37

Ultimate Disappointments, 1923–1921

NONE OF THE Cabinet, remarked Lloyd George in March 1923, appeared to be doing much with the exception of Curzon, who went on ‘burnishing his own halo’.1 Through the cynicism the former premier was echoing a general view that, in a Government of apparently grey men, the one outstanding figure was the Foreign Secretary. At the Cabinet’s formation Curzon had been pre-eminent among Law’s ministers, and since Lausanne his position had been enhanced. When he went to France for another treatment for phlebitis at the end of March, his position as the number two in the Government hierarchy seemed unassailable.

Bonar Law had left the Cabinet for health reasons in 1921, and he was not expected to serve a long term as premier. If the expectation was correct, Curzon seemed to be the only possible candidate to succeed him. Chamberlain of course was also a potential leader, but by now he and Law were distanced by a mutual lack of respect, and he refused to set himself up as ally and heir to a man he thought had twice robbed him of the leadership.

While he was in France, a seemingly incredible rumour reached Curzon that a rival had emerged in the shape of Stanley Baldwin. Apart from his moment at the Carlton Club, Baldwin still had few achievements to his name. He had reached the Cabinet only in 1921 after spending four years as a competent but not distinguished Financial Secretary to the Treasury. After promotion to the presidency of the Board of Trade, he had impressed neither the Prime Minister nor the two men he had served under at the Exchequer. Finding him ‘always … disappointing’, Lloyd George thought he did nothing to restore business confidence and wanted to move him. Equally disappointed, Chamberlain successfully resisted the idea that he should succeed Montagu at the India Office: Peel would be ‘much better’, he argued, than the indecisive Baldwin.2 In October 1922 Law considered him too inexperienced to become Chancellor of the Exchequer and only made the appointment after his first choice, Mckenna, refused the post. Since then he had almost forced the Prime Minister’s resignation after a disastrous visit to Washington in pursuit of an American debt settlement. No wonder he seemed an implausible threat to the Foreign Secretary.

On hearing the rumour that Law was about to retire and would be succeeded by Baldwin, Curzon reacted in the worst possible manner. In a pompous and indignant letter he reminded the Prime Minister of his claims to succeed him, his record and reputation, his years of service and his experience of high office. If the succession to Law had to be considered – which he ‘devoutly’ hoped would not be the case – he could not surrender those claims or consent to serve under any of his present colleagues; on this point he was ‘quite clear’. The Prime Minister drily replied that the rumour was without foundation and that, although he had not been well recently, he had no intention of resigning.3

Curzon was not an astute tactician in the field of human relations. But even he should have realized that an unceasing barrage of complaint was unlikely to persuade an ailing Prime Minister to want him as his successor. Familiar protests from Tours about ministers making unauthorized speeches on foreign affairs were followed later in April by a furious reaction to the fact that Lord Winchester had consulted Downing Street rather than the Foreign Office about forming a syndicate to develop Turkey. Asked by the Prime Minister if he had any objection to the scheme, Curzon replied in a tone he would never have used with Lloyd George. After criticizing Law’s Private Secretary for failing to send the applicant straight to the FO, Curzon denounced Winchester’s morals (both private and financial) and added, ‘When these persons go to No. 10 instead of here, they are really reproducing one of the least admirable features of the LG regime.’4 The Prime Minister, who had done nothing to deserve the reprimand, was deeply hurt. According to Lord Blake, the episode was crucial in forming Law’s decision not to recommend Curzon as his successor.5

Sick and in pain, the Prime Minister embarked on a Mediterranean cruise on the first day of May. Before leaving, he appointed the Foreign Secretary to act as Deputy Prime Minister, an arrangement which seemed to indicate the nature of his successor. In the same period Curzon’s confidence was bolstered by press speculation and by the support of Sir George Younger, the Chairman of the Conservative Party. Lunching together on 9 May, Younger assured Curzon that his succession was inevitable because Baldwin lacked both experience and authority.6

From France Law wrote on the 11th to tell Curzon he was feeling much better. But as everyone else thought he looked iller than ever, his physician was summoned from England to examine him. Cancer of the throat was diagnosed on the 17th and, although Law himself was not told immediately, his friend Beaverbrook gave up trying to dissuade him from resigning. For two days the Prime Minister remained in Paris, gloomily contemplating the defects of his two possible successors. But he was greatly relieved to be told by the ambassador, Lord Crewe, that a Prime Minister was not obliged to give a recommendation to the King. After his conversations with Law, Crewe came to the conclusion that no successor but the Foreign Secretary was being considered and could thus tell Curzon a few days later that he had ‘of course … anticipated’ his selection.7 Indeed Law seems to have regarded Curzon’s succession as inevitable but did not want the responsibility of either recommending or rejecting him. This attitude is reflected in the letter in which he announced his resignation to his deputy.

I understand that it is not customary for the King to ask the Prime Minister to recommend his successor in circumstances like the present and I presume that he will not do so; but if, as I hope, he accepts my resignation at once, he will have to take immediate steps about my successor.8

Unless he expected that successor to be Curzon, the second half of the sentence would have been both pointless and misleading.

