Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

"He has little foreign or eastern knowledge, and little craft; he is rough of tongue in public debate, but a great gentleman in private society; he is very remarkably clever, of unsure judgment, but is above anything mean; has no Disraelite prejudices; keeps a conscience, and has plenty of manhood and character. In a word the appointment of Lord Salisbury to Constantinople is the best thing the Government have yet done in the eastern question."

"[H]e never sees a voter—especially a Liberal voter—added to a constituency that he does not think he is going to have his pocket picked or that he is going to be robbed of some darling privilege. ... Lord Salisbury has nothing of the masculine confidence in the fibre of English people which distinguished the councils of Elizabeth; his statesmanship belongs to a later period and is founded upon the model of the Stuart type. His statecraft is that of Laud and his temper that of Strafford."

"After dinner I had a long conversation with Lord Salisbury on the subject of Ireland. His mind seemed full of "a put-your-foot-down policy." I asked him to remember that such policy must mean force, that the House of Commons could do nothing by legislation to carry such policy into effect, that 85 Irish members would have to be suspended before he carried one line of a Crimes Act, and that the English Radicals would certainly resent such suspension. Lord S. seemed to doubt this, and said, I thought somewhat meaninglessly, "No doubt the blow will have to be struck, and if so, the sooner it is struck the better." I asked what he meant by "the blow," and when it was to be struck. The reply was, "Oh, both in the House and out of it." "That means civil war," I said. "I think not," he replied, "but if it does, I cannot help it. We must not desert the loyal people of Ulster.""

"Lord Salisbury was a counsellor whose honour was above reproach. Britain had been peculiarly fortunate in securing the services of such men for her governors, and nothing gave greater confidence in the future of her people than that. Lord Salisbury had won the reputation of a great statesman in an age of great statesmen. A generation which knew Gladstone, Bismarck, Disraeli and Gambetta ranked him also amongst its giants. He had rendered the greatest service a ruler could give to his race, for it might be said of him that on more than one occasion he alone had preserved the peace of the world. They all recollected how, when they were on the brink of war with the United States of America, the tranquil dignity of Lord Salisbury's despatch and his wise retreat from a false position saved us from that terrible catastrophe. When later on we had trouble with France, and the order of apoplectic patriots in this country were engaged in lashing themselves and their fellow-countrymen into an unreasoning frenzy which would have made war inevitable, Lord Salisbury's calmness was unmoved, and he never uttered a word which could have stung France into the folly and wickedness of retaliation. When the last years of the 19th century were drenched in British blood it was not Lord Salisbury who was mainly responsible for that tragedy. He had passed away, and with him seemed to have vanished the potency of the great political combination which placed him in power and the dominance of which in the counsels of the nation his great sagacity and stately character so long maintained."

"Gladstone, looking at Ireland from a European point of view, had decided that Ireland should be free as were Italy and Bulgaria. Salisbury, looking at Ireland from another European point of view, had said that it was like the problem of Prussia and Poland. Gladstone, that is to say, was a self-determinationist, Salisbury the opposite. Salisbury's was the Tory point of view, and he was remembered by older Conservatives as the very best type of unsentimental, common-sense statesman."

"During the fourteen years that he was the undisputed ruler of England and her Empire, he must have been one of the most powerful men in the world."

"Salisbury's conservatism did not involve him in romantic, irrational thought, for he is a paradigm example of that curiously neglected strand of English Conservative thought—Empirical Conservatism."

"The problem that was the most important and fundamental of those considered by Salisbury in his writings was the problem of political change. In the case of many Conservatives one is left with the feeling that their reluctance to envisage change is grounded in the last resort in a sentimental regard for antique ceremonial and established political forms and social ways... Yet no such sentiment inspired Salisbury's conservatism. If he wished to preserve old political institutions, it was because he thought on rational grounds that they were better than anything that could be put in their place. It is true that he had an emotional fear of the mob and of the crudities of democratic politics. But he also disliked the traditional aristocracy...and he showed very little attachment and considerable rebellion against the ancient as such."

"He hoped that a publicly declared position of complete rigidity would stem the fatalism of the Conservatives and Whigs and would also moderate the hopes of the Radicals. But when the pressure for change became so great that the attempt at complete blockage was no longer realistic, he altered his tactics and tried to weaken its force by agreeing selectively to some of the demands for reform. And if this more limited policy failed he showed an unhesitating resilience and a willingness to work in the new situations created by previous failures. Most striking of all are the terms in which he chose to state his policies and the contrast between the Conservatism of a Burke which stood by ancient institutions as the expression of a divine will and that of Salisbury which recognised that stability as well as change had to be justified continually in terms of the social benefits they were likely to bring; between a Conservatism that regarded the State as an "organism" and one which likened it to a "joint-stock company"."

"He was a man, Sir, who all through his career was the consistent and the vehement opponent of every extension of the liberties of the Irish people."

"As Kipling predicted, all the pomp of her imperial yesterday "is one with Nineveh and Tyre". His countrymen can, however, take solace from the knowledge that in Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the great Marquess of Salisbury, they had a leader who brought Britain to a pitch of greatness never seen before or since."

"Salisbury was animated by the knowledge that it is easier to lose good things than to create them, and that the task of politics is to understand an inheritance of laws and institutions, and to protect it from unnecessary experiment. That vision of politics is perhaps peculiar to the English-speaking world. And it comes to us precisely from our great tradition of political amateurism. It is ambition and the lust for power that inspires people to march to the drum of progress. The person who acquires political power by the accident of birth, who has nothing to gain from its exercise in the way of money, status or recognition, and who regards the business of government as the wise disposition of inherited goods, is a great force for stability. If an explanation is needed of the peace that prevailed in England, when the whole of Europe was eager for revolution and war, then it is to be found in people like Lord Salisbury."

