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Archibald Philip Primrose 5th earl of Rosebery


(born May 7, 1847, London, Eng. — died May 21, 1929, Epsom, Surrey) British politician. He served in William E. Gladstone's governments as undersecretary for Scottish affairs (1881 – 83) and foreign secretary (1886, 1892 – 94). He succeeded Gladstone as prime minister (1894 – 95) but was ineffective in resolving conflicts within the Liberal Party and in passing legislation through the Conservative-dominated House of Lords. He broke with the Liberal Party by opposing Irish Home Rule (1905) and retired from public life.

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British History: Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery

Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th earl of (1847-1929). Prime minister. Rosebery seemed destined for a glittering public career, but faults of temperament severely hampered him. He was sent down from Oxford without a degree because he insisted on running his horse in the Derby. This lifelong passion for the turf—his horses won the Derby three times—complicated his relations with strait-laced Liberal nonconformity. It was a sign of Rosebery's diffidence that he refused office from Gladstone in 1872 and 1880, served from 1881 to 1883 when he resigned, and then declined the Scottish Office in the same year. Yet his political reputation steadily rose. The departure of many Whigs over the Home Rule issue in 1886 made Rosebery a vital figure in the House of Lords, and he thus became a young foreign secretary in that year.

For a time he enjoyed remarkably wide acclaim. On the one hand he had the confidence of the queen, who chose him as Gladstone's successor in 1894. On the other hand he seemed to many radical Liberals to be better attuned to social problems than Gladstone. One sign of this was his election as first chairman of the London County Council in 1889.

But his chief interest was foreign and imperial affairs. He developed a Liberal vision of the British empire as a ‘Commonwealth of Nations’, and as chairman of the Imperial Federation League he advocated a structure involving regular colonial conferences and formal colonial representation on the Privy Council. As foreign secretary (1892-4) he resisted party pressure to withdraw from Uganda and imposed a protectorate on that territory.

On his succession to the premiership in 1894, Rosebery's career collapsed. He fell out with colleagues over the death duties in Harcourt's budget and his wish to drop Irish Home Rule. On the defeat of his government in the Commons in 1895 he promptly resigned, forcing the Liberals into a disastrous election. A year later he quit as leader. Subsequently he attacked the Liberal position over the South African War and promoted a separate organization of Liberal Imperialists. However, Rosebery was easily outmanœuvred by Campbell-Bannerman, and the rest of his career was spent as a crossbencher increasingly out of sympathy with the radical reformism of Edwardian Liberalism.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th
earl of (rōz'bərē) , 1847–1929, British statesman. He succeeded his grandfather as earl in 1868. A Liberal, Rosebery was undersecretary for home affairs (1881–83), entered the cabinet as lord privy seal (1885), and served (1886, 1892–94) as foreign secretary. His imperialist views brought him into frequent conflict with the prime minister, William Gladstone, but he was able to secure the establishment of a British protectorate in Uganda. When Gladstone retired in 1894, it was expected that Sir William Harcourt would succeed him, but Queen Victoria called on Rosebery to become prime minister. That caused a split in the Liberal party, and Rosebery was forced to resign in 1895. He became the leader of the Liberal Imperialist division of the party, but retired from politics in 1905 when Henry Campbell-Bannerman was chosen as Liberal prime minister. He wrote a number of historical monographs, including William Pitt (1891), Napoleon: The Last Phase (1900), and Chatham (1910).

Bibliography

See biographies by his son-in-law, the 1st marquess of Crewe (1931), and R. R. James (1963).

 
Dictionary: Rose·ber·y  (rōz'bĕr'ē, -bə-rē) pronunciation, Fifth Earl of (Title of Archibald Philip Primrose.) 1847–1929.

British politician who served as prime minister (1894–1895) and supported imperialist policies.


 
Wikipedia: Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery
The Earl of Rosebery
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In office
5 March 1894 – 22 June 1895
Monarch Victoria
Preceded by William Ewart Gladstone
Succeeded by The Marquess of Salisbury

Born 7 May 1847(1847--)
Berkeley Square, London
Died 21 May 1929 (aged 82)
Epsom, Surrey
Political party Liberal
Spouse Hannah de Rothschild
Alma mater Christ Church, Oxford

Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, KG, PC (7 May 184721 May 1929) was a British Liberal statesman and Prime Minister, also known as Archibald Primrose (1847–1851) and Lord Dalmeny (1851–1868).

