Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry

Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, KG, MVO, PC, PC (Ire) (13 May 1878 – 10 February 1949), styled Lord Stewart until 1884 and Viscount Castlereagh between 1884 and 1915, was an Anglo-Irish peer known for his political career in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and, later, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He is best remembered for his tenure as Secretary of State for Air in the 1930s and for his links with the Appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany.

Background and education
The eldest son of Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 6th Marquess of Londonderry, and Lady Theresa Susey Helen, daughter of Charles John Chetwynd-Talbot, 19th Earl of Shrewsbury, he was educated at Eton and at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

Early career and the First World War
Lord Castlereagh was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards.

In early 1901 he was appointed by King Edward to take part as a junior officer in a special diplomatic mission to announce the King´s accession to the governments of Austria-Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey.

Pressured by his parents to stand for election to the House of Commons at the 1906 general election for Maidstone, his relatively unsuccessful career on the depleted Unionist backbenches was broken by a return to the British Army during the First World War.

As Captain Castlereagh MP he travelled to northern France in the first weeks of the war and reached Paris on 29 August 1914 having been gazetted ADC to General William Pulteney the previous day. Despite serving in a staff job, Castlereagh immediately saw plenty of fighting and believed he had personally shot and killed one of the enemy on 2 September 1914 (Montgomery Hyde, page 116). In the following months of 1914 Castlereagh extensively witnessed the destruction of war, and the terrible suffering of the British wounded.

Hitherto reluctant to involve himself like his father in Irish politics, the war prompted him to take up the cause of recruitment in Ireland. With his father's death in 1915 he ceased to be MP for Maidstone and inherited not only the Londonderry title, but also the immense wealth and status that went with it. His exalted position helped his political career, not least in Ireland, and this in turn brought him favorable attention at Westminster. However, this was to be in the future as 1915 saw Lord Londonderry (as he had now become) promoted to the rank of Major, mentioned in despatches, and successful in his wish to rejoin his regiment, the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues), into which he had first been commissioned in 1897. Also, in 1915, Londonderry saw the horrific effects of gas attack upon human beings for the first time when visiting those soldiers wounded by the poison gas which the Germans had used (Montgomery Hyde page 122). In 1916 Londonderry was appointed second-in-command of The Blues which was part of the 8th Cavalry Brigade, and he served at the front during the Battle of the Somme witnessing the mass slaughter first hand, during which his closest friend, Lt Colonel Harold Brassey, who had been best man at his wedding in 1899, was killed. In 1917 Londonderry took command of a composite battalion drawn from the 8th Cavalry Brigade with the brevet rank of Lt-Colonel and the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues) took part in the massed mounted cavalry attacks on Monchy-le-Preux on the morning of 11 April 1917, during the Battle of Arras. Monchy-le-Preux was one of the keys to the northern end of the Hindenburg Line. It was while carrying out a reconnaissance of the enemy near Monchy that the GOC 8th Cavalry Brigade, Brigadier-General Charles Bulkeley-Johnson, was struck by a bullet hitting his head full on the cheekbone. The General tumbled down with a piercing shriek, and rolled over on the ground, becoming the thirtieth British General to be killed in action or to die of wounds on the Western Front (See Davies & Maddocks "Bloody Red Tabs: General Officer Casualties of the Great War, 1914–18"). This situation necessitated Brevet Lt-Colonel Londonderry temporarily to step up into the room which had been created in the chain of command of the 8th Cavalry Brigade during this cavalry charge stage of the Battle of Arras. At Monchy 600 cavalrymen were casualties and many more horses died. The animals were tethered in the open, as their riders took cover, while attempts to take them to the rear during a "box barrage" only increased the killing (Sources: "April 1917 – The Real War Horse" Commonwealth War Graves Commission Newsletter, April 2012; "War Horse at Monchy-le-Preux – 11 April 1917" article by Stephen Barker). For Londonderry these experiences of war, which had visited carnage on the lives of his brother officers and the family and school friends he grew up with, would, as Professor Kershaw comments, "leave an indelible mark on him". After serving on the Irish Convention of 1917–18, Lord Londonderry served on the short-lived Viceroy's Advisory Council, meeting at Dublin Castle in the autumn of 1918. This was followed by his appointment to the Air Council at Westminster in 1919, as part of the postwar coalition government. With only a promotion to Under-Secretary of State for Air in 1920, Londonderry grew frustrated and took advantage of his Ulster connections to join the first Government of Northern Ireland in June 1921, as Leader of the Senate and Minister for Education. At Belfast he acted as a check on the increasingly partisan and survivalist government of Prime Minister Sir James Craig. Nevertheless, Londonderry's Education Act of 1923 received little in the way of good will from either Protestant or Catholic educational interests, and was amended to the point that its purpose, to secularise schooling in Northern Ireland, was lost.

