Curzon, George

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CURZON, GEORGE

CURZON, GEORGE (1859–1925), British statesman.

George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, was born in 1859 into an aristocratic family of Norman origin and raised in his family's distinguished Derbyshire estate, Kedleston Hall. Schooled at Eton, he went on to study at Balliol College, Oxford, which was becoming a training-ground for the political and imperial elite. Curzon dedicatedly pursued a prepolitical career, serving as president of the Oxford Union. He was known for his eloquent debating skills, Tory sentiments, and social connections, but also for his apparent sense of superiority. This provoked an uncharitable verse that would dog him for life:

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.

After winning a prestigious fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, Curzon was elected to Parliament as a Conservative member of Parliament (MP) in 1886. Inspired in part by a lecture he had heard as an Eton schoolboy, he decided to cultivate an expertise in Asian affairs. His preferred method of doing so involved traveling as much as possible. In 1887 he set off on a trip around the world; over the next seven years Curzon traveled to Russia, Persia, Afghanistan, central Asia, and east Asia, writing up his experiences in a series of multivolume books. In 1891 Curzon's specialist knowledge earned him a position as undersecretary of state for Indian affairs. From 1895 to 1898 he served as undersecretary of state in the foreign office and acted as the government's chief spokesman on foreign affairs in the House of Commons. In 1895 Curzon also concluded a period of romancing high-society women by marrying Mary Victoria Leiter, the daughter of a Chicago millionaire.

Curzon's ambitions directed him toward the position of viceroy of India, to which he was appointed in 1898. He arrived in India just forty years old, determined to reform the entire structure of British administration in the country and to assume a quasi-royal role. It was happy coincidence that Calcutta's Government House, built nearly a century before, had been modeled on Kedleston Hall. Curzon promoted an emphatically paternalistic vision of British imperial government. He believed in the alliance of power with spectacle and staged what many scholars see as the defining celebration of the British Empire at its peak: the Coronation Durbar of 1903, held in Delhi in honor of the coronation of King Edward VII (r. 1901–1910). Curzon's aristocratic paternalism also manifested itself in the 1904 Ancient Monuments Bill, designed to protect Indian architectural and archaeological heritage. He considered one of his greatest accomplishments to be the restoration of the Taj Mahal.

But not all Curzon's interventions were successful. He discounted the emerging Indian National Congress as an actor in India's political future. Most controversially, Curzon decided in 1905 to partition Bengal into two regions, one Hindu-majority and the other Muslim-majority. This was interpreted by Indian nationalists as an effort to "divide and rule" and was actively opposed in what is now seen as a defining moment in the Indian independence struggle. Curzon also invited criticism by sending Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863–1942) on a mission to Tibet that forcibly opened the region to British influence. But the viceroy was ultimately undone by a dispute with Lord Kitchener (Horatio Herbert Kitchener; 1850–1916), a war hero and commander-in-chief of the Indian army, over military restructuring. Confrontation between the two men led to Curzon's resignation in August 1905.

Curzon left India in disfavor and did not seek elected office. He also suffered the death of his beloved wife, Mary, in 1906. But he soon rebounded. In 1907 Curzon became chancellor of Oxford University and the following year took a seat in the House of Lords, where he opposed then chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George's radical "People's Budget" of 1909 but helped broker a solution to the political impasse that followed. Curzon's career revived during World War I. He sat in the coalition cabinet of 1915 and spearheaded the effort, in December 1916, to replace the apparently ineffectual prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith with Lloyd George. Curzon served on Lloyd George's war cabinet for the remainder of the war. In 1917 he also ended an eight-year affair with the novelist Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) and married an American widow nearly twenty years his junior.

During the 1919 peace negotiations, Curzon was appointed foreign secretary. He opposed Jewish settlement in Palestine and advocated the creation of Arab states under British supervision. While dedicated to the preservation of empire, he also acknowledged the need for strategic withdrawal, notably in Egypt. Curzon and Lloyd George parted ways on the question of peace with Turkey. Unlike the feud with Kitchener, however, Curzon prevailed, leading successful negotiations with Turkey after the Conservatives regained power in 1922. He narrowly missed being asked to become prime minister when Andrew Bonar Law resigned in 1923. But this was to be the last of Curzon's perceived failures. After a life plagued by health problems, he died in 1925 at the age of sixty-six.

Curzon is known as the last great Victorian proconsul and as an Edwardian statesman forced to grapple with the legacies of World War I. But his cultural stature, in Britain as in India, was at least as significant. He was a trustee of the National Gallery, president of the Royal Geographical Society, and an active architectural preservationist, restoring several stately homes and presenting them to the nation. Another accomplishment was to orchestrate the peace and remembrance day ceremonies commemorating World War I. For these services and his political work he was made an earl (1911), a knight of the garter (1916), and a marquess (1921).

See alsoGreat Britain; Imperialism; India.