Early life

1847–1860

Rosebery was born in his parents' house in Charles Street, London, on 7th May 1847. At the time of his birth he was styled Archibald Philip Primrose. His father was Lord Dalmeny, heir to The 4th Earl. Lord Dalmeny was MP for Stirling from 1832 to 1847 and served as First Lord of the Admiralty under Lord Melbourne. Rosebery's mother was Catherine, a daughter of The Earl Stanhope. His father died on 23rd January 1851 and from then on he was styled Lord Dalmeny. In 1854 his mother married The Duke of Cleveland. The relationship between mother and son was very poor. Dalmeny attended prepartory schools in Hertfordshire and Brighton.

Eton

Dalmeny attended Eton between 1860 and 1865. Whilst there, he participated in debates and attracted the attention of William Johnson Cory, not just because of his remarkable intellect but in a sexual way also.[1].

Oxford

Dalmeny was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1865 until 1869.

This meant that for a quarter of a century, from 1880 until 1905, the four Prime Ministers of that period – Gladstone, Salisbury, Rosebery and Balfour – all went to both Eton and Christ Church. All in all, 19 Prime Ministers (38%) have gone to Eton, and 11 (22%) to Christ Church.

A prominent figure on the turf for 40 years, Dalmeny bought a horse, Ladas, in 1868. A rule banned undergraduates from owning horses, and when he was found out, he was offered a choice: sell the horse or give up his studies. He chose the latter.

The 1870s

His grandfather having died in 1868, Dalmeny became Earl of Rosebery. This did not entitle him to sit in the House of Lords, as the title is part of the old Peerage of Scotland, from which 16 members (representative peers) were elected to sit in the Lords for each session of Parliament. However, in 1828 Rosebery's grandfather had been created 1st Baron Rosebery in the Peerage of the United Kingdom; this did entitle Rosebery to sit in the Lords like all peers of the United Kingdom.

Rosebery toured the United States in 1873. He was pressed to marry Mary Fox, the illegitimate daughter of Baron Holland by a French maid; Baroness Holland, a daughter of the Earl of Coventry, adopted Mary. However, Mary, who was only sixteen, declined and later married a Prince of Liechtenstein.

His three aims

Rosebery is reputed to have said that he had three aims in life: to win the Derby, to marry an heiress, and to become Prime Minister. He managed all three.

Personal life after 1878

Marriage

Hannah
Enlarge
Hannah

In 1878, Rosebery married Hannah, only child of the Jewish banker Baron Mayer de Rothschild, and the greatest English heiress of her day. In 1874 her father died and she largely inherited his estate.

The couple were introduced by Mrs. Disraeli in 1875, at Newmarket Racecourse.

They were married in the Board of Guardians in Mount Street, London, on 20th March 1878, when he was 31 and she 27. Later that day, the marriage was blessed in a Christian ceremony in Christ Church, Down Street, Piccadilly. In January, Rosebery had said to a friend that he found Hannah "very simple, very unspoilt, very clever, very warm-hearted and very shy...I never knew such a beautiful character." Both Queen Victoria's son the Prince of Wales and her cousin, the army commander George, Duke of Cambridge attended the ceremony. Hannah's death in 1890 from typhoid, compounded by Bright's disease, left him distraught.

It was speculated that he intended to marry the widowed Princess Helena, Duchess of Albany, who was married to Queen Victoria's 4th son, Prince Leopold.[2]

It was also speculated that he was bisexual. Like Oscar Wilde, he was hounded by John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry for his association with one of Queensberry's sons — Francis Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig.

Children

Rosebery had four children with Hannah:

  • Sybil Myra Caroline (1879–1955), married Sir Charles Grant (1877–1950).
  • Margaret, known as Peggy, (b. 1881), who in 1899 married The Marquess of Crewe (1858–1945). Such was her father's popularity that London came to a standstill for the wedding.
  • Harry Primrose, 6th Earl of Rosebery (Albert Edward Harry Meyer Archibald) (January 1882 – 1974), served as Scottish Secretary in 1945.
  • Neil James Archibald (December 1882 – 1917). Killed in action in Palestine. Married Lady Victoria Stanley; father of Ruth, Countess of Halifax.

Margot Asquith said that Rosebery loved to play with his children.

Homes

Dalmeny House was the ancestral seat of the Earls of Rosebery and the setting for Lord and Lady Rosebery's  political houseparties.
Enlarge
Dalmeny House was the ancestral seat of the Earls of Rosebery and the setting for Lord and Lady Rosebery's political houseparties.

Rosebery was the owner of twelve houses. By marriage, he acquired:

With his fortune, he bought:

  • A shooting lodge at Carrington in Midlothian
  • A Georgian villa at Postwick in Norfolk
  • In 1897 he bought Villa Delahante in Posillipo, overlooking the Bay of Naples, currently residence of President of Italian Republic, still known as "Villa Rosebery".
  • 38 Berkeley Square, London.
  • The Durdans, Epsom, where he died in 1929.

