Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 1

‘Matters are gloomy – I never saw them gloomier.’
(Lord Salisbury in March 1885, but could have been at any time in his long life, quoted on page 318 of ‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’)

‘The first of duties is to be pachydermatous’ (p.286)

The great thing about Tory writers is they are completely untroubled by theories, ideas or doubts. Living in a dream world of privilege and entitlement, they radiate confidence and suavity. This explains why the writings of so many Conservatives are often so clear and attractive. It explains one of the reasons why Andrew Roberts is so attracted to the hero of this huge biography – for his adamantine certainty:

Unlike so many conservative leaders before and since, Salisbury was a true, dyed-in-the-wool Tory, entirely lacking in either middle-class guilt or ideological doubt. (p.365)

Andrew Roberts is an accomplished biographer and journalist with a very strong Tory bent. He comes from the same kind of privileged, public school background as his subject (though not, admittedly, from the same kind of grand and venerable old family Salisbury came from).

Roberts attended Cranleigh public school then went on to Cambridge, where he chaired the Cambridge University Conservative Association. He has had a distinguished career as a freelance i.e. non-academic, historian, writing 19 books, including four about Winston Churchill, along with countless papers and articles. He writes regularly for the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. He lives in Knightsbridge. In 2022 he was created Baron Roberts of Belgravia by that reputable politician Boris Johnson (who has also, coincidentally, authored a book about Winston Churchill; I think everyone should write a biography of Winston Churchill, at least once in their lives) and so took his seat in the House of Lords draped in much the same ermine cloak as Lord Salisbury wore. You get the picture.

This is a blockbuster of a political biography, enormously researched and enormous sized, weighing in at 852 pages. It covers all the political issues its subject was involved in, in extraordinary detail, giving daily, sometimes hour-by-hour descriptions of changing events and opinions. And yet it is written with such tremendous clarity and verve, with such an authoritative presentation of the facts in such a logical order, presented in such beautifully lucid prose and with such amiable good humour, that the pages fly by.

Lord Salisbury

This is a blockbuster biography of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury KG GCVO PC FRS DL (1830 to 1903), British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times, for a total of over thirteen years. He was also Foreign Secretary before and during most of his tenure, holding these posts at arguably the high peak of the British Empire, 1886 to 1892 and then 1895 to 1902.

Salisbury’s forebears were the Cecils, advisers to Queen Elizabeth I, who built the imposing Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. The 7th Earl of Salisbury, politician and courtier, was raised to the marquessate, becoming the Marquis of Salisbury, by George III in 1789. (There are currently 34 marquises in Great Britain and Ireland.)

The first Marquis of Salisbury was a solid Tory, as was his son, the 2nd marquis, born in 1791, and so was his son, our hero, when he himself became the 3rd marquis on the death of his father in 1868. Cecil’s own father, the second marquis, had been a successful politician in his own right, Lord Privy Seal in 1852 and Lord President of the Council between 1858 and 1859.

Anyway, this is why Roberts refers to our hero by the family name of ‘Cecil’ in the first past of the book, up till the moment when his elder brother died, in 1865, at which point he inherited the title of Viscount Cranborne, from which point Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. When his father died in 1868 and he inherited the marquisate to become the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, from that point onwards Roberts refers to him as ‘Salisbury’.

1830 to 1865 – Cecil
1865 to 1868 – Cranborne
1868 to 1902 – Salisbury

In 1821 Cecil’s father had made a strategic marriage into the wealthy Gascoyne family, marrying Frances Mary Gascoyne, daughter of Bamber Gascoyne of Childwall Hall, Lancashire, which explains why the family name became Gascoyne-Cecil.

Lonely, sensitive and sad

Cecil’s siblings were either a lot older or younger than him, his father was away in London a lot, so he had a lonely childhood, wandering the echoing corridors of Hatfield House, his only company the house’s 40 or so servants and its vast library. He became a book addict.

Cecil was sent to Eton where he was so mercilessly bullied that he wrote his father a letter begging to be allowed home, and Roberts includes excerpts from his letters with quite harrowing accounts of being punched, kicked in the shins and spat on by older boys.

Cecil was lonely, hyper-sensitive, often depressed and his boyhood experiences made him an extreme pessimist about human nature, always ready to believe the worst, convinced that just beneath the civilised veneer lurked the savage, a belief he saw confirmed by, for example, the savage fighting of the American Civil War. ‘The optimistic view of politics assumes that there must be some remedy for every political ill,’ he wrote in 1872. But what if there isn’t?

High Tory conservatism

This extreme pessimism formed the basis of Cecil’s arch conservatism: we must hang on to what we’ve got because all change and innovation risks opening the door to democracy, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to barbarism.

Cecil didn’t just go up to Oxford but to Oxford’s poshest college, Christ’s Church. It was the time of the Oxford Movement to restore quasi-Catholic decorations to Anglican belief and services. This attracted him because it gave the C of E a more solid foundation in the central tradition of Christianity. At Oxford he crystallised into an arch conservative in religion, domestic politics and foreign affairs. High Anglican, High Tory. He was vehemently against all forms of change or innovation, in any sphere of life; after all, he was doing just fine, so why change anything?

That said, Cecil was too sensitive to complete his degree at Oxford and so was awarded an honourable 4th. But then academic qualifications didn’t matter. Oxford had done its job of putting the finishing touches to another deep-dyed reactionary member of the English aristocracy.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that he was a lifelong bibliophile, Cecil was solidly, thumpingly philistine, in that dim conservative aristocratic way. He didn’t like contemporary fiction, he disliked theatre and ballet and had no time for art. He didn’t even like music very much. He was also notoriously scruffy and badly dressed all through his life, even on state occasions, even when meeting royalty.

All this is what makes Cecil so funny, a very amusing caricature of a huffing, disapproving old buffer. Given his family name of Gascoyne-Cecil, I wondered whether the extended family of doddery old aristocrats of the Ascoyne D’Ascoyne family in the Ealing comedy ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ were based on him.

In line with tradition, Cecil was packed off on the Grand Tour of the Mediterranean sights. But then, a little unusually, he continued on to the southern hemisphere and visited Britain’s main colonies there, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand.

