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Anthony's father, Sir William, 7th baronet of West Auckland and 5th of Maryland, was an eccentric who loved art, painted well, and despised politics, red flowers, the smell of whisky or tobacco, and the high-pitched voices of young children, including those of his four sons (Anthony was the third) and one daughter. It was Eden's mother, a Sargent portrait come to life, who nurtured her son's interest in politics.
At Eton, Eden was a competent but not brilliant scholar, with a fleeting interest in theology. When World War I came, 28 members of Eden's Middle Fourth went, like him, into combat; nine were killed. Two of his brothers also were killed in that "slaughter of the finest," which robbed England of the flower of a generation. Eden went into the King's Royal Rifle Corps as a lieutenant at 18, came out of France a captain with the Military Cross.
At postwar Oxford he "took a first" (highest honors) in languages (Persian and Arabic), founded an art society, began collecting French art (his favorite: Cézanne), and fixed on politics as his career. He was assigned the "safe" Tory seat of Warwick and Leamington, in England's dead center, in 1923, and has held on to it handily in every election since. To the voters there, Socialists and Old Guard alike, he is still "Captain Eden." Good looks, a good brain and an influential father-in-law (he had married Miss Beatrice Beckett, daughter of an owner of the Yorkshire Post) caught the practiced eye of Stanley Baldwin.
Eden advanced fast, although not all the Tories were overwhelmed right off by his performance. "My God," exclaimed Winston Churchill many years later after listening to an Eden speech. "He used every é in the English language with the possible exception of 'God is love' and 'Gentlemen will please adjust their dress before leaving.* "He is still a somewhat soporific speechmaker, but in Parliament is widely respected for having that mystical quality known as "a sense of the House" —an ability to know when to parry, when to thrust, when to break off.
His reliability, earnestness and interest in foreign affairs brought him into the Office, as parliamentary private secretary to Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain. "A first-rate second-rater," Chamberlain found him, "who some day may be a big man." By 1931, he had become Under Secretary.
The Eden Boy. The handsome, Homburg-topped Eden profile became familiar alike in ladies' magazines and in the chancelleries of Europe. For his speeches in the League of Nations he was called "that young man who wants peace so terribly much." In Berlin, he was "Der Eden Knabe [the Eden Boy]." Mussolini marked him one of Fascist Italy's enemies, delighted in calling him "the best-dressed fool in Europe."