Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery

Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery KG PC ( 7 May 1847 in London , † 21 May 1929 in Epsom , Surrey ) was a British statesman and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1894 to 1895.

Origin and early years

Archibald was the eldest son and the third of four children of Archibald Primrose, Lord Dalmeny, and his wife Catherine Lucy Wilhelmina Stanhope. His father died when he was three years old.

Primrose received his education at Eton and Oxford . After his father had died early, he achieved peer status in 1868 with the death of his grandfather Archibald John Primrose (1783–1868), 4th  Earl of Rosebery . This was one of the Peers of Scotland elected to the House of Lords , who in 1828 received a permanent seat in the House of Lords as Baron Rosebery in the Peerage of the United Kingdom . The fourth earl was an active supporter of the Reform Bill . The Scottish Earl was first bestowed in 1703 on the great-grandfather of the fourth Earl, Archibald Primrose (1664-1723), a staunch Whig and member of the Unification Commission.

The mother of the 5th Earl, Catherine Lucy Wilhelmina Stanhope, was the only daughter of Philip Henry Stanhope, 4th Earl Stanhope (1781–1855). She was therefore the sister of the British historian Philip Henry Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope (1805-1875) and a niece of Lady Hester Stanhope , a niece of William Pitt . She was a celebrated beauty, maid of honor, and bridesmaid to Queen Victoria . On December 20, 1843 she married Archibald, Lord Dalmeny (1809-1851), who was Lord of the Admiralty under Melbourne . After his death, she married Lord Harry George Vane , who later became the 4th Duke of Cleveland, in a second marriage . She died in 1901.

Marriage and family

Primrose married Hanna Rothschild in 1878 , the only daughter and heiress of Baron Mayer Amschel de Rothschild. She was the richest woman in the United Kingdom since her father's death. She owned Mentmore Towers , a large English country house in Buckinghamshire , and a fortune of more than two million pounds.

The couple had four children:

• Sybil Myra Caroline Primrose (1879–1955), painter and writer ⚭ 1903 Sir Charles Grant (one child)
• Margaret "Peggy" Etrenne Hannah Primrose (1881–1967) ⚭ 1899 Robert Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe (two children)
• Albert Edward Harry Meyer Archibald Primrose, 6th Earl of Rosebery (1882–1974) ⚭ (1) 1909-1919 (divorced) Lady Dorothy Grosvenor (two children), ⚭ (2) 1924 Eva Isabel Bruce (one child)
• Neil James Archibald Primrose (1882–1917), died of his injuries in Palestine during the First World War ⚭ 1915 Lady Victoria Stanley, daughter of Edward Stanley, 17th Earl of Derby (one child)

Hanna died of typhus in 1890 . Three years after the death of his wife, John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry , accused him of having Primrose - like Oscar Wilde - a homosexual relationship with his son. Whether this claim was correct has not yet been clarified, as has the general statement that Primrose was bisexual .

Political career

In the upper house ( House of Lords ) Rosebery sat since May 1868 however, he was only moderately active there and described it as a "gilded cage", partly because the Liberals were permanently in the minority there. Basically of a strongly paternalistic attitude, he also harbored sympathy for the British working class and had in the past launched a public campaign against the exploitation of children in the brickworks of Glasgow.

From 1878 to 1879 Rosebery was Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen . In 1879 he invited William Ewart Gladstone to run for the constituency of Midlothian , where his family and those of the Duke of Buccleuch had fought for supremacy for years. Roseberry served as his campaign manager and it brought a new American methods he 1873 during a visit to a National Convention of the Democratic Party had observed in New York. For years he had been on friendly terms with Gladstone's opponent Disraeli, who saw him as a soul mate and would have liked to see him as a conservative. However, due to his family's strong Whig tradition, Rosebery remained a liberal. Rosebery was fascinated by American election campaigns; after attending the Democratic Party's National Convention in New York in 1873 , he spoke of a great political lesson. As an election campaign manager, he began at great financial expense to incorporate his experience from the USA, to transfer some American methods and to bring them into Gladstone's election campaign.

Rosebery's innovations were groundbreaking for the previous election campaigns of the Victorian Age . In the run-up to the event, large rooms were rented for the performances; As has been known in the USA for a long time, the events were accompanied by large parades with torchlight parades, equestrian parades and final fireworks. In addition, music bands were hired, triumphal arches installed and banners hung up. To this end, the campaign was created as a media event right from the start and great care was taken to create optimal conditions for the press present for their reporting. Even if the highly media-conscious Gladstone seemed ostensibly aimed at the Scottish electorate in the constituency, the campaign was actually aimed at the nation.