Like upper-class Englishmen before and since, Cecil got on well with the ‘natives’, conceiving an admiration for the ‘Kaffirs’ in SA and the Maoris in New Zealand, liking to think that he detected in them a certain aristocratic independence and natural superiority, much like his own. Just as predictably, he complained about the ghastly, awful, vulgar middle class people he was forced to mix with on the long sea voyages between these places. He hated the Boers of South Africa who he thought crude slave-drivers, an antipathy which mattered 40 years later when he was to be Prime Minister during the Boer War.

In Australia and New Zealand he saw how white men behave when far removed from the steadying hand of England with its hierarchy of Queen, Lord lieutenants, justices of the peace etc, which was appallingly. In colonial towns like Melbourne and Sydney he saw drunkenness, prostitution, violence, and unfettered lust for gold and money. It confirmed him in his High Toryism: human nature is essentially barbarous and needs to be restrained, by order, disciple, hierarchy, an established church, monarchy etc.

Married and elected MP

Within ten weeks of returning he was ‘elected’ unopposed i.e. nominated, to the ‘pocket borough’ of Stamford (p.20).

Surprisingly, he married not for money or to make an aristocratic alliance, but for love of a middle-class woman, Georgina Alderson, much against his father’s wishes, in 1857. Cut out of the family inheritance, he turned to journalism to support his wife and growing family (he quickly had seven children) and wrote a prolific amount, mainly reviewing and articles in a wide range of publications, notably The Saturday Review. The period 1857 to 1866 (i.e. from age 27 to 36) were his Journalism Years.

The journalism years, 1857 to 1866

Roberts does a great job of showing the themes and attitudes which informed Cecil’s huge output, demonstrating his fierce satire and sarcastic opinions on everything from women’s fashion to foreign affairs (his policy was to ‘encourage supporters and anger opponents,’ p.261). He was a fierce opponent of nationalisms on the continent and prophetically warned against the rise of German nationalism; scratch the sophisticated veneer of a German professor, he wrote, and you find the same barbarism which transacted the Thirty Years War. The twentieth century was to prove him right.

Cecil was anti-slavery but supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War because of a deep dislike of Americans as a whole, and of Abraham Lincoln in particular. He thought Lincoln’s actions during the war, such as closing the free press, suspending habeas corpus and interning up to 14,000 political opponents, was exactly what you got if you let democracy run rampant i.e. tyranny.

He also thought that letting the Confederacy win would have the benefit of splitting the US into two countries, both a lot weaker and less of a rival for Britain. He also worried that if the Union won the war, it would attack Canada next.

Roberts’ descriptions of Cecil’s vehement and bigoted views makes for hilarious reading. Cecil had strong views about everything, which he expressed in often very funny satire and sarcasm. For example, he hated the Irish. While happily admitting that England had behaved terribly to the Irish for centuries and possibly even owed the Irish reparations, he still wrote waspish satire such as that Ireland ‘had given us foreign invasions, domestic rebellions, and in quieter times the manly sport of landlord shooting’ (p.53).

Having just read Paul Collier’s book, The Bottom Billion, which highlights the need for capital investment in the poorest African countries, it’s interesting to see that Cecil thought this was precisely the trouble with 19th century Ireland too, that investors didn’t want to invest because of the poor returns and, above all, the lack of security i.e. threat of violence. Interesting to think of 19th century Ireland as experiencing the same problems as 21st century Africa.

So regarding Ireland, in Salisbury’s view, if inward investment was the solution, then it was vital to establish security and the rule of law in order to attract investors; in which case, the continual agrarian unrest in Ireland had to be ruthlessly crushed.

Cecil approved of Ireland’s high migration rate and, indeed, looked forward to a time when every single Irish person had emigrated and the island could be populated with law-abiding Scots and Saxons: ‘the sooner they are gone the better’ (p.53). Mind you, he was just as scathing about the Orangemen and ‘the special fanaticism of Ulster’ which is, of course, still causing trouble one hundred and sixty years later.

Another major issue was electoral reform on which Cecil had a very blunt utilitarian view: if the working classes were given the vote they would elect radicals who would redistribute wealth via fierce taxation on the rich. So in defence of his class, and out of naked self interest, Cecil was against extending the franchise. It wasn’t that the ruling class was morally better than the plebs – he wrote plenty of satirical articles criticising the lifestyle of the Victorian rich – but that the leisure and education they enjoyed made them likely to be better, more disinterested legislators, who would act for the national good, compared to radicals who, if elected, would owe their position to pleasing i.e. bribing, the electorate, probably by levying unjust taxes on the wealthy i.e. Cecil and his class.

(Cf Richard Shannon’s excellent book, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865 to 1915, which also drums home how both conservatives and opponents believed that the 1832 settlement had produced a nice balance between the interests of the landed aristocracy, the new business-based bourgeoisie, and the skilled working class. It wasn’t extending the franchise to the lower middle classes and rest of the working class they objected to, as such (although some did), it was upsetting this delicate balance by giving too much prominence to one particular part of the population, which they thought risked toppling the country into either anarchy or demagoguery.)

Cecil also pointed to the baleful example of America where, once every four years, the entire administration ground to a halt while the political parties competed in offering bribes (tax cuts, favourable government policies) to the electorate.

Timeless issues

The appeal of reading about old politics like this is that as well as the obvious appeal of explaining how political leaders behaved as they did and so helping to explain how and why we got from there to here – it also takes you way out of your comfort zone and presents you with completely different ways of thinking about all sorts of political problems. In my opinion this is useful because closely observing how people in the past were prisoners of their age’s assumptions, their level of technological, economic and social development, sheds light on how we, in our own time, are just as much prisoners of our technological, economic and social conventions. It prompts the thought that our descendants will view us with the same curiosity, puzzlement and disgust as we view the Victorians.

And it’s always disconcerting to learn how few of those issues have really changed: electoral reform; trade reform; worrying about economic rivals; worrying about our poor standard of education; squabbles about the rights of trade unions and strikers; managing clean water and sewerage; difficulties with Ireland; small wars in Africa; instability in the Middle East; how to fend off the growing threat from Russia. Ring any bells? Plus ça change… (a phrase which was coined in 1849 and itself hasn’t changed).

