Milnes, Robert Offley Ashburton Crewe- (1858–1945), marquess of Crewe , lord lieutenant of Ireland, was born 12 January 1858 in London, youngest child and only surviving son of Richard Monckton-Milnes (1809–85), 1st Baron Houghton, a Yorkshire landowner, MP, and man of letters, and his wife Annabella Hungerford (née Crewe; d. 1874), eldest daughter of the second Baron Crewe. An elder brother died in infancy and Milnes had two sisters. From his childhood it was generally expected that Milnes would become the heir of his eccentric uncle, the 3rd Baron Crewe; when he inherited the extensive Crewe estates he added the name ‘Crewe’ to his surname (June 1894) and he later revived the Crewe title in his peerage creations. Milnes was educated at a private school, Winton House near Winchester (from 1868), at Harrow School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge (from 1874, graduated BA, 1879). On 3 June 1880 he married Sibyl Graham (1857–87). In 1884 he successfully sought the liberal candidacy for a Yorkshire parliamentary seat, but on the sudden death of his father (11 August 1885) entered the house of lords as Baron Houghton.
In February 1886 Houghton became liberal chief whip in the lords, with the post of lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, under Gladstone's third administration. As one of the small minority of liberal peers who supported Gladstone over home rule Houghton reflected his father's pro-Irish views and his own conviction that liberal belief in self-government was incompatible with holding down Ireland by force. His father, though a religious sceptic (and a distinguished collector of pornography), entertained some emotional sympathy for catholicism; this was not shared by Houghton, who is described by his biographer, Pope Hennessy, as holding the protestant principles of 1689, though this did not keep him from welcoming the removal of explicitly anti-catholic terminology from the coronation oath in 1910. Houghton temporarily withdrew from public life after the deaths of his first wife (1887) and their son (1890).
In August 1892 Houghton accepted the post of lord lieutenant of Ireland in Gladstone's last administration (he continued to hold the post under Lord Rosebery, 1894–5). The choice of such a young nobleman aroused considerable comment. Houghton's nomination was due to the chief secretary, John Morley (qv), who felt that Lord Aberdeen (qv) (and his forceful wife) had been excessively assertive during the 1886 Gladstone administration and wished to make it clear that he was the deciding force in Irish policy. (Aberdeen, who resumed the position in 1905–15, and his wife were bitterly and vocally disappointed.) Houghton's biographer compares the tone of Morley's letters to Houghton during his lord lieutenancy to that of a forceful tutor addressing a promising student. Houghton was displeased to discover that most of the unionist gentry boycotted viceregal functions as an expression of their opposition to home rule, despite the fascination exerted by the presence of a young, widowed, and thus eligible lord lieutenant. (In the absence of a wife, his sisters presided over viceregal entertainments.) One of his principal tasks was to write regular reports to Queen Victoria on Irish affairs; this was a delicate task because of her opposition to home rule, and he tended to confine himself to matters arousing her special interest such as the Bridget Cleary (qv) case. On leaving office in 1895 Houghton was created earl of Crewe.
Crewe's support for home rule probably accounts for his continuing loyalty to the official liberal leadership, despite his second marriage, on 20 April 1899 to Lady Margaret (Peggy) Primrose, a daughter of the leading liberal imperialist, Lord Rosebery. He is alleged to have formulated the ‘step by step’ policy, pledging that if returned at the 1906 election the new liberal government would introduce moderate devolution but not full home rule; he justified this by arguing that the Liberal Party needed to consolidate its political position by passing social reform legislation. On the formation of the liberal government of Campbell-Bannerman (qv) in December 1905, Crewe was appointed lord president of the council with a seat in the cabinet, acting as virtual joint leader of the party in the house of lords. When Asquith succeeded Campbell-Bannerman in March 1908 Crewe became secretary of state for the colonies; shortly afterwards he was officially appointed liberal leader in the house of lords with the additional position of lord privy seal (which he surrendered to Morley in 1910). He served as secretary of state for India in 1910–15, in which capacity he organised the ceremonies marking George V's durbar (formal proclamation as emperor of India) at Delhi and chose Edwin Lutyens to design New Delhi. These activities won him the personal favour of George V, who presented him with the rarely conferred Order of the Victorian Chain; he received a marquessate in the 1911 coronation honours.
Crewe's role as liberal leader in the conservative-dominated lords gave him unusual prominence, but his principal political importance during the conflicts surrounding the abolition of the lords’ veto and the introduction of the third Home Rule Bill was as a negotiator and mediator between crown and government. His friendship with both Edward VII and George V made him a useful intermediary well placed to offer advice on the monarch's constitutional role. Though somewhat inarticulate (he had a stutter) and affected by ill health at crucial moments (he collapsed from overwork late in 1910, and illness also limited his participation in the events leading up to the Curragh mutiny in March 1914), Crewe was one of the most influential members of the government. Lloyd George respected his ‘subtle mind’ and he was Asquith's closest cabinet adviser: for example, he was the only member of the cabinet whom Asquith kept informed of the progress of his unofficial contacts with Bonar Law in late 1913. During the drafting of the third Home Rule Bill, Crewe opposed Lloyd George's and Churchill's proposal that Ulster exclusion should be put forward immediately; it was he who formally proposed that the bill should cover all Ireland while leaving open the possibility of a partition amendment if the Ulster situation seemed to require it. Crewe subsequently moved towards support for exclusion, though he occupied a centre position in the cabinet and was regarded as willing to abide by whatever Asquith decided.
Some embarrassment was caused to Crewe by his eldest daughter, Annabel – married to the Antrim unionist MP Arthur O'Neill (the future prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O'Neill (qv), was their son) – who took an active role in organising women's unionist organisations. ‘She has lost all sense of the proprieties of civilised life and ought to be tarred and feathered,‘ spluttered the Rev. J. B. Armour (qv) in a letter to his son in August 1911, in which he described her as ‘acting like King Lear's daughters’ (McMinn, 93). Her actions may have owed something to resentment that her father had overshadowed her debutante season in 1898–9 by announcing his pending marriage to a woman only eighteen months her senior. On the formation of the national government in 1915 Crewe became lord president of the council, and he was president of the board of education for several months in 1916. He left office when Asquith was replaced as prime minister by Lloyd George in December 1916; he supported the Asquithian liberals and was the official leader of the opposition in the lords in 1919–22. Denis Gwynn (qv) alleges that it was Crewe who conveyed to Lloyd George in 1917 that John Redmond (qv) would accept the Irish Convention as an alternative to the immediate introduction of home rule with partition.
In December 1922 Crewe was appointed ambassador to Paris, and retained the position until 1928; he represented the last gasp of the tradition that this high-level post should be entrusted to a leading patrician rather than a professional diplomat. Crewe returned to the cabinet in August 1931, when he was appointed secretary of state for war in Ramsay MacDonald's national government, but resigned in December of that year (after the government had won a landslide general election victory) in order to make way for a younger man. He subsequently sided with the liberal faction, led by Sir Herbert Samuel, which resigned from the government in 1932 over its abandonment of free trade; he was their leader in the house of lords from 1936 to 1944.
Crewe died 20 June 1945 at his home, West Horsley Place, near Leatherhead, Surrey. With his first wife he had three daughters and a fourth daughter with his second wife. Crewe's peerages all became extinct on his death. His papers are in Cambridge University Library.