". Cecil as caricatured by Spy (
Leslie Ward) in
Vanity Fair, October 1900 After his graduation as BA in 1891, Cecil went to work in parliament. From 1891 to 1892 he was Assistant Private Secretary to his father, who was
Foreign Secretary. Having paid his subscription he was elevated to
MA in 1894, and entered the
Commons as Conservative
Member of Parliament (MP) for
Greenwich in 1895. He took a keen interest in ecclesiastical questions and became an active member of the Church party, resisting attempts by
nonconformists and
secularists to take the discipline of the Church out of the hands of the archbishops and bishops, and to remove the bishops from their seats in the
House of Lords. In a speech on the second reading of Balfour's
Education Bill of 1902, he maintained that for the final settlement of the religious difficulty there must be cooperation between the
Church of England and nonconformity, which was the Church's natural ally; and that the only possible basis of agreement was that every child should be brought up in the belief of its parents. The ideal to be aimed at in education was the improvement of the national character. In the later stages of the bill's progress, he strongly resented an amendment approved by the House and taken over by the Government giving the school managers (governors, in modern parlance), instead of the local vicar, control of religious education in voluntary, i.e. church, schools. This was not the only point on which he showed considerable independence of the government of which Balfour, his cousin, was the head. During the early 20th century, Cecil (known to his friends as "Linky") was the eponymous leader of the
Hughligans, a group of privileged young
Tory Members of Parliament critical of their own party's leadership. Modelled after
Lord Randolph Churchill's
Fourth Party, the Hughligans included Cecil,
F. E. Smith,
Arthur Stanley,
Ian Malcolm and, until 1904,
Winston Churchill. Cecil was the
best man at Churchill's wedding in 1908 and the latter greatly admired his eloquence in the House of Commons. As Churchill declared to a contemporary,
Llewellyn Atherley-Jones,"How I wish I had his powers; speech is a painful effort to me." Cecil dissented from the beginning from
Joseph Chamberlain's policy of
tariff reform, pleading in Parliament against any devaluation of the idea of empire to a "gigantic profit-sharing business". He took a prominent position among the "
Free Food Unionists"; consequently he was attacked by the tariff reformers, and lost his seat at Greenwich in 1906. He immediately threw himself with passion into the struggle against the Ministerial Veto Resolutions, comparing the
Asquith government to "thimble riggers". In the next year, he was active in the resistance to the
Parliament Bill, treating
Asquith as a "traitor" for his advice to the Crown to swamp the Conservative majority in the Lords by creating hundreds of Liberal peers, and taking a prominent part in the disturbance which prevented the Prime Minister from being heard on 24 July 1911. But he never quite regained the authority which he had possessed in the House in the early years of the century. He strongly opposed the
Welsh Church Bill, and he denounced the
1914 Home Rule Bill as reducing
Ireland from the status of a wife to that of a mistress — she was to be kept by
John Bull, not united to him. 1918. Apart from his political career Cecil served as a
Lieutenant in the
Royal Flying Corps during the
First World War. In that capacity, in debate in 1918, he severely censured the treatment of
General Trenchard by the government. Lord Hugh was a committed Anglican, and a member of
House of Laity in the
Church Assembly from 1919. He was awarded a
Doctorate of Civil Law by Oxford University in 1924. He pleaded for lenient treatment of
conscientious objectors, and endeavoured unsuccessfully to relieve them of disability. He was a Trustee of the
London Library, and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law at
Durham University. He was also honorary
Doctor of Laws at the
University of Edinburgh in 1910, and at
Cambridge in 1933. From 1944 until his death he had an honorary association with
New College, Oxford. ==Personal life==