Using the Saturday Review

By the time I got to the end of the book I realised a simple central fact about it which is that Roberts uses Salisbury’s early journalism as a central structuring device. The main structure of the book is straightforwardly chronological, he covers all the events in Salisbury’s career as they occur. But almost every single one of these topics or themes is introduced with a quote from a Saturday Review article which Salisbury wrote about it. Sometimes, 10, 20 or 30 years later, and now in power, his early opinion as evinced in a Review article shows the continuity of his thinking; sometimes, on the contrary, the quote from an article shows how either his thinking or the situation has changed.

But either way, Roberts uses the fact that he has clearly read and carefully annotated all of Salisbury’s early journalism as a kind of running commentary on his later career. Thus almost every incident of Cecil’s long political career is seen from two perspectives: that of the cocksure young journalist writing in humorous, general, cynical terms; and that of the older, experienced statesman, acting on experience. Two voices, two perspectives. Or a running commentary on the mature politician by the cocky young tyro.

Viscount Cranborne

In June 1865 (two months after the end of the American civil war) Cecil’s older brother died, aged just 42, and so Cecil inherited the courtesy title Viscount Cranborne, he and his wife becoming Lord and Lady Cranborne. From now on Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. From now on Cranborne enjoyed the income associated with the title and so his journalistic activities wound down, as Roberts demonstrates with a graphic statistic: before his brother’s death he wrote 589 articles for the Saturday Review; afterwards, he wrote just 19, mostly to whip up support for policies he was trying to promote.

Four months later Lord Palmerston died and the numerous competing forces in British politics which he had been holding in check were let loose. Lord Derby and Disraeli formed a joint leadership of the Conservative Party, Derby in the Lords, Dizzy in the Commons. Cranborne grew to dislike and distrust ‘Dizzy’. He was the lead figure in the attempt to water down if not cancel Disraeli’s reform bill of 1867.

In 1868 Cranborne’s father died, aged 77, and he inherited Hatfield House and all its incomes, becoming the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury and, of course, being forced out of the House of Commons and into the House of Lords.

Cecil was a surprisingly ramshackle father who let his kids run wild. They all remember a boisterous sociable happy childhood, the exact opposite of his. Lady Salisbury grew into a formidable hostess and manager of the Hatfield Estate, which employed well over 100 staff. Parliamentary colleagues nicknamed him ‘Buffalo’ because he was big (well over 6 foot), solemn and obstinate. In 1870 he built a big ugly red-brick holiday home near Dieppe on the Channel coast of France, naming it Chalet Cecil.

Victorian Prime Ministers

Lord Derby – February 1858 to June 1859 (Tory)
Lord Palmerston – June 1859 to October 1865 (Whig)
Lord John Russell – October 1865 to June 1866 (Whig)
Lord Derby – June 1866 to February 1868 (Tory)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1868 to December 1868 (Tory)
William Gladstone – December 1868 to February 1874 (Liberal)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1874 to April 1880 (Tory)
William Gladstone – April 1880 to June 1885 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1885 to January 1886 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – February 1886 to July 1886 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – July 1886 to August 1892 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – August 1892 to March 1894 (Liberal)
Lord Rosebery – March 1894 to June 1895 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1895 to July 1902 (Conservative)

Posts Salisbury held

Member of Parliament: 1853 to 1866

He never canvased to be an MP but was simply appointed one by the Earl of Exeter to a pocket borough.

Secretary of State for India: 1866 to 1867

In 1865, his older brother died, he inherited the title of Cranborne, and in 1866 Disraeli appointed him Secretary of State for India.

Salisbury was blamed for mishandling the Orissa famine of 1866, a disaster which affected the east coast of India from Madras northwards. At least a million Indians died, roughly one third of the population of the area. New to his brief, Salisbury believed his officials and experts who said it wasn’t serious, until it was too late, leaving him with a lifelong suspicion of experts. It made him quick off the mark and insistent on spending whatever it took to save lives in later Indian famines. The scale of the disaster made educated Indians realise maybe Britain wasn’t the all-powerful protector she pretended to be. The famine was one among many triggers for Indian nationalism.

Fear, awe and respect

Salisbury thought Britain’s rule over India was achieved by psychological means. There was no way 250,000 (mostly native) troops could hold down 250 million people if they chose to rebel against them. Earlier India officials such as Macauley had recommended that a select number of upper class Indians be educated, in English, up to western standards, in order to become intermediaries between western and Indian culture. Salisbury was sceptical about even this colonial, patronising idea, in fact he thought it was catastrophic since it just produced a class of ‘seditious article writers’. He thought India was vital to Britain’s prestige in the world i.e. vis-a-vis the other powers, and must be kept down by ‘fear, awe and respect for the law’ (p.139).

As Secretary of State for India, where British resources depended to a large degree on prestige rather than actual resources employed, Salisbury…was one of the first people to appreciate quite the extent to which militarily the British Empire was a gigantic bluff. (p.178)

And, criticising the more enlightened policies of Gladstone’s Liberals, Cecil declared in a speech that:

‘They will not learn that these tribes, these vast uncivilised multitudes, are not governed merely by the sword. They are governed by the imagination. They are governed by their fears.’ (p.293)

As Roberts summarises:

He stood out against the Whig ethos propagated by Macauley and others that Britain’s duty was simply to prepare Indians for eventual self-government. In Salisbury’s view, India was a prize that should remain Britain’s until it was forcible wrested from her. (p.216)

The 1867 Reform Act

The big issue was electoral reform in which Disraeli dished i.e. scuppered the Whigs. Salisbury made himself a master of electoral statistics and predicted reform would eliminate support for Tories. Salisbury made a big speech attacking Disraeli for rubbishing the Whig bill in 1866 then introducing one which was even more radical in 1867. Disraeli calculated that the newly enfranchised middle classes would be grateful to the Tories. Salisbury had done the math and said they wouldn’t and they weren’t. In fact he was fanatical about research, and always read everything he could get his hands on about whatever issue was at hand, electoral reform in 1867, and then again in 1885, being classic examples.

In opposition: 1868 to 1874

Gladstone’s Liberals won the 1868 election and were in government for 6 long years which they devoted to reforming all aspects of British law and society

Cranborne’s father died and he inherited the title of Lord Salisbury, the big house at Hatfield and a seat in the House of Lords. Roberts describes the ecclesiastical and political issues around his election as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the core of high Anglican high Toryism.

