Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Lascelles, Frank Cavendish
LASCELLES, Sir FRANK CAVENDISH (1841–1920), diplomatist, was born in London 23 March 1841, the fifth son of the Hon. William Saunders Sebright Lascelles, third son of Henry Lascelles, second Earl of Harewood [q.v.]. His mother was Lady Caroline Georgiana, eldest daughter of George Howard, sixth Earl of Carlisle [q.v.]. He was educated at Harrow, and entered the diplomatic service in 1861. After serving for two years as an attaché in Madrid, he was transferred to Paris in 1864 and promoted to third secretary in 1865. Lascelles saw the Second Empire at its apogee at the time of the great Paris international exhibition of 1867. He then went on to Berlin, where he remained till the end of the Franco-Prussian War. He returned to Paris in February 1871 after the siege, and remained at the embassy under (Sir) Edward Baldwin Malet [q.v.] during the Commune, while the ambassador, Lord Lyons, accompanied the French government to Versailles. Proceeding in the same year, with the rank of second secretary, to Copenhagen, he was transferred in succession to Rome (1873), Washington (1876), and Athens (1878), and he was three times sent to take charge of the agency and consulate-general in Cairo during the last two stormy years of the Khedive Ismail's reign, which ended in Ismail's enforced abdication in 1879.
In recognition of his services in Egypt Lascelles was promoted at the end of 1879 to be agent and consul-general in Bulgaria, which country the Treaty of Berlin (1878) had virtually detached from the Ottoman Empire and constituted into an autonomous principality with Prince Alexander of Battenberg as its first ruler. He was still at Sofia when, in September 1885, a bloodless revolution at Philippopolis led to the union of Eastern Rumelia with the principality and to the first war between Bulgaria and Serbia. In the following year, owing to the hostility of the Tsar Alexander III, who resented the independent attitude of Bulgaria, Prince Alexander was kidnapped by a pro-Russian faction of the Bulgarian army, and in spite of the popular enthusiasm which greeted his return, was driven to abdicate and leave Bulgaria. Lascelles had won Lord Salisbury's approval by giving Prince Alexander his full support throughout this difficult period; he had also earned the special goodwill of Queen Victoria, who warmly favoured the prince's suit for the hand of her granddaughter, Princess Charlotte of Prussia, though Bismarck was vehemently opposed to it.
Lascelles was promoted to be British minister to Roumania at the beginning of 1887, and to Persia in 1891. In 1894 he was appointed British ambassador to Russia, and at the end of 1895 he was specially selected to succeed Sir Edward Malet who had been ambassador in Berlin for twelve years. Lascelles held this embassy for the same length of time as his predecessor, during a period when German ambitions and the menace of Germany's naval expansion led to a growing estrangement between her and Great Britain. The first public revelation of this was the famous telegram dispatched by William II to President Kruger in January 1896, only a few days after the new ambassador's arrival in Berlin. Lascelles's personal relations with William II, who was at great pains to capture his confidence, were, however, singularly cordial and even intimate. In spite of the Emperor's not infrequent outbursts of angry temper when talking of British ministers and British policy, Lascelles was generally inclined to acquit him of any hostile designs against England, and he preferred to throw the blame on the sovereign's advisers, and especially on Prince Bülow, whom he greatly distrusted. He retired in 1908, and even after his retirement continued to use his influence for the restoration of Anglo-German amity right up to the outbreak of the European War of 1914. Lascelles was created K.C.M.G. (1886), G.C.M.G. (1892), G.C.B. (1897), G.C.V.O. (1904), and a privy councillor in 1892. He married in 1867 Mary Emma (died 1897), eldest daughter of Sir Joseph Francis Olliffe [q.v.], physician to the British embassy at Paris, and had two sons and one daughter, Florence, who married Sir Cecil Spring-Rice [q.v.]. He died in London 2 January 1920.
[Official records; private letters.]