The Cliveden Set
The Astor-house circle made notorious in the 1930s as the alleged engine of British appeasement policy
Also known as: Cliveden Set, the Astor circle, the Cliveden group
The Cliveden Set was the 1930s social circle convened at the Astors' country house at Cliveden — Waldorf Astor, Nancy Astor, Geoffrey Dawson, Lord Lothian, Lord Halifax, Robert Brand, Baron Brand, and assorted Fellows of All Souls. Identified by the journalist Claud Cockburn in 1937 as the engine of pro-German appeasement policy, the Set was widely understood as a conspiracy. Quigley accepts the contemporaneous identification but corrects its boundaries: the Cliveden Set was 'the misnamed' surface manifestation of the Milner Group, not a separate cabal (AAE 2-5). 'The Milner Group, which was the reality behind the phantom-like Cliveden Set, began their program of appeasement and revision of the settlement as early as 1919' (AAE 193).
Cliveden House and the Astors
Cliveden is a Buckinghamshire country house bought in 1893 by William Waldorf Astor, the American-born press magnate, and passed to his son Waldorf Astor (Viscount Astor from 1919) in 1906. Through the 1910s and 1920s it became, alongside the Astors' London house at 4 St James's Square — directly across the square from Chatham House, headquarters of the Royal Institute of International Affairs — a regular weekend rendezvous for what Quigley calls 'the third generation' of the Milner Group. Waldorf Astor owned The Observer; his brother John Jacob Astor V owned The Times (with Major John Jacob Astor I as chairman from 1922). The Astor sisters-in-law — Nancy, the first woman MP, and Pauline — provided the salon. The geographic facts mattered. As Quigley notes, the Cliveden circle's members 'used to congregate at Cliveden House as the Astors' guests and earned the title of a "set," to which, in spite of imaginative left-wing propaganda, they never aspired' (AAE 62). The circle's notable habitués were the same names that appear on the Milner Group's tentative roster: Lothian, Dawson, Brand, Curtis, and an outer ring including Samuel Hoare, Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, and (in his ministerial years) Neville Chamberlain.
Cockburn's Exposure and the Public Legend
The phrase 'Cliveden Set' was popularized by the radical journalist Claud Cockburn in his fortnightly newsletter The Week, beginning November 1937. Cockburn alleged that a small pro-Nazi cabal centered on Lady Astor was systematically pressuring the Chamberlain Cabinet toward appeasement. The label stuck. Through 1938 and 1939 the Cliveden Set entered the popular vocabulary as a synonym for the appeasement faction; the New York newspapers picked it up; left-wing periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic deployed it as shorthand for upper-class treason. Quigley regards the Cockburn legend as a half-truth — there was a coordinating circle, and it did meet at Cliveden, but its boundaries and motives were misread. 'It would be entirely unfair to believe that the connotations of superficiality and conspiracy popularly associated with the expression "Cliveden set" are a just description of the Milner Group as a whole' (AAE 4). The Astors were not the masters of the network; they were its hosts and one of its financial backers. 'In fact, Viscount Astor was, relatively speaking, a late addition to the society, and the society should rather be pictured as utilizing the Astor money to further their own ideals rather than as being used for any purpose by the master of Cliveden' (AAE 4).
Quigley's Correction: The Set as Milner Group Manifestation
Quigley's central argument is that the Cliveden Set was not an autonomous appeasement cabal but the social face of a much older and more substantial network. 'This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. All of these terms are unsatisfactory, for one reason or another, and I have chosen to call it the Milner Group' (AAE 2). The appeasement policy did not originate at Cliveden in the late 1930s. It originated in Brand's international-banking economics of 1919-1931, in Curtis's constitutional vision of Commonwealth-as-moral-community, and in the editorial line of The Round Table from 1922 onward — all of it generated by the inner core of the Milner Group years before Hitler became Chancellor. By the time Cockburn began naming names in 1937, the Milner Group had been pursuing revision of the Versailles settlement for nearly two decades. 'The Milner Group, which was the reality behind the phantom-like Cliveden Set, began their program of appeasement and revision of the settlement as early as 1919' (AAE 193). The Cliveden weekends were where the policy was rehearsed socially, not where it was conceived.
Membership Overlap
The Cliveden regulars Quigley identifies fall squarely inside the Milner Group's inner core. Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr) — Milner's protégé in South Africa, secretary of the Rhodes Trust 1925-1939, ambassador to Washington 1939-1940 — was a fixture. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times (1912-1919, 1923-1941) and trustee of the Rhodes Trust, was Astor's editorial right hand. Robert Brand, brother-in-law of Lady Astor (Nancy was his sister-in-law) and managing director of Lazard Brothers, supplied the financial doctrine. Lionel Curtis brought the Round Table apparatus. Edward Wood (Lord Halifax) — Foreign Secretary 1938-1940, the most prominent appeaser after Chamberlain — was a less frequent but emblematic visitor. Quigley's biographer-source on Halifax's elevation to Foreign Secretary in 1938 records: 'Lothian, Geoffrey Dawson, and Brand, who used to congregate at Cliveden House as the Astors' guests . . . urged Chamberlain at the decisive moment to have the courage of his convictions and place Halifax . . . in the office to which his experience and record so richly entitled him' (AAE 62). That is the operative meaning of the Cliveden Set: a faction with the votes to nominate a Foreign Secretary.
