[William St. John Fremantle Brodrick; 1st Earl]. English politician, the son of the 8th viscount (1830–1907). He came of a Surrey family who in the 17th century, in the persons of Sir St. John Brodrick and Sir Thomas Brodrick, obtained grants of land in the south of Ireland. Sir St. John Brodrick settled at Midleton, between Cork and Youghal in 1641; and his son Alan Brodrick (1660–1728), speaker of the Irish House of Commons and lord chancellor of Ireland, was created Baron Brodrick in 1715 and Viscount Midleton in 1717 in the Irish peerage. In 1796 the title of Baron Brodrick in the peerage of the United Kingdom was created. The English family seat at Peper Harow, near Godalming, Surrey, was designed by Sir William Chambers. The 8th viscount was a Conservative in politics, who for a few years had a seat in the House of Commons, and who was responsible in the House of Lords for carrying the Infants Protection Act. His brother, the Hon. G. C. Brodrick, was for many years warden of Merton College, Oxford. As Mr. St. John Brodrick, the 9th viscount had a distinguished career in the House of Commons. After being at Eton and Balliol, Oxford, and serving as president of the Oxford Union, he entered parliament as conservative member for one of the Surrey divisions in 1880. From 1886 to 1892 he was financial secretary to the war office; under secretary for war, 1895–98; under secretary for foreign affairs, 1898–1900; secretary of state for war, 1900–03; and secretary of state for India, 1903–05. He lost his seat for the Guildford division of Surrey at the general election of January 1906. In March 1907 he was made an alderman of the London County Council. He did not remain long out of Parliament after his defeat in the general election of 1906, as in the following year his father died, and he entered the House of Lords as 9th viscount. He took a considerable share in the work of that House, and played an active part behind the scenes in Unionist politics, without returning to ministerial office. He was indeed perhaps the most conspicuous figure among the Unionist leaders who did not find a place in Mr. Asquith’s Coalition Cabinet. He had meanwhile become specially prominent as leader of the southern Unionists of Ireland, in virtue of his position as a landowner in county Cork. In his opposition to the Home Rule bills, he was never willing to base himself mainly on the difficulties of Ulster, but constantly called attention to the necessity of protecting loyalists in the South and securing them from discriminating taxation. He was disquieted by the negotiations carried on in the summer of 1916 with the Irish leaders by Mr. Lloyd George on behalf of Mr. Asquith’s Coalition Ministry, on the basis of excluding the six Ulster counties but bringing the Home Rule Act at once into effect in the rest of Ireland. In the Irish Convention, which was set up in the middle of 1917 and sat into the following year, he and a band of southern Unionists separated themselves from the Ulster standpoint, and showed themselves ready to concede a unitary Home Rule Government for Ireland, subject to provisions for safeguarding the minority of loyalists. At the beginning of 1920 he was created an earl. He married, first in 1880, Lady Hilda (d. 1901), daughter of the 9th earl of Wemyss, by whom he had a family; and secondly in 1903, Madeleine Stanley, daughter of Lady St. Helier by her first husband.