Bonar Law would have been astonished to learn that the uncertain feelings of a dying man would excite so much interest among historians. The chief source of this interest is the behaviour of his Private Secretary, Ronald Waterhouse, who delivered the resignation to the King at Aldershot on the 20th and at the same time handed over a memorandum to the royal Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham. Written by John Davidson, the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, the memorandum eulogized Baldwin and, after acknowledging Curzon’s talents and past services, disparaged the Foreign Secretary’s claims by alleging that ‘temperamentally’ he did ‘not inspire complete confidence in his colleagues, either as to his judgement or as to his ultimate strength of purpose in a crisis’. The document also asserted that his methods were ‘inappropriate to harmony’, that he was regarded as ‘representing that section of privileged conservatism’ which could not ‘in this democratic age … be too assiduously exploited’, and that most MPs believed that a Prime Minister could no longer be in the House of Lords. Davidson later claimed that Stamfordham had asked for the memorandum as an expression of the views of ‘an ordinary backbencher’ – an extraordinary request if true, because he was not a neutral MP at all but a friend and former Parliamentary Private Secretary to Baldwin. In the event the document was handed over by Waterhouse with the statement that it ‘practically expressed the views of Mr Bonar Law’.9

Several people claimed to have heard the Prime Minister state his personal preference for Baldwin, evidence which seems to suggest that Waterhouse did not misrepresent his views. But the fact that Law may have preferred Baldwin does not imply that he thought he should succeed him or that he wanted his preference to be known. Indeed the evidence suggests that he felt, in spite of Curzon’s defects and the problem of having a Prime Minister in the Lords, that the Foreign Secretary should succeed him. After telling Baldwin on the morning of his resignation that Curzon was the automatic choice, he gave Salisbury the impression the following day that in ‘this very grave and complex situation he would on the whole be disinclined to pass over Curzon’.10 Salisbury passed this opinion on to Stamfordham, adding that he would ‘strongly recommend’ the appointment of Curzon, whose faults were ‘improving’ and who, from his point of view, was ‘the only acceptable Prime Minister’.11 But such conflicting views on Law’s real feelings understandably confused Stamfordham and seem to have reduced the impact of Salisbury’s advice.

As Bonar Law resigned on Whitsunday, the King’s Private Secretary found immediate consultation difficult. Although two pro-Baldwin ministers, Amery and Bridgeman, were anxious to give him their advice, Stamfordham knew what they wanted to say and saw no point in hearing it. They were able to convey their views, however, during a walk in St James’s Park, an encounter which deluded Amery into believing for the rest of his life that he had been responsible for Curzon’s defeat.12 But the opinions Stamfordham most wanted – apart from Salisbury’s – were those of Balfour, who was summoned from a house party on the Norfolk coast. The King’s Private Secretary agreed with Salisbury, but his master sympathized with Balfour.

At his two interviews with Stamfordham on the 21st, Balfour did not discuss the merits of the candidates but concentrated on the difficulties presented by having the Prime Minister in the House of Lords. The Upper Chamber, he pointed out, already had a high proportion of Cabinet ministers, and the addition of the premier would thus be resented by MPs; another problem, he felt, was the fact that the Labour Party, now the main opposition in the Commons, was unrepresented in the Lords.13 George V welcomed advice which elucidated and reinforced his own feelings: no one, his biographer has pointed out, ‘played a more decisive part than Balfour in clarifying the King’s mind’.14 It would appear, therefore, that the matter was decided entirely on the constitutional issue by a very responsible monarch and a much revered elder statesman.

Yet decisions rarely come from a single source, and few people are entirely immune to personal considerations when a choice has to be made. No doubt the King acted from the best of motives, grateful that hostile feelings and political arguments both militated against the same candidate.fn1 But there is cause to question the role of Balfour, who, during their long and complicated relationship, had sometimes appeared to oppose Curzon because he was Curzon rather than because he disagreed with him. Like others in the party, he seems to have thought the Foreign Secretary’s chief drawback was not his peerage but his temperament, although he recognized that this was not a reason that could be advanced in public. According to Amery, he therefore suggested that the House of Lords issue should be the ‘official’ explanation for the preferment of Baldwin.16 Convinced that his intervention had been decisive, he returned to his friends in Norfolk. ‘And will dear George be chosen?’ asked one of the ladies. ‘No,’ he replied placidly, ‘dear George will not.’ When she feared he would be ‘terribly disappointed’, Balfour answered, ‘I don’t know. After all, even if he has lost the hope of Glory, he still has the means of Grace.’17 Tackled later over his behaviour by Grace herself, he claimed to have done her husband a good turn in saving him from ‘such a detestable office’, which he was unable to understand why anyone should want.18

Curzon was at Montacute on Whit Monday when he received Bonar Law’s letter informing him of his resignation. As he had refused to install that ‘disastrous invention’ (the telephone) in the Elizabethan mansion, he could not ring anyone to find out what was happening. Nor could he hurry back to London in case his action was ‘misinterpreted’. He therefore paced restlessly about the garden until the evening when the village policeman bicycled round with a telegram from Stamfordham asking to see him the following day in London. Curzon wired back that he would be at Carlton House Terrace at 1.20.

In the train the next morning he found that the bulk of the press supported his claims; the Daily Telegraph was particularly strong in his favour, though The Times dwelt on the problems of having a peer as a premier. For the rest of the journey he made plans, talked to Grace about ecclesiastical appointments and decided he would continue to live at Carlton House Terrace, using Downing Street for official purposes only; he was already resolved to combine the premiership with the Foreign Office, at least for a while. Confident of his destiny, he smiled for the press photographers at Paddington and outside his home. On learning that Stamfordham would not arrive until 2.30, he ‘scented danger’, but Grace assured him that, if the King was going to pass him over, he would not send his secretary to apologize.19

While he waited, Curzon received backing from an unexpected quarter. One of Chamberlain’s followers, Oliver Locker-Lampson MP, called to tell him that the coalitionist faction would support him if he could unite the party. Chamberlain himself, who was in France, had not authorized the approach, but a number of his supporters had agreed to it. According to Worthington-Evans, they cast Curzon in ‘the role of peacemaker and uniter of the Party’, and sent Locker-Lampson to inform him that Chamberlain and the other ex-ministers ‘would serve under him if thereby unity could be obtained’.20 They were not prepared, however, to serve under Baldwin.

Lord Stamfordham arrived soon afterwards, and a distressing interview ensued. According to Curzon’s account, the King’s Private Secretary explained ‘with obvious embarrassment and in halting language’ that, while the monarch recognized the superiority of his claims to those of any other candidate, he had convinced himself that the Prime Minister must be in the House of Commons to answer the Labour leader and for that reason he had decided to appoint Baldwin. Curzon was devastated by the announcement. He told Stamfordham that the decision amounted to a permanent exclusion of peers from the premiership; he said it was a slur on his long career that would force his retirement from public life; and he argued, after describing the encounter with Locker-Lampson, that he alone could reunite the party. As his visitor was leaving, Curzon asked him to put these considerations to the King.

