As the eldest son of Lord Salisbury’s sister, Lady Blanche Balfour, he was named Arthur for the Duke of Wellington, who acted as his godfather. On the paternal side the Balfours were of ancient Scottish lineage, their fortune having been made in the late Eighteenth Century by Arthur’s grandfather, James Balfour, a nabob of the East India Company. James acquired in Scotland an estate of 10,000 acres, at Whittinghame overlooking the Firth of Forth, which became the family home, as well as a deer forest, a salmon river, a shooting lodge, a seat in Parliament and a daughter of the eighth Earl of Lauderdale as wife. A daughter of this marriage, Balfour’s aunt, married the Duke of Grafton, so that along with the Salisbury connection, Balfour, as a friend said, “can call cousins with half the nobility of England.” His younger brother Eustace subsequently married Lady Frances Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll, granddaughter of the Duke of Sutherland, niece of the Duke of Westminster and sister-in-law of Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria.
Balfour’s father, also an M.P., died at thirty-five, when Arthur was seven, leaving Lady Blanche, in whom the Cecil streak of religious feeling was particularly marked, to govern her family of five sons and three daughters. Besides teaching Arthur to admire Jane Austen and her brother’s favorite, The Count of Monte Cristo, she also communicated the Cecil sense of duty. When her son at Cambridge became enamored of philosophy and wished to make over his inheritance to a brother in favor of the studious life, she scolded him severely for poor spirit in wanting to shirk the responsibilities of his position.
At Trinity College, where Balfour read Moral Science, his failure to take a First did not depress his imperturbable good nature or good spirits. He was, wrote Lady Jebb, the doyen of Cambridge society, “a young prince in his way and almost as much spoiled.” Of his four brothers, Frank was a professor of embryology who according to Darwin would have become “the first of English biologists” if he had not been killed climbing in the Swiss Alps at the age of thirty-one; Gerald, superbly handsome, was, according to Lady Jebb, “the most superior man I ever met,” although her niece thought him “the most conceited”; Eustace was merely average and Cecil was the bad apple in the barrel, who died disgraced in Australia. But Arthur, decided Lady Jebb, was “the best in a family all of whom are best,… a man that almost everyone loves.” She thought his nature, however, was “emotionally cold” and that his one essay in love, with May Lyttelton, sister of a Cambridge friend and Gladstone’s niece, who died when she was twenty-five and Balfour twenty-seven, had “exhausted his powers in that direction.” This was the accepted supposition in later years to explain Balfour’s bachelorhood. In fact, it was not so much that he was emotionally cold as that he was warmly attached to his complete freedom to do as he pleased.
Among his friends were two of Trinity’s outstanding scholars: his tutor Henry Sidgwick, later Professor of Moral Philosophy, and the physicist John Strutt, later third Baron Rayleigh, a future Nobel prize winner and Chancellor of the University, each of whom married a sister of Balfour. At that time, when to be an intellectual was to be agnostic, Balfour’s inherited religious sense caused his Cambridge friends to regard him as “a curious relic of an older generation.” His Society friends, on the other hand, when he published his first book, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, in 1879, assumed from the title that Arthur was championing agnosticism, and when his name was mentioned, “they went about looking very solemn.” In fact, by expressing doubt of material reality, the book was paradoxically asserting the right to spiritual faith, a position more explicitly stated in his later book, The Foundations of Belief. At Whittinghame, which was run for him by his maiden sister, Alice, and shared by his married brothers and their numerous children, he read family prayers every Sunday evening. Steeped in the Hebraism of the Old Testament, he felt a particular interest in the “people of the Book” and was concerned about the problem of the Jew in the modern world. His niece and biographer in her childhood imbibed from him “the idea that Christian religion and civilization owes to Judaism an immeasurable debt, shamefully ill repaid.”
