Eyre Crowe (diplomat)

Sir Eyre Alexander Barby Wichart Crowe (born July 30, 1864 in Leipzig , † April 28, 1925 ) was a British diplomat. He was one of the leading experts on Germany in the British Foreign Office in the period before World War I, and he was half of German descent himself.

Origin, relationship

Crowe went to school in Düsseldorf (where he grew up) and Berlin . His father Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896) was a journalist, British Consul General and later a commercial attachée for Europe. The painter Eyre Crowe was his uncle. His mother Asta von Barby (1841–1908) was German, daughter of Baron Gustav von Barby and Evelina von Ribbentrop , who married Otto von Holtzendorff after the death of her husband. Crowe's father was friends with Duke Ernst II (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) . The duchess was the godmother of Eyre Crowe.

From his origins, Crowe was very well versed in German history, literature, culture, politics and economics. Like his father, he had little sympathy for Wilhelm II , whom he considered to be the gravedigger of German liberalism.

In 1903 he married his German cousin Clema Gerhardt (1869–1953), daughter of Carl Jakob Adolf Christian Gerhardt , (who lived in Gamburg ) and the widow of Eberhardt von Bonin. Her cousin and that of Crowe himself was the later Grand Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff , with whom Crowe also corresponded (he was an opponent of Tirpitz). The marriage resulted in three daughters and one son.

His sister Victoria had married the military historian Spenser Wilkinson in 1880 .

Beginnings of the career

In 1882, Crowe went to England to take the diplomatic service exam. At that time he spoke German better than English and later, when he was excited, he could fall back into a German accent. Since he was not brought up in England (the family could not pay for upbringing there for financial reasons and instead he stayed longer in Paris), he was considered an outsider and his half-German origin made him the target of attacks from the First World War British press.

From 1885 he was in the diplomatic service and after a time as a junior clerk until 1896 resident clerk . First he worked in the consular department, then in the African protectorates department and from 1906 as a senior clerk in the Western Department.

The 1907 memorandum

He made a name for himself in the Foreign Ministry when, on January 1, 1907, he circulated a memorandum on the present state of British relations with France and Germany, which warned of the colonial endeavors of the German Empire, which had been in favor of England since around 1890 extortion foreign policy at regular intervals. So far, this has mostly been given in, but this has only resulted in new demands. He also accuses the German government of striving for a hegemonic role in Europe, a striving that England traditionally opposed in the past. He left it open whether this was done on purpose on the German side or as an expression of unskillful foreign policy as a result of the emperor's erratic and often aggressive influence. Since that would have the same political consequences, this question is secondary. According to Crowe, the continuation of the previous German policy would inevitably lead to war with Great Britain. The tone was by no means anti-German, it even praised the influence of German ideas and methods on the rest of the world and welcomed a strong Germany because of its role in a balance of power with France and Russia. The memorandum was drawn up as early as 1905/06 under the impact of the First Morocco Crisis .

Secretary of State Edward Gray found the memorandum useful and passed it on to other cabinet members such as Herbert Henry Asquith and Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman . Opinions later differed about the impact of the memorandum. Some saw it as the template for later British foreign policy up to the entry into the First World War, others found that the influence of Crowe was greatly overestimated and stated that the document did not have a greater influence.

Later career

Eyre did not deviate later in his assessment of the memorandum of 1907 and regularly gave similar assessments of the goals of German foreign policy in foreign policy crisis situations. In the Second Morocco Crisis (Panther Jump to Agadir) in 1911, he urged the German government to stand firm and support France in the crisis, if necessary even if the war was to enter, and in the July crisis of 1914 he also pleaded for entry into the war Side of France in the threatening conflict with the German Reich.

During World War I he was in the Department of contraband (Contraband Department) and the time of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, he was Assistant Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs (from 1912) and played a major role in the British delegation, with the rank of Ministre plénipotentiaire . From 1920 he was Permanent Under-Secretary in the State Department, which he remained until his death.

character

Crowe was considered brilliant, very precise, but also arrogant and someone who, regardless of the person, pointed it out to superiors if they thought they were poorly informed or argued weakly. Although he made an unstoppable career in the Foreign Ministry, his arrogance also hindered it: When the question of the successor to the Permanent Under-Secretary Arthur Nicolson (his immediate superior from 1910 to 1916) was discussed, Herbert Asquith initially prevented for this reason, that Crowe took over the assumed successor (he was only promoted to this position in 1920). Crowe got along well with Nicolson himself, but not so well with his predecessor Charles Hardinge (1906 to 1910 his immediate superior).

Honors

In 1907 he became CB , 1917 KCB and 1923 GCB, 1911 KCMG and 1920 GCMG.

literature

• Sybil Crowe, Edward Corp: Our ablest public servant: Sir Eyre Crowe, 1864-1925 , London, 1993 (from his daughter)
• Richard Cosgrove: Sir Eye Crowe and the English Foreign Office 1905-1914 , Dissertation, University of California 1967
• Elissa Jarvis: Shades of Gray: Anglo-German Diplomacy and Eyre Crowe 1905-1915, Master's Thesis, East Carolina University, 2010, pdf
• Zara Steiner The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1898-1914 , Cambridge University Press 1969
• Zara S. Steiner, Keith Nelson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War , 2nd edition, Macmillan 2003

Web links

Crowe Papers, Bodleian Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The action of Germany towards this country since 1890 might be likened not inappropriately to that of a professional blackmailer, whose exortions are wrung from his victims by the threat of some vague but dreadful consequences in case of a refusal
2. ↑ most valuable , marginal note on Crowe's memorandum, printed in Gooch, Temperley British documents on the origin of the war 1898-1914 , Volume 3, London, HMSO 1928, p. 420. The memorandum itself is printed from p. 406
3. ↑ Friedrich Thimme , EA Crowe's memorandum of January 1, 1907 , Berliner Monatshefte, Volume 8, 1929, p. 768
4. ^ For example, Cosgrove in his dissertation. After him, the influence of Crowe's was overestimated due to the large number of marginal notes he left on documents by historians who, for Cosgrove, were more indicative of a lack of access to Asquith.
5. ↑ Elissa Jarvis, Thesis, p. 24