Balfour, granddaughter of the second Viscount Goschen and of Lady Goschen, the
former Lady Evelyn Gathorne-Hardy (fifth daughter of the first Earl of Cranbrook). Thus
a grandchild of Milner was united with a great-grandchild of his old benefactor, Lord
Goschen.(4)
Among the persons recruited from All Souls by Lord Salisbury were two future
prelates of the Anglican Church. These were Cosmo Gordon Lang, Fellow for forty
years, and Herbert Hensley Henson, Fellow for twenty-four years. Lang was Bishop of
Stepney (1901-1908), Archbishop of York (1908-1928), and Archbishop of Canterbury
(1928-1942). Henson was Canon of Westminister Abbey (1900-1912), Dean of Durham
(1912-1918), and Bishop of Hereford and of Durham (1918-1939).
The Right Reverend Arthur Cayley Headlam was a Fellow of All Souls for about forty
years and, in addition, was editor of the
Divinity, and Bishop of Gloucester. He is chiefly of interest to us because his younger
brother, James W. Headlam-Morley (1863-1929), was a member of the Milner Group.
James (Sir James in 1929) was put by the Group into the Department of Information
(under John Buchan, 1917-1918), and the Foreign Office (under Milner and Curzon,
1918-1928), went to the Peace Conference in 1919, edited the first published volume of
British
Institute of International Affairs, where his portrait still hangs.
His daughter, Agnes, was made Montague Burton Professor of International Relations
at Oxford in 1948. This was a position strongly influenced by the Milner Group.
Francis W. Pember was used by Lord Salisbury from time to time as assistant legal
adviser to the Foreign Office. He was Warden of All Souls in succession to Anson (1914-
1932).
Walter Phillimore (Lord Phillimore after 1918) was admitted to All Souls with Anson
in 1867. He was a lifelong friend and associate of the second Viscount Halifax (1839-
1934). The latter devoted his life to the cause of church union and was for fifty-two years
(1868-1919, 1934) president of the English Church Union. In this post he was succeeded
in 1919 by Lord Phillimore, who had been serving as vice-president for many years and
who was an intimate friend of the Halifax family. It was undoubtedly through Phillimore
that the present Earl of Halifax, then simple Edward Wood, was elected to All Souls in
1903 and became an important member of the Milner Group. Phillimore was a specialist
in ecclesiastical law, and it created a shock when Lord Salisbury made him a judge of the
Queen's Bench in 1897, along with Edward Ridley, who had entered All Souls as a
Fellow the year before Phillimore. The echoes of this shock can still be discerned in Lord
Sankey's brief sketch of Phillimore in the
became a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1913 and in 1918 drew up one of the two British
drafts for the Covenant of the League of Nations. The other draft, known as the Cecil
Draft, was attributed to Lord Robert Cecil but was largely the work of Alfred Zimmern, a
member of the Milner Group.
Rowland Edmund Prothero (Lord Ernle after 1919) and his brother, George W.
Prothero (Sir George after 1920), are two of the most important links between the Cecil
Bloc and the Milner Group. They grew up on the Isle of Wight in close contact with
Queen Victoria, who was a family friend. Through the connection, the elder Prothero was
asked to tutor the Duke of Bedford in 1878, a position which led to his appointment in
1899 as agent-in-chief of the Duke. In the interval he was a Fellow of All Souls for
sixteen years and engaged in literary work, writing unsigned articles for the
being succeeded in the position by his brother for twenty-three years (1899-1922).
As agent of the extensive agricultural holdings of the Duke of Bedford, Prothero
became familiar with agricultural problems and began to w rite on the subject. He ran for
Parliament from Bedfordshire as a Unionist, on a platform advocating tariff reform, in
1907 and again in 1910, but in spite of his influential friends, he was not successful. He
wrote of these efforts: "I was a stranger to the political world, without friends in the
House of Commons. The only men prominent in public life whom I knew with any
degree of real intimacy were Curzon and Milner." (5) In 1914, at Anson's death, he was
elected to succeed him as one of Oxford's representatives in Parliament. Almost
immediately he was named a member of Milner's Committee on Home Production of
Food (1915), and the following year was on Lord Selborne's committee concerned with
the same problem. At this point in his autobiography, Prothero wrote: "Milner and I were