AWAKENING DEMOCRACIES

Salisbury was one of the severest critics of the Government's appeasement policy. In February he had opened a debate on national defence in the House of Lords and in July he was, with Winston Churchill, to lead a deputation of Privy Councillors which implored Prime Minister Baldwin to face the fact of German re-armament. Kenneth Rose finds it extraordinary that he should have issued the invitations to his Hatfield weekend in between these two events and that he actually had Buchman and his colleagues to meet his friends there six weeks after the New York World-Telegram interview.29 It would indeed have been strange for Salisbury to have done so - and still stranger for him to have supported the Group consistently throughout the war - if he believed that Buchman was in the slightest degree pro-Nazi. But Buchman had told him what he was trying to do in Germany, including his touches with Himmler, at the Oxford house-party a year earlier, and Salisbury's conduct argues that he understood the motives behind Buchman's initiatives.

Rose is also puzzled why Salisbury, who 'displayed only clarity of thought and robustness of will in all other private and public activities', was 'so pliant in the hands of the Oxford Group'.30 The fact is that far from being pliant, Salisbury, in his work with the Oxford Group, was always his own man. Some of his initiatives were suggested to him by one or other of his Oxford Group friends whom, like its Secretary, Roland Wilson, he had urged 'never to hesitate to come to me when you feel prompted by the Spirit'.31 But the letters and memos in my possession* - many in his own hand - show that he pondered deeply any such suggestion and made up his own mind whether or not to act. On other occasions - his interventions in the House of Lords in 1936 and 1941, for example - he acted, and the first thing his Oxford Group friends knew about it was from reports in the press or announcements in the House's Order Paper.

(* I have been unable to examine the relevant papers in the Cecil Archives at Hatfield as there is a fifty-year embargo placed upon them by the family. This embargo the Librarian and Archivist to the Marquess of Salisbury informs me has only been waived twice, for Kenneth Rose and for one other.)

252