Charles Vane Tempest Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry

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 College 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.

Pressed 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. Although a staff officer, Castlereagh immediately saw plenty of fighting and believed he had personally shot and killed one of the enemy on 2 September 1914.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 the Londonderry title and the immense wealth and status that went with it. His exalted position helped his political career, not least in Ireland, which later brought him favourable attention at Westminster. In 1915 Lord Londonderry (as he had now become) was promoted to Major, mentioned in despatches, and rejoined his regiment, the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues), into which he had been commissioned in 1897. He saw in 1915 for the first time the horrific effects of gas attack upon human beings when visiting soldiers gassed at the first Battle of Ypres. In 1916 Londonderry was appointed second-in-command of The Blues, part of the 8th Cavalry Brigade. He served at the front during the Battle of the Somme, witnessing the mass slaughter first hand; his closest friend, Lt Colonel Harold Brassey, 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. While reconnoitring the enemy near Monchy that the GOC 8th Cavalry Brigade, Brigadier-General Charles Bulkeley-Johnson, was shot in the face; he fell with a piercing shriek, the thirtieth British General to be killed in action or to die of wounds on the Western Front. This put Brevet Lt-Colonel Londonderry temporarily in command of the 8th Cavalry Brigade during their charge in 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; attempts to take them to the rear during a "box barrage" only increased the casualties. For Londonderry these experiences of war, carnage 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 in 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. He was appointed to the new Air Council at Westminster in 1919 by the postwar coalition government. Promoted to Under-Secretary of State for Air in 1920, Londonderry was nevertheless 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 Luftwaffe, led him to seek to clear his reputation as a 'warmonger', by engaging in diplomacy. This involved visits to meet Herr 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, later the German foreign minister, at the principal ancestral homes of the Marquess in Northern Ireland and England. They came to Mount Stewart on 29 May – 2 June, and were at Wynyard Hall on 13–17 November, and for 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. 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 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.

Fall from Grace

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.

After playing 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 during the war, 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 (1937). 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:

Lord Londonderry also had an illegitimate daughter with actress Fannie Ward, named Dorothe 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 aircraft 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.