Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon (12 June 1897 – 14 January 1977), was a British statesman, diplomat and military officer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1955 to 1957.
Achieving rapid promotion as a young Conservative member of Parliament, he became foreign secretary aged 38, before resigning in protest at Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy towards Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime in Italy. He returned to that position for most of the Second World War, and held it for a third time in the early 1950s. Having been deputy to Winston Churchill for almost 15 years, Eden succeeded him as the leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister in 1955, and a month later won a general election.
Eden's reputation as a skilled diplomat was overshadowed in 1956 when the United States refused to support the Anglo-French military response to the Suez Crisis, which critics across party lines regarded as a historic setback for British foreign policy, signalling the end of British influence in the Middle East. Most historians argue that he made a series of blunders, especially not realising the depth of American opposition to military action. Two months after ordering an end to the Suez operation, he resigned as Prime Minister on grounds of ill health, and because he was widely suspected of having misled the House of Commons over the degree of collusion with France and Israel.
Eden is generally considered to be among the least successful of British prime ministers in the 20th century, although two broadly sympathetic biographies have gone some way to shifting the balance of opinion. He was the first of fifteen British prime ministers to be appointed by Queen Elizabeth II in her seventy-year reign.
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Family
Robert Anthony Eden was born on 12 June 1897 at Windlestone Hall, County Durham, into a conservative family of landed gentry. He was the third of four sons of Sir William Eden, 7th and 5th Baronet, and Sybil Frances Grey, a member of the prominent Grey family of Northumberland. Sir William was a former colonel and local magistrate from an old titled family. An eccentric and often foul-tempered man, he was a talented water-colourist, portraitist, and collector of Impressionists. Eden's mother had wanted to marry Francis Knollys, who later became a significant Royal adviser, but the match was forbidden by the Prince of Wales. Although she was a popular figure locally, she had a strained relationship with her children, and her profligacy ruined the family fortunes, meaning Eden's elder brother Tim had to sell Windlestone Hall in 1936. Referring to his parentage, Rab Butler would later quip that Anthony Eden — a handsome but ill-tempered man — was "half mad baronet, half beautiful woman".
One of Eden's great-grandfathers was William Iremonger, who commanded the 2nd Regiment of Foot during the Peninsular War and fought at the Battle of Vimeiro under Sir Arthur Wellesley (the later Duke of Wellington). He was also descended from Governor Sir Robert Eden, 1st Baronet, of Maryland, and, through the Calvert family of Maryland, he was connected to the ancient Roman Catholic aristocracy of the Arundell and Howard families (including the Dukes of Norfolk), as well as Anglican families including the earls of Carlisle, Effingham and Suffolk. The Calverts had converted to the Established Church early in the 18th century to regain the proprietorship of Maryland. He also had some Danish (the Schaffalitzky de Muckadell family) and Norwegian (the Bie family) descent. Eden was once amused to learn that one of his ancestors had, like Churchill's ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, been the lover of Barbara Castlemaine.
There was speculation for many years that Eden's biological father was the politician and man of letters George Wyndham, but this is considered impossible as Wyndham was in South Africa at the time of Eden's conception. Eden's mother was rumoured to have had an affair with Wyndham. His mother and Wyndham exchanged affectionate communications in 1896 but Wyndham was an infrequent visitor to Windlestone and probably did not reciprocate Sybil's feelings. Eden was amused by the rumours but, according to his biographer Robert Rhodes James, probably did not believe them. He did not resemble his siblings, but his father Sir William attributed this to his being "a Grey, not an Eden".
Early life
School
Eden was educated at two independent schools. He attended Sandroyd School in Surrey from 1907 to 1910, where he excelled in languages. He then started at Eton College in January 1911. There, he won a Divinity prize and excelled at cricket, rugby and rowing, winning House colours in the last.
Eden learned French and German on continental holidays and, as a child, is said to have spoken French better than English. Although Eden was able to converse with Adolf Hitler in German in February 1934 and with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in French at Geneva in 1954, he preferred, out of a sense of professionalism, to have interpreters translate at formal meetings.
Although Eden later claimed to have had no interest in politics until the early 1920s, his biographer writes that his teenage letters and diaries "only really come to life" when discussing the subject. He was a strong, partisan Conservative, thinking his protectionist father "a fool" in November 1912 for trying to block his free-trade supporting uncle from a Parliamentary candidacy. He rejoiced in the defeat of Charles Masterman at a by-election in May 1914 and once astonished his mother on a train journey by telling her the MP and the size of his majority for each constituency through which they passed. By 1914 he was a member of the Eton Society ("Pop").
