The Right Honourable
The Earl of Balfour
KG, OM, PC, DL
|
|
|
|
|
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
|
In office
11 July 1902 – 5 December 1905
|
|
Monarch
|
Edward VII
|
|
Preceded by
|
The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
|
|
Succeeded by
|
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
|
|
Lord President of the Council
|
In office
27 April 1925 – 4 June 1929
|
|
Prime Minister
|
Stanley Baldwin
|
|
Preceded by
|
The Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
|
|
Succeeded by
|
The Lord Parmoor
|
In office
23 October 1919 – 19 October 1922
|
|
Prime Minister
|
David Lloyd George
|
|
Preceded by
|
The Earl Curzon of Kedleston
|
|
Succeeded by
|
The 4th Marquess of Salisbury
|
|
Foreign Secretary
|
In office
10 December 1916 – 23 October 1919
|
|
Prime Minister
|
David Lloyd George
|
|
Preceded by
|
The Viscount Grey of Fallodon
|
|
Succeeded by
|
The Earl Curzon of Kedleston
|
|
First Lord of the Admiralty
|
In office
25 May 1915 – 10 December 1916
|
|
Prime Minister
|
H. H. Asquith
David Lloyd George
|
|
Preceded by
|
Winston Churchill
|
|
Succeeded by
|
Sir Edward Carson
|
|
Leader of the Opposition
|
In office
27 February 1906 – 13 November 1911
|
|
Monarch
|
Edward VII
George V
|
|
Prime Minister
|
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
|
|
Succeeded by
|
Andrew Bonar Law
|
In office
5 December 1905 – 8 February 1906
|
|
Monarch
|
Edward VII
|
|
Prime Minister
|
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
|
|
Preceded by
|
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
|
|
Lord Privy Seal
|
In office
11 July 1902 – 17 October 1903
|
|
Preceded by
|
The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
|
|
Succeeded by
|
The 4th Marquess of Salisbury
|
|
Leader of the Conservative Party
|
In office
11 July 1902 – 13 November 1911
|
|
Preceded by
|
The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
|
|
Succeeded by
|
Andrew Bonar Law
|
|
Chief Secretary for Ireland
|
In office
7 March 1887 – 9 November 1891
|
|
Prime Minister
|
The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
|
|
Preceded by
|
Sir Michael Hicks Beach
|
|
Succeeded by
|
William Jackson
|
|
Secretary for Scotland
|
In office
5 August 1886 – 11 March 1887
|
|
Prime Minister
|
The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
|
|
Preceded by
|
The Earl of Dalhousie
|
|
Succeeded by
|
The Marquess of Lothian
|
|
Personal details
|
|
Born
|
Arthur James Balfour
(1848-07-25)25 July 1848
Whittingehame House, East Lothian, Scotland
|
|
Died
|
19 March 1930(1930-03-19) (aged 81)
Fishers Hill House, Woking, Surrey, England
|
|
Resting place
|
Whittingehame Church, Whittingehame
|
|
Citizenship
|
British
|
|
Nationality
|
Scottish
|
|
Political party
|
Conservative
|
|
Spouse(s)
|
None
|
|
Alma mater
|
Trinity College, Cambridge
|
|
Occupation
|
Politician
Statesman
|
|
Religion
|
Church of England and
Church of Scotland
|
|
Signature
|
|
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour KG, OM, PC, DL (UK ;[1] 25 July 1848 – 19 March 1930) was a British Conservative politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 1902 to December 1905, and later Foreign Secretary.
Balfour came into a vast inheritance at 21. Entering Parliament in 1874, he achieved prominence as Chief Secretary for Ireland, in which position he suppressed agrarian unrest whilst taking measures against absentee landlords. He opposed Irish Home Rule, saying there could be no half-way house between Ireland remaining within the United Kingdom or becoming independent. From 1891 he led the Conservative Party in the House of Commons, serving under his uncle, Lord Salisbury, whose government won large majorities in 1895 and 1900.
In July 1902 he succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. He oversaw reform of British defence policy and the Parliament Act. He resigned as party leader later in 1911.
