Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (3 February 1830—22 August 1903), the third Marquess of Salisbury, was a British Conservative politician, who had three spells as Prime Minister, starting out with a short-lived spell in 1885, then from 1886 to 1892, and finally from 1895 to his retirement in 1902.
Salisbury had started his political career in the House of Commons, and served as Secretary for India under the leadership of The Earl of Derby. Upon his father's death in 1868, he inherited the title of Marquess and moved to the House of Lords, and later had another spell as Secretary for India in the government of Benjamin Disraeli.
Disraeli's death shortly after his last government fell in 1881 created a Succession Crisis, as the Conservatives' mantra was that they were the country's rightful and natural party of government, and therefore the reigning monarch should appoint their new leader, typically on advice from their predecessor when they retired — though in fairness the opposing Liberal Party apparently held the same belief; the problem just hadn't come up for them, thanks to William Gladstone's ironclad grip on the party leadership — which naturally created a problem seeing how the Conservatives were in opposition, and Disraeli had died without designating a successor. Salisbury argued that Disraeli had led the party from the Lords. Therefore, as succeeding Lords leader, he should replace Disraeli as overall party leader. Stafford Northcote, who led the Conservatives in the House of Commons, instead argued that he should replace Disraeli, as they needed someone who could go toe-to-toe with Gladstone in the Commons. As with many political struggles in that time, it ultimately boiled down to which of the rivals would be the first to fall victim to senility — and seeing how Salisbury was twelve years younger than Northcote, he naturally had the advantage in that competition. By the time Gladstone was forced to resign as Prime Minister in 1885, after his indecisiveness led to the Siege of Khartoum ending in a massacre of British military officers and civilians, Salisbury had become the de facto Conservative leader, and took over as the new Prime Minister... for all of five months. Gladstone, who still had an overall parliamentary majority, forced a new election in which the Liberals again defeated the Conservatives, albeit while losing their majority.
Less than a year later, however, a game-changing event occurred when a big chunk of the Liberal parliamentary party broke away over the question of Irish home rule, formed a new party known as the Unionist Party, which entered into an alliance with, and later formally merged with the Conservatives (the Liberals' habit of having big chunks of their membership break off into new groups which joined up with the Tories would ultimately help to eliminate them as a serious contender for government by the 1930s). The new alliance voted out Gladstone's government and won nearly double the parliamentary seats of the Liberals in the ensuing election.
On the domestic front, things were mostly fairly quiet for Salisbury's first term as Prime Minister; while he was notoriously disdainful of commoners and ethnic minorities, and would likely have undone a lot of Gladstone's reforms if given the opportunity, the Unionists refused to let him do so, thus causing him to adopt the mantra that the best way to govern was to do as little as possible, an approach that future Conservative Prime Ministers all the way through to Stanley Baldwin would stick with. Foreign policy was where Salisbury was most active — which isn't really surprising when you consider that Britain still had an empire that needed taking care of — with the Suez Canal first becoming a major issue during his premiership, the country having to deal with the imperial ambitions of other European powers, and Salisbury massively expanding and overhauling the Royal Navy, which had slowly fallen into a sorry state following the end of The Napoleonic Wars.
The election of 1892 saw the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists lose their parliamentary majority. Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader in the Commons and Salisbury's right-hand man (and nephew), suggested that they might want to try winning over the Irish parliamentary parties with social reforms, since these parties would hold the balance of power in the new parliament. However, Salisbury maintained his dismissive attitude towards the common people, feeling they would just waste any extra money spent on them. Sure enough, the Irish parties voted to return Gladstone's Liberals to government. This return didn't last long, however, and Gladstone retired for good in 1894, being replaced by the unpopular Earl of Rosebery, whose government barely lasted a year. The Conservatives and Unionists won a crushing majority at the 1895 general election, and won only a slightly smaller majority when up for re-election in 1900.
Salisbury's third term as PM continued mostly along the lines of his second, and was marked by stability on the domestic front, and what was seen as skilful handling of foreign affairs. Just before he was re-elected for the final time, however, a conflict erupted in South Africa between the British Empire and the two Boer nations, leading to the second Boer War. Initially the conflict seemed to end in a swift and not overly costly victory for the Empire, which Salisbury capitalized on at the 1900 election. However, two years of bloody and brutal guerilla warfare led to a not-insignificant minority of the UK populace becoming disillusioned with the war and the government's handling of it. The majority viewpoint was that the Boers were a bunch of savages who deserved everything they got for daring to stand up to the might of the Empire, but as the years passed, general opinions on the war slowly soured, and it would prove an albatross for the Conservatives in the years ahead.
Between the war's conclusion (and possibly sensing that public support was slowly turning against it), his advancing years, and the death of his wife, Salisbury retired and handed over to Arthur Balfour in July 1902, before passing away himself a little over a year later.
Though Salisbury's leadership saw the Conservative Party really cement themselves as the leading force in British politics, in retrospect his disdain towards the working class is seen as having ensured that the Tories would struggle to win over that section of the populace for decades to come. His choice of Balfour as his successor is also generally now looked on as a poor one that may have been motivated somewhat by nepotism (though to be fair, Balfour had been a senior minister for close to a decade, so he was hardly unqualified) and a desire to install a leader who he knew wouldn't deviate too far from his personal beliefs and policies. All of this, combined with the increasing backlash to the Boer War, led to the Liberals enjoying 17 years at the head of government (albeit the last six of those were in a coalition with the Conservatives) after Balfour's government fell in 1905. The Liberal reforms that Salisbury had been trying to prevent, finally happened under Henry Campbell-Bannerman and then Herbert Henry Asquith.
This leaves Salisbury with the odd reputation of being a huge success in the short term because of his electoral track record, a failure in the medium term because many of his policies were eventually reversed by the Liberals, and pretty successful in the longer term thanks to the dominance his party would enjoy in UK politics from the 1920s onwards.note
