Balfour, Arthur James, 1st earl of

Balfour, Arthur James, 1st earl of (1848–1930). Prime minister. Essentially a mid-Victorian, Arthur Balfour seems miscast as a 20th-cent. prime minister. He was the last representative of the traditional landed class to rise to the top and achieved it largely through the patronage of the 3rd marquis of Salisbury. Naturally fitted for life in a rural vicarage or an Oxford college, Balfour did in fact produce an original work, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879), which his critics thought summed up his approach to politics admirably.

Balfour grew up on the family estate at Whittingehame in the Scottish borders; his father had been a Tory MP and his mother was a sister of Robert Cecil, the future Lord Salisbury. Though a member of the Souls (a cross-party group of gifted young politicians), the young Balfour remained a solitary, intellectual figure, especially after the death in 1875 of his intended wife, May Lyttelton. He never married. Having no particular purpose in life, he decided to enter politics, and from 1874 to 1885 represented Hertford, the Cecil family's pocket borough. A poor speaker, Balfour underlined his rather detached position by involvement with Lord Randolph Churchill's ‘Fourth Party’.

However, around 1885–6 Balfour's career took off. He left the security of Hertford and, despite his distaste for mixing with the electorate, contested a new, popular constituency, East Manchester, which he held until 1906. Acting as, in effect, his uncle's secretary, he entered upon a lengthy apprenticeship for the prime ministership. He served briefly as president of the Local Government Board (1885) and as secretary of state for Scotland (1886), but really made his reputation as chief secretary for Ireland (1887–91). In that role Balfour adopted a twofold strategy. First he ruthlessly suppressed rural violence, earning thereby the epithet ‘Bloody Balfour’. Second, he attempted to conciliate nationalist opinion by policies of social interventionism, including the sale of land to tenant farmers on easy terms, and investment in light railways and seed potatoes.

By promoting his nephew as leader of the House in 1891–2 and 1895–1902, Salisbury placed him in line for succession as prime minister in the latter year. Unhappily, Salisbury also bequeathed to Balfour the accumulated problems of his own prolonged reign. In particular, the financial cost of the South African War led Joseph Chamberlain to take up the cause of tariff reform. Though Balfour cleverly manœuvred Chamberlain into resigning from the cabinet, this only led him to launch a campaign from 1903 onwards which largely captured the party for protectionism. Balfour struggled to maintain party unity by offering a compromise acceptable to Tory free traders and protectionists. This meant adopting ‘retaliation’, in effect to use the threat of tariffs to force other states to reduce their barriers against British goods. However, Balfour's clever dialectics merely convinced colleagues that he did not care very much about the issue, and earned him the contempt of both sides. Free traders felt he had failed to support them in their constituencies, while the protectionists blamed his ambiguous approach for losing the 1906 election. None the less, although immersed in this controversy, Balfour's government did take several important initiatives including the passage of the 1902 Education Act, the Anglo-French Entente of 1904, and the establishment of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws.

After 1906 the parliamentary party became predominantly protectionist in sympathy and Balfour exercised little effective leadership. In 1909 he made no attempt to stop the Tory majority in the Lords from rejecting Lloyd George's budget. This proved to be a serious error. It resulted in Balfour having to lead his party through two unsuccessful elections in 1910, and as a result 1911 saw the development of a ‘Balfour Must Go’ campaign. He resigned—the first in a long line of modern Tory leaders to fall victim to their own backbenchers.

Yet a remarkably long career as a respected elder statesman still awaited Balfour. From the outbreak of war in 1914 he became an unofficial adviser to the Liberal government, and not surprisingly, Asquith appointed him 1st lord of the Admiralty in the coalition of May 1915. Subsequently he served Lloyd George as foreign secretary (1916–19) in which capacity he produced the famous Balfour declaration committing the government to the establishment of a national homeland in Palestine for the Jews. His last role was as lord president of the council under Lloyd George (1919–22) and under Baldwin (1925–9).

Martin Pugh

Bibliography

Zebel, S. H. , Balfour (Cambridge, 1973).