Roberts also has a passage describing Salisbury’s unexpected interest in new technology. He was an early adopter of electricity and built a laboratory at Hatfield House where he carried out quite serious experiments about light. Cecil had a surprisingly scientific openness, for example he refused to be drawn into attacking Darwin after the ‘Origin of Species’ was published.

Secretary of State for India: 1874 to 1878

Queen Victorian wished to be awarded the title Empress of India was sharpened when a newly united Germany, after its victory over France, declared itself an empire in 1871, so there as a danger that her daughter, Vicky, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia, would take precedence over her, a mere queen. Also the Tsar made a state visit to Britain in 1874 after the marriage of his daughter to the Duke of Edinburgh. In other words, everyone else was, or was becoming, an emperor – why not her?

The delicate handling of the issue, for British public opinion, abroad, and, of course, in India itself, are covered by Robert with typical thoroughness. He describes the great hou-ha that was held across India on the declaration on New Year’s Day 1877 (p.215).

The extremely complicated manoeuvring during the crisis triggered by uprisings against Ottoman rule in Bulgaria and Serbia in the summer of 1876. The Turks crushed the Bulgarians with great brutality, sending in mercenaries (the notorious bashi-bazouks) who were allowed to rape, pillage and murder at will. Gladstone publicised all this with his famous pamphlet of September 1876, ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’.

You have to understand that this was all caught up in the long-term consequences of the Crimean War. The Crimean War had been fought to prevent Russia’s extension of its influence into the Balkans i.e. further into Europe, at the expense of the Ottomans. The Treaty of Paris which concluded it pledged the allies i.e. France and Britain, to come to the support of the Ottomans.

The point of a detailed account like Roberts’ is to take you right into the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of the day, Disraeli, and describe in very great detail the different positions of the 12 men who comprised it. And this issue split them up into half a dozen factions as the crisis dragged on and a host of different responses, political, diplomatic and military all emerged.

Basically, some of the Cabinet thought the Ottoman Empire was irrevocably doomed to collapse and so we should never have pledged to prop it up. This led to the view that the Crimean War should have never been fought and was a colossal mistake. But this didn’t mean we supported Russia and its restless aims for expansion. Some supported Russia but opposed any expansion of its territory or power. Some thought we should continue to prop up ‘the sick man of Europe’. Some trod a middle way, trying to find a formula to support the Christians in the Balkans – the Bulgarians and Serbs – without insulting the Turks and without allowing undue Russian influence. Some went to an extreme and thought the European powers should partition the Ottoman Empire and civil servants in European capitals began drawing up suggestions for who would get where.3

Queen Victoria was a confirmed Russophobe. I was startled to learn that she threatened to abdicate no fewer than five times through the course of the crisis, leading Salisbury to speculate privately about her sanity (p.174). Disraeli had made it his policy to suck up to Her Majesty, maybe because it was good politics to have the monarch behind you, maybe because he saw it as his duty as ‘a minister of the Crown’, maybe because he liked sucking up.

Foremost in everyone’s minds was how to keep the route to India, the jewel in the British Crown, open and secure, but there were multiple answers to this problem: the most extreme was letting Russia invade and conquer through Bulgaria and down into Ottoman territory until she, possibly, took Constantinople and restored it as an Eastern orthodox Christian capital, as Russian extremists wanted to. In that case, some Cabinet members were for a) pre-emptively seizing Constantinople ourselves or b) sending an Expeditionary force to seize the Dardanelles i.e. the gateway from the Black Sea. The point of this would be to prevent the Russian fleet from freely passing through it and staking a claim in the Eastern Mediterranean. A simpler route would be to annex Egypt, thus securing the south east Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The rearguard position was continuing to prop up the sick man – and our power and influence in the region – hoping something would come along.

The enormous pleasure of a book like Roberts’s is that he takes you right into the detail of this complex chess game, in which everyone – not just Russians, Ottomans, and neighbours like Austria – had multiple points of views and proposals, but even within the British cabinet there were multiple beliefs and strategies and that these kept changing and evolving as the situation changed.

Thus Salisbury was chosen to attend the Constantinople Conference (December 1876 to January 1877) to try and sort out the crisis, very usefully meeting the heads of all the important states en route (including huge, coarse, very clever Count von Bismarck), but Roberts shows in great detail how his ostensible aim of securing peace between Turkey and Russia was secretly sabotaged by Disraeli and his ally Lord Derby who, along with the Queen, loathed Russia, but couldn’t be seen to be supporting the perpetrators of the atrocities. Roberts’ suggests that Disraeli’s reputation for two-faced slipperiness was well deserved.

Anyway, the peace conference failed and so Salisbury’s mission failed, but many commentators in the press realised that he had been set up to fail by his boss. It was a hugely useful experience of the realities of power and diplomacy for a man who was to become Foreign Secretary then Prime Minister.

And so war between Russia and Turkey broke out, lasting from April 1877 to Match 1878, with Russia recruiting Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro to her side. Russia won. Her army fought all the way to the gates of Constantinople at which point the western powers intervened again.

In victory Russia reclaimed provinces in the Caucasus but more importantly, the principalities of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro formally proclaimed their independence from the Ottoman Empire and, after almost five centuries of Ottoman domination, the Principality of Bulgaria emerged as a free nation.

So there’s one layer of pleasure to this narrative, which is watching the drama of high politics play out like an episode of House of Cards. But there’s a huge additional pleasure deriving from Salisbury’s Eeyorish character, always pessimistically convinced of the worse – ‘Things that have been secure for centuries are secure no longer,’ (p.274) – a doom-laden attitude which very often converts into hilariously satirical attitudes and observations. Roberts cites from Salisbury’s letters and dispatches countless examples of ironic reversals and witty sarcasms, a permanent attitude of ‘amused cynicism’ (p.215).

His unexpected juxtapositions aren’t on the level of Oscar Wilde’s deliberate paradoxes, but indicate the taste for aristocratic humour which characterised the age:

‘General Ignatiev is an amusing man without much regard for truth and an inordinate vanity which our Embassy takes every opportunity of wounding.’ (p.159)

Salisbury was an inveterate phrase-maker’ (p.247). Epigrams came naturally to him:

‘No one is fit to be trusted with a secret who is not prepared, if necessary, to tell an untruth to defend it.’ (p.194

Good government avoids one of the causes of hate; but it does not inspire love.’ (p.214)

And ran in the family. Salisbury’s daughter, Maud, accompanied him on his journey across Europe to Turkey, and kept a diary. Roberts cites her being told by beaming Ottoman officials that they were travelling on had been built by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, to which she politely enquired whether anyone had mended it since.

