Leopold Maxse

Leopold James Maxse (11 November 1864 – 22 January 1932) was an English amateur tennis player and journalist and editor of the conservative British publication, National Review, between August 1893 and his death in January 1932; he was succeeded as editor by his sister, Violet Milner. He was the son of Admiral Frederick Maxse, a Radical Liberal Unionist, who bought the National Review for him in 1893. Before the Great War, Maxse argued against liberal idealism in foreign policy, Cobdenite pacifism, Radical cosmopolitanism and, following the turn of the century, constantly warned of the 'German menace'. Life Maxse was educated at Harrow School and King's College, Cambridge, where he took no degree. While at the latter institution he was elected President of the Cambridge Union Society. He was a close friend of journalist and neo-Jacobite Herbert Vivian at Cambridge, and both were frequent visitors at Oscar Browning's apartment. He married Kitty Lushington (the model for Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway), at St. Andrew's Church, Cobham in 1890. He was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb, but would then go on to be one of the most prominent and influential of the tory Die-Hards. The National Review did not gain a distinct voice until the early part of the twentieth century. In 1903 Maxse became an ardent supporter of Joseph Chamberlain's Tariff Reform proposals. The National Review then became the most prominent ideological mainstay of the right-wing of the Conservative Party for two decades, and would flail those members of the Conservative Party who showed the slightest sign of equivocating on support for the House of Lords, the Union, and the Empire in the required manner. In 1911 he conducted the "B.M.G." (Balfour Must Go) campaign which resulted in Arthur Balfour resigning as Leader of the Conservative Party, showing that Maxse had become a force to be reckoned among Conservative opinion makers.