Stamfordham’s embarrassment was such that he could not bring himself to admit that it was too late for appeals. On discovering afterwards that Baldwin had already been summoned to the Palace, Curzon was extremely hurt. It seemed to him incredible that the decision could have been taken without even consulting the man who was the acting premier, the senior Cabinet minister and the Leader of the House of Lords. Such, he reflected bitterly, was his reward for those decades of public service. ‘Such was the manner in which it was intimated to me that the cup of honourable ambition had been dashed from my lips and that I could never aspire to fill the highest office in the service of the Crown.’21 His bitterness was understandable, for the disappointment had been accompanied by humiliation, the stigma of supersession by a man of inferior claims, the mortification, when he looked back, of that smile before the cameras.

Knowing the state of Curzon’s feelings, Baldwin felt unable to face his disappointed rival and so sent a note asking him to continue as Foreign Secretary.22 Curzon’s first reaction, as he told Stamfordham, was to decline, but he allowed himself to be dissuaded by appeals from friends and admirers: Salisbury urged him to stay on, Lovat Fraser begged him not to resign and ‘repeat the mistake of 18 years ago’.23 On the following day, the 23rd, Curzon congratulated Baldwin on his appointment and told him of his desire to retire. But, he added, ‘as there are certain things which in the public interest I ought, perhaps, endeavour to carry through, and as my retirement at this moment might be thought to involve distrust in your administration, which would be a quite unfounded suspicion, I will for the present continue at the Foreign Office’.24 Five days later, in a speech of much charm and eloquence, he proposed Baldwin’s election as leader of the Conservatives. Even his opponents inside the party admitted that towards both themselves and the new Prime Minister he behaved with singular magnanimity.

History – or rather hindsight – proclaims that the King made the right choice. It contrasts Baldwin’s later achievements with the accepted view of Curzon, that compound figure of anecdotal absurdities and Beaverbrook’s malevolent imagination. It ignores the fact that Baldwin gained the post with fewer credentials than any other Conservative leader; it disregards both Curzon’s Indian record and his emergence since Lloyd George’s fall as a Foreign Secretary whom people compared with Castlereagh. Baldwin’s selection has thus acquired an aura of inevitability: the MPs, the associations, the country itself all wanted him. But Bonar Law thought the party wanted Curzon, who did indeed manage to attract the backing both of leading Diehards and of leading coalitionists. Claims of the inevitability of Baldwin and the impossibility of Curzon really belong to a later retrospect. No outcry had greeted Curzon’s appointment as acting premier, and it is difficult to see what damage he might have done as Prime Minister. He would have rapidly reunited the Conservatives; he would have spared them (and the country) two wholly unnecessary elections; and his foreign policy would have continued along that route which ultimately found solutions to the problems of reparations and European security. Had he died twenty-two months later – as he did – he would probably have been succeeded by Austen Chamberlain.

Yet, leaving their credentials aside, Baldwin represented the post-war national mood very much better than Curzon. A generation earlier, in the confident world of late Victorian Britain, the outcome would have been different, whatever doubts might have existed about the Foreign Secretary’s character. In politics and speech, observed T.P. O’Connor, Curzon personified those imperial feelings which Kipling had expressed in poetry and prose.25 But neither the statesman nor the poet was comfortable in the Britain of 1923, a nation uneasy with its greatness, tired of empire and its responsibilities, wanting to turn inwards and concentrate on its social and economic ills. The country was glad, as it later demonstrated, to have a man well-attuned to the temper of the age, a rather ordinary, pipe-smoking Englishman with an ear for the concerns of ordinary people and a sympathetic approach to the Labour movement. It is ironic that he happened to be Kipling’s first cousin.

The new Prime Minister allowed Curzon considerable freedom to carry out those unspecified tasks he had alluded to in his letter of congratulation. One of these was to wrap up the Turkish settlement, which was finally done in the Treaty of Lausanne signed in July. Another was to confront the Russians over certain outrages against British subjects and to demand the curtailment of their anti-British propaganda in various parts of Asia. Two years earlier he had rebuked the Bolsheviks for intrigues that were ‘more than usually repugnant to normal international law and comity’. But as this had made no difference to their behaviour, he now threatened to denounce the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement of 1921 unless satisfaction for the outrages was given and the agents were ‘disowned and recalled from the scene of their maleficent labours’. Uncharacteristically, the Soviet Government returned a conciliatory reply and duly transferred its agents from Kabul, Tehran and elsewhere.26

The most critical problems remained the questions of French security and the reparation payments the Allies had imposed on Germany four years earlier in the Treaty of Versailles. During the Coalition Curzon had been happy to leave these matters largely in the hands of Lloyd George, who had handled them at the Paris Peace Conference, and since its fall he had been preoccupied with Turkey. By the time he took charge in the spring of 1923, the French had occupied the Ruhr and were attempting to collect by force the reparations which Germany had failed to deliver. Britain had taken up a position of neutrality which was morally respectable but politically ineffectual. Had it taken one side, the other would have been forced to back down.

