Archibald Primrose (7 May 1847 – 21 May 1929), the fifth Earl of Rosebery, was a British Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister from March 1894 to June 1895.
Rosebery got his start in politics during the late 1870s, when William Gladstone was looking for someone to bankroll the party back into government. When the Liberals regained power in 1881, Gladstone felt obligated to give Rosebery a role in his government. So he initially gave Rosebery the important-sounding but largely powerless role of the Under-Secretary of the Home Office, and later the only marginally more important role of the First Commissioner of Works. Eventually, Rosebery rose in standing and experience enough for Gladstone to give him the job of Foreign Secretary... just in time for Gladstone's government to fall thanks to the Liberal-Unionist split of 1886, which put them in opposition for the next six years.
During the Liberals' time in opposition, Rosebery led their faction in the House of Lords, and also got involved with London's slowly-coalescing local government. When Gladstone returned to power in 1892, Rosebery likewise returned as foreign secretary. Rosebery began advocating for an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy, largely in opposition to the rest of his party. Despite Rosebery growing increasingly distant from Gladstone over this and some other policy differences, he remained in his office until Gladstone's retirement in 1894.
Rosebery's ascension to the top job came as a shock to everyone, including both Rosebery himself, and his predecessor. The tradition back then was that the reigning monarch would decide on the new party leader on advice from their predecessor when they retired, and Gladstone had indicated to Queen Victoria that she should appoint Lord Spencer as his successor, with Gladstone's chancellor, William Harcourt, also being mentioned as a possible successor. However, Victoria completely ignored Gladstone's advice and instead appointed Rosebery as the new Prime Minister, supposedly because he was the leading Liberal who she disliked the least. Purportedly, also because she thought that he would be incompetent as Prime Minister and would quickly lose power, allowing the Marquess of Salisbury to return to the position. Needless to say, this kind of political interference by the monarch would not fly nowadays (and was pretty controversial even at the time), and it remains the second-to-last occasion where it was left entirely up to the reigning monarch who the next Prime Minister would be.note
All that being said, if Victoria really was attempting to pull a Springtime for Hitler gambit to get the Conservatives back into power, it could hardly have gone any better for her. Rosebery lasted barely a year as Prime Minister, quickly becoming seen as unpopular and ineffectual. The contrast between Gladstone, a rough-and-ready man of the people, and Rosebery, an aristocratic intellectual, was so glaring that it led to jokes that Rosebery had accidentally sat down with the Liberals on his first day in the House of Lords and had just been too proud to admit that he was with the wrong group. Rosebery continued to advocate his expansionist foreign policy, which went against the views of the majority of his party. He also clashed frequently with Harcourt, who had taken over the Commons leadership of the Liberals. It wasn't uncommon for Harcourt to push a bill through the Commons (often needing to make concessions to the Irish MPs, whose support the Liberals needed to stay in power), only for Rosebery to veto it when it reached the Lords. In turn, Harcourt refused to enact the legislation that Rosebery actually wanted to be pushed through.
Even though few expected Rosebery to last very long as PM, his downfall proved sooner and more farcical than anyone had expected. A committee meeting attended by roughly only a third of the Commons voted to reduce the salary of Secretary of War Henry Campbell-Bannerman over an issue of the army being supplied with inadequate amounts of ammunition. Back then, reducing the salary of a public official was effectively a way of easing them out and letting them say that they had left of their own accord, rather than being dismissed. Rosebery had two options open to him; the first was to simply let Campbell-Bannerman resign, and the second was to have a full Commons vote on overriding the earlier and less well-attended committee vote. Instead, Rosebery decided to treat it as a vote of no confidence in the whole government and duly resigned. Victoria, hardly believing her luck, quickly reinstated Salisbury as PM, and he in turn wasted no time in calling an election that utterly decimated the Liberals. Rosebery resigned as party leader and largely left politics the following year, though he remained nominally involved up until around the start of World War I.
With only one year under his belt as Prime Minister, most of which was taken up by internal feuding among his party rather than actually getting anything done, Rosebery has a reputation as possibly the worst Prime Minister of the 19th century, and among the country's worst Prime Ministers overall. Despite this, he was actually a highly successful race horse owner and trainer — two of his horses won the Derby during his time as PM — and helped develop the sports of Association Football and Rugby Football in his native Scotland, albeit as a private individual rather than PM. Rosebery is the last Prime Minister never to have served in the House of Commons at any point in his career, and will likely remain so, given that it's now widely accepted that a PM cannot feasibly rule from the House of Lords.
