Lord Robert Cecil was born at Hatfield House, the second son of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 2nd Marquess of Salisbury and Frances Mary Gascoyne. He was a patrilineal descendant of Lord Burghley and the 1st Earl of Salisbury, chief ministers of Elizabeth I. The family owned vast rural estates in Hertfordshire and Dorset. This wealth increased sharply in 1821, when he married the rich heiress of a merchant prince who had bought up large estates in Essex and Lancashire.  Robert had a miserable childhood, with few friends; he filled his time with reading. He was bullied unmercifully at the schools he attended. In 1840, he went to Eton College, where he did well in French, German, Classics, and Theology; however, he left in 1845 because of intense bullying. The unhappy schooling shaped his pessimistic outlook on life and his negative views on democracy. He decided that most people were cowardly and cruel, and that the mob would run roughshod over sensitive individuals.  In December 1847 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he received an honorary fourth class in mathematics conferred by nobleman's privilege due to ill health. Whilst at Oxford he found the Oxford movement or "Tractarianism" to be an intoxicating force; he had an intense religious experience that shaped his life.  In April 1850 he joined Lincoln's Inn but subsequently did not enjoy law. His doctor advised him to travel for his health, and so in July 1851 to May 1853 Cecil travelled through Cape Colony, Australia, including Tasmania, and New Zealand. He disliked the Boers and wrote that free institutions and self-government could not be granted to the Cape Colony because the Boers outnumbered the British three-to-one, and "it will simply be delivering us over bound hand and foot into the power of the Dutch, who hate us as much as a conquered people can hate their conquerors". He found the Kaffirs "a fine set of men - whose language bears traces of a very high former civilisation", similar to Italian. They were "an intellectual race, with great firmness and fixedness of will" but "horribly immoral" as they lacked theism.  In the Bendigo goldmine of Australia, he claimed that "there is not half as much crime or insubordination as there would be in an English town of the same wealth and population". Ten thousand miners were policed by four men armed with carbines, and at Mount Alexander 30,000 people were protected by 200 policemen, with over 30,000 ounces of gold mined per week. He believed that there was "generally far more civility than I should be likely to find in the good town of Hatfield" and claimed this was due to "the government was that of the Queen, not of the mob; from above, not from below. Holding from a supposed right (whether real or not, no matter)" and from "the People the source of all legitimate power," Cecil said of the Maori of New Zealand: "The natives seem when they have converted to make much better Christians than the white man". A Maori chief offered Cecil five acres near Auckland, which he declined.

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