First World War
During the First World War, Eden's elder brother, Lieutenant John Eden, was killed in action on 17 October 1914, at the age of 26, while serving with the 12th (Prince of Wales's Royal) Lancers. He is buried in Larch Wood (Railway Cutting) Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery in Belgium. Their uncle Robin was later shot down and captured whilst serving with the Royal Flying Corps.
Volunteering for service in the British Army, like many others of his generation, Eden served with the 21st (Service) Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps (Yeoman Rifles) (KRRC), a Kitchener's Army unit, initially recruited mainly from County Durham country labourers, who were increasingly replaced by Londoners after losses at the Somme in mid-1916. He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant on 2 November 1915 (antedated to 29 September 1915). His battalion transferred to the Western Front on 4 May 1916 as part of the 41st Division. On 31 May 1916, Eden's younger brother, Midshipman William Nicholas Eden, was killed in action, aged 16, on board HMS Indefatigable during the Battle of Jutland. He is commemorated on the Plymouth Naval Memorial. His brother-in-law, Lord Brooke, was wounded during the war.
One summer night in 1916, near Ploegsteert, Eden had to lead a small raid into an enemy trench to kill or capture enemy soldiers to identify the enemy units opposite. He and his men were pinned down in no man's land under enemy fire, his sergeant seriously wounded in the leg. Eden sent one man back to British lines to fetch another man and a stretcher, and he and three others carried the wounded sergeant back with, as he later put it in his memoirs, a "chilly feeling down our spines", unsure whether the Germans had not seen them in the dark or were chivalrously declining to fire. He omitted to mention that he had been awarded the Military Cross (MC) for the incident, of which he made little mention in his political career.
On 18 September 1916, after the Battle of Flers-Courcelette (part of the Battle of the Somme), he wrote to his mother, "I have seen things lately that I am not likely to forget." On 3 October, he was appointed an adjutant, with the rank of temporary lieutenant for the duration of that appointment. At the age of 19, he was the youngest adjutant on the Western Front.
Eden's MC was gazetted in the 1917 Birthday Honours list. His battalion fought at Messines Ridge in June 1917. On 1 July 1917 Eden was confirmed as a temporary lieutenant, relinquishing his appointment as adjutant three days later. His battalion fought in the first few days of the Third Battle of Ypres (31 July – 4 August). Between 20 and 23 September 1917 his battalion spent a few days on coastal defence on the Franco-Belgian border.
Oxford
Eden had dabbled in the study of Turkish with a family friend. After the war, he studied Oriental Languages (Persian and Arabic) at Christ Church, Oxford, starting in October 1919. Persian was his main and Arabic his secondary language. He studied under Richard Paset Dewhurst and David Samuel Margoliouth.
At Oxford, Eden took no part in student politics, and his main leisure interest at the time was art. Eden was in the Oxford University Dramatic Society and President of the Asiatic Society. Along with Lord David Cecil and R. E. Gathorne-Hardy he founded the Uffizi Society, of which he later became president. Possibly under the influence of his father, Eden gave a paper on Paul Cézanne, whose work was not yet widely appreciated. Eden was already collecting paintings.
In July 1920, still an undergraduate, Eden was recalled to military service as a lieutenant in the 6th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry. In the spring of 1921, once again as a temporary captain, he commanded local defence forces at Spennymoor as serious industrial unrest seemed possible. He again relinquished his commission on 8 July. He graduated from Oxford in June 1922 with a Double First. He continued to serve as an officer in the Territorial Army until May 1923.
Early political career, 1922–1931
1922–1924
Captain Eden, as he was still known, was selected to contest Spennymoor, as a Conservative. He had initially hoped to win with some Liberal support, as the Conservatives were still supporting Lloyd George's coalition government, but by the time of the 1922 general election in November, it was clear that the surge in the Labour vote made that unlikely. His main sponsor was the Marquess of Londonderry, a local coal owner. The seat went from Liberal to Labour.
Eden's father had died on 20 February 1915. As a younger son, he had inherited capital of £7,675 and in 1922 he had a private income of £706 after tax (approximately £375,000 and £35,000 at 2014 prices).
Eden read the writings of Lord Curzon, and was hoping to emulate him by entering politics with a view to specialising in foreign affairs. Eden married Beatrice Beckett in the autumn of 1923, and after a two-day honeymoon in Essex, he was selected to fight Warwick and Leamington for a by-election in November 1923. His Labour opponent, Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, was, by coincidence, his sister Elfrida's mother-in-law, and also mother to his wife's step-mother, Marjorie Blanche Eve Beckett, née Greville. On 16 November 1923, during the by-election campaign, Parliament was dissolved for the December 1923 general election. He was elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-six.
