Chapter 2: The Cecil Bloc The Milner Group could never have been built up by Milner's own efforts. He had no political power or even influence. All that he had was ability and ideas. The same thing is true about many of the other members of the Milner Group, at least at the time that they joined the Group. The power that was utilized by Milner and his Group was really the power of the Cecil family and its allied families such as the Lyttelton (Viscounts Cobham), Wyndham (Barons Leconfield), Grosvenor (Dukes of Westminster), Balfour, Wemyss, Palmer (Earls of Selborne and Viscounts Wolmer), Cavendish (Dukes of Devonshire and Marquesses of Hartington), and Gathorne-Hardy (Earls of Cranbrook). The Milner Group was originally a major fief within the great nexus of power, influence, and privilege controlled by the Cecil family. It is not possible to describe here the ramifications of the Cecil influence. It has been all-pervasive in British life since 1886. This Cecil Bloc was built up by Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Viscount Cranborne and third Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903). The methods used by this man were merely copied by the Milner Group. These methods can be summed up under three headings: (a) a triple-front penetration in politics, education, and journalism; (b) the recruitment of men of ability (chiefly from All Souls) and the linking of these men to the Cecil Bloc by matrimonial alliances and by gratitude for titles and positions of power; and (c) the influencing of public policy by placing members of the Cecil Bloc in positions of power shielded as much as possible from public attention. The triple-front penetration can be seen in
Lord Salisbury's own life. He was not only Prime Minister for a longer period than anyone else in recent history (fourteen years between 1885 and 1902) but also a Fellow of All Souls (from 1853) and Chancellor of Oxford University (1869-1903), and had a paramount influence on The Quarterly Review for many years. He practiced a shameless nepotism, concealed to some extent by the shifting of names because of acquisition of titles and female marital connections, and redeemed by the fact that ability as well as family connection was required from appointees.
Lord Salisbury's practice of nepotism was aided by the fact that he had two brothers and two sisters and had five sons and three daughters of his own. One of his sisters was the mother of
Arthur J. Balfour and Gerald W. Balfour. Of his own daughters, one married the Second Earl of Selborne and had a son, Lord Wolmer, and a daughter, Lady Mabel Laura Palmer. The daughter married the son of
Earl Grey, while the son married the daughter of Viscount Ridley. The son, known as Lord Wolmer until 1942 and Lord Selborne since that date, was an M.P. for thirty years (1910-1940), a figure in various Conservative governments since 1916, and Minister of Economic Warfare in 1942-1945.
Of Lord Salisbury's five sons, the oldest (now fourth Marquess of Salisbury), was in almost every Conservative government from 1900 to 1929. He had four children, of whom two married into the Cavendish family. Of these, a daughter, Lady Mary Cecil, married in 1917 the Marquess of Hartington, later tenth Duke of Devonshire; the older son, Viscount Cranborne, married Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, niece of the ninth Duke of Devonshire. The younger son, Lord David Cecil, a well-known writer of biographical works, was for years a Fellow of Wadham and for the last decade has been a Fellow of New College. The other daughter, Lady Beatrice Cecil, married W. G. A. Ormsby Gore (now Lord Harlech), who became a member of the Milner Group. It should perhaps be mentioned that Viscount Cranborne was in the House of Commons from 1929 to 1941 and has been in the House of Lords since. He was Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs in 1935-1938, resigned in protest at the Munich agreement, but returned to office in 1940 as Paymaster General (1940), Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs (1940-1942), and Colonial Secretary (1942). He was later Lord Privy Seal (1942-1943), Secretary for Dominion Affairs again (1943-1945), and Leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Lords (1942-1945).
Lord Salisbury's second son, Lord William Cecil (1863- ), was Rural Dean of Hertford (1904-1916) and Bishop of Exeter (1916-1936), as well as chaplain to King Edward VII.
Lord Salisbury's third son, Lord Robert Cecil (Viscount Cecil of Chelwood since 1923), was an M.P. from 1906 to 1923 as well as Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs (1915-1916), Assistant Secretary in the same department (1918), Minister of Blockade (1916-1918), Lord Privy Seal (1923-1924), and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1924-1927). He was one of the original drafters of the Covenant of the League of Nations and was the Englishman most closely associated in the public mind with the work of the League. For this work he received the Nobel Prize in 1937.
Lord Salisbury's fourth son, Lord Edward Cecil (1867-1918), was the one most closely associated with Milner, and, in 1921, his widow married Milner. While Lord Edward was besieged with Rhodes in Mafeking in 1900, Lady Cecil lived in close contact with Milner and his Kindergarten. After the war, Lord Edward was Agent-General of the Sudan (1903-1905), Under Secretary of Finance in Egypt (1905-1912), and financial adviser to the Egyptian government (1912-1918). He was in complete control of the Egyptian government during the interval between Kitchener's departure and the arrival of Sir Henry McMahon as High Commissioner, and was the real power in McMahon's administration (1914-1916). In 1894 he had married Violet Maxse, daughter of Admiral Frederick Maxse and sister of General Sir Ivor Maxse. Sir Ivor, a good friend of Milner's, was the husband of Mary Caroline Wyndham, daughter of Baron Leconfield and niece of
Lord Rosebery. Lord Edward Cecil had a son and a daughter. The daughter, Helen Mary Cecil, married Captain Alexander Hardinge in the same year (1921) in which she became Milner's stepdaughter. Her husband was the heir of Baron Hardinge of Penshurst and a cousin of Sir Arthur Hardinge. Both Hardinges were proteges of Lord Salisbury, as we shall see.
