The Permanent Under-Secretary of State: A Brief History of the Office and its Holders

Hardinge was surprised at Sanderson having 'taken up the cudgels for Germany'. He should not have been. Sanderson had worked closely with Foreign Secretaries who had looked to Germany almost as a natural ally in their dealings with older and more dangerous imperial rivals. But Hardinge was very different in background, career and character from Sanderson.

His paternal grandfather had been Governor-General of India, and his maternal grandfather, Lord Lucan, had led the Light Brigade in its ill-fated charge in the Crimea. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College Cambridge, where he gained a third class honours degree in mathematics, he entered the Diplomatic Service in the spring of 1880 and served successively in Constantinople, Berlin, Washington, Sofia, Bucharest, Paris, Tehran and St Petersburg, and he was briefly Assistant Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office during 1903-04. And although in 1905 he quibbled over the pecuniary sacrifice involved in exchanging an Embassy for the Permanent Under-Secretaryship, he had by then come to realise, as he later acknowledged in his memoirs, 'that the only way to get on in the service was to disregard material advantages and to seek only for power'. Hardinge was the first PUS to be drawn from the Diplomatic Service, and he was the only PUS to hold the office twice.

Hardinge's appointment as Permanent Under-Secretary coincided with three significant developments in Foreign Office history: the collapse of the Unionist Government in December 1905 and the formation of a Liberal administration with Sir Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary; the opening of the Algeciras Conference which was intended to settle the international crisis resulting from Germany's championing of Morocco's independence against the expansive designs of France, and the challenge this apparently posed to the recently-concluded entente cordiale; and the implementation of the Sanderson/Crowe reforms for which Hardinge was later to claim credit. Grey was much more inclined than Lansdowne had been to regard the maintenance of the Anglo-French entente as a fundamental element in British foreign policy, and over the next few years the relationship was transformed from an understanding on colonial issues into what was in effect a quasi-alliance. This was very much in line with Hardinge's own thinking, and a relatively inexperienced Grey, who, unlike his immediate predecessors, had to defend policy in the Commons, came to rely increasingly on his advice and that proffered by other senior officials. Despatches from missions abroad were henceforth regularly accompanied by minutes and Office memoranda analysing and summarising international developments and recommending appropriate courses of action. In addition, Hardinge corresponded by private letter with all of Britain's major Embassies in Europe, conveying both Office gossip and detailed information on current preoccupations in Whitehall.

Hardinge's burden of work steadily increased in a period which witnessed renewed crises in the Near East, the seemingly relentless expansion of German naval power, and the achievement of a rather less than successful accommodation with Russia in Persia and central Asia. The King's enthusiasm for foreign travel also expanded the role of the PUS. On no less than eight occasions between April 1906 and February 1909 Hardinge accompanied Edward VII on official or semi-official visits to foreign Heads of State. That to Carthagena in April 1907 opened the way to the conclusion of the Mediterranean Accords with France and Spain, an event which was perceived in Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg as evidence that the King was pursuing a policy aimed deliberately at encircling Germany; and that to Reval in June 1908 appeared to confirm the new understanding with Russia and the emergence of what was sometimes referred to as the 'Triple Entente'. The meeting between Edward VII and Nicholas II at Reval might also be classed as a minor triumph for Sir Arthur Nicolson, who, after succeeding Hardinge as Ambassador in St Petersburg, was also to succeed him as PUS, when in November 1910 Hardinge was appointed Viceroy of India.

Nicolson was not well-suited either in stamina or temperament for the post of Permanent Under-Secretary.

A career diplomat, before taking up his post in St Petersburg he had been Britain's Minister in Tangier, Ambassador in Madrid and Head of Delegation to the Algeciras Conference. But while he was a skilled negotiator and adept reporter of events, he never developed the makings of a good administrator. Anglo-Russian differences over Persia, a fresh crisis over Morocco, and war in the Balkans, placed new burdens on the Office, and Nicolson was evidently overwhelmed by a system which required him to act as filter between energetic departmental heads and the Secretary of State. Moreover, he never achieved the close working relationship which Hardinge had established with Grey. The latter, with whom he quarrelled over Ulster, relied increasingly upon his Private Secretary, William Tyrrell, for advice, and Nicolson was accused of excessive Russophilia. In ill-health and anxious to leave London, Nicolson began in August 1912 to hanker after a posting abroad. After having been refused the Embassies at Constantinople and Vienna, both of which became vacant in 1913, he set his sights on Paris. Bertie, who had been Ambassador there since January 1905, was due to retire when he reached seventy in August 1914. But Bertie was reluctant to go, and certainly had no wish make way for Nicolson whom he feared 'would be an out and out advocate at Paris and in London of Russian views'. At a time when Austria-Hungary and Russia seemed set on a collision course in the Balkans, Bertie thought there was a need to have in Paris someone who would moderate French zeal for supporting their Russian allies. He was therefore particularly irritated when Nicolson, 'the little blue eyed rogue', began making enquiries about re-furnishing the Embassy.

