Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery Facts & Worksheets

• He also supported Gladstone’s Second Irish Home Rule Bill in the House of Lords at this time, but it was turned down in 1893, just like the first one had been in 1886.
• Rosebery became the unofficial leader of the Liberal Imperialist faction, which wanted to combine liberal reform at home with a strong imperial policy abroad. Queen Victoria, who did not trust most senior Liberals, wanted Rosebery to take over when Gladstone retired in March 1894. Sir William Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and head of the party’s more radical wing, was not happy about his appointment, though. 
• Rosebery’s job in the House of Lords made it even harder for him to lead because Harcourt was in charge of the House of Commons and often blocked the Prime Minister’s plans. Rosebery’s government had a lot of problems, both at home and abroad. 
• His handling of the Armenian Crisis (1895–1896), in which he condemned Ottoman atrocities against Armenians and supported a pro-Armenian policy, turned some members of his own party against him and caused divisions among the European powers.
• He pushed for naval expansion because he thought that Britain’s naval power was important for protecting the empire. However, some Liberals were against this because they did not want to spend more on the military.
• The Unionist-controlled House of Lords also got in the way of his domestic agenda by always voting against Liberal bills. There were a lot of disagreements in the Cabinet. Strong personalities like Harcourt, H. H. Asquith (Home Secretary), and Henry Campbell-Bannerman (Secretary of State for War) often clashed with Rosebery’s cautious style of leadership.
• The Prime Minister was getting more and more tired and disappointed with the constant fighting. People who lived at the time said he looked tired and had not slept in days because of stress and insomnia caused by cabinet disagreements and being politically alone. 
• On 21 June 1895, the government lost a vote in parliament by seven votes on the army supply. This was the last straw for them. Even though Campbell-Bannerman, the War Secretary, could have just seen this as a criticism, Rosebery chose to see it as a vote of no confidence in his government. 
• He quit on 22 June 1895, and Queen Victoria asked Lord Salisbury to make a Unionist government. The following general election in July 1895 was a clear victory for the Unionists, marking the start of a decade of Conservative rule under Salisbury and Arthur Balfour.
• Rosebery was still the head of the Liberal Party for another year, but he left politics in 1896. He was unhappy with the party’s internal divisions and the decline of the old Whig liberal tradition, so he spent most of his last years in retirement, focusing on horse racing, writing, and giving to charity. Rosebery’s short and tumultuous time as Prime Minister showed the tensions between aristocratic liberalism and democratic reform in late Victorian Britain.

LATER LIFE AND ISSUES ON SEXUALITY

• After stepping down as leader of the Liberal Party on 6 October 1896, and being replaced by William Harcourt, Lord Rosebery slowly moved away from the party's mainstream politics. In 1899, during the Boer War, the Liberals split up, and he became the unofficial leader of the “Liberal Imperialist” group, which was against Irish Home Rule and for Britain's military campaign. People who didn't agree with him supported him, but younger Liberals like David Lloyd George and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman criticised him.
• Rosebery turned down repeated requests from allies like H. H. Asquith and Edward Grey to take back leadership. When he told party members to clean the slate in a speech in Chesterfield in 1901, it shocked them because it showed how far apart he was from their ideas. The next year, he became president of the Liberal League, which replaced the Liberal Imperialist League. This gave him more power among imperialist Liberals.
• He was given the honorary title of Colonel of the 1st Midlothian Artillery Volunteers in 1903. He kept this title until he died in 1929.
• Rosebery could not join the new Liberal government by 1905 because he was too conservative and imperialist. He turned to writing, publishing biographies of Chatham, Pitt the Younger, Napoleon, and Randolph Churchill, while also amassing an impressive rare book collection. He became a vocal opponent of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith governments, arguing for personal freedom and against what he saw as too much bureaucracy, class legislation, and socialism.
• He was on the same side as Unionist peers against Lloyd George’s People’s Budget in 1909, but he did not vote against it directly. His demand for Lords reform after the 1910 crisis was not met, and his last speech in the Lords, in which he opposed the 1911 Parliament Bill, ended his public career. He later backed the war effort in the First World War, helped set up a bantam battalion, and turned down Lloyd George’s offer to join his coalition government in 1916. There were rumours about Rosebery’s sexuality and his dislike of women that made his private life difficult.
• He stayed close with younger men, like his Eton tutor William Johnson Cory and student Frederick Vyner, whose death in 1870 had a big effect on him. His relationship with Francis Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig, who became his private secretary and later became a Lord, caused a scandal after Drumlanrig died mysteriously in 1894. Queensberry, Drumlanrig’s father, said that Rosebery had corrupted his sons and may have been involved in the tragedy. 
• The fight was like Queensberry’s persecution of Oscar Wilde, and during Wilde’s trial, he even made fun of Rosebery in court papers. Later claims, like those made by Edmund Backhouse, said that Rosebery had romantic relationships with men, but historians disagree on what they mean: Robert Rhodes James did not talk about it in 1963, Leo McKinstry (2005) found only circumstantial evidence, and Michael Bloch (2015) said that Rosebery was probably romantically interested in men.