THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY

History Today Vol 1 - April 1951 - British Prime Ministers : I

By A.P. RYAN - A Monthly Magazine Published From 72 Coleman Street London E.C. 2 -

Beginning as the enfant terrible of the Conservative Party, Salisbury ended as its Grand Old Man. In his younger days, he was seen by Disraeli, whom he first loathed and then served, as " a great master of jibes and Bouts and jeers ". A generation later, Mr.Winston Churchill, looking out " from my regimental cradle ", saw him as " venerable, august Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister since God knew when ". He was Prime Minister for thirteen years and ten months, sixteen months more than Gladstone and longer than any predecessor in the nineteenth century, except Liverpool; none of his successors has come up to this record. He was the last Prime Minister in the House of Lords and, for much of the time that he led the government, he was also Foreign Secretary. Entering Parliament before the Crimean war, he was in office when Edward VII came to the throne. Leader of his party through three victorious General Elections, he left it still strongly entrenched in power. Had he confined himself to diplomacy, his achievements in the Near East and in Africa would rank him high among the most memorable figures who have presided over the Foreign Office. His general record in home affairs, although less notable than what he accomplished abroad, is not one of stagnation. He introduced free education, remarking that, since the state had made education compulsory, it was unfair that the very poor should be asked to find the money. Yet he is little remembered - except for his foibles

To everyone who has glanced through late Victorian histories the portly, reassuring form and patriarchal beard are familiar ; and a miscellany of anecdotes lingers on to keep green the legend of a Wodehousian Lord Emsworth in Downing Street. Superhuman vagueness, which caused him to forget names and faces, even of colleagues in the cabinet, dilettante zeal for science, for pottering about with arc lights and primeval telephones, are characteristics affectionately preserved. The English love an eccentric - not less when he is a lord - and the authorized and apocryphal versions of his behaviour entitle Lord Salisbury to a front bench seat in the honourable company of unaffected individualists. His casual clothes, his shunning of society that amounted to a harmless mania, have sown a crop of hardy perennial anecdotes. Behind them the central figure has disappeared as in life it was his habit to dodge company in the by-ways of Hatfield. He was happiest in the solitude of his study, endlessly drafting his despatches and minutes and brooding over the growth of democracy with a calm assurance at least on one point - that he knew how to govern. That he stands in the lengthening vistas of time as less of a Colossus than Disraeli and Gladstone, as a less fascinating personality than his nephew, Balfour, would not in the least have worried him. His appetite for power was gargantuan, but by publicity he was actively bored.

To understand how the hard-hitting, high Tory Lord Robert Cecil, preferring resignation to acquiescence in what he believed to be a betrayal of principle, turned into the wise old marquess, it is necessary to go back to his origins. It is also necessary never to forget that the first of these two partners never resigned from the firm. The realism that always saw cant for what it is, and the flash of phrase that gave a white heat to common sense, continued to mark Salisbury out from his contemporaries almost to the day of his death. He owed much to women, As the first Cecil to make a great name since his direct ancestors Burghley and the Earl of Salisbury, his break-away from the long intervening line of undistinguished owners of Hatfield may largely be explained by the new blood brought into the family by his mother and grandmother. The one was Creevey's Dowager, the Irishwoman who reigned in Arlington Street, a great hostess for the supporters of Pitt, who continued to impress her remarkable qualities on society until she was burnt alive in a fire at Hatfield in the Thirties. Her daughter-in-law, the future Prime Minister's mother, was a strong Tory, a friend of the Duke of Wellington's and a political hostess of unusual intelligence and charm. She died when her son was ten, and he led a miserable life at school. He described his preparatory school as " an existence among devils ". From Eton he wrote to his father that he was bullied from morning to night. After reciting a tale of woe, the boy added, with characteristic detachment, "I know that this is very little interesting to you, but it relieves me telling it to someone ". The kindly father removed him from Eton when he was fifteen and let him browse in the library and roam on botanizing expeditions across the countryside until he went up to Christchurch. There, although handicapped by ill-health and using a " nobleman's" privilege in taking a degree, he began to find his feet. He became treasurer and secretary to the Union, and a debater on the side of protection and against all forms of popular government. At the same time he was in favour of admitting the poorer classes to universities and an advocate of higher wages.

