In the spring of 1902 it seemed to Lord Salisbury that he might at last lay down the burden he had carried, as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, for the better part of twenty-four years. He was alone, weary, and aging rapidly. With increasing frequency, Cabinet ministers, hearing a slow, rhythmic breathing at the Cabinet table, would glance at their leader’s chair and note that the Prime Minister had dropped off to sleep.
Salisbury would have departed sooner had the war been won more quickly. As the struggle on the veldt dragged on, the Prime Minister clung to office. At last, on May 31, 1902, a peace treaty was signed at Pretoria reincorporating the two Boer republics into the British Empire. The new King’s coronation was only six weeks away, and Salisbury decided to stay until the formal transference had been achieved. When King Edward’s sudden appendicitis forced an indefinite postponement of the ceremony, no further reason existed to delay. On July 11, 1902, without consulting or even notifying his colleagues, Lord Salisbury went to Buckingham Palace and resigned. His physician advised him to leave immediately for the Continent. He took the advice, but his health was ruined. When death came at Hatfield on August 22, 1903, he was prepared. “One might as well1 be afraid of going to sleep,” he had noted earlier.
Four days before Lord Salisbury’s resignation, Joseph Chamberlain had suffered a serious accident. On the morning of July 7, 1902, Chamberlain had stepped into the quadrangle of the Colonial Office and reviewed a battalion of West African troops brought to London for the coronation. After congratulating them on their loyalty, the Colonial Secretary suggested that some of them might be fortunate enough to glimpse “the King’s face2 before you return to your homes.” In the afternoon, Chamberlain had taken a hansom cab from the Colonial Office to his club. The day was hot and the glass front window of the cab, secured by a leather strap, had been folded up against the roof. To settle the dust, the pavements had been sprinkled and the footing was slippery. Near the Canadian Arch on Trafalgar Square, the horse shied, slipped, and fell, tipping the cab violently forward. Chamberlain was hurled out of his seat as the heavy glass pane snapped its restraining thong and crashed down on the Colonial Secretary’s head. His scalp was penetrated to the bone in a three-and-a-half-inch gash running from the middle of his forehead across his right temple. Stunned, with blood pouring into his eyes, he was taken to Charing Cross Hospital. Despite the blow and loss of blood, Chamberlain seemed all right; his wife found her husband wreathed in a cloud of smoke from one of his cigars. He remained in the hospital several days and then went home to Prince’s Gardens to rest. His injury was greater than had first appeared. “Joe Chamberlain was3... very nearly killed,” wrote Lord Esher. “The skull was bruised at a very thin place and he has not been able to read or think since.”
Chamberlain was at home in bed when Lord Salisbury resigned. That afternoon, July 11, the King sent for Arthur Balfour and asked him to lead the government. Balfour received the King’s messenger at the House of Commons and, before going to the Palace to accept, drove to Prince’s Gardens to consult Chamberlain. The invalid was asleep and his doctor had left orders that he must not be disturbed. Mrs. Chamberlain, however, agreed to awaken her husband, and Chamberlain, lying in bed, promised Balfour his complete support. Then Balfour went to the King.
King Edward’s choice was expected. Only two other candidates had been imaginable, Devonshire and Chamberlain, and both were disqualified because they came from the smaller Liberal wing of the Unionist coalition. Nevertheless, to many people, Chamberlain’s position in the new government seemed awkward; some said bluntly that a Cabinet in which Mr. Chamberlain served under Mr. Balfour was upside down. Chamberlain had spoken for Britain on many of the issues of the day. He had led the party to victory in the Khaki Election. In the countryside, he was England’s most popular politician and although the aristocratic Cecils, uncle and nephew, had ruled in Whitehall and Westminster, no one believed that either could rule without Joseph Chamberlain’s support. Since the Khaki Election, Balfour and Chamberlain had in effect shared power, with Chamberlain managing the war and the Empire, while Balfour managed everything else. Chamberlain recognized that, when it came to confronting the constituencies and facing the rough and tumble of bringing out the vote, he was the one who kept the coalition in power.
