servative interest at a by-election as member for East Gloucestershire, a seat which his father had held in 1854 for a few months before his death, and which he himself retained until 1885. From 1885 until 1906, when he was raised to the peerage, he sat for West Bristol.
Hicks Beach's political ability early marked him out for office. In the last year (1868) of the Earl of Derby's ministry, he was appointed in February parliamentary secretary of the Poor Law Board, and in August under-secretary for the Home Department. After the resignation of the ministry in December he spent five years in opposition, but in 1874, when Mr. Disraeli became prime minister for the second time, he was appointed chief secretary for Ireland. In this office he showed a sympathy with reform which was not very much to the taste of the Irish tories, but he had the approval of Disraeli, who described him in 1874 as ‘a very able and rising man’ [Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Disraeli, v, 271] and in 1876 brought him into the Cabinet.
When the fourth Earl of Carnarvon resigned the office of colonial secretary in January 1878, in consequence of his disapproval of Disraeli's attitude towards the Eastern question, Hicks Beach, who had supported Disraeli's war policy throughout, succeeded him on 4 February. During his two years of office his chief pre-occupation was with South Africa. As Carnarvon's resignation was not directly connected with colonial questions, Hicks Beach naturally followed the general lines of his policy in South Africa and gave support to his chosen agent, Sir Bartle Frere [q.v.]. But Frere, who had been sent as governor to the Cape in 1877 with wide discretionary powers to carry out Carnarvon's policy of confederation as embodied in the South Africa Act of 1877, soon found his attention occupied by the movements of the Zulus, who were menacing Natal and the Transvaal border. In 1878 Frere became convinced that a settlement of the Zulu question was a necessary preliminary to the achievement of South African federation. When he visited Natal in September he became certain that a Zulu attack was imminent and that reinforcements should therefore be sent to Natal as speedily as possible. With this view Hicks Beach, after becoming colonial secretary, had on several occasions expressed himself in agreement. But in the meantime the prime minister was giving more attention to South African affairs than during Carnarvon's tenure of office, and by May 1878 he began to be dissatisfied with Carnarvon's policy and to be apprehensive of trouble [ibid., vi, 419]. By the autumn his alarm had increased [ibid., 420] and early in October, in view of the serious situation in the Balkans and Afghanistan, the government determined to limit, if possible, their commitments in South Africa. In consequence, in a dispatch dated 17 October, Hicks Beach informed Frere that the government were not prepared to send out troops, and that they had a confident hope that, by the exercise of prudence, peace with the Zulu chief, Cetywayo, could be preserved. The actual reasons for this reversal of policy—the situation in Afghanistan and the Near East—were not given in this dispatch, which Frere received on 10 November. In any case Frere considered that it was impossible at that time to avert a rupture by any concessions, and that to make the attempt would weaken British authority and almost inevitably lead to a Boer revolt in the Transvaal [Frere to Hicks Beach, 5 January 1879, Worsfold, Life of Frere, 139]. On 11 December 1878, therefore, he sent an ultimatum to Cetywayo, which made that chief decide to begin hostilities as soon as he was ready.
Two days later (13 December) Frere received a private letter from Hicks Beach in which the reasons influencing the Cabinet to refuse reinforcements were expressly stated. Although this letter reached Frere after he had sent the ultimatum, a summary of its contents, telegraphed from Cape Town by Lady Frere, had reached him on 30 November, and it is probable, though not certain, that the telegram included this statement. It is, therefore, unlikely that the omission from the official dispatch of the reasons determining the Cabinet had any effect on Frere's action. But it was unfortunate that the reasons were eventually given in a private letter, because it enabled the government to omit the statement of their motives and Frere's reply in justification of himself, when the official papers relating to the matter were published [Frere to Sir Robert Herbert, 23 December 1878, Martineau, Life of Frere, ii, 265; Frere to Hicks Beach, 5 January 1879, Worsfold, ibid.].
In the meantime, on 3 November, Hicks Beach explained to Disraeli that he could not control Frere without a telegraph line, that he did not know whether he could if he had one, and that ‘it is as likely as not that he is at war with the Zulus at the
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