Between Oxford and the House of Commons he travelled to South Africa and Australia where one of his most abiding dislikes showed itself. "The clerks in Downing Street interfere in every little local question ", he wrote from Australia. It was the era of "Mr. Mother Country" in colonial administration; and Salisbury had an early glimpse of the limitations of centralized bureaucracy. How persistently he stuck to ideas will be evident from this example. Years later he was to break many lances with officialdom. "There is an insuperable bar ", he minuted on one occasion, " in the shape of the objection of the Treasury, which declines the expense. And the expense is under a £100. Has the Cabinet no authority ? Have these gentlemen no perspective in their mental vision? These Treasury officials are enough to drive one mad .... .. It is quite intolerable that they should be allowed to thwart the policy by these imbecile punctilios . . . . My objection to the traditional policy of the Treasury is that it tries to economize by sweating the public services; that that plan really saves very little money ; that it produces in the department a feeling towards the Treasury analagous to that which grows up in a family towards a miserly grandfather and that the result is rather a desire to outwit the Treasury and spend in spite of it, than to co-operate in saving.... I believe that in public, as in private affairs, parsimony is a symptom of mismanagement. When there is sufficient scraping to make people uncomfortable - I am speaking, of course, of well-to-do people - it means they are trying to live a degree too highly ; and that retrenchment is wanted not in the details but in the heads of expenditure. This is the fault I find with the traditional Treasury system. They don't interpose their veto at the beginning of a policy when they may prevent it, but at the tail of a policy when they can only spoil it." His wars on this point were unceasing. " Take another matter which I have had to fight for the Foreign Office. It is reasonable to say that consuls are an expensive luxury and to say that no more than a certain number shall he created. But it is not reasonable to allow them to be created and then to ignore the fact that they must be liable to the casual expenses to which all agents are liable and to try and diminish their costliness by throwing these burdens on the unlucky consuls themselves."

This contempt for red tape in the execution of policies was matched by an equally strong distaste for loose thought in their shaping. Salisbury's philosophy of statecraft was expressed more coherently and at greater length than is to be found in the writings of most men of action. If he had never held office, he would deserve to be remembered as a Conservative apologist on home and foreign politics. From the time when he got back from Australia, was elected to an All Souls fellowship and entered the House of Commons, his pen was always at work. He contributed to the Quarterly and the Saturday Reviews, and such of his journalism as is to be met in book form remains well worth reading to-day. He quickly mastered a forthright, personal style. Commenting on an episcopal life of Pitt, he described it as being distinguished " by the solemn emptiness of which the Bishop was an acknowledged master ". Solemn emptiness was precisely what Salisbury avoided. No Prime Minister has written so much so well, except Mr. Churchill and Rosebery.

His private life is important in these formative years while he was still a younger son and not yet holding high office. The good fortune that had gone before his entrance into the world smiled on him in marriage. He married young, against the wishes of his father, and lived happily ever after. His wife saved him from the melancholy to which his temperamental incapacity for being an easy mixer might have doomed him. They lived modestly at first by the standards of their world. A fashionable lady found herself unable to call on the young Cecils because she " never left cards north of Oxford Street ". Deprivation of such company was bliss to a man absorbed in adding to his income by his articles, and beginning to find his feet in the House. He had married in 57, and in 65 on the death of his sickly elder brother, he became Cranborne and his father's heir.

Office followed, naturally, within a year. It was the India Office, then regarded as the " padded room " of ministers, but the newcomer did not stay long in its dignified seclusion. In July he took over; and in February he resigned. He did not hold office again until 1874. What he denounced as " the Conservative surrender " of Derby and Disraeli to popular pressure for reform was too much for him. Reform was in the air; between '52 ad '67 six bills were introduced by Ministers and several more by private members. Feelings ran high as to the wisdom of trusting the people, regardless of accepted property qualifications, with the vote. Salisbury was stirred to the depths of his intellectual conviction by what he regarded as a Gadarene stampede of democracy. He had a further reason for being unhappy about the active part he ought to play in politics. " I have never concealed my opinion of Mr. D' Israeli " he wrote to his father. " The prospect of having to serve with this man again ", he exclaimed, " is like a nightmare." That he did serve him again and went as his Emissary to Constantinople and as his lieutenant in Berlin is partly to be explained by the natural urge of an able, ambitious man to shoulder the public responsibilities which he rightly felt himself fitted to discharge, but it is also a tribute to the extraordinary fascination of his leader. Not all the admirably documented tomes of Monypenny and Buckle, and the innumerable studies based on that monumental biography, have succeeded in bringing to light the secret of Disraeli's way with the patrician Conservatives.

