Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Elliot, Gilbert John Murray Kynynmond
ELLIOT, GILBERT JOHN MURRAY KYNYNMOND, fourth Earl of Minto (1845-1914), governor-general of Canada and viceroy of India, was born in London 9 July 1845. He was the eldest son of William Hugh Elliot, third earl, by his wife Emma, daughter of Sir Thomas Hislop, first baronet [q.v.]. He had ancestral connexions with India, both on his father’s and on his mother’s side of the family. His great-grandfather, Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards first Earl of Minto [q.v.], was an able and vigorous governor-general of India. His mother’s father had commanded the Deccan army in the Marquess of Hastings’s Pindari and Maratha war. Elliot, bearing the courtesy title of Viscount Melgund, was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was in his youth a noted gentleman jockey, riding several times in the Grand National and winning the Grand Steeplechase de Paris in 1874. He held a commission in the Scots Guards 1867-1870. During the next twelve years he led a curiously adventurous life, playing a part in many wars in many lands. In 1871 he witnessed the street fighting of the Paris commune. In 1878, as war correspondent to the Morning Post, he was with the Carlist army in the north of Spain. In 1877, at the outbreak of war between Russia and Turkey, he at once started for Constantinople, became assistant attaché under Colonel Lennox to the Turkish army and saw the Russian bombardment of Nikopolis and the passage of the Danube that followed. In 1879 Melgund, volunteering for service in the second Afghan War, was attached to the staff of Sir Frederick (afterwards Earl Roberts in the Kurram valley, and it was only the pressure of private affairs, necessitating a return home, that kept him from attending Sir Louis Cavagnari [q.v.] on his ill-fated mission to Kabul. In 1881 Roberts took Melgund with him as private secretary, when he was sent out to South Africa to take up the work of Sir George Colley [q.v.] after the defeat of Majuba. But on their arrival, finding peace concluded, they returned to England. In the Egyptian campaign of 1882 Melgund was attached to the mounted infantry, was wounded at Mahuta, and subsequently commanded the regiment in the march into Cairo. Then he turned from the East to the West, and from 1883 to 1885 acted as military secretary to the governor-general of Canada, Lord Lansdowne. When the North-Western rebellion broke out in 1885 under Louis Riel [q.v.] he went to the front as chief of the staff with General Middleton, and was present at the battle of Fish Creek. In 1886 he failed to gain election as liberal-unionist candidate for the Hexham division of Northumberland. Then followed a quiet period of twelve years spent mostly on his Roxburghshire estate in local and county work—especially in promoting the efficiency of the volunteer service. He succeeded to the earldom in 1891 on the death of his father.
The most important part of Minto’s career was yet to come, and after this interlude of comparative ease he held in succession, without any appreciable break between the two periods of office, the governor-generalship of Canada and the viceroyalty of India. As governor-general of Canada (1898-1904)—a position requiring many of the qualities that grace a constitutional monarch—Minto was happily placed. His geniality, directness, and natural shrewdness, his reputation as a soldier and a sportsman, his unaffected manners, all made him very popular, and, in consequence, thoroughly efficient as a moderating and unifying influence. Accompanied by his wife, he visited all parts of the Dominion. It was his lot in his public life to find himself the colleague—not always an enviable position—of men of great powers and striking individuality. His time in Canada coincided largely with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain’s tenure of the Colonial Office and entirely with Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s long liberal premiership. His relations with both these statesmen were of the happiest character. During his period of office the Dominion enjoyed an era of great commercial and material prosperity. The revenue and population of the country increased by nearly fifty per cent. The most important events were the sudden shifting of population to the extreme north-west, on the opening of the Klondyke gold-mines; the adoption by Canada of the economic policy of preference to the goods of the mother country in the hope, which proved unfulfilled, that Great Britain would grant a reciprocal preference to Canadian products; the raising and sending forth of Canadian forces to take part in the Boer War—a policy for which the governor-general was directly responsible; and the settlement of the Alaska boundary question with America. The last was the only problem during Minto’s time—apart from an indiscreet speech by Lord Dundonald, the commander-in-chief, on an army question —that strained the relations between the Dominion and Great Britain. It was finally settled in October 1903 by six jurists, three British and three American. The award was unfavourable to Canadian claims, and was only agreed upon by the concurrence of Lord Alverstone, one of the British representatives, with the American members of the commission against the two other British members, who were Canadians. The natural, though unwarranted, inference that Alverstone’s decision had been ‘diplomatic rather than judicial’, caused some soreness, but the award was loyally accepted.
Minto left Canada in November 1904. He arrived in India as viceroy 17 November 1905, having thus had less than twelve months’ rest between his two arduous offices. The task before him was no easy one. He succeeded a brilliant viceroy, Lord Curzon, whose reign, ending in storm and stress, left troubled waters for his successor to navigate. Appointed by a unionist government, Minto’s tenure of office was almost exactly conterminous with the secretaryship of state of Mr. John (afterwards Viscount) Morley, the lineal descendant of the philosophical radicals, and a member of the most powerful and advanced liberal cabinet that has ever held office in England. Few could have expected smooth co-operation between colleagues of such widely different antecedents, and many must have surmised that any co-operation at all would be impossible. ‘To speak quite frankly’, wrote the secretary of state, ‘all depends on you and me keeping in step.’ This the two men succeeded in doing, and though they differed on certain matters, such as the agreement with Russia, the deportation of seditious agitators, and the embarrassing interest displayed by ‘impatient idealists’ in the House of Commons (which Minto was inclined to resent), they worked in harmony to the end.