Balfour returned as Balfour Declaration bore his name. He continued to serve in senior Cabinet positions throughout the 1920s, and died on 19 March 1930 aged 81, having spent a vast inherited fortune. He never married. Balfour trained as a philosopher – he originated an argument against believing that human reason could determine truth – and was seen as having a detached attitude to life, epitomised by a remark attributed to him: "Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all".
Background and early career
Balfour early in his career.
Whittingehame House
Arthur Balfour was born at Whittingehame House, East Lothian, Scotland, the eldest son of James Maitland Balfour (1820–1856) and Lady Blanche Gascoyne-Cecil (1825–1872). His father was a Scottish MP, as was his grandfather James; his mother, a member of the Cecil family descended from Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, was the daughter of the 2nd Marquess of Salisbury and a sister to the 3rd Marquess, the future Prime Minister. His godfather was the Duke of Wellington, after whom he was named.[2] He was the eldest son, third of eight children, and had four brothers and three sisters. Arthur Balfour was educated at Grange preparatory school in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire (1859–1861), and Eton College (1861–1866), where he studied with the influential master, William Johnson Cory. He went to the University of Cambridge, where he read moral sciences at Trinity College (1866–1869),[3] graduating with a second-class honours degree. His younger brother was the Cambridge embryologist Francis Maitland Balfour (1851–1882).
Although he coined the saying "Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all", Balfour was distraught at the early death from typhus in 1875 of his cousin May Lyttelton, whom he had hoped to marry: later, mediums claimed to pass on messages from her – see the "Palm Sunday Case".[4][5] Balfour remained a bachelor. Margot Tennant (later Margot Asquith) wished to marry him, but Balfour said: "No, that is not so. I rather think of having a career of my own."[2] His household was maintained by his unmarried sister, Alice. In middle age, Balfour had a 40-year friendship with Mary Charteris (née Wyndham), Lady Elcho, later Countess of Wemyss and March.[6] Although one biographer writes that "it is difficult to say how far the relationship went", her letters suggest they may have become lovers in 1887 and may have engaged in sado-masochism,[7] a claim echoed by A. N. Wilson.[4] Another biographer believes they had "no direct physical relationship", although he dismisses as unlikely suggestions that Balfour was homosexual, or, in view of a time during the Boer War when he replied to a message while drying himself after his bath, Lord Beaverbrook's claim that he was "a hermaphrodite" whom no-one saw naked.[8]
In 1874 he was elected Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Hertford until 1885. In spring 1878, Balfour became Private Secretary to his uncle, Lord Salisbury. He accompanied Salisbury (then Foreign Secretary) to the Congress of Berlin and gained his first experience in international politics in connection with the settlement of the Russo-Turkish conflict. At the same time he became known in the world of letters; the academic subtlety and literary achievement of his Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) suggested he might make a reputation as a philosopher.
Balfour divided his time between politics and academic pursuits. Released from his duties as private secretary by the general election of 1880, he began to take more part in parliamentary affairs. He was for a time politically associated with Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and John Gorst. This quartet became known as the "Fourth Party" and gained notoriety for leader Lord Randolph Churchill's free criticism of Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord Cross and other prominent members of the "old gang".
Service in Lord Salisbury's governments
Balfour photo by George Grantham Bain
In 1885, Lord Salisbury appointed Balfour President of the Local Government Board; the following year he became Secretary for Scotland with a seat in the cabinet. These offices, while offering few opportunities for distinction, were an apprenticeship. In early 1887, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, resigned because of illness and Salisbury appointed his nephew in his place. That surprised the political world and possibly led to the British phrase "Bob's your uncle!". Balfour surprised critics by ruthless enforcement of the Crimes Act, earning the nickname "Bloody Balfour". His steady administration did much to dispel his reputation as a political lightweight.
In Parliament he resisted overtures to the Irish Parliamentary Party on Home Rule, and, allied with Joseph Chamberlain's Liberal Unionists, encouraged Unionist activism in Ireland. Balfour also helped the poor by creating the Congested Districts Board for Ireland in 1890. In 1886–1892 he became one of the most effective public speakers of the age. Impressive in matter rather than delivery, his speeches were logical and convincing, and delighted an ever wider audience.