Nevertheless, when Balfour was summoned, Chamberlain made no complaint. During Salisbury’s decline, the succession had been decided. In February 1902, four months before Salisbury’s actual retirement, Chamberlain had sought out Balfour’s private secretary and emphasized—the private secretary reported—“that I was to understand4 that he was ‘not a candidate for that office. I have my own work to do and it is not done yet and I am quite content to stay where I am.... I shall be quite willing to serve under Balfour.’”
The future of the Unionist government and the party depended on close cooperation between the new Prime Minister and his more famous subordinate. In temperament as well as ideology, the two men had little in common. Chamberlain was an innovator; Balfour, like his uncle, was a conserver. “The country is full5 of a vague desire for change, for great change,” declared a fortnightly journal, “but Mr. Balfour is made Prime Minister precisely because it is desired by the ruling families that the minimum of change should be made.” Chamberlain once described their differences: “Arthur hates difficulties.6 I love ’em.” Balfour did not disagree. “The difference between Joe and me,”7 he explained, “is the difference between youth and age. I am age.” (In 1902, Balfour was fifty-four, Chamberlain sixty-five.) Nevertheless, at the beginning, each man, aware of the other’s strengths and his own weaknesses, entered the partnership determined to make it work.
The new. Prime Minister seemed to many of his contemporaries an embodiment of the Aristotelian philosopher-king. Blue blood, wealth, and charm, guided by what Austen Chamberlain called “the finest brain8 that has been applied to politics in our time,” made up Arthur Balfour. Observers, struggling to describe Balfour’s qualities, came up with words usually applied to aesthetic objects: “brilliant,” “dazzling,” “radiant,” “resplendent.” Indeed, John Maynard Keynes characterized Arthur Balfour as “the most extraordinary objet d’art9 our century has produced.”
Arthur Balfour was born July 25, 1848, at Whittingehame House, a white Greek Revival mansion in the center of a ten-thousand-acre estate in the East Lothian region of the Scottish Lowlands. His paternal grandfather had gone to India in the eighteenth century, prospered with the East India Company, and returned to marry an earl’s daughter. Balfour’s father married the daughter of a marquess, Lady Blanche Cecil, one of Lord Salisbury’s older sisters. At eighteen, Lady Blanche began producing children, giving birth to nine in eleven years before her husband died of tuberculosis at thirty-five. The eldest of her sons, named Arthur after his godfather, the Duke of Wellington, was seven when his father died.
Left to raise her children alone, Lady Blanche placed dust covers over the French furniture in Whittingehame House’s yellow-damask drawing rooms and shifted her attention to the nurseries. She taught her children to read and write, heard their nightly prayers, and nursed them through diphtheria, typhoid, and whooping cough. Even before her husband’s death, a friend described Lady Blanche’s unusual character: “To know her slightly10 you would think she was a healthy-minded, happy wife, a mother of children, doing all the good she could.... You never could suspect the intense... feeling, dashing and flashing, and bursting and melting and tearing her at times to pieces. And she looks so quiet and pure and almost cold, aye cold.” Nevertheless, her son Arthur always seemed to know how to handle her. As a little boy, he would climb into his mother’s lap, put his arms around her neck, and ask, “Can you tell me11 why I love you so much?”
At eleven Arthur went off to school, where he was remembered by his masters as a fragile child with “a beautiful purity of mind.”12 He had no stamina and, on doctor’s orders, was required to lie down in the afternoons. He liked to rest in a room above the chapel where he could listen to the organ played in the hall below. At Eton, where he fagged for the future Marquess of Lansdowne,fn1 he was solitary. Spectacles were not permitted at Eton, and Balfour, who was shortsighted, could not play cricket or other games with balls. Boys made fun of him, but, “if he was laughed at,13 he would join in the laugh, often shutting up his assailant by some witty repartee,” recalled a schoolmaster.
