Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon, KP, PC, DL, FRS, FSA (24 June 1831 – 29 June 1890), known as Lord Porchester from 1833 to 1849, was a British politician and a leading member of the Conservative Party. He was twice Secretary of State for the Colonies and also served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
Born at Grosvenor Square, London, Carnarvon was the eldest son and heir of Henry Herbert, 3rd Earl of Carnarvon (d.1849), by his wife Henrietta Anna Howard, a daughter of Lord Henry Howard-Molyneux-Howard, younger brother of Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk. The Hon. Auberon Herbert was his younger brother.
He was educated at Eton College. In 1849, aged 18, he succeeded his father in the earldom. He attended Christ Church, Oxford, where his nickname was "Twitters", apparently on account of his nervous tics and twitchy behaviour, and where in 1852 he obtained a first in literae humaniores.
Carnavon made his maiden speech on 31 January 1854, having been requested by Lord Aberdeen to move the address in reply to the Queen's Speech. He served under Lord Derby, as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1858 to 1859, aged twenty-six.
In 1863 he worked on penal reform. Under the influence of Joshua Jebb he saw the gaols,[a] with a population including prisoners before any trial, as numerically more significant than the system of prisons for convicts. He was himself a magistrate, and campaigned for the conditions of confinement to be made less comfortable, with more severe regimes on labour and diet. He also wished to see a national system that was more uniform. In response, he was asked to run a House of Lords committee, which sat from February 1863. It drafted a report, and a Gaol Bill was brought in, during 1864; it was, however, lost amid opposition. The Prisons Act 1866, passed by parliament during 1865, saw Carnarvon's main ideas implemented, though with detailed amendments.
In 1866 Carnarvon was sworn of the Privy Council and appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies by Derby. In 1867 he introduced the British North America Act, which conferred self-government on Canada, and created a federation. Later that year, he resigned (along with Lord Cranborne and Jonathan Peel) in protest against Benjamin Disraeli's Reform Bill to enfranchise the working classes.
Returning to the office of the British colonial secretary in 1874, he submitted a set of proposals, the Carnarvon terms, to settle the dispute between British Columbia and Canada over the construction of the transcontinental railroad and the Vancouver Island railroad and train bridge. Vancouver Island had been promised a rail link as a condition for its entry into British North America confederation.
In the same year, he set in motion plans to impose a system of confederation on the various states of Southern Africa. The situation in southern Africa was complicated, not least in that several of its states were still independent and so required military conquest before being confederated. The confederation plan was also highly unpopular among ordinary southern Africans. The Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (by far the largest and most influential state in southern Africa) firmly rejected confederation under Britain, saying that it was not a model that was applicable to the diverse region, and that conflict would result from outside involvement in southern Africa at a time when state relations were particularly sensitive. The liberal Cape government also objected to the plan for ideological concerns; Its formal response, conveyed to London via Sir Henry Barkly, had been that any federation with the illiberal Boer republics would compromise the rights and franchise of the Cape's Black citizens, and was therefore unacceptable. Other regional governments refused even to discuss the idea. Overall, the opinion of the governments of the Cape and its neighbours was that "the proposals for confederation should emanate from the communities to be affected, and not be pressed upon them from outside."
Lord Carnarvon believed that the continued existence of independent African states posed an ever-present threat of a "general and simultaneous rising of Kaffirdom against white civilization".[7] He thus decided to force the pace, "endeavouring to give South Africa not what it wanted, but what he considered it ought to want."
He sent administrators, such as Theophilus Shepstone and Bartle Frere, to southern Africa to implement his system of confederation. Shepstone invaded and annexed the Transvaal in 1877, while Bartle Frere, as the new High Commissioner, led imperial troops against the last independent Xhosa in the 9th Frontier War. Carnarvon then used the rising unrest to suspend the Natal constitution, while Bartle Frere overthrew the elected Cape government, and then moved to invade the independent Zulu Kingdom.
However the confederation scheme collapsed as predicted, leaving a trail of wars across Southern Africa. Humiliating defeats also followed at Isandlwana and Majuba Hill. Of the resultant wars, the disastrous invasion of Zululand ended in annexation, but the first Anglo-Boer War of 1880 had even more far-reaching consequences for the subcontinent.
Francis Reginald Statham, editor of The Natal Witness in the 1870s, famously summed up the local reaction to Carnarvon's plan for the region:
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He (Carnarvon) thought it no harm to adopt this machinery (Canadian Confederation System) just as it stood, even down to the numbering and arrangement of the sections and sub-sections, and present it to the astonished South Africans as a god to go before them. It was as if your tailor should say — "Here is a coat; I did not make it, but I stole it ready-made out of a railway cloak-room, I don't know whether you want a coat or not; but you will be kind enough to put this on, and fit yourself to it. If it should happen to be too long in the sleeves, or ridiculously short in the back, I may be able to shift a button a few inches, and I am at least unalterably determined that my name shall be stamped on the loop you hang it up by.