The fifth son of Lord Salisbury was Lord Hugh Cecil (Baron Quickswood since 1941). He was a Member of Parliament for Greenwich (1895-1906) and for Oxford University (1910-1937). He is now a Fellow of New College, after having been a Fellow of Hertford for over fifty years.
The degree to which Lord Salisbury practiced nepotism can be seen by a look at his third government (1895-1902) or its successor, Balfour's first government (1902-1905). The Balfour government was nothing but a continuation of Salisbury's government, since, as we have seen, Balfour was Salisbury's nephew and chief assistant and was made premier in 1902 by his uncle. Salisbury was Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary; Balfour was First Lord of the Treasury and Party Leader in Commons (1895-1902); his brother, Gerald Balfour, was Chief Secretary for Ireland (1895-1900) and President of the Board of Trade (1900-1905); their cousin-in-law Lord Selborne was Under Secretary for the Colonies (1895-1900) and First Lord of the Admiralty (1905-1910). Arthur Balfour's most intimate friend, and the man who would have been his brother-in-law except for his sister's premature death in 1875 (an event which kept Balfour a bachelor for the rest of his life), Alfred Lyttelton, was chairman of a mission to the Transvaal in 1900 and Colonial Secretary (1903-1906). His older brother, Neville, was Assistant Military Secretary in the War Office (1897-1898), Commander-in-Chief in South Africa under Milner (1902-1904), and Chief of the General Staff (1904-1908). Another intimate friend of Balfour's, George Wyndham, was Parliamentary Under Secretary for War (1898-1900) and Chief Secretary for Ireland (1900-1905). St. John Brodrick (later Lord Midleton), a classmate of Milner's, brother-in-law of P. L. Gell and son-in-law of the Earl of Wemyss, was Under Secretary for War (1895-1898), Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs (1898-1900), Secretary of State for War (1900-1903), and Secretary of State for India (1903-1905). James Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, Lord Salisbury's heir, was Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs (1900-1903) and Lord Privy Seal (1903-1905). Evelyn Cecil (Sir Evelyn since 1922), nephew of Lord Salisbury, was private secretary to his uncle (1895-1902). Walter Long (later Lord Long), a creation of Salisbury's, was President of the Board of Agriculture (1895-1900), President of the Local Government Board (1900-1905), and Chief Secretary for Ireland (1905-1906). George N. Curzon, (later Lord Curzon) a Fellow of All Souls, ex-secretary and protege of Lord Salisbury, was Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs (1895-1898) and Viceroy of India (1899-1905).
In addition to these personal appointees of Lord Salisbury, this government had the leaders of the Unionist Party, which had split off from the Liberal Party in the fight over Home Rule in 1886. These included the eighth Duke of Devonshire and his nephew, the Marquess of Hartington (the Cavendish family), the latter's father-in-law (Lord Lansdowne), Goschen, and Joseph Chamberlain. The Duke of Devonshire was Lord President of the Council (1895-1903); his nephew and heir was Treasurer of H.M. Household (1900-1903) and Financial Secretary to the Treasury (1903-1905). The latter's father-in-law, Lord Lansdowne, was Secretary for War (1895-1900) and Foreign Secretary (1900-1905); Goschen was First Lord of the Admiralty (1895-1900) and rewarded with a viscounty (1900). Joseph Chamberlain was Secretary for the Colonies (1895-1903).
Most of these persons were related by numerous family and marital connections which have not yet been mentioned. We should point out some of these connections, since they form the background of the Milner Group.
George W. Lyttelton, fourth Baron Lyttelton, married a sister of Mrs. William E. Gladstone and had eight sons. Of these, Neville and Alfred have been mentioned; Spencer was secretary to his uncle, W. E. Gladstone, for three extended periods between 1871 and 1894, and was an intimate friend of Arthur Balfour (world tour together in 1875);
Edward was Headmaster of Haileybury [East-India Company College] (1890-1905) and of Eton (1905-1916); Arthur was chaplain to the Queen (1896-1898) and Bishop of Southampton (1898-1903). Charles, the oldest son, fifth Baron Lyttelton and eighth Viscount Cobham (1842-1922), married Mary Cavendish and had four sons and three daughters. The oldest son, now ninth Viscount Cobham, was private secretary to Lord Selborne in South Africa (1905-1908) and Parliamentary Under Secretary of War (1939-1940). His brother George was assistant master at Eton. His sister Frances married the nephew of Lady Chelmsford.
The youngest son of the fourth Baron Lyttelton, Alfred, whom we have already mentioned, married twice. His first wife was Laura Tennant, whose sister Margot married Herbert Asquith and whose brother Baron Glenconner married Pamela Wyndham.
Pamela married, for a second husband, Viscount Grey of Fallodon. For his second wife, Alfred Lyttelton married Edith Balfour. She survived him by many years and was later deputy director of the women's branch of the Ministry of Agriculture (1917-1919), a substitute delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations for five sessions (1923-1931), and a member of the council of the Royal institute of International Affairs. Her son, Captain Oliver Lyttelton, has been an M.P. since 1940, was managing director of the British Metals Corporation, Controller of Non-ferrous Metals (1939-1940), President of the Board of Trade (1940-1941, 1945), a member of the War Cabinet (1941-1945), and Minister of Production (1942-1945).
