The arms are those of Primrose quartering those of Cressy, as borne by Archibald, 5th Earl of Rosebery, who succeeded his grandfather to the Earldom in 1868 at the age of 21. A man of great gifts, it is said that while a schoolboy he announced that his three ambitions in life were to become Prime Minister, to marry a Rothschild and to win the Derby. The story may be apocryphal but, as Sir Francis Watson remarked, it was without doubt his marriage to Hannah, the heiress of Baron Mayer Amschel de Rothschild in 1878, that helped Rosebery achieve his two other objectives. A Liberal, he devoted much of his life to politics; "with graceful erudition and a happy gift of oratory, more common in a Pre-reform than a modern Statesman, he combined a breadth of political outlook and a warm sympathy with the policy of political expansion which drew him naturally to foreign affairs." (W.H. Dawson, Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, vol. III, p. 198). He served as Foreign Secretary in 1886 and again from 1892-1894 before becoming Prime Minister in March of that year. His tenure of that office however was short and he was ousted in June of the following year. "He had come to the front as the Prince Charming of politics--young, handsome, rich, eloquent, candid and popular...But he was fatally lacking in party attitudes. Succeeding to the title as a minor he had never been apprenticed in the House of Commons. Few men could speak so eloquently on a public platform, yet none so seldom woke party applause. Thus the fighters in his own camp never liked him, and least of all the dominant nonconformists, in whom as a Whig aristocrat and an owner of racehorses he inspired instinctive distrust." (Ensor, The Oxford History of England, 1870-1914, pp. 215-216)

As a sportsman Rosebery was well-known; he owned rÿce horses from 1868 and was elected to the Jockey Club in 1870. He won the Derby three times, with Ladas in 1894, Sir Visto in 1895 and Cicero in 1905. No Prime Minister had ever won the Derby while in office, although the 3rd Duke of Grafton had won it, also three times, after his resignation in the early years of the century. In addition to great wealth, Rosebery's marriage to Hannah Rothschild also brought him Mentmore, the great "Jacobethan" palace designed by Joseph Paxton, the new "Christopher Wren", for Baron Rothschild in the 1850s. The present wine coolers were apparently purchased for use at the Roseberys's townhouse in Berkeley Square during his bachelordom and were removed to Mentmore after his marriage.