ABSTRACT
This is a study of a notably cerebral politician, who revealed the qualities necessary for success and survival in a career to which he appeared unsuited at the start. No prime minister was less inclined to accept conventional wisdom at face value, or to succumb to the routines of office. The first two chapters take the young Robert Cecil to 1866, through the formative influences of home, school, university and a taste of colonial life, parliament, marriage, his rise in the Tory party, an extraordinary output as a journalist and painful experience of the City. His ideas were evolving and his attitudes changing. Chapters 3 to 6 (1866-80) cover the losing battle in cabinet and the Commons for safeguards to accompany household suffrage, his emergence as the conscience of the party, the time at the India Office spent learning the limitations of power, and the events that led from the Constantinople conference of 1876-7 to the Foreign Office. From 1880 he was a leader in waiting and in 1885-6 at the head of a minority government: half a dozen years that made him a worthy antagonist for Gladstone. After these two chapters (7 and 8) the remaining six are devoted to his achievements with the Unionist alliance that gave him the indispensable parliamentary majority in 1886 and again in 1895 and 1900:9 and 12 to domestic politics, including Ireland; 10 and 13 to the foreign policy of an expanding but vulnerable empire; 11 to a spell of opposition in 1892-5; and 14 to the last years after he gave up the Foreign Office in 1900.