Before he had at last swallowed the Disraelian pill, and settled down to a quarter of a century's collar work in the service of the State, Salisbury argued the case against the optimistic levelling theories of Victorian radicalism with zestful eloquence. His opposition to what was happening around him - some of the full consequences of which are being experienced in our own day - may be summarized from his writings and speeches. Political equality, in his view, is not merely a folly ; it is a chimera. Whatever may be the written text of a constitution, the multitude always will have leaders among them - leaders not selected by themselves. If they will, they may set up the pretence of political equality, and delude themselves with the belief of its existence ; but the only consequence will be that they will have bad leaders instead of good. They will find themselves under adroit electioneers, clever wire pullers, smart in coining the largest gain out of any popular sentiment of the day, but utterly devoid of the higher forms of mental culture and, still more, of the higher instincts of patriotism and honour. Were it not for the complex interests which the existence of property creates, the machine of government would be far too cumbrous for its work. In proportion as the property is small, the danger of misusing the franchise will be great. You may cover that by sentiment; you may attempt to thrust it away by vague declamation; but as a matter of fact, as a matter of truth, it will remain all the same.

Taxation ever falls lightly on the depositaries of absolute power. The magnates of Hungary, the noblesse of France, have left us a warning that, even to cultivated minds, exemption from taxation is one of the most valued results of irresponsible power. What grounds have we for the fond belief that, if we trust the English working class with so perilous a gift, they will be proof against a temptation to which every other class that has been exposed to it has succumbed ? His own feeling, he once remarked, with respect to the working men is simply this " we have heard a great deal too much of them, as though they were different from other Englishmen ". His distrust of the trend of the times was profound. "We find ourselves" he once complained "in the enchanted region of pure Gladstonism . . . . We bid good-bye to the simple city virtues of slow security and safe investments and well balanced ledgers. We soar in the empyrean of finance. Everything is on a colossal scale of grandeur, all-embracing free trade, abysses of deficit, mountains of income tax." Political ideology seemed to him dangerous. " Theories ", he said, " though they never inspire with enthusiasm any considerable mass of human beings, are yet prized for the purpose of throwing a veil of decency over the naked passions by which political convulsions are brought about." Every claim for what was called progress found in him a critic, and sometimes a cynic. When Cardwell said that the abolition of army purchase would bring in "seniority tempered by selection" he retorted that it would mean " stagnation tempered by jobbery ".

It would be easy, but inaccurate, to paint him as a diehard. He had no fear of the people; he simply maintained that they were the same as everybody else, and that efficiency in government was not to be achieved by the enforcement of doctrinaire equality. There was a streak of pessimism in him, that led to his thinking at one point that he should give up politics " because my opinions are of the past ". There was also a relish for controversy that sometimes provoked him to indiscretions. " If I speak when I am tired ", he reflected, "I find that I always shock people." Commenting on the repeal of the paper duty, he asked whether it can be maintained that a person of any education can learn anything worth knowing from a penny paper. A man who had thus shown his cards in the sixties might seem unlikely to have been accepted - as Salisbury was accepted by the majority of his countrymen - as Prime Minister in the eighties and nineties. There are two suggestions which may be produced to show why he enjoyed a term of office so long and so largely tranquil. The first is that his sense of the continuity of British history led him loyally to accept accomplished facts. No nation, he remarked, was ever induced to revoke its decision. The object of his party, he believed, was not, and ought not to be, simply to keep things as they were. He opposed and criticized changes that appeared to him unwise; but, once they were made, he was willing to carry on without any hankering to go back on his tracks. The second, and perhaps more important, reason is that the explosions which he had expected in his younger days proved to be of the delayed action kind. The enfranchized and educated masses did not begin to make themselves felt in Parliament until 1906. Thus Salisbury ruled in the twilight of the political day of which he was old enough to have seen the afternoon sun.

