Sir Nevile Meyrick Henderson (10 June 1882 – 30 December 1942) was a British diplomat who served as the ambassador of the United Kingdom to Germany from 1937 to 1939.
Early life and education Henderson was born at Sedgwick Park, near Horsham, Sussex, the third child of Robert Henderson and Emma Caroline Hargreaves.Appeasing Hitler: The Diplomacy of Sir Nevile Henderson, 1937–39, Peter Neville, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, p. 1. His uncle was Reginald Hargreaves, who married Alice Liddell, the original of Alice in Wonderland. Henderson was very attached to the countryside of Sussex, especially his home of Sedgwick, and wrote in 1940: "Each time that I returned to England the white cliffs of Dover meant Sedgwick for me, and when my mother died in 1931 and my home was sold by my elder brother's wife, something went out of my life which nothing can replace". Henderson was extremely close to his mother, Emma, a strong-willed woman who had successfully managed the estate at Sedgwick after her husband's death in 1895 and developed the gardens of Sedgwick so well that they were photographed by Country Life magazine in 1901. Henderson called his mother "the presiding genius of Sedgwick" who was a "wonderful and masterful woman if ever there was one".
He was educated at Eton and joined the Diplomatic Service in 1905. He was, as one historian notes, "something of a snob", although another historian states that his snobbishness mostly derived from the death of his mother.
Henderson had a great love of sports, guns and hunting, and those who knew him noted he was always most happy when he was out on the hunt. Henderson was also known for his love of clothing and always wore the most expensive Savile Row suits and a red carnation. He was considered to be one of the best-dressed men in the Foreign Office, being obsessed with the proper fashion even during long-distance rail voyages. Henderson's obsession with his wardrobe, social etiquette, and hunting was part of a carefully cultivated image that he sought for himself as a polished Edwardian gentleman.
Henderson never married, but his biographer, Peter Neville, wrote that "women played an important role in his life". Henderson's lifelong bachelorhood did not cause questions about his sexuality; Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary of the Auswärtiges Amt, wrote in his diary that Henderson was a "ladies' man".
Ambassador to Turkey In the early 1920s, Henderson was stationed at the embassy in Turkey, where he played an important role in the often difficult relations between Britain and the new Turkish Republic. Henderson had wanted a posting in France, rather than Turkey, where he constantly complained to his superiors about being sent. During his time in Turkey, Henderson played a major role in the negotiations about the Mosul dispute, which had been caused by Turkish President Mustafa Kemal's claim to the Mosul region of Iraq. Henderson was forceful in upholding the British claim to the region, but was prepared to yield to Turkish demands for Constantinople. He argued that Britain had been shown to have a very weak hand by the Chanak Crisis in 1922, which revealed that public opinion in Britain and its dominions was unwilling go to war over the issue.
Ambassador to France and Yugoslavia Henderson served as an envoy to France in 1928 to 1929 and as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between 1929 and 1935. He did not want the latter post, whose British legation was considered to be an unglamorous post, compared to the "grand embassies" in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Vienna, Madrid and Washington. He had been lobbying for a major post in the Paris embassy and, expecting to move back to Paris soon, continued to pay the rent for his apartment there for some time after moving to Belgrade. During his time in Belgrade, Henderson became a very close friend of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, who shared his love of hunting and guns. In January 1929, having been a constitutional monarch, Alexander had staged a self-coup, abolished democracy and made himself the dictator of Yugoslavia. Following these events, Henderson's dispatches from Belgrade took on a notably pro-Yugoslav tone. His friendship with Alexander notably increased British influence in Yugoslavia, which first brought him attention in the Foreign Office.
As would be the case during his time in Berlin, Henderson took exception to any negative remark in the British press about Yugoslavia and wrote to the Foreign Office to ask if anything could be done to silence such criticism. After Alexander's assassination in Marseille, France, in October 1934, Henderson wrote: "I felt more emotion at King Alexander's funeral than I felt at any other except my mother's". Henderson wrote to a friend in Britain in 1935: "My sixth winter in the Belgrade trenches is the worst of all. The zest has gone out of it with King Alexander gone. It interested me enormously to play Stockmar to his Albert and that made all the difference". Henderson was also in close confidence with Prince Paul, the regent of Yugoslavia on behalf of Alexander's son, Peter II, who was only a boy. In January 1935, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert "Van" Vansittart sharply rebuked him for a letter he had written to Paul in which Henderson strongly supported Yugoslavia's complaints against Italy. Vansittart complained particularly about Henderson's claim that the Italian government supported Croat and Macedonian separatist terrorists and that Italy had been involved in Alexander's assassination: "Are we convinced of this and do we wish Prince Paul to think that we are convinced of it".