His innovations were already tailored to the significant expansion of the right to vote in 1867, which Disraeli's conservatives in association with internal party liberal opponents of Gladstone had passed in the great Reform Act of 1867 and the number of eligible voters suddenly rose to around 1.4 million had increased to 2.5 million. It became apparent that a larger proportion of the working-class voters tended towards the Liberal Party. Gladstone's personal reputation, coupled with the more radical left-wing liberalism that advocated social reform, made the working class in its majority vote the liberals. According to his own later estimate, Rosebery invested a sum of approximately 50,000 pounds in the election campaign, but his biographer Robert Rhodes James later doubted the full amount of this sum.

After the liberal election victory, Gladstone Rosebery offered a post as undersecretary in the India Office. However, since he was disappointed not to have received a cabinet post, he turned down the offer. However, through the Midlothian campaign, he had also achieved national notoriety and became a leading figure of liberalism in Scotland in the eyes of political observers. In the following years he also developed into the most important representative of Scottish interests in Westminster's political establishment. It is largely due to his dedication that Gladstone created the post of Minister for Scotland in his third term .

In 1881 he was appointed Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior by Gladstone, who owed him in part the electoral success of the Liberals in 1880. After resigning from this office in 1883, he was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs in the new Gladstone Ministry in February 1886 , but resigned with Gladstone in July. In 1881 he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

He was 1892-1894 again Foreign Minister, 1894-1895 Prime Minister and in 1895 Lord Privy Seal ( Lord Privy Seal )

When Gladstone resigned in 1894, Primrose succeeded him as Prime Minister because Queen Victoria opposed the other leading liberals. His reign was not very successful. The massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1894-1896 called Gladstone on the scene, who spoke out in favor of British intervention and undermined Roseberry's position. His attempts to increase naval armament met resistance from the Liberal Party . Domestic legislative projects were brought down by the conservatively dominated House of Lords . After a vote taken by Roseberry as a vote of confidence was lost, Roseberry and his cabinet resigned on June 21, 1895, making way for his conservative successor, the Marquess of Salisbury . On October 8, he also resigned as leader of the Liberal Party; In the following years he moved more and more away from their course, because he supported the Boer War and spoke out against Home Rule for Ireland.

Next life

After saying goodbye to politics, he turned back to writing. He also became chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Rhodes Trust in 1902 , an office he held until 1917.

On July 3, 1911, he was given the hereditary titles of Earl of Midlothian , Viscount Mentmore and Baron Epsom .

Primrose's library was auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 2009 .

Quotes

• "There are two supreme pleasures in life. One is ideal, the other real. The ideal is when a man receives the seals of office from his Sovereign. The real pleasure comes when he hands them back " .

literature

• Ian Donnachie, George Hewitt: A Companion to Scottish History. From the Reformation to the Present . Batsford, London 1989, ISBN 0-7134-5739-2 , pp. 170-171.
• Leo McKinstry: Rosebery. Statesman in Turmoil . Murray, London 2005, ISBN 0-7195-5879-4 .
• Sil-Vara : English statesmen . Ullstein, Berlin 1916, pp. 169-181
• Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 23 : Refectory - Sainte-Beuve . London 1911, p. 731 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Commons : Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery in the 20th Century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• dalmeny.co.uk
• Archibald Primrose in Hansard (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Dick Leonard: Nineteenth Century Prime Ministers. Pitt to Rosebery. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2008, p. 327.
2. ^ Richard Aldous: The Lion and the Unicorn. Gladstone vs. Disraeli . Pimlico, London 2007, p. 291.
3. ^ Richard Aldous: The Lion and the Unicorn. Gladstone vs. Disraeli. Pimlico, London 2007, p. 292.
4. ^ Richard Aldous: The Lion and the Unicorn. Gladstone vs. Disraeli. Pimlico, London 2007, p. 295.
5. ^ Paul Brighton: Original Spin: Downing Street and the Press in Victorian Britain. Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2015, p. 204.
6. ↑ Gottfried Niedhart: History of England in the 19th and 20th centuries. CH Beck, Munich 1996, p. 95 ff.
7. ↑ Gottfried Niedhart: History of England in the 19th and 20th centuries. CH Beck, Munich 1996, p. 100.
8. ^ Martin Roberts: Britain, 1846-1964: The Challenge of Change. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001, p. 67.
9. ^ Dick Leonard: Nineteenth Century Prime Ministers. Pitt to Rosebery. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2008, p. 328.
10. ↑ Dick Leonard: The Great Rivalry: Gladstone and Disraeli. IB Tauris, London 2013, p. 179.
11. ^ Michael Münter: Constitutional reform in the unitary state. The policy of decentralization in Great Britain. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Erlangen 2005, p. 84 ff.
12. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed March 31, 2020 . 
13. ^ Philip Ziegler, Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships . New Haven / London: Yale University Press 2008, pp. 23 and 90f.

predecessor	Office	successor
Archibald Primrose	Earl of Rosebery 1868-1929	Albert Primrose
New title created	Earl of Midlothian 1911-1929	Albert Primrose