Salisbury: Victorian Titan [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

It seems incredible in view of the plethora of studies on Gladstone and Disraeli that it's been half a century since any historian has made a full-scale re-evaluation of the life of Robert Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury, three-times Prime Minister and architect of Queen Victoria's glittering Empire.

And yet he was a man arguably of greater intellect than either of these two other late Victorian "giants". Disraeli wrote rather affected, stylized novels; Gladstone turned out unreadable religious tracts. Salisbury, on the other hand, produced stimulating and pithy articles in the Saturday and Quarterly Reviews and delivered parliamentary speeches at least as memorable as those of the other two statesmen.

But few historians have really come to grips with Salisbury in recent times. One had to look into Barbara Tuchman's epic "The Proud Tower" to find a chapter that did justice to the colorful, quirky patrician figure who performed sometimes dangerous chemical experiments in his spare time, was one of the first to introduce electricity into his home, rode around on an enormous tricycle and who was always ready to chat to strangers, even lunatics.

Perhaps historians have been too ready to downgrade Salisbury's standing because of his inherent conservatism in the domestic field, his endeavors to preserve the status quo. And as to his being a main architect of Empire, this all-too-readily clashes with the modern, probably justified aversion to that theme.

This book was commissioned by the present Marquess of Salisbury. It says a lot about the open-mindedness of the Cecil family that historian Andrew Roberts was given the task. Anyone who has read his wonderfully debunking "Eminent Churchillians" knows Roberts as an historian of the utmost integrity, incapable of pulling punches. And he pulls none in his biography of Salisbury, whom he paints on a broad canvass, "warts and all". But Roberts's admiration and affection for his subject is never in doubt. The result is a big book about a very big statesman by a young, big, historian.

Roberts records Salisbury's many contradictions. He supported "the right of a minority of Americans to secede from a Union, but not a majority of Irishmen." He opposed socialism as mere confiscation, but upheld the actions of his ancestor, the First Earl, who had confiscated much of Ulster's land between 1607 and 1609, then selling it to City and Scottish businessmen.

He wrote eloquently against intervention in other countries' domestic affairs. "The Assemblies that meet at Westminster have no jurisdiction over the affairs of other nations. Neither they nor the Executive, except in plain defiance of international law, can interfere with the brigandage of Italy, or the persecutions in Spain, or the teachings of the schools in Schleswig-Holstein. What is said in either House about them is simply impertinence ... It is not a dignified position for a Great Power to occupy, to be pointed out as the busybody of Christendom." And, "there is no practice which the experience of nations more uniformly condemns, and none which governments more consistently pursue."

Indeed, his Governments annually waged colonial wars in Asia and Africa, adding 2.5 million square miles and 44 million people to the Empire. His war against the Boers was particularly shameful: he claimed that Britain had sovereignty over the Transvaal, although the British Government had ceded this in the 1884 Pretoria Convention. (Roberts grants that Salisbury was `on exceedingly tricky ground legally'.) As Salisbury admitted, "If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other peoples, the British Empire would never have been made."