Critical of both countries, Curzon was more sympathetic to the Germans. He did not consider that the ‘passive resistance’ to the occupation which they financed was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Indeed he thought it was the occupation itself, economically counter-productive for everybody, which the Treaty did not sanction. But he was not prepared to break the Entente on the issue, because he still believed, in spite of so many confrontations, that the Anglo-French partnership was crucial for the future of Europe. His policy was thus to prod the countries towards each other. While he exhorted the Germans to make a realistic offer of what they were prepared to pay, he urged the French to accept a moratorium on reparations while Germany reorganized her ruined currency, and to agree to an impartial inquiry into her financial capacity. As usual, the chief obstacle was Poincaré, who, Curzon suspected, was not ‘capable of a generous gesture or a genial thought’.27 The French premier stuck to his intransigent demands on German payments and refused to admit that an inquiry was necessary. Curzon experienced his familiar feelings of exasperation when dealing with the French; if he spoke in favour of the Entente, he moaned, they reproached him with hypocrisy for not supporting them in the Ruhr, yet if he was critical of anything they did, they accused him of ‘affronting their dignity’ or siding with Germany.28

During the summer and autumn of 1923 a series of exchanges, dialectically brilliant but diplomatically sterile, sped between London and Paris. President Millerand complained privately that Curzon and Poincaré ‘would do nothing but stand like Homeric heroes each in his country and fling denunciations at each other’.29 In September the French hero appeared to have won. To Curzon’s disgust, he managed to induce Baldwin, who had been holidaying in France, to issue a joint communiqué implying that Britain was no longer neutral between France and Germany but was once more on the French side. In the end, however, Poincaré’s two main schemes to weaken Germany were defeated. Attempts to set up separatist states in the Rhineland and the Palatinate – subsidized by France and supported by French troops – were destroyed, largely thanks to Curzon’s resolute opposition. ‘The firmness of his attitude’, noted the British ambassador in Berlin, ‘was indeed fatal to the conspiracy of the separatists.’30

At the end of 1923 Poincaré was also forced to acknowledge that his position on reparations was untenable. Since June Curzon had been urging the appointment of a committee, in which America would participate, to enquire into the whole reparations question. The proposal was finally adopted in the autumn, a committee began its work in the winter, and in April 1924 it produced the Dawes Plan, a comprehensive attempt to reorganize German finances and to settle both the extent of reparations and the rate of payment. Although Curzon had nothing to do with the plan itself, he might justly be regarded in Harold Nicolson’s words as its ‘spiritual begetter’.31

In August 1923, after despatching a strong and highly critical Note to the French Government, Curzon went to France for medical treatment – to the derision of Lloyd George, who thought it ‘most fatuous’ of him to threaten Poincaré and then spend his ‘holiday’ in the country he was ‘trying to bully’.32 But the Foreign Secretary’s mind had left the Ruhr and was now back in Calcutta, recalling the city’s buildings and directing his pen as it travelled over the foolscap pages of his final book. The hotel at Bagnolles provided the usual nocturnal comedy, Curzon rattling doors and banging on walls in unsuccessful attempts to disrupt the ‘trumpeting’ of snorers on all sides. But he retained enough humour to draw Marcella a diagram showing the location of the offenders, including an elderly Greek whose snores reverberated through the ceiling above.

While he was at Bagnolles, Mussolini inaugurated a policy that Smuts was to describe as ‘running about biting everybody’.33 When an Italian general working for an international boundary commission was mysteriously killed on Greek soil, Mussolini delivered an impossible ultimatum to Athens – ‘much worse’, thought Curzon, than Austria’s to Serbia after Sarajevo – and then bombarded and occupied the island of Corfu. The British Foreign Secretary was appalled by the behaviour of this ‘old fashioned buccaneer without scruple or remorse’,34 and supported Greece’s demand that the matter should be dealt with by the League of Nations. Mussolini, however, insisted that it be referred to the Conference of Ambassadors, which represented the Great Powers in Paris, and for which the murdered general had been working. Infuriated by Britain’s support for the Greek position, he accused her of defying ‘every principle of international morality’, ordered his admirals to prepare for war against the Royal Navy, and threatened to destroy the League of Nations if it tried to intervene.35 According to the ambassador in Rome, the Italian leader attributed Britain’s hostility to Curzon’s personal dislike of himself.36 Unlike many Conservatives, the British Foreign Secretary had no vestige of admiration for Mussolini or his regime, but there was nothing personal in his criticism of the bombardment of an undefended harbour and the killing of a number of innocent people.

The ideal solution would have been to defy Mussolini and have him slapped down by the League of Nations. But Curzon doubted whether such an outcome was feasible. He had little support from British public opinion and much opposition from the newspapers, above all the Rothermere press, which ridiculed the League of Nations, refused to condemn Mussolini and accused Curzon of ‘war-mongering’. Furthermore, the French, in need of Italian support over the Ruhr, were playing a double game, secretly assuring the Italians of their sympathy while warning the British that humiliation for Mussolini would lead to his fall and an outbreak of communism in Italy. Further warnings came from the Italian ambassador to London and the British embassy in Rome, which believed Mussolini would be replaced by a military dictatorship. Persuaded that a condemnation from Geneva would merely result in Mussolini storming out of the League while leaving him in Corfu, Curzon reluctantly accepted the arbitration of the Conference of Ambassadors. As far as Corfu was concerned, he was probably right, for Mussolini clearly wanted to annex the island and had already issued postage stamps bearing its name. Yet it did nothing for the prestige of the League. And although the Italians were persuaded to evacuate, the Conference, under pressure from the Franco-Italian axis, pronounced what Curzon considered the ‘unjust and in reality indefensible verdict’ of forcing Greece to pay an indemnity of 50 million lire. ‘Those wretched Ambassadors’, he complained, ‘had been utterly bamboozled by the Italian’ and had given the aggressor a large bribe to go away. He sighed: ‘To such a pitch of immorality have we sunk.’37

Although Curzon remained loyal to the concept of the Entente, his persistent opposition to French policy induced politicians on both sides of the Channel to try to get rid of him. In October 1923 he was shown an intercepted telegram from Poincaré to the Comte de Saint-Aulaire, the French ambassador to London, telling him to call on the Prime Minister and explain that France could no longer tolerate Curzon as Foreign Secretary. He also saw a telegram from Saint-Aulaire informing the French premier that Baldwin himself wanted to remove Curzon, and from further documents he learnt that H.A. Gwynne, the journalist who had schemed with Kitchener over the Military Member in India, was a party to the intrigue. Curzon sent the documents to Baldwin, who denied that, as far as he was concerned, there was any foundation for their insinuations. A month later, when confronted with another batch of evidence, the Prime Minister replied that ‘Poincaré has got you on the brain and is always looking out for occasion of offence in all that you do or say’. To Lord Crewe in Paris Curzon described the operation as Poincaré’s ‘sinister attempt to hound me out of office in the mistaken belief that he would then get a pliant Baldwin with a complaisant Eddie Derby’.38

