British Foreign Office
British government department responsible for foreign affairs
Also known as: Foreign Office, FO, His Majesty's Foreign Office, Her Majesty's Foreign Office
The Foreign Office is the British government department responsible for the conduct of foreign relations, formally constituted in 1782 and led by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Quigley's Anglo-American Establishment documents the Foreign Office, together with its Diplomatic Service and the historical-research division, as the principal institutional environment within which the Milner Group's diplomatic personnel operated. From the appointment of Sir Eyre Crowe to the senior clerkship in 1907 through the inter-war Permanent Under-Secretaries (Hardinge, Tyrrell, Lindsay, Vansittart, Cadogan, Sargent), the FO was, in Quigley's reading, saturated with Group members, All Souls fellows, and Rhodes Scholars across the full 1900–1950 period.
The Foreign Office as Milner-Group Habitat
Quigley's documentation of the FO in AAE is cumulative rather than singular. Chapter after chapter records Group members in successive FO positions: Cecil Spring-Rice (Ambassador to Washington 1912–1918), Sir William Tyrrell (PUS 1925–1928), Sir Robert Vansittart (PUS 1930–1938), Lord Halifax (Foreign Secretary 1938–1940 and Ambassador to Washington 1941–1946), Sir Alexander Cadogan (PUS 1938–1946), Sir Orme Sargent (PUS 1946–1949). When Quigley enumerates the personnel of the inter-war FO Research Department — the historical-analytic body inside the FO from which much policy paper-work issued — he repeatedly finds the same All Souls fellows, the same Group associates, the same Round Table affiliates. "F. B. Bourdillon… had been secretary to Feetham on the Irish Boundary Commission in 1924-1925 and a member of the British delegation to the Peace Conference in 1919. He has been in the Research Department of the Foreign Office since 1943" (AAE 153) is Quigley's typical sentence.
The Quigley Framing: Whitehall as Network
Quigley's larger claim about the FO is that the formal institutional structure — Secretary of State, Permanent Under-Secretary, Deputy Under-Secretaries, departmental heads, the Diplomatic Service in the field — was overlaid by an informal personnel network composed of Eton-Balliol-All Souls products, often Rhodes Scholars in the American case, with substantial overlap with the Round Table and Chatham House. Policy-formation in this network operated as much through luncheons, weekend country-house parties (Cliveden, Hatfield, the Astor residences), and the All Souls Senior Common Room as through formal departmental minutes. The Foreign Office was therefore not — in Quigley's reading — the place where British foreign policy was made so much as the place where Group decisions, formed in the broader network, were translated into formal diplomatic instructions.
The Inter-War FO: Vansittart, Cadogan, and Appeasement
Quigley's most operationally consequential treatment of the FO is in Tragedy and Hope's chapters on appeasement (chs. 13–14) and in AAE's Chapter 12 on Foreign Policy 1919–1940. The contest in the late 1930s between Sir Robert Vansittart (anti-German, demoted from PUS in 1938 to the powerless post of Chief Diplomatic Adviser) and Sir Horace Wilson (Chamberlain's principal foreign-policy advisor, operating outside the FO chain of command) is, for Quigley, the moment at which the formal FO institution was bypassed by an informal apparatus accountable only to the Prime Minister. The Munich settlement was negotiated through Wilson, the Berlin embassy under Henderson, and the German Mittelstand network — not through Vansittart or the FO's German Department. After 1938 the FO regained authority under Cadogan; by 1940 the Wilson apparatus had been dismantled.
Decolonization and the Post-Imperial FO
The post-1945 Foreign Office Quigley discusses chiefly through specific episodes: the recognition of Communist China (1950); the Persian oil crisis (1951–1953) which Quigley treats as a joint FO–CIA operation against Mossadegh (T&H 1023, 1058); the Suez crisis of 1956 (T&H 1076); and the ongoing tension through the 1960s between an FO oriented toward European integration and a Commonwealth Relations Office oriented toward the Sterling Area and the Old Dominions. The 1968 merger of the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) post-dates Quigley's principal writing but is anticipated in his discussion of the structural incompatibility of the two roles.
All Souls, the Diplomatic Service, and the Limits of the Group's Reach
Quigley is careful, in The Anglo-American Establishment, not to claim that the FO was a Group monopoly. He notes that anti-Group voices were also present — Vansittart, Reginald Leeper, Sir Frank Roberts; that Labour Foreign Secretaries (Hugh Dalton, Ernest Bevin) had their own networks; and that the Diplomatic Service career officers, while sociologically homogeneous, were not uniformly Round Table men. His claim is the more limited and the more documentary one: that the Group's representation in the FO, the Diplomatic Service, and the historical-research apparatus was disproportionate, sustained, and self-reproducing, and that this disproportion gave the Group a structural advantage in shaping British policy across the period from the Second Boer War to the end of empire.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 153 Quigley
F. B. Bourdillon… has been in the Research Department of the Foreign Office since 1943.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 155 Quigley
Since 1946, he has been engaged with the Foreign Office historical section.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 218 Quigley
Sir Robert Vansittart… demoted from PUS in 1938 to the powerless post of Chief Diplomatic Adviser.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 491 Quigley
England, freedom, 491; fascism, 491.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1023 Quigley
Strategic position (1940-43), 748-9, 1023.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1076 Quigley
Suez crisis, 1076.
- napoleonic-italy Quigley
British Foreign Office reporting on Italian unification provided one of the chief external archives consulted in the construction of this thesis.