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Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon (12 June 1897 – 14 January 1977) was a British Conservative politician, who was Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957. He was also Foreign Secretary for three periods between 1935 and 1955, including during the Second World War.

Eden's worldwide reputation as an opponent of appeasement, a 'Man of Peace', and a skilled diplomat was overshadowed in the second year of his premiership by his handling of the Suez Crisis of 1956, which critics across party lines regarded as a historic setback for British foreign policy, signalling the end of British predominance in the Middle East.

In the post-war years, Eden was a protagonist of the change in British policy on war criminal trials, which was perhaps best symbolised by his signature under the pardon conceded to the German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring on 24 October 1952.

He is generally ranked among the least successful British Prime Ministers of the twentieth century, although two broadly sympathetic biographies (in 1986 and 2003) have gone some way to redressing the balance of opinion.

Early life

Eden was born at Windlestone Hall, County Durham, England, into a very conservative landed gentry family. He was a younger son of Sir William Eden, baronet, from an old titled family. His mother, Sybil Frances Grey, was a member of the famous Grey family of Northumberland (see below). This was perhaps the meaning of Rab Butler's later gibe that Eden – in later life a handsome but ill-tempered man – was "half mad baronet, half beautiful woman". However, there has been credible speculation for many years that Eden's father was actually the politician and man of letters George Wyndham, whom he resembled in appearance and speech, and with whom his mother was rumoured to have had an affair. Eden had an elder brother called Timothy and a younger brother, Nicholas, who was killed when the battlecruiser HMS Indefatigable blew up and sank at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

Education

Eden was educated at two independent schools: at Sandroyd School from 1907–1910, at the time based in Cobham in Surrey (and now the home of Reed's School), followed by Eton College, in Eton in Berkshire, where he won a Divinity prize and excelled at cricket, rugby and rowing, winning House colours in the latter. After the war, he studied at Christ Church at the University of Oxford, where he graduated in Oriental Languages. He was fluent in French, German and Persian, and also spoke Russian and Arabic.

Life and career

During the First World War, Eden served with the 21st (Yeoman Rifles) Battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, and reached the rank of captain. He received a Military Cross, and at the age of twenty-one became the youngest brigade-major in the British Army. At a conference in the early 1930s, he and Adolf Hitler observed that they had probably fought on opposite sides of the trenches in the Ypres sector. After fighting a hopeless seat in the November 1922 General Election, Captain Eden, as he was still known, was elected Member of Parliament for Warwick and Leamington in the December 1923 General Election, as a Conservative. Also in that year he married Beatrice Beckett. They had two sons (as well as a third who died in infancy), but the marriage was not a success and later broke up under the strain of a son missing in action during the latter half of the Second World War.

In the 1924–1929 Conservative Government, Eden was first Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson Hicks, and then in 1926 to the Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain. In 1931 he held his first ministerial office as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. In 1934 he was appointed Lord Privy Seal and Minister for the League of Nations in Stanley Baldwin's Government. Like many of his generation who had served in the First World War, Eden was strongly anti-war, and strove to work through the League of Nations to preserve European peace. However, he was among the first to recognise that peace could not be maintained by appeasement of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. He privately opposed the policy of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, of trying to appease Italy during its invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935. When Hoare resigned after the failure of the Hoare-Laval Pact, Eden succeeded him as Foreign Secretary.

At this stage in his career Eden was considered as something of a leader of fashion. He regularly wore a Homburg hat (similar to a trilby but more rigid), which became known in Britain as an "Anthony Eden".

Foreign secretary and resignation (1935–38)

Eden became Foreign Secretary at a time when Britain was having to adjust its foreign policy to face the rise of the fascist powers. He supported the policy of non-interference in the Spanish Civil War, and supported prime minister Neville Chamberlain in his efforts to preserve peace through reasonable concessions to Germany. He did not protest when Britain and France failed to oppose Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. When the French requested a meeting with a view to some kind of military action in response to Hitler's occupation, Eden in a statement firmly ruled out any military assistance to France. His resignation in February 1938 was largely attributed to growing dissatisfaction with Chamberlain`s policy of Appeasement. That is, however, disputed by new research; it was not the question if there should be negotiations with Italy, but only when they should start and how far they should be carried. Similarly, he at no point registered his dissatisfaction with the appeasement policy directed towards Nazi Germany in his period as Foreign Secretary. He became a Conservative dissenter leading a group conservative whip David Margesson called the "Glamour Boys," and a leading anti-appeaser like Winston Churchill, who led a similar group called "The Old Guard." Although Churchill claimed to have lost sleep the night of Eden's resignation (later recounted in his wartime memoirs (The Gathering Storm, 1948), they were not allies, and did not see eye to eye until Churchill became Prime Minister. There was much speculation that Eden would become a rallying point for all the disparate opponents of Neville Chamberlain, but instead he maintained a low profile, avoiding confrontation, though he opposed the Munich Agreement and abstained in the vote on it in the House of Commons. As a result, Eden's position declined heavily amongst politicians, though he remained popular in the country at large; in later years he was often wrongly supposed to have resigned in protest at the Munich Agreement.

