IEL, 1ST MARQUESS (1859-1925), English statesman, eldest son of the 4th baron Scarsdale, rector of Kedleston, Derbyshire, was born on Jan. 11, 18J9, and was educated at Eton and Balliol college, Oxford. At Oxford he was president of the Union (188o), and was elected a fellow of All Souls college in 1883. He became assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury in 1885, and in 1886 entered parliament as member for the Southport division. He was appointed under-secretary for India in 1891-1892 and for foreign affairs in 1895-1898. As under-secretary he created the impression that his career might rise to any height. Meantime he had travelled in Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan, the Pamirs, Siam, Indo-China and Korea, and published three important books : Russia in Central Asia (1889), Persia and the Persian Question (1892) and Problems of the Far East (1894). In 1895 he married Mary Victoria Leiter (d. 1906), daughter of a Chicago millionaire.
In Jan. 1899 he was appointed governor-general of India. On his appointment he chose an Irish peerage, which would leave him free to re-enter the House of Commons on his return. Reaching India shortly after the suppression of the frontier risings of he paid special attention to the independent tribes of the north-west frontier, inaugurated a new province called the North West Frontier province, and carried out a policy of con ciliation mingled with firmness of control. The only trouble on this frontier during the period of his administration was the Mahsud Waziri campaign of 1901. He exerted himself to en courage British trade in Persia, paying a visit to the Persian gulf in 1903 ; while on the north-east frontier he anticipated a possible Russian advance by the Tibet mission of 1903, which rendered necessary the employment of military force for the protection of the British envoys. The mission, which had the ostensible support of China as suzerain of Tibet, penetrated to Lhasa, where a treaty was signed in Sept. 1904. Curzon appointed a number of commissions to inquire into Indian education, irriga tion, police and other branches of administration, and he placed on a stable basis the financial relations between the provinces and the Government of India. He established the Imperial Cadet corps, settled the question of Berar with the nizam of Hyderabad, reduced the salt tax, and gave relief to the smaller income-tax payers. He created the new department of commerce and in dustry. In Jan. 1903 he presided at the durbar which was held at Delhi in honour of the coronation of King Edward VII. On the expiration of the customary five years of office, Lord Curzon was reappointed governor-general and was thus able to supervise the execution of the reforms based on the exhaustive inquiries made during his first term. Of these the partition of Bengal, not actually carried out until after he had left India, roused bitter opposition, and was practically reversed in 1911. A difference of opinion with the commander-in-chief, Lord Kitch ener, regarding the position of the military member of council in India, led to a controversy in which Lord Curzon was not supported by the home government. He resigned (1905) and returned to England. After his return he became warden of the Cinque Ports. In 1906 Lady Curzon died of heart failure. Curzon succeeded Goschen in 1907 as chancellor of the University of Oxford. He took his duties very seriously, and inaugurated several important changes in the constitution of the university. He now gave up the idea of returning to the House of Commons, and took his seat in the House of Lords as an Irish representative peer.
Lord Curzon received an earldom, along with the viscountcy of Scarsdale and the barony of Ravensdale, as a coronation honour in 1911. He was a strong opponent of the Parliament bill. Never theless, when the crisis came, he stood by Lord Lansdowne in persuading the bulk of the Conservative peers to abstain from voting, and so to permit the bill to pass and avoid a constitutional crisis.
During the vehement party conflicts of the years before the World War he was the chief lieutenant of Lord Lansdowne in the Lords. But much of his time and attention was given to the affairs of Oxford university. He had, moreover, a scholarly love for antiquities, and bought and preserved from further ruin the ancient castles of Tattershall in Lincolnshire and Bodiam in Sussex, and eventually presented them to the nation.
He joined Asquith's Coalition Cabinet in the summer of 1915, as lord privy seal; he introduced the bill constituting the new Ministry of Munitions, and took charge in the Lords of the Muni tions of War bill. He became president of the Air Board in May 1916 and in July became a permanent member of the War Com mittee of the cabinet. When Lloyd George formed his ministry in December, Lansdowne and Crewe—the two leaders of parties in the Lords—both retired from office, and Curzon became the leader of the House with the office of lord president. He was also one of the four ministers who constituted the war cabinet, and were charged with the permanent daily conduct of the war. After the Paris conference he took over the Foreign Office from A. J. Bal four, retaining his leadership of the party in the House of Lords.
