Salisbury

By Eric Midwinter

Biography of the first Prime Minister of the 20th Century during the height of the British Empire

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781912208517

Book preview

Introduction: The Disregarded Premier

The General Holidays Bill of 1871 was a measure introduced by the Liberal politician, Sir John Lubbock, and it was passed with surprising ease, given that a more modest proposal had failed only three years previously. It provided for three extra annual holidays on Easter Monday, Whit Monday and the first Monday in August. ‘Saint Monday’ was the day when workers took what, in modern parlance, would be termed ‘sickies’, so Monday was the pragmatic choice, and the first-ever such holiday was celebrated on Whit Monday 1871. Hitherto only Good Friday and Christmas Day had been public holidays for everyone. In the less stringent decades of pre-Victorian economic laxity, the staff of the Bank of England had had 42 separate days but these had been reduced to 18 days by 1830 and then to four in 1834.

When the General Holidays Bill was at its committee stage in the House of Lords it received the crucial support of Lord Salisbury, in part because he did have some little conscience about easing the lot of the working man, in part because it was a scheme about which the sitting Liberal government, to which the Conservative peer was in opposition, remained unenthusiastic. The legal thrust of the bill was to ensure that all banks would close on these days, with the anticipated consequence of all businesses following suit. Thus Lord Salisbury suggested they be called ‘Bank Holidays’ – and so they were and they have brought some refreshment to the busy lives of millions.

This is probably Lord Salisbury’s chief claim to a place in popular lore, but it is unlikely that many of those sunning themselves on the beaches or, a likelier fate, steaming in traffic jams on August Bank Holiday are aware of their benefactor. Nobody thought to call them ‘Salisbury Days’; indeed, had they hinted at such a populist notion, the patrician Lord Salisbury would have been sorely offended. Other politicians have been thus eponymously adopted. Examples include the Gladstone bag; the Churchill tank or College; the Belisha beacon, after Leslie Hore-Belisha, Minister of Transport 1934–7, and the Anderson shelter, after Sir John Anderson, Home Secretary 1939–40. More recently there have been ‘Baker Days’, for in-service teacher training, after one of Margaret Thatcher’s Education Secretaries, Kenneth Baker, and the proposal that extra-time schooling should be called ‘Kelly Hours’, after Tony Blair’s Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly.

But there were to be no ‘Salisbury Days’. In a nutshell that encapsulates much about the man, his public face and his historical account. Given that he was Prime Minister three times and for a joint period of over 13 years, he is the least well remembered of long-serving premiers. He is something of a forgotten man. Curiously, the rule-proving exception to the case occurred when, in 1890, the capital of Southern Rhodesia was founded and named Salisbury after the Prime Minister, who was closely associated with imperial policy and whose family had 80,000 acres of farmland in Rhodesia. First, within a generation, many people, had they bothered to think about it, would have assumed it was named after the cathedral city, as was Salisbury, North Carolina. Second, adding injury to insult, with the emergence of the independent republic of Zimbabwe in 1980, and a good riddance to imperialist vestiges, the city was renamed Harare.

For much of the 20th century, Lord Salisbury was, for those with but a general interest in political history, squeezed into anonymity between the competing giants, Gladstone and Disraeli, and the flamboyant David Lloyd George. Even as late as the 1950s, working men, in receipt of national insurance payments, would speak of collecting their ‘Lloyd-George’, acknowledging his ministerial hand in that Edwardian reform. Few memorials exist to applaud the work of the late Victorian Conservative leader and Lord Salisbury has long been a grey figure, chiefly remembered only by specialists in the field.

There can be little doubt that he would have preferred it that way. He shunned the limelight and did not play to the political gallery, not so much perhaps out of modesty but from hauteur. He scorned the trappings of rulership, possibly out of a decent sensibility of their emptiness, possibly because they had come so easily to him that he scarcely valued them. Lord Salisbury, born to the governmental purple, was, in regard of such baubles, akin to the plutocrat who was asked the cost of his yacht – if you have to ask, was his lofty reply, you can’t afford it.

The mismatch between his length of service as Prime Minister and the slight mark he has left on the historical consciousness of the nation is the central key to an examination of his life and work. This book is basically an attempt to answer the question as to whether the public, taking Lord Salisbury at his own self-assessment, have been justified in consigning him to the dusty footnotes of the collective historical memory, or whether recent energetic endeavours to reconstruct him as a mighty and imposing personage, yet sadly misjudged and ignored, offer a more truthful interpretation.

Part One

THE LIFE

Chapter 1: From Noble Birth to Sitting Member

Among 20th century prime ministers, and even allowing for Winston Churchill’s spirited ancestry, Lord Salisbury’s antecedents were the most portentous in terms of likely political success. The Cecil family were originally of Welsh stock, hence, apparently, the rather twee pronunciation of ‘Cecil’ to rhyme with – to borrow from another kingdom’s lore – ‘thistle’. They provided the Tudors with faithful service. David Cecil fought with Henry VII at the decisive Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and was made a Yeoman of the Guard, his reward an estate in the Stamford area. His great grandson was the famed William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, the wise and perceptive advisor to Elizabeth I, while his son, Robert Cecil, replaced him and was instrumental in the safe transfer of monarchical power to James I on the death of the Queen in 1603. He was heavily involved in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, some say as anxious guardian, others say as manipulative agent.

