English politician and man of letters, born on the 29th of August 1863, the eldest son of the Hon. Percy Scawen Wyndham, and grandson of the 1st Lord Leconfield. His mother was Madeline Caroline Frances Eden, daughter of Sir Guy Campbell, 1st baronet; and through her he was great-grandson of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Irish rebel. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, obtained a commission in the Coldstream Guards in 1883, and served through the Suakin campaign of 1885. But his military career was a very short one. Interested as he was in soldiering, his eager temperament impelled him still more to adventure in politics and letters. He left the army in 1887, married Sibell Mary, daughter of the 9th Earl of Scarbrough, widow of Earl Grosvenor, mother of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, and became private secretary to Mr. Balfour, at the time Irish Secretary, a position which he held till 1892. In 1889 at the age of twenty-six he entered Parliament as Conservative member for Dover, and retained the seat till his death. In 1898 he was appointed financial secretary to the War Office, a post in which he distinguished himself during the Boer War, in particular by a brilliant defence, in the debate on the Address in 1900, of the conduct of his office in regard to intelligence and reinforcements. But his chief claim to political remembrance is based on his tenure, from 1900 to 1905 (after 1902 as a Cabinet minister), of the office of Chief Secretary for Ireland. Having been private secretary for several years to the most successful chief secretary of modern times, he started with a large store of experience, and his appointment was regarded with benignity even by the Nationalists on account of his descent from Lord Edward Fitzgerald. His early work in Ireland met with general approval. He developed enormously the policy of land purchase, which the Unionists had found to exercise such a calming and beneficial effect; and the Land Purchase Act which he successfully carried in 1903 was the most comprehensive measure of the kind ever submitted to Parliament. He entertained hopes of arranging some form of local government which should sufficiently meet Nationalist hopes; and with this in view appointed an eminent Anglo-Indian, Sir Antony (afterwards Lord) Macdonnell, who was known to be a decided Home Ruler, to the permanent secretaryship in 1902, giving him at the same time greater authority and wider scope than is usually conferred on a civil servant. The Unionist party, both in Ireland and in England, became suspicious of the tendencies of his administration, and he was driven to resignation. He never held office again, but he was very active in support of the causes which he had at heart, such as tariff reform, and woman suffrage; he was a keen critic of Lord Haldane’s army reforms, and threw himself vigorously into the “die-hard” campaign of 1911.
This varied political activity was however but a portion of his life. He was also a man of letters, possessed of fine taste and a graceful style. Here his genius was stimulated by his friendship with W. E. Henley, who dedicated a book to “George Wyndham, soldier, courtier, scholar.” His principal published work was an edition of Shakespeare’s Poems (1898); but he wrote also on North’s Plutarch and Ronsard. The Admirable Crichton of his day, he was keen alike on field sports and the arts, the friend and admirer equally of Cecil Rhodes and of Rodin, a railway director and a yeomanry colonel. Oxford, Edinburgh and Glasgow gave him honorary degrees; the two Scottish universities made him lord rector.
By his father’s death in 1911, Mr. Wyndham came into possession of his beautiful house, Clouds, in Wiltshire. Two years later, at the early age of fifty, he died in Paris, of congestion of the lungs, after only a few hours’ illness. Lady Grosvenor survived her husband. They had one son, Lt. Percy Lyulph Wyndham, who followed his father in the Coldstream Guards, was married in 1913, a few weeks before his father’s death, and was killed in action in France on the 15th of September 1914, leaving no child.