On the death of W.H. Smith in 1891, Balfour became First Lord of the Treasury – the last in British history not to have been concurrently Prime Minister as well – and Leader of the House of Commons. After the fall of the government in 1892 he spent three years in opposition. When the Conservatives returned to power, in coalition with the Liberal Unionists, in 1895, Balfour again became Leader of the House and First Lord of the Treasury. His management of the abortive education proposals of 1896 showed a disinclination for the drudgery of parliamentary management, yet he saw the passage of a bill providing Ireland with improved local government and joined in debates on foreign and domestic questions between 1895 to 1900.
During the illness of Lord Salisbury in 1898, and again in Salisbury's absence abroad, Balfour was in charge of the Foreign Office, and he conducted negotiations with Russia on the question of railways in North China. As a member of the cabinet responsible for the Transvaal negotiations in 1899, he bore his share of controversy and, when the war began disastrously, he was first to realise the need to use the country's full military strength. His leadership of the House was marked by firmness in the suppression of obstruction, yet there was a slight revival of the criticisms of 1896.
Prime Minister
Portrait of Arthur Balfour (1892)
On Lord Salisbury's resignation on 11 July 1902, Balfour succeeded him as Prime Minister, with the approval of all the Unionist party. The new Prime Minister came into power practically at the same moment as the Committee on Imperial Defence.
In foreign affairs, Balfour and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, improved relations with France, culminating in the Entente cordiale of 1904. The period also saw the Russo-Japanese War, when Britain, an ally of the Japanese, came close to war with Russia after the Dogger Bank incident. On the whole, Balfour left the conduct of foreign policy to Lansdowne, being busy himself with domestic problems.
Balfour distrusted the American concept of equality. During negotiations over creation of the League of Nations, the topic of "all men being created equal" came up in the context of the American Declaration of Independence. Speaking to Col. Edward M. House an aide to President Woodrow Wilson and David Hunter Miller, chief legal adviser to the US Commission, Balfour said "that was an 19th century proposition that he didn't believe was true. He believed that it was true that in a sense all men in a particular nation were created equal, but not that a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European."[10]
The budget was certain to show a surplus and taxation could be remitted. Yet as events proved, it was the budget that would sow dissension, override other legislative concerns and signal a new political movement. Charles Thomson Ritchie's remission of the shilling import-duty on corn led to Joseph Chamberlain's crusade in favour of tariff reform. These were taxes on imported goods with trade preference given to the Empire, to protect British industry from competition, strengthen the Empire in the face of growing German and American economic power, and provide revenue, other than raising taxes, for the social welfare legislation. As the session proceeded, the rift grew in the Unionist ranks. Tariff reform was popular with Unionist supporters, but the threat of higher prices for food imports made the policy an electoral albatross. Hoping to split the difference between the free traders and tariff reformers in his cabinet and party, Balfour favoured retaliatory tariffs to punish others who had tariffs against the British, in the hope of encouraging global free trade.
This was not sufficient for either the free traders or the extreme tariff reformers in government. With Balfour's agreement, Chamberlain resigned from the Cabinet in late 1903 to campaign for tariff reform. At the same time, Balfour tried to balance the two factions by accepting the resignation of three free-trading ministers, including Chancellor Ritchie, but the almost simultaneous resignation of the free-trader Duke of Devonshire (who as Lord Hartington had been the Liberal Unionist leader of the 1880s) left Balfour's Cabinet weak. By 1905 few Unionist MPs were still free traders (Winston Churchill crossed to the Liberals in 1904 when threatened with deselection at Oldham), but Balfour's act had drained his authority within the government.
