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Robert Threshie Reid, 1st Earl of Loreburn (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. 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 Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
During the 1900s and 1910s, many Liberal politicians took up the ideology of Liberal Imperialism, led by Chancellor of the Exchequer Herbert Henry Asquith, War Secretary Richard Burdon Haldane, and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. This troika of politicians was strongly in favor of an entente 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 in 1906, and in 1911, he additionally became Earl of 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 Grey, 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:
| My differences with you have always been this, you have been an Imperialist "au fond" and always in my opinion it is quite impossible to reconcile Imperialism with the Liberal creed which we professed, and on the force of which we received the support of the country. In this way we became hopelessly estranged on the greatest of all issues. |
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