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Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton (10 February 1894 – 29 December 1986) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963.

Nicknamed 'Supermac' and known for his pragmatism, wit and unflappability, Macmillan achieved notoriety before the Second World War as a Tory radical and critic of appeasement. Rising to high office as a protegé of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he believed in the essential decency of the post-war settlement and the necessity of a mixed economy, and in his premiership pursued corporatist policies to develop the domestic market as the engine of growth. As a One Nation Tory of the Disraelian tradition, haunted by memories of the Great Depression, he championed a Keynesian strategy of public investment to maintain demand, winning a second term in 1959 on an electioneering budget. Benefiting from favourable international conditions, he presided over an age of affluence, marked by low unemployment and high if uneven growth. In his Bedford speech of July 1957 he told the nation they had 'never had it so good', but warned of the dangers of inflation, summing up the fragile prosperity of the 1950s.

In international affairs Macmillan rebuilt the special relationship with the United States from the wreckage of Suez, and redrew the world map by decolonising sub-Saharan Africa. Reconfiguring the nation's defences to meet the realities of the nuclear age, he ended National Service, strengthened the nuclear deterrent by acquiring Polaris, and pioneered the Nuclear Test Ban with the United States and the Soviet Union. Belatedly recognising the dangers of strategic dependence, he sought a new role for Britain in Europe, but his unwillingness to disclose United States nuclear secrets to France contributed to a French veto of the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community.

Macmillan's government in its final year was rocked by the Vassall and Profumo scandals, which seemed to symbolise for the rebellious youth of the 1960s the moral decay of the British establishment. Resigning prematurely after a medical misdiagnosis, Macmillan lived out a long retirement as an elder statesman of global stature. He was as trenchant a critic of his successors in his old age as he had been of his predecessors in his youth. When asked what represented the greatest challenge for a statesman, Macmillan replied: 'Events, my dear boy, events'.

Family

Harold Macmillan was born at 52 Cadogan Place in Chelsea, London, to Maurice Crawford Macmillan (1853–1936), publisher, and Helen (Nellie) Artie Tarleton Belles (1856–1937), artist and socialite, from Spencer, Indiana, US. He had two brothers, Daniel, eight years his senior, and Arthur, four years his senior. His paternal grandfather, Daniel MacMillan (1813–1857), was the son of a Scottish crofter who founded Macmillan Publishers.

Education

Macmillan's early education was intense and closely guided by his American mother. He was taught French at home every morning by a succession of nursery maids, and exercised daily at Mr Macpherson's Gymnasium and Dancing Academy, around the corner from the family home in Cadogan Place. From the age of six or seven he received introductory lessons in classical Latin and Greek at Mr Gladstone's day school, close by in Sloane Square.

Macmillan then attended Summer Fields School, Oxford (1903-6), but his time at Eton (1906-10) was blighted by recurrent illness, starting with a near-fatal attack of pneumonia in his first half; he missed his final year after being invalided out, and had to be taught at home by private tutors (1910-11), notably Ronald Knox, who did much to instil his High Church Anglicanism. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford (1912-14), where he obtained a First in Mods (Latin and Greek, the first half of the four-year Oxford Greats course), and became an officer of the Oxford Union Society, before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.

War service

Macmillan served with distinction as a captain in the Grenadier Guards during the war, and was wounded on three occasions. During the Battle of the Somme, he spent an entire day wounded and lying in a slit trench with a bullet in his pelvis, reading the classical Greek playwright Aeschylus in the original language. Macmillan spent the final two years of the war in hospital undergoing a long series of operations, and saw no further active service. His hip wound took four years to heal completely, and left him with a slight shuffle to his walk (and a limp grip in his right hand from a separate hand wound) for the rest of his life. As was common for contemporary former officers, he continued to be known as 'Captain Macmillan' until the early 1930s. Of the 28 freshmen who started at Balliol with Macmillan, only he and one other survived.

Canadian aide-de-campship

Macmillan lost so many of his fellow students during the war that afterwards he refused to return to Oxford, saying the university would never be the same. According to his entry in Who's Who (1987) he obtained "1st. Class Hon. Moderations 1919", suggesting that he was awarded a degree in absentia. He served instead in Ottawa, Canada, in 1919 as ADC to Victor Cavendish, 10th Duke of Devonshire, then Governor General of Canada and future father-in-law.

Publishing

On his return to London in 1920 he joined the family firm Macmillan Publishers as a junior partner, remaining with the company until his appointment to ministerial office in 1940.
 