As Earl of Rosebery, he was laird of:

  • Dalmeny House on the banks of the Firth of Forth (pictured)
  • Barnbougle Castle in the grounds of Dalmeny Estate, used by Rosebery (an insomniac) for privacy.

He rented:

  • A home in Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh, during World War I.
  • Lansdowne House, in London, from the Marquess of Lansdowne.

Earlier political career

Early Whig leanings

At Eton, Rosebery notably attacked Charles I for his despotism, and went on to praise his Whig forebears (His ancestor, The 1st Earl Stanhope, was a minister to George I.)

Disraeli pursues

Benjamin Disraeli often met with Rosebery in the 1870s to attract him to his party, but this proved futile.

Gladstone pursues

Disraeli's major rival, William Ewart Gladstone, also pursued Rosebery, with considerable success.

The Midlothian campaign

As part of the Liberal plan to get Gladstone to be MP for Midlothian, Rosebery sponsored and largely ran the Midlothian Campaign of 1879. He based this on seeing a presidential election in the USA. Gladstone spoke from open-deck trains, and gathered mass support. In 1880 he was duly elected Member for Midlothian and returned to the Premiership.

Foreign Secretary

First period in office (1886)

Rosebery helped Gladstone's perpetual Home Rule Bill in the House of Lords; nevertheless it failed.

Second period in office (1892–1894)

Rosebery's second period as Foreign Secretary predominantly involved quarrels with France over Uganda. To quote his hero Napoleon, Rosebery thought that "the Master of Egypt is the Master of India"; thus he pursued the policy of expansion in Africa.

Prime Minister

Rosebery became a leader of the Liberal Imperialist faction of the Liberal Party, and in Gladstone's third (February to July 1886) and fourth (August 1892 to March 1894) administrations, Rosebery served as Foreign Secretary. When Gladstone retired in 1894, Rosebery became his successor as Prime Minister, much to the disgust of Sir William Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the more left-wing Liberals. His selection was largely the consequence of Queen Victoria's dislike for most of the leading Liberals of the day.

Rosebery's government was largely unsuccessful. His designs in foreign policy, such as expansion of the fleet, were defeated by disagreements within the Liberal Party, while the Unionist-dominated House of Lords stopped the whole of the Liberals' domestic legislation. On June 21, 1895, Rosebery resigned after a minor defeat in the House of Commons, and a Unionist government under Lord Salisbury took his place.

Later life

Rosebery resigned as leader of the Liberal Party on October 8, 1896, to be succeeded by Harcourt, and gradually moved further and further from the mainstream of the party, supporting the Boer War and opposing Irish Home Rule, a position that prevented him from participating in the Liberal government that returned to power in 1905. In his later years, Rosebery turned to writing, including biographies of Lord Chatham, Pitt the Younger, Napoleon, and Lord Randolph Churchill. Another one of his passionate interests was the collecting of books.

The last years of his political life saw Rosebery become a purely negative critic of the Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. His crusade "for freedom as against bureaucracy, for freedom as against democratic tyranny, for freedom as against class legislation, and … for freedom as against Socialism"[3] was a lonely one, conducted from the cross-benches in the Lords. He did join the die-hard unionist peers in attacking Lloyd George's redistributive People's Budget in 1909, but stopped short of voting against the measure for fear of bringing retribution upon the Lords. The crisis provoked by the Lords' rejection of the budget encouraged him to reintroduce his resolutions for Lords reform, but they were lost with the dissolution of parliament in December 1910. After assaulting the "ill-judged, revolutionary and partisan" terms of the 1911 Parliament Bill,[4] which proposed to curb the Lords' veto, he voted with the government in what proved to be his last appearance in the House of Lords. This was effectively the end of his public life, though he made several public appearances to support the war effort after 1914 and sponsored a "bantam battalion" in 1915. Though Lloyd George offered him "a high post not involving departmental labour" to augment his 1916 coalition, Rosebery declined to serve.[5]

The last year of the war was clouded by two personal tragedies—his son Neil's death in Palestine in November 1917 and Rosebery's own stroke a few days before the armistice. He regained his mental powers, but his movement, hearing, and sight remained impaired for the rest of his life. His sister, Constance, described his last years as a "life of weariness, of total inactivity, & at the last of almost blindness"; John Buchan remembered him in his last month of life, "crushed by bodily weakness" and "sunk in sad and silent meditations".[6] Rosebery died at The Durdans, Epsom, Surrey, on 21 May 1929, to the accompaniment—as he had requested—of a gramophone recording of the Eton boating song. Survived by three of his four children, he was buried in the small church at Dalmeny.

