Rosebery was widely known as a brilliant orator, an outstanding sportsman and marksman, a writer and historian, connoisseur and collector.

"[1] Rosebery was a Liberal Imperialist who favoured strong national defence and imperialism abroad and social reform at home, while being solidly anti-socialist.

Lord Dalmeny died on 23 January 1851, having predeceased his father, when the courtesy title passed to his son, the future Rosebery, as the new heir to the earldom.

At Eton, he formed a close attachment to his tutor William Johnson Cory: they visited Rome together in 1864, and maintained correspondence for years afterwards.

The title is part of the old Peerage of Scotland, from which 16 members (Scottish representative peers) were elected to sit in the Lords for each session of Parliament.

[citation needed] Rosebery inherited his title from his grandfather in 1868, aged 21, together with an income of £30,000 a year (equivalent to £3.41 million in present-day terms[16]).

In the last year of his premiership, he was increasingly haggard: he suffered insomnia due to the continual dissension in his Cabinet.

On 22 June, he and his ministers tendered their resignations to the Queen, who invited the Unionist leader, Lord Salisbury, to form a government.

The following month, the Unionists won a crushing victory in the 1895 general election, and held power for ten years (1895–1905) under Salisbury and Arthur Balfour.

[31][32] However the war was opposed by a younger faction of Liberals, including David Lloyd George and the party leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

The last years of his political life saw Rosebery become a purely negative critic of the Liberal governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith.

He joined the die-hard unionist peers in attacking Lloyd George's redistributive People's Budget in 1909 but stopped short of voting against the measure for fear of bringing retribution upon the Lords.

Though Lloyd George offered him "a high post not involving departmental labour" to augment his 1916 coalition, Rosebery declined to serve.

In January 1878, Rosebery had told a friend that he found Hannah "very simple, very unspoilt, very clever, very warm-hearted and very shy ...

He was devastated by Vyner's murder at the hands of Greek brigands in 1870, keeping the anniversary sacred for the rest of his life.

A few months later he arranged for Drumlanrig, who was 26 at the time, to be made a junior member of the government with a seat in the House of Lords.

[49] During the preliminary hearing of the case against Wilde, a letter from Queensberry was produced referring to him as 'a damned cur and coward of the Rosebery type'.

The suggestion was that Queensberry had threatened to expose the Prime Minister if his government did not vigorously prosecute Wilde for the latter's relationship with Drumlanrig's younger brother, Lord Alfred Douglas.

In August 1893, Queensberry had followed Rosebery to the spa town of Bad Homburg with the declared intention of giving him a horse-whipping, and had to be dissuaded by the Prince of Wales who was also staying there.

Michael Bloch, in 2015, has, however, no doubt that Rosebery was at least romantically interested in men, making him one of the four figures presented in the first chapter of his book on homosexual and bisexual British politicians of the 20th century.

In his view, any remaining evidence (of which he gives a long list) can only be circumstantial in any case, considering Rosebery's paranoid taste for secrecy.

[56] The last year of the war was clouded by two personal tragedies: his son Neil's death in Palestine in November 1917 and Rosebery's own stroke a few days before the armistice.

John Buchan remembered him in his last month of life, "crushed by bodily weakness" and "sunk in sad and silent meditations".

[57] Rosebery died at his Epsom, Surrey home of The Durdans on 21 May 1929, to the accompaniment, as he had requested, of a gramophone recording of the "Eton Boating Song".

In 1882 he donated a trophy, the Rosebery Charity Cup, to be competed for by clubs under the jurisdiction of the East of Scotland Football Association.

This occurred nine times during Rosebery's lifetime, most notably for the 1900 British Home Championship match against England, which the Scots won 4–1.

Although he was an orator and statesman in the mold of his original leader, Gladstone, his fifteen-month term as Liberal Prime Minister in 1894-5 was an unhappy spectacle.

Journalists and biographers have criticized his lack of character and sense of failure, possibly influenced by his Scottish Calvinist upbringing.

[63] The Oatlands area in the South Side of Glasgow was laid out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contemporary with Rosebery's most prominent period.

In October 1895 Lord Rosebery opened the new Liberal Club on Westborough, in Scarborough, only months after resigning as Prime Minister.