At eighteen, Balfour entered Trinity College, Cambridge. He showed no interest in politics and avoided the Cambridge Union; instead, he attended concerts and recitals and developed a passion for Handel. He decorated his rooms with a collection of blue china, and here on Sunday evenings he served and presided over talk of books and philosophy. Some of his fellows considered him affected and nicknamed him “Pretty Fanny.”14 Balfour did not mind; nor was he bothered that he took only a Second in Moral Science. He was being educated in another way outside Cambridge at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, where Lord Salisbury was trying to assist his widowed sister to bring up her children. Balfour, only eighteen years younger than his uncle, was close enough in age to understand the ingredients of the older man’s success without being overcome by awe. Salisbury fostered this understanding by always speaking to his nephew man-to-man rather than man-to-boy. A friendship, based on mutual respect as well as family affections, developed.
In 1872, Lady Blanche, debilitated by progressive heart disease, died at forty-seven. A few years earlier, Arthur had come of age and inherited his father’s estate, estimated at four million pounds. In 1874, Salisbury proposed that Balfour enter Parliament and found him a safe seat in Hertfordshire. Balfour, still not much interested in politics, did not open his mouth during his first two and a half years in the House; when finally he did speak it was during the dinner hour, on the subject of Indian silver currency. “In these conditions,”15 Balfour recalled, “I enjoyed to the fullest extent the advantages of speaking in a silent and friendly solitude.” Two years later, he tried his hand at drafting legislation; his subject was a proposed reform of the Burial Law. “A very good bill,”16 his uncle wrote to him, “but, if you bring it in, you will probably find yourself pretty well protected from the curse that attaches to those of whom all men speak well.” In 1878, Salisbury, who had just become Foreign Secretary, took Balfour with him to the Congress of Berlin as his Parliamentary Private Secretary. The young man’s principal memories were of banquets, balls, and parties, but he observed Bismarck, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Andrássy as they pressured Prince Gorchakov into giving up most of what Russia had won from Turkey. Bismarck, on learning Balfour’s name, asked if he was related to a character named Balfour in one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Balfour admitted that he was not and expressed surprise that the Chancellor knew Scott’s novels. “Ah,” said Bismarck, “when we were young17, we all had to read Sir Walter.”
A young man, handsome, charming, rich, and unmarried, had little difficulty making his way in London society. There was little he wanted that he could not have. Loving Handel, he paid for a performance of the full oratorio Belshazzar at the Albert Hall. Savoring philosophy, he wrote a book, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, and published one thousand copies at his own expense. Balfour bloomed slowly in Parliament. In 1880, when he was thirty-two, an observer wrote: “The member for Hertford18 is one of the most interesting young men in the House... a pleasing specimen of the highest form of culture and good breeding which stands to the credit of Cambridge University. He is not without desire to say hard things of the adversary opposite, and sometimes yields to the temptation. But it is ever done with such sweet and gentle grace, and is smoothed over by such earnest protestations of innocent intention, that the adversary rather likes it than otherwise.”
Balfour, a junior Conservative M.P., was a close friend of Mr. Gladstone, the Liberal leader. Balfour’s London house, at No. 4 Carlton Gardens, was only a few doors from the house occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone when the Liberals were not in power. The new M.P. often met the older couple for dinner. Mrs. Gladstone referred to him as “that very pretty, quaint boy,19 tall and funny”; the Grand Old Man confessed to his wife, “I really delight in him,20 no more and no less.” Balfour’s inheritance, besides Whittingehame, included a Highland estate called Strathconan with a deer forest and a salmon stream. Balfour himself neither hunted nor fished, but in the autumn he kept the lodge filled with guests. Once, when Gladstone was Prime Minister, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone came with their daughter Mary, who some thought was in love with Balfour. Gladstone enjoyed the visit and kept putting off his departure for a Cabinet meeting in London. Finally, with little time to spare, host and guest set off to walk the five miles of moor and heather between house and station. The station was some distance away when the train—“with ill-timed punctuality,”21 Balfour wrote—appeared. Balfour charged ahead, splashing through pools, waving frantically to catch the eye of the engineer. He succeeded, and a few minutes later the Prime Minister arrived and clambered aboard. As the train left the station, Balfour reported, “I saw with intense thankfulness22 a pair of wet socks hanging out of the carriage window to dry. I had at least not inflicted on my distinguished guest the added horrors of a head cold.”