The Appeasement Policy in Context
Quigley distinguishes between the Group's broader revisionism (1919 onward) and the specific catastrophe of 1938-1939. The earlier revisionism — opposition to the Versailles 'war guilt' clause, support for the Dawes and Young Plans, advocacy of Germany's return to the Concert of Europe — had been respectable mainstream policy in the 1920s, championed by Smuts, MacDonald, and large parts of the Foreign Office. The fatal turn came after 1933, when the same revisionist instincts were carried over into a Germany now governed by the National Socialists. The Milner Group, Quigley argues, refused to recognize that Hitler's Germany was categorically different from Stresemann's. 'They did not see that the Kaiser was merely a façade for four other groups: the Prussian Officers' Corps, the Junker landlords, the governmental bureaucracy (especially the administrators of police and justice), and the great industrialists' (AAE 194). The Group received explicit warnings from Brigadier General John H. Morgan — 'almost a member of the Group' — and from Alfred Zimmern, both ignored (AAE 194). The result, in the four months between Munich (September 1938) and the German seizure of Czechoslovakia (15 March 1939), was the collapse of Cliveden's policy and the Group's most serious internal split since the Boer War (AAE 6).
End of the Set
The Cliveden Set as a coherent political formation ended in 1940. Lothian died in Washington in December 1940 — ambassador to the United States, working to bring America into the war he had once worked to avoid. Halifax replaced him as ambassador, removing the most prominent Cliveden member from the inner Cabinet. Brand went to Washington in 1941 as head of the British Food Mission, then as Treasury representative (AAE 252). Cliveden itself, like most great country houses during the war, ceased to function as a political house; Nancy Astor's once-formidable social influence dwindled. After 1945 the Astors gave Cliveden to the National Trust; the rest of the principals returned to Lazard Brothers, the editorial chair of The Times, or the House of Lords. The label survived as historical shorthand. Quigley's reading — the Set as a momentary social configuration of a much older Milner Group network — is the most precise account on record, and the one that explains why a circle indicted in 1937 as a 'Nazi conspiracy' was, by 1942, organizing Britain's wartime supply from Washington.
T&H Summary
Quigley returned to the Cliveden question in Tragedy and Hope more briefly. 'Because The Times has been owned by the Astor family since 1922, this Rhodes-Milner group was sometimes spoken of as the "Cliveden Set," named after the Astor country house where they sometimes assembled' (T&H 146). He maintains the same line: the Cliveden label was a journalistic identification — accurate as far as it went, misleading in its implication of a 1930s cabal. The real network was 'the Round Table Groups,' founded a generation earlier and operating in seven countries, of which Cliveden weekends were one social manifold among many (T&H 146). Readers who came to Quigley expecting confirmation of conspiracy-theory Cliveden — secret meetings with Ribbentrop, Nazi sympathizers in the British Cabinet — find instead a careful re-description of a long-established imperial-policy network whose 1930s policy mistakes were continuous with its 1920s convictions and its 1900s ideology. The Cliveden Set, on Quigley's account, was not a conspiracy and not a fiction; it was the Milner Group taking weekend visitors.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 2 Quigley
This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 4 Quigley
In the 1930s, the misnamed 'Cliveden set' was close to the center of the society, but it would be entirely unfair to believe that the connotations of superficiality and conspiracy popularly associated with the expression 'Cliveden set' are a just description of the Milner Group as a whole.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 4 Quigley
Viscount Astor was, relatively speaking, a late addition to the society, and the society should rather be pictured as utilizing the Astor money to further their own ideals rather than as being used for any purpose by the master of Cliveden.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 62 Quigley
Lothian, Geoffrey Dawson, and Brand, who used to congregate at Cliveden House as the Astors' guests and earned the title of a 'set,' to which, in spite of imaginative left-wing propaganda, they never aspired, urged Chamberlain at the decisive moment to have the courage of his convictions and place Halifax . . . in the office to which his experience and record so richly entitled him.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 102 Quigley
They were neither anti-German in 1910 nor pro-German in 1938, but pro-Empire all the time, changing their attitudes on other problems as these problems affected the Empire.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 193 Quigley
The Milner Group, which was the reality behind the phantom-like Cliveden Set, began their program of appeasement and revision of the settlement as early as 1919.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 194 Quigley
They did not see that the Kaiser was merely a façade for four other groups: the Prussian Officers' Corps, the Junker landlords, the governmental bureaucracy (especially the administrators of police and justice), and the great industrialists.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 252 Quigley
His long acquaintance with the country and the personal connections built up during almost fifteen years as Rhodes Secretary more than counteracted his intimate relationship with the notorious Cliveden Set, especially as this latter relationship was unknown to most Americans.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 146 Quigley
Because The Times has been owned by the Astor family since 1922, this Rhodes-Milner group was sometimes spoken of as the 'Cliveden Set,' named after the Astor country house where they sometimes assembled.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 581 Quigley
The decisive influence in shaping the British acceptance of German expansion to the east (and through this, the Munich Agreement) came from the editorial line of The Times and the country-house network associated with the Astors.