Beaconsfieldism

In 1876 Queen Victorian rewarded Disraeli for his ~~toadying~~ services to the nation, by making him Earl of Beaconsfield. From this point onwards contemporaries, and Roberts, refer to him as ‘Beaconsfield’.

From 1878 to 1880 the leading opponent of the Tories, William Gladstone, gave a series of speeches as he campaigned to win the parliamentary seat of Midlothian in Scotland. There were 6 very long speeches and over twenty shorter ones, addressed to halls full of thousands of voters, which harped on four main themes. He charged Disraeli’s administration with: financial incompetence, neglect of domestic legislation, and mismanagement of foreign affairs. In particular he charged Disraeli with a strategy of distracting public opinion from the economic and financial problems of Britain by means of foreign adventures. Gladstone gave the name Beaconsfieldism to ‘the immoral, bullying acquisition of territory almost for its own sake’ (p.212). One Tory critic defined it as: ‘occupy, fortify, grab and brag’ (p.227).

Foreign Secretary: 1878 to 1880

As mentioned above the recurring concerns of Britain in foreign affairs were: continual wars, unrest and Russian threat in the Balkans; management of Egypt and her southern extension, Sudan; management of South Africa and fractious relations with the Boers and the irritating little states like the Transvaal which kept being claimed or created with resulting tribal wars where we had to decide where we stood. And above all else, the running sore of Ireland.

Russo-Turkish War (April 1877 to March 1878)
Second Afghan War (November 1878 to September 1880)
First Zulu War (January to July 1879)
Egypt

Congress of Berlin

Roberts gives an intricate account of the multi-layered diplomacy which brought an end to the at the Congress of Berlin, June to July 1878, for which he was rewarded by the Queen with the Order of the Garter (as was with Disraeli).

Afghanistan

Many in the Foreign Office panicked about Russian intentions in Afghanistan i.e. it was placing diplomats there with a view to infiltrating/overthrowing the Amir, with a view to eventually invading India. Salisbury was sceptical about this talk of Russia attacking. He believed that the expansion of the Russian empire, or ‘the Russian avalanche’ as he called it, was unstoppable but was moving east across central Asia.

‘If it keeps north of the Hindu Kush it may submerge one caste of Muslim robbers after another without disturbing our repose.’ (p.145)

The Afghan war was the fault of Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India. Lytton’s despatches had become steadily more hysterical and Salisbury predicted to a cabinet colleague that he expected him [Lytton] would no conduct operations ‘so as to achieve the most brilliant results – lose the greatest number of men – and spend the largest amount of money’ (p.221).

Sure enough Lytton disobeyed instructions to disengage and sent a British force to force the Amir to accept a British representative at his court, which was defeated at the Khyber Pass. This forced Salisbury’s hand because he believed Britain must be seen to be strong.

The Battle of Maiwand

The war included the Battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880 when Afghan forces under Ayub Khan defeated an admittedly smaller British force consisting of two brigades of British and Indian troops under Brigadier-General George Burrows, some 969 of whom were killed.

The point of mentioning this is that when British forces were dispatched to south Afghanistan in 2006 their bases in Helmand Province turned out not to be very far from the site of the battle and they discovered that local Afghan leaders and fighters still remembered it as a great patriotic victory over the infidel invader. The moral being that we, the British, have forgotten or never even knew most of our imperial history whereas, for scores of nations which we fought and conquered, our violent interventions are very much part of their national story.

The Anglo-Zulu War

From Wikipedia:

Following the passing of the British North America Act of 1867 forming a federation in Canada [Salisbury’s friend and ally in Disraeli’s cabinet] Lord Carnarvon thought that a similar political effort, coupled with military campaigns, might succeed with the African Kingdoms, tribal areas and Boer republics in South Africa. In 1874, Sir Bartle Frere was sent to South Africa as British High Commissioner to effect such plans. Among the obstacles were the armed independent states of the South African Republic and the Kingdom of Zululand. Frere, on his own initiative, sent a provocative ultimatum on 11 December 1878 to the Zulu king Cetshwayo and upon its rejection sent Lord Chelmsford to invade Zululand. The war is notable for several particularly bloody battles, including an opening victory of the Zulu at the Battle of Isandlwana, followed by the defence of Rorke’s Drift by a small British force from attack by a large Zulu force. The British eventually won the war, ending Zulu dominance of the region.

Salisbury in several places rages against the way the men on the spot, politicians or viceroys or diplomats or sometimes buccaneering businessmen like Cecil Rhodes, were forever stirring up trouble and starting conflicts which the government back in London then had no option to follow through. It was true of both the Afghan and Zulu wars where the same ends might have been achieved through diplomacy, trade and deals.

Roberts tells how Salisbury couldn’t understand why the Queen was so keen to allow the son of the exiled French Emperor Napoleon III (who had sought refuge in Chislehurst in Kent) Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, to accompany British forces, but she insisted. He was promptly killed on 1 June 1879 by Zulus who stripped his corpse, all except for one blue sock bearing the initial N from which he was identified.

Egypt

Salisbury wanted to exercise ‘informal empire’ over Egypt not officially annex it. In theory Egypt was run by a Khedive appointed by the Ottoman Sultan. In practice, in return for propping up the Sultan and broadly supporting him against the Russians, Britain was allowed to interfere in Egypt. Apart from anything else Britain had huge sums invested in the Suez Canal and associated businesses. When the stroppy Khedive Ismail Pasha threw out British representatives, Salisbury had the British ambassador to Istanbul ask the Sultan to oust him in favour of his son, Tewfik Pasha, who would be more pliable. A few weeks later Salisbury wrote with typical dour cynicism to a colleague:

‘The only form of control we have is that which is called moral influence, which in practice is a combination of nonsense, objuration and worry.’ (p.229)

I had to look up ‘objuration’. It means ‘a firm binding by oath’. Salisbury’s cynicism is deliberately witty but it’s also bullshit, isn’t it? We also had a massive army (in India a truly huge army), the Royal Navy (which bombarded Alexandria and docked at Istanbul to threaten the Sultan with their guns), and various instruments of financial control through the City of London. A lot more tangible than ‘nonsense, objuration and worry.’