Almost as ramified as the Lyttelton clan were the Wyndhams, descendants of the first Baron Leconfield. The Baron had three sons. Of these, the oldest married Constance Primrose, sister of
Lord Rosebery, daughter of Lord Dalmeny and his wife, Dorothy Grosvenor (later Lady Brassey), and granddaughter of Lord Henry Grosvenor and his wife, Dora Wemyss. They had four children. Of these, one, Hugh A. Wyndham, married Maud Lyttelton and was a member of Milner's Kindergarten. His sister Mary married General Sir Ivor Maxse and was thus the sister-in-law of Lady Edward Cecil (later Lady Milner). Another son of Baron Leconfield, Percy Scawen Wyndham, was the father of Pamela (Lady Glenconner and later Lady Grey), of George Wyndham (already mentioned), who married Countess Grosvenor, and of Mary Wyndham, who married the eleventh Earl of Wemyss. It should perhaps be mentioned that Countess Grosvenor's daughter Lettice Grosvenor married the seventh Earl of Beauchamp, brother-in-law of Samuel Hoare. Countess Grosvenor (Mrs. George Wyndham) had two nephews who must be mentioned. One, Lawrence John Lumley Dundas (Earl of Ronaldshay and Marquess of Zetland), was sent as military aide to Curzon, Viceroy of India, in 1900. He was an M.P. (1907-1916), a member of the Royal Commission on Public Services in India (1912-1914), Governor of Bengal (1917-1922), a member of the Indian Round Table Conference of 1930-1931 and of the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on India in 1933. He was Secretary of State for India (1935-1940) and for Burma (1937-1940), as well as the official biographer of Lord Curzon and Lord Cromer.
The other nephew of Countess Grosvenor, Laurence Roger Lumley (Earl of Scarbrough since 1945), a cousin of the Marquess of Zetland, was an M.P. as soon as he graduated from Magdalen (1922-1929, 1931-1937), and later Governor of Bombay (1937-1943) and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for India and Burma (1945).
Countess Grosvenor's sister-in-law Mary Wyndham (who married the Earl of Wemyss) had three children. The younger son, Guy Charteris, married a Tennant of the same family as the first Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, the second Mrs. Herbert Asquith, and Baron Glenconner. His sister, Cynthia Charteris, married Herbert Asquith's son Herbert. In an earlier generation, Francis Charteris, tenth Earl of Wemyss, married Anne Anson, while his sister Lady Hilda Charteris married St. John Brodrick, eighth Viscount Midleton of first Earl Midleton. Lord Midleton's sister Edith married Philip Lyttelton Gell.
This complicated interrelationship of family connections by no means exhausts the links between the families that made up the Cecil Bloc as it existed in the period 1886-1900, when Milner was brought into it by Goschen. Nor would any picture of this Bloc be complete without some mention of the persons without family connections who were brought into the Bloc by Lord Salisbury. Most of these persons were recruited from All Souls and, like Arthur Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, Baron Quickswood, Sir Evelyn Cecil, and others, frequently served an apprenticeship in a secretarial capacity to Lord Salisbury. Many of these persons later married into the Cecil Bloc. In recruiting his proteges from All Souls, Salisbury created a precedent that was followed later by the Milner Group, although the latter went much further than the former in the degree of its influence on All Souls.
All Souls is the most peculiar of Oxford Colleges. It has no undergraduates, and its postgraduate members are not generally in pursuit of a higher degree. Essentially, it consists of a substantial endowment originally set up in 1437 by Henry Chichele, sometime Fellow of New College and later Archbishop of Canterbury, from revenues of suppressed priories. From this foundation incomes were established originally for a warden, forty fellows, and two chaplains. This has been modified at various times, until at present twenty-one fellowships worth £300 a year for seven years are filled from candidates who have passed a qualifying examination. This group usually join within a year or two of receiving the bachelor's degree. In addition, there are eleven fellowships without emolument, to be held by the incumbents of various professorial chairs at Oxford. These include the Chichele Chairs of International Law, of Modern History, of Economic History, of Social and Political Theory, and of the History of War; the Drummond Chair of Political Economy; the Gladstone Chair of Government; the Regius Chair of Civil Law; the Vinerian Chair of English Law; the Marshal Foch Professorship of French Literature; and the Chair of Social Anthropology. There are ten Distinguished Persons fellowships without emolument, to be held for seven years by persons who have attained fame in law, humanities, science, or public affairs. These are usually held by past Fellows. There are a varying number of research fellowships and teaching fellowships, good for five to seven years, with annual emoluments of £300 to £600. There are also twelve seven-year fellowships with annual emoluments of £50 for past Fellows. And lastly, there are six fellowships to be held by incumbents of certain college or university offices.