He was the most dined-out man in London. Blandly ignoring the implacable rule that required the Leader of the House to be in his place throughout a sitting, he would often disappear during the dinner hour, reappearing shamelessly some hours later in evening dress. Every diary of the time finds him at house parties and dinner parties: “at the Rothschilds,” wrote John Morley, “only Balfour there, partie carrée, always most pleasurable.” He was one of twenty men at dinner at Harry Cust’s, where the talk was so absorbing that when the house caught fire upstairs the dinner continued while the footmen passed bath towels with the port for protection against water from the firemen’s hoses; he was at Blenheim Palace with the Marlboroughs in a party including the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Curzons, the Londonderrys, the Grenfells and Harry Chaplin; he was at Chatsworth with the Devonshires in a party including the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, Count Mensdorff, the Austrian Ambassador, the ugly, fascinating and ribald Marquis de Soveral, Ambassador of Portugal, the de Greys, Ribblesdales and Grenfells; he was at Hatfield with the Salisburys in a party including the Duke of Argyll, Mr. Speaker Peel and his daughter, Mr. Buckle of The Times, George Curzon and General Lord Methuen; he was at Cassiobury, home of Lord Essex, one Sunday at the end of a brilliant London season, when Edith Wharton, arriving for tea, “found scattered on the lawn under the great cedars the very flower and pinnacle of the London world: Mr. Balfour, Lady Desborough, Lady Elcho, John Sargent, Henry James and many others of that shining galaxy, so exhausted by their social labors of the past weeks … that beyond benevolent smiles they had little to give.”
Most often Balfour was to be found at Clouds, home of the baronet Sir Percy Wyndham and favored country house of the Souls. Among their congenial company the particular attraction for Balfour was Lady Elcho, one of the three beautiful Wyndham sisters, with whom, though she was the wife of a friend, Balfour pursued a discreet affair over a period of some twelve years, of which the letters survive. Sargent, when he painted the sisters in 1899, was hampered by no such compelling realism as affected him in the matter of Lady Charles Beresford’s eyebrows. The group portrait of Lady Elcho, Mrs. Tennant and Mrs. Adeane, gowned in porcelain whiteness and draped in poses of careless but haughty elegance upon a sofa, is a dazzling dream of feminine aristocracy.
The ladies of the Souls, in conscious reaction to the Victorian feminine ideal, determined to be intellectual, to be slim and likewise to allow themselves a new freedom of private morality. Their only American member, the beautiful Daisy White, wife of Henry White, First Secretary of the American Embassy, was once congratulated by a friend on not allowing herself to be changed by “all those people who have lovers.” In this activity the Souls were no different from the more philistine members of the Prince of Wales’s set. All were engaged in the same open conspiracy in which Society managed to depart from Victorian morality without deserting propriety. Balfour’s liaison with Lady Elcho was for a while serious enough to cause their friends some anxiety. The feelings of the husband, Hugo, Lord Elcho, heir of the Earl of Wemyss and a member, though a silent one, of the same circle, are unknown. The affair, like the Duke of Devonshire’s, was the permitted excursion of a person of character and position sufficiently lofty to be above reproach.
When Balfour first entered Parliament at twenty-six from a family-controlled borough, it had been less from personal desire than from ordained fate as an eldest son and a Cecil. By the time he moved into Downing Street in 1895 as First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the House, in lieu of his uncle, who preferred to live at home, the passion for politics latent in his blood had grown with growing skill and power. Yet it did not disturb his temperamental detachment. When meeting criticism he would regard it, not as something to resent, but as a thing to be examined like an interesting beetle. “Quite a good fellow,” he would say of an opponent, “has a curious view, not uninteresting.” He was at heart both a conservative who wante
d to retain the best of the world he knew and a liberal with, as his sister-in-law remarked, “a sympathetic outlook for all progress.” People felt in him “a natural spring of youth,” in the words of one friend, and a “freshness, serenity and buoyancy” in the words of another. Later, as Prime Minister, he was the first in that office to go to Buckingham Palace in a motorcar and the first to go to the House of Commons in a Homburg hat.
