He was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister from 1928 to 1930 and Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 and later served as Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the British Government.

Vansittart was born at Wilton House, Farnham, Surrey, the eldest of the three sons of Robert Arnold Vansittart, of Foots Cray Place, Kent, a Captain in the 7th Dragoon Guards, by his wife Susan Alice Blane, third daughter of Gilbert James Blane,[1] landowner, of Foliejon Park, Berkshire.

[1] He then travelled in Europe for two years to improve his French and German, where his experiences and study of the political systems prevailing may have contributed to his Germanophobia and Francophilia.

[4] Vansittart entered the Foreign Office in 1902, starting as a clerk in the Eastern Department, where he was a specialist on Aegean Islands affairs.

[7] He thought that satisfying Hitler's "land hunger" at Soviet expense would be immoral and regarded the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance as non-negotiable.

[8] Vansittart thought that in either case time should be "bought for rearmament" by an economic agreement with Germany and by appeasing every "genuine grievance" about colonies.

[10] At the Foreign Office in the 1930s, Vansittart was a major figure in the loose group of officials and politicians opposed to appeasement of Germany.

Vansittart argued that there was no prospect of a "general settlement" with Hitler, and the best that could be done was to strengthen ties with the French in order to confront Germany.

[13] By contrast, Eden saw British interests as confined only to Western Europe, and did not share Vansittart's beliefs about what Hitler's ultimate intentions might be.

[14] Henlein was the leader of the Sudeten German Party, which demanded autonomy for the Sudetenland, as was eventually achieved through the Munich Agreement (1938).

Vansittart genuinely liked Henlein, the mild-mannered and easy-going gymnastics teacher, and believed in assurances that all he wanted was autonomy for the Sudetenland.

"[16] That reached Hitler in the second half of 1937, when he was deciding about his plan to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia; his decisions were not proof of high intuition or intellect but were based on information received indirectly from Vansittart, among other well-placed politicians and officers in Britain, like Lord Lothian, Lord Mount Temple, Oliver Vaughan Gurney Hoare (Sir Samuel Hoare's younger brother) and others.

It is not known how much that encouraged Hitler, but he later stated very similar views: "the Führer believed that almost certainly Britain and probably France as well, had already tacitly written off the Czechs and were reconciled to the fact that this question would be cleared up in due course by Germany.

[18] In the late 1930s, Vansittart together with Reginald Leeper, the Foreign Office's Press Secretary, often leaked information to a private newspaper, The Whitehall Letter, edited by Victor Gordon-Lennox, the anti-appeasement diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph.

[19] That brought him into conflict with the political leadership at the time, and he was removed as Permanent Under-Secretary in 1938 into the meaningless role of an advisor (although initially the French and Germans thought it was a promotion).

They are all alike, and the only hope for a peaceful Europe is a crushing and violent military defeat followed by a couple of generations of re-education controlled by the United Nations.

[24]The British historian R. B. McCallum wrote in 1944: "To some, such as Lord Vansittart, the main problem of policy was to watch Germany and prevent her power reviving.

He wrote the screenplay for Wedding Rehearsal (1932), contributed dialogue to Sixty Glorious Years (1938) and, under the pseudonym "Robert Denham", provided song lyrics for Korda's The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Jungle Book (1942), in collaboration with the noted Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa with whom he also wrote the concert musical work for voices, "Beast of Burden" (1940).