Second World War (1939–45)

In September 1939, on the outbreak of war, Eden, who had briefly rejoined the army with the rank of major, returned to Chamberlain's government as Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, but was not in the War Cabinet. As a result, he was not a candidate for the Premiership when Chamberlain resigned after Germany invaded France in May 1940 and Churchill became Prime Minister. Churchill appointed Eden Secretary of State for War.

At the end of 1940 Eden returned to the Foreign Office, and in this role became a member of the executive committee of the Political Warfare Executive in 1941. Although he was one of Churchill's closest confidants, his role in wartime was restricted because Churchill conducted the most important negotiations, with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, himself, but Eden served loyally as Churchill's lieutenant. Nevertheless he was in charge of handling much of the relations between Britain and de Gaulle during the last years of the war. Eden was often critical of the emphasis Churchill put on the Special Relationship with the United States, and was often disappointed by American treatment of their British allies.

In 1942 Eden was given the additional job of Leader of the House of Commons. He was considered for various other major jobs during and after the war, including Commander-in-Chief Middle East in 1942 (this would have been a very unusual appointment as Eden was a civilian; General Harold Alexander was in fact appointed), Viceroy of India in 1943 (General Archibald Wavell was appointed to this job), or Secretary-General of the newly-formed United Nations Organisation in 1945. In 1943 with the revelation of the Katyn Massacre Eden refused to help the Polish Government in Exile. In 1944 Eden went to Moscow to negotiate with the Soviet Union at the Tolstoy Conference. Eden also opposed the Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialise Germany.

Eden's eldest son, Pilot Officer Simon Gascoigne Eden, went missing in action, later declared deceased, while serving as a navigator with the RAF in Burma, in June 1945. There was a close bond between Anthony and Simon, and Simon's death was a great personal shock to his father, who nevertheless accepted it. Lady Eden reportedly reacted differently to her son's loss, and this led to a breakdown in the marriage. De Gaulle wrote him a personal letter of condolence in French.

In 1945, he was mentioned by Halvdan Koht among seven candidates that were qualified for the Nobel Prize in Peace. However, he did not explicitly nominate any of them. The person actually nominated was Cordell Hull.

Post-war

Opposition (1945–51)

After the Labour Party won the 1945 elections, Eden went into opposition as Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party. Many felt that Churchill should have retired and allowed Eden to become party leader, but Churchill refused to consider this, and Eden was too loyal to press him. He was in any case depressed during this period by the break-up of his first marriage and the death of his eldest son. Churchill was in many ways only "part-time Leader of the Opposition", given his many journeys abroad and his literary work, and left the day-to-day-work largely to Eden. Eden was largely regarded as lacking sense of party politics and contact with the common man. In these opposition years, however, he developed some knowledge about domestic affairs and created the idea of a "property-owning-democracy", which Thatcher government's attempted to achieve decades later. His domestic agenda is overall considered centre-left.

Anthony Eden is the great-great-grandnephew of author Emily Eden and wrote an introduction to her 1860 novel The Semi-Detached Couple in 1947.

Return to government (1951–55)

In 1951, the Conservatives returned to office and Eden became Foreign Secretary for a third time. Churchill was largely a figurehead in this government, and Eden had an effective control of British foreign policy for the first time, as the Empire declined and the Cold War grew more intense. He dealt effectively with the various crises of the period, although Britain was no longer the world power it had been before the war. The success of the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indo-China ranks as his outstanding achievement of his third term in the Foreign Office. During the summer and fall of 1954, the Anglo-Egyptian agreement to withdraw all British forces from Egypt was also negotiated and ratified. In 1950 he and Beatrice Eden were finally divorced, and in 1952 he married Churchill's niece, Clarissa Spencer-Churchill (b. 1920), a nominal Roman Catholic who was fiercely criticised by Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh for marrying a divorced man. This second marriage was much more successful than his first had been. In 1954 he was made a Knight of the Garter and became Sir Anthony Eden.