Mary Gladstone’s tenderness for young Arthur Balfour was typical of the interest women took in him throughout his life. His deepest attachment came at twenty-two when he fell in love, not with Gladstone’s daughter but with Gladstone’s twenty-year-old niece, May Lyttelton. Balfour’s pursuit was slow and irresolute and, at one point, Miss Lyttelton gave up and agreed to marry someone else. Even after this suitor conveniently died, Balfour still hesitated. And then, after he finally had spoken to her, May Lyttelton died suddenly of typhoid. Stunned, dazed, Balfour wandered through the streets of London. Before the funeral, he sent an emerald ring which had been his mother’s and which he had planned to give as an engagement ring, asking that it be placed in May’s coffin. At the funeral service, Balfour broke down. His gloom persisted during a six-month trip around the world with her brother. “Comatose23 most of the time,” reports Spencer Lyttelton’s diary on the condition of his traveling companion.
May Lyttelton’s death deprived Balfour of the woman he loved most, but there were other women. The most enduring of these discreet affairs was with Mary Wyndham, who became Lady Elcho and then, when her husband succeeded to an earldom, Countess of Wemyss. This relationship, which lasted over twelve years, occurred with the knowledge of Lord Elcho, nominally one of Balfour’s friends. Balfour began the pursuit when Mary Wyndham was still unmarried, one of three beautiful Wyndham sisters who turned their father’s country house at Clouds into a literary gathering place. Balfour never proposed to Mary Wyndham and Lord Elcho did, but the attraction reasserted itself. The affair was conducted in Victorian style: weekend house parties in labyrinthine mansions, golden afternoons on immaculate green lawns, tiny smiles during dinner, adjoining bedrooms. Balfour, never truly in love, did not flaunt his conquest, although at one point, Lord Elcho, fearing public exposure and ridicule, mentioned divorce.
The amused and approving attendants to this love affair were the “Souls,” a close-knit group of friends who idolized Arthur Balfour and endeavored to share his tastes. Essentially young men and women who, in addition to noble blood, possessed wit and intellect, they had refused to restrict their talk to horses, clothing, and bridge. “Nearly all the young men24 in my circle were clever and became famous,” was the way Margot Tennant, the most uninhibited of the Souls, described her male companions, most of whom were beginning their careers as junior ministers in Lord Salisbury’s government. The women included Lady Elcho, Lady Desborough, Lady Horner, and the three spirited daughters of the Scottish millionaire landowner Sir Charles Tennant: Laura, who married Alfred Lyttelton; Charlotte, who became Lady Ribblesdale; and the irrepressible Margot. The Souls met regularly at No. 40 Grosvenor Square, Sir Charles’ London house, and, on weekends, transplanted their activities to country mansions, where they took up tennis and bicycling and plunged into talk. Their conversation explored literature, art, music, science, and philosophy. Repartee was deft and rapier sharp. A newcomer who had wandered into the group one day announced, “The fact is, Mr. Balfour,25 all the faults of the age come from Christianity and journalism.” Balfour replied with childlike innocence: “Christianity, of course... but why journalism?” Society was uncomfortable around the Souls and their serious talk—which is how the group got its name. “You all sit around26 and talk about each other’s souls,” grumbled Lord Charles Beresford, a famous hunter, naval officer, and close friend of the Prince of Wales. “I shall have to call you the ‘Souls.’”
