Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, was a British politician and statesman.
Background
Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice was born at Lansdowne House, Berkeley Square, London, on 14 January 1845. He was the eldest son of Henry Thomas, fourth Marquess of Lansdowne, by his second wife, Emily Jane Mercer Elphinstone de Flahault, Baroness Nairne, daughter of the Comte de Flahault and the Baroness Keith and Nairne. While his grandfather was alive and his father was the Earl of Shelburne, he was known as Viscount Clanmaurice.
Education
Clanmaurice received his primary education at a private school in Woodcote, near Reading, and was enrolled at Eton at 13 years of age. During his last months at Eton, he was a senior classmate to the young Arthur James Balfour, who later became prime minister. After graduating from Eton, Clanmaurice attended Balliol College, Oxford. In 1866, before his graduation from Oxford with a lower-second-class honors degree, his father died, and he entered the House of Lords as Lord Lansdowne.
Career
As Lord Lansdowne, for much of the rest of his life, he was actively involved in politics. Between 1868 and 1883 he held minor posts in two of William Gladstones governments. In 1868 he became a junior Lord of the Treasury, and in 1872, undersecretary for war.
From 1874 to 1880 Lansdowne was in opposition to the government of Benjamin Disraeli, but in 1880 he was appointed undersecretary of state for India in Gladstone’s government. As the owner of estates in Kerry, in Ireland, he was opposed to Gladstone’s policy of Irish Home Rule. However, before these tensions came to the fore, he was made governor-general of Canada in 1883, a post he held until 1888. In this post he became a great promoter of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was completed in June 1886.
In 1888, Lord Salisbury, the new Conservative prime minister, asked Lansdowne to become viceroy of India, a post he held until January 1894. He was immediately faced with border disputes with Afghanistan and with an uprising in Manipur, a small native state on the border of Burma, in 1890. He also had to deal with currency disputes and with anti-opium agitation in England in 1892, which threatened some of the revenues of the Indian government.
Because of his split with Gladstone over Home Rule, Lansdowne was now a Unionist politician and was working closely with the Conservative Party. In 1895 he became secretary of state for war in Lord Salisbury’s government. His first task was to reorganize the army along the lines of reforms instigated in 1890, which strengthened the power of the secretary of state for war. His next responsibility was to mount a military operation against the Boers after President Kruger precipitated the Boer War in October 1899. However, the operation did not go well, for the British military expedition was unused to fighting the extremely mobile war that the Boers initiated. Frustrated with British military failures, Lansdowne readily accepted the new post of secretary of state for foreign affairs, which Lord Salisbury offered him after the general election of November 1900. In effect, Salisbury had given up trying to act as prime minister and foreign secretary at the same time.
Lansdowne remained foreign secretary for the duration of the governments led by Lord Salisbury and then by Arthur James Balfour, and relinquished the post in December 1905.
From 1906 to 1916, Lansdowne became the official leader of the Conservatives and Unionists in the House of Lords. This occurred at an active time, since the reforming Liberal governments of December 1905 to May 1915 had accelerated the pace of change.
Lansdowne retired from active politics after World War I, although he publicly expressed some disquiet at the creation of an independent Ireland in 1922. In 1919 he was struck down by rheumatic fever. Ill health dogged him for the rest of his life, and he died on 3 June 1927.
Connections
In 1869 he was married to Lady Maud Evelyn Hamilton, the youngest daughter of the first Duke of Abercorn.