George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston KG, GCSI, GCIE, PC, known as The Lord Curzon of Kedleston between 1898 and 1911 and as The Earl Curzon of Kedleston between 1911 and 1921, was a British Conservative statesman.
Background
Marquess Curzon of Kedleston was born at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, on January 11, 1859, the son of the rector of Kedleston. Lord Curzon was the eldest son and second of eleven children of Alfred Curzon, the 4th Baron Scarsdale (1831–1916), Rector of Kedleston in Derbyshire, and his wife Blanche (1837–1875), daughter of Joseph Pocklington Senhouse of Netherhall in Cumberland. He was born at Kedleston Hall, built on the site where his family, who were of Norman ancestry, had lived since the 12th century. His mother, worn out by childbirth, died when George was 16; her husband survived her by 41 years. Neither parent exerted a major influence on Curzon's life. Lord Scarsdale was an austere and unindulgent father who believed in the short-held family tradition that landowners should stay on their land and not go "roaming about all over the world". He thus had little sympathy for those journeys across Asia between 1887 and 1895 which made his son one of the most traveled men who ever sat in a British cabinet. A more decisive presence in Curzon's childhood was that of his brutal governess, Ellen Mary Paraman, whose tyranny in the nursery stimulated his combative qualities and encouraged the obsessional side of his nature. Paraman periodically forced him to parade through the village wearing a conical hat bearing the words liar, sneak, and coward. Curzon later noted, "No children well-born and well-placed ever cried so much and so justly."
Education
He was educated at Wixenford School, Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford. At Eton he was a favourite of Oscar Browning, an over-intimate relationship that led to his tutor's dismissal. While at Eton, he was a controversial figure who was liked and disliked with equal intensity by large numbers of masters and other boys. This strange talent for both attraction and repulsion stayed with him all his life: few people ever felt neutral about him. At Oxford he was President of the Union and Secretary of the Oxford Canning Club. Although he failed to achieve a first class degree in Greats, he won the Lothian and Arnold Prizes, the latter for an essay on Sir Thomas More (about whom he confessed to having known almost nothing before commencing study, delivered as the clocks were chiming midnight on the day of the deadline). He was elected a prize fellow of All Souls College in 1883. Whilst at Oxford, he was a contemporary and close friend of Cecil Spring Rice and Edward Grey.
Career
After much travel, Curzon in 1898 was appointed viceroy of India and created Baron Curzon of Kedleston in the Irish peerage. His seven years in India ended with the failure to include Tibet in the British sphere of influence and in a bitter quarrel with Lord H. H. Kitchener, then commander in chief in India. In 1905 Curzon began eleven years of political isolation and disappointment. At first a "ditcher" on the issues of the Lords' veto powers, in August 1910, he reversed his position and supported the parliamentary bill upholding the Commons' power of the purse; in November 1911, he was created Earl Curzon of Kedleston, Viscount Scarsdale, and Baron Ravensdale.
On May 27, 1915, Curzon was appointed lord privy seal in Herbert Asquith's coalition government. It was a largely honorific post and Curzon received no important functions and was excluded from the War Council. He spoke out against evacuation of British troops from Gallipoli for reasons of prestige, and he strongly favored compulsory national service at home. Early in 1916 he was placed in charge of the Shipping Control Committee and in May 1916 appointed president of the Air Board; at both posts he clashed frequently with Arthur James Balfour, then first lord of the Admiralty, whom he accused of having "the mind of a marshmallow." Indeed, Lord Curzon had brought to the cabinet more than the average man's fund of pomposity, and his "rotund expositions of the obvious" were often the subject of ridicule after that body had ended its daily sessions. His enemies gleefully revived the old Oxford University jingle: "My name is George Nathaniel Curzon/I am a most Superior Person. ..."
At the end of 1916 Curzon hedged his bets as Asquith and David Lloyd George struggled for leadership of the Liberal party. The fiery Welshman's victory on December 7 brought Curzon a seat on the inner War Cabinet as well as the leadership in the House of Lords. As a spokesman of the New Imperialism, Curzon decried Balfour's "unfortunate insistence upon the Jewish National Home in Palestine," preferring instead an active British role in Persia and Mesopotamia leading ultimately to the creation of a British-controlled Arab state. Curzon accompanied Lloyd George on April 30, 1917, during the prime minister's historic visit to the Admiralty to encourage the sea lords to introduce the convoy system of merchant shipping in the wake of Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. And Curzon shared the prime minister's pessimism concerning victory at the western front, hoping, like Lloyd George, to triumph in Palestine or Mesopotamia.