"He took over the Foreign Office in January 1887... Salisbury quickly restored Britain's prestige, earning the grudging respect even of Bismarck, who found him a wily and elusive negotiator."

"Calm, sardonic, and pessimistic, Salisbury in many ways matched the spirit of the times. He did not, like Gladstone, assert the importance of moral principle in international life. His objective, in an increasingly dangerous world, was to protect essential British interests (the defence of the Raj against Russian incursions and the protection of the sea lanes to India through the Suez Canal and through the longer route via South Africa across the Indian Ocean), but to do so by preserving the peace and thus minimizing expenditure in the cause of domestic stability. To this difficult task Salisbury brought two great diplomatic skills. He clearly saw the interconnections between imperial issues and shifts in the European power game; and he showed a remarkable aptitude for isolating whichever foreign power happened, at any moment, to be Britain's principal enemy."

"Into the 'progressive' strain of modern Conservatism he simply will not fit."

"[H]e had small taste for theorising, and did not set out to be a political thinker in any large or systematic sense. Yet his fundamental feelings and beliefs, if they were never consciously organised into a political philosophy, were necessarily prime determinants of his political action. Moreover, they represent very well an important strain of Conservative thought. It is not, despite large elements in common and a virtual identity of practical outcome, typical Toryism: Salisbury was too utilitarian, too lacking in reverence for authority, prescription, and tradition, too cynical and pessimistic perhaps, for that. It is an intellectual and sophisticated Toryism, which employs an apparatus of close empirical reasoning to support the conclusions at which it is programmed by instinctive predilection to arrive. It is, or desires to be, a clear, hard, logical creed, realistic and sceptical, seeking an argumentative basis for resistance to radical change not in the sentimental or mystical idealisation but in the rational justification of the existing order. It is, in short, Toryism for the clever man."

"Salisbury's ideas on international society and politics were just as much influenced as his views on internal questions by his pessimism about human nature and his overriding desire for stability and security. He started from the observation that international relations were something like a Hobbesian state of nature, the nations existing in a condition of virtual anarchy, without a common law. It was this that made it ridiculous and dangerous to follow what he lampooned as "the preaching school of politicians" in wishing to direct the country's foreign policy according to the mild and precise morality that was properly applicable to the conduct of individuals... So-called international law helped to mitigate disputes, but it could not stop aggression... A nation had to look after itself: its policy had to be egoistical, and the statesmen who conducted that policy held a trust to act accordingly, even if this meant pursuing in the interest of the state a course of selfishness which their principles would preclude in private life. Salisbury saw that the central factor in international politics was power, and expressed his vivid contempt for the type of thinking about external relations common among his political opponents, which, lulled by years of apparent insular security, had become so abstract and moralistic that it was doubtful whether it could grapple with the hard problems involved in maintaining England's position in an era when her relative physical force in the world was declining."

"He was a first-rate writer. His letters and dispatches are still, after half a century, a delight to read – no one could say the same of Peel or even of Gladstone. His political journalism is as fresh as when it was written. His essay on the Polish question, for instance, written in 1863, is the most sensible thing ever written on Poland and Russia."

"There is nothing in the history of our foreign policy to compare with the prolonged and patient way in which Salisbury solved the difficulties of the British position in Egypt, isolating Egypt first from one country and then another, and finally staging the open challenge to France at Fashoda in 1898. Indeed, I would say that Salisbury laid down the lines on which British foreign policy was to develop for many years after his death: he saw that so long as we were quarrelling with France and Russia all over the world...we were dependent on German favour, and he was determined to escape this favour... At the very basis of his thoughts was the fact that has been brought home to us by two great wars: if England and Russia, the two Great Powers on the edge of Europe, fall out, they will have Europe, in the shape of Germany, on their backs. That is why Salisbury, greatest of our foreign secretaries, was the greatest advocate of Anglo-Russian cooperation."

"I remember there was a very well-known speech of Salisbury's—the great Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister for thirteen years, a remarkable man, I often look back at his work—saying ‘You must never rely on the rightness of your cause. It isn't enough; it will not see you through. You are governing a country; trust only in your own defence’. And of course it was very very good advice."

"Lord Salisbury was a student, a man of intellectual, religious and scientific interests, an aristocrat by upbringing and by nature, averse from all methods of réclame. He stood for the old traditions of the British political nobles, bearing the load of public care with a sense of inherited responsibility. He had indeed accepted without reserve the new democratic conditions of political power, although in earlier years he had put up the last open resistance to Disraeli's Bill for household franchise. His gravity was relieved by a pungency in epigram, and a more than royal indifference to the effect of any words that fell from his lips. Though astute in his sense of what was practical, and appealing less often than Gladstone to ideal motives, he stood for character, principle and tradition, maintained public life on a high level, and despised the sensationalism of the journalist and the tricks of the politician."

"He is haughty and proud, of an intractable temper. He cannot submit to party discipline...he is too Conservative for modern times. He is a High Churchman. In politics he is a Tory. His motto in politics and religion is "No Surrender!" ... In short he is a man of a past age, has no sympathy with the life, the stir and growth of the present, and no belief in the future."

"Shortly before he died, I invited Clement Attlee to Chequers ... I asked him, parties and politics apart, whom he regarded the best prime minister qua prime minister since he first took an interest in politics. He had no hesitation – "Salisbury"."