A few weeks later, with the Allies nearing catastrophic defeat and British forces falling back to Dunkirk, Halifax favoured approaching Italy to see if acceptable peace terms could be negotiated.

He was born into a Yorkshire family, the sixth child and fourth son of Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax (1839–1934), and Lady Agnes Elizabeth Courtenay (1838–1919).

[5] He was a Ditcher (i.e. opposed to the bitter end and ready to "die in the last ditch" to defend the House of Lords' right to veto legislation) in the disputes over the Parliament Act 1911 but really made little impact on politics before 1914.

In the 1918–1922 Parliament, Wood was an ally of Samuel Hoare, Philip Lloyd-Greame and Walter Elliot, all ambitious younger MPs in favour of progressive reform.

He wanted Indians to be more united and friendly to the UK; his first major speech as viceroy, and several more throughout his term of office, urged an end to communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.

[10] Indian responses to Simon's arrival included the All-Parties Conference, a committee of which produced the Nehru Report (May 1928), advocating dominion status for India.

[citation needed] In June 1929, a new Labour government took office in the UK, with Ramsay MacDonald Prime Minister for the second time and William Wedgwood Benn as Secretary of State for India.

His plan was for Simon to write proposing a Round Table Conference to discuss the findings of the commission, and that MacDonald would then reply pointing out that the 1917 Montagu Declaration implied a commitment to Dominion status (i.e. that India should become completely self-governing, like Canada or Australia).

[citation needed] In November 1930, King George V opened the First Round Table Conference in London; no Congress delegates took part because Gandhi was in jail.

[10] The fortnight-long discussions resulted in the Gandhi–Irwin Pact of 5 March 1931, after which the Civil Disobedience Movement and the boycott of British goods were suspended in exchange for a Second Round Table Conference that represented all interests.

[citation needed] On the evening of 23 March 1931, after a trial now widely viewed to have been unlawful and unfair, the Indian revolutionaries Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar were hanged, in an execution brought forward by 12 hours.

In June 1932, on the sudden death of Sir Donald Maclean, he returned to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Education, for the second time, having been apparently genuinely reluctant to accept.

Ignoring Eden's reservations, he did not object in principle to Hitler's designs on Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland, although he stressed that only peaceful processes of change would be acceptable.

[22] It appears that a frank conversation with his pugnacious Permanent Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, brought Halifax to the sharp realisation that the road to appeasement had taken Britain into a series of concessions that were unwise and that were unlikely to secure the necessary pacification of Germany.

He hoped that increased rearmament—including strengthening of alliances with and economic support to the countries of Eastern Europe, and the reintroduction of conscription—coupled with a firmer line towards Germany, Italy, and Japan would reduce the risks of those three hostile powers acting in combination.

[29] The Foreign Office confirmed to the US chargé d'affaires on 8 August 1939 that "the military mission, which had now left Moscow, had been told to make every effort to prolong discussions until 1 October 1939".

[34] On 2 August 1939, Hitler asked Konstantin von Neurath, a former Foreign Minister and career diplomat during the Weimar Republic, whether the German people would accept such an ideological shift from anti-communism to signing a pact with the Soviet Union.

They replied that it might be possible but only with a different prime minister and that before they could give an official answer, they would need the approval of Labour's National Executive Committee, then in Bournemouth preparing for the annual conference which was to start on the Monday.

[43] On doing so, one of Churchill's first actions was to form a new, smaller War cabinet by replacing six of the Conservative politicians with Greenwood and Attlee, retaining only Halifax and Chamberlain.

Halifax believed it better to try to get terms "safeguarding the independence of our Empire, and if possible that of France", in the belief that peace talks would make it easier to get the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) home.

[37] Churchill disagreed, believing that "nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished"[citation needed] and that Hitler was unlikely to honour any agreement.

A few weeks later, in July 1940, Halifax rejected German peace offers presented through the Papal Nuncio in Berne and the Portuguese and Finnish prime ministers.

Dorothy and I had spent a lovely summer evening walking over the Wolds, and on our way home sat in the sun for half an hour at a point looking across the plain of York.

All the landscape of the nearer foreground was familiar—its sights, its sounds, its smells; hardly a field that did not call up some half-forgotten bit of association; the red-roofed village and nearby hamlets, gathered as it were for company round the old greystone church, where men and women like ourselves, now long dead and gone, had once knelt in worship and prayer.

[48]When Chamberlain retired from the Cabinet due to ill health, Churchill tried to ease Halifax out of the Foreign Office by offering him a job as de facto Deputy Prime Minister, living at 11 Downing Street.

It was a demanding post by any standards, but Halifax could reasonably claim to have played his part, and he enjoyed a notably longer term than his less successful successor Archibald Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel.

Back in the United Kingdom, Halifax refused to rejoin the Conservative front bench, arguing that it would be inappropriate as he had been working for the Labour Government then still in office.

[16] Harold Begbie described Halifax as "the highest kind of Englishman now in politics" whose "life and doctrine were in complete harmony with a very lofty moral principle, but who has no harsh judgement for men who err and go astray.

Conservative historian Maurice Cowling argued that Halifax's stance of increasing resistance to Hitler, especially the Polish guarantee in the spring of 1939, was motivated not so much by considerations of strategy but by a need to keep ahead of a sea-change in British domestic opinion.

However, his "most important role in public life" was, in Dutton's view, as Ambassador to the United States, where he helped to smooth a relationship which was "often more fraught than early interpretations ... tended to suggest".