Letter to the Editor: A Historical Perspective on Inherited Wealth and Power

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In this country, the Democratic Party has begun its search for a new presidential nominee.  Concurrently in Britain, our closest ally in war and peace for over a century, the Conservative Party is searching for a new prime minister.

Within hours of the Brexit referendum in 2016, in which Britain voted by the very narrow margin of 52% to 48% to depart the European Union, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron resigned. 

Chosen to succeed Cameron was fellow Tory Theresa May, who promised to effectuate the departure. Three humiliating years later, May has accomplished nothing and is resigning herself.

British prime ministers must be members of the lower house of Parliament, the House of Commons, which has 650 members. The 313 Conservatives in the Commons have narrowed the choice for May’s successor to two finalists, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt. The rank and file of the party will choose one of these in a postal ballot, with the results to be announced on July 22. The likely winner is Johnson, the controversial and eccentric former mayor of London.  Hunt, the current foreign and commonwealth secretary, is regarded as more conventional.

By unwritten convention since 1902, members of the House of Lords have not served as prime minister. While most British women received the right to vote in 1918, the Lords remained men-only until 1958, and was mostly hereditary until 1999.

The retiree in 1902 was no less than Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, 7th Earl of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne, Baron Cecil, Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter, Knight Grand Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, leader of the Conservative Party.  

Salisbury held 16th-century titles to over 10,000 acres of prime English countryside and to numerous, invaluable swaths of central London. He owned 80,000 acres in the general vicinity of Salisbury, Rhodesia, which is now known as Harare, Zimbabwe.

Even by the standards of the time, the Marquess was reactionary, aloof and dismissive. He attempted to thwart the election to the Commons of an Indian-born Parsi, Dadabhai Naoroji, solely on the basis of his ethnicity and religion.



This incident acquired worldwide notoriety, and Salisbury was strongly condemned. Especially critical was The New York Times, a stalwart defender of decency, then and now.

In both 1867 and 1884, Salisbury vehemently resisted efforts to extend the franchise to the common working man, splitting on this issue with fellow Tory Benjamin Disraeli. 

The belted aristocrat who by luck of lineage held a seat in the Lords would not grant the basic right to vote to the plowmen on his inherited estates.  At least he didn’t stand in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and shoot one of them.

But while a mammoth anachronism, the Marquess in his own way was an honest and principled man, if frequently mistaken. He never claimed that his millions were self-made, and he never would have invited a foreign power to determine the fate of the British Empire. We should be so lucky.

 

Joseph Tipler

Centralia