The first Labour Government, under Ramsay MacDonald, took office in January 1924. Eden's maiden speech (19 February 1924) was a controversial attack on Labour's defence policy, and was heckled; he was thereafter careful to speak only after deep preparation. He later reprinted the speech in the collection Foreign Affairs (1939) to give the impression that he had been a consistent advocate of air strength. Eden admired H. H. Asquith, then in his final year in the Commons, for his lucidity and brevity. On 1 April 1924 Eden spoke to urge Anglo-Turkish friendship and the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne, which had been signed in July 1923.
1924–1929
The Conservatives returned to power at the 1924 general election. In January 1925 Eden, disappointed not to have been offered a position, went on a tour of the Middle East and met King Feisal of Iraq. Feisal reminded him of the "Czar of Russia & (I) suspect that his fate may be similar" (a similar fate indeed befell the Iraqi Royal Family in 1958). During a visit to Pahlavi Iran he inspected the Abadan Refinery, which he likened to "a Swansea on a small scale".
Eden was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Godfrey Locker-Lampson, Under-Secretary at the Home Office (17 February 1925), serving under Home Secretary William Joynson Hicks.
In July 1925 Eden went on a second trip to Canada, Australia and India. He wrote articles for The Yorkshire Post, controlled by his father-in-law Sir Gervase Beckett, under the pseudonym "Backbencher". In September 1925 he represented the Yorkshire Post at the Imperial Conference in Melbourne.
Eden continued to be PPS to Locker-Lampson when the latter was appointed Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in December 1925. He distinguished himself with a speech on the Middle East (21 December 1925), that called for the readjustment of Iraqi frontiers in favour of Turkey but also for a continued British mandate, rather than a "scuttle". Eden ended his speech by calling for Anglo-Turkish friendship. On 23 March 1926 he spoke to urge the League of Nations to admit Germany, which would happen the following year. In July 1926 he became PPS to the Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain.
Besides supplementing his parliamentary income of around £300 a year at that time by writing and journalism, he published a book about his travels, Places in the Sun in 1926 that was highly critical of the detrimental effect of socialism on Australia and to which Stanley Baldwin wrote a foreword.
In November 1928, with Austen Chamberlain away on a voyage to recover his health, Eden had to speak for the government in a debate on a recent Anglo-French naval agreement in reply to Ramsay MacDonald, then Leader of the Opposition. According to Austen Chamberlain, he would have been promoted to his first ministerial job, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, if the Conservatives had won the 1929 general election.
1929–1931
The 1929 general election was the only time that Eden received less than 50% of the vote at Warwick. After the Conservative defeat, he joined a progressive group of younger politicians consisting of Oliver Stanley, William Ormsby-Gore and the future Speaker W.S. "Shakes" Morrison. Another member was Noel Skelton, who had before his death coined the phrase "property-owning democracy", which Eden was later to popularise as a Conservative Party aspiration. Eden advocated co-partnership in industry between managers and workers, whom he wanted to be given shares.
In opposition between 1929 and 1931, Eden worked as a City broker for Harry Lucas, a firm that was eventually absorbed into S. G. Warburg & Co.
Foreign Affairs Minister, 1931–1935
In August 1931, Eden held his first ministerial office as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's National Government. Initially, the office was held by Lord Reading (in the House of Lords), but Sir John Simon held the position from November 1931.
Like many of his generation who had served in the First World War, Eden was strongly antiwar, and he strove to work through the League of Nations to preserve European peace. The government proposed measures superseding the post-war Versailles Treaty to allow Germany to rearm (albeit replacing its small professional army with a short-service militia) and to reduce French armaments. Winston Churchill criticised the policy sharply in the House of Commons on 23 March 1933, opposing "undue" French disarmament as this might require Britain to take action to enforce peace under the 1925 Locarno Treaty. Eden, replying for the government, dismissed Churchill's speech as exaggerated and unconstructive and commented that land disarmament had yet to make the same progress as naval disarmament at the Washington and London Treaties and arguing that French disarmament was needed to "secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed". Eden's speech was met with approval by the House of Commons. Neville Chamberlain commented shortly afterwards, "That young man is coming along rapidly; not only can he make a good speech but he has a good head and what advice he gives is listened to by the Cabinet".
Eden later wrote that in the early 1930s, the word "appeasement" was still used in its correct sense (from the Oxford English Dictionary) of seeking to settle strife. Only later in the decade would it come to acquire a pejorative meaning of acceding to bullying demands.
He was appointed Lord Privy Seal in January 1934, a position that was combined with the newly created office of Minister for League of Nations Affairs. As Lord Privy Seal, Eden was sworn of the Privy Council in the 1934 Birthday Honours.