Curzon felt betrayed by Lloyd George in July 1917, when the prime minister, breaking an earlier pledge to the Tories, installed Winston Churchill as minister of munitions. Lloyd George had correctly opted to have Churchill's parliamentary skills on his side and had sought the good offices of Lord Beaver-brook to bring Churchill back into the fold; Curzon denounced the renegade Conservative as "an ill-educated man with a great natural power of writing English." And when the House of Commons that same year accorded women the franchise ("this biological mistake"), Curzon, president of the Anti-Suffrage League, outraged his fellow Tories by deserting their cause and voting for the measure on the second reading of the bill. Shortly after the armistice, Curzon made a strong plea that the Germans be made to pay for the war and that the kaiser be brought to trial for starting it.
Curzon served as foreign minister ad interim from January to October 1919, while Balfour accompanied Lloyd George to Paris; on October 24, 1919, he became permanent foreign secretary. However, Curzon fell out with the prime minister over the Persian and Graeco-Turkish questions and soon denounced Lloyd George as "an evil genius." During 1922/1923, he reached the height of his career at the Lausanne Conference dealing with the crisis in Asia Minor and in denouncing the French invasion of the Ruhr. Curzon once stated that he had three ambitions in life: to be viceroy of India, to be secretary of state for foreign affairs, and to be prime minister; with regard to the latter, he was deeply offended in May 1923 when King George V overlooked him and called instead upon Stanley Baldwin to head a Conservative government. Only with great effort was Curzon persuaded to accept the post of lord privy seal in January 1924. He died in London on March 20, 1925, with the full realization that a member of the House of Lords would never again be called upon to form a government.
Connections
In 1895 George married Mary Victoria Leiter, the daughter of Levi Ziegler Leiter, an American millionaire of German Mennonite origin and co-founder of the Chicago department store Field & Leiter (later Marshall Field). She had a long and nearly fatal illness near the end of summer 1904, from which she never really recovered. Falling ill again in July 1906, she died on the 18th of that month in her husband's arms, at the age of 36. It was the greatest personal loss of his life.
She was buried in the church at Kedleston, where Curzon designed his memorial for her, a Gothic chapel added to the north side of the nave. Although he was neither a devout nor a conventional churchman, Curzon retained a simple religious faith; in later years he sometimes said that he was not afraid of death because it would enable him to join Mary in heaven.
They had three daughters during a firm and happy marriage: Mary Irene, who inherited her father's Barony of Ravensdale and was created a life peer in her own right; Cynthia, who became the first wife of politician Sir Oswald Mosley; and Alexandra Naldera ("Baba"), who married Edward "Fruity" Metcalfe, the best friend, best man and equerry of Edward VIII. Mosley exercised a strange fascination for the Curzon women: Irene had a brief romance with him before either were married; Baba became his mistress; and Curzon's second wife, Grace, had a long affair with him.
After a long affair with the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn, Curzon married the former Grace Elvina Hinds in January 1917. She was the wealthy Alabama-born widow of Alfredo Huberto Duggan (died 1915), a first-generation Irish Argentinian appointed to the Argentine Legation in London in 1905. Elinor Glyn was staying with Curzon at the time of the engagement, and read about it in the morning newspapers.
Grace had three children from her first marriage, two sons, Alfred and Hubert, and a daughter, Grace Lucille. Alfred and Hubert, as Curzon's step-sons, grew up within his influential circle. Curzon had three daughters from his first marriage, but he and Grace (despite fertility-related operations and several miscarriages) did not have any children together, which put a strain on their marriage. Letters written between them in the early 1920s imply that they still lived together, and remained devoted to each other. In 1923, Curzon was passed over for the office of Prime Minister partly on the advice of Arthur Balfour, who joked that Curzon "has lost the hope of glory but he still possesses the means of Grace".
In 1917, Curzon bought Bodiam Castle in East Sussex, a 14th-century building that had been gutted during the English Civil War. He restored it extensively, then bequeathed it to the National Trust.
On his appointment as Viceroy of India in 1898, he was created Baron Curzon of Kedleston, in the County of Derby. This title was created in the Peerage of Ireland to enable him to potentially return to the House of Commons, as Irish peers did not have an automatic right to sit in the House of Lords.
In 1911 he was created Earl Curzon of Kedleston, Viscount Scarsdale, and Baron Ravensdale. All of these titles were in the Peerage of the United Kingdom and thus precluded Curzon's return to the House of Commons, but conferred upon him the right to sit in the House of Lords.
Upon his father's death in 1916, he also became 5th Baron Scarsdale, in the Peerage of Great Britain. The title had been created in 1761.
In the 1921 Birthday Honours, he was created Marquess Curzon of Kedleston and Earl of Kedleston. Both titles were extinct upon his death in 1925, as he was survived by three daughters and no sons.