old friends. We had been undergraduates together at Balliol College.... The outside world
thought him cold and reserved.... But between Milner and myself there was no barrier,
mainly, I think, because we were both extremely shy men." The interim report of the
Selborne Committee repeated the recommendations of the Milner Committee in
December 1916. At the same time came the Cabinet crisis, and Prothero was named
President of the Board of Agriculture with a seat in the new Cabinet. Several persons
close to the Milner Group were put into the department, among them Sir Sothern
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
in 1899. He was editor of the Cambridge
in History (1915), and director of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office and general
editor of the
Conference (1917-1919). Besides his strictly historical works, he wrote a
rote the sketch of Lord Selborne in the
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.