On 25 March 1935, accompanying Sir John Simon, Eden met Hitler in Berlin and raised a weak protest after Hitler restored conscription against the Versailles Treaty. The same month, Eden also met Joseph Stalin and Maxim Litvinov in Moscow.
Foreign Secretary and resignation, 1935–1938
Eden became Foreign Secretary after Samuel Hoare had resigned after the collapse of the Hoare–Laval Pact. Britain had to adjust its foreign policy to face the rise of the fascist powers of Nazi Germany and Hitler as well as Italian fascism and Mussolini. He supported the policy of non-interference in the Spanish Civil War through conferences such as the Nyon Conference and supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his National Government in their efforts to preserve peace through seemingly reasonable concessions to Nazi Germany.
The Italian-Ethiopian War was brewing, and Eden tried in vain to persuade Mussolini to submit the dispute to the League of Nations. The Italian dictator scoffed at Eden publicly as "the best dressed fool in Europe". Eden did not protest when Britain and France failed to oppose Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936. When the French government (Sarraut II government) requested a meeting with a view to some kind of military action in response to Hitler's occupation, Eden's statement firmly ruled out any military assistance to France.
Eden resigned on 20 February 1938 as a public protest against Chamberlain's policy of coming to friendly terms with Fascist Italy. Eden used secret intelligence reports to conclude that the Mussolini regime in Italy posed a threat to Britain. In a 1967 interview, Eden explained his decision to resign: "we had an agreement with Mussolini about the Mediterranean and Spain, which he was violating by sending troops to Spain, and Chamberlain wanted to have another agreement. I thought Mussolini should honour the first one before we negotiated for the second. I was trying to fight a delaying action for Britain, and I could not go along with Chamberlain's policy".
In 1938, when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to Parliament with his and Hitler's signature on the Munich peace agreement, most of the MPs in the house rose in tumultuous acclamation. Eden walked out of the house pale with shame and anger. A few others remained seated: Churchill (who initially rose to catch the Speaker's eye to speak), Leo Amery, Vyvyan Adams, and Harold Nicolson.
He became a Conservative dissenter, leading a group that Conservative whip David Margesson called the "Glamour Boys". Meanwhile, the leading anti-appeaser Churchill led a similar group, "The Old Guard". They were not yet allies and would not see eye-to-eye until Churchill became prime minister in 1940. There was much speculation that Eden would become a rallying point for all the disparate opponents of Chamberlain, but Eden's position declined heavily among politicians since he maintained a low profile and avoided confrontation though he opposed the Munich Agreement and abstained in the vote on it in the House of Commons. However, he remained popular in the country at large and, in later years, was often wrongly supposed to have resigned as Foreign Secretary in protest at the Munich Agreement and appeasement generally.
Second World War
During the last months of peace in 1939, Eden joined the Territorial Army with the rank of major, in the London Rangers motorised battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps and was at annual camp with them in Beaulieu, Hampshire, when he heard news of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
Two days after the outbreak of war, on 3 September 1939, Eden, unlike most Territorials, did not mobilise for active service. Instead, he returned to Chamberlain's government as Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs and he visited Mandatory Palestine in February 1940 to inspect the Second Australian Imperial Force. However, he was not in the War Cabinet. As a result, he was not a candidate for prime minister when Chamberlain resigned on 10 May 1940 after the Narvik Debate 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 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 himself conducted the most important negotiations, those with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin, but Eden served loyally as Churchill's lieutenant. In December 1941 he travelled by ship to the Soviet Union, where he met Stalin and surveyed the battlefields upon which the Soviets had successfully defended Moscow from the German Army attack in Operation Barbarossa.
Nevertheless, he was in charge of handling most of the relations between Britain and the Free French leader, Charles de Gaulle, during the last years of the war. Eden was often both critical of the emphasis Churchill put on the special relationship with the United States and disappointed by the American treatment of its British allies.
In 1942 Eden was given the additional role 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 (which would have been a very unusual appointment as Eden was a civilian; General Harold Alexander would be 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. Eden supported the idea of post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia.
Postwar, 1945–1955
In opposition, 1945–1951
After the Labour Party won the 1945 election, 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 the idea. As early as the spring of 1946, Eden openly asked Churchill to retire in his favour. He was in any case depressed by the end of his first marriage and the death of his eldest son. Churchill was, in many ways, only "part-time Leader of the Opposition" because of his many journeys abroad and his literary work, and left the day-to-day work largely to Eden, who was largely regarded as lacking a sense of party politics and contact with the common man. In the opposition years, however, he developed some knowledge about domestic affairs and created the idea of a "property-owning-democracy", which Margaret Thatcher's government attempted to achieve decades later. His domestic agenda is overall considered to be centre-left.