Balfour was the centerpiece around whom the Souls revolved. Slightly older than the others, he was admired by the men and adored by the women. “Oh dear,”27 sighed Lady Battersea. “What a gulf between him and most men.” Margot Tennant spoke of his “exquisite attention,28 intellectual tact, cool grace and lovely bend of the head [which] made him not only a flattering listener, but an irresistible companion.” He was difficult “to know intimately29 because of his formidable detachment,” she complained. “The most many of us could hope for was that he had a taste for us as one might have for clocks and furniture.” One day, driven to exasperation by his cool self-containment, she burst out that he would not care if all his closest women friends—Lady Elcho, Lady Desborough, several others, and herself—were all to die. Balfour paused for a moment and then said softly, “I think I should mind30 if you all died on the same day.”
Gradually, as marriage and other distractions came along, the Souls drifted apart, but Balfour remained the focus of the dinner parties he attended. Usually, his conversation was gentle and self-effacing, designed to bring out the best in everyone else. “After an evening31 in his company,” wrote a friend, “one left with the feeling that one had been at the top of one’s form and really had talked rather well.” Occasionally Balfour snapped, as when he said of a colleague, “If he had32 a little more brains, he would be a half-wit.” Once in a great while, he annihilated: after dinner in a country house, another guest told an off-color joke. The women had left the table, but two Eton boys remained with the gentlemen. Balfour’s voice turned to ice. “Who did you say33 was the hero of this singularly disgusting tale?” he asked.
These flashes of anger, rarely revealed in society, stemmed from another side of Arthur Balfour, which the country and the House of Commons had only begun to observe when he was in his fortieth year. Under the charm lay hardness, even ruthlessness, which could be applied when the situation demanded. Friendliness could evaporate, friendship could be set aside, friends sacrificed in the name of what he considered a higher duty.
At the beginning of 1887, when Lord Salisbury’s second government was settling in for what was to be a six-year term, the most pressing problem facing the Cabinet was Ireland. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill had been defeated and law and order on the island was breaking down. The source of the crisis was land tenure: when absentee landlords attempted to collect rents from Irish tenants, many of whom had been on the land for generations, the impoverished tenants refused to pay or offered to pay only part of what they owed. All too frequently, the landlords called on the police to evict. When the police arrived, the countryside was often aroused against them and they became the targets of vitriol, stones, and pots of boiling water. Some landlords were implacable; Lord Clanricarde, an absentee millionaire who extracted every legal penny from his four thousand tenants in Galway, scoffed at threats. “If you think34 you can intimidate me by shooting my agent, you are mistaken,” he told his tenants.
When the Salisbury Cabinet was formed, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, known as “Black Michael,” had taken the Irish portfolio, but by March 1887, he was afflicted by painful eye trouble. He resigned and speculation about his replacement bubbled. The news that the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland, the most demanding, thankless, and personally dangerous post in the Cabinet, would go to the Prime Minister’s nephew, Arthur Balfour, staggered the political world. In those days, although he was thirty-nine, Balfour still was known as a lightweight, delicate in health, a spineless charmer, “drifting with lazy grace35 in a metaphysical cloudland.” An Irish newspaper described him as “a silk-skinned sybarite.”36 Other papers called him Prince Charming, Pretty Fanny, and even Miss Balfour.
