Private lives

Sir Philip Magnus

The Later Cecils Kenneth Rose (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £6.50)

Mr Kenneth Rose's elegant and charming account of the seven children (five sons and two daughters) of Queen Victoria's last Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, will enhance the reputation earned already by his study of the great Lord Curzon. An average of thirty-eight pages is devoted to each of these later Cecils, and these sparkling character sketches are prefaced by brief essays on the history of the family, Salisbury himself, and childhood at Hatfield House.

The Cecils were an extraordinarily self-sufficient family group; but the author quotes approvingly a sharp retort by Lloyd George to a question about the place which Arthur Balfour would have in history: "He will be just like the scent on a pocket handkerchief." Mr Rose suggests that Balfour's Cecil cousins "cannot justly claim a more resounding epitaph." If they failed, however, to influence history, they impressed and amused their contemporaries by tracing a series of vivid and sometimes eccentric patterns of patrician life, which have been lucidly and sympathetically unravelled in this intensely interesting book.

The Cecils owed much to the influence radiated by the Prime Minister's wife who Sprang from the professional middle class. Born Georgina Alderson, she infused vitality and vehemence into a somewhat effete tradition; and overcame successfully her husband's Pathological shyness and dislike of meeting People. Hatfield under her masterful rule became boundlessly hospitable, but the family made no secret of its strong preference, which She shared, for its own company over that of all Others.

The Cecil children continued to live mostly at Hatfield even after they married, and those who never married were encouraged to treat that Place as their permanent home. It was of course, as Lady Edward Cecil (afterwards Lady Milner) wrote, a vast house, "and we each had our own valets and maids, and those with children had their own nurses and nursery maids. Still, it was no small triumph on Lord and Lady Salisbury's part to be able to keep all their sons and daughters at home and happy; and to have their married daugher, Lady Selborne, as much at home as she was in her own place."

Arthur Balfour, Salisbury's nephew and successor as Prime Minister, and Arthur's Younger brother, Gerald, who sat also at one time in his uncle's Cabinet, were treated as members of the family. They were constantly at Hatfield where Arthur Balfour's amateur and woolly philosophical speculations were seldom if ever discussed. Positive and confident, the Cecils' minds were quick and their jokes were first-class. They were brilliant at scoring off oPPonents. But because they all thought alike on fundamentals it seemed pointless to debate the foundations of belief.

When Salisbury "sometimes heard it urged against the truth of some Christian doctrine that it was morally unsatisfactory or rationally incomprehensible, his only comment would be: As if that had anything to do with it' ". The entire family were convinced that in the Anglican Church they possessed the key to all essentials. Humbly accepting the Christian mysteries without qualification or doubt, they always started the day with prayers and regarded a weekly Communion as a necessity of life. That absolute certainty provided the Cecils with a secure bastion against adversity, grief and pain, and with an impregnable inner serenity.

It seems possible that Hugh Cecil, Lord Quickswood (nicknamed "Linky") may be Mr Rose's favourite. A superb orator as well as a high Anglican and a high Tory, he seemed intent upon going to the extreme length of opinions which he held. He gave great offence, for example, by leading a group of Tory MPs in lib-Ming-down the Prime Minister, Asquith, during a debate in the Commons on the Parliament Bill. He conveyed to the King the fantastic advice that Asquith should be dismissed as a traitor to the Constitution and that Rosebery should be asked to take his place; and that the royal assent should be withheld from the Parliament and Irish Home Rule Bills.

At the age of forty-six in 1915 Hugh Cecil joined the Royal Flying Corps and was the first member of Parliament to be awarded a pilot's .certificate. But although eager to undertake combat duties, he was posted to Hugh Trenchard's staff. Regarding himself always as a member of a dedicated band of brothers, he made full allowance for those who felt differently and warmly defended, for example, the extremely unpopular cause of conscientious objectors to conscription.

Despite a lifelong prejudice against schoolmasters which he never attempted to hide, Hugh Cecil served happily as Provost of Eton. And although, like all members of his family, he fussed a great deal about his health, he survived until 1956 when he died, aged eighty-eight, with a jest on his lips in an unlovely villa at Bournemouth.

The best loved of the later Cecils was the fourth Marquess, "Jem", whose "goodness" was praised by all his family. He had a passion for part-time soldiering, but he joined his uncle, Arthur Balfour's cabinet as Lord Privy Seal, after serving with distinction in the Boer War. He and Lady Salisbury were very closely concerned indeed in the great controversy between Curzon and Kitchener over the control of the Indian Army.

On the outbreak of World War One, Salisbury was gazetted a major-general and given command of a division of territorials; but he believed with characteristic modesty that he had been promoted far beyond his capacity. His wife, Alice, observed gaily that "Jem is dreadfully like a general — except that he does not yet swear," When Bonar Law's health collapsed in 1923, Salisbury recommended Curzon in preference to Baldwin as his successor. He distrusted Baldwin's background and was shocked by his action in subsidising the coal industry as the price of settling a miners' strike. "You and I," he wrote privately to Baldwin, "do not belong to the same school of Conservatism."

Every member of this famous and fortunate family was strongly individualistic; they all enjoyed ample light, air and space in which to develop their personalities, characters and minor idiosyncrasies to the full. There was Robert, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, a tremendous supporter of the League of Nations, who died as recently as 1958, aged ninety-four. He resented the commercial middle class and some of his more thoughtless private gibes appear rather supercilious and disagreeable.

All seven of the later Cecils are brought vividly to life by Mr Kenneth Rose. Their values in the last analysis differed greatly from those of their contemporaries, and they cared less, for example, about general elections than they did about the last trump and the immortality of the soul. "Ultimately this unfitted them for the shifts and manoeuvres of political life. The nightingale, an Oxford scholar once declared, wins no prizes at the poultry show".

Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft has written, among other books, biographies of Gladstone and King Edward the Seventh.