More lonely than queer
Jane Ridley
ROSEBERY: STATESMAN IN TURMOIL by Leo McKinstry John Murray, £25, pp. 626, ISBN 0719558794 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Lord Rosebery was the great lost leader of Victorian politics. Today he is a forgotten figure, but in his time he was the most famous man in Britain. Precociously talented and a star orator, he could draw vast crowds and keep them spellbound. He was the heir apparent to Gladstone as leader of the Liberal party, but as prime minister he was a failure. He held office for little more than a year, and by the time he resigned the Liberal party was in a state of shambles from which it never fully recovered. His life is an extraordinary story of squandered talent and wasted opportunity.
Until now, Rosebery has remained an enigma. There has never been a full biography. Historians have dissected his speeches, but no one has got close to the man. The reasons for his brilliant failure remained a matter for inspired speculation. There were dark mutterings about a hidden life, dogged by homosexual blackmail and scandal. Historians salivated about the locked cupboards at Dalmeny, Rosebery’s Scottish seat, which were rumoured to contain the diaries where he confided his innermost secrets.
Leo McKinstry has gained access to the Rosebery archive, and he has used the diaries, and many other papers, to magnificent effect. This is a superb political biography. It’s wonderfully timely too. Rosebery is a life for our times.
He was born with a massive silver spoon in his mouth, but also with a crippling psychological burden. His father was an undistinguished Scottish aristocrat who died when Rosebery was four. His mother was a kinswoman of the younger Pitt, a connection which meant a great deal to Rosebery. He modelled himself on Pitt, and he also wrote his biography (this seems to be a habit with youthful retired leaders — William Hague has written a life of Pitt too). Rosebery’s mother, who was witty, pretty and hard, considered her son ‘a terribly dull little boy’, and they were early estranged. At Eton Rosebery was unremarkable. Clever, idle and ‘ladylike’, he was a favourite of his tutor, William Johnson, a sinister homosexual who was infatuated with him. Pederasts pop up again and again in Rosebery’s life: his best friend was Reggie Brett, Lord Esher, whom he met at Eton, another shocking pederast. When Rosebery was 20 his grandfather died and he inherited the family estates. He never needed to work in his life. He quit Christ Church on a whim without taking a degree and proceeded to spend, spend, spend on racehorses. He bought a villa near Epsom called The Durdans where he kept a stud. Racing remained a passion throughout his life. He was a bad rider and bored by bloodstock, but he gambled heavily (though always within his means). His aims in life, he once said, were to win the Derby, marry an heiress and become prime minister. He achieved all three, winning the Derby at last in the year he became prime minister.
The heiress whom Rosebery bagged was Hannah de Rothschild, the only child of Baron Meyer de Rothschild. Through her he acquired Mentmore, a vast museum-like palace which housed Baron Meyer’s fabulous collections. Rosebery and Hannah were among the richest couples in Britain, and their joint income was a staggering £140,000. Of course there were sneers about Hannah being a Jewess and gossip about Rosebery’s motives. Hannah, said Henry James, in an uncharacteristically antiSemitic moment, was ‘large, coarse, Hebrew-looking, with hair of no particular colour and personally unattractive’. No doubt Hannah’s money helped, but it wasn’t the only reason for the marriage. Rosebery was genuinely devoted to her; she was the mother figure that he so badly needed, and she was far brighter at politics than he was. Pushed by Hannah, Rosebery intervened to brilliant effect in Liberal politics. He stage-managed Gladstone’s astoundingly successful Midlothian campaign, when audiences of thousands turned out to listen not just to Gladstone but also to Rosebery. He was box-office.
In fact, as McKinstry makes very clear, the point about Rosebery is that he was a celebrity. He never stood for a parliamentary election, and he had no experience of the hard grind of democratic politics; party organisation or constituency work was a closed book to him. But it was his good fortune to be the right man at the right moment. Public speaking was the rock and roll of the late Victorians; instead of Beckham or Jagger, it was Rosebery and Gladstone whom they queued to see. This was a profoundly deferential society, and toffs such as Salisbury were adulated. Rosebery was a natural public speaker, and his mask-like face and dramatic gestures mesmerised audiences, though he overacted as he grew older. Blessed with the born journalist’s instinctive nose for public opinion, his speeches magically articulated what people felt.
In spite of being a star, Rosebery loathed making speeches. He built a political reputation on refusing office. He was too lofty to accept junior office, and he sulked when he wasn’t promoted to the cabinet. Gladstone thought him the most ambitious man he had ever met. The truth was that Rosebery didn’t need the work. He cultivated a reputation for mystery and independence, retreating to Barnbougle, the ruined castle near Dalmeny which he restored, where he would brood in his library in solitude, reading omnivorously and writing political biographies. He suffered from depression, hypochondria and chronic insomnia, but his Garboish behaviour merely added to his mystique.
As foreign secretary, Rosebery was a success, hardworking and effective. But as prime minister in 1894-5 he was an unmitigated disaster. This was not all his fault. His rival to succeed Gladstone was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, a bully and a bruiser. Harcourt and his son, the poisonous reptile Loulou Harcourt — who, incidentally, was also a pederast, and a particularly nasty one — campaigned for all they were worth to undermine Rosebery. But Rosebery was his own worst enemy. He was isolated, frightening and very, very grand. He possessed a ridiculously thin skin and couldn’t tolerate press criticism. His health broke down, his nerves gave way and for months he barely slept at all. His doctors drugged him with vast quantities of morphine which had no effect, and he took long, lonely drives through the night, but all to no avail.
Conspiracy theories abounded. It was alleged that Rosebery’s breakdown was triggered by blackmail, and that he was terrified of exposure as a homosexual. He was hounded by the lurid Marquess of Queensberry, a homophobic madman, who threatened to expose the prime minister. The theory was that Rosebery was having an affair with his private secretary, Lord Drumlanrig, Queensberry’s son, who shot himself — whether by accident or not will never be known. It was allegedly in order to protect Rosebery that the government backed Queensberry’s case against Oscar Wilde, whose lover Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas was Drumlanrig’s younger brother.
This attempt to involve Rosebery in the Oscar Wilde scandal is all tosh, as McKinstry shows convincingly in a gripping account. There seems no reason to believe that Rosebery was a closet queen. He was devastated when Hannah died aged 39. Rosebery was lonely, not queer. Not that he much liked women. The glamorous Daisy, Countess of Warwick, did her voluptuous best to have an affair with him and got nowhere, and when Princess Victoria, daughter of Edward VII, wanted to marry him, he snubbed her. Rosebery was shy, but he was also impossibly spoilt and selfish. His premiership failed because, like a spoilt child, he sulked when things didn’t go his way.
Leo McKinstry has written an enviably good biography. Political biography all too easily gets bogged down in wearisome day-to-day detail, but McKinstry manages to make even the labyrinthine intrigues of the 1890s Liberal party interesting. Basing his account on the archives and especially diaries gives it a freshness and immediacy that are rarely found. This is an authoritative and original biography which is also a riveting read.
Previous page
