Foreign News: The Squire

Had duty not so incessantly thwarted desire, the gaunt nobleman with the melancholy face might never have been known beyond his Yorkshire estate. He was the kind of man to be believed when he said: "I would rather be a master of foxhounds than Prime Minister." In many ways the Earl of Halifax was ill suited to his times; yet the times were to know him well.

He was born Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, son of the second Viscount Halifax, devout man of the Established Church who had himself devoted a frustrating lifetime to trying to bring about a reunion between the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. Like his father, he was a conciliator by nature—the product of a mellow world in which everyone played by the rules. In spite of a withered left hand that had been crippled from birth, he trained himself to be an expert horseman, yet was scholar enough to win a first (modern history) at Oxford. When World War I broke out, young Wood, already a Member of Parliament, chose to serve in action with the Yorkshire Dragoons.

Crown & Spinning Wheel. It was in 1926, when he was catapulted to the position of viceroy of India, having been created a baron for the purpose, that the world beyond England first began to hear of him. In those days, the viceroy ruled more splendidly than the King, but the real symbol of India was the primitive spinning wheel of Mahatma Gandhi. The two men took to each other from the first. In the simple and staunch Anglican, Gandhi found "one of the noblest of Englishmen." In Gandhi, the viceroy found "my dear friend." In London, the empire-minded Winston Churchill railed at such softness, and the jingo press jeered. But in the end, the bloodshed that had threatened India was averted, and when independence came, it came peacefully.

Back home, the future earl was elected Joint Master of the Middleton Hounds, a lifetime ambition, and, in the Baldwin government, became Lord Privy Seal. Then, in 1938, when Anthony Eden resigned in protest against the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain, Halifax found himself with the fateful job of Foreign Secretary, and all that he was by temperament and training betrayed him.

"Smiling Good Will." Only a short time before, he had met Hitler at Berchtesgaden and as Churchill was to write later, "one could hardly conceive of two personalities less able to comprehend one another." Like Chamberlain, "this High Church Yorkshire aristocrat . . . reared in all the smiling good will of former English life," paid dearly for taking Hitler at his word. Halifax became, to his enemies, "Lord Holy Fox." He was to insist that at the time there was no alternative to Munich, but the world was never quite able to believe him—or to forgive.

The storm broke; Neville Chamberlain went to Buckingham Palace to resign, and King George VI later described their interview: "I, of course, suggested Halifax, but he [Chamberlain] told me H. was not enthusiastic, as being in the Lords he could only act as a shadow or a ghost in the Commons, where all the real work took place. I was disappointed . . . Then I knew there was only one person whom I could send for ... and that was Winston."