A simultaneous and possibly connected plot in England foundered on the inflexible integrity of Austen Chamberlain. At the end of October the former Conservative leader was approached with the suggestion that he should return to the Government and replace Curzon as Foreign Secretary. According to a go-between, the substitution would be welcomed by Baldwin, the Cabinet and the party, and would produce a ‘more wholesome atmosphere’ in Britain’s foreign relations. Chamberlain answered acerbically that, although he was under no obligation to Curzon, he would not enter into any secret agreement against him, nor would he return to office ‘in conditions which amount to an intrigue’.39 How much Baldwin knew of either of these conspiracies is uncertain. Curzon heard rumours of the second but found no difficulty in dismissing them. ‘You need attach no importance’, he told Grace in December, ‘to the silly stories of my being jettisoned. After all, where would Baldwin be without me? And that he knows full well.’40

In the Governments of Bonar Law and Baldwin, Curzon strove to maintain personal control of foreign policy and the House of Lords. In neither sphere was he prepared to delegate. When Salisbury, the Deputy Leader of the Lords, suggested taking over certain duties on the grounds that his superior could not be in the Chamber often enough to carry them out, he was imperiously rebuffed. Such an arrangement, Curzon told him, would mean his abdication of ‘the main functions of leadership’, an action which he had ‘never contemplated’, and for which he saw ‘no present necessity’.41 In similar style he attempted to enforce his view that foreign affairs should be the preserve of himself, his Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ronald McNeill) and, up to a point, the Prime Minister. He deplored the way foreign policy was conducted in Cabinet where any minister, he complained to Baldwin, could make any suggestion and take the discussions off into ‘hopeless irrelevancies’.42 He also resented attempts to influence his policy, particularly from Derby who persistently tried to impose a strong pro-French line on the Cabinet and whose ‘mission in life’, grumbled Curzon, was ‘to vary attendance at Parisian race meetings with attempts to correct the blunders of the British ambassador and Foreign Secretary’.43

Curzon’s most difficult colleague was his friend Lord Robert Cecil, the newly appointed minister with special responsibility for the League of Nations. Cecil’s position almost guaranteed conflict for, although the League’s affairs came under the Foreign Office, Curzon refused to let him work in the building for fear that he would encroach on areas not directly connected with Geneva. The delimitation of spheres of responsibility for their intertwining roles would have taxed the most accommodating of politicians; it was well beyond the temperaments of Cecil and Curzon. Throughout the summer of 1923 they reproached each other for lack of co-operation, and the Foreign Secretary accused his colleague of aspiring to be an Assistant Secretary of State. They also disagreed on policy itself. Cecil was ‘a terrible nuisance to me in Cabinet,’ Curzon once remarked to Grace, ‘talking interminably and always wrong about foreign affairs’.44 On hearing that he had discussed Anglo-French relations with President Millerand without informing the Foreign Office, Curzon threatened to resign unless he could be assured that such incidents would not recur.45 Yet another old friendship fell away.

There was little reason to complain of interference from the Prime Minister. Indeed the state of affairs had changed so completely since Lloyd George’s time that Curzon could claim he now not only ran his own foreign policy but also determined Baldwin’s pronouncements on the subject as well. During his first month in office, he told Crewe, the Prime Minister had done nothing but read out in the Commons answers that Curzon had prepared for him, while in the Cabinet he said not a word except to endorse his Foreign Secretary’s policy.46 The situation had barely altered by November. Nothing exceeded Baldwin’s ‘cheerfulness, good temper and courtesy’, Curzon told his wife, ‘except his impotence. At the Imperial Conference he never opens his mouth and leaves the entire lead to me.’47 The only unsatisfactory feature of this arrangement was the newspapers’ habit of praising the Prime Minister for successes achieved by the Foreign Secretary. After winning a ‘very considerable victory’ over Poincaré in November, he was rather nettled to see it ‘attributed in every paper to the courage and sagacity of Baldwin, who had no more to do with the thing than our butler …’48

The Imperial Conference of 1923, at which Curzon elaborately surveyed the problems of the planet, was his last triumph on an ample stage. The plaudits he received afterwards from the Dominion Prime Ministers were very gratifying in themselves but aroused some painful reflections. According to Smuts, all of them had been surprised by Baldwin’s feebleness and regarded Curzon as the only effective figure in the Government. Mackenzie King, the Canadian premier, admitted he had come to the conference with a violent prejudice against the Foreign Secretary based on the press image of the ‘superior person’, but had been profoundly impressed by his knowledge, eloquence and affability. Curzon was almost overcome by emotion. ‘Oh!’ he groaned to Grace. ‘How these cursed papers have killed me for half a lifetime. I can never recover now.’ He was right, of course. The memory of Lausanne had evaporated from the mind of the popular press, and he was now again regularly assailed in the Beaverbrook and Rothermere papers. When Lord Riddell told him he was the ‘most misjudged of men’, Curzon replied bitterly that if journalists had taken the trouble to find out about him, they would have been ‘spared the parrot-like repetition of a silly old tag’ and might have helped his career instead of ‘hindering it by every means in their power’.49

At the beginning of November the Cabinet considered whether it should appeal to the electorate for a mandate to introduce tariffs as a means of combating unemployment. Curzon led the opposition to the scheme, arguing that another election so soon after the last one would savour of trickery, lead very likely to electoral disaster and once again disrupt the conduct of foreign policy during a critical period. Like many people then and since, he could not understand why Baldwin should not go tranquilly on until 1927 rather than take a ‘huge gamble’ for little purpose. On hearing the election announcement on the 13th, he was for once tempted to agree with Derby who exclaimed that Europe was dominated by madmen, Mussolini and Poincaré, while England was ruled by a ‘damned idiot’.50

