in public than most of his political contemporaries, and he died an old man who was respected by Conservatives rather than revered. Ironically he has been remembered less for his grasp of great issues than for some of his sayings, pointed and terse, like his private comment that The Daily Mail, launched by Alfred Harmsworth in 1896, was “a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys”. He married very early for a politician of his time—at the age of 26—and his family mattered to him. He was succeeded as prime minister by his nephew A. J. Balfour, a very different kind of Conservative, whose talents he had quickly recognized.

One other feature of Salisbury’s outlook was at first sight incompatible with his conservatism. He not only believed in the power of modern science, particularly the science and technology of communication, but practised science himself, sometimes to the peril of his guests at Hatfield, where his building of a private laboratory was as significant to him as his refurbishment of the chapel. He installed electricity and a primitive telephone system in the house. He improved farming, which interested him far more than gardening. He spoke in public too on the significance of the sciences, and one of his early reviews in the Quarterly Review praised the work of photographers. Painting interested him less. It is surprising that cartoonists did not make more of Salisbury’s hobbies or, indeed, of his views of the world. He was never, indeed, one of their favourite subjects.