Archibald Primrose, 5Th Earl Of Rosebery

The Right Honourable The Earl of Rosebery KG KT PC FRS FBA
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In office 5 March 1894 – 22 June 1895
Monarch	Victoria
Preceded by	William Ewart Gladstone
Succeeded by	The Marquess of Salisbury
Leader of the Opposition
In office 22 June 1895 – 6 October 1896
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	The Marquess of Salisbury
Preceded by	The Marquess of Salisbury
Succeeded by	Sir William Harcourt
Lord President of the Council
In office 10 March 1894 – 21 June 1895
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	Himself
Preceded by	The Earl of Kimberley
Succeeded by	The Duke of Devonshire
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
In office 18 August 1892 – 10 March 1894
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	William Ewart Gladstone
Preceded by	The Marquess of Salisbury
Succeeded by	The Earl of Kimberley
In office 6 February 1886 – 3 August 1886
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	William Ewart Gladstone
Preceded by	The Marquess of Salisbury
Succeeded by	The Earl of Iddesleigh
Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal
In office 5 March 1885 – 9 June 1885
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	William Ewart Gladstone
Preceded by	The Lord Carlingford
Succeeded by	The Earl of Harrowby
First Commissioner of Works
In office 13 February 1885 – 9 June 1885
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	William Ewart Gladstone
Preceded by	George Shaw-Lefevre
Succeeded by	David Plunket
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department
In office August 1881 – June 1883
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	William Ewart Gladstone
Preceded by	Leonard Courtney
Succeeded by	J. T. Hibbert
Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal
In office 7 May 1868 – 21 May 1929 Hereditary peerage
Preceded by	The 4th Earl of Rosebery
Succeeded by	The 6th Earl of Rosebery
Personal details
Born	Archibald Philip Primrose (1847-05-07)7 May 1847 Mayfair, Middlesex, England
Died	21 May 1929(1929-05-21) (aged 82) Epsom, Surrey, England
Resting place	Dalmeny Parish Church, Edinburgh, Scotland
Political party	Liberal
Spouse(s)	Hannah de Rothschild (m. 1878; died 1890)
Children	4, including Sybil, Harry, and Neil
Parents	Archibald Primrose, Lord Dalmeny Wilhelmina Powlett, Duchess of Cleveland
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford
Signature

After an education at Eton and Oxford, Dalmeny succeeded to his grandfather's Scottish earldom in 1868.

Becoming involved in politics, he became a Liberal, and was involved in Gladstone's Midlothian campaign, which brought the Liberals back into power in 1880. In the Liberal administration that followed, Rosebery served in junior offices, including that of Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, before entering the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal in March 1885.

Rosebery became a leader of the Liberal Imperialist faction of the Liberal Party, and in Gladstone's third (1886) and fourth (1892–1894) administrations, Rosebery served as Foreign Secretary. When Gladstone retired in 1894, Rosebery became his successor as Prime Minister, much to the disgust of the more left-wing Liberals. 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 Tory-dominated House of Lords stopped the whole of the Liberals' domestic legislation. In 1895, Rosebery resigned, and a Conservative government under Lord Salisbury took his place.

Rosebery resigned as leader of the Liberal Party in 1896, and gradually moved further and further from the mainstream of the party, supporting the Boer War and opposing Irish Home Rule, a position which prevented him from taking part in the Liberal government that returned to power in 1905. In his later years, Rosebery turned to writing, including biographies of Lord Chatham, Pitt the Younger, Napoleon, and Lord Randolph Churchill. He was also famous for his champion racehorses.

Roseberry was extremely wealthy, even by the standards of the aristocracy before the First World War. He owned 12 houses, all of them grand, and some of huge size.

 

 

 

By marriage, he acquired:

• Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, a huge neo-Renaissance stately home, sold in the 1970s
• Number 40, Piccadilly, in London.

With his fortune, he bought:

• a shooting lodge at Carrington in Midlothian
• a Georgian villa at Postwick in Norfolk
• In 1897, he bought Villa Delahente in Posillipo, overlooking the Bay of Naples, currently an official residence of the President of the Italian Republic, still known as Villa Rosebery
• 38 Berkeley Square, London
• The Durdans, Epsom, where he died in 1929.

As Earl of Rosebery, he was laird of:

• Dalmeny House on the banks of the Firth of Forth (pictured)
• Barnbougle Castle in the grounds of Dalmeny Estate, used by Rosebery (an insomniac) for privacy.

He rented:

• a home in Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh, during World War I
• Lansdowne House, in London, from the Marquess of Lansdowne.

It was rumoured that Rosebery was homosexual or bisexual. Like Oscar Wilde, he was hounded by Queensbury for his association with one of Queensberry's sons. It was Francis Douglas, who was Roseberry's private secretary. The suggestion was that Queensberry had threatened to expose the Prime Minister if his government did not vigorously prosecute Wilde for Wilde's relationship with Francis Douglas's younger brother, Lord Alfred Douglas. Queensberry believed, as he put it in a letter, that "Snob Queers like Rosebery" had corrupted his sons, and he held Rosebery indirectly responsible for Drumlanrig's death.