On the Fringes of Diplomacy

Influences on British Foreign Policy, 1800–1945

Antony Best, John Fisher, John Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317085775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Diplomacia y tratados

In recent decades the study of British foreign policy and diplomacy has broadened in focus. No longer is it enough for historians to look at the actions of the elite figures - diplomats and foreign secretaries - in isolation; increasingly the role of their advisers and subordinates, and those on the fringes of the diplomatic world, is recognised as having exerted critical influence on key decisions and policies. This volume gives further impetus to this revelation, honing in on the fringes of British diplomacy through a selection of case studies of individuals who were able to influence policy. By contextualising each study, the volume explores the wider circles in which these individuals moved, exploring the broader issues affecting the processes of foreign policy. Not the least of these is the issue of official mindsets and of networks of influence in Britain and overseas, inculcated, for example, in the leading public schools, at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and in gentlemen's clubs in London's West End. As such the volume contributes to the growing literature on human agency as well as mentalité studies in the history of international relations. Moreover it also highlights related themes which have been insufficiently studied by international historians, for example, the influence that outside groups such as missionaries and the press had on the shaping of foreign policy and the role that strategy, intelligence and the experience of war played in the diplomatic process. Through such an approach the workings of British diplomacy during the high-tide of empire is revealed in new and intriguing ways.

Chapter 1
The Invisible Politician: Mary Derby and the Eastern Crisis

John Charmley and Jennifer Davey

At the height of the Great Eastern Crisis, Mary Stanley, 15th Countess of Derby, confided in a friend that she hoped that history would judge her right;1 but history is a fickle judge, and she was to be disappointed. Like most aristocratic women of her era, Mary Derby’s fate was to be relegated to the margins of history, visible only in footnotes and passing references. This might be deplored on the general ground that it has tended to produce a history of diplomacy and politics dominated by men; but in this instance it can be regretted for a more specific reason. Although the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875–1878 has provoked much interest among historians, including two full-scale studies and several substantial treatments, there remains something more to be said about it – and that something involves the role of Lady Derby.2 The excavation of her story might not mean that she is judged ‘right’, but it will rescue her from the massive condescension of historians, and in so doing it might suggest that aristocratic women deserve more attention from posterity.

Aristocratic women were legally and constitutionally excluded from the formal political process; political historians, and more recently gender historians, have written as though they were also absent from history itself. They are certainly absent from any of the great narratives of nineteenth-century history, being neither male aristocrats resisting or assisting the advance of the forces of progress nor yet male or female proletarians struggling for emancipation. They appear, when they do, as frivolous social butterflies pinned in the diary of an ‘Edwardian Country Lady’. The tendency of both political and gender historians to isolate the experience of one sex at the expense of the other and present issues of gender relations as divorced from the political narrative has left a fractured picture of gender experiences in the mid-nineteenth century. This has, unintentionally, reinforced the imagery if not the prescriptive discourse of separate spheres, in essence adding to the construct it purports to be describing. While the notion of strict divisions between the public and the private, the work and the home, the male and female, has been widely challenged,3 the imagery still provides the loose overarching framework for the majority of work dealing with female experience in the nineteenth century, leading to a highly gendered image of the Victorian public sphere. As a lone voice, Kim Reynolds’ work, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain, provides the only theoretical framework for dealing with the difficult issue of wifely influence.4 Her study borrows the idea of incorporation from feminist sociology to characterise the activities of over 40 aristocratic wives. This model suggests that ‘in most societies … married women are in many ways asymmetrically drawn into the social person of their husbands’.5 Mary Derby’s own political role offers an interesting commentary on this model. It suggests that during the Great Eastern Crisis which convulsed British politics from 1875 to 1878, she pursued a course of political action on her own account which, far from assisting the career of her husband, almost destroyed it; to understand how this could have happened, some account must be given of her previous lives.

