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 nigh
t, 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.
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