During the Palestine Emergency, Eden narrowly avoided assassination by the Stern Gang via a letter bomb sent by Betty Knouth and Yaakov Levstein. Eden carried a letter bomb in his suitcase for a whole day, thinking it was a Whitehall pamphlet that he would read later in the day. He only realized it was a bomb after being warned by the police, who were informed by MI5. In September 1947, a Belgian court sentenced Knouth to one year in prison and Levstein to eight months in prison for illegally transporting explosives with intent to commit a felony.
Return to government, 1951–1955
In 1951 the Conservatives returned to office and Eden became Foreign Secretary for a third time. Churchill was largely a figurehead in the government, and Eden had effective control of British foreign policy for the second time, with the decline of the empire and the intensifying of the Cold War. Churchill wanted to appoint Eden Deputy Prime Minister as well as Foreign Secretary, but King George VI objected and said that the office did not exist in the British constitution and might interfere with his ability to appoint a successor. Thus, Eden was not appointed Deputy Prime Minister. However, he still considered himself Churchill's "second-in-command" and had been regarded as Churchill's "crown prince" since 1942.
Eden's biographer Richard Lamb said that Eden bullied Churchill into going back on commitments to European unity made in opposition. The truth appears to be more complex. Britain was still a world power or at least trying to be one in 1945–55, with the concept of sovereignty not as discredited as on the Continent. The United States encouraged moves towards European federalism so that it could withdraw troops and have the Germans rearmed under supervision. Eden was less Atlanticist than Churchill and had little time for European federalism. He wanted firm alliances with France and other Western European powers to contain Germany. Half of British trade was then with the sterling area and only a quarter with Western Europe.
Despite later talk of "lost opportunities", even Macmillan, who had been an active member of the European Movement after the war, acknowledged in February 1952 that Britain's special relationship with the United States and the Commonwealth would prevent it from joining a federal Europe at the time. Eden was also irritated by Churchill's hankering for a summit meeting with the Soviet Union in 1953 after Stalin's death. Eden became seriously ill from a series of botched bile duct operations in April 1953 that nearly killed him. After that, he had frequent bouts of poor physical health and psychological depression. Despite the ending of the British Raj in India, British interest in the Middle East remained strong. Britain had treaty relations with Jordan and Iraq and was the protecting power for Kuwait and the Trucial States, the colonial power in Aden, and the occupying power in the Suez Canal. Many right-wing Conservative MPs, organised in the so-called Suez Group, sought to retain the imperial role, but economic pressures made maintenance of it increasingly difficult.
Prime Minister, 1955–1957
In April 1955 Churchill retired, and Eden succeeded him as prime minister. Eden was well known due to his long wartime service and his public profile as a senior statesman. His statement, “Peace comes first, always,” reflected his emphasis on diplomacy and was widely reported at the time.
On taking office he immediately called a general election for 26 May 1955, at which he increased the Conservative majority from seventeen to sixty, an increase in majority that broke a ninety-year record for any British government. This election remains the last in which the Conservatives won the majority share of the votes in Scotland. However, 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 US President Dwight Eisenhower. Eden's attempts to maintain overall control of the Foreign Office drew widespread criticism.
Eden has the distinction of being the British prime minister to oversee the lowest unemployment figures of the post-Second World War era, with unemployment standing at just over 215,000—barely one per cent of the workforce—in July 1955.
Suez (1956)
The alliance with the US proved not universal, however, when in July 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt, nationalised the Suez Canal, following the withdrawal of Anglo-American funding for the Aswan Dam. Eden believed the nationalisation was in violation of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty that Nasser had signed with the British and French governments in October 1954. This view was shared by Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and Liberal leader Jo Grimond. In 1956 the Suez Canal was of vital importance since over two-thirds of the oil supplies of Western Europe (60 million tons annually) passed through it on 15,000 ships a year, one-third of them British; three-quarters of all Canal shipping belonged to NATO countries. Britain's total oil reserve at the time of the nationalisation was enough for only six weeks. The Soviet Union was certain to veto any sanctions against Nasser at the United Nations. Britain and a conference of other nations met in London following the nationalisation in an attempt to resolve the crisis through diplomatic means. However, the Eighteen Nations Proposals, including an offer of Egyptian representation on the board of the Suez Canal Company and a share of profits, were rejected by Nasser. Eden feared that Nasser intended to form an Arab Alliance that would threaten to cut off oil supplies to Europe and, in conjunction with France, decided Nasser should be removed from power.