British politics and the Second World War
In 1926, he resigned from the Northern Ireland Parliament and involved himself in the General Strike of that year, playing the role of a moderate mine owner, a stance made easier for him by the relative success of the Londonderry mines in County Durham. His performance earned him high praise, and along with the Londonderrys' role as leading political hosts, he was rewarded by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin with a seat in the Cabinet in 1928 as First Commissioner of Works. Londonderry was also invited to join the emergency National Government under Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Lord President Baldwin in 1931. This was the cause of some scandal as MacDonald's many critics accused the erstwhile Labour leader of being too friendly with Edith, Lady Londonderry.

When the National Government won the 1931 General Election he returned to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Air (Londonderry also held a pilot's licence). This position became increasingly important during his tenure, not least due to the deliberations of the League of Nations Disarmament Conference at Geneva. Londonderry toed the British government's equivocal line on disarmament, but opposed in Cabinet any moves that would risk the deterrent value of the Royal Air Force. For this he was attacked by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party, and thus became a liability to the National Government. In the spring of 1935 he was removed from the Air Ministry but retained in the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords. Combined with his role as a leading member of the Anglo-German Fellowship he attracted the popular nickname of "Londonderry Herr".

The sense of hurt Lord Londonderry felt at this, and of accusations that he had misled Baldwin about the strength of Nazi Germany's air force, led him to seek to clear his reputation as a 'warmonger' by engaging in diplomacy. This involved visits to meet Hitler, Hess, Goering, Himmler, von Papen, and other senior members of the German Government and the much-discussed two stays, of several days each, in 1936, of Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Ambassador to the Court of St. James (and later the German foreign minister), at the principal ancestral homes of the Marquess in Northern Ireland and England namely at Mount Stewart 29 May-2 June, and at Wynyard Hall 13–17 November, and subsequent briefings with government officials in London. Between January 1936 and September 1938 Lord Londonderry made six visits to Nazi Germany, the first lasting for three weeks, but a seventh invitation previously accepted for March 1939 was abruptly declined by Londonderry following the Nazi occupation of Prague. During the first two visits, prior to the abdication of Edward VIII (who the Nazis assessed as a supporter of their party), Londonderry was considered an aristocrat of real influence by Hitler. The friendly regard in which the Marquess was held in Berlin was reflected in Hitler indiscreetly informing his guest, in October 1936, of his intended moves both on Czechoslovakia and Poland years in advance of these two invasions being actioned (Fleming, page 189). Although Londonderry immediately passed this information regarding Hitler's indicated future direction of German policy on to a member of the British Government, via a letter to Lord Halifax on 24 December 1936 (later reproduced in "Ourselves and Germany"- see below – as letter "to a friend", pages 130–4) rearmament was not notably accelerated in Britain at this point.In the end, Londonderry's high-profile promotion of Anglo-German friendship marked him with a far greater slur than that which had led him to engage in appeasement in the first place. Lord Londonderry seemed never to comprehend that, with or without British support, Hitler wanted an empire based upon racial dominance. In addition, Hitler believed that human life was one continual struggle from birth until death to prove that the strong could crush the weak. So, there was, judging by Hitler's statement of conviction that: "the law is that the stronger must overcome the weaker and, through the struggle necessary for such a conquest, increase the constitutional vigour and effective strength of the victor" (Mein Kampf, page 318) probably no limit to Hitler's violent ambitions for dominance for as long as he was alive. Hitler was absolutely unequivocal that "He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist" (Mein Kampf, page 261).

