The Milner Group

The British secret society Quigley documents as the organizing core of the Anglo-American Establishment from 1891 to the 1950s

Also known as: Milner Group, Rhodes-Milner Group, the Group, the Society, the Rhodes crowd, the Times crowd, the Chatham House crowd, the All Souls group

The Milner Group is the central subject of Quigley's exposé. Founded in February 1891 by Cecil Rhodes, W. T. Stead, and Reginald Brett as a secret society on the Jesuit model, reorganized by Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner after Rhodes's death in 1902, and continued by Philip Kerr and Robert Brand, Baron Brand, it operated for more than half a century through the The Rhodes Trust, the Round Table, All Souls College, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Cliveden Set, and the editorial chair of The Times (AAE 5). Quigley names this Group as 'one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century' (AAE 4).

Founding (February 1891)

On a winter afternoon in February 1891 in London, three men — Cecil Rhodes, the diamond and gold magnate then dominant in South Africa; W. T. Stead, the most famous journalist of the day; and Reginald Baliol Brett (later Lord Esher), confidant of Queen Victoria — sat together drawing up the plan of a secret society and a list of original members (AAE 4). The plan distinguished an inner circle, 'The Society of the Elect,' from an outer circle, 'The Association of Helpers.' Within the Society of the Elect, real power was to be vested in a leader — Rhodes — and a 'Junta of Three': Stead, Brett, and Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, who was added to the society by Stead shortly after (AAE 4). The 'ideal arrangement' also envisioned a Circle of Initiates that included Cardinal Manning, General Booth, Albert Grey, and Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, plus 'A College, under Professor Seeley, to be established to train people in the English-speaking idea' (AAE 33-34). The romantic apparatus of secret signs and oaths was quickly dropped — 'to Milner and Brett, secret signs or oaths were so much claptrap and neither necessary nor desirable, for the initiates knew each other intimately and had implicit trust in each other' (AAE 34). What endured was the structure: a tight inner core, an outer ring of helpers, and the shared aim of imperial consolidation. Rhodes's purpose had been on paper since 1877, when in his first will he set out 'the extension of British rule throughout the world . . . and finally the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity' (AAE 28). The Jesuit model was explicit — Rhodes told a later trustee, 'In considering questions suggested take Constitution of the Jesuits if obtainable and insert "English Empire" for "Roman Catholic Religion"' (AAE 29).

Membership and Concentric Rings

Quigley reconstructs the Group as a set of concentric rings, never a formal organization with a membership list. The innermost ring he calls 'The Society of the Elect.' The outer ring is 'The Association of Helpers,' which Quigley further subdivides into an Inner Circle and an Outer Circle for analytical purposes (AAE 258-262). The diagnostic markers of Group membership, as Quigley uses them, are: fellowship at All Souls College; an Oxford degree from New College or Balliol; service in Milner's Kindergarten in South Africa; trusteeship of the The Rhodes Trust; editorship of or contribution to The Round Table magazine; a senior position at The Times under Geoffrey Dawson; and a record of attendance at the Astors' houses (Cliveden, St James's Square) or at Lord Lothian's Blickling, or at 175 Piccadilly (AAE 2). The Society of the Elect, as Quigley reconstructs it from documentary evidence, included Rhodes, Stead, Esher, Nathan Rothschild, Sir Harry Johnston, Alfred Milner, Sir Abe Bailey, Albert Grey, Lord Rosebery, Arthur Balfour, Sir George Parkin, the Earl of Selborne, Sir Patrick Duncan, Robert Brand, Philip Kerr, Lionel Curtis, Geoffrey Dawson, Edward Grigg, Jan Smuts, Leopold Amery, and Waldorf Astor and Nancy Astor (AAE 258-260). Quigley is candid about the limits of this list: 'mistakes, such as they are, are to be found rather in my attribution of any particular person to the outer circle instead of the inner core, rather than in my connecting him to the Group at all' (AAE 3). Several figures — notably Lord Halifax — he places in the outer circle while suspecting they belonged to the inner.

