SALISBURY, ROBERT ARTHUR TALBOT GAS COYNE-CECIL, 3RD MARQUIS OF (1830-1903), British states man, second son of James, 2nd marquis, by his first wife, Frances Mary Gascoyne, was born at Hatfield on Feb. 3, 1830. Lord Robert Cecil, as he then was, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. His health was delicate and after leaving Oxford, he spent nearly two years at sea on a voyage round the world, visiting Cape Colony, Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. On his return home he stood for parliament and on Aug. 22, 1853, was returned unopposed as member for the borough of Stamford in Lincolnshire. In the same year he was elected to a fellowship of All Souls.
He married in July 1857, the eldest daughter of Sir Edward Hall Alderson, Baron of the Court of Exchequer, a man of notable parts who at Cambridge had earned the rare distinction of being both Senior Wrangler, Senior Classic and Smith's Prizeman. His daughter inherited his abilities but there was very little money, and to add to his income Lord Robert joined the staff of the Saturday Review which had been lately founded by his brother in-law, Mr. Alexander Beresford-Hope, this being, so far as is known, his only contribution to pure journalism. Most of his writing was done for the Quarterly Review, whose articles were then exclusively anonymous. The literary quality and vigorous lucidity of his style secured him a welcome in its pages, and of the 24 numbers which appeared between the years 186o and 1866 there were only three which did not contain an article from his pen. Six of these have since been republished in volume form —three of them biographical essays on Pitt and Castlereagh and three dealing with foreign questions. These were uncompromis ingly denunciatory of Lord John Russell's policy and to the study required for an effective presentation of his case may probably be traced his first knowledge of and interest in foreign affairs.
defeated over Mr. Gladstone's Reform bill in 1866, it was a foregone conclusion that he should be among those invited to join Lord Derby's cabinet. His eldest brother had died in 1865 and it was as Lord Cranborne that, in July 1866, he took office as secretary of State for India.
He only held it for seven months. The story of that ministry is well known. In the summer of 1866 the Tory party, assisted by a secession of anti-democratic Liberals, defeated Mr. Glad stone's Reform bill as tending dangerously in the direction of household suffrage. In the summer of 1867, the same party passed a Reform bill which established household suffrage. Lord Cranborne, with two other members of the Cabinet, Lord Carnar von and General Peel, resigned on Feb. 9, two days before the bill's introduction. The breach was embittered by the tactics which the two leaders employed towards their junior colleagues. They kept them in the dark till within a week or two of the bill's production ; offered reassurance in the shape of counter-checks and limitations which were changed with every meeting of the cabinet —and were in fact all abandoned in the course of the bill's pas sage through parliament—and allowed them no opportunity for considered argument. Their belief that there had been a deliberate attempt to hustle them into a consent which it was known that they would not have given freely, estranged them personally from Disraeli for many years afterwards. When the parliamentary fight was over Lord Cranborne accepted the constitutional change as an accomplished fact which it behoved every good citizen to make the best of, and it was the offence against public morality of which he held his party and its leaders to have been guilty that became the theme of an article called "The Conservative Surrender" which appeared that October in the Quarterly Review. Its quality and its easily divined authorship procured it a sensa tional reception. Seven editions of the number which„contained it had to be issued in order to meet the demand for it.