It was he who was created Earl of Salisbury and who exchanged his Lincolnshire estate for the crown land of Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, where, of course, the young Princess Elizabeth had awaited with some trepidation news of her accession to the throne. There he began the building of the Jacobean stately home that would one day be Lord Salisbury’s opulent dwelling.

The fourth Earl found himself stranded on the wrong side when, at the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1689, he had backed the Roman Catholic James II against the Protestant contender, William of Orange. This Whig settlement introduced the real beginnings of a constitutional monarchy. The fourth Earl’s preference for the status quo became the regular stance of the Cecils, as might be expected of such a longstanding landowning family. James Cecil, Lord Salisbury’s grandfather, was an active Tory and Lord Chamberlain during the stirring times of the late 18th century; indeed, he was made a Marquess by George III in the climactic year of 1789. His son, also James, Lord Salisbury’s father, was also a vigorous upholder of the landed interest. He was opposed to parliamentary reform and, unsurprisingly, Robert Peel’s brave overthrow of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, whilst he served in a couple of Tory ministries in the 1850s.

It is worthwhile dwelling for a moment on this centuries-old lineage of traditional attachment to land and class with its concomitant obsessive wariness of change. Given the strength of that heritage, it would have been as remarkable if Lord Salisbury had become an adherent of Karl Marx (whose Das Kapital was published in 1867, the year Lord Salisbury spoke forcefully, as to the manner born, against Disraeli’s parliamentary reform bill) as it would have been had one of Saddam Hussein’s sons transpired to be a paid-up member of Amnesty International. Lord Salisbury was not to disappoint the watching shades of his aristocratic forebears.

Lord Salisbury was born at Hatfield House on 3 February 1830 and he was christened Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, the hyphen introducing the maiden name of his mother, Frances Gascoyne, whose rich family had brought increased wealth to the Cecil domain. The Duke of Wellington was his godfather. His birth and well being were important to the Cecil line, for the heir, his elder brother, James, Viscount Cranborne, was severely disabled and a second son had died in infancy. There were two much older sisters and one much younger brother, leaving ‘Bobby’ an isolated figure, never very strong physically and subject to mental depression. Nor was this condition helped by the death of his mother in 1839, when he was nine. Incidentally, and in the hope of avoiding undue confusion, the subject of this study will be referred to as ‘Lord Salisbury’ throughout, even in these opening pages before, of course, he had succeeded to the earldom.

Being born with a silver spoon in the mouth is no guarantee of a golden childhood idyll, however. Lord Salisbury’s high-handed father, the second Marquess, subjected his son to a schooling of abject misery. After being whacked and starved from the age of six by the local vicar who took in tiny boarders, and following a rather more pleasant experience at a Devonshire school, he then went to Eton, aged ten, in 1840. Although Thomas Arnold had begun his celebrated headmastership of Rugby School in 1828, his governing text the primacy of ‘Godliness and good learning’, his reforming message was as yet unheeded by the public schools that were ‘essentially self-governing schoolboy republics, run by a prefectorial elite, in which the teachers rarely intervened’. In practice and habit, they were violent and debauched.

Eton College in Windsor, Berkshire, was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI to provide free education for 70 poor scholars who would then go on to further their education at King’s College, Cambridge. One of the country’s most prestigious public schools, it has educated 18 prime ministers including Sir Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Elder and the Duke of Wellington. More recently Princes William and Harry attended the College.

The new Etonian did not fit in well and refused to conform, especially to the code whereby clever pupils were coerced into doing the translations for older, lazier and less brainy boys. He was bullied hour after hour by a gang of ten or more; burnt with a candle; spat on and kicked; pelted and driven from meals; his possessions were damaged and destroyed, the constant beatings leaving him ‘aching in every joint’ and forced to hide in corners, without food, until the house had settled down for the night. He wrote to his father: I know that you do not like complaints and I have tried to suppress them and conceal all this, but you are the only person to whom I can safely confide these things. Really now Eton has become insupportable. I am bullied from morning to night without ceasing.¹ Young Robert was so terrorised that, eventually and after pitiful complaints, he was taken away in 1845 in a state of nervous and physical collapse. Thereafter he was tutored privately at Hatfield House, but the damage to heart and mind was done. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1847, and there, in a hot-bed of High Toryism and High Anglicanism, he felt more at home, although his repressed and lonesome childhood left him lacking in those cheery traits which enliven undergraduate existence. Studious in mode and active in the Oxford Union debates, life for him was much less of a trial, but, unluckily, ill-health, possibly the consequence of the horrors of Eton, felled him. He left after two years, with nothing more illustrious than an honorary fourth class degree in mathematics, little more than a glorified certificate of