ABSTRACT
History has not been kind to Sir Samuel Hoare. Although he served at the Foreign Office for just six months, his time there ended in chaos and resignation, when it became clear that public opinion was infuriated by the Anglo-French plan he co-sponsored with the French Prime Minister Pierre Laval in an effort to resolve the crisis created by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935. The pact was widely held by British public opinion to undermine the moral authority of the League of Nations as a vehicle of collective security, by making too many concessions to Mussolini in order to secure peace, and it has subsequently come to play an important role in the whole mythology of appeasement. The situation in 1935 was, however, a good deal more complex than has sometimes been realised. Hoare’s resignation attracted a wide range of responses from his contemporaries. For some-including most ministers-it was a price that had to be paid by the Foreign Secretary for sponsoring an unpopular policy that did not have prior Cabinet sanction. For others, ranging from members of the Labour Party through to activists in the League of Nations Union, Hoare was a scapegoat who paid the price when public opinion rebelled against the Cabinet’s cavalier attitude towards collective security. Hoare himself represented his resignation as a matter of principle, which he felt bound to carry out once he realised the gulf that separated him from his Cabinet colleagues. Such wide-ranging responses show the problems of attempting to use the niceties of constitutional theory to explain the complex realities of domestic politics. Hoare was both the architect and the victim of the crisis that erupted in December 1935.
