Lord Salisbury(1830–1903)

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil was born at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire on 3 February 1830, into the family that had served the English crown at its highest levels since the reign of Elizabeth I; his ancestor William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had been the queen's chief minister and the architect of the Elizabethan state, and Hatfield itself had been the family seat for over two centuries. A clever, short-sighted, melancholy boy, unhappy at Eton, he came into politics through a safe family seat in 1853 and made his early name as a fierce and brilliant journalist and debater on the Conservative benches.

He rose through the high politics of the mid-Victorian age as a man known for the sharpness of his mind and the independence of his judgement, served as Secretary of State for India, and then made his reputation on the European stage as Foreign Secretary. At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, working alongside Disraeli, he helped to settle a dangerous crisis in the Balkans that had brought Russia and Britain close to war, and came home with a peace that held. When Disraeli died, the leadership of the Conservative Party and, three times over, the office of Prime Minister came to him.

He was Prime Minister in 1885, again from 1886 to 1892, and a third time from 1895 to 1902, for most of that period holding the Foreign Office in his own hands as well, an almost unmatched concentration of responsibility for the affairs of a world-spanning empire. He governed in what he himself called a policy of keeping Britain free of binding entanglements, choosing each question on its merits, and through a quarter-century of imperial expansion and great-power rivalry he kept his country out of any war among the major powers of Europe.

His skill was diplomatic rather than oratorical or popular: the patient, unhurried management of crises, the avoidance of the irrevocable step, the long view taken by a man who distrusted enthusiasm and excitement in public affairs. He was the last Prime Minister to lead a British government from the House of Lords, and he did it at the very summit of the country's wealth and reach, when a despatch from his desk at the Foreign Office could be felt on every continent.

He gave up the premiership in the summer of 1902, worn out, and died at Hatfield on 22 August 1903. The Cecil name, already carrying four centuries of service to the state through Burghley and his line, carries with him the memory of the scholar-statesman who held the highest offices of a global empire three times over and brought it through the most dangerous diplomatic decades of the age at peace.