Robert Reid, 1st Earl Loreburn

Robert Threshie Reid, 1st Earl Loreburn, GCMG, PC (3 April 1846 – 30 November 1923) was a Liberal politician in the United Kingdom. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford.

Reid's national political career began in 1880, when he was elected to the House of Commons as MP for Hereford. He stayed there until 1886, when he became MP for Dumfries Burghs. He remained in the House of Commons until 1905; during this time period, he was appointed to the offices of Solicitor General (1894) and Attorney General (1894–1895). He left the House of Commons in 1905, though, and became Lord Chancellor under Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

During the 1900s and 1910s, many Liberal politicians took up the ideology of Liberal Imperialism, led by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Herbert Henry Asquith), the Secretary of State for War (Richard Burdon Haldane) and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Sir Edward Grey). This troika of politicians was strongly in favor of an with France, along with the creation of a British Expeditionary Force, in the event of a war between France and Germany. These three politicians made their views known, and when Campbell-Bannerman appointed his cabinet, he appointed Reid Lord Chancellor as a counter to the Liberal Imperialists.

Reid became Baron Loreburn, of Dumfries in the County of Dumfries, in 1906, and in 1911 he was created Earl Loreburn. In 1908, Asquith became Prime Minister, and David Lloyd George (who was promoted to Chancellor of the Exchequer) "defected" onto the Liberal Imperialists. Lord Loreburn's disagreements with Lord Haldane, Sir Edward, Asquith, and eventually Lloyd George became more prominent, and it seemed that the Imperialists would get their way and force British military action onto the Continent.

However, events would not turn out that way. Asquith, Lloyd George, Grey, Churchill, and Haldane thought they could force the rest of the Cabinet into their eventual goals, but they were sorely mistaken. The five Imperialists had met secretly on 23 August 1911, and when certain Cabinet members found out, they were furious. Reginald McKenna had recently been deprived of his position as First Lord of the Admiralty for refusing to provide military aid to the French, and he led the majority (whose members included Loreburn, McKenna, Colonial Secretary Lewis Vernon Harcourt, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Joseph Pease) in "a strong line about Cabinet supremacy over all other bodies in the matter of sea and land defence". Lord Esher wrote, "There has been a serious crisis. Fifteen members of the Cabinet against five. The Entente is decidedly imperilled."

Unfortunately, Lord Loreburn's health began declining, and in the summer of 1912, he resigned his Lord Chancellorship. In a parting, "valedictory" letter to Lord Haldane, he wrote:

Nonetheless, Lord Loreburn survived for more than a decade hence, passing on 30 November 1923, his earldom and all subsidiary titles becoming extinct upon his death.

References

* [http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/peer.htm The Anglo-French Entente]
* [http://www.angeltowns.com/town/peerage/peersl4.htm Leigh Rayment's Peerages]