Four eminent Victorian statesmen gathered at midday on Monday, June 14th, 1895. [...]
It was an odd quartet, socially and politically. The Marquess of Salisbury and the Duke of Devonshire were peers; Arthur Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain were commoners. Salisbury and Balfour were members of the same distinguished family, the Cecils, whose forebears has served at the elbow of Queen Elizabeth I. The modern Cecils, uncle and nephew, were the leaders of the Conservative Party, which would have pre-eminent place in the new government. Devonshire and Chamberlain were Liberals who, on the tormenting issue of Home Rule for Ireland, had resigned from the leadership of the Liberal Party. [...]
Lord Salisbury, naturally, would become Prime Minister. This was the Queen's decision and none of the men in Salisbury's drawing room questioned Her Majesty's choice. [...]
The other peer in the Arlington Street drawing room, Spencer Compton Cavendish, eigth Duke of Devonshire, would have preferred to have been somewhere else. [...] Most of his life had been spent serving in government while he wished he were watching his horses race. [...] Twice he had been offered and declined the premiership.
Arthur Balfour, at forty seven the youngest of Lord Salisbury's guests, was heir to his uncle's political estate. [...] Balfour's manner in the House could be deceiving. Lolling on the Government Bench, he permitted himself to slide lower and lower, "as if, " said an observer in the Gallery, "to discover how nearly he could sit on his shoulder blades." From this horizontal posture, he could rise up suddenly to intervene in debate. So great was Balfour's charm and so intricate the dialectic of his arguments that most members even across the aisle delighted in him. "Balfour," said one of them, "was one of the rare men who make public life respectable." [...]
Joseph Chamberlain was fifty-nine in 1895. He had not attended Oxford or Cambridge or a public school. He had gone to work at sixteen and had made enough money to retire from business at thirty-four and go into politics as a Radical Liberal. [...] In Parliament and on podiums around the country, he was the voice of the shopkeeper, the middle class, and the Nonconformist. He sat with a marquess, a duke and Arthur Balfour because his passion and eloquence had won him the allegiance of dozens of members of Parliament and hundreds of thousands of British voters. Salisbury had no choice but to invite Chamberlain into his Cabinet - the Liberal Unionists would be the margin of his majority over the Liberals and the Irish - but all four men were keenly aware of the differences that separated them. Chamberlain was the future, they were the past.
What an extraordinary quartet. Both the peers turned down chances to become Prime Minister - what a comparison to the ambitious little rats of today who would take bites out of each other for a chance to get themselves inside No. 10.
Anyway, the stage is set, the curtain is about to go up and 'Splendid Isolation' is about to be torn down and Britain forced to involve itself in European affairs.
Quotations from Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War by Robert K. Massie - positively the best history book I have ever read!
On the subject of history: what happened to the Emperor's troops after Waterloo? Did the British-Allied Army, or the Prussian Army, pursue them? Presumably they must have done in case the beggars came at them again. Did they run for it, or surrender in droves? I don't think I've ever seen an account of What Happened Next.
Posted by: dearieme | Sunday, 20 June 2010 at 19:24
It was a murderous rout, 'DM', with the Prussians determined to slaughter as many as possible. Bonaparte forced his way through the retreating army and riding hard south passed Quatre Bras where some 4,000 bodies, stripped naked by looters, still lay in the open. He made it back to Paris but that crafty, ambitious ratbag, Fouche, had turned the parliament against him. He tried to escape by means of an American ship but the Royal Navy had the coast locked down tight and in the end he was forced to 'turn himself in'.
Posted by: David Duff | Monday, 21 June 2010 at 09:18