Editing Cliveden set (section)

{{Short description|1930s politically influential group of British people}}
[[File:Cliveden,_June_2005.JPG | thumb | right | Cliveden house]]
The '''Cliveden set''' were an [[upper-class]] group of politically influential people active in the 1930s in the [[United Kingdom]], prior to the [[Second World War]]. They were in the circle of [[Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor]], the first female [[Member of Parliament (United Kingdom)|Member of Parliament]] to take up her seat. The name comes from [[Cliveden]], a [[stately home]] in [[Buckinghamshire]] that was Astor's country residence. 

The "Cliveden Set" tag was [[neologism|coined]] by [[Claud Cockburn]] in his journalism for the [[communist]] newspaper ''[[The Week (1933)|The Week]]''. His notion of an upper class pro-German conspiracy was widely  accepted by opponents of [[Appeasement]] in the late 1930s. It was long accepted that the [[aristocracy (class)| aristocratic]] [[Germanophile]] [[social network]] supported friendly relations with [[Nazi Germany]] and helped create the 1930s policy of [[appeasement]]. [[John L. Spivak]], writing in 1939, devoted a chapter to the Cliveden Set.<ref>Secret Armies, (New York, Modern Age Books, 1939)</ref> 

After the [[end of World War II in Europe]], the discovery of the Nazis' [[The Black Book (list)| ''Black Book'']] in September 1945 showed that all the group's members were to be arrested as soon as Britain had been invaded by the [[Axis powers | Axis]]. Lady Astor remarked, "It is the complete answer to the terrible lie that the so-called 'Cliveden Set' was pro-Fascist."<ref>{{cite news |date=1945-09-14 |title=Nazi's black list discovered in Berlin |work=The Guardian |url=https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,6051,127730,00.html |access-date=2023-01-24}}</ref>  

New research shows that the Astors invited a very wide range of guests, including socialists, communists and enemies of appeasement. Scholars no longer claim there was any Cliveden conspiracy. Historian [[Andrew Roberts (historian)|Andrew Roberts]] says: "The myth of Cliveden being a nest of appeasers, let alone pro-Nazis, is exploded."<ref>Andrew Roberts, ''The Holy Fox: Biography of Lord Halifax'' (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991) p. 52.</ref>  Norman Rose's 2000 account of the group rejects the conspiracy theory of a pro-Nazi cabal. [[Carroll Quigley]] argues against the "mistaken idea" that the Cliveden group was pro-German: "They were neither anti-German in 1910 nor Pro-German in 1938, but pro-Empire all the time."<ref> Carroll Quigley, ''The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden'' (1981), p. 102.</ref>

[[Christopher Sykes (author)| Christopher Sykes]], in a sympathetic 1972 biography of Nancy Astor, argued that the entire story about the Cliveden Set had been an ideologically motivated fabrication by Cockburn that came to be generally accepted by the public, which was looking for scapegoats for the British prewar appeasement of [[Adolf Hitler]]. Some academic arguments have stated that Cockburn's account may have not have been entirely accurate, but that his main allegations cannot be easily dismissed.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=3tQoAEo9Y6oC&dq=appeasement%2C+public+opinion&pg=PA114 Frank McDonough, ''Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement, and the British Road to War'' (Manchester University Press,1998), p. 96-100]
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[http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~epf/1999/taylor.html A Reevaluation of Cockburn's Cliveden Set<!-- bot-generated title -->] at userwww.sfsu.edu {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090228171849/http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~epf/1999/taylor.html|date=28 February 2009}}</ref>