The resignation of Anthony Eden: 20 February 1938 Posted on: 20 February 2018 On Sunday, 20 February 1938, after two days of fraught Cabinet discussion, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that he must resign rather than agree to enter into early talks with the Italian government led by Mussolini. Eden’s resignation has often been portrayed as a principled rejection of appeasement, but in fact, as the Cabinet discussions showed, he and Chamberlain differed not on principle Sir Anthony Eden (National Portrait Gallery) but on method and timing. Eden felt Mussolini must offer some sign of good faith first, such as stopping Italian submarines attacking British ships off the coast of Spain. Chamberlain, though he described Italy as a ‘hysterical woman’, felt it important to show Mussolini ‘that he might have other friends beside Herr Hitler’. Neither Chamberlain nor Eden saw appeasement as a dirty word: it meant the pacification of Europe, a state profoundly to be desired. Both men accepted the need to improve relations with Italy, to weaken the Rome-Berlin axis and avoid fighting two major European enemies at once (with an aggressive Japan waiting in the wings); both rejected Hitler’s ambitions for a free hand in Eastern Europe and Russia and for territorial changes brought about by force; both accepted that conflict with Hitler’s Nazi Germany was probably inevitable, but that delaying that confrontation was essential to give time for Britain’s rearmament. So why did Eden resign? The reasons lie in the personal and psychological, as well as political context. Eden and Chamberlain: men with a mission Eden and Chamberlain had poor personal chemistry and had become exasperated with each other. Each thought himself better qualified to work for peace and to delay, if not avoid war. Eden had longer professional experience in international affairs, but Chamberlain had been dabbling—many said interfering—in foreign affairs long before he became Prime Minister in May 1937, and understood the costs of rearmament. A tough-minded man with a strong belief in his own convictions, Chamberlain was impatient with the professional caution of the Foreign Office. He relied on his own advisers, principally senior civil servant Sir Horace Wilson, and Sir Joseph Ball, former MI5 officer now Director of Research at Conservative Central Office, for information and back-channel diplomacy.
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