Colonel Wilfrid William Ashley, 1st Baron Mount Temple, PC DL (13 September 1867 – 3 July 1939) was a British soldier and Conservative politician.

He left the House of Commons in 1932 and was raised to the peerage as Baron Mount Temple, of Lee in the County of Southampton,[10] a revival of the title held by his great-uncle.

[14] The Anglo-German Fellowship was an elitist group intended to bring together the elites of Germany and Britain by promoting cultural exchanges and economic agreements.

[16] Mount Temple was the chairman of the Fellowship, but the group's two most important members were the merchant banker Sir Ernest Tennant and the historian Philip Conwell-Evans with the latter serving as the British agent for Joachim von Ribbentrop.

[14] On 5 December 1935, Mount Temple made a speech at a Fellowship meeting in London saying he hoped if another world war came that "the sides will be different" with the implication that Britain and Germany should be allies against France.

[17] In a speech given in Berlin on 11 January 1936 at an Anglo-German Fellowship meeting, Mount Temple stated: "our public opinion is convinced that a final and clear understanding between our two peoples must be attained so that peace and stability in the world can be established".

[15] As such, Mount Temple and the other members of the Anglo-German Fellowship saw France – the power most committed to upholding the Treaty of Versailles – as the main danger to world peace rather than Germany.

[19] In what sounded like a threat to the government, Mount Temple wrote: "To find themselves drawn into a war in defense of Bolshevism would be deeply repugnant to the mass of British people.

[20] On 14 July 1936 in an anti-French gesture intended to mark Bastille Day, Mount Temple hosted the Duke of Brunswick at a Fellowship dinner.

[24] Mount Temple called Blomberg a hero for his role in German rearmament and violating the Treaty of Versailles, saying he had "created what any impartial historian must regard as essential to a Great Nation; Self-Respect and World Equality".

[24] In July 1937, Mount Temple wrote in The Anglo-German Review (the journal of the Fellowship) that the British newspapers had made "little or no attempt to describe any of the constructive efforts of the Hitler regime in the social sphere".

Sir Robert Vansittart, the British Foreign Office's Permanent Undersecretary wrote a memo stating that:"The P.M. [Prime Minister] should certainly not see Lord Mount Temple – nor should the S[ecretary] of S[tate].

If there is anything worthwhile in their remarks – there never is, for of course, we have much better information than this naïf propaganda stuff – we can report it to the S of S. But a stage has now been reached where the service is entitled to at least this amount of protection.

These superficial people are always gulled into the lines of least resistance – vide Lord Lothian – and we then have the ungrateful but necessary task of pointing out the snags and appearing obstructive.

[28] In a letter to The Times that was published on 26 February 1938, Mount Temple called the Anschluss an expression of the Nazi "dynamic of National Liberation" from the Treaty of Versailles.

[2] At a Fellowship dinner on 10 October 1938 in London, Mount Temple praised the Munich Agreement as marking the beginning of a new era of Anglo-German friendship as he declared: "Seventeen out of twenty Englishmen ardently desire an understanding with Germany".

[30] Unlike some of his contemporaries in the Fellowship, the laissez-faire capitalist Mount Temple did not support ideological Nazism (perhaps due in part to the fact that his first wife was Jewish).

[34] In 2008, the British historian Edward Feuchtwanger described Ashley as "a strikingly good-looking man, of military bearing, courteous and tactful, with strongly held, rather conventional views, sometimes regarded as reactionary".