The total number of Fellows at any one time is generally no more than fifty and frequently considerably fewer. Until 1910 there were usually fewer than thirty-five, but the number has slowly increased in the twentieth century, until by 1947 there were fifty-one. In the whole period of the twentieth century from 1900 to 1947, there was a total of 149 Fellows. This number, although small, was illustrious and influential. It includes such names as Lord Acton, Leopold Amery, Sir William Anson, Sir Harold Butler, G. N. Clark, G. D. H. Cole, H. W. C. Davis, A. V. Dicey, Geoffrey Faber, Keith Feiling, Lord Chelmsford, Sir Maurice Gwyer, Lord Halifax, W. K. Hancock, Sir Arthur Hardinge, Sir William Holdsworth, T. E. Lawrence, C. A. Macartney, Friedrich Max Muller, Viscount Morley of Blackburn, Sir Charles Oman, A. F. Pollard, Sir Charles Grant Robertson, Sir James Arthur Salter, Viscount Simon, Sir Donald Somervell, Sir Arthur Ramsay Steel-Maitland, Sir Ernest Swinton, K. C. Wheare, E. L. Woodward, Francis de Zulueta, etc. In addition, there were to be numbered among those who were fellows before 1900 such illustrious persons as Lord Curzon, Lord Ernie, Sir Robert Herbert, Sir Edmund Monson, Lord Phillimore, Viscount Ridley, and Lord Salisbury. Most of these persons were elected to fellowships in All Souls at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three years, at a time when their great exploits were yet in the future. There is some question whether this ability of the Fellows of All Souls to elect as their younger colleagues men with brilliant futures is to be explained by their ability to discern greatness at an early age or by the fact that election to the fellowship opens the door to achievement in public affairs. There is some reason to believe that the second of these two alternatives is of greater weight. As the biographer of Viscount Halifax has put it, "It is safe to assert that the Fellow of All Souls is a man marked out for a position of authority in public life, and there is no surprise if he reaches the summit of power, but only disappointment if he falls short of the opportunities that are set out before him. (1)
One Fellow of All Souls has confessed in a published work that his career was based on his membership in this college. The Right Reverend Herbert Hensley Henson, who rose from humble origins to become Bishop of Durham, wrote in his memoirs: "My election to a fellowship, against all probability, and certainly against all expectation, had decisive influence on my subsequent career. It brought me within the knowledge of the late Lord Salisbury, who subsequently recommended me to the Crown for appointment to a Canonry of Westminister.... It is to All Souls College that all the 'success' [!] of my career is mainly due." (2)
It would appear that the College of All Souls is largely influenced not by the illustrious persons whose names we have listed above (since they are generally busy elsewhere) but by another group within the college. This appears when we realize that the Fellows whose fellowships are renewed for one appointment after another are not generally the ones with famous names. The realization is increased when we see that these persons with the power to obtain renewing appointments are members of a shadowy group with common undergraduate associations, close personal relationships, similar interests and ideas, and surprisingly similar biographical experience. It is this shadowy group which includes the All Souls members of the Milner Group.
In the nineteenth century, Lord Salisbury made little effort to influence All Souls, although it was a period when influence (especially in elections to fellowships) was more important than later. He contented himself with recruiting proteges from the college and apparently left the wielding of influence to others, especially to Sir William Anson. In the twentieth century, the Milner Group has recruited from and influenced All Souls. This influence has not extended to the elections to the twenty-one competitive fellowships. There, merit has unquestionably been the decisive factor. But it has been exercised in regard to the seventeen ex-officio fellowships, the ten Distinguished Persons fellowships, and the twelve re-elective fellowships. And it has also been important in contributing to the general direction and policy of the college.
This does not mean that the Milner Group is identical with All Souls, but merely that it is the chief, if not the controlling, influence in it, especially in recent years. Many members of the Milner Group are not members of All Souls, and many members of All Souls are not members of the Milner Group.
The fact that All Souls is influenced by some outside power has been recognized by others, but no one so far as I know has succeeded in identifying this influence. The erratic Christopher Hobhouse, in his recent book on Oxford, has come closer than most when he wrote: "The senior common room at All Souls is distinguished above all others by the great brains which meet there and by the singular unfruitfulness of their collaboration.... But it is not these who make the running. Rather is it the Editor of The Times and his circle of associates — men whom the public voice has called to no office and entrusted with no responsibility. These individuals elect to consider themselves the powers behind the scenes. The duty of purveying honest news is elevated in their eyes into the prerogative of dictating opinion. It is at All Souls that they meet to decide just how little they will let their readers know; and their newspaper has been called the All Souls Parish Magazine." (3) The inaccuracy and bitterness of this statement is caused by the scorn which a devotee of the humanities feels toward the practitioners of the social sciences, but the writer was shrewd enough to see that an outside group dominates All Souls. He was also able to see the link between All Souls and The Times, although quite mistaken in his conclusion that the latter controls the former. As we shall see, the Milner Group dominates both.
In the present chapter we are concerned only with the relationship between the Cecil Bloc and All Souls and shall reserve our consideration of the relationships between the Milner Group and the college to a later chapter. The former relationship can be observed in the following list of names, a list which is by no means complete:
Name / College / Fellow of All Souls
C. A. Alington, 1872- / Trinity, Oxford 1891-1895 / 1896-1903
W. R. Anson, 1843-1914 / Balliol 1862-1866 / 1867-1914; Warden 1881-1914
G. N. Curzon, 1859-1925 / Balliol 1878-1822 / 1883-1890
A. H. Hardinge, 1859-1933 / Balliol 1878-1881 / 1881-
A. C. Headlam, 1862- / New College 1881-1885 / 1885-1897, 1924-
H. H. Henson, 1863- / Non-Collegiate 1881-1884 / 1884-1891, 1896-1903; 1939
C. G. Lang, 1864-1945 / Balliol 1882-1886 / 1888-1928
F. W. Pember, 1862- / Balliol 1880-1884 / 1884-1910- Warden, 1914-1932
W. G. F. Phillimore, 1845-1929 / Christ Church 1863-1867 / -
R. E. Prothero, 1852-1937 / Balliol 1871-1875 / 1875-1891
E. Ridley, 1843-1928 / Corpus Christi 1862-1866 / 1866-1882
M. W. Ridley, 1842-1904 / Balliol 1861-1865 / 1865-1874
J. Simon, 1873- / Wadham 1892-1896 / 1897-
F. J. N. Thesiger, 1868-1933 / Magdalen 1887-1891 / 1892-1899, 1929-1933
The Reverend Cyril A. Alington married Hester Lyttelton, daughter of the fourth Baron Lyttelton and sister of the famous eight brothers whom we have mentioned. He was Headmaster of Eton (1916-1933) in succession to his brother-in-law Edward Lyttelton, and at the same time chaplain to King George V (1921-1933). Since 1933 he has been Dean of Durham.
