Anthony Eden, Neville Chamberlain and the Cabinet Quest for Italy, 1937 to February 1938

Abstract

Historians have not yet provided a detailed authenticated account of Anthony Eden's term as Foreign Secretary in the Chamberlain Cabinet and of his resignation. Written in the immediate aftermath of Eden's resignation, the Chatham House account reflects the mixture of confusion and speculation manifested by contemporary spectators caught largely unaware, despite rumours, by an event supposedly significant but the precise nature of that significance e1usive. By the time Churchill's version appears, with the aid of hindsight after the holocaust, a rift based on clear-cut policy alternatives is discerned. On one side there is Chamberlain and his ageing sycophants bedazzled by a quest for 'peace in their time', conceived as a mission, therefore unthwartable and increasingly representing a position of weakness; on the other Eden, with harsher principles for dealing with truculent dictators , a martyr to a more resolute cause. The rift is therefore inevitable, and significant in the chronicling of the 'disastrous' policy of appeasement, because it centres on different principles for the execution of foreign policy.