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The confederation idea was dropped when Carnarvon resigned in 1878, in opposition to Disraeli's policy on the Eastern Question, but the bitter conflicts caused by Carnarvon's policy continued, culminating eventually in the Anglo-Boer War and the ongoing divisions in South African society.
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 1885–6
On his party's return to power in 1885, Carnarvon became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. His short period of office, memorable only for a conflict on a question of personal veracity between himself and Charles Stewart Parnell, as to his negotiations with the latter in respect of Home Rule, was terminated by another premature resignation. He never returned to office.
Lord Carnarvon married twice:
· Firstly in 1861 to Lady Evelyn Stanhope (1834–1875), a daughter of George Stanhope, 6th Earl of Chesterfield and Anne Stanhope, Countess of Chesterfield, by whom he had one son and three daughters:
o George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon (1866–1923), eldest son and heir, the financial backer of the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun;
o Lady Winifred Herbert, eldest daughter, who married as her second husband Herbert Gardner, 1st Baron Burghclere and was the mother of Evelyn Gardner, who married the novelist Evelyn Waugh. Evelyn Gardner's marriage soon ended in divorce and, despite the opposition of the Herbert family, Waugh remarried to her half first cousin[13] Laura Herbert, a daughter of Aubrey Herbert of Pixton, a son of the 4th Earl by his second wife.
o Lady Margaret Herbert, who married George Herbert Duckworth, a notable civil servant and half-brother of the novelist Virginia Woolf and of the artist Vanessa Bell.
o Lady Victoria Herbert.
Secondly, in 1878, he married his first cousin Elizabeth Catherine Howard (1857–1929), a daughter of Henry Howard of Greystoke Castle, near Penrith, Cumberland (brother of Henrietta Anna Molyneux-Howard (1804–1876), wife of Henry Herbert, 3rd Earl of Carnarvon), a son of Lord Henry Howard-Molyneux-Howard, younger brother of Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk.
Elizabeth Howard's brother was Esmé Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Penrith.
By his second wife he had two further sons:
o Hon. Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert (1880–1923), of Pixton Park in Somerset and of Teversal, in Nottinghamshire, soldier, diplomat, traveller, intelligence officer associated with Albanian independence and Conservative Member of Parliament for Yeovil. His daughter Laura Herbert was the second wife of Evelyn Waugh
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o Hon. Mervyn Robert Howard Molyneux Herbert (1882–1929), of Tetton, Kingston St Mary, Somerset, third son (second son by second wife), a diplomat and cricketer. Tetton was a former Acland property bequeathed to him by his father.
Lord Carnarvon died in June 1890, aged 59, at Portman Square in London. His second wife survived him by almost forty years and died in February 1929, aged 72.
Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser (NSW : 1843 - 1893), Thursday 3 July 1890, page 8
The Late Earl of Carnarvon.
The late Earl of Carnarvon, whose death was reported by cable on Monday, was the eldest son of Henry John George, the third earl (who was an accomplished scholar and poet), by Henrietta Anna, daughter of Lord Henry T. Molyneux Howard, born June 24, 1831, and was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated an a first-class in classics in 1852, and D.C.L. in 1859. Lord Carnarvon, who represented a younger house of the noble house of Pembroke, succeeded to the title during his minority. Soon after taking his seat in the House of Peers be made his maiden speech, on which he was highly complimented by Lord Derby, who, in 1859, nominated him High Steward of the University of Oxford. He was Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in Lord Derby's second Administration, 1858-9, and was appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies in Lord Derby's third Administration, Jane, 1866. On Feb. 19,1867, be moved in the House of Lord, the second reading of the Bill for the Confederation of the British North American Provinces, which he truly described as one of the largest and most important measures that for many years it had been the duty of any Colonial Minister in England to submit to Parliament.
Shortly after this (March 2) his Lordship resigned the Colonial Secretaryship on account of a difference of opinion respecting Parliamentary reform. At the same time, General Peel, War Secretary, and Lord Cranbourne (now the Marquis of Salisbury), Secretary for India, tendered their resignations, which were accepted. Lord Carnarvon, in the speech he delivered in the House of Peers on the occasion, avowed that the new Reform Bill would make an entire transfer of political power in five-sixths of the boroughs, and expressed his belief that the Government were going too far in a democratic direction. On the formation of Mr. Disraeli's Cabinet in February, 1874, he was for the second time appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies.
