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Winner:
Wolfson Prize for History 1999
James Stern Silver Pen Award
for Non-Fiction 1999.
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Hardcover
- 949 pages (October 1999) Weidenfeld; ISBN: 0297817132
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From the Khyber Pass on India's North-West
Frontier to the Kimberley goldmines in South Africa, from
Khartoum on the Upper Nile to Hong Kong on the Chinese coast,
the destinies of the British Empire were directed for nearly
two decades by a single remarkable brain. Working from his
study at Hatfield House, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
(1830-1903), masterminded the policies and campaigns, secret
treaties and jubilee pageantries which brought the British
Empire to its zenith in terms of power and prestige.
Thrice Prime Minister between 1885 and 1902,
and four times foreign secretary over 22 years, Lord Salisbury
seemed to personify the solid, worthy, complacent Victorian
Tory statesman. But in fact he was a profoundly unconventional
aristocrat, a depressive who was forced into journalism becaused
he insisted on marrying for love. Witty, sardonic and intellectually
brilliant, he astonished contemporaries by the violence of
his speeches and opinions. Disraeli dubbed him "the master
of the flout, the jibe and the sneer". Yet in private
he was eccentrically charming and as a father he adopted the
un-Victorian policy of encouraging his children to be both
seen and heard.
In the course of a tumultous career - which
saw his 1867 shock resignation from the Cabinet, the Congress
of Berlin, the Scramble for Africa, the Jameson Raid and the
Boer War - Lord Salisbury saw off threats to his policy from
Gladstone and Disraeli, Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cecil
Rhodes and Paul Kruger, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Randolph
Churchill, Charles Stewart Parnell and Tsar Nicholas II. Had
his diplomatic policy - now misnamed "Splendid Isolation"
- been followed after his death, the Empire he championed
would not have been fatally weakened by the First World War.
At the end of his 53 year parliamentary
career, Queen Victoria even rated Lord Salisbury above Disreali
as her greatest Prime Minister, but today he is largely unknown,
partly because there has been no definitive biography. Filling
this longest and largest historiographical gap, Andrew Roberts
presents a life of the statesman, scientist, sceptical polemicist
and wit who raised the British name higher than ever before
or since.
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