Democracy has arrived at a gallop in England, and I feel all the time it is a race for life. Can we educate them before the crash comes?’ So the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, wrote in 1927 to the Viceroy of India, Edward Wood, then called Lord Irwin and a quondam Fellow of All Souls, afterwards Earl of Halifax and an Honorary Fellow of the college for a quarter of a century. I am going to call him Halifax as I measure his pace in the democratic gallop during the quarter-century before he reached viceregal splendour in 1925.

Halifax is remembered as a nobleman, as a territorial magnate, and as a Master of Foxhounds: his properties and trappings are supposed to have set his springs of action. David Cannadine has called him ‘a quintessential grandee’ and ‘a decorative but essentially marginal figure in politics.’ Yet Halifax’s family were notable for academic intelligence: his grandfather Charles Wood of Oriel secured double first-class honours in Classics and Mathematics in the reign of George IV. He, too, got first-class honours early in the reign of Edward VII. Election to the fellowship of All Souls, and the giving there of tutorials to undergraduates, followed. His rent-roll and the stables mattered to him, but so did private thinking and public ideals. This chapter is an examination of Halifax’s formative reasoning, and of the beliefs and connections that he formed in early adulthood. These were the making of the statesman who succeeded Edward Grey as Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1933, replaced Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary in 1938, and yielded to Churchill in the contest to succeed Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1940.

Halifax never lost the appearance of a first-class honours man who learnt from older Fellows when he was young and listened to younger Fellows when he was old. He was tall, slender, and stooping, with a pale, narrow face but a broad intellectual forehead: someone described him in 1924 as of ‘a rather dusty and untidy appearance, as though he lived chiefly among books.’ Vyvyan Adams, a Leeds MP who saw him speaking in the city in 1940, noted:

still there lingers about him the air of the overgrown schoolboy, very apt with his books, respectful to his superiors … and able by his conscientious application to win any open scholarship.