His lifelong study of foreign politics, and his first hand knowl edge of Asiatic problems fitted him admirably for the foreign office. But foreign affairs in the years immediately following the war were still dominated by the prime minister and the Supreme Council ; and it was at meetings of the latter, which Lloyd George attended—at Paris, San Remo, Spa, Lympne and London—that a settlement, or at least a temporary salve, was found for recurrent difficulties. Lord Curzon's reputation was a rather formidable one. He had the grand manner, and none but his few intimates knew the witty, friendly and even modest personality behind the façade. His autocratic method in India and the conflict with Lord Kitchener there led people to expect that he would be a masterful foreign secretary. But to the general surprise he accepted the position imposed by Lloyd George's assumption of the main work of diplomacy, and never showed any resentment. It was not until after the fall of the coalition (Oct. 192 2) that Curzon had the full powers associated with the position of foreign secretary. He retained office under Bonar Law and Baldwin until During this period he had first to straighten out British relations with the Nationalist Turks, who, disregarding the Treaty of Sevres, had driven the Greeks out of Thrace and Asia Minor by force of arms. In the winter of 1922-3 he presided over a European con ference at Lausanne, where he employed all his resources of knowledge, skill, patience and courtesy in the vain endeavour to win Turkish consent to a satisfactory settlement. Ultimately Turkey was allowed to retain all she had regained. Relations with Russia also presented great difficulties. By remonstrances in the spring and summer of 1923, he obtained from the Russian Government the suspension of anti-British action and propaganda, and the removal of their incriminated officials at Kabul and Teheran.
But his principal preoccupation was the relations of England, France and Germany. Poincare, the French prime minister, in spite of serious British protests, embarked in the winter of 1922-23 on the Ruhr expedition to exact reparations from Germany; and he continued and intensified the pressure throughout the year, accompanying it with the policy of encouraging Separatist move ments in the Rhineland. Curzon, who had begun by merely dis sociating Britain from French action, gradually took up a position of decided antagonism ; and finally in August issued a note of severe condemnation, asserting the total illegality of the French movement. It is fair to say that this note was drafted in the prime minister's department, and that the most that can be alleged against the foreign office is that they did not modify its terms so as to make it more acceptable. In any case the re monstrance merely exacerbated the situation. Meanwhile Curzon had encouraged Germany to make, in regard to reparation, offers of her own, which eventually became sufficient to afford a basis for negotiation. Before he left office he had secured the consent of France and Belgium to an advisory committee of experts (in which the United States had decided to co-operate) to be appointed by the Reparations Commission. This developed under Ramsay Mac Donald into the Dawes committee, from whose report dated the improvement of European relations.
Curzon had two serious disappointments in his last years, both of which he bore with dignity. The first of these was when, on Bonar Law's resignation in May 1923, Baldwin was chosen prime minister, mainly because it was only in the House of Corn mons that the real opposition, the Labour party, could be en countered. The other was when Baldwin formed his second cabinet in the autumn of 1924, and passed over Curzon's claims to return to the Foreign Office in favour of Austen Chamberlain. On the first occasion, Lord Curzon consented to take the chair at the conservative party meeting which elected Baldwin to the leader ship; on the second, he accepted the presidency of the council, retaining, of course, the leadership in the Lords.
The first Lady Curzon, by whom he had three daughters, died in 1906, and in 1917 he married, as his second wife, Grace Elvina, widow of Alfred Duggan, of Buenos Aires, and daughter of J. Munroe Hinds, United States consul, Rio, Brazil. He succeeded to the barony of Scarsdale on his father's death in 1916 and became a K.G. in the same year. He was created a marquess on the king's birthday in 1921. In 1925 he received the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society.
Curzon's life was one of unremitting industry. He followed a strict regime, was always working and always writing. In spite of a serious weakness, curvature of the spine, which he de veloped in his early days at Oxford, he took violent physical exercise, and during his eastern travels, rode many hundreds of of miles. He had forced himself by sheer will-power, to do day by day more than a strong man's work; and in the early spring of 1925, his health suddenly broke down, and after a fortnight's illness he died in London on March 20. As he left no son, the marquessate and earldom became extinct ; the viscountcy and barony of Scarsdale passed, with Kedleston, to his nephew; and his eldest daughter, Lady Irene Curzon, inherited the barony of Ravensdale.
His British Government in India (2 vols.), on the proofs of which he was engaged during his last illness, appeared in 1925. To his later years also belongs the Tales of Travel (1923) .
The official Life of Lord Curzon, in three volumes, by Lord Ronald shay, appeared in 1928.