Balfour consulted his doctor to make sure his constitution could take the strain, then accepted. Before leaving for Dublin, he made out his will and sent it to a sister, observing that “accidents have occurred37 to a Chief Secretary for Ireland and (though I think it improbable) they may occur again.” In Ireland, two detectives followed him everywhere. He consented to Carry a loaded revolver, although he often forgot that it was in his pocket and dumped it out on the floor when he took off his coat. On arriving in Dublin he announced that Cromwell’s Irish policy had “failed because he relied38 solely on repressive measures. This mistake I shall not imitate. I shall be as relentless as Cromwell in enforcing obedience to the law, but... as radical as any reformer in redressing grievances and especially in removing every cause of complaint in regard to the land.” He proceeded ruthlessly to restore order. A police magistrate in Cork, hearing that a crowd of tenants meant to attack a small force of policemen, wired the threatened officers, “If necessary, do not hesitate39 to shoot them.” Balfour publicly backed the order as being “best calculated40 in the long run to prevent injuries and loss of life.” He elaborated on this view: “It is impossible to say,41 when the order to fire is once given, who will be the victims. That no doubt is a conclusive reason for deferring to the last dread necessity the act of firing. It has never been a reason, and if I have my way, will never be a reason for not firing when self-defence and the authority of the law actually require it.” Those inciting tenants to refuse to pay rent were sent to jail, even though the inciters included Irish members of the House of Commons. When defaulting tenants began to fortify their houses, believing that the police lacked the equipment to force their way in, Balfour provided the constabulary with efficient battering rams which quickly ended the sieges, usually by destroying the houses. Accused of savagery in the House of Commons, he hurled back, “What I have done42 I have done, and if I had to do it again, I would do it again in the way I have done it.” In Ireland, no one still called him Pretty Fanny; now he was known as Bloody Balfour.43
As Chief Secretary, Balfour not only had to administer policy in Dublin, he had to defend it in Westminster. Every day during Question Period, he faced a ferocious, relentless attack from eighty Irishmen who screamed at him and shook their fists in his face. Balfour fought back alone, drawing on the versatile weaponry of his own personality. He met invective with serenity, rage with satire, passion with nonchalance. Sunk low on the Treasury Bench, his pince-nez drooping down his cheeks or dangling idly from his long fingers, he waited out the Celtic onslaught. When his moment came, his weapons flashed. “There are those,”44 he said in one debate, “who talk as if Irishmen were justified in disobeying the law because the law comes to them in foreign garb. I see no reason why any local color should be given to the Ten Commandments.” One day, an Irish M.P. let his voice rise to a shriek condemning Balfour, while the Chief Secretary sprawled languidly on the Treasury Bench, his face fixed in a mildly attentive smile. When the assailant, his face and clothing drenched with perspiration, finally finished, Balfour, affecting boredom, rose and disdainfully dismissed the whole performance by saying that his “jaded palate45 was no longer tickled by anything so lacking in flavor.”
Balfour tried to redress grievances. Under his Chief Secretaryship, the Unionist Party commenced an Irish land-reform program, based on voluntary sale and voluntary purchase, backed by a government fund of £33 million. The Chief Secretary proposed that a Roman Catholic college be built in Ireland and maintained with state funds. “My object is not to bribe46 the Irish people,” Balfour said, replying to criticism. “My object is a simpler one—to afford Irish Roman Catholics some of that education which we in Scotland enjoy.... I desire to see them taught philology, philosophy, history, science, medicine....” When he toured Ireland in 1891, at the end of his term, Balfour took no detectives and no revolver.
Balfour had gone to Ireland an expected failure and returned the strongest Conservative-Unionist Minister in the House of Commons. When the position of First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the House fell vacant, Balfour succeeded by the unanimous choice of Unionist M.P.’s. He accepted, reported Lord Salisbury, “with rather a wry face.”47 In his new post, Balfour modified his behavior. As Chief Secretary for Ireland, he had been a single gladiator, battling over issues personally felt. As Leader of the House, he was responsible for passage of the whole program of government legislation, including many items for which Balfour had little passion. All too often, the Leader displayed his apathy. Previous leaders had remained within the Houses of Parliament, if not actually on the Front Bench, throughout the hours the House was in session. Members were surprised, therefore, the first time Balfour returned to the Commons after dinner in evening dress; obviously he had left Westminster to dine in society. Leading the Opposition during Gladstone’s last government, Balfour thrust and parried with the Grand Old Man, who was making his last fight for Irish Home Rule. Mr. Gladstone, now in alliance with the Irish Nationalists, was, said Balfour, “formerly as ready48 to blacken the Irish members’ characters as he is now ready to blacken their boots.” Yet Gladstone told Margot Tennant (who wrote to Balfour) that “he had never loved49 a young man so much as you and that your quickness had delighted him and your astonishing grip of difficult subjects.” Balfour replied to Margot, “I am very glad50 you like the Old Man; for my part, I love him....” Balfour’s last visit to Gladstone’s home at Hawarden came in 1896, two years after Gladstone had retired from politics and two years before his death. “I ran up from the station51 on my ‘bike,’” Balfour wrote to Lady Elcho. “It shocked the Old Man. He thought it unbefitting a First Lord of the Treasury.”