Most people believed that Nasser was acting from legitimate patriotic concerns and the nationalisation was determined by the Foreign Office to be deliberately provocative but not illegal. The Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, was not asked for his opinion officially but made known his view that the government's contemplated armed strike against Egypt would be unlawful.
Anthony Nutting recalled that Eden told him, "What's all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or 'neutralising' him as you call it? I want him destroyed, can't you understand? I want him murdered, and if you and the Foreign Office don't agree, then you'd better come to the cabinet and explain why." When Nutting pointed out that they had no alternative government to replace Nasser, Eden apparently replied, "I don't give a damn if there's anarchy and chaos in Egypt." At a private meeting at Downing Street on 16 October 1956 Eden showed several ministers a plan submitted two days earlier by France. Israel would invade Egypt, Britain and France would give an ultimatum telling both sides to stop and, when one refused, send in forces to enforce the ultimatum, separate the two sides – and occupy the Canal and get rid of Nasser. When Nutting suggested the Americans should be consulted, Eden replied, "I will not bring the Americans into this ... Dulles has done enough damage as it is. This has nothing to do with the Americans. We and the French must decide what to do and we alone." Eden openly admitted his view of the crisis was shaped by his experiences in the two world wars, writing, "We are all marked to some extent by the stamp of our generation. Mine is that of the assassination in Sarajevo and all that flowed from it. It is impossible to read the record now and not feel that we had a responsibility for always being a lap behind ... Always a lap behind, a fatal lap."
Britain–France rejected plan for union
British Government cabinet papers from September 1956, during Eden's premiership, have shown that French Prime Minister Guy Mollet approached the British Government suggesting the idea of an economic and political union between France and Britain. This was a similar offer, in reverse, to that made by Churchill (drawing on a plan devised by Leo Amery) in June 1940.
Mollet‘s offer was referred to by Sir John Colville, Churchill's former private secretary, in his collected diaries, The Fringes of Power (1985), his having gleaned the information in 1957 from Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson during an air flight (and, according to Colville, after several whiskies and soda). Mollet's request for Union with Britain was rejected by Eden, but the additional possibility of France joining the Commonwealth of Nations was considered, although similarly rejected. Colville noted, in respect of Suez, that Eden and his Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd "felt still more beholden to the French on account of this offer".
Retirement
When he stood down as prime minister, Eden also resigned from the Commons, where he had been a member for 33 years. Eden kept in touch with Lord Salisbury, agreeing with him that Macmillan had been the better choice as prime minister, but sympathising with his resignation over Macmillan's Cyprus policy. Despite a series of letters in which Macmillan almost begged him for a personal endorsement prior to the 1959 general election, Eden only issued a declaration of support for the Conservative Government. Eden retained much of his personal popularity in Britain and contemplated returning to Parliament. Several Conservative MPs were reportedly willing to give up their seats for him, although the party hierarchy was less keen. He finally gave up such hopes in late 1960 after an exhausting speaking tour of Yorkshire. Macmillan initially offered to recommend him for a viscountcy, which Eden assumed to be a calculated insult, and he was granted an earldom (which was then the traditional rank for a former prime minister) after reminding Macmillan that he had already been offered one by the Queen. He entered the House of Lords as the Earl of Avon in 1961.
In retirement Lord Avon, as he became, lived in 'Rose Bower' by the banks of the River Ebble in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire. Starting in 1961, he bred a herd of 60 Hereford cattle (one of whom was called "Churchill") until a further decline in his health forced him to sell them in 1975. In 1968 he bought Alvediston Manor in Wiltshire, where he lived until his death on 14 January 1977.
In July 1962 Lord Avon made front-page news by commenting that "Mr Selwyn Lloyd has been horribly treated" when the latter was dismissed as Chancellor in the reshuffle known as the "Night of the Long Knives". In August 1962, at a dinner party, he had a "slanging match" with Nigel Birch, who as Secretary of State for Air had not wholeheartedly supported the Suez Invasion. In 1963 Lord Avon initially favoured Hailsham for the Conservative leadership but then supported Douglas-Home as a compromise candidate.
From 1945 to 1973, Lord Avon was Chancellor of the University of Birmingham. In a television interview in 1966, he called on the United States to halt its bombing of North Vietnam to concentrate on developing a peace plan "that might conceivably be acceptable to Hanoi." The bombing of North Vietnam, he argued, would never settle the conflict in South Vietnam. "On the contrary," he declared, "bombing creates a sort of David and Goliath complex in any country that has to suffer—as we had to, and as I suspect the Germans had to, in the last war." Lord Avon 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.