Prime minister (1955–57)

In April 1955 Churchill finally retired, and Eden succeeded him as Prime Minister. He was a very popular figure, as a result of his long wartime service and his famous good looks and charm. His famous words "Peace comes first, always" added to his already substantial popularity.

On taking office he immediately called a general election, at which the Conservatives were returned with an increased majority. But Eden had never held a domestic portfolio and had little experience in economic matters. He left these areas to his lieutenants such as Rab Butler, and concentrated largely on foreign policy, forming a close relationship with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.

Suez (1956)

The alliance with the US proved not universal, however, when in July 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt, unexpectedly nationalised the Suez Canal, following the US withdrawal to fund Aswan Dam. Eden, in conjunction with France, decided Nasser should be removed from power. The canal had been built in the 19th century by the Suez Canal Company through a concession from the viceroy of Egypt, but later became owned by its British and French shareholders. Eden, drawing on his experience in the 1930s, saw Nasser as another Mussolini, considering the two men aggressive nationalist socialists determined to invade other countries. Eden even responded by plotting to assassinate Nasser by enlisting Miles Copeland's assistance, since he was apparently a close friend of Nasser's. Others believed that Nasser was acting from legitimate patriotic concerns and the nationalisation was determined to by the Foreign Office as legal.

In October 1956, after months of negotiation and attempts at mediation had failed to dissuade Nasser, Britain and France, in conjunction with Israel, invaded Egypt and occupied the Suez Canal Zone. But Eisenhower was an advocate of decolonisation, and he immediately and strongly opposed the invasion. Eden, who faced domestic pressure from his party to take action, as well as stopping the decline of British influence in the Middle East, had ignored Britain's financial dependence on the U.S. in the wake of the Second World War, and had overestimated US loyalty towards its closest ally. Eden was finally forced to bow to American pressure to withdraw. The Suez Crisis is widely taken as marking the end of Britain's status as a superpower, although, in reality, this had happened by the end of the Second World War.

The Suez fiasco ruined, in many eyes, Eden's reputation for statesmanship and led to a breakdown in his health. He went on vacation to Ian Fleming's estate on Jamaica in November 1956, at a time when he was still determined to soldier on as Prime Minister. His health, however, did not improve and during his absence from London, his Chancellor Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler worked to manoeuvre him out of office. Eden resigned on 9 January 1957. Macmillan, despite having himself been one of the architects of Suez, succeeded him as Prime Minister in January 1957. Eden retained some of his personal popularity and was made Earl of Avon in 1961.

Retirement (1957–77)

Eden soon retired and lived quietly with his second wife Clarissa, formerly Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, niece of Sir Winston, in 'Rose Bower' by the banks of the River Ebble in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire. He published a highly acclaimed personal memoir, Another World (1976), as well as several volumes of political memoirs, in which he, however, denied that there had been any collusion with France and Israel. In his view, American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whom he particularly disliked, was responsible for the ill fate of the Suez adventure. This lack of candour further diminished his standing and a principal concern in his later years was trying to rebuild his reputation that was severely damaged by Suez, sometimes taking legal action to protect his viewpoint. It was not until some years after his death that a more balanced view of Suez came to be advanced by some historians and other commentators in the light of subsequent events.

Eden sat for extensive interviews for the famed multi-part Thames Television production, The World at War, which was first broadcast in 1973. He also featured frequently in Marcel Ophüls' 1969 documentary Le chagrin et la pitié, discussing the occupation of France in a wider geopolitical context. He spoke impeccable, if accented, French. From 1945 to 1973, Eden was Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, England.

On a trip to the United States in 1976–1977 to spend Christmas and New Year with Averell and Pamela Harriman, his health rapidly deteriorated. At his family's request, James Callaghan arranged for an RAF plane that was already in America to divert to Miami to fly him home. The Earl of Avon died from liver cancer in Salisbury on 14 January 1977, at the age of 79. Born in the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, he thus died in the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee.

Anthony Eden is buried in the country churchyard at Alvediston, just three miles upstream from 'Rose Bower' at the source of the River Ebble. Eden's papers are housed at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.

Eden's surviving son, Nicholas Eden (1930–1985), known as Viscount Eden until 1977, was also a politician and a minister in the Thatcher government until his premature death from AIDS at the age of 54.