Andrew Roberts: Salisbury

Victorian Titan

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999     Amazon.co.uk

Book Description:

Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, masterminded the campaigns, alliances, treaties and pageantries which brought the British Empire to its zenith in terms of power and prestige. Prime Minister for all but four years between 1885 and 1902, it was he who, from his Jacobean palace at Hatfield, co-ordinated the subtly interlocking policies over five continents and a quarter of the globe. A profoundly unconventional aristocrat, Lord Salisbury was witty, ironic and intellectually brilliant, but there was also a ruthless, acerbic and depressive side to his nature. In the course of a turbulent fifty-year career he won over opponents such as Disraeli and Queen Victoria, destroyed others such as Lord Randolph Churchill and Paul Kruger, brought Joseph Chamberlain and King Edward VII to heel, wrecked Gladstone’s hopes for Irish Home Rule, offered secret deals to Charles Stewart Parnell and Tsar Nicholas II, saw off Otto von Bismarck and saw through Kaiser Wilhelm II. In this comprehensive new biography, written with complete access to Salisbury’s papers at Hatfield House, Andrew Roberts explores every aspect of Lord Salisbury’s phenomenal statesmanship, but also his eccentric family, his journalism, his distinctive philosophy of Toryism, his passion for scientific experiments and above all, his extraordinary, complex, but ultimately hugely attractive character.

From the Author:

My purpose in writing this book was to resurrect Lord Salisbury both as a personality and a statesman. The historian AJP Taylor recognised that Salisbury was “a character in the same way that Samuel Johnson was a character”, but without a full-scale biography for nearly half a century, this had been forgotten. His controversial marriage for love, his superb sense of humour, his caustic journalism, his manic depression, his sensational Cabinet resignation, all had been overlaid by dry-as-dust histories which made him out, quite wrongly, to have been just yet another boring, grey-bearded 19th century politician. As well as having one of the most complex, fascinating personalities of the Victorian age, Salisbury was the statesman who masterminded the Congress of Berlin, brought the British Empire to its height, and took over from Bismarck as the central figure of Great Power diplomacy from 1890 to 1902. Had he had his arch-rival Gladstone’s political longevity, I believe he could have averted the First World War. The history of this period has for too long been dominated by Gladstone and Disraeli, yet the man who took on and beat both of them has until now been far unfairly left in the shade. In the course of a long, exciting and risk-taking political career, Salisbury worked with or fought against almost all the “greats” of the era – Queen Victoria, Cecil Rhodes, Joseph Chamberlain, Florence Nightingale, Paul Kruger, the Zulu King Cetewayo, the Mahdi, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II – and through charm, ruthlessness and occasional dissembling he got the better of them all.

About the Author:

Andrew Roberts took a first in Modern History at Cambridge. He has been a professional historian since the publication of his life of Lord Halifax , The Holy Fox, in 1991, followed by Eminent Churchillians in 1994. He contributes regularly to the Sunday Telegraph. Lives in Knightsbridge, London, and has two children. His Salisbury won the Wolfson History Prize in 2000. His books include Napoleon and Wellington in 2001, Hitler and Churchill (based on BBC-2 series) in 2003. What Might Have Been (editor) in 2004. His History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900 was published in 2006 and won the Walter Bagehot Prize.