Anthony Eden - Life and Career

Life and Career

Like many aspirant politicians Captain Eden, as he was still known, first contested a seat where he had little chance of winning in the November 1922 general election, and was then elected Member of Parliament for Warwick and Leamington in the December 1923 general election, as a Conservative, at the age of twenty-six. Also in that year he married Beatrice Beckett. They had three sons, one of whom died in infancy, but the marriage was not a success and later broke up under the strain of a son missing in action during the latter half of World War II.

In the 1924–1929 Conservative Government, Eden was first Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson Hicks, and then in 1926 to the Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain. In 1931 he held his first ministerial office as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. In 1934 he was appointed Lord Privy Seal and Minister for the League of Nations in Stanley Baldwin's Government.

Like many of his generation who had served in World War I, Eden was strongly anti-war, and strove to work through the League of Nations to preserve European peace. His ruling National Government, led by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, failed to recognize the threat that an ascendant Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler posed, and proposed measures, in contravention of existing international agreements, that would allow Germany to rearm. In response to sharp criticism of this policy by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons on 23 March 1933, he defended this appeasement policy toward Adolf Hitler's Germany by arguing that Britain needed to "secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is needed", a speech that brought him a standing ovation in the House. He later to came to recognise that peace could not be maintained by appeasement of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. He privately opposed the policy of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, of trying to appease Italy during its invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935. When Hoare resigned after the failure of the Hoare-Laval Pact, Eden succeeded him as Foreign Secretary. When Eden had his first audience with King George V, the King is said to have remarked, "No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris."

At this stage in his career Eden was considered as something of a leader of fashion. He regularly wore a Homburg hat (similar to a trilby but more rigid), which became known in Britain as an "Anthony Eden".