Balfour resigned as Prime Minister in December 1905, hoping the Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman would be unable to form a strong government. This was dashed when Campbell-Bannerman faced down an attempt ("The Relugas Compact") to "kick him upstairs" to the House of Lords. The Conservatives were defeated by the Liberals at the general election the following January (in terms of MPs, a Liberal landslide), with Balfour losing his seat at Manchester East to Thomas Gardner Horridge, a solicitor and king's counsel. Only 157 Conservatives were returned to the Commons, at least two-thirds followers of Chamberlain, who chaired the Conservative MPs until Balfour won a safe seat in the City of London.
Arthur Balfour's Government, July 1902 – December 1905
Changes
Later career
An older Balfour
After the Andrew Bonar Law.
Balfour remained important in the party, however, and when the Unionists joined Balfour Declaration of 1917, a letter to Lord Rothschild promising the Jews a "national home" in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire.
Balfour resigned as Foreign Secretary following the Lord Curzon, who was ill. He put proposed for an international settlement of war debts and reparations, called the Balfour Note, but met an unfavourable response.
In 1922 he, with most of the Conservative leadership, resigned with Lloyd George's government following the Conservative back-bench revolt against continuance of the coalition. Bonar Law became Prime Minister. On 5 May 1922, Balfour was created
Balfour was not initially included in Stanley Baldwin's second government in 1924, but in 1925 he returned to the Cabinet, in place of the late Lord Curzon as Lord President of the Council until the government ended in 1929. In 1925 he visited the Holy Land.[12]
Apart from a number of colds and occasional influenza, Balfour had good health until 1928, and remained until then a regular tennis player. Four years previously he had been the first president of the International Lawn Tennis Club of Great Britain. At the end of 1928 most of his teeth were removed and he suffered the unremitting circulatory trouble which ended his life. Late in January 1929 Balfour was taken from Whittingehame to Fishers Hill House, his brother Gerald's home near Woking, Surrey. In the past he had suffered occasional phlebitis and by late 1929 he was immobilised by it. Finally, soon after receiving a visit from his friend Chaim Weizmann, Balfour died at Fishers Hill House on 19 March 1930. At his request a public funeral was declined and he was buried on 22 March beside members of his family at Whittingehame in a Church of Scotland service, though he also belonged to the Church of England. By special remainder, the title passed to his brother Gerald.
His obituaries in The Times, The Guardian and the Daily Herald did not mention the declaration for which he is most famous.[13]
Personality
Balfour developed a manner known to friends as the Balfourian manner. Harold Begbie, a journalist, in a book called Mirrors of Downing Street, criticised Balfour for his manner, personality and self-obsession. Begbie disagreed with Balfour's political views, but even his one-sided criticisms do not entirely conceal Balfour's shyness and diffidence. The sections of the work dealing with Balfour's personality were:
This Balfourian manner, as I understand it, has its roots in an attitude of mind—an attitude of convinced superiority which insists in the first place on complete detachment from the enthusiasms of the human race, and in the second place on keeping the vulgar world at arm's length. It is an attitude of mind which a critic or a cynic might be justified in assuming, for it is the attitude of one who desires rather to observe the world than to shoulder any of its burdens; but it is a posture of exceeding danger to anyone who lacks tenderness or sympathy, whatever his purpose or office may be, for it tends to breed the most dangerous of all intellectual vices, that spirit of self-satisfaction which
— Begbie, Harold (as 'A Gentleman with a Duster'): Mirrors of Downing Street: Some political reflections, Mills and Boon (1920), p. 76–79
After the First World War, when there was controversy over the style of headstone proposed for use on British war graves being taken on by the Imperial War Graves Commission, Balfour submitted a design for a cruciform headstone.[17] At an exhibition in August 1919, it drew many criticisms; the Commission's principal architect, Sir John Burnet, said Balfour's cross would create a criss-cross effect destroying any sense of "restful diginity", Edwin Lutyens called it "extraordinarily ugly", and its shape was variously described as resembling a shooting target or bottle.[17] His design was not accepted but the Commission offered him a second chance to submit another design which he did not take up, having been refused once.[18] After a further exhibition in the House of Commons, the "Balfour cross" was ultimately rejected in favour of the standard headstone the Commission permanently adopted because the latter offered more space for inscriptions and service emblems.[19]