British troops used Egypt as a base to head south to defeat the forces of the Mahdi in what is now the Sudan. Despite all Salisbury and other British politicians’ insistence that the occupation of Egypt was purely temporary, it was, of course, strategic and long term, designed to secure the Suez Canal and the route to India (p.343). British troops didn’t leave Egypt until 1956, leaving a deep legacy of suspicion and resentment.

Tory defeat in 1880

The Tories were surprised at the scale of the landslide which turned them out in the 1880 election: Liberals 352, Tories 237, Irish Home Rule MPs 60 (p.238). Beaconsfield was ill, he had looked tired at the Conference of Berlin, had fluffed his lines and missed sessions due to chronic asthma (p.203).

Leader of the Opposition: 1881 to 1885

Salisbury took up some of his old hobbies including experimenting with electricity and collecting seaweed. Beaconsfield continued as Tory leader until his death in April 1881.

The Liberal Party had only been founded in 1859 as a coalition of anti-Tory forces. As the number of Radical Liberal MPs increased, it alienated the other wing of the party, the landed aristocratic Whig faction (p.244). In opposition, one of Salisbury’s cunning plans was to subtly egg on Gladstone’s radicalism, specially regarding Irish Home Rule and electoral reform, in order to inflame the Radicals’ expectations and rhetoric and so scare the landowning Whigs that they would come over to the Tories. There’s huge amounts of that kind of Machiavellian scheming in this book.

Electoral reform

The big issue at the end of Gladstone’s ministry was electoral reform. Eventually he passed two acts, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. Both were passed by the Liberal House of Commons but strongly resisted in the House of Lords led by Salisbury. This was for the simple reason that both acts tended to favour the Liberal, Whig and Radical interest at the expense of the aristocracy.

For the first time Britain was divided into 670 constituencies of roughly equal size, each returning just one Member of Parliament (previously many constituencies had returned two MPs, who tended to be one Liberal and one Tory, who didn’t even bother campaigning against each other. In other two-member constituencies the fractured Liberal Party had handed one to a Whig and one to a Radical. Salisbury cannily calculated that forcing them to choose one or the other would drive wedges between the two factions.

A lot more constituencies were created in cities, but Roberts shows that Salisbury, with characteristic thoroughness, had done intensive research into British psephology and correctly guessed that although some of these cities might turn Liberal or Radical, a lot of Britain’s big cities now had extensive suburbs and the inhabitants of these were just as scared of working class radicalism as the aristocracy (p.306). This was referred to ‘villa Toryism’ and came to be seen as a legacy of Disraeli.

A small symbol of this was the establishment in October 1882 of the periodical the National Review, designed to produce intelligent journalism for these middle-class Tories.

‘Caretaker’ prime minister: 1885 to 1886

Roberts chronicles the extraordinary manoeuvrings which surrounded Salisbury’s first spell as Prime Minister. In February the Liberals were defeated in an amendment to a bill and Gladstone immediately resigned. But the organisation required by the new Reform Act had not yet been put in place and wouldn’t be until the end of the year so, if he accepted power, Salisbury was faced with the unappetising prospect of being Prime Minister of a minority government for 6 months which was just long enough to make numerous mistakes and, at the next election, be unceremoniously chucked out. It’s fascinating to read the long maze of negotiations this led to, centrally getting Gladstone to agree to pass various nuts and bolts laws and acts which needed to go through. Gladstone had done the same thing to Disraeli in 1874; Salisbury had watched and learned.

There were two other problems. Salisbury wasn’t a shoe-in for Prime Minister. He sat in the House of Lords whereas the leader in the Commons throughout the period in opposition had been Sir Stafford Northcote, 1st Baronet [Eton]. Northcote expected the job but was widely seen to be too weak and lacking drive whereas Salisbury (as we’ve seen) enjoyed nothing more than making swingeing attacks on his enemies.

The second problem was Winston Churchill’s father, the radical and unreliable Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill (Eton). Randolph had set himself up with a cohort of followers on the Radical wing of the Conservative Party the leaders of which came to be referred to as ‘the Fourth Party’ (Churchill, Henry Drummond Wolff, John Gorst and Arthur Balfour). He promoted something called ‘Tory democracy’, that the Tories should accept the 1885 Reform Act, and the rise of the working class which lay behind it, but ensure the boundaries and details were drawn up to their advantage. A flashy update of Disraeli’s ‘One Nation Conservatism’. He created the National Union of the Conservative Party, created to ‘organise propaganda to attract working men’s votes, registration, choose candidates and conduct elections’, had many followers but refused to serve in Salisbury’s cabinet unless various demands were met.

Salisbury’s juggling of all these issues, trying to square various circles, makes for fascinating reading, insight into the real, smoke-filled rooms nature of actual party politics, more like a soap opera or school playground, with gangs and threats and changing alliances, than anything to do with principles, let alone serving the country.

Salisbury only finally accepted the job when Queen Victoria shed tears and pleaded with him. It was called a ‘caretaker’ government. He was 55. Lord Northcote was gutted but rewarded by being made Earl of Iddlesleigh and packed off to the Lords. Apparently, this is the origin of the expression, being ‘kicked upstairs’.

It is impossible to take the honours system seriously when you see titles like this being used with the utmost cynicism as rewards for mediocrity or being a big donor to party funds or simply to shut people up and get them out of the way. The people these made-up ‘titles’ get handed out to are generally lapdogs, the superannuated or inconvenient mediocrities who need to be shut up. That the givers or takers of these ‘honours’ then get on their hind legs and spout about ‘honour’ and ‘tradition’ and all the rest of it is risible, pathetic: see the way Boris Johnson simply rewarded key allies with peerages, damehoods and knighthoods. Dame Priti Patel. Or Liz Truss’s ‘honours’ list which even the Daily Telegraph described as ‘shameless’.

