ABSTRACT
On his father’s death Salisbury came into an inheritance of 20 000 acres spread over a number of English counties, including valuable urban property in London and Liverpool; two-thirds of this acreage lay in Hertfordshire. He put his gross income in 1873 at £70 000 p.a.; it has been estimated at about £60 000 towards the end of his life. In the interval, agricultural rents fell heavily, by at least twenty per cent in Hertfordshire after the mid-1870s, while the income from urban holdings rose, yielding over £20 000 in London and £10 000 in Liverpool. There were also stock exchange investments: in correspondence with a family trustee, the ninth Earl Waldegrave, Salisbury expressed a preference for the bonds issued by the governments of settler colonies, as safe as Consols and offering another one per cent or more. His disposable income after encumbrances, allowing for an official salary of £5000 in most years from 1874, is impossible to calculate exactly from the surviving accounts, but was around £53 000 in 1873.1 In the 1890s he still described his income as “largely agricultural”, and therefore uncertain in view of the decline in farm rents.2 It sufficed to maintain him in the style associated with a Victorian magnate; besides Hatfield his houses included a London residence, 20 Arlington Street, in the heart of the West End, rebuilt at a cost of £60 000 after his succession; and a Continental retreat, first at Dieppe, the Chalet Cecil, and then on the Riviera above Beaulieu. Salisbury’s political independence rested in part on the wealth that buttressed the prestige of his high rank and historic name. The “upper ten thousand” who constituted the social world in which politicians moved and by which they were influenced, often in spite of themselves, treated landed magnates with respect unless they forfeited it by outrageous or absurdly eccentric behaviour.
