Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister of Britain at the peak of its power. He was Prime Minister on and off during the period from 1885 to 1902 and had a great influence on the country’s foreign policy at its colonial height. Avan Fata explains.
Lord Salisbury in 1886.
At the turn of the 20th century, the British Empire seemed to be at its zenith. Its colonial holdings far surpassed the second largest imperial power, the French, and the City of London was the trading capital of the world. Yet as the Victorian age gave way to the Edwardian, many in Whitehall and the Foreign Office came to the conclusion that these heights of economic and political might would not be easy to maintain, let alone to increase further. The economic-industrial disparity between Britain and other European great powers was closing, and from the New World the United States was also narrowing the gap.
In foreign politics too, there were signs of a storm on the horizon. The competition between imperial states had also reached a crossroads; large swathes of the globe had already been partitioned between imperialist European states, and some feared that the next “Scramble” would be over the dying carcass of an empire at the end of its tether; not for nothing was the Ottoman Empire termed the “sick man of Europe”. Britain had reluctantly taken up the task of helping to secure the Sublime Porte - as the Ottoman capital at Constantinople was known - from foreign encroachment and possible invasion.
Russia remained the perceived enemy of British foreign policy; its expansion eastwards and into Central Asia had been dubbed “The Great Game” by a British officer and later popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his novel Kim. But Britain also faced the rising ambitions of a newly-created German Empire, whose Kaiser Wilhelm II had dismissed Bismarck as Chancellor in favor of pursuing a more expansionist foreign policy, dubbed Weltpolitik (world politics).
Enter Salisbury
It was in these circumstances that Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, became Prime Minister. First elected to 10 Downing Street in 1885, he would go on to serve two more terms (1886 - 1892, 1895 - 1902); leading Britain for a total of 13 years and 252 days - only Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Younger, and Lord Liverpool served longer. Curiously however, Lord Salisbury also served as his own Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; a realm which he had considerable experience in.
Salisbury’s first foray into foreign affairs came in 1876, when he was chosen by then prime minister Disraeli to represent Britain at the Constantinople Conference. Despite the conference’s failure to secure greater rights and land for Bulgarian and Herzogvinian subjects in Ottoman territory, it catapulted Salisbury into the political spotlight. Two years later during the Russo-Turkish War, when Disraeli’s Cabinet protested the Treaty of San Stefano, Salisbury was chosen to succeed Lord Derby (who had resigned as Foreign Secretary due to the protest). Even before his official appointment on 2 April, Salisbury single-handedly drafted a circular calling for a congress of European nations to re-examine the terms of the San Stefano Treaty, which was duly approved and dispatched to the great powers.
At the resulting Congress of Berlin (1878), Salisbury was overshadowed publicly by Lord Beaconsfield, but it was apparent to all the plenipotentiaries that he had been the architect of the Congress and the subsequent settlement. The Congress overruled many of the terms of the San Stefano Treaty, reducing the size of a new Bulgaria and returning Russian-conquered territories back to the Ottomans, whilst also securing Cyprus for the British - ostensibly for use as a naval base to dissuade any future Russian aggression into the Straits.
Despite being a Conservative, Salisbury was not particularly supportive of the Empire. He questioned its actual economic benefits, and would come to prefer maintaining the status quo as opposed to seizing any new territory. In a speech as Prime Minister after the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, he remarked that ‘our first duty is towards the people of this country, to maintain their interests and their rights; our second is to all humanity.’ In his foreign policy, he eschewed these priorities, placing the security of the Empire first and foremost.
Foreign policy
To Salisbury, managing foreign policy demanded a calm and unwavering statesman. ‘Sleepless tact, immovable calmness and patience’ were, he deemed, the qualities which would allow a diplomat to succeed. Perhaps more significant to his government and those in Europe, he refused to entangle Britain in any alliances. Much like Gladstone, Salisbury did not prefer to enter Britain into any mutual defense pacts, viewing them as commitments which would seriously hinder Whitehall’s ability to act independently of its continental counterparts. When his government and public opinion pressed for an Anglo-German alliance, Salisbury was reluctant to permit talks with Berlin. When it became clear that the Germans were unwilling to support Britain in the Far East against Russia, whilst simultaneously asking for British colonial concessions, Salisbury remarked to German ambassador Paul von Hatzfeldt that ‘you ask too much for our friendship.’
This commitment to a lack of commitment was seen by Salisbury’s Conservative colleagues not as a deliberate choice, but rather a continuity of a longstanding preference in British - and prior to 1707 English - foreign policy. As far back as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, they argued, ensuring a balance of power in Europe and remaining independent of embroilments on the continent was the modus operandi. In 1896, Salisbury’s adherence to this doctrine earned a name: ‘splendid isolation’, after a Canadian politician and later Joseph Chamberlain (then Secretary of State for the Colonies) popularized it in debates. Salisbury’s critics were more inclined to use the term ‘terrible isolation’.
For his own part, Salisbury took disdain with the term, deriding it as ‘jargon about isolation’, and mentioned to Queen Victoria that isolation ‘is much less danger [sic] than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us.’ In hindsight, non-intervention seems a more apt term to use, as Britain was far from isolated from the various quarrels taking place at the fringes of its empire: Russia in the Far East and Central Asia, Germany in Africa and the Pacific, and France in Northern Africa as well as the Sudan. In each case, Salisbury balanced the interests of London and the other powers with great skill and, as with the case of Portuguese claims in South Africa (1890), with military pressure if need be. It was during Salisbury’s reign that the Royal Navy adopted the ‘Two Power Naval Standard’, the policy that the British fleet should be equal in strength to the next two largest navies combined.
Conclusion
Salisbury’s power declined following the Second Boer War, which broke out against his will in 1899. His own health was failing, and in 1900 he finally handed over the reins of the Foreign Office to Lord Lansdowne. At the end of his political career, he had managed to usher the British Empire into the 20th century with great diplomatic skill and tact. Far from being preyed upon by the other great powers, Salisbury had defended British interests across the world and expanded the “red on the map” by six million square miles, a feat unmatched since the days of Pitt the Elder. His policy of splendid isolation however, was judged by his successors to be a relic of a bygone Victorian age, and Britain would enter into her first mutual defense pact with Japan in 1902.
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Sources
Darwin, John. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Howard, Christopher. “Splendid Isolation.” History 47, no. 159 (1962): 32-41. Accessed August 22, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24404639.
Leonard, Dick. British Prime Ministers from Walpole to Salisbury: The 18th and 19th Centuries. New York: Routledge, 2021.
MacMillan, Margaret. The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War. London: Profile Books, 2014.
Margaret M. Jefferson. "Lord Salisbury and the Eastern Question, 1890-1898." The Slavonic and East European Review 39, no. 92 (1960): 44-60. Accessed August 22, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stab le/4205217.
Penson, Lillian M. "The Principles and Methods of Lord Salisbury's Foreign Policy." Cambridge Historical Journal 5, no. 1 (1935): 87-106. Accessed August 22, 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stab le/3020834.
Roberts, Andrew. Salisbury: Victorian Titan. New York: Phoenix Press, 2006.