Balfour led the House of Commons for seven years, 1895–1902, in Lord Salisbury’s third government. Because his uncle preferred to live in his own house in Arlington Street, Balfour as First Lord of the Treasury moved into No. 10 Downing Street. The relationship between uncle and nephew, built on family affection and mutual respect as well as an understanding of each other’s views, was harmonious. Asked if there was a difference between his uncle and himself, Balfour replied, “There is a difference.52 My uncle is a Tory—and I am a liberal.” Following the Prime Minister’s lead, Balfour gave Joseph Chamberlain free rein in the Colonial Secretary’s management of the growing crisis in South Africa. “My dear Uncle Robert,”53 he wrote to Lord Salisbury in the spring of 1897. “You have, I suppose, by this time heard from Joe about his renewed proposal for an addition to our South African garrison. His favorite method of dealing with the South African sores is the free application of irritants.... [But] I cannot think it wise to allow him to goad on the Boers by speeches, and refuse him the means of repelling Boer attacks... it is a nice point whether the sending out of 3,000 men may prove to be a sedative or a stimulant.” Balfour misjudged the outcome of Chamberlain’s policy. “You ask me about South Africa,”54 he wrote to Lady Elcho just before the fighting started. “I somehow think that war will be avoided.” When war did come, Salisbury was already beginning to weaken physically. During the crescendo of military disasters that culminated in Black Week, Balfour attempted to buffer his aging uncle. “Every night I go down to the War Office55 between eleven and twelve at night, and walk up all the stairs... and there was never any news except defeats.” It became apparent that Sir Redvers Buller would have to be replaced. Balfour went to see Lord Salisbury. Over the Prime Minister’s initial objection, the decision was made to send out Lord Roberts.
In the new Cabinet formed after the Khaki Election, Lord Salisbury finally relinquished the post of Foreign Secretary in favor of Lord Lansdowne; but the number of the Prime Minister’s relatives in the Cabinet still provoked the nickname “Hotel Cecil.”56 In addition to Arthur Balfour, there was Arthur’s brother, Gerald, who became President of the Board of Trade, and Lord Salisbury’s son-in-law, Lord Selborne, who became First Lord of the Admiralty. Challenged on this point in the House of Commons, Balfour deftly replied that it was inconsistent to charge that “this unhappy and persecuted family”57 dominated the Cabinet and at the same time to say “that this Cabinet sits simply to register the decree of one too powerful Minister, and that too powerful Minister is not the Premier backed up by his family, but my Hon. friend the Secretary for the Colonies.... These are two quite opposite views—not only opposite but inconsistent—both equally the creation of an uninformed imagination.”
When Balfour became Prime Minister, he continued to be selective as to where he placed his energy and political support. On issues on which he could find no compelling advantage for one side over the other, Balfour took no strong stand. When it came to something which he regarded as essential to the defense or future of the realm—creation of a Committee of Imperial Defence, reequipping and redeploying of the Navy, furtherance of education, science, and technology—Balfour became tenacious. He would work day and night, applying the sharpest edges of his mind and tongue, worrying the issue, hounding colleagues, until he achieved his object. His political philosophy was conservative. While not absolutely opposed to social reform—in 1902 he carried through the Education Act in the teeth of formidable opposition from both parties—he feared glib remedies. “It is better, perhaps,58 that our ship shall go nowhere than that it shall go wrong, that it should stand still than that it should run upon the rocks,” he said. Like Lord Salisbury, Balfour had only a vague interest in party organization and campaigning. He could not simulate hearty backslapping or hand-shaking. Balfour’s mien was politeness and distance; sometimes the politeness was so perfect and the distance so great that others were discomfited. King Edward VII complained that Mr. Balfour condescended to him.