Under attack from anti-Nazis inside and outside Westminster, Lord Londonderry attempted to explain his position by publishing Ourselves and Germany in March 1938. Then, after the Munich agreement, in October 1938, Londonderry wrote in a letter that he was aware that Hitler was "gradually getting back to the theories which he evolved in prison", when working on Mein Kampf. However, this merely revealed that Londonderry never understood that the anti-Semitism redolent throughout the 600 pages of Mein Kampf required no reverting to by Hitler because it had always been retained as a core essence of Nazism. Whereas the opening page of "Ourselves" alluded to the part played by Londonderry's forebear Viscount Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna in bringing back the world to "peaceful habits" after the Napoleonic Wars, Hitler stated in Chapter XIV of Mein Kampf, entitled GERMANY'S POLICY IN EASTERN EUROPE: "Times have changed since the Congress of Vienna. It is no longer princes and their courtesans who contend and bargain about State frontiers, but the inexorable cosmopolitan Jew...The sword is the only means whereby a nation can thrust that clutch from its throat...this road is, and will always be, marked with bloodshed". After playing, it is said, a marginal role in the resignation of Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940, he failed to win any favour from the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (his second cousin), who thought little of his talents. Out of office he produced his memoirs, Wings of Destiny (1943), a relatively short book that was considerably censured by some of his former colleagues.

Lord Londonderry also served as Lord Lieutenant of County Down between 1915 and 1949 and of County Durham between 1928 and 1949 and was Chancellor of the University of Durham and The Queen's University of Belfast. He was Mayor of Durham during the year of George VI's Coronation. He was sworn of the Irish Privy Council in 1918 and of the British Privy Council in 1925 and appointed a Knight of the Garter in 1919.

Family
On 28 November 1899, Lord Londonderry married the Hon. Edith Helen Chaplin, eldest daughter of Henry Chaplin, 1st Viscount Chaplin, and Lady Florence Sutherland-Leveson-Gower (herself a daughter of the 3rd Duke of Sutherland) and had issue:


 * Lady Maureen Helen Vane-Tempest-Stewart (1900–1942), who married in 1920 the Hon. Oliver Stanley and had issue: (i) Michael Charles Stanley (1921–1990), who married (Aileen) Fortune Constance Hugh Smith and had two sons; and (ii) Kathryn Edith Helen Stanley DCVO (1923–2004), Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II from 1955 to 2002 and who married Sir John Dugdale KCVO (1923–1994) and had two daughters and two sons, one of whom, Henry Dugdale (b. 1963) is married to Litia Mara Dugdale.
 * Edward Charles Stewart Robert Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 8th Marquess of Londonderry (1902–1955)
 * Lady Margaret Frances Anne Vane-Tempest-Stewart (1910–1966), who married in 1934 (div. 1939) Frederick Alan Irving Muntz and in 1952 (div) 1958 as his 3rd wife, Hugh Falkus (1917–1996).
 * Lady Helen Maglona Vane-Tempest-Stewart (1911–1986), who married in 1935 Edward Jessel, 2nd Baron Jessel, and had issue: (i) Hon. Timothy Edward Jessel (1935–1969) who married twice and has issue; (ii) Hon. Camilla Edith Mairi Elizabeth Jessel (b. 1940) who was married and has issue; and (iii) Hon. Joanne Margaret Jessel (b. 1945) who is married and has issue.
 * Lady Mairi Elizabeth Vane-Tempest-Stewart (1921–2009), who married in 1940 (div. 1958) Derek William Charles Keppel, Viscount Bury (1911–1968), eldest son of Walter Keppel, 9th Earl of Albemarle and had issue: (i) Lady Elizabeth Mairi Keppel (b. 1941) who married in 1962 (div.) Alastair Michael Hyde Villiers (1939–2005) and has issue, and in 1980 (div. 1988) Merlin Hanbury-Tracy, 7th Baron Sudeley; and (ii) Lady Rose Deirdre Margaret Keppel (b. 1943) who married Peter Lathrop Lauritzen and has issue.

Lord Londonderry also had an illegitimate daughter with actress Fannie Ward, named Dorothé Mabel Lewis. She first married, in 1918, a nephew of mining magnate Barney Barnato, Capt. Jack Barnato, who died of pneumonia shortly after their wedding. Her second husband, whom she married in 1922, was Terence Plunket, 6th Baron Plunket, and with him she had three sons: Patrick Plunket, 7th Baron Plunket, Robin Plunket, 8th Baron Plunket, and the Hon Shaun Plunket. Lord and Lady Plunket were killed in an airplane crash in California in 1938.

Having suffered a stroke after a gliding accident a few years after the end of the war, Lord Londonderry died on 10 February 1949 at Mount Stewart, County Down, aged 70.