When Rosebery died in 1929 his estate was probated at £1,500,122 3s. 6d.; he was thus the richest Prime Minister ever, followed by Salisbury, then by Palmerston.

Involvement in professional sport

Thoroughbred horse racing

As a result of his marriage to Hannah de Rothschild, Rosebery acquired Mentmore Towers and Mentmore stud near Leighton Buzzard that had been built by Mayer Amschel de Rothschild. Rosbery would build another stable and stud near Mentmore Towers at Crafton, Buckinghamshire, called Crafton Stud.

Rosebery's horses won at least one of each of the five English Classic Races. Among the most famous were Ladas who won the 1894 Epsom Derby, Sir Visto who did it again in 1895, and Cicero in 1905.

Football

Rosebery also developed a keen in interest in association football and was an early patron of the sport in Scotland. In 1882 he donated a trophy, the Rosebery Charity Cup, to be competed for by clubs under the jurisdiction of the East of Scotland FA. The competition lasted over 60 years and raised thousands of pounds for charities in the Edinburgh area.

Rosebery also became Honorary President of the national Scottish Football Association, with the representative Scotland national team occasionally forsaking their traditional dark blue shirts for his traditional racing colours of primrose and pink. This occurred 9 times during Rosebery's lifetime, most notably for the 1900 British Home Championship match against England, which the Scots won 4–1.

Lord Rosebery's government, March 1894 – June 1895

Changes

  • May 1894: James Bryce succeeds A.J. Mundella at the Board of Trade. Lord Tweedmouth succeeds Bryce at the Duchy of Lancaster, remaining also Lord Privy Seal.

See also

  • Hannah Primrose, Countess of Rosebery
  • In his fraudulent memoirs, Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet claimed to be Rosebery's lover.

Notes

  1. ^ Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006)
  2. ^ Lord Rosebery to marry a Princess?, New York Times, July 11, 1901.
  3. ^ The Times, 16 February 1910
  4. ^ R. R. James, Rosebery: a biography of Archibald Philip, fifth earl of Rosebery (1963), p. 469.
  5. ^ R. O. A. Crewe-Milnes, Lord Rosebery, (1931), vol. 2. p. 51.
  6. ^ Rhodes James, p. 485.

References

  • Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil by Leo McKinstry ISBN 0-7195-5879-4

External links

Wikisource
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Political offices
Preceded by
George Lefevre
First Commissioner of Works
1885
Succeeded by
David Plunket
Preceded by
The Lord Carlingford
Lord Privy Seal
1885
Succeeded by
The Earl of Harrowby
Preceded by
The Marquess of Salisbury
Foreign Secretary
1886
Succeeded by
The Earl of Iddesleigh
Preceded by
The Marquess of Salisbury
Foreign Secretary
1892 – 1894
Succeeded by
The Earl of Kimberley
Preceded by
William Ewart Gladstone
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
1894 – 1895
Succeeded by
The Marquess of Salisbury
Preceded by
The Earl of Kimberley
Leader of the House of Lords
1894 – 1895
Lord President of the Council
1894 – 1895
Succeeded by
The Duke of Devonshire
Preceded by
The Marquess of Salisbury
Leader of the Opposition
1895 – 1896
Succeeded by
Sir William Harcourt
Party political offices
Preceded by
William Ewart Gladstone
Leader of the British Liberal Party
1894 – 1896
Succeeded by
Sir William Harcourt
Academic offices
Preceded by
William Edward Forster
Rector of the University of Aberdeen
1878 – 1881
Succeeded by
Alexander Bain
Preceded by
The Marquess of Hartington
Rector of the University of Edinburgh
1880 – 1883
Succeeded by
Sir Stafford Northcote
Preceded by
Joseph Chamberlain
Rector of the University of Glasgow
1899 – 1902
Succeeded by
George Wyndham
Preceded by
The Earl of Kimberley
Chancellor of the University of London
1902 – 1929
Succeeded by
The Earl Beauchamp
Preceded by
The Lord Avebury
Rector of the University of St Andrews
1910 – 1913
Succeeded by
The Earl of Aberdeen
Peerage of Scotland
Preceded by
Archibald Primrose
Earl of Rosebery
1868 – 1929
Succeeded by
Harry Primrose
Peerage of the United Kingdom
New creation Earl of Midlothian
1911 – 1929
Succeeded by
Harry Primrose



 
 

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
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