WHEN GLADSTONE's second home rule initiative passed the Commons in 1893, only to be defeated by the most lopsided vote in the history of the House of Lords, the Grand Old Man of Victorian liberalism finally retired after sixty-one years in parliament. His reluctant successor in March 1894 was Arthur's contemporary and Scottish neighbour Lord Rosebery. Temperamental, a victim of insomnia and fractious colleagues, he lasted hardly more than a year. A general election in summer 1895 returned the Conservative–Unionist alliance to power for the next decade, and with Lord Salisbury's health and faculties weakening, Arthur would take on significant new responsibilities as his deputy. In 1902 Arthur became prime minister himself.

Only two years after Arthur's reflections to Margot Tennant about the role of chance in political life, he might have been excused for wondering how so many of his generational rivals had been removed so fortuitously. Rosebery never re-emerged as a viable national figure. Parnell was dead. In January, Randolph Churchill's funeral took place, with Arthur making a hasty trip from Scotland to attend: ‘It was very impressive and pathetic’, he told Mary Elcho. ‘Rosebery, Harcourt [the other contender to succeed Gladstone] and I sat together, Harcourt in the middle, and I could not help speculating which of his neighbours he liked the most, or perhaps I should say the least!’ Ten years later a sudden, incapacitating stroke removed Joseph Chamberlain just as he looked poised to challenge Arthur for leadership of the Edwardian Conservative Party.

Arthur, not yet fifty, was reaching the pinnacle of power at a moment when national and imperial affairs were intersecting in unforeseen ways. The year 1895 was so fraught with portents of the new century that a recent scholarly study by Nicholas Freeman made the year itself the protagonist. Month by month, Freeman charts the developments in commodity culture, leisured consumerism, revolutionary aesthetics, imperial adventures and public discontent that revealed to contemporaries ‘the drama, disaster and disgrace’ of late-Victorian Britain. Freeman reports the ‘national success’ of Arthur's Foundations of Belief and his opening speech to the new parliament elected in the summer: in the House of Commons Arthur expressed cautious optimism that now, with home rule laid to rest, parliament would have a period of tranquility to deal with long-neglected educational and social reforms for the next generation of Britons.