IRELAND

Salisbury was as solid as a rock against any form of home rule or national assembly for Ireland, because:

the 1800 Act of Union was a bulwark of property rights, law and order
it would be a slippery slope, the first step on an irresistible drive towards independence
as the first and nearest colony of Great Britain, giving Ireland any measure of home rule would immediately trigger calls for the same from every other colony in the empire, especially India (cf pages 574, 587)
it would mean abandoning the minority of the population of Ireland who were active supporters of the Union i.e. mostly in Ulster
on a moral level, it would be an ignoble surrender to the forces of violence (what was later called terrorism) i.e. the continual low-level agrarian protests and occasional murders all across Ireland
losing our prime colony would undermine Britain’s prestige in the world, make us look less powerful, and also
an independent Ireland led by people who hate us would become a serious security threat, even a starting point for invasion by enemy powers (as it had been for the French during the Revolutionary Wars)
a neutral or hostile Ireland would threaten Britain’s ability to import food in time of war (p.587)

Ireland quotes:

‘Are we to cut our country in two and, in the smaller portion, are we to abandon a minority of our own blood and religion to the power of their ancient enemies, in spite of their bitter protests against the debasing and ruinous servitude to which we propose to leave them?’ (p.586)

There was also rabid anti-Catholicism. Salisbury wasn’t just an Anglican, he was a fierce insister on the rights and perquisites of the Church of England in all its aspects. There was, therefore, a strong element of religious bigotry in his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland. It’s not just in the last few years that politicians have come up with superficial trivialising jingles: it was about this time that ‘Home Rule means Rome Rule’ began to be repeated by the lighter minded Conservatives and chanted at meetings and conferences (p.380).

But Roberts gives the game away, on the same page, about Ireland and the whole imperial ethos, by telling us that the very First Earl of Salisbury had been instrumental in the wholesale CONFISCATION of land in Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone between 1607 and 1609 and selling it in lots roughly the size of parishes to Scottish and City businessmen for settlement. He makes it crystal clear that the Protestant English stole the land from its rightful owners, then distributed it according to English law and from that point onwards, for the next 400 years, insisted it was a bulwark of English law when it was plain for any bystander to see that English law was, in that case, just a form of organised thieving, looting, imperial confiscation.

To then turn around and claim that this act of grand larceny, the organised theft of an entire nation’s patrimony, represented the epitome of ‘law and order’ and defending the theft amounted to ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276):

Hartington looked upon the Irish Question primarily as one of defending property and landowning rights. (p.367)

is either to lie to yourself or be guilty of ridiculous hypocrisy. Ask any Irish historian what they think of English ‘honour’ and ‘legality’.

Roberts’ long account of the lengthy manoeuvrings about Home Rule is interrupted for a brief mention of how the British ‘formally annexed’ Upper Burma. The king of Burma, King Theebaw, was negotiating a convention with France but Salisbury was having none of that – Burma had little or no value in itself but might be a useful conduit to western China, and the French certainly weren’t going to have it! — so he sent a force of 9,000 troops who smashed the Burmese army, overthrew the king and put him in prison, installing a friendly Buddhist in power.

Invading foreign countries, overthrowing their traditional rulers, making them subservient to British rule. Only a special kind of mental perversion could talk about this in the same breath as ‘preserving law and order’ and ‘the inviolable rights of property’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’, let alone think that ‘Britain’s greatest contribution to civilisation and mankind [was her] empire’ (p.370).

The violent overthrows, the coups, the imposition of rule by military force, the suppression of opposition voices, were all carried out to defend British strategic and business interests. The fact that they were dressed up in fancy rhetoric was what prompted continental observers like the French or Germans to routinely accuse the British of stunning hypocrisy.

Anti-democracy

It’s worth exploring the thinking behind Salisbury’s opposition to expanding the franchise. Basically he thought liberty was based on a) property and b) tradition and c) the law which upheld them. Only people with property have an interested in the existing system. Give the vote to people who have no property and their opinions will be wild and unpredictable, harmful to tradition, security, property etc. It would be mob rule, unjust, arbitrary and destructive. This is why he often referred to ‘the tyranny of numbers’. Just because a majority of the voters vote for something doesn’t make it right.

If you start from the position that property is the bedrock of liberty, then it follows that all attacks on property are, to the same extent, attacks on liberty. Thus Salisbury put a wide variety of reforms, such as extending the franchise or a graduated death duties, under the heading Attacks on Property which, in Salisbury’s mind, was synonymous with Attacks on Liberty.

It’s a coherent and logical position, but one which doesn’t take account of poverty. Its twinning of liberty with property, the more the better, gives no representation, voice or opinion to the large number of people who have little or no property: should they have no say in the running of the country? No, according to Tories of Salisbury’s stripe.

This was because he had nightmares that enfranchising the working classes and the poor would encourage in them, or demagogues, a wish to overthrow the aristocracy and take the money and property of everyone better off than themselves. He had a lifelong fascination with, and horror of, the French Revolution, not only read books on the subject but amassed a collection of pamphlets and ephemera, often some up from Paris bookshops and second-hand stalls (p.541). The conclusion he drew from it was that it was the fault of weak-willed liberals who set off with the best of intentions but broke down the constitutional checks and restraints and so opened the door to Terror and tyranny. That’s how he viewed the Liberals of his day: as well-intentioned but weak-willed types who, by attacking ‘privilege’ and ‘property’, threatened to sweep away restraint and open the door to anarchy.

Ironically, however, the actual result of electoral reform was virtually the opposite: as a result of the 1884 Reform Act, during the 1890s Salisbury began to worry that the effect of widening the franchise would not be revolution but the opposite, the triumph of super-patriotic Jingoism which, with his incurable pessimism, he regarded as almost as bad.

Salisbury sayings

‘The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.’ (p.173)

When a member of his own party objected to the way bits of other countries were traded like counters at the Berlin Conference, Salisbury robustly replied:

that if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.’ (p.185)

Comedy

At the Conference of Berlin in the summer of 1878 it was very hot. At the Kaiser’s residence in Potsdam there were mosquitoes, but at Berlin there were ‘minor powers. I don’t know which is worse.’ (p.201).

Of the army hero and adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, who had undertaken a 1,000 mile midwinter expedition across Central Asia, he wrote: ‘I cannot see any reason for interfering with the natural right of a Briton to get his throat cut when and where he likes,’ (p.218). (Burnaby was subsequently killed in hand-to-hand fighting against followers of the Mahdi at the Battle of Abu Klea, 16 January 1885.)

