Hugh Cecil , 1st Baron Quickswood 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 . Background and education . Cecil was the eighth and youngest child of Robert Gascoyne - Cecil , 3rd Marquess of Salisbury , three times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom , by 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 to 1936 . Political career . After his graduation , Cecil was Assistant Private Secretary to his father from 1891 to 1892 , in the latter ' s role as Foreign Secretary and entered the Commons as 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 the attempts that were made 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 . During the early 20th century , Cecil ( known to his friends as " Linky " ) was the eponymous leader of the Hughligans , a group of privileged young Tory Members of Parliament critical of their own party ' s leadership . Modelled after Lord Randolph Churchill ' s Fourth Party , the Hughligans included Cecil , F . E . Smith , Arthur Stanley , Ian Malcolm , and , until 1904 , Winston Churchill . In 1908 , Cecil was the best man at Churchill ' s wedding . Cecil dissented from the beginning from Joseph Chamberlain ' s policy of tariff reform , pleading in Parliament against any lowering of the idea of empire into that of a " gigantic profit - sharing business . " He took a prominent position among the " Free Food Unionists " , and consequently was attacked by the tariff reformers and lost his seat at Greenwich in 1906 . In 1910 Cecil became MP for Oxford University , which he represented for the next twenty - seven years . He threw himself immediately with passion into the struggle against the Ministerial Veto Resolutions , comparing the Asquith government to " thimble riggers " . In the next year , he was active in the resistance to the Parliament Bill , treating Asquith as a " traitor " for his advice to the crown to create peers , and taking a prominent part in the disturbance which prevented the Prime Minister from being heard on 24 July 1911 . But he never quite regained the authority which he had possessed in the House in the early years of the century . He strongly opposed the Welsh Church Bill , and he denounced the 1914 Home Rule Bill as reducing Ireland from the status of a wife to that of a mistress — she was to be kept by John Bull , not united to him . In 1916 Cecil was part of the Mesopotamia Commission of Inquiry . He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1918 . Apart from his political career Cecil served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War . In that capacity , he severely censured , in debate in 1918 , the treatment of General Trenchard by the government . He pleaded for lenient treatment of conscientious objector s , and endeavoured unsuccessfully to relieve them of disability . He left the House of Commons in 1937 to become Provost of Eton College , a post he retained until 1944 . In 1941 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Quickswood , of Clothall in the County of Hertford . Personal life . Lord Quickswood never married . He died in December 1956 , aged 87 , at which time the barony became extinct .