- Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery
Infobox Prime Minister
name= The Earl of Rosebery
order=Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
term_start =5 March 1894
term_end =22 June 1895
monarch =Victoria
predecessor =William Ewart Gladstone
successor =The Marquess of Salisbury
order2=Foreign Secretary
term_start2=6 February
term_end2=3 August 1886
monarch2=Victoria
primeminister2=William Ewart Gladstone
predecessor2=The Marquess of Salisbury
successor2=The Earl of Iddesleigh
term_start3=18 August 1892
term_end3=11 March 1894
monarch3=Victoria
primeminister3=William Ewart Gladstone
predecessor3=The Marquess of Salisbury
successor3=The Earl of Kimberley
birth_date =birth date|1847|5|7|df=y
birth_place =Berkeley Square ,London
death_date =death date and age|1929|5|21|1847|5|7|df=y
death_place =Epsom ,Surrey
alma_mater =Christ Church, Oxford
spouse =Hannah de Rothschild
party=LiberalArchibald 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 forStirling from 1832 to 1847 and served asFirst 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 inHertfordshire andBrighton .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.. [Michael Matthew Kaylor, "Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde" (2006)]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 theHouse of Lords , as the title is part of the oldPeerage of Scotland , from which 16 members (representative peer s) were elected to sit in the Lords for each session of Parliament. However, in 1828 Rosebery's grandfather had been created 1stBaron Rosebery in thePeerage 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
[
right|thumb|200px|Hannah,_painted_by_Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton ] 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 commanderGeorge, Duke of Cambridge attended the ceremony. Hannah's death in 1890 fromtyphoid , compounded byBright's disease , left him distraught.It was speculated that he intended to marry the widowed
Princess Helena, Duchess of Albany , who was married toQueen Victoria 's 4th son, Prince Leopold. [ [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=950CE6D71139EF32A25752C1A9619C946097D6CF Lord Rosebery to marry a Princess?] , "New York Times", 11 July 1901.]It was also speculated that he was
bisexual . LikeOscar Wilde , he was hounded byJohn 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 inPalestine . Married Lady Victoria Stanley; father of Ruth, Countess of Halifax.Margot Asquith said that Rosebery loved to play with his children.Homes
thumb|right|300px|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:
*Mentmore Towers inBuckinghamshire , a huge neo-Renaissance stately home, sold in the 1970s.
*Mentmore Stud inLeighton Buzzard ,Bedfordshire
*Another stud inCrafton, Buckinghamshire ,
*Number 40, Piccadilly, in London. With his fortune, he bought:
*A shooting lodge at Carrington inMidlothian
*A Georgian villa at Postwick inNorfolk
*In 1897 he bought Villa Delahante in Posillipo, overlooking theBay 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 theFirth 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 , duringWorld 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 .Citation | title = Congress Presidents 1869-2002| url =http://archive.co-op.ac.uk/downloadFiles/congressPresidentstable.pdf|date=February 2002| accessdate =2008-05-10]econd period in office (1892–1894)
Rosebery's second period as Foreign Secretary predominantly involved quarrels with
France overUganda . To quote his heroNapoleon , 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 SirWilliam Harcourt and Harcourt and his sonLewis 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 forthe 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 ofno 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 underLord Salisbury andArthur 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, andLord 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" ["The Times", 16 February 1910] 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, [R. R. James, "Rosebery: a biography of Archibald Philip, fifth earl of Rosebery" (1963), p. 469.] 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. [R. O. A. Crewe-Milnes, "Lord Rosebery", (1931), vol. 2. p. 51.]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". [Rhodes James, p. 485.] 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 atDalmeny .When Rosebery died in 1929 his estate was probated at £1,500,122 3"s". 6"d".; ( £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 nearLeighton Buzzard that had been built byMayer Amschel de Rothschild . Rosbery would build another stable and stud near Mentmore Towers atCrafton, Buckinghamshire , calledCrafton 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 theEdinburgh 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 1900British 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 , andLeader 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
*SirHenry Campbell-Bannerman –Secretary of State for War
*Sir Henry Hartley Fowler –Secretary of State for India
*Sir William Harcourt –Chancellor of the Exchequer andLeader 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
*SirGeorge Otto Trevelyan –Secretary for Scotland
*SirArthur 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.
ee also
*
Hannah Primrose, Countess of Rosebery
*In his fraudulent memoirs,Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet claimed to be Rosebery's lover.Notes
References
*Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil by
Leo McKinstry ISBN 0-7195-5879-4External links
* [http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/record.jsp?type=page&ID=13&liberalbiographies=liberalbiographies Earl Of Rosebery 1847–1929] biography from the Liberal Democrat History Group
* [http://pm.gov.uk/output/Page143.asp More about The Earl of Roseberry] on the Downing street website.-
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.