Memoirs
In retirement, Lord Avon corresponded with Selwyn Lloyd, co-ordinating the release of information and with which writers they would agree to speak and when. Rumours that Britain had colluded with France and Israel appeared, albeit in garbled form, as early as 1957. By the 1970s they had agreed that Lloyd would only tell his version of the story after Avon's death (in the event, Lloyd would outlive Lord Avon by a year, struggling with terminal illness to complete his own memoirs).
In retirement, Lord Avon was particularly bitter that Eisenhower had initially indicated British and French troops should be allowed to remain around Port Said, only for the US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., to press for an immediate withdrawal at the UN, thereby rendering the operation a complete failure. Avon felt the Eisenhower administration's unexpected opposition was hypocritical in light of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état and the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état.
The Earl of Avon published three volumes of political memoirs, in which he denied that there had been any collusion with France and Israel. Like Churchill, Lord Avon relied heavily on the ghost-writing of young researchers, whose drafts he would sometimes toss angrily into the flowerbeds outside his study. One of them was the young David Dilks.
In his view, American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whom he particularly disliked, was responsible for the ill fate of the Suez adventure. In an October press conference, barely three weeks before the fighting began, Dulles had coupled the Suez Canal issue with colonialism, and his statement infuriated Eden and much of the UK as well. "The dispute over Nasser's seizure of the canal," wrote Eden, "had, of course, nothing to do with colonialism, but was concerned with international rights." He added that "if the United States had to defend her treaty rights in the Panama Canal, she would not regard such action as colonialism." His 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.
Lord Avon faulted the United States for forcing him to withdraw, but he took credit for United Nations action in patrolling the Israeli-Egyptian borders. Eden said of the invasion, "Peace at any price has never averted war. We must not repeat the mistakes of the pre-war years, by behaving as though the enemies of peace and order are armed with only good intentions." Recalling the incident in a 1967 interview, Lord Avon declared, "I am still unrepentant about Suez. People never look at what would have happened if we had done nothing. There is a parallel with the 1930s. If you allow people to break agreements with impunity, the appetite grows to feed on such things. I don't see what other we ought to have done. One cannot dodge. It is hard to act rather than dodge." In his 1967 interview (which he stipulated would not be used until after his death), Avon acknowledged secret dealings with the French and "intimations" of the Israeli attack. He insisted, however, that "the joint enterprise and the preparations for it were justified in the light of the wrongs it [the Anglo-French invasion] was designed to prevent." "I have no apologies to offer," Eden declared.
Personal life
Relationships
On 5 November 1923, shortly before his election to Parliament, he married Beatrice Beckett, who was then eighteen. They had three sons: Simon Gascoigne (1924–1945), Robert, who died fifteen minutes after being born in October 1928, and Nicholas (1930–1985).
The marriage was not a success, with both parties apparently conducting affairs. By the mid-1930s his diaries seldom mention Beatrice. The marriage finally broke up under the strain of the loss of their son Simon, who was killed in action with the RAF in Burma in 1945. His plane was reported "missing in action" on 23 June and found on 16 July; Eden did not want the news to be public until after the election result on 26 July, to avoid claims of "making political capital" from it.
Between 1946 and 1950, whilst separated from his wife, Eden conducted an open affair with Dorothy, Countess Beatty, the wife of David, Earl Beatty. In 1950 Eden and Beatrice were finally divorced, and in 1952, he married Churchill's niece Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, a nominal Roman Catholic who was fiercely criticised by the Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh for marrying a divorced man.
Eden was the great-great-grandnephew of the author Emily Eden, and in 1947 he wrote an introduction to her novel The Semi-Attached Couple (1860).
Health issues
Eden had a stomach ulcer, exacerbated by overwork, as early as the 1920s. He also had gallstones, requiring surgery to remove the gallbladder (cholecystectomy). The physician consulted at the time was the Royal Physician, Sir Horace Evans. Three surgeons were recommended and Eden chose the one that had previously performed his appendectomy, John Basil Hume, surgeon from St Bartholomew's Hospital. During the open cholecystectomy on 12 April 1953, in London, it is thought that the common bile duct was damaged, leaving Eden susceptible to recurrent infections, biliary obstruction, and liver failure.
Eden suffered from cholangitis, an abdominal infection which became so agonising that he was admitted to hospital in 1956 with a temperature reaching 41 °C (106 °F). He was re-operated in London in an attempt to correct the injury with placement of a surgical drain. He suffered further with symptoms of biliary obstruction and required further revisional surgery on three more occasions in Boston, Massachusetts, to treat recurrent stricturing of the right hepatic duct.