From his return to the India Office in 74 until his death, he was never again a free lance. Responsibility absorbed and delighted him, and he allowed no distractions to tempt him away from work. His daughter in her brilliant biography left, alas, unfinished, says of him that on one or two occasions during his last two years at the Foreign Office, Balfour took over his work there for a few weeks. Otherwise, throughout the whole of the eleven and a half years, with a break from 92 to 95, during which he held the two offices, he never, except when he was ill, and then only while his temperature was seriously high, enjoyed a whole day's rest - doubtfully half a day's. The record of his ministries at home and abroad are neither spectacular nor unhappy. Attempts to give Conservatism a new deal were adroitly damped down. Salisbury's attitude to this move was best expressed in his warning to Lord Randolph Churchill, which is worth quoting, for it shows that the young Lord Robert lived on in the older statesman.

"We have so to conduct our legislation that we shall give satisfaction to both classes and masses. This is specially difficult with the classes - because all legislation is rather un-welcome to them as tending to disturb a state of being with which they are satisfied. It is evident, therefore, that we must work at less speed and at a lower temperature than our opponents. Our Bills must be tentative and cautious, not sweeping and dramatic. But I believe that with patience, feeling our way as we go, we may get the one element to concede and the other to forbear. The opposite course is to produce drastic symmetrical measures, hitting the 'classes' hard and consequently dispensing with their support, but trusting to public meetings and the democratic forces generally to carry us through. I think such a policy will fail."

How far that point of view is regarded as wise depends on the reading given to what has happened to Conservatism under Balfour and later leaders. It is a still unresolved historical controversy. Firmly though Salisbury kept his hand on home affairs, his heart was always in the Foreign Office. The issues have changed so completely, since he was engaged in keeping the balance between isolation and a judicious interference abroad, that no sweeping judgment can fairly be passed upon him. In his study of Castlereagh, who was his model, he himself defined the functions of the diplomat. "There is nothing" he says, "dramatic about the successes of a diplomatist. His victories are made up of a series of microscopic advantages ; of a judicious suggestion here, of an opportune civility there; of a wise concession at one moment, and a far-sighted persistence at another ; of sleepless tact, immovable calmness and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunders can shake." Rosebery, who shared Salisbury's zest for diplomacy, declared that his greatest triumph was the " Circular " of 78 which profoundly influenced the chanceries of Europe in the weeks immediately before the Congress of Berlin. Salisbury's patient efforts to preserve the state of equilibrium in the world and to assert the value of a public law among the states of Europe were, considered on a short term basis, effective. More can seldom, truthfully, be said of any Foreign Secretary. If he could come to life and consider how the balance of power has altered in the half century since his death, Salisbury might well maintain that he had been right in his policy of abstention from meddling and of always being prone to let action go along with words, rather than to let it lag behind them. "A nation" he said, "may uphold its honour without being Quixotic, but no reputation can survive a display of Quixotism which falters at the sight of a drawn sword." He had as little use for appeasement as for aggression.

So conscientiously, self-confidently, altogether unromantically, he toiled on into the twentieth century, never lapsing into cynical despair and never losing his early contempt for cant and pretension, wherever he decided that he had detected them. Formalism in the transaction of state business and reverence for experts alike struck him as folly. The first rule of cabinet conduct is, he said, that no member should ever " Hansardize" another. " If you believe the doctors ", he remarked, "nothing is wholesome; If you believe the theologians nothing is innocent ; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of common sense." He gave the key to his own hold on the nation when he wrote "there is no blindness so unaccountable as the blindness of English statesmen to the political value of a character ". It was by character that he won his own victories - character founded on religion of a stubbornly English sort. A staunch Anglican who began each day at Hatfield by going to church, he replied to all arguments against the truth of some Christian doctrine as being morally unsatisfactory or rationally incomprehensible - " as if that had anything to do with it ".

The voice of the old aristocrat sounds more and more " period " as the years roll on ; but periods have no monopoly of political wisdom and he has never been more worth hearing than to-day - if only as an antidote.