Sir Cecil Arthur Spring Rice was a British diplomat who served as British Ambassador to the United States from 1912 to 1918. In this role he was responsible for leading British efforts to end American neutrality during the First World War. He is best known as the writer of the lyrics of the patriotic hymn, "I Vow to Thee, My Country". He was also a close friend of US President Theodore Roosevelt, and served as best man at his second wedding.
Background
Cecil Rice was born in London on February 27, 1859, the son of a high civil servant. He was the son of the diplomat, Hon. Charles William Thomas Spring Rice, second son of the prominent Whig politician and former cabinet minister The 1st Baron Monteagle of Brandon. Spring Rice's maternal grandfather was the politician, William Marshall, and he was a cousin of Frederick Spring. He was the great-grandson of The 1st Earl of Limerick and John Marshall. Spring Rice's father died when he was eleven, and he was brought up at his mother's family's house at Watermillock on the shore of Ullswater. He was often ill as a child and later suffered from Graves' disease, but he was active and fit.
Education
He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, under the direction of Benjamin Jowett. He rowed for his college and achieved a double first in Classical Moderations (1879) and Literae Humaniores (1881). He was a contemporary and close friend of George Curzon, John Strachey and Edward Grey. After completing university, Spring Rice travelled in Europe, where he improved his French, at the time the language of diplomacy. Uncertain about which career to pursue, he took an examination for the Foreign Office and was accepted. Although brought up as an Englishman, Spring Rice maintained a close affinity with Ireland, and he later wrote a poem about his dual Rice (Irish) and Spring (English) roots.
Career
He was posted abroad to Washington, Berlin, Constantinople, and Teheran, before becoming British commissioner on the Egyptian Caisse de la Dette Publique in 1901. Thereafter came a brief stint in St. Petersburg, followed by appointment as British minister to Persia. In 1908 Spring Rice was posted as minister to Sweden for five years; in April 1913, he received the ambassadorship to his first post, Washington. The outbreak of the European war in August 1914 found him at home in England on leave.
Back in Washington, Spring Rice ironically signed a document to establish a permanent International Peace Commission to which disputes were to be referred. Overall, the ambassador did not have an enviable task in the United States. American claims to the "freedom of the seas" were compounded by anti-British agitation among certain ethnic groups, especially the Irish-Americans and German-Americans. London's blockade regulations in March
1915 and declarations in August and October defining raw cotton as well as cotton products as contraband greatly exacerbated relations with the United States. Above all, the British blacklisting in February 1916 of firms all over the world under the Trading with the Enemy Act aroused American businessmen against Great Britain. Spring Rice was certain that the U.S. military establishment had been infiltrated by German spies, and he felt frustrated by the American President, Woodrow Wilson, whom he found to be "an unknown force and the movements of his mind are so mysterious that no one seems to be able to prophecy with certainty what decisions he will arrive at."
All this changed early in February 1917 with Germany's decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. On April 3 Spring Rice attended the session of Congress in which Wilson declared a state of war to exist between the United States and Germany; Congress supported this initiative three days later. Spring Rice then strained at the leash to elicit more energetic actions from the Americans: "The realities of the war have not yet reached this country." The ambassador continued to be convinced that the Americans simply were not willing to devote their full vitality towards winning the war in Europe, and the crotchety envoy saw sinister anti-British plots in every nook and cranny: "You will notice," he wrote to Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour in November 1917, "that there are three sorts of Universalists who seem an especial danger to the Allies. The Catholics, the Socialists, the Jews." Spring Rice especially resented the American navy's refusal immediately to scrap its long-term capital ship-building program in favor of antisubmarine craft and merchant shipping. Yet when the United States finally mounted a financial and military effort to overcome the stalemate in Europe, the acerbic Spring Rice grew apprehensive; he warned London that there existed in Washington "an under current of feeling that, by the end of the war, America will have all the ships and all the gold in the world, and that the hegemony probably of the world, and certainly of the Anglo-Saxon race, will pass across the Atlantic." It was probably this paranoia that prompted the British in January 1918 to replace Spring Rice as ambassador with the more stable marquess of Reading, who had already been sent to Washington to rationalize British financial transactions in the United States.
Spring Rice left the American capital on January 13, and on February 14, 1918, he died in Ottawa, Canada, while waiting for a ship to take him home to England.
Achievements
Connections
In 1904, Spring Rice married Florence Caroline Lascelles, the daughter of Sir Frank Cavendish Lascelles and a cousin of the Duke of Devonshire. He had two children with Florence:
Mary Elizabeth Spring Rice (1906–1994), married Sir Oswald Raynor Arthur in 1935.
Anthony Theodore Brandon Spring Rice (1908–1954), died unmarried.