enigma to his contemporaries because his nature was paradoxical, his opinions often irreconcilable, and because he did not see life or politics in terms of absolutes. As a result, he was often charged with being cynical, and people who looked at the world from a liberal point of view thought him perverse. H. G. Wells portrayed him as Evesham in The New Machiavelli. “In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his subtle mind.… Did he really care? Did anything matter to him?” Winston Churchill, too, once used the word “wicked” in speaking of him to Mrs. Asquith. She thought the secret of Balfour’s imperturbability in a crisis was that he did not “really care for the things at stake or believe that the happiness of mankind depends on events going this way or that.” Balfour did, in fact, hold certain basic convictions, but he could see arguments on both sides of a matter, which is the penalty of the thoughtful man. On one occasion, arriving for an evening party at a great house whose staircase split in twin curves, he stood at the bottom for twenty minutes trying to work out, as he explained to a puzzled observer, a logical reason for taking one side rather than the other.
In 1887 Salisbury’s surprising appointment of his nephew to the difficult and dangerous post of Chief Secretary for Ireland was expected to prove a fiasco. Balfour was then regarded as a languid intellectual whom the press delighted to call “Prince Charming,” or even “Miss Balfour.” Ireland was seething in its chronic war between landlord and tenant made fiercer by agitators for Home Rule. Police daily evicted tenants unable to pay their rent and were in turn bombarded with stones, vitriol and boiling water by the mob. The memory of Lord Frederick Cavendish’s fate five years earlier had been kept fresh by continued assaults and “everybody right up to the top was trembling.” Balfour, ignoring threats to his life, astonished both islands. He said he intended to be “as relentless as Cromwell” in enforcing the law and as “radical as any reformer” in redressing grievances with regard to the land. His resolute rule “took his foes by surprise,” wrote John Morley, “and roused in his friends a delight hardly surpassed in the politics of our day.” It made him a popular celebrity and brought him in one bound to recognition as “Bloody” Balfour in Ireland and as the coming natural leader of his party in England.
In 1891, on the resignation of W. H. Smith as Leader of the House, he succeeded by unanimous choice. As Irish Secretary, his absolute disregard for personal danger had revealed a courage—or absence of fear—that his contemporaries had not suspected. George Wyndham, then serving as Balfour’s Private Secretary, wrote from Dublin that the Irish loyalists’ admiration for him was “almost comic” and ascribed it to the fact that “great courage being so rare a gift and so large a part of human misery being due to Fear, all men are prepared to fall down before anyone wholly free from fear.” Winston Churchill ascribed Balfour’s lack of nerves to a “cold nature” but acknowledged him “the most courageous man alive. I believe if you held a pistol to his face it would not frighten him.”
The same quality gave him mastery in debate. Sure of his own powers, he feared no opponent or embarrassment. According to Morley, he operated on Dr. Johnson’s principle that “to treat your adversary with respect is to give him an advantage to which he is not entitled.” He debated with “dauntless ingenuity and polished raillery.” Although in public he rarely indulged in hurtful sarcasm, his private epigrams could be sharp. He once said of a colleague, “If he had a little more brains he would be a half-wit.” In the House he maintained toward opponents an almost deferential courtesy, and when under bitter attack by the Irish
In 1887 Salisbury’s surprising appointment of his nephew to the difficult and dangerous post of Chief Secretary for Ireland was expected to prove a fiasco. Balfour was then regarded as a languid intellectual whom the press delighted to call “Prince Charming,” or even “Miss Balfour.” Ireland was seething in its chronic war between landlord and tenant made fiercer by agitators for Home Rule. Police daily evicted tenants unable to pay their rent and were in turn bombarded with stones, vitriol and boiling water by the mob. The memory of Lord Frederick Cavendish’s fate five years earlier had been kept fresh by continued assaults and “everybody right up to the top was trembling.” Balfour, ignoring threats to his life, astonished both islands. He said he intended to be “as relentless as Cromwell” in enforcing the law and as “radical as any reformer” in redressing grievances with regard to the land. His resolute rule “took his foes by surprise,” wrote John Morley, “and roused in his friends a delight hardly surpassed in the politics of our day.” It made him a popular celebrity and brought him in one bound to recognition as “Bloody” Balfour in Ireland and as the coming natural leader of his party in England.
In 1891, on the resignation of W. H. Smith as Leader of the House, he succeeded by unanimous choice. As Irish Secretary, his absolute disregard for personal danger had revealed a courage—or absence of fear—that his contemporaries had not suspected. George Wyndham, then serving as Balfour’s Private Secretary, wrote from Dublin that the Irish loyalists’ admiration for him was “almost comic” and ascribed it to the fact that “great courage being so rare a gift and so large a part of human misery being due to Fear, all men are prepared to fall down before anyone wholly free from fear.” Winston Churchill ascribed Balfour’s lack of nerves to a “cold nature” but acknowledged him “the most courageous man alive. I believe if you held a pistol to his face it would not frighten him.”
The same quality gave him mastery in debate. Sure of his own powers, he feared no opponent or embarrassment. According to Morley, he operated on Dr. Johnson’s principle that “to treat your adversary with respect is to give him an advantage to which he is not entitled.” He debated with “dauntless ingenuity and polished raillery.” Although in public he rarely indulged in hurtful sarcasm, his private epigrams could be sharp. He once said of a colleague, “If he had a little more brains he would be a half-wit.” In the House he maintained toward opponents an almost deferential courtesy, and when under bitter attack by the Irish
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