He thought of himself as belonging to the younger generation of Tories who recognized the necessity of responding to the rising challenge of the working class. Yet bred as they were in privilege they could not, when issues came to a test, range themselves on the side of the invaders. In his first years in Parliament, Balfour had joined the four “Radical” Tories of the Fourth Party led by Lord Randolph Churchill. They occupied the Front Bench below the gangway and Balfour sat with them, because, he said, he had room there for his legs, but the choice indicated a point of view. The Fourth Party were gadflies in the cause of what was called “Tory Democracy,” the belief that the rising political power of Labour could be harnessed in partnership with the Tories. If Labour, stated Lord Randolph in 1892, found that it could “obtain its objects and secure its own advantage” under the existing constitution—which it was the Tories’ business to preserve—then all would be well; but if the Conservatives stubbornly resisted these demands in “unreasoning and shortsighted support of all the present rights of property,” then Labour would be ranged against them. Since the Tories were a minority in the country, it was incumbent on them to enlist in their support “a majority of the votes of the masses of Labour.”
Balfour was never thoroughly persuaded of this convincingly worded argument, any more than, when it came to a practical test, was Lord Randolph himself. In the abstract, Balfour believed in democracy and extension of the suffrage and in improvement of working conditions and of the rights of Labour but not at the cost of breaking down the walls of privilege that protected the ruling class. Here was the fundamental difficulty of Tory Democracy. Its advocates thought it possible to meet the demands of the workers while at the same time preserving intact the citadel of privilege, but Balfour suspected the bitter truth of history: that progress and gain by one group is never accomplished without loss of some permanent value of another. He continued to express his belief that Socialism would never get possession of the working classes “if those who wield the collective forces of the community show themselves desirous … to ameliorate every legitimate grievance.” But when it came to specific acts of amelioration he was not enthusiastic or deeply concerned. “What exactly is a ‘Trade Union’?” he once asked a Liberal friend. Margot Asquith said to him that he was like his uncle in having a wonderful sense of humor, literary style and a deep concern with science and religion. Was there any difference between them? “There is a difference,” Balfour replied. “My uncle is a Tory—and I am a liberal.” Yet the fact that his uncle remained undisturbed by Balfour’s early association with the Tory “Radicals” and that the perfect confidence between them remained unclouded suggests that there was a basic identity of belief stronger than the difference.
Balfour seemed an enigma to his contemporaries because his nature was paradoxical, his opinions often irreconcilable, and because he did not see life or politics in terms of absolutes. As a result, he was often charged with being cynical, and people who looked at the world from a liberal point of view thought him perverse. H. G. Wells portrayed him as Evesham in The New Machiavelli. “In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his subtle mind.… Did he really care? Did anything matter to him?” Winston Churchill, too, once used the word “wicked” in speaking of him to Mrs. Asquith. She thought the secret of Balfour’s imperturbability in a crisis was that he did not “really care for the things at stake or believe that the happiness of mankind depends on events going this way or that.” Balfour did, in fact, hold certain basic convictions, but he could see arguments on both sides of a matter, which is the penalty of the thoughtful man. On one occasion, arriving for an evening party at a great house whose staircase split in twin curves, he stood at the bottom for twenty minutes trying to work out, as he explained to a puzzled observer, a logical reason for taking one side rather than the other.
In 1887 Salisbury’s surprising appointment of his nephew to the difficult and dangerous post of Chief Secretary for Ireland was expected to prove a fiasco. Balfour was then regarded as a languid intellectual whom the press delighted to call “Prince Charming,” or even “Miss Balfour.” Ireland was seething in its chronic war between landlord and tenant made fiercer by agitators for Home Rule. Police daily evicted tenants unable to pay their rent and were in turn bombarded with stones, vitriol and boiling water by the mob. The memory of Lord Frederick Cavendish’s fate five years earlier had been kept fresh by continued assaults and “everybody right up to the top was trembling.” Balfour, ignoring threats to his life, astonished both islands. He said he intended to be “as relentless as Cromwell” in enforcing the law and as “radical as any reformer” in redressing grievances with regard to the land. His resolute rule “took his foes by surprise,” wrote John Morley, “and roused in his friends a delight hardly surpassed in the politics of our day.” It made him a popular celebrity and brought him in one bound to recognition as “Bloody” Balfour in Ireland and as the coming natural leader of his party in England.
