went off for a holiday, and Lord Halifax took over his tasks. Halifax did this, for
example, during the first two weeks of August 1936, when the nonintervention policy
was established in Spain; he did it again in February 1937, when the capable British
Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, was removed at Ribbentrop's demand and
replaced by Sir Nevile Henderson; he did it again at the end of October 1937, when
arrangements were made for his visit to Hitler at Berchtesgaden in November; and,
finally, Halifax replaced Eden as Foreign Secretary permanently in February 1938, when
Eden refused to accept the recognition of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in return for an
Italian promise to withdraw their forces from Spain. In this last case, Halifax was already
negotiating with Count Grandi in the Foreign Office before Eden's resignation statement
was made. Eden and Halifax were second cousins, both being great-grandsons of Lord
Grey of the Reform Bill of 1832, and Halifax's daughter in 1936 married the half-brother
of Mrs. Anthony Eden. Halifax and Eden were combined in the Foreign Office in order
that the former could counterbalance the "youthful impetuosities" of the latter, since these
might jeopardize appeasement but were regarded as necessary stage-settings to satisfy the
collective-security yearnings of public opinion in England. These yearnings were made
evident in the famous "Peace Ballot" of the League of Nations Union, a maneuver put
through by Lord Cecil as a countermove to the Group's slow undermining of collective
security. This countermove, which w as regarded with extreme distaste by Lothian and
others of the inner circle, resulted, among other things, in an excessively polite crossing
of swords by Cecil and Lothian in the House of Lords on 16 March 1938.
During the period in which Halifax acted as a brake on Eden, he held the sinecure
Cabinet posts of Lord Privy Seal and Lord President of the Council (1935-1938). He had
been added to the Cabinet, after his return from India in 1931, as President of the Board
of Education, but devoted most of his time from 1931 to 1935 in helping Simon and
Hoare put through the Government of India Act of 1935. In October 1933, the same
group of Conservative members of Convocation who had made Lord Milner Chancellor
of Oxford University in 1925 selected Lord Irwin (Halifax), for the same position, in
succession to the late Lord Grey of Fallodon. He spent almost the whole month of June
1934 in the active functions of this position, especially in drawing up the list of recipients
of honorary degrees. This list is very significant. Among sixteen recipients of the
Doctorate of Civil Law, we find the following five names: Samuel Hoare, Maurice
Hankey, W. G. S. Adams, John Buchan, and Geoffrey Dawson.
We have indicated that Halifax's influence on foreign policy was increasingly
important in the years 1934-1937. It was he who defended Hoare in the House of Lords
in December 1935, saying: "I have never been one of those . . . who have thought that it
was any part in this dispute of the League to try to stop a war in Africa by starting a war
in Europe. It was Halifax who went with Eden to Paris in March 1936 to the discussions
of the Locarno Powers regarding the remilitarization of the Rhineland. That his task at
this meeting was to act as a brake on Eden's relatively large respect for the sanctity of
international obligations is admitted by Lord Halifax’s authorized biographer. It was
Halifax, as we have seen, who inaugurated the nonintervention policy in Spain in August
193fi. And it was Halifax who opened the third and last stage of appeasement in
November 1937 by his visit to Hitler in Berchtesgaden.
It is probable that the groundwork for Halifax's visit to Hitler had been laid by the
earlier visits of Lords Lothian and Londonderry to the same host, but our knowledge of
these earlier events is too scanty to be certain. Of Halifax's visit, the story is now clear, as
a result of the publication of the German Foreign Office memorandum on the subject and
Keith Feiling's publication of some of the letters from Neville Chamberlain to his sister.
The visit was arranged by Halifax himself, early in November 1937, at a time when he
was Acting Foreign Secretary, Eden being absent in Brussels at a meeting of signers of
the Nine-Power Pacific Treaty of 1922. As a result, Halifax had a long conversation with
Hitler on 19 November 1937 in which, whatever may have been Halifax's intention,
Hitler's government became convinced of three things: (a) that Britain regarded Germany
as the chief bulwark against communism in Europe; (b) that Britain was prepared to join
a Four Power agreement of France, Germany, Italy, and herself; and (c) that Britain was
prepared to allow Germany to liquidate Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland if this could
be done without provoking a war into which the British Government, however
unwillingly, would be dragged in opposition to Germany. The German Foreign Ministry