In the Kitchener-Curzon controversy the solution of the late government, which had practically accepted Lord Kitchener’s view, was ratified. The general result was that the purely military control over army matters was strengthened and centralized, and a system was introduced, which was afterwards condemned in unsparing terms by the commission that investigated the break-down of the transport and medical services in Mesopotamia during the European War of 1914-1918. The partition of Bengal was maintained. In 1907 a threefold convention with Russia was concluded affecting Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. Here Minto was mainly carrying out a policy imposed upon him by the liberal government at home, and the secretary of state made it quite clear that the policy of an entente with Russia was not an open question, however much the Indian government might be consulted as to the details. Minto’s personal part in carrying the famous reforms of 1909, which made his viceroyalty so notable, was much greater. In these he claimed that the initiative came from himself—a claim which Lord Morley in his Recollections hardly disputes. The reforms, said the viceroy, ‘had their genesis in a note of my own addressed to my colleagues in August 1906. . . . It was based entirely on the views I had myself formed of the position of affairs in India. It was due to no suggestions from home—whether it was good or bad, I am entirely responsible for it.’ It was Lord Minto who took the initiative in the appointment of an Indian to the viceroy’s executive council, and he was in favour of sweeping away the official majority even in the supreme legislative council—but this was too advanced a step for Lord Morley. The inauguration of the age of reform unhappily coincided with the outbreak of a campaign of outrage and murder, the pretext for which was found in the refusal to reverse the partition. In November 1909 an attempt was made on the lives of Lord and Lady Minto by bombs at Ahmedabad. It was found necessary to strengthen the laws against the holding of seditious meetings and the unchecked licence of the press (1910). The position of the government was rendered exceedingly difficult; in Lord Minto’s own words, they were obliged ‘with one hand to dispense measures calculated to meet novel political conditions, and with the other hand sternly to eradicate political crimes’. They were conscious, too, that, though their course was determined on before the outrages began, any reform proposals which they might now put forward would be condemned by the one side as an inadequate concession to lawful political ambition, and denounced by the other as a pusillanimous truckling to revolutionary violence. Yet they determined not to draw back. ‘In the midst of such complications’, said the viceroy, ‘I could not enter light-heartedly on a policy of reform, but I refused to lose faith in it.’ Morley and Minto were undoubtedly right in maintaining their course, but a reasonable criticism, passed at the time, was that more firmness should have been shown in the early days in putting down disorders.
A feature of Minto’s viceroyalty was the increasing influence of the secretary of state upon the policy of the Indian government. This was due to the strong determination of a triumphant parliamentary majority to extend liberalizing principles throughout the Empire, the dominant personality of Lord Morley, and the viceroy’s disinclination to quarrel with his colleague. Constitutional purists noted with misgiving the tendency of both the viceroy and the secretary of state to neglect their councils and permanent officials, and to raise—and all but settle—important questions through the medium of an intimate private correspondence.
Not the least valuable part of Lord Minto’s work was seen in his relations with the Indian princes. No Indian viceroy, not even Lord Mayo, was so universally liked and respected by them. During the winter of 1906-1907 the Amir of Afghanistan was induced to visit India, and the foundations of a stable friendship with the British power were laid. It cannot be doubted that the loyalty and enthusiasm displayed by the ruling chiefs during the European War of 1914-1918 had been largely fostered by the geniality and camaraderie of Lord Minto.
Minto left India in November 1910. Among many other honours he received the Garter, and the freedom of the cities of London and Edinburgh. At the coronation of King George V he was one of four peers selected to hold the canopy over the King. He only lived for four years to enjoy the pleasures of retirement in his Scottish home and amidst his family circle. His health failed suddenly and unexpectedly in the autumn of 1913, and he died at Hawick 1 March 1914.
Lord Minto was one of those men who would probably never have risen to the high offices he held except in a country where some deference was still paid to the claims of birth and position; and his whole career shows how much his country would have lost, had such considerations of choice been disregarded. He proved himself a conscientious, capable, and loyal servant of the state. He was, wrote Lord Morley, ‘able, straightforward, steadfast, unselfish, and the most considerate of comrades in tasks of arduous public duty’. Without being a born administrator, he was able to direct successfully the work of administration: without being an orator, he fulfilled adequately all that was required of him in the council chamber and the assembly: without any deep grasp of statesmanship, he was able by sterling qualities of heart and head to control situations which might well have taxed the powers of abler men. Above all there was the appeal that his attractive character always made to the allegiance of his colleagues.
Lord Minto married in 1888 Mary Caroline, daughter of General the Hon. Charles Grey [q.v.], brother of the third Earl Grey, and he was aided all his life by his wife’s devotion, cleverness, and charm. He had two sons and three daughters. Of his sons, the elder, Victor Gilbert, born 1891, succeeded to the earldom, the younger was killed in Flanders in 1917.
An excellent portrait-sketch of Minto by P. A. de Laszlo was painted in 1912. An equestrian statue by Sir W. Goscombe John has been erected in Calcutta (Royal Academy Pictures, 1913).
[Annual Register: Lord Morley, Recollections, 1917; Sir Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest, 1910; Sir Verney Lovett, A History of the Indian Nationalist Movement, 1920; Lord Minto, Speeches, published by the Government of India, 1911; John Buchan, Lord Minto: A Memoir, 1924; private information.]