Curzon’s pessimism about the election was justified by the result. The Conservatives were reduced from 345 seats to 258, their lowest figure between the disasters of 1906 and 1945, while between them the Liberals and the Labour Party amassed 350. It was the price, Curzon observed to his wife, ‘that we all have to pay for the utter incompetence of Baldwin and the madness of his selection by the King’.51

Since the Conservatives had lost their majority but remained the largest party, the political situation was confused. Curzon’s immediate reaction was that Baldwin, as the architect of ‘an act of blind folly’, ought to resign: the King might then send for Asquith or MacDonald but, should he decide to invite another Conservative to form a government, he should ‘logically’ send for the Foreign Secretary. Curzon did not expect to be chosen, however, partly because of his peerage and partly because the Daily Mail (which complained about his lack of sympathy for Mussolini) had convinced many people that he was an enemy of the Entente and that his foreign policy was a failure.52 In fact, even outside the readership of the Daily Mail, Curzon does not seem to have been mentioned as a possible successor. There were moves to promote Derby or Austen Chamberlain, but these soon collapsed, leaving Baldwin in office until January when a successful Labour amendment to the King’s Speech brought about his resignation. On the 22nd of that month Ramsay MacDonald was summoned to the Palace and asked to form the first Labour Government.

Curzon had begun to say his farewells before the inevitable parliamentary defeat. He gave a party for junior Foreign Office staff at a Fleet Street pub and a dinner for senior officials at Carlton House Terrace. The second occasion, noted Nicolson, was an awkward affair, Curzon being genial and showing his Napoleonic collection, but everyone else feeling shy and embarrassed. On his last day at the Foreign Office Nicolson found him ‘rather pathetic sitting there in his big room eating raspberry jam and knowing that he will be out of office in a few hours’.53 Curzon had not got used to the idea of a Labour Foreign Secretary sitting in his place, and he was appalled to be told that MacDonald, who had decided to combine the office with the premiership, would refuse to read papers or see ambassadors. ‘All I can say’, he wrote to Crewe, ‘is a) Good God! b) he will soon learn wisdom …’54

Shortly before MacDonald’s arrival, he apologized to his secretaries for being a ‘hard task-master’ and vacated his office. He did not regard it, however, as a final farewell. Since the Labour Party had less than a third of the seats in the House of Commons, the Government could not last long, and he expected to return to the FO on its demise. But it was not to be. Curzon’s tenure, which including those first nine months under Balfour had lasted for five years, was over for good.

The performance of a Foreign Secretary is perhaps more difficult to assess than that of other ministers because the success of a policy, however sound in theory and in application, depends on at least one extra dimension, the behaviour of other countries. Another difficulty, which tends to restrict the appreciation of contemporaries, is the long gestation period usually required for diplomatic success; foreign ministers are therefore often out of office before their achievements can be seen in perspective. This was particularly true in the case of Curzon.

A common criticism of the time, articulated by Amery in 1923, was that Curzon drafted magnificent despatches but pursued a ‘purely static and argumentative’ policy which did ‘not attempt to deal with the development of live forces’.55 This tendency, which others had noted earlier, undoubtedly existed. But in the post-Lloyd George era it did not manage to prevent a series of diplomatic successes. In the period Amery was writing about, Britain’s ‘static’ foreign policy somehow helped to get the French out of the Ruhr and the Italians off Corfu, forced the Russians to behave more reasonably, prevented the disintegration of Germany and defused the reparations issue; above all, it almost singlehandedly solved the Turkish question.

In earlier years, working uncomfortably beside Lloyd George, there had been fewer achievements; Persia had been a failure, Egypt was only a modest success. Had Curzon been ousted during his illness of 1922, the balance sheet would have looked bleak. He would have been judged as a Foreign Secretary who lacked vision and purpose, a minister who could explain a problem without being able to solve it. Yet even in that period he was frequently more far-sighted than his colleagues. He did not share Balfour’s vision of Zionism, Montagu’s vision of the dyarchy, or Lloyd George’s vision of an Hellenic revival in Asia Minor, because he foresaw that they would lead to Arab-Jewish conflict, Indian independence and a Greek-Turkish tragedy. The prophet and the visionary were on opposite sides, and the prophet was usually right. As with his later European policies, he did not of course receive praise for prophecies fulfilled while he was out of office or after his death. But they should be placed to the credit of a statesman too often assumed to have been gazing perpetually into the past. Curzon may not have liked or understood the modern age, but his knowledge and comprehension of the outside world remained unrivalled.

After nearly nine years of continuous service in the Cabinet, Curzon left his bench in the House of Lords and took up his new duties as leader of the Opposition peers. But in 1924 there was room for other things than politics. In January he became a member of the Fine Arts Commission and in the same month succeeded Lansdowne as Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery. A few weeks later he made a speech at an exhibition of British architecture and lamented the destruction of Nash’s Regent Street. Kedleston took up much of his time, especially the spring planting, and so did his writing. Elated by the reviews and sales of Tales of Travel, he settled down to complete his long book on Calcutta and the Viceroys, which was published posthumously under the confusing title British Government in India. Yet he lingered over the writing in a way he had never done before, so that his publisher believed he could not bear to let go of it. In fact he merely wished to perfect a delightful work which he regarded as his literary monument and which he hoped would be read for 200 years after his death.56

A parliamentary defeat for the Government in October led to the third general election in just under two years. The Conservatives were expected to win, which they did with an enormous majority, and Curzon assumed he would go back to his old job. On hearing a rumour that he might be superseded, he wrote incredulously to Baldwin two days after the poll.

