ABSTRACT
In a surprising lapse from his usual good taste Mr Gladstone brought up, in private, the old story that Salisbury, then prime minister, was really the son of a Whig predecessor, Lord Melbourne. A noted Tory hostess, his mother was one of the attractive and intelligent women linked with that charming and gifted man.1 The point of the anecdote is that by then Salisbury’s reputation was second only to Gladstone’s: Melbourne seemed a more likely father than the second Marquess of Salisbury, whose membership of two cabinets left no mark on British politics. In fact, the future prime minister owed a great deal to his Cecil inheritance, in every sense. Rank and wealth provided a solid foundation for a political career starting in the mid-nineteenth century, when the prestige of the aristocracy had never stood higher in his lifetime, wrote one of the greatest of contemporary radicals, looking back on nearly fifty eventful years.2 Like other forgotten magnates, the second marquess was a considerable figure in the localities which he dominated. He combined strong Toryism and resistance to the state’s modest encroachments on the independence of county government with a zeal for improvement that his opponents acknowledged. Boys directly employed by him on his property at Hatfield were fined if they failed to attend the night school he established for them in the village: half a century later only his son’s determination got the abolition of fees for elementary schooling through a reluctant cabinet. The father exploited the coming of the railways to his wide estates, took a keen interest in canals and went in for agricultural innovation. The son accepted the chairmanship of the ailing Great Eastern Railway and oversaw its recovery. He, too, was a conscientious and improving landlord in the intervals of politics. His father was notoriously intolerant of political dissent among his dependants, but a perceptive, and witty, local obituarist-a Liberal-allowed that he was a kind patron, a good employer, and a hero even to his valet.3
