Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Biography

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil was born at Hatfield House in 1830, the third son of the 2nd Marquess of Salisbury. A lonely child who was badly bullied at school, he left Eton in 1845 and went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1847. He entered the House of Commons for Stamford in 1853 and from 1856 wrote hundreds of anonymous articles for the Saturday Review and the Quarterly Review.

He was Secretary of State for India under Lord Derby in 1866 but resigned in 1867 in protest against the Conservatives' parliamentary reform bill. On his father's death in 1868 he became Marquess of Salisbury and entered the House of Lords, and in 1869 he was elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Under Disraeli he returned to the India Office in 1874, represented Britain at the Constantinople Conference of 1876-77 and, as foreign secretary from 1878, played a leading part at the Congress of Berlin.

After Disraeli's death he led the Conservatives in the Lords, and in June 1885 he became prime minister. Opposing Irish Home Rule, he allied with the Liberal Unionists and governed from 1886 to 1892 and again from 1895 to 1902, for most of that time as his own foreign secretary. He avoided binding alliances, secured large territories for Britain in the partition of Africa by agreements such as the 1890 treaty with Germany, forced Portugal to abandon its claims in central Africa with the ultimatum of January 1890 and managed the Venezuela boundary crisis with the United States in 1895.

His last government fought the Second Boer War and won the 1900 general election. In failing health and grieving for his wife, he handed the premiership to his nephew Arthur Balfour in July 1902 and died at Hatfield in August 1903.