I cannot believe that you would propose to put such a terrible slur upon my administration of [the Foreign Office] which was conducted amid extreme difficulties but not without success in the closest and pleasantest cooperation with yourself and your predecessor, and as I have always been led to think, with your just approval. It would be too much to expect me to accept such a situation.57

Baldwin, however, thought that a change was desirable and had already decided to replace him with Austen Chamberlain. The decision was generally welcomed. Putting Curzon back in the Foreign Office, declared the Daily Chronicle, would have been like returning the Quai d’Orsay to Poincaré, who had fallen from power the previous summer: ‘memories of Anglo-French friction’ would have been revived on both sides of the Channel.58 At a painful interview on 5 November, Baldwin acknowledged Curzon’s past achievements, told him foreign policy needed ‘a fresh start’ and, learning his lesson from the King, declared that ‘in the present condition of public affairs’ it was ‘of the first importance’ to have the Foreign Secretary in the Commons.59 He hoped very much, however, that Curzon would accept the positions of Lord President of the Council, Leader of the House of Lords and Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence.

Earlier in the day Curzon had told Walter Lawrence that he would accept nothing but his old office. It was therefore rather difficult to explain why he had changed his mind, especially as he could not give the real reason, which was that he had been bullied by his wife. Grace was less discreet about the episode. Sitting next to Crawford at a dinner party a fortnight later, she told him her husband had sworn never to accept so subordinate a position. But she pressed him, Crawford recounted in his diary, ‘said it was his duty to the state, but also his duty to her, as he would be intolerable at home if he was at the same time out of office and no longer Leader of the Opposition. So, like a sensible fellow, he allowed himself to be overborne.’60

Curzon’s reluctance to participate in the new Government increased when he saw the list of ministers. It was ‘impossible to imagine’, he told Grace, ‘a stranger collection of round pegs in square holes’. The Cabinet did indeed contain some bizarre appointments, notably Churchill, who went to the Exchequer although finance was one of the few things he did not claim to know about, and Birkenhead, who became Secretary of State for India although he had never been there and was not interested in the Subcontinent. The placing of Austen Chamberlain at the Foreign Office was in fact one of the more sensible decisions.

As Lord President, Curzon had to preside over the ceremony at which the new ministers were sworn in. It was ‘rather a tragic moment’ for him, he confessed, for he was reverting to the role he had filled eight years earlier when ‘all was new and promising’. And there was another repetition of circumstances. Twenty years earlier, when he had come home from India the first time for a holiday, he had felt ‘terribly stranded and rather miserable’ without his work. Now, after years of cursing the red boxes which kept him up night after night until two in the morning, he experienced a similar desolation. ‘I feel rather stranded,’ he confessed to Grace, ‘a new government formed and I with no boxes coming in and nothing to do.’61 Had he been a ploughman he would have sighed when the last furrow was ploughed; had he been a navigator he would have grieved to see his home port. His life was a journey of labour, and however much he grumbled along the way, he never wanted the fireside at the end of it.

In January 1925 George Curzon had a holiday. He went to the South of France and stayed in a villa near Eze, where his old friend Consuelo Vanderbilt, the former Duchess of Marlborough, now lived with her second husband Jacques Balsan. He loved their house, the views of the sea, the walks on the hillsides, and even contemplated buying some property nearby. The enviable climate made him contrast the delights of working in a warm Provençal garden with the discomfort of splashing about in the cold mud of Derbyshire. Consuelo took him for drives along the coast in the afternoons, and one evening they dined at Monte Carlo’s ‘opera bouffe court’. The only dull moment in an idyllic stay came afterwards when they watched a Russian ballet from the royal box. Curzon was ‘bored to tears’ and made his bad leg an excuse for leaving before the end.

Of course it was not a complete holiday. Warned beforehand that he planned to edit his book on India, Consuelo had put a writing table in his bedroom and double-lined the curtains to help him sleep. Hoping he was not being ‘an inordinate bore’, Curzon remained working in his room in the mornings and in the late afternoon. Surveying the work he was engaged in, his hostess once asked him why he did not employ a secretary. His answer was true to form: ‘Do you think that anyone but myself could master the intricacies of my Indian administration or the spelling of those Indian names?’62

Although he was in good spirits, he seems to have sensed that his end was not far off. One afternoon he surprised Consuelo by saying, ‘I know that Mary will be the first to greet me in heaven’, a remark which illustrates what Archbishop Lang called the ‘amazing simplicity of his religious faith’.63 Yet Lang was probably not aware that here, as in so many other areas of his friend’s life, there was an apparently inexplicable paradox. Curzon said his prayers every day and retained his childhood view of heaven, but he was not an orthodox Christian. Spiritual contemplation rarely interrupted his life, and when it did it seems to have induced in him a vague deism, a belief in a Creator whose secrets had not been revealed to mankind through the prophets of any religion.64

In February he was back in London, berating his colleagues for their failure to sit through debates in the House of Lords. The Chamber’s proceedings, he reminded them, were not ‘as a rule prolonged, and the strain of attendance [was] very slight’.65 Among the new members of the House, the most distinguished was Asquith who, since losing his seat in the recent election, had been ennobled as the Earl of Oxford and Asquith. In welcoming him, Curzon predicted that the elderly Liberal statesman would soon be seduced by the charms of the Upper House. But although they had worked on some improbable recruits in the past, they failed with Asquith. After six weeks in the Lords, he claimed to have heard only one good speech, ‘poor Curzon’s last’ on 4 March.66

On the following day Curzon went to Cambridge to speak to the university’s Conservative association. While dressing for dinner at Christ’s College, he suffered a haemorrhage of the bladder and lost quantities of blood. A doctor arrived, made him lie down and refused, in spite of his protestations, to let him get up to deliver his talk. ‘This is the end,’ Curzon murmured later to his host, the Master of the College. ‘I have worked overtime for forty years, and I have no resistance left in me. I know this is the end.’67

Grace arrived before breakfast the next morning to bring him home for treatment in London. ‘I know I have not been a good man,’ she recalled him saying in the motor car, ‘but on the other hand, looking back, I don’t think I have been a very bad one.’ Later he said, ‘If anyone asks you if I believe in a future life, you can tell them that I most certainly do.’68