The Three Tributaries: Toynbee Group, Cecil Bloc, Rhodes Secret Society

Quigley argues that the Milner Group as it came to exist after 1902 was the confluence of three earlier streams that ran together in Milner himself: 'the Toynbee group,' the Cecil Bloc, and the Rhodes secret society (AAE 7). The Toynbee group was the Balliol circle of political intellectuals organized around Arnold Toynbee (the elder, not the historian) and Milner from about 1873, and supplied the ideology — duty to the state, the moral case for empire, the obligation of social-service work among the working classes — that Toynbee bequeathed to the Group (AAE 9-10). The Cecil Bloc, organized by Lord Salisbury, supplied the political housing: cabinet posts, Eton and Harrow headmasterships, fellowships of All Souls, the editorial chair at The Quarterly Review and The Times. The Rhodes secret society supplied the money — the South African mining fortune that, after Rhodes's death in 1902, Milner administered as senior trustee. 'It is doubtful if Milner could have formed his Group without assistance from all three of these sources,' Quigley writes; 'the Toynbee group gave him the ideology and the personal loyalties which he needed; the Cecil Bloc gave him the political influence without which his ideas could easily have died in the seed; and the Rhodes secret society gave him the economic resources which made it possible for him to create his own group independent of the Cecil Bloc' (AAE 7). By 1902 the Cecil Bloc was passing from Salisbury's masterful hand into Balfour's indifferent one, and Rhodes was dead, leaving Milner the chief controller of the estate. The Group was operationally autonomous from that point forward.

Instruments

The Milner Group did not act directly. It acted through instruments — a portfolio of magazines, colleges, trusts, country houses, and front organizations that Quigley enumerates with forensic detail. The The Rhodes Trust, established by Rhodes's will and dominated by Milner's nominees as secretaries — George Parkin, Geoffrey Dawson, Edward Grigg, Lord Lothian — was the financial reservoir (AAE 73). The Rhodes Scholarships, drawing carefully selected young men from the Dominions, the United States, and Germany into Oxford, were the recruitment pipeline. All Souls College was the intellectual headquarters: fellowship there was nearly coterminous with Group membership in the 1920s and 1930s (AAE 7). The Round Table magazine, founded 1910 and bankrolled by Sir Abe Bailey, was the policy mouthpiece (AAE 99). The Times, controlled by the Group through Geoffrey Dawson's editorship (with the brief exception of 1919-1922), was the public voice. The Royal Institute of International Affairs, founded 1919 with Bailey and Astor money and housed at Chatham House, projected the Group's analysis into the policy press. The Cliveden Set and the dining clubs (The Club, Grillion's) were the social manifolds. 'It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910 . . . it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910 . . . it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years . . . it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it,' Quigley writes (AAE 5).

Major Operations

Quigley's bill of particulars is unsparing. The Group plotted the Jameson Raid of December 1895 — Rhodes's failed coup against the Transvaal — and triggered the Boer War of 1899-1902, sending Milner to Cape Town as High Commissioner to pursue the war it had engineered (AAE 5). It created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910 through the work of Milner's Kindergarten — Curtis, Brand, Kerr, Dawson, Hichens, Feetham, and the rest — and used that template for the federation movement that became the Round Table project (AAE 99). It supplied the dominant influence in Lloyd George's War Cabinet of 1916-1919 (Milner served as a member without portfolio); it dominated the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; it had 'a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates' (AAE 5). It coined and circulated the name 'British Commonwealth of Nations' in 1908-1918 and engineered the Imperial War Cabinet of 1917. From 1919 it pursued a policy of revision of the Versailles settlement and, by the 1930s, of appeasement of Germany — '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). It was the controlling influence on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India from 1917 to 1945 (AAE 6). Quigley summarizes: a Group with such a record 'would be a familiar subject for discussion among students of history and public affairs. In this case, the expectation is not realized, partly because of the deliberate policy of secrecy which this Group has adopted' (AAE 5).

American Branch and the Council on Foreign Relations

After 1919 the Milner Group's instruments crossed the Atlantic. Tragedy and Hope carries the story Quigley could not tell in 1949 when he finished AAE: 'In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J. P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group. The American organizers were dominated by the large number of Morgan "experts," including Lamont and Beer, who had gone to the Paris Peace Conference and there became close friends with the similar group of English "experts" which had been recruited by the Milner group. In fact, the original plans for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations were drawn up at Paris' (T&H 951-952). The American 'Round Tablers' Quigley names include George Louis Beer, Walter Lippmann, Frank Aydelotte, Whitney Shepardson, Thomas W. Lamont, Jerome D. Greene, and Erwin D. Canham of the Christian Science Monitor (T&H 950). Money came from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, the Rockefeller and Whitney families, J. P. Morgan, and Lazard Brothers (T&H 951). The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton was, in Quigley's reading, 'a reasonable copy of the Round Table Group's chief Oxford headquarters, All Souls College,' set up by Abraham Flexner after his stint as Rhodes Memorial Lecturer at Oxford (T&H 952). The Institute of Pacific Relations, organized by Lionel Curtis in 1925, extended the same nucleus to a third network spanning ten countries (T&H 953).

