(1) Lord Randolph Churchill and his friends were to act in harmony with Lord Salisbury, and were to be treated with full confidence by him and the ruling members of the Conservative party.
(2) Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was to be elected chairman of the National Union.
(3) The Primrose League was to be officially recognised by the leaders of the party and by the Council of the Union.
(4) In order to celebrate this concordat—as you have put it—Lord Salisbury was to give a dinner to the Council.
The conditions were carried out within a few days. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was elected chairman and the Primrose League recognised, by resolution, at the first meeting.
As above mentioned, your father was at the time absent, but until now I had always understood that he concurred in the course taken. I had attributed his absence from the dinner to some other cause, and I the more believed in his approval of the reconciliation from the support given the next year, after conference, both by himself and Lord Randolph Churchill, to a motion made by me in the House of Commons to adjourn the third reading of the new Reform Bill during the interregnum between the resignation of Mr. Gladstone and the accession of Lord Salisbury. This motion is, I think, referred to by Sir Herbert Maxwell in his ‘Life of Mr. W. H. Smith.’
I had regretted in later years to perceive that there was some tension between your father and Lord Randolph Churchill; but, through ignorance, I had imputed it to disagreements on the formation of Lord Salisbury’s second Administration in 1886, when I was absent from England.
The second passage which, to my mind, requires explanation occurs on page 140. It runs thus:—
‘But no member of the Fourth Party, except himself (Lord R. C.), was admitted to the Cabinet. Mr. Balfour, though made President of the Local Government Board, was excluded from the latter distinction.’
I have always understood that at the time Lord Randolph Churchill not only advised, but urged the admission of Mr. Balfour to the Cabinet; and that this advice was not followed on account of Lord Salisbury’s reluctance to give to a near kinsman an advancement to which others might think they had greater claim.