He resigned his seat in the Cabinet January 24, 1878, in consequence of his disagreement from his colleagues as to the policy of ordering the British fleet to proceed to the Dardanelles. His Lordship considered this to be a departure from the policy of neutrality which the Government had pledged themselves to preserve as long as neither of the belligerents infringed certain conditions which her Majesty's Government itself had laid down. Lord Derby, Foreign Secretary, tendered his resignation at the same time, but consented to resume his post after the order respecting the fleet had been countermanded, and explanations had been made with his colleagues, Lord Carnarvon held the post of Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland from June, 1885, to January, 1886, under Lord Salisbury's first Administration.
He was the author of " The Archaeology of Berkshire," an address delivered to the Archaeological Association at Newbury, 1859; " Recollections of the Druses of the Lebanon, and Notes on their Religion, 1860, being notes of a visit to the East ;" and a preface and notes to a report on " The Prison Discipline," adopted at the Hampshire Quarter Sessions, January .4,1864.
He edited, in 1869, " Reminiscences of Athens and the Morea: Extracts from a Journal of Travels in Greece during 1839, by the late Earl of Carnarvon ; and in 1875, " The Gnostic Heresies of the First and Second Centuries," by the late H. L. Mansell, Dean of St. Paul's, to which his Lordship wrote as a preface a sketch of the life, work, and character of the author.
He published, in 1879, a poetical translation of the " Agamemnon" of _Aeschylus. His latest work was a verse translation of the Odyssey. Lord Carnarvon was major in the Hampshire Yeomanry Cavalry, 1862-8; and was a deputy lieutenant and a magistrate for Hampshire, Constable of Carnarvon Castle, High Steward of Newbury, and Pro-Grand Master of the Freemasons of England, 1875; was president of the Society of Antiquaries from 1878 to 1885, and a Member of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1882.
He married, firstly, in 1861, Lady Evelyn Stanhope (who died in 1875) ; and secondly, December 81, 1878, Elizabeth Catherine, daughter of the late Mr. Henry Howard, of Greystoke Castle, Cumber-land.
Rather more than two years ago the deceased Earl visited Australia and New Zealand. While in Sydney he delivered several speeches, which won for him considerable popularity. His presence in Sydney was hailed with much interest by the brethren of the Masonic craft, and the circumstance of the various Masonic constitutions having united under one Grand Lodge was in a, large measure due to the advice and influence of the Earl of Carnarvon.
Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW : 1871 - 1912), Saturday 19 November 1887, page 1068
Lord Carnarvon.
Few of our recent visitors have really been better worth showing the colonies to than Lord Carnarvon, -who is now on a visit to Australia. Lord Rosebery, indeed, may be counted an exception, because he is one of the coming men ; and so also may Lord Aberdeen, who though not so strong a man, may, as one of Mr. Gladstone's old colleagues, be again an Imperial Minister. But Lord Carnarvon has been specifically Minister for the Colonies more than once ; and having helped to govern them, he is now learning by personal observation what the colonies he sought to control are like.
The control exercised by Downing street is at present slight, but it is not altogether reduced to a shadow. It has been less in Australia than it was in South Africa, but Lord Carnarvon has been a party to some despatches to our Governors which have been very important. It will be on the whole a better thing if politicians who mean to be Secretaries for the Colonies should visit us first, and acquire something more than a book knowledge of the Greater Britain that lies outside the limits of the United Kingdom. It would give them a very valuable experience, and release them from subjection to the permanent officers of the department, none of whom have been taught to consider it part of the training to know the colonies otherwise than through books and despatches.
We are so far detached from English party factions that we can, without any hypocrisy, receive a Conservative or a Liberal with equal cordiality, and give as genuine a welcome to Lord Carnarvon as to Lord Rosebery or Lord Aberdeen. The speeches which our new guest has made in Melbourne have all been such as to procure him a favourable reception ; they have been marked by good sense, and show an earnest desire to appreciate Australian development. He is quite sure of a cordial welcome to Sydney, and our Parliament have done wisely in arranging to give him a banquet.
