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the Cecil Bloc, while still in existence as a political and social power, has largely been
replaced by the Milner Croup.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
1923 followed roughly the lines between the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc.
It should perhaps be pointed out that the Cecil Bloc was a social rather than a partisan
group—at first, at least. Until 1890 or so it contained members of both political parties,
including the leaders, Salisbury and Gladstone. The relationship between the two parties
on the topmost level could be symbolized by the tragic romance between Salisbury's
nephew and Gladstone's niece, ending in the death of the latter in 1875. After the split in
the Liberal Party in 1886, it was the members of the Cecil Bloc who became Unionists—
that is, the Lytteltons, the Wyndhams, the Cavendishes. As a result, the Cecil Bloc
became increasingly a political force. Gladstone remained socially a member of it, and so
did his protege, John Morley, but almost all the other members of the Bloc were
Unionists or Conservatives. The chief exceptions were the four leaders of the Liberal
Party after Gladstone, who were strong imperialists: Rosebery, Asquith, Edward Grey,
and Haldane. These four supported the Boer War, grew increasingly anti-German,
supported the World War in 1914, and were close to the Milner Group politically,
intellectually, and socially.(7)
Socially, the Cecil Bloc could be divided into three generations. The first (including
Salisbury, Gladstone, the seventh Duke of Devonshire, the eighth Viscount Midleton,
Goschen, the fourth Baron Lyttelton, the first Earl of Cranbrook, the first Duke of
Westminster, the first Baron Leconfield, the tenth Earl of Wemyss, etc.) was not
as"social" (in the frivolous sense) as the second. This first generation was born in the first
third of the nineteenth century, went to both Oxford and Cambridge in the period 1830-
1855, and died in the period 1890-1915. The second generation was born in the second