On the death of his father in 1890, William Waldorf Astor came into an inheritance of $100 million, about $2.8 billion at today's values. The family fortune had originated in the fur trade in the 18th century, when John Jacob Astor emigrated from Germany to America. Later, John Jacob's sons and grandsons moved into real estate, and by the end of the 19th century the Astors owned some very large chunks of New York city. Money begets money, and whatever the family put its hand to turned to gold: the Waldorf Hotel, built by William Waldorf on the site of his father's old mansion on Fifth Avenue, grossed $4.5 million in its first year.
Having put a toe into the polluted waters of New York politics and quickly withdrawn it, William Waldorf, like one of Henry James's fabulously wealthy expatriates, moved to England, where he leased a London house, built an office block on the Victoria Embankment, and bought Cliveden (pronounced Clivden, with a short i and silent e), a vast mansion perched on chalk cliffs above the Thames some 20 miles outside London. He also began to acquire newspapers, including, in 1911, the Observer. When William's son Waldorf married, as a wedding gift the father bestowed on the couple the house at Cliveden and all it contained.
The Astor sons had been brought up with a keen sense of public duty; old William Waldorf, though certainly no man of the people, drilled into his children the belief that great wealth brings with it great responsibility. Waldorf Astor, much concerned at the ill-effects of contaminated milk, would take a cow, and cowman, along with him on family holidays, housed in a special carriage attached to his train, so that he might dispense fresh milk free to children at stations along the way.
And there were larger matters than milk. In Waldorf's lifetime, Cliveden would become the centre of a network of highly influential individuals, all fired with the desire to do good in the world. That the good of the world should be largely synonymous with the interests of the British Empire seemed to them entirely natural; one of the leading Clivedenites, Lionel Curtis, in his magnum opus, the multi-volume Civitas Dei, attempted to present a blueprint for the Kingdom of God on earth, to be founded mainly on the British Commonwealth. Curtis, a relentless defender of the Empire, was one of the chief British negotiators at the Irish Treaty talks in London in 1921, and was known as the "hammer of the Nationalists", some commentators even holding him directly responsible for the Civil War.
Others among the "Cliveden Set" were the diplomat and political thinker Philip Kerr, later Lord Lothian, the liberal international banker Robert Brand, and Geoffrey Dawson, long-time editor of the London Times, and one of the most influential journalists of the pre-war years. Under Dawson, a fervent supporter of Chamberlain and the quest for "peace in our time", the newspaper became a loud and powerful voice in favour of striking a deal with Hitler.
If the Astors were out of Henry James, Waldorf's wife, Nancy Langhorne, was pure Evelyn Waugh. A spirited, some might say manic, person, Nancy was one of the famous Langhorne sisters, Southern belles who went forth from Danville, Virginia, to take on the great new world they could see approaching with the new century. Nancy's first foray, however, was a disaster. She married Robert Shaw, a drunkard, enduring four miserable years with him until they divorced in 1901, not before Shaw had contracted a second, bigamous marriage. Freed at last, Nancy sought solace in foreign travel. In England she met Waldorf Astor, who quickly proposed marriage. After a suitably coy hesitation, Nancy accepted.
Despite Nancy's fire-cracker personality, she does not seem to have been a particularly passionate woman, while Waldorf, though patently a good man, was a bit of a dull dog. The marriage worked, though. As Norman Rose writes, "Despite an obvious clash of temperaments - one extrovert, domineering, emotional, tending to see issues and people in terms of black and white; the other, reflective, intellectual, self-controlled, almost ascetic in outlook - they were, at heart, linked by a deep, intuitive mutual need."
In their last years together the relationship turned sour, and Nancy was frequently heard to declare, "I married beneath me, all women do." The two great causes in Nancy's life were the temperance movement, and Christian Science. She was elected to parliament in 1919, taking the Plymouth seat that Waldorf had vacated when he inherited a peerage on the death of his father. She was the first woman MP to enter the House - Countess Markiewicz had been elected in 1918, but was in prison for Sinn Fein activities - and many of the old boys were deeply affronted by her irreverence and energy. Lloyd George described the scene of her first entry to the parliamentary Chamber:
[Nancy] talked all the way up the floor of the House . . . When she got to the table she almost forgot to sign the register owing to her anxiety to engage in conversation with Bonar Law. Then she wanted to have a chat with the Speaker.
Although she and Waldorf were liberal in outlook, Nancy had many prejudices. She was fiercely anti-Catholic, considered the "coloured" races irredeemably inferior to the white, and was a rabid anti-Semite. In her declining years, when her son David Astor had taken over the Observer and turned it into one of the greatest liberal, investigative newspapers of the 20th century, she railed against him and the paper for his "left-wing" politics, and what she considered his weakness for putting too many black men on the front page. She was a piece of work, all right, was Nancy.
The 1930s saw the Cliveden Set at the height of its powers and influence. Or so the public believed. But it is arguable that this little band of do-gooders, seeking to set the world to rights in the intervals between afternoon tea, a few games of Nancy's beloved musical chairs, and a good dinner, constituted nothing more than a talking shop. Legendary status was bestowed on them by the radical and cheerfully irresponsible journalist Claud Cockburn, who in his mimeographed paper The Week hounded the Clivedenites as conspirators, political meddlers, and champions of appeasement. Towards the end of the 1930s, in the fevered run-up to war, the Cliveden Set became famous the world over as the real power behind Chamberlain's government - as, indeed, the "real", clandestine government of England and of what remained of the British Empire.
Did Nancy and Waldorf and Co. really have much power? Certainly not as much as The Week credited them with. Norman Rose, who holds the Chair of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is judicious, even generous, in his assessment. He doubts that Clivedenite appeasement policies gave Hitler any great encouragement; the Fuhrer knew from the start what he was going to do, and nothing was going to stop him, as Lord Lothian, one of the leading "appeasers", discovered to his horror when he finally got round to reading Mein Kampf.
From the 1960s onward, the history of "appeasement" began to come under revisionist scrutiny.
There were no more Children of Light battling the Children of Darkness, no more heroes or villains. Instead, we find working politicians, morally upright, diligent, harassed, picking their way through a minefield of economic, social, political, international and psychological constraints.
On the evidence of Professor Rose's scholarly, entertaining, but somewhat raggedly written book, that seems a fair assessment.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times. His new novel, Eclipse, has just been published by Picador.