Hugh Cecil, 1st Baron Quickswood

The Right Honourable The Lord Quickswood PC
Lord Hugh Cecil, circa 1914
Personal details
Born	14 October 1869 Hertfordshire, England
Died	10 December 1956 (aged 87) Sussex, England
Nationality	British
Political party	Conservative
Relations	Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (father), Georgina Caroline Alderson (mother)
Alma mater	University College, Oxford

Hugh Richard Heathcote Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Baron Quickswood PC (14 October 1869 – 10 December 1956), styled Lord Hugh Cecil until 1941, was a British Conservative Party politician.

Cecil was the eighth and youngest child of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, three times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Georgina Alderson, daughter of Sir Edward Hall Alderson. He was the brother of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury, Lord William Cecil, Lord Cecil of Chelwood and Lord Edward Cecil and a first cousin of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. He was educated at Eton and University College, Oxford. He graduated with first-class honours in Modern History in 1891 and was a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford from 1891 until 1936, when he thought he could not be Provost of Eton and a Fellow of Hertford simultaneously.

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. He graduated as MA in 1894, and he 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 warmly resented an amendment approved by the House and taken over by the Ministry giving the managers, instead of the incumbent of the parish, the control of religious education in non-provided schools. This was not the only point on which he showed considerable independence of the government of which Balfour, his cousin, was the head.