LIKE GEORGE PEMBROKE, Arthur Balfour might also have been thought by outside observers to fit the description of a ‘man at the margins’ in 1886. He too worried that he lacked the qualities to be successful in politics, telling John Morley that ‘he had quite come to the conclusion that as a public man he was a failure and that he had no aptitude for politics’. He was also sensitive about charges of unearned preferment. Rather than press his own claims during the government construction in summer 1886, he disappeared to play golf in Scotland, writing to a cousin that he felt ‘no natural vocation for being a Great Man's Great Man, still less for being thought to be so’. As it turned out, Lord Salisbury offered Arthur a position as secretary of state for Scotland, a new government office only recently established. Without a seat in the cabinet, the appointment carried no great status, especially since Arthur's rival Randolph Churchill became both chancellor of the exchequer and a very young leader of the House of Commons. Then, six months later, the great wheel of fortune intervened. Arthur plunged forward, transforming himself through his experiences of love and politics in ways that George Pembroke never managed to do.

Arthur was thirty-eight when the surprise announcement came on 7 March 1887 that he would take over as chief secretary for Ireland. The government was in a shambles, rocked by Randolph's impetuous and ill-advised resignation during Christmas week of 1886 – ‘one of those exquisite moments’, as Morley put it, ‘in which excited politicians enjoy the ineffable sensation that the end of the world has come’. Now Churchill's ally Sir Michael Hicks Beach was using the advice of doctors to bow out of the government's anticipated confrontation with the Irish nationalists. Though Gladstone's first home rule bill had failed in the Commons the year before, Parnell and the Liberals were still allied, and the implacable Irish MPs William O’Brien and John Dillon had launched another programme of targeted economic resistance, the Plan of Campaign, in the Irish countryside. Salisbury was committed to addressing some of Ireland's grievances, but he was determined first to enact a range of Ireland-only legal measures that would cripple the organisational tools of the ‘revolutionary’ movement, including obstructionism in parliament and collective resistance in the countryside.