Sir William Anson can best be discussed later. He, Lord Goschen, and H. A. L. Fisher were the chief instruments by which the Milner Group entered into All Souls.
George Nathaniel Curzon (Lord Curzon after 1898, 1859-1925) studied at Eton and Balliol (1872-1882). At the latter he was intimate with the future Lords Midleton, Selborne, and Salisbury. On graduating, he went on a trip to the Near East with Edward Lyttelton. Elected a Fellow of All Souls in 1883, he became assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury two years later. This set his future career. As Harold Nicolson says of him in the Dictionary of National Biography, "His activities centered from that moment on obedience to Lord Salisbury, an intense interest in foreign and colonial policy, and the enjoyment of the social amenities." A Member of Parliament from 1886 to 1898, he traveled widely, chiefly in Asia (1887-1894), financing his trips by writing for The Times. He was Under Secretary in the India Office (1891-1892), Under Secretary in the Foreign Office (1895-1898), and Viceroy of India (1899-1905) by Lord Salisbury's appointment. In the last-named post he had many controversies with the "Balfour-Brodrick combination" (as Nicolson calls it), and his career was more difficult thereafter, for, although he did achieve high office again, he failed to obtain the premiership, and the offices he did obtain always gave him the appearance rather than the reality of power. These offices included Lord Privy Seal (1915-1916, 1924-1925), Leader in Lords (1916-1924), Lord President of the Council (1916-1919), member of the Imperial War Cabinet (1916-1918), and Foreign Secretary (1919-1924). Throughout this later period, he was generally in opposition to what was being supported by the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group, but his desire for high office led him to make constant compromises with his convictions.
Arthur Henry Hardinge (Sir Arthur after 1904) and his cousin, Charles Hardinge (Baron Hardinge of Penshurst after 1910), were both aided in their careers by Lord Salisbury. The former, a Fellow of All Souls in 1881 and an assistant secretary to Lord Salisbury four years later, rose to be Minister to Persia, Belgium, and Portugal (1900-1913) and Ambassador to Spain (1913-1919). The latter worked up in the diplomatic service to be First Secretary at the Embassy in St. Petersburg (1898-1903), then was Assistant Under Secretary and Permanent Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs (1903-1904, 1906-1910, 1916-1920), Ambassador at St. Petersburg (1904-1906), Viceroy of India (1910-1916), and Ambassador at Paris (1920-1922). Charles Hardinge, although almost unknown to many people, is one of the most significant figures in the formation of British foreign policy in the twentieth century. He was the close personal friend and most important adviser on foreign policy of King Edward VII and accompanied the King on all his foreign diplomatic tours. His post as Under Secretary was kept available for him during these trips and in later life during his service as Ambassador and Viceroy. He presents the only case in British history where an ax-Ambassador and ax-Viceroy was to be found in the position of Under Secretary. He was probably the most important single person in the formation of the Entente Cordiale in 1904 and was very influential in the formation of the understanding with Russia in 1907. His son, Captain Alexander Hardinge, married Milner's stepdaughter, Helen Mary Cecil, in 1921 and succeeded his father as Baron Hardinge of Penshurst in 1944. He was equerry and assistant private secretary to King George V (1920-1936) and private secretary and extra equerry to both Edward VIII and George VI (1936-1943). He had a son, George Edward Hardinge (born 1921), who married Janet Christian Goschen, daughter of Lieutenant Colonel F. C. C. Balfour, granddaughter of the second Viscount Goschen and of Lady Goschen, the former Lady Evelyn Gathorne-Hardy (fifth daughter of the first Earl of Cranbrook). Thus a grandchild of Milner was united with a great-grandchild of his old benefactor, Lord Goschen. (4)
Among the persons recruited from All Souls by Lord Salisbury were two future prelates of the Anglican Church. These were Cosmo Gordon Lang, Fellow for forty years, and Herbert Hensley Henson, Fellow for twenty-four years. Lang was Bishop of Stepney (1901-1908), Archbishop of York (1908-1928), and Archbishop of Canterbury (1928-1942). Henson was Canon of Westminister Abbey (1900-1912), Dean of Durham (1912-1918), and Bishop of Hereford and of Durham (1918-1939).
The Right Reverend Arthur Cayley Headlam was a Fellow of All Souls for about forty years and, in addition, was editor of the Church Quarterly Review, Regius Professor of Divinity, and Bishop of Gloucester. He is chiefly of interest to us because his younger brother, James W. Headlam-Morley (1863-1929), was a member of the Milner Group. James (Sir James in 1929) was put by the Group into the Department of Information (under John Buchan, 1917-1918), and the Foreign Office (under Milner and Curzon, 1918-1928), went to the Peace Conference in 1919, edited the first published volume of British Documents on the Origin of the War (1926), and was a mainstay of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where his portrait still hangs. His daughter, Agnes, was made Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford in 1948. This was a position strongly influenced by the Milner Group.