Lord Carnarvon’s ADC – His first cousin
Esmé William Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Penrith GCB GCMG CVO PC (15 September 1863 – 1 August 1939) was a British diplomat. He served as British Ambassador to the United States between 1924 and 1930. He was one of Britain's most influential diplomats of the early part of the twentieth century. With a gift for languages and a skilled diplomat, Howard is described in his biography as an integral member of the small group of men who made and implemented British foreign policy between 1900 and 1930, a critical transitional period in Britain's history as a world power
He was educated at Harrow School. In 1885, he passed the Diplomatic Service examination, and was assistant private secretary to the Earl of Carnarvon as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland before being attached to the British Embassy in Rome. In 1888, he arrived in Berlin as the embassy's third secretary, and after retiring from the Diplomatic Service four years later, he was made assistant private secretary to the Earl of Kimberley, the Foreign Secretary at the time. Howard was a talented linguist who would spoke 10 languages and chose to retire from the diplomatic service in 1890 out of boredom. For the next 13 years, Howard lived a life of irregular employment, spending his time prospecting for gold in South Africa, working as a researcher for the social reformer Charles Booth, making two lengthy trips to Morocco, working as the private secretary to Lord Kimberley in 1894–1895, frequently visiting his sister at her estate in Italy and running unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate in the 1892 election.
Greatly concerned with social problems, Howard had developed in the 1890s his "Economic Credo" about "co-partnership" under which he envisioned the state, businesses and unions working together for the improvement of the working classes. Alongside his "Economic Credo", Howard believed in "Imperial Federation" under which Great Britain would be united in a federation that would take in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and South Africa. In 1897, Howard set up a rubber plantation in Tobago, which was partly intended to finance a "co-partnership" business in Britain and partly to demonstrate to the British working class how the British empire benefited them financially.
Howard came from a cadet branch of one of the most famous Roman Catholic aristocratic families in England, but his grandfather had converted to the Church of England and Howard had been raised as an Anglican. In 1898, Howard converted to Roman Catholicism to marry the Countess Isabella Giustiniani-Bandini, who came from a "black" Italian aristocratic family who supported the Papacy in its refusal to recognize the Italian state, unlike the "white" aristocrats who supported the Italian crown against the Catholic Church. In 1903, following the failure of his rubber plantation together with a lack of public interest in his "Economic Credo" led to Howard rejoining the Diplomatic Service.
Having fought in the Second Boer War with the Imperial Yeomanry, Howard became Consul General for Crete in 1903, and three years later was sent to Washington as a counsellor at the embassy there. Esme Howard was married to Isabella Giovanna Teresa Gioachina Giustiniani-Bandini of Venice.
In 1906, the Liberals won the general election and Howard's old friend whom he had known since 1894, Sir Edward Grey became Foreign Secretary, which greatly benefited his career. In 1908, he was appointed in the same role to Vienna, and that same year became Consul General at Budapest. Three years later, Howard was made Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Swiss Confederation, and in 1913 he was transferred to Stockholm, where he spent the whole of the First World War. During World War I, Sweden leaned in a pro-German neutrality and Howard's time as the British minister in Stockholm was a difficult one with the Swedish leaders openly expressing their hopes for a German victory. In an attempt to counter-act the pro-German sympathies of the Swedish elite, Howard sought to broaden his social contacts in Sweden, meeting with journalists, union leaders, businessmen, academics, clergymen, soldiers, and any local anglophiles in order to explain to them the British viewpoint. In 1916, having already been appointed CMG and CVO ten years earlier, he was knighted as KCMG, becoming KCB three years later.
In 1919, Sir Esmé Howard was attached to the British delegation during the Paris Peace Conference, also being made British Civil Delegate on the International Commission to Poland. At the Paris Peace Conference, Howard was assigned to drafting sections of the Treaty of Versailles dealing with Poland. That same year, he was sent to Madrid as ambassador there, arriving in August 1919. Being appointed ambassador to Spain was a major step up in the Foreign Office, but Howard knew that Spanish issues were for the most part secondary to Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary. In Howard's first annual summary as an ambassador from Madrid, Howard wrote: "In the first survey of the situation which I wrote after my arrival in this country I drew attention to three dominant factors in the state of affairs then existing: the activities of the juntas, the labour unrest and the bankruptcy of parliamentary institutions. These elements were perhaps not so immediately threatening as they then seemed but they are still elements of mischief".
Howard reported that the Spanish economy which depended upon exports of raw materials was collapsing due to the fall in commodity prices, that the politicians were incapable of providing leadership and King Alfonso XIII was not behaving as a constitutional monarch with the king trying to rule by intriguing with various politicians and generals instead of reigning. Howard reported that for in 1920 that Spain had 1,060 strikes that year and predicated that 1921 seemed likely to surpass that record. Through Howard reported almost weekly bombings, assassinations and other "outrages" committed by extreme left-wing groups, in the main he blamed the confrontational relations between unions and businesses on the management, reporting that most Spanish corporations had little interest in compromise.
