Blackwell Reference Online

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British Prime Minister (1957–63). A delicate boy, who left Eton early, he was deeply affected by his possessive, domineering American mother. He gained a first class honours degree in classics at Oxford and then served in the Grenadier Guards in the First World War and was wounded three times. After the war he was aide‐de‐camp to the Governor‐General of Canada, the Duke of Devonshire, whose daughter, Lady Dorothy Cavendish, he married on their return to England in 1920. She formed a liaison with Robert Boothby in 1929 which lasted until her death: her fourth child was Boothby's. Macmillan and his wife kept up appearances in public but in private, as Dorothy said, ‘I am faithful to Bob’. Elected as a Conservative MP in 1924, Macmillan was distressed by the unemployment of the Great Depression (1929–39) and in 1938 wrote The Middle Way , which combined state planning with private enterprise and accepted a mixed economy. He adopted keynesianism as a means of reviving the economy and criticized the government's domestic policy. Macmillan was a critic of the government's foreign policy too. He voted against the government in 1936 because of its failure to take action against Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and resigned the conservative party whip, sitting as an Independent Conservative until Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937. He first became a minister under ... log in or subscribe to read full text