When, at the time of the Congress of Berlin, an Admiral Hornby demanded that preparations for war with Russia be stepped up, Salisbury wrote to a cabinet colleague that:

‘If Hornby is a cool-headed, fearless, sagacious man, he ought to bring an action for libel against his epistolary style.’ (p.192)

At a tricky point of negotiations with Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Salisbury wrote to the British Ambassador at the Sublime Porte, Sir Austen Henry Layard, that they might get their way in small matters with the Sultan but at the risk of inflaming his Muslim people and risking revolution, which was ‘rather like burning down a house to procure roast pork.’ (p.237).

‘To those who have found breakfast with difficulty and do not know where to find dinner, intricate questions of politics are a matter of comparatively secondary interest.’ (p.250)

In 1889 the Shah of Persia, Nasr-el-Din, visited England for a month. When he was taken to see a model modern prison, he asked to see a gallows in action. On being told that no-one was due to be hanged that day he offered one of his own entourage (p.543).

Of the Daily Mail Salisbury quipped that Alfred Harmsworth had:

‘invented a paper for those who could read but not think’ (p.668)

He liked to say that bishops came in two mutually exclusive categories: those who were fit to be made bishops but unwilling, and those who were willing but unfit. A lot of bishops died and needed to be replaced during his premiership, he appointed 38 new bishops, more than any other Prime Minister before or since. He joked: ‘They die to spite me’ (p.676).

Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1895 to 1902 was so appalled by the rapidly escalating cost of the (second) Boer War that he repeatedly threatened to resign from the cabinet. So many times in fact, that Salisbury joked that he had a special drawer in his desk just for Hicks Beach’s resignation letters (p.744).

Balfour said of his uncle that he certainly believed that all men are equal, ‘by which he means, equally incompetent’ (p.746).

When the Liberal politician John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley, attacked the dire management of the Boer War, Salisbury replied that:

‘A more gloomy collection of lugubrious vaticinations I never heard.’ (p.755)

In 1896 Victoria asked Salisbury to promote Lord Waldegrave from being a Lord in Waiting to the Yeoman of the Guard, because as a Lord he was constantly in her presence and she found him simply too ugly to look at (p.794).

Roberts says that Salisbury’s wit was the equal of Disraeli’s but different in kind, relying on ‘high irony rather than mere paradox’ (p.849). Discuss.

Roberts the fanboy

Roberts loves his hero:

Protecting the Royal Family from embarrassment, whether it be political in Berlin, financial over the Royal Grants, sexual over disappointed mistresses, or even highly tangential, as over the Cleveland Street Scandal, Salisbury simply saw as part of the duties of the premiership, and he carried them out impeccably. (p.561)

This is not the tone of an objective historian but of an impassioned fan. Robert devotes pages 336 to 338 to citing witnesses to Salisbury’s sense of fun, his dry humour and cynical wit:

Just as he could not write a boring sentence, so Salisbury was also incapable of uttering a commonplace or canting remark. Lord Rosebery [Eton] once wrote that reading old political speeches was as dull as drinking decanted champagne. Salisbury’s extra brut speeches are the exception, and of a vintage that is still effervescent. (p.208)

Roberts himself often mimics or echoes Salisbury’s drollness:

Sultans of Turkey lived on the grand scale, some compensation for their occasional short life expectancy. (p.161) [E.g. Midhat Pasha was dismissed as Grand Vizier during the Russo-Turkish War, banished to Baghdad and eventually strangled.]

They both have that lofty Tory irony, that droll detachment and amused good humour, which makes the book so readable.

Conclusion to part one

This is a magnificent biography, huge, compendious but written with a tremendous lightness of touch and good humour throughout, echoing the ethos of its subject who portrayed himself as a gruff old Tory but, as his letters and speeches reveal, was a lifelong humorist. It is an absolute goldmine of insights into every aspect of British domestic and foreign policy for the 35 years when Britain reached the peak of its economic and imperial might, 1867 to 1902. It is massively enjoyable on every level.

But none of this should blind us to the fact that Salisbury was the enemy. He was the rooted opposition to everything progressive that was attempted through the period. He stood for a level of privilege and entitlement that almost no one nowadays can conceive, an almost incomprehensibly dedication to the life-or-death importance of hierarchy, the aristocracy, the Church of England. Like all conservatives and authoritarians he thought that if any of this was tampered with it would open the floodgates to anarchy. Thus he resisted every move to give Ireland more home rule because he saw it as threatening a wider collapse:

He saw the [Home Rule] campaign in Ireland as merely the precursor for a general class struggle over the rights of property. (p.258)

Of course it didn’t. Trying to hang onto this world of privilege in the face of changing technologies, social norms and culture, in the increasingly embittered clinging onto India, in the embittered clinging on to Ulster, in the embittered fight against electoral reform (all leading to the climactic struggle between Tories and Liberals in 1911), it was these rearguard positions which nearly led to anarchy.

Above all, he held positions of power during the height of empire and openly admitted it was based on threat and intimidation. In Roberts’s view: ‘Salisbury believed implicitly in the politics of prestige and revenge’ (p.247).

The single biggest conundrum is how he managed to reconcile the windy rhetoric of his speeches about ‘the highest interests of Empire’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276) (cf Ireland p.351) with the acid cynicism of his private papers and correspondence, which bluntly state that we had to hang onto India and Ireland by whatever means possible because they’re what made Britain ‘great’.

You know the cliché ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’? Well, every time you read a Victorian politician talking about ‘honour’ you can be sure it’s high-sounding cover for either he and his class clinging onto their wealth and privileges or, in an international context, for the British clinging on to countries they acquired by force, with no right or law or ‘honour’ involved in either.

Roberts’ central argument is that Salisbury kept the peace between jostling European Powers for a generation by his foresight and intelligence and diplomacy. This is all true and yet we know that the sweeping changes across all aspects of society which he held back for so long were inevitably going to come about, and it could be argued that, by delaying them for so long, Salisbury made the process of managing them when they became unavoidable (votes for women, rights for workers, Irish independence) much more violent and painful than they need have been if they had been addressed more sympathetically and much earlier.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.