Personal Life

Marriage

Macmillan married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, on 21 April 1920. Her great-uncle was Spencer Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire, who was leader of the Liberal Party in the 1870s, and a close colleague of William Ewart Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Salisbury. Lady Dorothy was also descended from William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, who served as Prime Minister from 1756–1757 in communion with Newcastle and Pitt the Elder. Her nephew William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington married Kathleen, a sister of John F. Kennedy. Between 1929 and 1935 Lady Dorothy had a long affair with the Conservative politician Robert Boothby, in full public view of Westminster and established society. Boothby was widely rumoured to have been the father of Macmillan's youngest daughter Sarah. The stress caused by this may have contributed to Macmillan's nervous breakdown in 1931. Lady Dorothy died on 21 May 1966, aged 65.

The Macmillans had four children:

• Maurice Macmillan, Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden (1921–1984)

• Lady Caroline Faber (born 1923)
• Lady Catherine Amery (1926–1991)
• Sarah Macmillan (1930–1970)

Brother-in-law

On 26 November 1950, Lady Dorothy's brother Edward Cavendish, the 10th Duke of Devonshire had a heart attack and died in the presence of John Bodkin Adams, the suspected serial killer. Thirteen days before, Edith Alice Morrell, another patient of Adams, had also died. Adams was tried in 1957 for her murder but controversially acquitted. Political interference has been suspected and indeed, the case was prosecuted by a member of Macmillan's cabinet, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller. Home office pathologist Francis Camps linked Adams to a total of 163 suspicious deaths.

Eileen O'Casey

Eileen Kathleen O'Casey (née Reynolds), the actress wife of Irish dramatist Seán O'Casey, had a close relationship with Macmillan, who had published her husband’s plays. There is disagreement over whether he proposed after she was widowed. According to her husband's biographer: 'Eileen and O'Casey's marriage had become celibate by the time she was in her fifties, now a strikingly handsome woman, notable for her warm wit, who, on her own candid admission, fulfilled her sexual needs outside marriage ... One ardent, lifelong admirer was Macmillan, who in later life gently broached to her the idea of marriage, which she declined.'

Eileen's obituary notice in the Evening Standard states: 'It was the death of Sean O'Casey in 1964, and of Dorothy Macmillan, two years later, that cemented Macmillan and Eileen’s intimacy. She became the light which illuminated his prime years, eventually even replacing Dorothy in his affections.' O'Casey's biographer notes that 'Eileen was the first woman whom Macmillan asked to sit in Lady Dorothy’s place at table in Birch Grove; he also took her out frequently to dine at Buck’s Club.'

Eileen's obituary in The Times records that 'she became one of Harold Macmillan's closest friends. The two grew even closer after the death of their respective spouses. That Macmillan never proposed marriage was a source of bewilderment to outsiders, although Eileen was understanding about his shyness....Her relationship with Macmillan, which only ended with his death in 1986, was a source of comfort to her in old age. For his part, he relied completely on her honest, outspoken Irish perspective. She recalled one lunch when Lord Home asked Macmillan to accept a peerage: "Harold turned to me and said 'What about that Eileen?' I told him I thought it nicer to keep the name Harold Macmillan to the end of his days and said, 'Titles are two-a-penny these days. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers are all getting them.' I got the impression that Alec Douglas-Home was a bit annoyed with me."

Retirement (1963–1986)

Resignation

The Profumo affair may have exacerbated Macmillan's ill-health. He was taken ill on the eve of the Conservative Party conference, diagnosed incorrectly with inoperable prostate cancer. Consequently, he resigned on 18 October 1963. He felt privately that he was being hounded from office by a backbench minority:

Succession

Macmillan was succeeded as Prime Minister by the Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home in a controversial move; it was alleged that Macmillan had pulled strings and utilised the party's grandees, nicknamed 'The Magic Circle', to ensure that Butler was not chosen as his successor.

Macmillan initially refused a peerage and retired from politics in September 1964.

Oxford Chancellor (1960–1986)

Macmillan had been elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1960, in a campaign masterminded by Hugh Trevor-Roper, and continued in this distinguished office for life, frequently presiding over college events, making speeches and tirelessly raising funds. According to Sir Patrick Neill QC, the vice-chancellor, Macmillan 'would talk late into the night with eager groups of students who were often startled by the radical views he put forward, well into his last decade.'

Political interventions

Macmillan made occasional political interventions in retirement. Responding to a remark made by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson about not having boots in which to go to school, Macmillan retorted: 'If Mr Wilson did not have boots to go to school that is because he was too big for them.'

