The Lord Quickswood | |
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.jpg) Lord Hugh Cecil, circa 1914 | |
| Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal | |
| In office 25 January 1941 – 10 December 1956 Hereditary peerage | |
| Preceded by | Peerage created |
| Succeeded by | Peerage extinct |
| Member of Parliament forOxford University | |
| In office 15 January 1910 – 23 February 1937 | |
| Preceded by | John Gilbert Talbot |
| Succeeded by | Arthur Salter |
| Member of Parliament forGreenwich | |
| In office 13 July 1895 – 8 February 1906 | |
| Preceded by | Thomas Boord |
| Succeeded by | Richard Jackson |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Hugh Richard Heathcote Gascoyne-Cecil 14 October 1869 Hertfordshire, England |
| Died | 10 December 1956 (aged 87) Sussex, England |
| Political party | Conservative |
| Parent(s) | Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury Georgina Alderson |
| Alma mater | University College, Oxford |
Hugh Richard Heathcote Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Baron QuickswoodPC (14 October 1869 – 10 December 1956), styledLord Hugh Cecil until 1941, was a BritishConservative Party politician.[1]
Cecil was the eighth and youngest child ofRobert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, three timesPrime Minister of the United Kingdom, andGeorgina Alderson, daughter of SirEdward Hall Alderson. He was the brother ofJames Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury,Lord William Cecil,Lord Cecil of Chelwood andLord Edward Cecil and a first cousin of Prime MinisterArthur Balfour. He was educated atEton andUniversity College, Oxford. He graduated with first-class honours in Modern History in 1891[2] and was a fellow ofHertford College, Oxford, from 1891 until 1936, when he considered that he could not beProvost of Eton College and simultaneously a Fellow of Hertford.[3]
After his graduation as BA in 1891, Cecil went to work in parliament. From 1891 to 1892 he was Assistant Private Secretary to his father, who wasForeign Secretary.[3] Having paid his subscription he was elevated toMA in 1894, and entered theCommons as ConservativeMember of Parliament (MP) forGreenwich in 1895.[4][5] He took a keen interest in ecclesiastical questions and became an active member of the Church party, resisting attempts bynonconformists andsecularists to take the discipline of the Church out of the hands of the archbishops and bishops, and to remove the bishops from their seats in theHouse of Lords. In a speech on the second reading of Balfour'sEducation Bill of 1902, he maintained that for the final settlement of the religious difficulty there must be cooperation between theChurch of England and nonconformity, which was the Church's natural ally; and that the only possible basis of agreement was that every child should be brought up in the belief of its parents. The ideal to be aimed at in education was the improvement of the national character. In the later stages of the Bill's progress, he strongly resented an amendment approved by the House and taken over by the Government giving the school managers (governors, in modern parlance), instead of the local vicar, control of religious education in voluntary, i.e. church, schools.[a] This was not the only point on which he showed considerable independence of the government of which Balfour, his cousin, was the head.[6]
During the early 20th century, Cecil (known to his friends as "Linky") was the eponymous leader of theHughligans, a group of privileged youngTory Members of Parliament critical of their own party's leadership. Modelled afterLord Randolph Churchill'sFourth Party, the Hughligans included Cecil,F. E. Smith,Arthur Stanley,Ian Malcolm and, until 1904,Winston Churchill. Cecil was thebest man at Churchill's wedding in 1908 and the latter greatly admired his eloquence in the House of Commons. As Churchill declared to a contemporary,Llewellyn Atherley-Jones,"How I wish I had his powers; speech is a painful effort to me."[7] Cecil dissented from the beginning fromJoseph Chamberlain's policy oftariff reform, pleading in Parliament against any devaluation of the idea of empire to a "gigantic profit-sharing business". He took a prominent position among the "Free Food Unionists"; consequently he was attacked by the tariff reformers, and lost his seat at Greenwich in 1906.[6]
In 1910 Cecil became an MP forOxford University, which he represented for the next 27 years.[8] He immediately threw himself with passion into the struggle against the Ministerial Veto Resolutions, comparing theAsquith government to "thimble riggers". In the next year, he was active in the resistance to theParliament Bill, treatingAsquith as a "traitor" for his advice to the Crown to swamp the Conservative majority in the Lords by creating hundreds of Liberal peers, and taking a prominent part in the disturbance which prevented the Prime Minister from being heard on 24 July 1911. But he never quite regained the authority which he had possessed in the House in the early years of the century. He strongly opposed theWelsh Church Bill, and he denounced the1914 Home Rule Bill as reducingIreland from the status of a wife to that of a mistress — she was to be kept byJohn Bull, not united to him.[6] In 1916 Cecil was part of theMesopotamia Commission of Inquiry. He was sworn of thePrivy Council on 16 January[9] 1918.[10]
Apart from his political career Cecil served as aLieutenant in theRoyal Flying Corps during theFirst World War. In that capacity, in debate in 1918, he severely censured the treatment ofGeneral Trenchard by the government.
Lord Hugh was a committed Anglican, and a member ofHouse of Laity in theChurch Assembly from 1919. He was awarded aDoctorate of Civil Law by Oxford University in 1924. He pleaded for lenient treatment ofconscientious objectors, and endeavoured unsuccessfully to relieve them of disability.[6] He left the House of Commons in 1937 because the previous year he had been appointed Provost of Eton College, a post he retained until 1944.[3] On 25 January 1941 he was raised to the peerage asBaron Quickswood, of Clothall in the County of Hertford.[11] He was a Trustee of theLondon Library, and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law atDurham University. He was also honoraryDoctor of Laws at theUniversity of Edinburgh in 1910, and atCambridge in 1933. From 1944 until his death he had an honorary association withNew College, Oxford.[9]
Lord Quickswood never married. He died on 10 December 1956, aged 87, at which time the barony became extinct.[3]
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| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
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| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forGreenwich 1895 –1906 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forOxford University Jan. 1910 –1937 With:Sir William Anson, Bt 1910–1914 Rowland Prothero 1914–1919 Sir Charles Oman 1919–1935 Sir A. P. Herbert 1935–1937 | Succeeded by |
| Academic offices | ||
| Preceded by | Provost of Eton 1936–1944 | Succeeded by |
| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
| New creation | Baron Quickswood 1941–1956 | Extinct |
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