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At 38, Anthony Eden became Britain's youngest Foreign Secretary in a century. He served Neville Chamberlain, though he was out of sympathy with Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. Chamberlain was determined to recognize Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia, in hopes of an Anglo-Italian understanding. Through a secret go-between, he went so far as to negotiate with Italian Ambassador Dino Grandi behind Eden's back. In February 1938, after Chamberlain, Eden and Grandi had conferred most of one day, Grandi reported to Rome:
"Chamberlain and Eden were not a Prime Minister and a Foreign Minister discussing with the Ambassador of a foreign power a delicate situation . . . They were . . . two enemies confronting each other, like two cocks in true fighting posture. The questions and queries addressed to me by Chamberlain were all, without exception, intentionally put with the aim of producing replies which would have the effect of contradicting and overthrowing . . . Eden."
Two days later, Anthony Eden resigned —with a characteristic lack of fire. A dramatic outburst against a policy he was certain would lead to disaster might have changed the course of Britain, perhaps of history. Instead, Eden chose to bow out with an undramatic, technical speech that quickened no bloodstreams and hurt no feelings. "I do not believe we can make progress in European appeasement," he said in its strongest passage. "... I am certain that progress depends above all on the temper of the nation and that temper must find expression in a firm spirit."
Still, in a world in which resignations on a matter of principle have gone out of style, Eden's act produced a thrill. "There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender," wrote the Tory who was soon to step in to arrest the drift. "My conduct of affairs would have been different from his in various ways," Winston Churchill added, "but he seemed to me at this moment to embody the life hope of the British nation."
In the Shadow. The Churchill-Eden partnership grew out of that moment in 1938. Eden, installed once again in the Foreign Office in 1940, came through the war years with enhanced prestige and a conviction that after the peace "we must dare once more and do better." His cautious, spongelike grasping for all the facts —a quality which causes him to treat a weighty decision like a hooded cobra—fitted well with Churchill's decisive, sweeping and sometimes impetuous dealings. Churchill respected Eden's qualities of polish and restraint, which he himself lacks; he designated Eden as heir apparent —though never ceasing to point out, with impish satisfaction, that Gladstone was 82 the last time he became Prime Minister. Eden, outwardly at least, seemed content to stand in the shadow of the Churchillian oak. If ever Eden has felt resentment towards his chief, the public has never seen signs of it. "Anthony is no Brutus," says a friend.