Macmillan accepted the distinction of the Order of Merit from the Queen in 1976. In October of that year he called for 'a Government of National Unity', including all parties, that could command the public support to resolve the economic crisis. Asked who could lead such a coalition, he replied: 'Mr Gladstone formed his last Government when he was eighty-three. I'm only eighty-two. You mustn't put temptation in my way.' His plea was interpreted by party leaders as a bid for power and rejected.

Macmillan still travelled widely, visiting China in October 1979, where he held talks with its leader, senior Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping.

Relations with Thatcher

Macmillan found himself drawn more actively into politics after Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader and Prime Minister, and the record of his own premiership came under attack from the monetarists in the party, whose theories Thatcher supported. In a celebrated speech he wondered aloud where such theories had come from:

On Macmillan's advice in April 1982 Thatcher excluded the Treasury from her Falklands War Cabinet. She later said: 'I never regretted following Harold Macmillan's advice. We were never tempted to compromise the security of our forces for financial reasons. Everything we did was governed by military necessity.'

Macmillan finally accepted a peerage in 1984 and was created Earl of Stockton and Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden. He took the title from his former parliamentary seat on the border of the Durham coalfields, and in his maiden speech in the House of Lords he criticised Thatcher's handling of the coal miners' strike and her characterisation of Marxist militants as 'the enemy within'. He received an unprecedented standing ovation for his oration which included the words:

As Chancellor of Oxford Lord Stockton also condemned the university's refusal in February 1985 to award Thatcher an honorary degree. He noted that the decision represented a break with tradition, and predicted that the snub would rebound on the university.

Stockton is widely supposed to have likened Thatcher's policy of privatisation to 'selling the family silver'. What he did say (at a dinner of the Tory Reform Group at the Royal Overseas League on 8 November 1985) was that the sale of assets was commonplace among individuals or states when they encountered financial difficulties: 'First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon. Then the Canalettos go.' Profitable parts of the steel industry and the railways had been privatised, along with British Telecom: 'They were like two Rembrandts still left.'

Stockton's speech was much commented on and a few days later he made a speech in the House of Lords to clarify what he had meant:

In the last month of his life, he mournfully observed:

Death and funeral

Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, died on 29 December 1986, at Birch Grove, the Macmillan family mansion on the edge of Ashdown Forest near Chelwood Gate in East Sussex. He was aged 92 years and 322 days—the greatest age attained by a British Prime Minister until surpassed by James Callaghan on 14 February 2005. His grandson and heir Alexander, Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden, said: 'In the last 48 hours he was very weak but entirely reasonable and intelligent. His last words were, "I think I will go to sleep now".'

Thatcher, on receiving the news, hailed him as 'a very remarkable man and a very great patriot', and said that his dislike of 'selling the family silver' had never come between them. He was 'unique in the affection of the British people'.

Tributes came from around the world. US President Ronald Reagan said: 'The American people share in the loss of a voice of wisdom and humanity who, with eloquence and gentle wit, brought to the problems of today the experience of a long life of public service.' Outlawed ANC president Oliver Tambo sent his condolences: 'As South Africans we shall always remember him for his efforts to encourage the apartheid regime to bow to the winds of change that continue to blow in South Africa.' Commonwealth Secretary-General Sir Shridath Ramphal affirmed: 'His own leadership in providing from Britain a worthy response to African national consciousness shaped the post-war era and made the modern Commonwealth possible.'

A private funeral was held on 5 January 1987 at St Giles Church, Horsted Keynes, West Sussex, where Lord Stockton had regularly worshipped and read the lesson. Two hundred mourners attended, including 64 members of the Macmillan family, Thatcher and former premiers Lord Home of the Hirsel and Edward Heath, Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone, and 'scores of country neighbours'. The Prince of Wales sent a wreath 'in admiring memory'. Stockton was buried beside his wife, Lady Dorothy, and next to the graves of his parents and of his son, Maurice Macmillan.

The House of Commons paid its tribute on 12 January 1987, with much reference made to the dead statesman's book, The Middle Way. Thatcher said: 'In his retirement Harold Macmillan occupied a unique place in the nation's affections', while Labour leader Neil Kinnock struck a more critical note:

A public memorial service, attended by the Queen and thousands of mourners, was held on 10 February 1987 in Westminster Abbey.

Stockton's son Maurice had become heir to the earldom, but predeceased him suddenly a month after his father's elevation. The 1st Earl was succeeded instead by his grandson, Maurice's son, Alexander, Lord Macmillan, who become the 2nd Earl of Stockton.