"Home! Home! Home!" cried the third Lord Home, trying to rally his Scots against the English soldiery by shouting the family name at Flodden Field in 1513. In the heat of battle, the clansmen misunderstood and—so the story goes—took off for home. Ever since, lest another such disaster befall, the family has pronounced the name "Hume."
Last week the noble and ancient name of Home resounded once more over a British battle. Press and politicians of all parties were up in arms because Prime Minister Macmillan appointed the 14th Earl of Home to the key post of Foreign Secretary. The earl was Macmillan's replacement for Selwyn Lloyd, faithful veteran of Suez and scores of disarmament sessions, who after five years at the foreign office moved on to the treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Mac's Mount. What chiefly outraged the M.P.s was the fact that the new For eign Secretary was a peer, and therefore could not be cross-examined in the House of Commons. "Utterly retrograde," cried Tory Backbencher Gerald Nabarro. "Effrontery," shouted members of the Conservative M.P.s Foreign Policy Committee. Though there is no written law requiring a Foreign Secretary (or a Prime Minister for that matter) to sit in Commons, M.P.s have taken it pretty much for granted that nowadays such ministers are answerable only to them. Not since before World War II, when the late Lord Halifax served briefly, had a member of the upper house held the high office of Foreign Secretary. Worse, said the Liberal News Chronicle, Macmillan's man was a peer whose career had progressed only from "the negligible to the mediocre." The Laborite Daily Mirror called it "the most reckless political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula made his favorite horse a consul," and the independent-conservative Spectator, far from disagreeing, called the comparison "apt" and added: "The Earl of Home at his best has shown signs of equine intelligence." The object of all this objurgation is one of unflappable Mac's most steadfast supporters and closest confidants. Called "Gentle Alec" by his friends, tall, tweedy Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, 57, belongs to that diminishing number of landed Britons who go into politics as an inherited duty. His ancestors were border lairds who fought alternately for the English and the Scots. His nephew, Robin Douglas-Home, used to play the piano in nightclubs for a living, was recently in the news as a dashing contender for the hand of Sweden's Princess Margaretha. His younger brother William is a successful West End playwright who once wrote a hit comedy (Chiltern Hundreds) spoofing Gentle Alec's unexpected loss of the family's "safe" Lanarkshire seat in the 1945 Labor landslide election. In his 31 years in politics, Home served as Neville Chamberlain's parliamentary private secretary (accompanying Chamberlain to Munich in 1938 and riding with him behind Hitler and Mussolini through cheering Nazi crowds). After succeeding to the earldom in 1951 and taking his seat in the House of Lords he served as Scottish Secretary and later as Commonwealth Secretary and leader of the House of Lords.