Francis W. Pember was used by Lord Salisbury from time to time as assistant legal adviser to the Foreign Office. He was Warden of All Souls in succession to Anson (1914-1932).
Walter Phillimore (Lord Phillimore after 1918) was admitted to All Souls with Anson in 1867. He was a lifelong friend and associate of the second Viscount Halifax (1839-1934). The latter devoted his life to the cause of church union and was for fifty-two years (1868-1919, 1934) president of the English Church Union. In this post he was succeeded in 1919 by Lord Phillimore, who had been serving as vice-president for many years and who was an intimate friend of the Halifax family. It was undoubtedly through Phillimore that the present Earl of Halifax, then simple Edward Wood, was elected to All Souls in 1903 and became an important member of the Milner Group. Phillimore was a specialist in ecclesiastical law, and it created a shock when Lord Salisbury made him a judge of the Queen's Bench in 1897, along with Edward Ridley, who had entered All Souls as a Fellow the year before Phillimore. The echoes of this shock can still be discerned in Lord Sankey's brief sketch of Phillimore in the Dictionary of National Biography. Phillimore became a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1913 and in 1918 drew up one of the two British drafts for the Covenant of the League of Nations. The other draft, known as the Cecil Draft, was attributed to Lord Robert Cecil but was largely the work of Alfred Zimmern, a member of the Milner Group.
Rowland Edmund Prothero (Lord Ernie after 1919) and his brother, George W. Prothero (Sir George after 1920), are two of the most important links between the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group. They grew up on the Isle of Wight in close contact with Queen Victoria, who was a family friend. Through the connection, the elder Prothero was asked to tutor the Duke of Bedford in 1878, a position which led to his appointment in 1899 as agent-in-chief of the Duke. In the interval he was a Fellow of All Souls for sixteen years and engaged in literary work, writing unsigned articles for the Edinburgh Review, the Church Quarterly Review and The Quarterly Review. Of the last, possibly through the influence of Lord Salisbury, he became editor for five years (1894-1899), being succeeded in the position by his brother for twenty-three years (1899-1922).
As agent of the extensive agricultural holdings of the Duke of Bedford, Prothero became familiar with agricultural problems and began to write on the subject. He ran for Parliament from Bedfordshire as a Unionist, on a platform advocating tariff reform, in 1907 and again in 1910, but in spite of his influential friends, he was not successful. He wrote of these efforts: "I was a stranger to the political world, without friends in the House of Commons. The only men prominent in public life whom I knew with any degree of real intimacy were Curzon and Milner." (5) In 1914, at Anson's death, he was elected to succeed him as one of Oxford's representatives in Parliament. Almost immediately he was named a member of Milner's Committee on Home Production of Food (1915), and the following year was on Lord Selborne's committee concerned with the same problem. At this point in his autobiography, Prothero wrote: "Milner and I were old friends. We had been undergraduates together at Balliol College.... The outside world thought him cold and reserved.... But between Milner and myself there was no barrier, mainly, I think, because we were both extremely shy men." The interim report of the Selborne Committee repeated the recommendations of the Milner Committee in December 1916. At the same time came the Cabinet crisis, and Prothero was named President of the Board of Agriculture with a seat in the new Cabinet. Several persons close to the Milner Group were put into the department, among them Sir Sothern Holland, Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Lady Evelyn Cecil, and Lord Goschen (son of Milner's old friend). Prothero retired from the cabinet and Parliament in 1919, was made a baron in the same year, and a Fellow of Balliol in 1922.
Sir George W. Prothero (1848-1922), brother of Lord Ernie, had been lecturer in history at his own college at Cambridge University and the first professor in the new Chair of Modern History at Edinburgh before he became editor of The Quarterly Review in 1899. He was editor of the Cambridge Modern History (1902-1912), Chichele Lecturer in History (1915), and director of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office and general editor of the Peace Handbooks, 155 volumes of studies preparatory to the Peace Conference (1917-1919). Besides his strictly historical works, he wrote a Memoir ofJ.R. Seeley and edited and published Seeley's posthumous Growth of British Polity. He also w rote the sketch of Lord Selborne in the Dictionary of National Biography. His own sketch in the same work was written by Algernon Cecil, nephew of Lord Salisbury, who had worked with Prothero in the Historical Section of the Foreign Office. The same writer also wrote the sketches of Arthur Balfour and Lord Salisbury in the same collective work. All three are very revealing sources for this present study.
G. W. Prothero's work on the literary remains of Seeley must have endeared him to the Milner Group, for Seeley was regarded as a precursor by the inner circle of the Group. For example, Lionel Curtis, in a letter to Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) in November 1916, wrote: "Seeley's results were necessarily limited by his lack of any knowledge at first hand either of the Dominions or of India. With the Round Table organization behind him Seeley by his own knowledge and insight might have gone further than us. If we have been able to go further than him it is not merely that we followed in his train, but also because we have so far based our study of the relations of these countries on a preliminary field-study of the countries concerned, conducted in close cooperation with people in those countries. "(6)
Matthew White Ridley (Viscount Ridley after 1900) and his younger brother, Edward Ridley (Sir Edward after 1897), were both proteges of Lord Salisbury and married into the Cecil Bloc. Matthew was a Member of Parliament (1868-1885, 1886-1900) and held the offices of Under Secretary of the Home Department (1878-1880), Financial Secretary of the Treasury in Salisbury's first government (1885-1886), and Home Secretary in Salisbury's third government (1895-1900). He was made a Privy Councillor during Salisbury's second government. His daughter, Grace, married the future third Earl of Selborne in 1910, while his son married Rosamond Guest, sister of Lady Chelmsford and future sister-in-law of Frances Lyttelton (daughter of the eighth Viscount Cobham and the former Mary Cavendish).