In 1891, on the resignation of W. H. Smith as Leader of the House, he succeeded by unanimous choice. As Irish Secretary, his absolute disregard for personal danger had revealed a courage—or absence of fear—that his contemporaries had not suspected. George Wyndham, then serving as Balfour’s Private Secretary, wrote from Dublin that the Irish loyalists’ admiration for him was “almost comic” and ascribed it to the fact that “great courage being so rare a gift and so large a part of human misery being due to Fear, all men are prepared to fall down before anyone wholly free from fear.” Winston Churchill ascribed Balfour’s lack of nerves to a “cold nature” but acknowledged him “the most courageous man alive. I believe if you held a pistol to his face it would not frighten him.”
The same quality gave him mastery in debate. Sure of his own powers, he feared no opponent or embarrassment. According to Morley, he operated on Dr. Johnson’s principle that “to treat your adversary with respect is to give him an advantage to which he is not entitled.” He debated with “dauntless ingenuity and polished raillery.” Although in public he rarely indulged in hurtful sarcasm, his private epigrams could be sharp. He once said of a colleague, “If he had a little more brains he would be a half-wit.” In the House he maintained toward opponents an almost deferential courtesy, and when under bitter attack by the Irish members, would sit quietly with a placid smile, and when he rose to reply, demolish them with words which had the effect “of a bullet on a bubble.” Yet it was not done without strain. He confessed to a friend that he never slept well after a rough night in the House. “I never lose my temper but one’s nerves get on edge and it takes time to cool.” He admired Macaulay, finding his narrative irresistible and his style a delight. His own speeches, delivered without notes, were unstudied yet perfectly finished. Lord Willoughby de Broke, an active young member of the other House, who liked to come over to listen to Balfour, said the pleasure lay in hearing “ideas and arguments being produced in exactly the right sequence without any appearance of premeditation, the whole masterly process of thought, argument and phrasing being carried out with such consummate skill and such perfect ease, that to witness the exercise of the art was sheer delight.”
Balfour was careless of facts, unsafe with figures, and memory was not his strong point, but he surmounted this weakness by a technique that never failed to amuse the House. When dealing with a complicated bill he would take care to be flanked by a knowledgeable minister such as the Home Secretary or Attorney-General, and if he floundered over details his colleague could whisper a correction. As describe
d by Sir Henry Lucy, parliamentary correspondent of Punch, Mr. Balfour would pause, regard the colleague with a friendly glance tinged with gentle admonition, and say, “Exactly.” At the next mistake and whispered correction, he would repeat the performance with a sterner note in his “Exactly,” conveying the impression that there was a limit to toleration in these matters and the colleague could be forgiven once but he really must not go on blundering.
Promptness was not one of his virtues and often he would come lounging gracefully in when Questions were almost over. He effected a revolution by changing the Wednesday short sitting of the House to Fridays for the sake of the weekend, an institution which he, in fact, invented to allow time for his golf. “This damned Scotch croquet,” as a disgusted sportsman called it, owed its popularity to Balfour’s influence. With perfect insouciance and contrary to all custom, he played it even on Sundays except in Scotland and such was his magnetism that Society followed where he went, and so the custom of the country-house weekend was born. He neither shot nor hunted but in addition to golf played vigorous tennis, bicycled whenever possible, on occasion twenty miles at a stretch, and indulged a guilty passion for the thrilling new experience of the motorcar. His idea of distraction was not everyone’s. When visiting his sister, Lady Rayleigh, and asked by her what he would like in the way of entertainment, he replied, “Oh something amusing; get some people from Cambridge to talk science.” Music was another enthusiasm. He wrote an essay on Handel for the Edinburgh Review, and went on a musical tour of Germany during which he charmed that difficult relict Frau Wagner.
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