In the end Nicolson was denied the opportunity to move by the outbreak of the First World War and a request from Grey to Bertie to 'stay on and see the war through'. He spent another two unhappy years as PUS, confining himself to helping Grey with the routine work of the Office and neither attempted nor desired to take a leading part in the conduct of war-time diplomacy. 'His whole attitude towards the war was', in the words of his biographer, his son Harold Nicolson, 'indeed, old fashionable'. He objected to the blockade: he hated the secret service work and spy-fever which it produced: he was particularly distressed by the excesses of war-time propaganda.' Yet, the exigencies of total war required the mobilisation of all the resources of the state and increasingly involved other Whitehall Departments in the conduct of foreign relations. Senior officials in the Foreign Office continued to exercise considerable influence on the Foreign Secretary, but foreign policy was no longer his exclusive preserve. Grey willingly accepted a subordinate role in the Cabinet, deferring to the wishes of the Admiralty and the War Office, and Balfour, his successor in Lloyd George's Government, was not even a member of the War Cabinet. On the eve of Hardinge's return to London as PUS in June 1916, Bertie wrote from Paris to warn him: 'I think that you will find that the Foreign Office is in great part a 'pass on' Department viz. it issues instructions at the issue of other offices often without considering whether such instructions are advisable or feasible and sometime in ignorance seemingly of what has already been said by some other Departments of the Foreign Office.'

Hardinge was also not the man he had once been. Prior to his departure for India he had been raised to a peerage and had taken the title of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst. But personal bereavements, public criticism of his part in the disastrous Mesopotamian campaign, and the shock of being blown up on an elephant, had all seemed to weaken his resolve. He soon had to cope with an Office in which there was an uncertain division of responsibility between Balfour and Lord Robert Cecil, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary and Minister of Blockade, and with a Prime Minister who had little respect for traditional institutions, distrusted intermediaries and preferred to engage in his own brand of personal diplomacy. His colleagues hoped that when peace came the Office would be able to reassert its central role in directing policy. Elaborate preparations were made for a peace conference, and the newly-established Historical Section produced over 180 Handbooks containing background information on issues likely to be considered. Hardinge was not however permitted truly to play the part of organising Ambassador during the negotiations at Paris, and Lloyd George looked to his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, to provide what central coordination the British delegation possessed. Moreover, the effective division of the Office into two parts in 1919, one with Balfour in Paris, and the other under his successor Lord Curzon in London, helped further reduce its influence on policy.

Hardinge was also faced with implementing the report of the pre-war MacDonnell Commission on the Civil Service, whose recommendations included the fusion of the Foreign Office with the Diplomatic Service and the introduction of an entry system which would attract candidates from a broader social base. This was to involve Hardinge in long battles with the Treasury, which favoured reform but was reluctant to pay for it. In consequence, only a partial merger of the two services was achieved up to First Secretary level and, while entrance procedures were liberalised, conservatives in the Office were to insist on a method of selecting candidates separate to that applied elsewhere in the Civil Service. There would, as one official remarked, otherwise be no way of excluding 'Jews, coloured men and infidels who [were] British subjects'. Hardinge nonetheless gave oblique recognition to the shortcomings of such selection procedures. When in June 1920 Sir Auckland Geddes, then British Ambassador in Washington, suggested that the ideal senior staff in his Embassy should consist of at least one Roman Catholic, a Jew, a Scotch Presbyterian, and an Anglican, Hardinge confessed: 'We could not find enough Jews and Scotch Presbyterians to go round!' Meanwhile, the PUS failed to establish a modus vivendi with George Curzon. It was difficult for one former Viceroy to reconcile himself to taking instructions from another, and their relationship was characterised by personal bickering and deep-seated animosity. 'They were', Lord Vansittart later recalled, 'connected by a broad old speaking tube, and when George blew down Charlie blew up.' Relations between them only improved after Hardinge managed to fulfil one of his long held ambitions by securing appointment as Ambassador to Paris in November 1920. There, much to Curzon's evident disgust, he set about furnishing the beautiful Hôtel de Charost with tiger skins, elephant tusks and silver caskets. He was replaced as PUS by Crowe, a survivor of the old diplomacy and an unacknowledged progenitor of the new.