Holland, Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Lady Evelyn Cecil, and Lord Goschen (son of Milner's
old friend). Prothero retired from the cabinet and Parliament in 1919, was made a baron
in the same year, and a Fellow of Balliol in 1922.
Sir George W. Prothero (1848-1922), brother of Lord Ernle, had been lecturer in
history at his own college at Cambridge University and the first professor in the new
Chair of Modern History at Edinburgh before he became editor of The Quarterly Review
in 1899. He was editor of the Cambridge Modern History (1902-1912), Chichele Lecturer
in History (1915), and director of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office and general
editor of the Peace Handbooks, 155 volumes of studies preparatory to the Peace
Conference (1917-1919). Besides his strictly historical works, he wrote a Memoir of J.R.
Seeley and edited and published Seeley's posthumous Growth of British Polity. He also w
rote the sketch of Lord Selborne in the Dictionary of National Biography. His own sketch
in the same work was written by Algernon Cecil, nephew of Lord Salisbury, who had
worked with Prothero in the Historical Section of the Foreign Office. The same writer
also wrote the sketches of Arthur Balfour and Lord Salisbury in the same collective work.
All three are very revealing sources for this present study.
G. W. Prothero's work on the literary remains of Seeley must have endeared hin1 to
the Milner Group, for Seeley was regarded as a precursor by the inner circle of the
Group. For example, Lionel Curtis, in a letter to Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) in November
1916, wrote: "Seeley's results were necessarily limited by his lack of any knowledge at
first hand either of the Dominions or of India. With the Round Table organization behind
him Seeley by his own knowledge and insight might have gone further than us. If we
have been able to go further than him it is not merely that we followed in his train, but
also because we have so far based our study of the relations of these countries on a
preliminary field-study of the countries concerned, conducted in close cooperation with
people in those countries."(6)
Matthew White Ridley (Viscount Ridley after 1900) and his younger brother, Edward
Ridley (Sir Edward after 1897), were both proteges of Lord Salisbury and married into
the Cecil Bloc. Matthew was a Member of Parliament (1868-1885, 1886-1900) and held
the offices of Under Secretary of the Home Department (1878-1880), Financial Secretary
of the Treasury in Salisbury's first government (1885-1886), and Home Secretary in
Salisbury's third government (1895-1900). He was made a Privy Councillor during
Salisbury's second government. His daughter, Grace, married the future third Earl of
Selborne in 1910, while his son married Rosamond Guest, sister of Lady Chelmsford and
future sister-in-law of Frances Lyttelton (daughter of the eighth Viscount Cobham and
the former Mary Cavendish).
Edward Ridley beat out Anson for the fellowship to All Souls in 1866, but in the
following year both Anson and Phillimore were admitted. Ridley and Phillimore were
appointed to the Queen's Bench of the High Court of Justice in 1897 by Lord Salisbury.
The former held the post for twenty years (1897-1917).
John Simon (Viscount Simon since 1940) came into the Cecil Bloc and the Milner
Group through All Souls. He received his first governmental task as junior counsel for
Britain in the Alaska Boundary Arbitration of 1903. A Member of Parliament as a Liberal
and National Liberal (except for a brief interval of four years) from the great electoral
overturn of 1906 to his elevation to the upper house in 1940, he held governmental posts
for a large portion of that period. He was Solicitor General (1910-1913), Attorney
General (1913-1915), Home Secretary (1915-1916), Foreign Secretary (1931-1935),
Home Secretary again (1935-1937), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1937-1940), and,
finally, Lord Chancellor (1940-1945). He was also chairman of the Indian Statutory
Commission (1927-1930).
Frederic John Napier Thesiger (Lord Chelmsford after 1905) was taken by Balfour
from the London County Council in 1905 to be Governor of Queensland (1905-1909) and
later Governor of New South Wales (1907-1913). In the latter post he established a
contact with the inner circle of the Milner Group, which v`,as useful to both parties later.
He was Viceroy of India in 1916-1921 and First Lord of the Admiralty in the brief
Labour government of 1924. He married Frances Guest in 1894 while still at All Souls
and may have been the contact by which her sister married Matthew Ridley in 1899 and
her brother married Frances Lyttelton in 1911.
The Cecil Bloc did not disappear with the death of Lord Salisbury in 1903 but was
continued for a considerable period by Balfour. It did not, however, continue to grow but,
on the contrary, became looser and less disciplined, for Balfour lacked the qualities of
ambition and determination necessary to control or develop such a group. Accordingly,
the Cecil Bloc, while still in existence as a political and social power, has largely been
replaced by the Milner Croup. This Group, which began as a dependent fief of the Cecil
Bloc, has since 1916 become increasingly the active portion of the Bloc and in fact its
real center. Milner possessed those qualities of determination and ambition which Balfour
lacked, and was willing to sacrifice all personal happiness and social life to his political
goals, something which was quite unacceptable to the pleasure-loving Balfour. Moreover,
Milner was intelligent enough to see that it was not possible to continue a political group
organized in the casual and familiar way in which it had been done by Lord Salisbury.
Milner shifted the emphasis from family connection to ideological agreement. The former
had become less useful with the rise of a class society based on economic conflicts and
with the extension of democracy. Salisbury was fundamentally a conservative, while
Milner was not. Where Salisbury sought to build up a bloc of friends and relatives to
exercise the game of politics and to maintain the Old England that they all loved, Milner
was not really a conservative at all. Milner had an idea—the idea he had obtained from
Toynbee and that he found also in Rhodes and in all the members of his Group. This idea
had two parts: that the extension and integration of the Empire and the development of
social welfare were essential to the continued existence of the British way of life; and that
this British way of life was an instrument which unfolded all the best and highest
capabilities of mankind. Working with this ideology derived from Toynbee and Balliol,
Milner used the power and the general strategic methods of the Cecil Bloc to build up his
own Group. But, realizing that conditions had changed, he put much greater emphasis on
propaganda activities and on ideological unity within the Croup. These were both made
necessary by the extension of political democracy and the rise of economic democracy as
a practical political issue. These new developments had made it impossible to be satisfied
with a group held together by no more than family and social connections and animated
by no more far-sighted goal than the preservation of the existing social structure.
The Cecil Bloc did not resist this change by Milner of the aims and tactics of their
older leader. The times made it clear to all that methods must be changed. However, it is
possible that the split which appeared within the Conservative Party in England after