"...Arthur as always admired his mother's ability to guide politics without intervening directly, perhaps most notably when the Cabinet was thrown into sudden crisis by the unexpected death of Northcote on January 12, 1887. The Prime Minister and Chancellor died in his sleep at 10 Downing Street, shocking Britain, though he was 68 and long in fragile health. Immediately, the minority Tory government was reeling over the question of who was next to lead the Cabinet; to many, Lord Salisbury from the Foreign Office seemed the ideal choice. He was a statesman held in high regard, already the longest-serving Foreign Secretary in British history (a record as of yet unbroken, with his streak extending to fifteen years by the time he relinquished the office) and the Conservative leader in the House of Lords for nearly a decade, since Carnarvon's retirement from active politics. In Salisbury, the Queen seemed to have the clearest candidate to lead a government in decades. Arthur was thus surprised when his mother expressed skepticism of inviting Salisbury to form a government, though he quickly understood her reasoning.
For being cloistered within her palaces and contemptuous of the day's leading Liberals, Victoria was astute in understanding public opinion and well aware that appointing a member of the Lords to head the Cabinet would be thoroughly unpopular not just with the public at large but even within the increasingly Commons-driven Conservative Party; Victoria was perfectly suited to appoint a member of the aristocracy, but even she could read the tea leaves on the small-l liberal currents bubbling up in her country as she neared the end of her life. In the year of her Golden Jubilee, Victoria decided to instead appoint a man groomed by Northcote as his protege - William Henry Smith, a wealthy publisher and financier who hailed from the Tory old guard but who was still responsible to the public (though he represented perhaps one of the safest Conservative constituencies in London). Smith kissed hands on January 17th, after Northcote's funeral had been held, his appointment a genuine shock to the public and the establishment. Even Arthur was surprised, rather expecting a man in the vein of RA Cross to take the ring instead. Smith elected to pursue a thoroughly "Northcotian" Cabinet; his one change was that he took no ministerial portfolio for himself, taking the view of himself as a managerial type for the Cabinet, much like at his own publishing house, a first among equals rather than the more consolidated top-down Ministries of his four predecessors at Downing Street. To replace Northcote at the Exchequer was Michael Hicks Beach, to many suggesting that it was Beach who held the track to one day lead the Tories in the Commons. Smith's only other major change was to appoint the former Prime Minister Earl of Derby's younger son, Lord Stanley, to be governor-general of Canada; it was seen as a particular snub at the current Earl of Derby, Edward Stanley, who had been a Tory Prime Minister as well and now sat on the crossbench in the Lords with the Liberals due to disputes with Salisbury and others.
The little-changed Cabinet satisfied most, including most Liberals who strongly disliked Salisbury's reputation for aristocratic autocracy and inflexibility. The one figure whom it did not was Lord Randolph Churchill, who had expected to be rewarded for his taking of Burma while at the Colonial Office and for his development of the National Union. To be undercut by Smith, who had hardly made much of an illustrious figure either at Dublin Castle or at the War Office, outraged the ever ambitious Churchill, who at minimum had assumed he would receive the Exchequer, and who despite anticipating that Salisbury or Cross would lead the Cabinet had held out an outside, thin hope that he could be headed to Number 10. Wounded and dismayed, Churchill's snub would be the beginning of the turning point in his career's trajectory..."
- The Lion of Edinburgh: Prince Arthur, the Empire and the Twilight of the Victorian Age