Edward Ridley beat out Anson for the fellowship to All Souls in 1866, but in the following year both Anson and Phillimore were admitted. Ridley and Phillimore were appointed to the Queen's Bench of the High Court of Justice in 1897 by Lord Salisbury. The former held the post for twenty years (1897-1917).
John Simon (Viscount Simon since 1940) came into the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group through All Souls. He received his first governmental task as junior counsel for Britain in the Alaska Boundary Arbitration of 1903. A Member of Parliament as a Liberal and National Liberal (except for a brief interval of four years) from the great electoral overturn of 1906 to his elevation to the upper house in 1940, he held governmental posts for a large portion of that period. He was Solicitor General (1910-1913), Attorney General (1913-1915), Home Secretary (1915-1916), Foreign Secretary (1931-1935), Home Secretary again (1935-1937), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1937-1940), and, finally, Lord Chancellor (1940-1945). He was also chairman of the Indian Statutory Commission (1927-1930).
Frederic John Napier Thesiger (Lord Chelmsford after 1905) was taken by Balfour from the London County Council in 1905 to be Governor of Queensland (1905-1909) and later Governor of New South Wales (1907-1913). In the latter post he established a contact with the inner circle of the Milner Group, which v\as useful to both parties later. He was Viceroy of India in 1916-1921 and First Lord of the Admiralty in the brief Labour government of 1924. He married Frances Guest in 1894 while still at All Souls and may have been the contact by which her sister married Matthew Ridley in 1899 and her brother married Frances Lyttelton in 1911.
The Cecil Bloc did not disappear with the death of Lord Salisbury in 1903 but was continued for a considerable period by Balfour. It did not, however, continue to grow but, on the contrary, became looser and less disciplined, for Balfour lacked the qualities of ambition and determination necessary to control or develop such a group. Accordingly, the Cecil Bloc, while still in existence as a political and social power, has largely been replaced by the Milner Croup. This Group, which began as a dependent fief of the Cecil Bloc, has since 1916 become increasingly the active portion of the Bloc and in fact its real center. Milner possessed those qualities of determination and ambition which Balfour lacked, and was willing to sacrifice all personal happiness and social life to his political goals, something which was quite unacceptable to the pleasure-loving Balfour. Moreover, Milner was intelligent enough to see that it was not possible to continue a political group organized in the casual and familiar way in which it had been done by Lord Salisbury. Milner shifted the emphasis from family connection to ideological agreement. The former had become less useful with the rise of a class society based on economic conflicts and with the extension of democracy. Salisbury was fundamentally a conservative, while Milner was not. Where Salisbury sought to build up a bloc of friends and relatives to exercise the game of politics and to maintain the Old England that they all loved, Milner was not really a conservative at all. Milner had an idea — the idea he had obtained from Toynbee and that he found also in Rhodes and in all the members of his Group. This idea had two parts: that the extension and integration of the Empire and the development of social welfare were essential to the continued existence of the British way of life; and that this British way of life was an instrument which unfolded all the best and highest capabilities of mankind. Working with this ideology derived from Toynbee and Balliol, Milner used the power and the general strategic methods of the Cecil Bloc to build up his own Group. But, realizing that conditions had changed, he put much greater emphasis on propaganda activities and on ideological unity within the Group. These were both made necessary by the extension of political democracy and the rise of economic democracy as a practical political issue. These new developments had made it impossible to be satisfied with a group held together by no more than family and social connections and animated by no more far-sighted goal than the preservation of the existing social structure.
The Cecil Bloc did not resist this change by Milner of the aims and tactics of their older leader. The times made it clear to all that methods must be changed. However, it is possible that the split which appeared within the Conservative Party in England after 1923 followed roughly the lines between the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc.
It should perhaps be pointed out that the Cecil Bloc was a social rather than a partisan group — at first, at least. Until 1890 or so it contained members of both political parties, including the leaders, Salisbury and Gladstone. The relationship between the two parties on the topmost level could be symbolized by the tragic romance between Salisbury's nephew and Gladstone's niece, ending in the death of the latter in 1875. After the split in the Liberal Party in 1886, it was the members of the Cecil Bloc who became Unionists — that is, the Lytteltons, the Wyndhams, the Cavendishes. As a result, the Cecil Bloc became increasingly a political force. Gladstone remained socially a member of it, and so did his protege, John Morley, but almost all the other members of the Bloc were Unionists or Conservatives. The chief exceptions were the four leaders of the Liberal Party after Gladstone, who were strong imperialists:
Rosebery, Asquith,
Edward Grey, and
Haldane. These four supported the Boer War, grew increasingly anti-German, supported the World War in 1914, and were close to the Milner Group politically, intellectually, and socially. (7)
Socially, the Cecil Bloc could be divided into three generations. The first (including Salisbury, Gladstone, the seventh Duke of Devonshire, the eighth Viscount Midleton, Goschen, the fourth Baron Lyttelton, the first Earl of Cranbrook, the first Duke of Westminster, the first Baron Leconfield, the tenth Earl of Wemyss, etc.) was not as "social" (in the frivolous sense) as the second. This first generation was born in the first third of the nineteenth century, went to both Oxford and Cambridge in the period 1830-1855, and died in the period 1890-1915. The second generation was born in the second third of the nineteenth century, went almost exclusively to Oxford (chiefly Balliol) in the period 1860-1880, and died in the period 1920-1930. This second generation was much more social in a spectacularly frivolous sense, much more intellectual (in the sense that they read books and talked philosophy or social problems) and centered on a social group known at the time as "The Souls." The third generation of the Cecil Bloc, consisting of persons born in the last third of the nineteenth century, went to Oxford almost exclusively (New College or Balliol) in the period 1890-1905 and began to die off about 1940. This third generation of the Cecil Bloc was dominated and organized about the Milner Group. It was very serious-minded, very political, and very secretive.