Born in 1824, Lady Mary Catherine Sackville-West was married to the recently widowed Marquis of Salisbury, James Cecil, in 1847. The marriage was a prudent investment for both parties. Salisbury was 33 years older than his second wife, but given the sickliness of his male heirs, it seemed prudent to provide a few more ‘spares’. Their marriage produced five children, including three more boys; it also gave the young Mary the opportunity to establish herself within the political elite. Salisbury’s country estate, Hatfield House, gave his wife the ideal venue to start a political salon. A short train ride out of central London, Mary’s salon provided leading political figures with sanctuary from the metropolitan hustle and bustle. She successfully attracted elderly statesman, young politicians, foreign dignitaries and society figures to the staterooms of Cecil’s Jacobean house. The death of Salisbury in 1868 and her marriage to Derby in 1870 saw Mary’s political world turn upside down. The extravagant entertaining she had become accustomed to abruptly stopped; the 15th earl was not a man to waste good money on political entertaining. But if the doors to her political salon would never reopen, her union with one of the leading politicians of the day gave her a unique opportunity to ‘exercise political power behind the scenes’.6

If Mary Derby’s gender has been one of the reasons for her neglect, her connection with the House of Stanley provides a second explanation for her marginalisation. By a series of historical accidents, the Stanley family has failed to receive its proper place in the historiography of the nineteenth century. The need to restore the ‘view from Knowsley’ has been argued elsewhere,7 but while the 14th Earl of Derby, Conservative prime minister in the 1850s and 1860s, is undergoing a renaissance in historical judgement, Mary’s second husband, Edward Stanley, is still an object of historical neglect.8 The discovery of his diaries in the 1970s and their editing and publication by John Vincent has provided material from which historians can reconstruct his career, but his continued absence from the canon of great Conservative figures of the nineteenth century serves as an ‘example of history as written by the victors’.9 For this, the Great Eastern Crisis, or more properly its historians, must bear the blame. Disraeli and Salisbury would emerge from the crisis with their reputations enhanced, while Derby’s was destroyed – history has treated the former kindly; it has ignored or abused the latter. With aristocratic women often confined to the biographical chapters on family and home life, the lack of any sustained body of work on the 15th Earl had a direct impact on the visibility of his wife.

The sources from which Mary Derby’s role can be reconstructed bear witness to the historical fate of her type; chance and circumstance limit our access to her thoughts and actions far more than would be the case for a male aristocrat. In her case, however, at least there is a core archive, which is held at the ancestral home of the Cecil family, Hatfield House; this circumstance may well have played its part in determining the nature of what has survived. It is a sadly reduced remnant of what once existed. It contains a selection of letters sent to her, although the principles on which the selection is based cannot now be determined; there is no trace of the diaries which she is known to have kept; the assumption is they were destroyed, along with much else, by her executor and daughter, Margaret Cecil. Her path must be traced in her correspondence to others. Like others of her generation, she was an indefatigable correspondent; she herself often remarked how a letter was the next best thing to a chat in St James’s Square.10 Although Mary Derby was a prolific letter writer, her concern with the verdict of posterity has had its impact. In addition to her diaries, key collections of letters have disappeared: few of the letters between her and her stepson, the 3rd Lord Salisbury, survive; the same is true for Disraeli’s side of their correspondence. Despite her recording that Lord Derby would often supply her with many ‘written notes’ when she was out of town, no correspondence between husband and wife has survived.11 Mary Derby’s censorship (she not only ‘weeded’ her own papers but also ensured that her diary would not survive) reaches its peak at the height of the crisis; crucially, the majority of letters for 1878 have been destroyed. In all the key collections at Hatfield House, correspondence continues with routine regularity until December 1877, where it stops abruptly, only to resume again in January 1879. At what point material once in the archive was destroyed is uncertain; what is clear is that what survives is a fraction of what once existed.

The countess, and the inheritors of her archive, could only destroy letters sent to her or material kept by her; for the rest, time and circumstance have wreaked their own forms of destruction. There are more than 300 letters from the Earl of Cowley in her papers; not one of hers survives in his voluminous archive. This pattern is repeated with numbing regularity in other private and public collections; archivists seem to have preceded historians in disregarding the views of aristocratic women. Before complaining too much about the randomness of the survival of Mary Derby’s letters, it might be worth noting that virtually no trace survives of her period as chatelaine at Hatfield House; the social spaces in which so much of the activity of political hostesses occurs occasioned no written record. Ironically it was the parsimony of Lord Derby that served to push her into forms of political activity which have left some traces. Her address book during her time as the Countess of Derby included major political figures from the worlds of politics and diplomacy. Among her regular correspondents were members of the Cabinet, including Disraeli, Richard Cross (home secretary) and the 4th Earl of Carnarvon (colonies). Similar relationships existed with leading Liberal politicians, including Charles Wood, Viscount Halifax and Robert Lowe, who were among those who sought her out for political gossip and intrigue, while diplomats often used her as...