Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, KG, PC (7 May 1847 – 21 May 1929) was a British Liberal statesman and Prime Minister, also known as Archibald Primrose (1847–1851) and Lord Dalmeny (1851–1868).
This meant that for nearly a quarter of a century, from 1880 until 1902, the three Prime Ministers of that period – Gladstone, Salisbury and Rosebery – all went to both Eton and Christ Church. All in all, 19 Prime Ministers (38%) have gone to Eton, and 14 (28%) to Christ Church.
A prominent figure on the turf for 40 years, Dalmeny bought a horse, Ladas, in 1868. A rule banned undergraduates from owning horses, and when he was found out, he was offered a choice: sell the horse or give up his studies. He chose the latter.
Rosebery toured the United States in 1873. He was pressed to marry Mary Fox, the illegitimate daughter of Baron Holland by a French maid; Baroness Holland, a daughter of the Earl of Coventry, adopted Mary. However, Mary, who was only sixteen, declined and later married a Prince of Liechtenstein.
In 1878, Rosebery married Hannah, only child of the Jewish banker Baron Mayer de Rothschild, and the greatest English heiress of her day. Her father had died in 1874 and she had inherited the bulk of his estate.
They were married in the Board of Guardians in Mount Street, London, on 20 March 1878, when he was 31 and she 27. Later that day, the marriage was blessed in a Christian ceremony in Christ Church, Down Street, Piccadilly. In January, Rosebery had said to a friend that he found Hannah "very simple, very unspoilt, very clever, very warm-hearted and very shy...I never knew such a beautiful character." Both Queen Victoria's son the Prince of Wales and her cousin, the army commander George, Duke of Cambridge attended the ceremony. Hannah's death in 1890 from typhoid, compounded by Bright's disease, left him distraught.
It was also speculated that he was bisexual. Like Oscar Wilde, he was hounded by John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry for his association with one of Queensberry's sons — Francis Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig.
Margot Asquith said that Rosebery loved to play with his children.
Rosebery was the owner of twelve houses. By marriage, he acquired:
With his fortune, he bought:
As Earl of Rosebery, he was laird of:
Rosebery's government was largely unsuccessful. His designs in foreign policy, such as expansion of the fleet, were defeated by disagreements within the Liberal Party, while the Unionist-dominated House of Lords stopped the whole of the Liberals' domestic legislation. On 21 June 1895, Rosebery resigned after a minor defeat in the House of Commons, and a Unionist government under Lord Salisbury took his place.
According to his biographer Robert Rhodes James Rosebery rapidly lost interest in running the government that he found Gladstone had basically dumped on him. The strongest figure in the Cabinet was Sir William Harcourt and Harcourt and his son Lewis Harcourt were perennially critical of Rosebery's policies. Towards the last year of the Premiership, Rosebery was increasingly haggard, due to insomnia brought about by the difficulties in his official government family. Interestingly enough there was a future Prime Minister in the Cabinet, Herbert Asquith who was Attorney-General. However Asquith was in no real position to assist his chief.
The "defeat" that led to his resignation caught everyone by surprise. It was on a bill for the an increase of the government budget for the purchase of cordite for explosives. It was defeated by a relatively small number of votes, and without any warning Rosebey announced it to be a vote of no confidence, much to the surprise of the Conservative Party. Rosebery's resignation led to a period of ten years (1895-1905) of Tory Party Governments under Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour.
The last years of his political life saw Rosebery become a purely negative critic of the Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. His crusade "for freedom as against bureaucracy, for freedom as against democratic tyranny, for freedom as against class legislation, and … for freedom as against Socialism was a lonely one, conducted from the cross-benches in the Lords. He did join the die-hard unionist peers in attacking Lloyd George's redistributive People's Budget in 1909, but stopped short of voting against the measure for fear of bringing retribution upon the Lords. The crisis provoked by the Lords' rejection of the budget encouraged him to reintroduce his resolutions for Lords reform, but they were lost with the dissolution of parliament in December 1910. After assaulting the "ill-judged, revolutionary and partisan" terms of the 1911 Parliament Bill, which proposed to curb the Lords' veto, he voted with the government in what proved to be his last appearance in the House of Lords. This was effectively the end of his public life, though he made several public appearances to support the war effort after 1914 and sponsored a "bantam battalion" in 1915. Though Lloyd George offered him "a high post not involving departmental labour" to augment his 1916 coalition, Rosebery declined to serve.
The last year of the war was clouded by two personal tragedies—his son Neil's death in Palestine in November 1917 and Rosebery's own stroke a few days before the armistice. He regained his mental powers, but his movement, hearing, and sight remained impaired for the rest of his life. His sister, Constance, described his last years as a "life of weariness, of total inactivity, & at the last of almost blindness"; John Buchan remembered him in his last month of life, "crushed by bodily weakness" and "sunk in sad and silent meditations". Rosebery died at The Durdans, Epsom, Surrey, on 21 May 1929, to the accompaniment—as he had requested—of a gramophone recording of the Eton boating song. Survived by three of his four children, he was buried in the small church at Dalmeny.
When Rosebery died in 1929 his estate was probated at £1,500,122 3s. 6d.; (£62,693,299.71 ) he was thus the richest Prime Minister ever, followed by Salisbury, then by Palmerston.
Rosebery also became Honorary President of the national Scottish Football Association, with the representative Scotland national team occasionally forsaking their traditional dark blue shirts for his traditional racing colours of primrose and pink. This occurred 9 times during Rosebery's lifetime, most notably for the 1900 British Home Championship match against England, which the Scots won 4–1.