Decline and Transformation

Quigley closes AAE in 1949 with the Group 'badly split on the policy of appeasement after 16 March 1939' and dealt 'a rude jolt' by the General Election of 1945, which swept Labour to power and broke the Conservative monopoly the Group had cultivated since 1916 (AAE 6). The four phases he distinguishes — preparatory (1873-1891), Rhodes (1891-1901), New College (1901-1922), All Souls (1922 onward) — give way after 1945 to a fifth, undefined phase in which the Group's instruments survive but its center of gravity has shifted to the American side (AAE 6). In T&H, written fifteen years later, Quigley notes that the surviving Kindergarten had thinned to one man — Robert Brand, who died in 1963 — and that the magazine's editorial work had passed to Adam Marris, Brand's successor at Lazard Brothers (T&H 950-951). The wider network that had grown up from the original Round Table — Chatham House, the CFR, the Institute of Pacific Relations, the Bilderberg meetings — continued to function, but as a transatlantic establishment rather than a British imperial coterie. Quigley is explicit that the Anglo-American power structure 'penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy. In England the center was the Round Table Group, while in the United States it was J. P. Morgan and Company or its local branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland' (T&H 952).

Quigley's Documentation

AAE was finished in 1949. Quigley spent the next sixteen years unable to find a publisher willing to take it; only in 1981, two years after his death, did Books in Focus issue it. T&H (1966) is the only book published in his lifetime that names the network — and even there Quigley does not call it 'the Milner Group' but 'the Round Table Groups,' identifying it as 'an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act' (T&H 950). His credentials are unique: 'I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments' (T&H 950). His sole standing complaint with the Group is that 'it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known' (T&H 950). The AAE preface is more pointed on method: 'It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it' (AAE 2). The book divides the Group into two concentric circles and ends with an Appendix — 'A Tentative Roster of the Milner Group' — listing 31 names in the Society of the Elect and roughly 80 in the Association of Helpers, plus brackets around the names Quigley suspects but cannot fully document (AAE 258-262). That roster remains the canonical sociogram of the Anglo-American Establishment.

Cited in

anglo-american-establishment · p. 2 Quigley
What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire.
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
One wintry afternoon in February 1891, three men were engaged in earnest conversation in London. From that conversation were to flow consequences of the greatest importance to the British Empire and to the world as a whole.
anglo-american-establishment · p. 4 Quigley
The plan of organization provided for an inner circle, to be known as 'The Society of the Elect,' and an outer circle, to be known as 'The Association of Helpers.' Within The Society of the Elect, the real power was to be exercised by the leader, and a 'Junta of Three.'
anglo-american-establishment · p. 5 Quigley
It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910.
anglo-american-establishment · p. 5 Quigley
It founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years.
anglo-american-establishment · p. 6 Quigley
It was the chief influence in Lloyd George's war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations.
anglo-american-establishment · p. 7 Quigley
Milner was able to dominate this Group because he became the focus or rather the intersection point of three influences. These we shall call 'the Toynbee group,' 'the Cecil Bloc,' and the 'Rhodes secret society.'
anglo-american-establishment · p. 28 Quigley
The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable . . . the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire.
anglo-american-establishment · p. 29 Quigley
In considering questions suggested take Constitution of the Jesuits if obtainable and insert 'English Empire' for 'Roman Catholic Religion.'
anglo-american-establishment · p. 33 Quigley
1. General of the Society: Rhodes 2. Junta of Three: Stead, Brett, Milner 3. Circle of Initiates: Cardinal Manning, General Booth, Bramwell Booth, 'Little' Johnston, Albert Grey, Arthur Balfour.
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. 258 Quigley
A. The Society of the Elect: Cecil John Rhodes, Nathan Rothschild, Sir Harry Johnston, William T. Stead, Reginald Brett (Viscount Esher), Alfred Milner (Viscount Milner), B. F. Hawksley, Thomas Brassey, Edmund Garrett.
tragedy-and-hope · p. 132 Quigley
Under Milner in South Africa they were known as Milner's Kindergarten until 1910. In 1909-1913 they organized semisecret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States.
tragedy-and-hope · p. 146 Quigley
The power and influence of this Rhodes-Milner group in British imperial affairs and in foreign policy since 1889, although not widely recognized, can hardly be exaggerated.
tragedy-and-hope · p. 950 Quigley
There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.
tragedy-and-hope · p. 950 Quigley
I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.
tragedy-and-hope · p. 951 Quigley
The Round Table Groups were semi-secret discussion and lobbying groups organized by Lionel Curtis, Philip H. Kerr (Lord Lothian), and (Sir) William S. Marris in 1908-1911. This was done on behalf of Lord Milner, the dominant Trustee of the Rhodes Trust in the two decades 1905-1925.
tragedy-and-hope · p. 952 Quigley
In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J. P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group.
tragedy-and-hope · p. 953 Quigley
On this basis, which was originally financial and goes back to George Peabody, there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.