On 9 July 1920, the miners working for the British Rio Tinto company went on strike. Howard's dispatches to London stating that the attitude of Walter Browning, Rio Tinto's manager in Spain, was harming Britain's image in Spain, led to the Foreign Office discreetly pressuring the CEO of the Rio Tinto company, Lord Denbigh, to settle the strike. Much to Howard's satisfaction, the strike was ended in early 1921 with the Rio Tinto company giving wage increases to their Spanish miners. In a sort of goodwill tour, Howard visited the Basque country in November 1920 where he toured mines, shipyards and foundries owned by British companies in an attempt to improve the British image with the Basque working class.
In 1921, Howard had to play detective to find out the truth about reports about a major Spanish military disaster in the Rif mountains of Morocco. After two weeks of seeking the truth, Howard reported to London that the Spanish defeat at the Battle of the Annual had been "decisive" and warned that the "Disaster of the Annual" as the battle was known in Spain had plunged the country into a crisis. Howard reported that much fighting and huge expenditure of money that almost everything the Spanish had won in the Rif over the years had been lost in a matter of weeks and that the Spanish had been driven back in disorder to two coastal enclaves. Howard predicated that the "Disaster of the Annual" would lead to "the growth of a chauvinistic Pan-Islamic movement" in North Africa and that the French would intervene rather than see their own position threatened in Algeria and French Morocco.[14] As the British did not wish for the French to control all of Morocco, Howard was ordered to see if it was possible if somehow the Spanish might rescue themselves from the war that they were losing in the Rif without the help of the French.
Howard wrote that in the aftermath of the "Disaster of the Annual", the Spanish people were obsessed with finding out who had sent General Manuel Fernández Silvestre into his ill-fated drive into the Rif and growing evidence was emerging that the King Alfonso had given the orders, predicating the future of the Spanish monarchy was at stake. Howard described Spain's colonial rule in Morocco as "a byword for cruelty, incompetence and corruption", but argued Britain had never let moral factors interfere "for the sake of larger and wider purposes of Policy", giving the example of British support for the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century despite the mistreatment of Christians in the Balkans.
Howard aruged that the main concern for Britain was preventing France from expanding its influence in Morocco, which meant that Britain should support Spain wholeheartedly in the Rif war.
In 1922, Howard suggested that to improve the image of Britain in Spain that several British intellectuals visit that country to give talks that might about the needed change in public relations and shortly afterwards, Hilaire Belloc visited Madrid to speak about Anglo-Spanish relations. To formalize these exchanges, Howard together with the Duke of Alba founded the English Committee in Spain, which arranged for university students in both countries to take exchange courses and for various British intellectuals to undertake lecture tours in Spain. In another initiative to improve Britain's image in Spain, Howard with the British-born Queen Victoria Eugenia established a relief fund for Spanish soldiers wounded in Morocco.[ In the immediate post-war period, British decision-makers viewed France as too powerful and wanted a stronger Spain to check French power in the Mediterranean, and for this reason Howard welcomed the coup d'état of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in September 1923 as a force for order in Spain. Through Howard initially distrusted Primo de Rivera because of his stance on the Gibraltar issue, he quickly found from his discussions with Primo de Rivera that his main concern was winning the Rif war and he wanted British support for Spanish claims in Morocco against the French.
In 1924 Howard returned to Washington as ambassador. Puzzled at first by the provincial background and eccentric style of President Calvin Coolidge, Howard came to like and trust the president, realizing that he was conciliatory And eager to find solutions to mutual problems, such as the Liquor Treaty of 1924 which diminished friction over smuggling. Washington was greatly pleased when Britain ended its alliance with Japan. Both nations were pleased when in 1923 the wartime debt problem was compromised on satisfactory terms.
Appointed GCMG and GCB in 1923 and 1928 respectively, he was created, on his retirement in 1930, Baron Howard of Penrith, of Gowbarrow in the historic county of Cumberland. He died nine years later aged 75.
Born at Greystoke Castle, near Penrith, Cumberland, Howard was the youngest son of Henry Howard, son of Lord Henry Howard-Molyneux-Howard, younger brother of Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk. His mother was Charlotte Caroline Georgina, daughter of Henry Lawes Long and Catharine Long (daughter of Horatio Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford), while Henry Howard and Sir Stafford Howard were his elder brothers.
He married Lady Isabella Giustiniani-Bandini (daughter of Sigismondo Niccolo Venanzio Gaetano Francisco Giustiniani-Bandini, 8th Earl of Newburgh), of a branch of the Giustiniani by whom he had five sons. They included Francis Philip Howard, 2nd Baron Howard of Penrith, Henry Anthony Camillo Howard and Hubert Howard.
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