Sir Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice GCMG GCVO (27 February 1859 – 14 February 1918), was a British diplomat who served as British Ambassador to the United States from 1912 to 1918.
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Spring-Rice was the son of Hon. Thomas William Spring Rice, second son of the prominent Whig politician and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Thomas Spring Rice, 1st Baron Monteagle of Brandon. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford.
Spring-Rice went on to become the British Chargé d'Affaires in Tehran (1900), Commissioner of Public Debt in Cairo (1901) and Chargé d'Affaires in St. Petersburg (1903). He later served in Persia (1906) and Sweden (1908) before his appointment as ambassador to the United States in 1912. He was abruptly recalled in a one-line telegram, and died in Ottawa shortly thereafter, where he is buried in Beechwood Cemetery.
According to Edmund Morris, in his The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, "Spring-Rice was a born diplomat [who] invariably picked out and cultivated the most important person in any place".[1] He was well respected in London's diplomatic circles. Further, "he was one of [President] Theodore Roosevelt's most ardent and loyal admirers"[2] and acted as Roosevelt's best man in Roosevelt's wedding to Edith Carrow. Spring-Rice memorably remarked about Roosevelt: "You must remember that the president is about six".[3]
However he seems to have been unable to turn these earlier close links to the administration to a relationship of use to his government. Spring-Rice had earned the enmity of his government after becoming paranoid - seeing German spies everywhere - and also because of his immense dislike of any British visitors to Washington that were not under the control of his embassy.
The US found him obstructive and his description of Woodrow Wilson as a "mysterious personage" doesn't suggest a particularly close relationship.
Spring-Rice suffered from Graves' disease[4]
He wrote the present text for the hymn I Vow to Thee My Country, which can now be found in many British Hymn books, revising a poem of his own, about the same time. He was a close friend of Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol, a British journalist and later diplomat, with whom he corresponded for many years.
| Diplomatic posts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by James Bryce |
British Ambassador to the United States 1913-1918 |
Succeeded by The Earl of Reading |