Edgar
Algernon Robert Cecil (September 14, 1864-November 24, 1958)
British lawyer, parliamentarian and cabinet minister, one of the
architects of the League of Nations and its faithful defender,
was the distinguished son of the third Marquess of Salisbury,
that remarkable man who occupied, in the course of his career,
the highest offices in the land: the foreign ministry under
Disraeli, the prime ministry three times (1885, 1886-1892, and
1895-1902).
The education which Robert absorbed at home until he was thirteen
was superior and far more interesting, he writes in his
autobiography, than his four years at Eton. He enjoyed his
undergraduate days at Oxford where he won renown as a debater, and after
several terms of reading law, he was called to the Bar in 1887,
at the age of twenty-three. Of his marriage to Lady Eleanor
Lambton two years later he was fond of saying that it was the
cleverest thing he had ever done1.
From 1887 to 1906, Cecil's career was a legal one, involving most
of the forms of common law, occasional efforts in Chancery, and a
steadily increasing parliamentary practice. He also collaborated
in writing Principles of Commercial Law.
From the law, Cecil turned to politics. As a Conservative, he
represented East Marylebone in the House of Commons from 1906 to
1910, lost two elections in the next year, and then won as an
Independent Conservative in 1911 as member for the Hitchin
Division of Hertfordshire, remaining in the Commons until
1923.
Fifty years old at the outbreak of World War I, Cecil went to
work for the Red Cross, but with
the formation of the coalition government in 1915, he became
undersecretary for foreign affairs for a year, served as minister
of blockade from 1916 to 1918, being responsible for devising
procedures to bring economic and commercial pressure against the
enemy, and early in 1918 became assistant secretary of state for
foreign affairs.
The «third phase»2 of
Cecil's public career - his absorption in the maintenance of
peace - began in 1916. Appalled by the war's destruction of life,
property, and human values, he became convinced that civilization
could survive only if it could invent an international system
that would insure peace. In September, 1916, he circulated a
memorandum making proposals for the avoidance of war, which he
says was the «first document from which sprang British
official advocacy of the League of Nations»3.
From the inception of the League to its demise in 1946, a span of
almost thirty years, Cecil's public life was almost totally
devoted to the League. At the Paris Peace Conference, he was the
British representative in charge of negotiations for a League of
Nations; from 1920 through 1922, he represented the Dominion of
South Africa in the League Assembly; in 1923 he made a five-week
tour of the United States, explaining the League to American
audiences; from 1923 to 1924, with the title of Lord Privy Seal,
and from 1924 to 1927, with that of Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, he was the minister responsible, under the
jurisdiction of the Foreign Secretary, for British activities in
League affairs.
In 1927, dissatisfied with the attitude of the British cabinet
toward the League, he resigned from governmental office and
thereafter, although an official delegate to the League as late
as 1932, worked independently to mobilize public opinion in
support of the League. He was president of the British League of
Nations Union from 1923 to 1945, and joint founder and president,
with a French Jurist, of the International Peace Campaign, known
in France as Rassemblement universel pour la paix. Among his
publications during this period were The Way of Peace
(1928), a collection of lectures on the League; A Great
Experiment (1941), a personalized account of his relationship
to the League of Nations; All the Way (1949), a more
complete autobiography.
Lord Robert's career brought him many honors. He was created
first Viscount of Chelwood in 1923 and made a Companion of Honour
in 1956, was elected chancellor of Birmingham University
(1918-1944) and rector of the University of Aberdeen (1924-1927), was given
the Peace Award of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in 1924 and the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1937, was presented with honorary degrees by
the Universities
of Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Liverpool, St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Princeton,
Columbia,
and Athens.
In the spring of 1946 he participated in the final meetings of the
League at Geneva, ending his speech with the sentence: «The
League is dead; long live the United Nations!» He was eighty-one.
He lived for thirteen more years, occasionally occupying his place
in the House of Lords, and supporting international efforts for
peace through his honorary life presidency of the United Nations
Association.
Selected Bibliography |
Bachofen, Maja, Lord Robert Cecil und der Völkerbund. Zurich, 1959. |
Carlton, David, «Disarmament with Guarantees: Lord Cecil, 1922-1927», in Disarmament and Arms Control, 3 (1965, no. 2) 143-164. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, All the Way [an autobiography]. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1949. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, «American Addresses», League of Nations, 5 (1922, no. 6) 401-460. [A publication of the World Peace Foundation, Boston.] |
Cecil, Lord Robert, An Emergency Policy. London and New York, Hutchinson, 1948. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, A Great Experiment: An Autobiography. New York, Oxford University Press, 1941. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, International Arbitration [the Burge Memorial Lecture]. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1928. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, «The League as a Road to Peace», in The Intelligent Man's Way to Prevent War, ed. by L. Woolf. London, Gollancz, 1933. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, The Moral Basis of the League of Nations [the Essex Hall Lecture]. London, Lindsey Press, 1923. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, The New Outlook. London, Allen & Unwin, 1919. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, Peace and Pacifism [the Romanes Lecture]. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1938. |
Cecil, Lord Robert, The Way of Peace: Essays and Addresses. London, Allen, 1928. [Reissued, Port Washington, N.Y., Kennikat Press, 1968.] |
Cecil, Lord Robert, and Joseph Hurst, The Principles of Commercial Law. London, Stevens & Haynes, 1891. |
Crewe, Marquess of, «Lord Cecil and the League», The Fortnightly, 155 [n.s. 149] (March, 1941) 209-218. |
Obituary, the (London) Times (November 25, 1958) 13. |
1. Cecil,
A Great Experiment, p. 19.
2. Cecil, All the Way, pp.
142, 239.
3. Ibid. p. 141.
From Nobel Lectures, Peace 1926-1950, Editor Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1937