Rowland Edmund Prothero, 1st Baron Ernle PC MVO (6 September 1851 – 1 July 1937) was a British administrator, author, and politician.

The son of the Rev. Canon George Prothero, Rector of Whippingham, Isle of Wight, Hampshire, and his wife, Emma, only daughter of the Rev. William Money-Kyrle, of Homme House, Herefordshire, and brother of Sir George Prothero, he was educated at Marlborough College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained a 1st class honours degree in Modern History in 1875. He was a Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford 1875-1891, and was Proctor in 1883-1884. He was awarded the MVO in 1901.

He published The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming in 1888 and edited Quarterly Review from 1893-9. From 1898-1918, he was chief agent for the 11th Duke of Bedford.

He contested Biggleswade in 1910 and was elected as Conservative Member of Parliament for Oxford University at a by-election in 1914, holding the seat until 1919. He held office as President of the Board of Agriculture from 1916-19. In that role he introduced a guaranteed price for wheat.

He was appointed a Privy Counsellor in 1916, and raised to the peerage as 1st Baron Ernle in 1919, a title chosen in reflection of his pride in his own matrilineal descent from the Ernle family, one of the historic landed families of Sussex and Wiltshire. The barony became extinct upon his death, his only son having been killed in action in World War I.

His other works include Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, published in 1893, and Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1898-1901) and his autobiography, From Whippingham to Westminster.

Sources

• A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain, 1863 edition, p. 1231 (lineage of Prothero of Malpas Court, co. Monmouth)
• Concise Dictionary of National Biography
• From Whippingham to Westminster (autobiography of R. E. Prothero, later 1st and last Baron Ernle)
• Who Was Who
• Wiltshire Archæological and Natural History Society Magazine, 1919.

External links

• Works by Rowland Prothero, 1st Baron Ernle at Project Gutenberg

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