"1st Baron Quickswood" Hugh Cecil Hand Written Letter Dated 1909 For Sale

Up for sale a VERY RARE! "1st Baron Quickswood" Hugh Cecil Hand Written Letter Dated 1909.

ES-9940

Hugh Richard Heathcote Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Baron

Quickswood PC (14 October 1869 – 10

December 1956), styled Lord Hugh Cecil until 1941, was a British Conservative Party politician.  Cecil

was the eighth and youngest child of Robert

Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, three times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,

and Georgina Alderson, daughter of Sir Edward Hall Alderson. He was the

brother of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th

Marquess of Salisbury, Lord William Cecil, Lord Cecil of Chelwood and

Lord Edward Cecil and a first cousin of Prime

Minister Arthur Balfour. He was educated at Eton

and University College, Oxford. He graduated

with first-class honours in Modern History in 1891  and was a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford from 1891 until

1936, when he thought he could not be Provost of Eton and a Fellow of Hertford

simultaneously.  After

his graduation as BA in 1891, Cecil went to work in parliament. From 1891 to

1892 he was Assistant Private Secretary to his father, who was Foreign

Secretary. He graduated as MA

in 1894, and entered the Commons as Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Greenwich in 1895. He took

a keen interest in ecclesiastical questions and became an active member of the

Church party, resisting attempts by nonconformists and secularists

to take the discipline of the Church out of the hands of the archbishops and

bishops, and to remove the bishops from their seats in the House of

Lords. In a speech on the second reading of Balfour's Education Bill of 1902, he maintained that for

the final settlement of the religious difficulty there must be cooperation

between the Church of England and nonconformity, which was

the Church's natural ally; and that the only possible basis of agreement was

that every child should be brought up in the belief of its parents. The ideal

to be aimed at in education was the improvement of the national character. In

the later stages of the bill's progress, he warmly resented an amendment

approved by the House and taken over by the Ministry giving the managers,

instead of the incumbent of the parish, the control of religious education in

non-provided schools. This was not the only point on which he showed

considerable independence of the government of which Balfour, his cousin, was

the head. During the early 20th century, Cecil

(known to his friends as "Linky") was the eponymous leader of the Hughligans,

a group of privileged young Tory Members of Parliament critical of their own party's

leadership. Modelled after Lord Randolph Churchill's Fourth Party,

the Hughligans included Cecil, F. E. Smith, Arthur Stanley, Ian Malcolm and, until 1904, Winston

Churchill. Cecil was the best man

at Churchill's wedding in 1908 and the latter greatly admired his eloquence in

the House of Commons. As Churchill declared to a contemporary, Llewellyn Atherley-Jones,"How I wish

I had his powers; speech is a painful effort to me." Cecil dissented from

the beginning from Joseph Chamberlain's policy of tariff reform,

pleading in Parliament against any devaluation of the idea of empire to a

"gigantic profit-sharing business". He took a prominent position

among the "Free Food Unionists", and consequently was attacked by the

tariff reformers and lost his seat at Greenwich in 1906. In 1910 Cecil became an MP for Oxford University, which

he represented for the next 27 years. He immediately threw himself with passion

into the struggle against the Ministerial Veto Resolutions, comparing the Asquith government to "thimble

riggers". In the next year, he was active in the resistance to the Parliament Bill, treating Asquith

as a "traitor" for his advice to the Crown to create peers, and

taking a prominent part in the disturbance which prevented the Prime Minister

from being heard on 24 July 1911. But he never quite regained the authority

which he had possessed in the House in the early years of the century. He

strongly opposed the Welsh Church Bill, and he denounced the 1914 Home Rule Bill as

reducing Ireland

from the status of a wife to that of a mistress — she was to be kept by John Bull,

not united to him. In 1916 Cecil was part of the Mesopotamia

Commission of Inquiry. He was sworn of the Privy Council on 16

January 1918.