The word "appeasement" entered British political discourse as a term of abuse only after the Munich Agreement of September 1938, when it became apparent that Hitler was not going to honour the territorial settlement he had accepted there.[1] Before that, it was used in a neutral or even positive sense by those who advocated it: the active management of German grievances through negotiation, with the goal of avoiding a second European war. This was not, in 1934 or 1935, an obviously foolish position. The first European war had killed seventeen million people and produced the economic conditions that had given rise to fascism in the first place. A political class that had lived through it was not willing to repeat it without exhausting every alternative.
What made appeasement more than a diplomatic strategy was the degree to which parts of the British establishment found the substance of German demands not merely negotiable but genuinely sympathetic.[2] The Versailles settlement had been widely regarded in Britain, even at the time of its signing, as vindictive and unsustainable. The recovery of German territories with German-speaking majorities — the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland — could be argued, on the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, as a legitimate redress of post-war injustice. This argument was made, in private, by men who held senior positions in government, the Church, the press, and the armed forces.
The country house circuit and appeasement's social infrastructure
The mechanism through which appeasement was organised as a political project — rather than merely a diplomatic preference — was the informal network of country houses, clubs, and social occasions at which senior figures met without official record.[3] Cliveden, the Astor house in Berkshire, has become the most famous of these venues — the term "Cliveden set" was coined by Claud Cockburn in 1937 to describe the circle of pro-appeasement figures who gathered there. But Cliveden was not unique. Similar conversations were taking place at Chatsworth, at Blenheim, at the major Kent estates, and at the London houses of several prominent political families.
Ribbentrop's social programme during his time as Ambassador was designed to insert him into this network — to ensure that when the decisive conversations took place, someone was present who could report their content to Berlin and who could make the German position appear both reasonable and advantageous. He was largely successful in this aim. The dinners and shooting weekends he attended between 1936 and 1938 gave him access to a picture of British elite opinion that the formal diplomatic channel could not have produced.
"The men who supported appeasement were not, in most cases, stupid or ignorant. They knew what Germany wanted. The question was whether what Germany wanted was compatible with British interests. Many of them concluded that it was."
The individuals who moved through this network — and who appear, in various guises, in the novel that grew out of this research — include Lord Halifax, Lord Londonderry, the Duke of Westminster, Sir Samuel Hoare, and a number of senior figures in the press, the Church, and the military whose names are less prominent in the popular record but who are well-documented in the relevant archives.[4] What united them was not cowardice, venality, or pro-German sentiment in a simple ideological sense. What united them was a belief, held with varying degrees of sophistication and honesty, that a German-dominated Europe east of the Rhine was preferable to a war that would destroy the British Empire along with everything else.