He was also prescribed Benzedrine, an amphetamine, in the 1950s. It was regarded then as a harmless stimulant, and at that time, was prescribed and used casually. Among the side effects of Benzedrine are insomnia, restlessness, and mood swings, all of which Eden suffered during the Suez Crisis; indeed, earlier in his premiership he complained of being kept awake at night by the sound of motor scooters, being unable to sleep more than five hours per night or sometimes waking up at 3 am. Eden's drug regimen is now commonly agreed to have been a part of the reason for his bad judgment while prime minister. The Thorpe biography, however, denied Eden's abuse of Benzedrine, stating that the allegations were "untrue, as is made clear by Eden's medical records at Birmingham University, not yet [at the time] available for research".
The resignation document written by Eden for release to the Cabinet on 9 January 1957 admitted his dependence on stimulants while denying that they had affected his judgement during the Suez crisis in the autumn of 1956. "I have been obliged to increase the drugs [taken after the "bad abdominal operations"] considerably and also increase the stimulants necessary to counteract the drugs. This has finally had an adverse effect on my precarious inside," he wrote. However, in his book The Suez Affair (1966), the historian Hugh Thomas, quoted by David Owen, claimed that Eden had revealed to a colleague that he was "practically living on Benzedrine" at the time.
Final illness and death
In December 1976, Lord Avon, as Eden now was, felt well enough to travel with his wife to the United States to spend Christmas and New Year with W. Averell and Pamela Harriman; however, after reaching the United States, his health rapidly deteriorated. Prime Minister James Callaghan arranged for an RAF plane that was already in America to divert to Miami, to fly Avon home.
Lord Avon died of metastatic prostate cancer to bones and mediastinal nodes at his home, Alvediston Manor in Wiltshire, on 14 January 1977, aged 79. His will was proven on 17 March, with his estate amounting to £92,900 (equivalent to £545,815 in 2025).
He was buried in St Mary's churchyard at Alvediston, Wiltshire, just 3 miles (4.8 km) upstream from Rose Bower, at the source of the River Ebble. His papers are housed at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.
At his death, Lord Avon was the last surviving member of Churchill's War Cabinet. His surviving son, Nicholas Eden, 2nd Earl of Avon (1930–1985), known as Viscount Eden from 1961 to 1977, was also a politician and a minister in the Margaret Thatcher government until his death from AIDS at the age of 54.
Legacy
Eden liked to portray himself as well-mannered and well-groomed. This image gave him huge popular support throughout his political life, but some contemporaries felt he was merely a superficial person lacking any deeper convictions. That view was enforced by his very pragmatic approach to politics. In 1947, Dick Crossman called Eden "that peculiarly British type, the idealist without conviction".
US Secretary of State Dean Acheson regarded Eden as quite an old-fashioned amateur in politics, typical of the British establishment. In contrast, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev commented that until his Suez adventure Eden had been "in the top world class".
Eden was heavily influenced by Stanley Baldwin when he first entered Parliament. After earlier combative beginnings, he cultivated a low-key speaking style that relied heavily on rational argument and consensus-building, rather than rhetoric and party point-scoring, which was often highly effective in the Commons. However, he was not always an effective public speaker, and his parliamentary performances sometimes disappointed many of his followers, such as after his resignation from Neville Chamberlain's government. Sir Oswald Mosley said he never understood why Eden was so strongly pushed by the Conservative party, as he felt that Eden's abilities were very much inferior to those of Macmillan and Oliver Stanley. Winston Churchill once even commented on one of Eden's speeches that the latter had used every cliché except "God is love". That was deliberate; Eden often struck out original phrases from speech drafts and replaced them with clichés.
Eden's inability to express himself clearly is often attributed to shyness and lack of self-confidence. Eden is known to have been much more direct in meeting with his secretaries and advisers than in cabinet meetings and public speeches and sometimes tended to become enraged and behave "like a child", only to regain his temper within a few minutes. Many who worked for him remarked that he was "two men": one charming, erudite, and hard-working, and the other petty and prone to temper tantrums, during which he would insult his subordinates.
As prime minister, Eden was notorious for telephoning ministers and newspaper editors from 6 a.m. onward. Rothwell wrote that even before Suez, the telephone had become "a drug": "During the Suez Crisis Eden's telephone mania exceeded all bounds".
Archives
Personal and political papers of Anthony Eden and papers of the Eden family can be found at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham in the Avon Papers collection. A collection of letters and other papers relating to Anthony Eden can also be found at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.
Memoirs
Another World. London. Allen Lane, 1976. (covers early life)
Facing the Dictators: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden. London. Cassell, 1962. (covers early career and first period as Foreign Secretary, to 1938)
The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden. London. Cassell, 1965. (covers 1938–1945)
Full Circle: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden. London. Cassell, 1960. (covers post-war career)