The first two generations did not regard themselves as an organized group but rather as "Society." The Bloc was symbolized in the first two generations in two exclusive dining clubs called "The Club" and "Grillion's." The membership of the two was very similar, with about forty persons in each and a total of not over sixty in both together. Both organizations had illustrious pasts.
The Club, founded in 1764, had as past members Joshua Reynolds (founder),
Samuel Johnson,
Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, Charles Fox, David Garrick, Adam Smith, Richard B. Sheridan, George Canning, Humphry Davy, Walter Scott, Lord Liverpool, Henry Hallam, Lord Brougham, T. B. Macauley, Lord John Russell, George Grote, Dean Stanley, W. E. H. Lecky, Lord Kelvin, Matthew Arnold,
T. H. Huxley, Bishop Wilberforce, Bishop Stubbs, Bishop Creighton, Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Balfour, John Morley, Richard Jebb, Lord Goschen, Lord Acton,
Lord Rosebery, Archbishop Lang, F. W. Pember (Warden of All Souls), Lord Asquith,
Edward Grey,
Lord Haldane, Hugh Cecil, John Simon, Charles Oman, Lord Tennyson,
Rudyard Kipling, Gilbert Murray, H. A. L. Fisher, John Buchan, Maurice Hankey, the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, Lord Lansdowne, Bishop Henson, Halifax, Stanley Baldwin, Austen Chamberlain, Lord Carnock, and Lord Hew art. This list includes only members up to 1925. There were, as we have said, only forty members at any one time, and at meetings (dinner every fortnight while Parliament was in session) usually only about a dozen were present.
Grillion's was very similar to The Club. Founded in 1812, it had the same members and met under the same conditions, except weekly (dinner when Parliament was in session). The following list includes the names I can find of those who were members up to 1925: Gladstone, Salisbury, Lecky, Balfour, Asquith,
Edward Grey, Haldane, Lord Bryce, Hugh Cecil, Robert Cecil,
Curzon, Neville Lyttelton, Eustace Percy, John Simon, Geoffrey Dawson, Walter Raleigh, Balfour of Burleigh, and. Gilbert Murray.(8)
The second generation of the Cecil Bloc was famous at the time that it was growing up (and political power was still in the hands of the first generation) as "The Souls," a term applied to them partly in derision and partly in envy but used by themselves later. This group, flitting about from one great country house to another or from one spectacular social event to another in the town houses of their elders, has been preserved for posterity in the autobiographical volumes of Margot Tennant Asquith and has been caricatured in the writings of
Oscar Wilde. The frivolity of this group can be seen in Margot Tennant's statement that she obtained for Milner his appointment to the chairmanship of the Board of Inland Revenue in 1892 merely by writing to Balfour and asking for it after she had a too brief romantic interlude with Milner in Egypt.
As a respected scholar of my acquaintance has said, this group did everything in a frivolous fashion, including entering the Boer War and the First World War.
One of the enduring creations of the Cecil Bloc is the Society for Psychical Research, which holds a position in the history of the Cecil Bloc similar to that held by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the Milner Group. The Society was founded in 1882 by the Balfour family and their in-laws, Lord Rayleigh and Professor Sidgwick. In the twentieth century it was dominated by those members of the Cecil Bloc who became most readily members of the Milner Group. Among these we might mention Gilbert Murray, who performed a notable series of experiments with his daughter, Mrs. Arnold J. Toynbee, in the years before 1914, and Dame Edith Lyttelton, herself a Balfour and widow of Arthur Balfour's closest friend, who was president of the Society in 1933-1934. The third generation was quite different, partly because it was dominated by Milner, one of the few completely serious members of the second generation. This third generation was serious if not profound, studious if not broadly educated, and haunted consistently by the need to act quickly to avoid impending disaster. This fear of disaster they shared with Rhodes and Milner, but they still had the basic weakness of the second generation (except Milner and a few other adopted members of that Group), namely that they got everything too easily. Political power, wealth, and social position came to this third generation as a gift from the second, without the need to struggle for what they got or to analyze the foundations of their beliefs. As a result, while awake to the impending disaster, they were not able to avoid it, but instead tinkered and tampered until the whole system blew up in their faces.
This third generation, especially the Milner Group, which formed its core, differed from its two predecessors in its realization that it formed a group. The first generation had regarded itself as "England," the second regarded itself as "Society," but the third realized it was a secret group — or at least its inner circles did. From Milner and Rhodes they got this idea of a secret group of able and determined men, but they never found a name for it, contenting themselves with calling it "the Group," or "the Band," or even "Us." (9)