On examining him that evening, Curzon’s physicians decided to operate after leaving him for three days to recover some strength. He spent the interval in bed, tiring himself out by writing letters and making additions to his will with the help of his brother Frank. The night before the operation he wrote to his publisher at Cassell enclosing detailed instructions for his Indian book ‘if anything goes wrong’. He also wrote to thank the King for his enquiries. Although ‘not in the least alarmed at the prospect’ of an operation, he admitted it was ‘a bore being cut open’ at his age.69

The operation, performed on the 9th, seemed briefly to have been successful. It was followed by a series of optimistic bulletins which, as the Lord Chancellor later revealed in the Lords, disguised the gravity of the situation in case the patient demanded to see a newspaper. Another precaution taken for the same purpose was to prevent Irene from entering the house. Had his estranged daughter appeared at his bedside, thought Grace, Curzon would have known he was dying. Of his immediate family, Grace and Baba were with him nearly all the time, as was Frank; Marcella, whom he would have loved to see, was on a journey to the Middle East which he had arranged for her.

Curzon was a difficult patient, restless and inquisitive, always wanting to know what the doctors had really said. At his funeral one of them told Vansittart, ‘he did his best to teach us our business’, and afterwards his former secretary added the appropriate coda – ‘as he did most of us’.70 The sick man’s condition worsened a few days after the operation; there was further bleeding and congestion in one of the lungs; the suffering and overburdened frame was at last giving up. On the 18th he wrote his last letter, a pathetic and almost illegible document professing his loyalty to the King. ‘I have been through the valley of the shadow of death,’ he said, ‘and have experienced the tortures of the damned.’ But knowing that His Majesty was about to set off on a Mediterranean cruise, he wanted to wish him all success on the journey. The letter was signed, ‘your faithful servant, Curzon’.71

That day the doctors told Grace he was dying. On asking what she should tell him, Sir Thomas Horder replied that her husband was a ‘great man, and it would be wrong to deceive him any longer’; the truth should be revealed so that he could ‘prepare his mind in his own way’.72 When she told him, Curzon closed his eyes and repeated the Lord’s Prayer several times. They were the last words he spoke. The next day, the 19th, he lost consciousness, and early on the following morning, with Grace and Baba at his side, he died. He was 66.

Five days later the first part of the funeral service took place in London. The coffin, made from the same tree at Kedleston that had encased Mary, was brought by motor-hearse from Carlton House Terrace along Whitehall to Westminster Abbey. The Archbishop of Canterbury officiated; Salisbury, Asquith, Baldwin and Churchill were among the pall-bearers. The music that had moved him all his life resounded through the Abbey: the hymns ‘Abide with me’ and ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’, the psalm ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills’, the thundering majesty of the ‘Dead March’ from Saul, the more restrained solemnity of Chopin’s Funeral March.fn2 Afterwards the coffin was taken by train to St Pancras and placed on a special train for Derby. Accompanying it in other carriages were members of the family and a small group of selected mourners.

The coffin was taken in pouring rain to Kedleston and placed on a bier in the Marble Hall. The Archbishop of York conducted a simple and unaffected service the following morning, and the body was taken to the church next door and interred beside Mary in the family vault. At the end of the ceremony the congregation sang the hymn, ‘Now the labourer’s task is o’er’. The choice could not have been more appropriate.

Differences in tone separated the obituaries; a pedestrian and inadequate piece in The Times contrasted poorly with T.P. O’Connor’s long, moving but not uncritical memoir in the Daily Telegraph. But the message in most cases was very similar: Curzon had been a great public servant, a man of brilliant intellect, unparalleled industry, anachronistic tastes and strange flaws of character. Shafts of insincerity only occasionally shone through. No one who knew him could have been impressed by Lord Hardinge’s claims of long friendship, his eulogy of the ‘greatest’ of modern Viceroys and his concluding words, ‘Peace! Let his critics be still!’ – a command he himself notoriously failed to obey when writing his memoirs.73

Heartfelt tributes came from unexpected places both in Britain and abroad. Curzon would have wept had he been able to read the message of condolence from Ismet Pasha, the words of the trade union leader Ben Tillett describing him as ‘one of the most humane men’ he had ever met, and the opinion of The Times of India, which asserted that he was ‘in his prime the greatest Englishman of his time; to India he gave his superb best’.74 Surveying the acclaim a fortnight after Curzon’s death, Harold Nicolson saw it as evidence of ‘a sense of national loss manifested in an almost unexpected outburst of national homage’. It was a ‘tragic satisfaction’, he added, ‘to record this posthumous understanding of a man who imagined always that he was misunderstood’. And in searching for the sources of Curzon’s inspiration, he composed an appropriate epitaph: ‘the magnitude of England, the integrity of beauty, the glory of work; such were the ideals by which he achieved his victory, by which he triumphed over pain and tragedy and disappointment’.75

Among the parliamentary tributes Baldwin and Asquith exhibited their high standards of oratory. After speaking of the façade which had concealed ‘an intense and exquisite sensitiveness’, the Prime Minister spoke movingly of those two events in which he had caused Curzon such disappointment: his winning of the premiership and his decision not to reappoint him as Foreign Secretary. In his reactions to both these occasions, Baldwin assured the Commons, Curzon had displayed ‘a vein of the purest gold’.76 Making his maiden speech in the Lords on the same day, Asquith encapsulated essential truths about his old friend when he described him as ‘a great and unselfish servant of the state … always ready in that service to scorn delights and live laborious days – a man who pursued high ambitions by none but worthy means …’

The most charming and spontaneous of the parliamentary tributes was the last and the shortest. After the party spokesmen in the Commons had sat down, O’Connor rose to say that an Irish voice should be added to the other contributions. Ireland had ‘some quaint prophecies’, he remarked, which had ‘an uncanny method of being realized’. And recently he had learnt that

an old Irish prophetess [had] prophesied that one day an Irishman would be found weeping over an Englishman’s grave. Today I, as an Irishman, weep over a great Englishman’s grave.77