Arthur Balfour

Prime minister of the United Kingdom (1902-1905)

• Born: July 25, 1848
• Birthplace: Whittingehame, East Lothian, Scotland
• Died: March 19, 1930
• Place of death: Woking, Surrey, England

As prime minister, and in many other high government offices, Balfour not only provided leadership to his country but also made noteworthy contributions to world peace and diplomacy. He sponsored the idea of a League of Nations and sponsored the Balfour Declaration, which, by endorsing Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people, sought Jewish support for the Allied cause during World War I.

Early Life

Arthur Balfour (BAHL-fuhr) was born to Lady Blanche Balfour, the daughter of the second marquess of Salisbury, and James Balfour, the descendant of an old Scottish family that had grown very wealthy from trade with India. Named Arthur, after his godfather, the duke of Wellington, Balfour could take wealth and contacts with influential people for granted as he grew up. His father, who died in 1856 of tuberculosis, was a member of Parliament. His mother’s brother, Robert Cecil, third marquess of Salisbury and later prime minister, became an important figure in Balfour’s early career.

Lady Blanche had given birth to nine children when she was widowed at the age of thirty-one. She never remarried, and she provided close and rigorous supervision to her children. Arthur, the oldest son, was to win the greatest renown, although several of the other children who survived to adulthood also had distinguished careers: Gerald was a member of Parliament for twenty years, Frank was an authority on genetics and held a chair at Cambridge University, Eleanor became the principal of Newnham College, and Eustace was a successful architect. The family was very close-knit; one sister, Alice, who like Balfour never married, devoted her later life to supervising his household. The Balfours were also devout, with a commitment to both the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

When he was ten, Balfour was sent away from home to attend a private boarding school at Hoddeston in Hertfordshire. In 1861, he went on to study at Eton, where he was an indifferent student and not robust enough to take an active part in sports. Five years later, Balfour began his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. There he developed an interest in the study of philosophy, a subject to which he considered devoting his career. He enjoyed Cambridge much more than Eton, although he was not a diligent scholar. He now began to take part in sports and games, an interest that continued to the end of his life.

In 1869, when he came of age, Balfour inherited the family estates. With wealth came responsibility, and he was often occupied with family and business affairs. His mother’s death in 1872 increased this burden. He turned to his uncle, Lord Salisbury, for guidance in these years and under his patronage began a career in politics by standing for Parliament in January, 1874. He was returned unopposed as the Conservative member for Hertford.

Life’s Work

At first, Balfour appeared no more promising in politics than he had as a student. He hesitated to speak or play an active role in the House of Commons and occupied himself with foreign travel and work on a book of philosophy. Published in 1879 as A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, the treatise was the first of several books that marked him as a shrewd but rather conventional intellectual talent.

When Salisbury became foreign secretary in 1878, he asked Balfour to become his parliamentary private secretary. This gave the young politician contacts and firsthand experience in diplomacy as he attended the Congress of Berlin. By 1880, when the Liberals under William Ewart Gladstone swept into office and forced Balfour into opposition, he was emerging as an articulate rising member of the Conservative Party. He soon became identified, along with Randolph Churchill, with an outspoken faction of Conservatives known as the “Fourth Party,” raising objections to their own party leadership as well as Gladstone’s government. When the Conservatives returned to office under Salisbury in 1885, Balfour became president of the Local Government Board. The following year he was made a member of the cabinet.

In 1887, Salisbury made his nephew chief secretary for Ireland, a challenging assignment in this period of unrest in Ireland. Balfour succeeded in removing some economic grievances in that troubled colony and had the good fortune to face an increasingly divided nationalist opposition. Nationalists distressed at his hard-line policies dubbed him “Bloody Balfour.” At home, among his fellow Conservatives, he was lauded for his vigor and skills as an administrator.

In 1891, Balfour was promoted to First Lord of the Treasury and became his party’s leader in the House of Commons. He acted as a deputy to his uncle, the prime minister, in formulating policy and was the chief Conservative legislative strategist and spokesperson. His achievements in this role were mixed; he had success with the Irish Local Government Act and some other pieces of legislation. Not a reformer, Balfour still showed foresight in such areas as transportation and urban housing, and he was ready to undertake constructive change.

Balfour was the logical choice to succeed his uncle as prime minister in 1902. The party over which he presided made his tenure in that office a rather difficult one. It was divided over such contentious issues as free trade and tariff reform, and Balfour had to work hard to keep it united. Moreover, he had no great popular following in the country at large. Nonconformists were especially upset by his Education Act of 1902, which retained government support for denominational schools operated by the Church of England. Faced with this opposition, Balfour resigned in 1905 and was defeated by the Liberals in the ensuing elections.

