Archibald_Primrose,_5th_Earl_of_Rosebery

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, KG, PC (7 May 1847 – 21 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 7 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 23 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 preparatory 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..

Oxford

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

This meant that for nearly a quarter of a century, from 1880 until 1902, the three Prime Ministers of that period – Gladstone, Salisbury and Rosebery – all went to both Eton and Christ Church. All in all, 19 Prime Ministers (38%) have gone to Eton, and 14 (28%) 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

In 1878, Rosebery married Hannah, only child of the Jewish banker Baron Mayer de Rothschild, and the greatest English heiress of her day. Her father had died in 1874 and she had inherited the bulk of 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 20 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.

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

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

Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, a huge neo-Renaissance stately home, sold in the 1970s.
Mentmore Stud in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire
Another stud in Crafton, Buckinghamshire,
Number 40, Piccadilly, in London.

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.

He served as President of the first day of the 1890 Co-operative Congress.

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 21 June 1895, Rosebery resigned after a minor defeat in the House of Commons, and a Unionist government under Lord Salisbury took his place.

According to his biographer Robert Rhodes James Rosebery rapidly lost interest in running the government that he found Gladstone had basically dumped on him. The strongest figure in the Cabinet was Sir William Harcourt and Harcourt and his son Lewis Harcourt were perennially critical of Rosebery's policies. Towards the last year of the Premiership, Rosebery was increasingly haggard, due to insomnia brought about by the difficulties in his official government family. Interestingly enough there was a future Prime Minister in the Cabinet, Herbert Asquith who was Attorney-General. However Asquith was in no real position to assist his chief.

The "defeat" that led to his resignation caught everyone by surprise. It was on a bill for the an increase of the government budget for the purchase of cordite for explosives. It was defeated by a relatively small number of votes, and without any warning Rosebey announced it to be a vote of no confidence, much to the surprise of the Conservative Party. Rosebery's resignation led to a period of ten years (1895-1905) of Tory Party Governments under Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour.

Later life

Rosebery resigned as leader of the Liberal Party on 8 October 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 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, 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.

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". 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.; (£62,693,299.71 ) he was thus the richest Prime Minister ever, followed by Salisbury, then by Palmerston.

A southern suburb of Sydney, Australia, is named Rosebery, after the Earl. A major street, Dalmeny Avenue, runs through the area.

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

Lord Rosebery – First Lord of the Treasury, Lord President of the Council, and Leader of the House of Lords
Lord Herschell – Lord Chancellor
Lord Tweedmouth – Lord Privy Seal
Herbert Henry Asquith – Secretary of State for the Home Department
Lord Kimberley – Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
Lord Ripon – Secretary of State for the Colonies
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman – Secretary of State for War
Sir Henry Hartley Fowler – Secretary of State for India
Sir William Harcourt – Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons
Lord Spencer – First Lord of the Admiralty
Anthony John Mundella – President of the Board of Trade
Arnold Morley – Postmaster-General
George John Shaw-Lefevre – President of the Local Government Board
James Bryce – Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
John Morley – Chief Secretary for Ireland
Sir George Otto Trevelyan – Secretary for Scotland
Sir Arthur Herbert Dyke Acland – Vice President of the Council

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.