Page:The house of Cecil.djvu/322

 280 THE CECILS

the intervention of the Queen, and the second by the promotion of Northcote to the Peerage, as Earl of Iddesleigh, with the post of First Lord of the Treasury The Prime Minister himself went to the Foreign Office, and Sir M. Hicks-Beach became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. The difficulty of the dual leadership of the party was thus finally overcome. These negotiations rendered the formation of a ministry more than usually troublesome, and Lord Cranbrook, who was Lord President of the Council, records in his Diary that " Salisbury, weary of the self-seekers, the beggars, the imprac- ticables, and above all, of one who played such pranks, would gladly have thrown up his task, and gone almost into private life ; but his feeling for the Queen, who cannot retire or resign, was such as to overbear all other considerations." x Lord Salisbury, as the same observer notes, " abhorred patronage and its littleness," and though he loved the Foreign Office, and would not willingly have given that up, he would probably have gladly resigned the Premiership at any time. 2

In this ministry, Mr. A. J. Balfour, Lord Salisbury's nephew, took office for the first time, as President of the Local Government Board.

At home the Government had little to do beyond the necessary winding-up of business in prepara- tion for the election in the autumn. But Lord

1 Life of Lord Cranbrook, II. 220.

2 Ibid., II. 286.

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