Balfour’s greatest contributions as prime minister came in the field of foreign policy. Coming into office in the aftermath of the Boer War (1899-1902), which had shown Great Britain to be dangerously isolated, he strengthened ties with other nations. This important reversal of British policy was marked by the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904. Moreover, he established the Committee of Imperial Defense to provide expert advice on military preparedness and responded forcefully to the German challenge in building warships. These accomplishments may not have helped him with the electorate, but they did secure his reputation in the area of foreign and defense policy and led to many future opportunities to serve his country.

Balfour’s dismay at being thrown out of office was compounded when he lost his own seat in Parliament in 1906. A safer seat was soon found for him in the City of London, and he took up the position of leader of his party in opposition. These were difficult years for Balfour, as Joseph Chamberlain and other tariff reformers often railed against his leadership. Weakened in health and spirit, he became increasingly distrustful of the burgeoning democratic currents of the age. He resigned his leadership position in 1911, although remaining as a member of Parliament.

Troubled by the dangerous drift in international affairs, Balfour helped found the Garton Foundation in 1912 to work for world peace. When World War I erupted in 1914, he became an unhesitating supporter of the government’s position. He was asked to resume membership on the Committee of Imperial Defense and in November, 1914, joined an inner cabinet known as the War Council. The following year he was made First Lord of the Admiralty in the Asquith coalition government. When David Lloyd George ousted H. H. Asquith from the new coalition in 1916, he made Balfour, by now a trusted almost nonpartisan elder statesman, his foreign secretary.

Balfour made many important contributions as minister for foreign affairs, although it is difficult to disentangle his policies from those of the very assertive prime minister whom he served. Perhaps the two contributions for which Balfour would be most remembered were his sponsorship of the idea of a League of Nations and the Balfour Declaration . This document, issued in November, 1917, sought Jewish support for the Allied cause by endorsing the idea that Palestine should become a national home for the Jewish people. It was endorsed by the Allied powers in 1920 and was later interpreted by Zionists as a commitment to make Palestine a Jewish state.

With the war over, Balfour left the Foreign Office in 1919. He remained a member of the cabinet, however, until 1922 as Lord President of the Council. He headed the British delegation to the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922, and enhanced his reputation as an astute diplomat and peacemaker there. At this conference, which achieved a substantial measure of naval disarmament, Balfour was able to cement good relations between Great Britain and the United States. He also was able to contribute to the work of the League of Nations organization in its early years, regularly representing his country there and chairing the first meeting of the League Council.

In 1922, Balfour was elevated to a peerage as the first earl of Balfour. Yet his political career did not end when he left the House of Commons. He was Lord President of the Council from 1925 until 1929, the year before his death. He was also president of the British Academy and a leader in other voluntary groups, such as the League of Nations Union.

Significance

To the British public, the tall, graceful figure of Balfour came to symbolize the aristocrat in politics. His languid manner, taking for granted that his wealth and connections should bring him to the top, fitted this image. Yet much of Balfour is difficult to typecast. His intellectual interests, for example, were serious, as the four books he wrote on philosophy attest. If he was an athlete, he did not participate in the usual aristocratic sports, but, rather, was interested in bicycling and tennis. A respected but not outstanding prime minister, Balfour had a career that was in some ways more noteworthy after he left 10, Downing Street. The Balfour Declaration and his encouragement of the League of Nations and the cause of internationalism are the monuments to this second phase of his career.

Bibliography

Dugdale, Blanche E. C. Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937. Written by his niece, this popular work glosses over many aspects of Balfour’s career.

Egremont, Max. Balfour: A Life of Arthur James Balfour. London: Collins, 1980. Based on manuscript sources but colorfully written, this is a good introduction to Balfour’s career for general readers.

Green, E. H. H. Balfour. London: Haus, 2006. Brief overview of Balfour’s life and diplomatic and political career. One of the volumes in the British Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century series.

Hudson, David R. C. The Ireland That We Made: Arthur and Gerald Balfour’s Contribution to the Origins of Modern Ireland. Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 2003. Describes Britain’s policy of constructive unionism in Ireland, a reform program instituted from 1887 through 1905 that was designed to reduce Irish support for home rule. As chief secretary for Ireland from 1887 through 1891, Balfour was one of those responsible for administering this policy.

Judd, Denis. Balfour and the British Empire. London: Macmillan, 1968. This scholarly work examines Balfour’s attitude toward the Empire and places it in the context of a broader examination of “imperial evolution” from 1874 to 1932.

Mackay, Ruddock F. Balfour: Intellectual Statesman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. A scholarly reexamination of Balfour’s career that concentrates on certain subjects on which the author has found new evidence.

Zebel, Sydney H. Balfour: A Political Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. An account of Balfour’s political career, this work is addressed to scholars and is well documented.