Balfour’s life was made up of opposites, each essential, each providing balance for the other: the serenity of philosophy and the thrust and parry of parliamentary debate, the clamor of Society and the quiet of solitude. “When I’m at work in politics,59 I long to be in literature and vice versa,” he told John Morley. He made other men uneasy. His ability to see both sides of issues troubled political colleagues and opponents, who sometimes charged him with cynicism. “Quite a good fellow,”60 Balfour would say of an adversary. “Has a curious view. Not uninteresting.” Once, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he was accused of planning to jail six Irish nationalist M.P.’s in the hope that they would die in prison. Balfour dismissed the charge as “ridiculous” and “grotesque”61 and continued, “I should like to say that I should profoundly regret the permanent absence of any of the distinguished men who lead the Parnellite Party.... If you sit opposite a man every day, and you are engaged in fighting him, you cannot help getting a liking for him whether he deserves it or not.” Temperamentally and philosophically, Balfour refused to see life in terms of absolutes. This was important, that was more important, neither was really important, he seemed to say. Margot Asquith decided that the secret of her friend’s imperturbability was that he did not “really believe62 that the happiness of mankind depends on events going this way or that.”
Behind this dispassionate approach to life lay a sober pessimism about human destiny. On the surface, Balfour was religious, a conventional Anglican who attended Sunday morning services and read Sunday evening prayers to his guests and servants sitting in chairs around his dining room. On another level, Balfour had learned from science that, set against the immensities of time, man was a puny, transitory creature. His view of man’s ultimate fate was bleak: “Imperishable monuments63 and immortal deeds, death itself and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest.”
Arthur Balfour’s retreat as Chief Secretary for Ireland, as leader of the House, and later as Prime Minister, was his childhood home at Whittingehame. The mistress of the house was his unmarried sister, Alice. Other residents, in the summer, included two brothers and their families with a total of three nephews and eight nieces. Balfour presided serenely over this establishment, playing hero to an eager bodyguard of giggling nieces. Each wanted to sit next to him at seashore picnics; all banded together to invade his sitting room, where “having cooked for him a sparrow64 rolled in clay according to a Red Indian recipe, [they] had presented it to him on a platter... in hopes of seeing him eat it.”
Amid this activity, he preserved an attitude of calm. He breakfasted in bed and, until lunchtime, remained in his rooms dictating letters. Because he never read the newspapers, the family competed over lunch to tell him the news. In the afternoon, he sometimes played tennis on his own grass court (he played into his seventies) or rode his bicycle (the learning process took its toll, forcing the Leader to appear in the House at one point with an arm in a sling and a foot in a slipper). His obsession was golf. Every year, Balfour dedicated an entire month (usually August) to the then new sport. Tory aristocrats and country gentlemen snorted at their leader’s middle-class recreations; men who killed birds and rode to the hounds had trouble understanding a man who wobbled about on bicycles and played “this damned Scottish croquet.”65 But they recalled Balfour was a Cecil, and Lord Salisbury, the greatest Cecil of the day, shunned all sports and did not even go out of doors except to examine flora. Music surrounded Balfour. Two grand pianos filled his London parlor in Carlton Gardens, where the Handel Society often rehearsed. Even in Scotland, music followed dinner as a guest or an invited performer played Handel, Bach, or Beethoven on the concertina. Books were more important even than music. His library and sitting room overflowed from floor to ceiling with books. Between tea and dinner, and again for an hour or two before retiring, Balfour read. A new book on science might be propped on his bedroom mantelpiece so that he could read while dressing; his sister-in-law suspected him of “making a raft with his sponge”66 so that he could float a French novel on it when he bathed.
fn1 Who was to be Foreign Secretary in the Balfour Cabinet.