Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury enjoyed a political career that encompassed almost half a century, from 1853 to 1902. During that period he was the 44th, 46th and 49th Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary on four occasions each.
Background
Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil (later Lord Cranborne, and then Lord Salisbury) was born on 3 February 1830 into one of Britain’s oldest political dynasties. He was the son of the second Marquess of Salisbury and Frances Gascoyne. As a younger son, however, his political and social success was far from guaranteed.
Education
He was educated at Eton—an experience he detested, since he was mercilessly bullied there. Indeed, he refused to ever go to Eton as a guest speaker throughout his adult life. After graduating from Eton, he went on to Christ Church College at Oxford University, where he was elected secretary of the Oxford Union. Although he obtained only an aristocratic fourth- class degree, he was later awarded an All Souls fellowship, and ultimately, the Oxford chancellorship.
On leaving Oxford, the young Lord Robert Cecil, as he was then titled, opted to become a journalist, writing articles for the Saturday Review and the Quarterly Review as he had little prospect of inheriting title and land.
His various writings at this time indicate that he claimed to despise academic life, concerts, and the theater, but Andrew Roberts suggests that this was very much for show.
Career
His journalistic activity was combined with an early involvement in parliamentary politics. In these early years, his interest in a ministerial career was primarily motivated by the need to earn an income; but the deaths of his elder brother and his father eventually gave him both a peerage and property. He thus acquired the attitude of a great landowner; but he did not lose the drive to write in order to earn an income.
Between 1866 and 1867 Salisbury was secretary of state for India, but he resigned in opposition to Disraeli’s campaign in favor of the Reform Bill (later, Act) of 1867, having been unable to prevent the measure’s passage. After his father’s death, he moved to the House of Lords. Here he watched, disapprovingly, Gladstone’s reforming zeal between 1868 and 1874. Here he also matured as a politician, becoming the Conservative leader in the Lords. Disraeli appointed him foreign secretary in his second administration (1878-1880), in place of the fifteenth Earl of Derby, who had resigned as a result of Disraeli’s pursuit of a belligerent policy abroad. Disraeli and Salisbury did not work closely together, largely because Salisbury disagreed with Disraeli’s view of Turkey as a potential counterweight to Russian ambitions in the Middle East.
When Disraeli died in 1881, Salisbury became one of the contenders, along with Sir Stafford Northcote in the Commons, for leadership of a future Conservative ministry. He cultivated his position well, attempting to attract right-wing dissident Liberals into the Conservative Party. In 1885 he managed to attract the Liberal Unionists away from Gladstone over the issue of Home Rule but kept them as a separate party. When Gladstone fell from power, Salisbury was asked to form a Conservative government. He served as prime minister on three separate occasions—from 1885 to 1886, 1886 to 1892, and 1895 to 1902. He also combined this post with that of foreign secretary from 1885 to 1887, 1887 to 1892, and 1895 to 1900.
Gladstone and the Liberal Party won the general election of 1892, but Salisbury returned at the head of another Conservative government after the 1895 general election. He remained prime minister until 1902, winning the 1900 general election, but was foreign secretary only in the first of these two administrations, from 1895 to 1900.
Joseph Chamberlain, the leader of the Liberal Unionists, was included in this government; social reform therefore was among its objectives, although Salisbury opposed the provision of old-age pensions by the state, as well as all attempts to restrict the length of the workday. He was also opposed to income tax, being unwilling to accept the premise that one social class should pay for the needs of another. However, this reticence disappeared during the Boer War at the turn of the century, when income tax doubled and the government abandoned its attempt to pay down the national debt through the Sinking Fund.
As foreign secretary, Salisbury continued to face the problem of Britain’s diminishing military power. Attempts were made to win German support for Britain’s restraining Russia in the Far East, in return for British naval support against France, but they came to nothing. In the end, British interests were preserved in the Far East when Lord Lansdowne, who took over from Salisbury, negotiated an alliance with Japan. In 1902, Salisbury decided to retire as prime minister, before the political and military disasters of the Boer War were exposed. He died on 22 August 1903.
Politics
He became M.P. for a family borough in 1857, and held that seat until the early 1870s. During this period he seems to have moved from being a High Tory, fixed on the rule of the Anglican Church and the rule of property, to being a rather flexible Conservative.
Salisbury’s political views were, therefore, dualistic. Although he fought against the widening of the parliamentary franchise in 1867, he was a pragmatist and recognized that one of its main implications was that the Tory party had to win support in the towns. Nevertheless, as an aristocrat, he believed that “fear, awe and respect for the law” were the keys to British rule in India. Although he believed that the southern states in America should be supported in their attempt to secede from the Union, he regarded William Ewart Gladstone as an “old hypocrite” for backing Ireland’s right to secede from the United Kingdom.
Personality
Although he greatly influenced the development of the British Empire, before the publication of Andrew Roberts’s recent book Salisbury: Victorian Titan he had not attracted as much attention as other illustrious Conservative leaders, such as Benjamin Disraeli and A. J. Balfour.
Andrew Roberts, in his recent monumental biography, suggests that this leader of the “stupidest party” was a lot brighter than his bulky frame (he was six feet five inches tall) and aristocratic foibles made him look. Roberts and other recent writers consider Salisbury one of the great prime ministers of the nineteenth century. After Lord Liverpool, he held the premiership longer than any other nineteenth-century statesman; he won three general elections (1885, 1886, and 1900); he was one of the longest-serving of all foreign secretaries, often combining the role with that of prime minister; and he accomplished all of this from the House of Lords. The Boer War brought imperial and foreign affairs disasters that took a toll on his reputation, and the Conservative Party began to fracture when he left office. Nevertheless, it is possible that his skill in handling his fellow ministers and his practice of not interfering in departmental affairs helped keep the Conservative Party together in the late nineteenth century. He was undoubtedly a skillful politician and an effective premier, and recent writers seem to be coming to the opinion that he was one of the most able of Britain’s prime ministers.
Connections
He married Georgina Alderton in 1857, and the couple had an ever increasing brood of children.