Ambassador to Argentina In 1935, Henderson became ambassador to Argentina.
Ambassador to Germany On 28 May 1937, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden appointed Henderson to be ambassador in Berlin. Harold Macmillan wrote of Eden's choice in his 1966 memoirs:
Eden wanted an ambassador in Berlin who could get along well with dictators, and Vansittart gave him a list of three diplomats who had shown a strong partiality towards autocratic leaders: Henderson, Sir Percy Loraine and Sir Miles Lampson. In his 1956 memoirs, The Mist Procession, Vansittart wrote about the appointment of Henderson: "Nevile Henderson... made such a hit with the dictator [King Alexander] by his skill at shooting that he was ultimately picked for Berlin. All know the consequences". Henderson's promotion from being the ambassador in Buenos Aires to being the ambassador in Berlin, which was regarded as one of the "grand embassies" in the Foreign Office, was a major boost to his ego. Henderson wrote at the time that he believed he had been "specially selected by Providence for the definite mission of, I trusted, helping to preserve the peace of the world". As he crossed the Atlantic on a ship to take him back to Britain, Henderson read Mein Kampf in the original German version to acquaint himself with the thinking of Adolf Hitler. Henderson wrote in his 1940 The Failure of a Mission that he was determined "to see the good side of the Nazi regime as well as the bad, and to explain as objectively as I could its aspirations and viewpoint to His Majesty's Government".
Upon arriving in London, Henderson met the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, who was due to replace Stanley Baldwin as prime minister the next month, for a briefing about the Berlin mission. Some controversy has ensued over just what precisely Chamberlain told Henderson. In Failure of a Mission, Henderson wrote that Chamberlain "outlined to me his views on the general policy towards Germany and I think I may honestly say to the last and bitter end I followed the general line which he set me, all the more easily and faithfully since it corresponded so closely with my own private conception of the service I could best render in Germany to my own country". Henderson was to say that Chamberlain had authorised him to commit "calculated indiscretions" in the pursuit of peace, but the German-born American historian Abraham Ascher wrote that no evidence has emerged to support that claim. T. Philip Conwell-Evans, a British historian who taught German history at Königsberg University, later said Henderson had told him that Chamberlain had made him his personal envoy to Germany who was to bypass Vansittart by taking orders directly from Chamberlain's office. Regardless of what Chamberlain said to Henderson in April 1937, Henderson always seemed to have regarded himself as directly answerable to 10 Downing Street and showed a marked tendency to ignore Vansittart.
A believer in appeasement, Henderson thought Hitler could be controlled and pushed toward peace and cooperation with the Western powers. Like almost all of the British elite in the interwar era, Henderson believed that the Treaty of Versailles was far too harsh on Germany and that if only the terms of Versailles were revised in Germany's favour, another world war could be prevented. Neville wrote that the charge that Henderson was pro-Nazi was incorrect since Henderson had advocated the revision of Versailles in Germany's favour long before Hitler had come to power. By contrast, Ascher credited Henderson's beliefs on avoiding war to his desire to uphold white supremacy and to avoid another "fratricidal" war between white peoples while other peoples started to demand equality. Ascher cited Henderson's dispatch to Eden on 26 January 1938 that warned that another Anglo-German war "would be ... absolutely disastrous – I cannot imagine and would be unwilling to survive the defeat of the British Empire. At the same time, I would view with dismay another defeat of Germany, which would merely serve the purposes of inferior races".
Shortly after arriving in Berlin, Henderson started to clash with Vansittart, who complained that Henderson was exceeding his brief and becoming too close to the Nazi leaders, especially Hermann Göring, who became Henderson's main diplomatic source as well as a personal acquaintance. Henderson first met Göring on 24 May 1937 and admitted to having a "real personal liking" for him. The same tendency towards hero worship that Henderson had displayed towards King Alexander in Belgrade reasserted itself in Berlin towards Göring, as Henderson had a fascination with militaristic authority figures. Göring shared Henderson's love of hunting and guns, and both frequently went away for hunting trips to discuss the future of Anglo-German relations. Eden sharply criticised Henderson for not challenging Göring's statement that the German people should not look upon Britain as "an enemy in their path" and that closer Anglo-German ties were needed, as the statement implied that current British foreign policy was anti-German. In one of his "calculated indiscretions", Henderson broke with the unwritten rule in the Foreign Office that ambassadors should never criticise their predecessors by telling Göring that Sir Eric Phipps had been too insensitive towards German concerns.