Diana, Lady Mosley (néeMitford; 17 June 1910 – 11 August 2003), known as Diana Guinness between 1929 and 1936, was a British aristocrat,
fascist, writer and editor. She was one of the
Mitford sisters and the wife of
Oswald Mosley, leader of the
British Union of Fascists.
Initially married to
Bryan Guinness, heir to the
barony of Moyne, who were both part of the
Bright Young Things, a social group of young
Bohemian socialites in 1920s London, her marriage ended in divorce as she was pursuing a relationship with Oswald Mosley. In 1936, she married Mosley at the home of the propaganda minister for
Nazi Germany,
Joseph Goebbels, with
Adolf Hitler as a guest of honour. Her involvement with fascist political causes resulted in three years'
internment during the
Second World War, when Britain was at war with the fascist regime of Nazi Germany. She later moved to Paris and enjoyed some success as a writer. In the 1950s, she contributed diaries to Tatler and edited the magazine The European.[1] In 1977, she published her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts,[2] and two more biographies in the 1980s.[3]
She was educated at home by a series of governesses, except for a six-month period in 1926, when she was sent to a day school in Paris.[14] In childhood, her younger sisters
Jessica Mitford ("Decca") and
Deborah ("Debo", later the Duchess of Devonshire), were particularly devoted to her. At the age of 18, shortly after her
presentation at Court, she became secretly engaged to
Bryan Walter Guinness. In her youth, Mitford was considered part of the social set known as 'The
Bright Young Things'.
Marriages
Guinness, an Irish aristocrat, writer and brewing heir, would inherit the
barony of Moyne. Diana's parents were opposed to the engagement but in time were persuaded; Sydney was particularly uneasy at the thought of two such young people having possession of such a large fortune, but she was eventually convinced Bryan was a suitable husband. They married on 30 January 1929; her sisters Jessica and Deborah were too ill to attend the ceremony. The couple had an income of £20,000 a year, an estate at
Biddesden in Wiltshire, and houses in London and Dublin. They were well known for hosting social events involving the
Bright Young People. The writer
Evelyn Waugh exclaimed that her beauty "ran through the room like a peal of bells", and he dedicated the novel Vile Bodies to her.[15] Portraits of her were painted by
Augustus John,
Pavel Tchelitchew and
Henry Lamb.[16] She was one of a series of society beauties photographed as classical figures by
Madame Yevonde.[17] The couple had two sons,
Jonathan (b. 1930) and
Desmond (1931–2020).
In February 1932, Diana met Sir
Oswald Mosley at a garden party at the home of the society hostess
Emerald Cunard. He soon became leader of the newly formed
British Union of Fascists and Diana became his lover; Mosley was then married to
Lady Cynthia Mosley, a daughter of
Lord Curzon, a former
Viceroy of India, and his first wife, the American mercantile heiress
Mary Victoria Leiter. Diana left her husband, "moving with a skeleton staff of nanny, cook, house-parlourmaid and lady's maid to a house at 2
Eaton Square, round the corner from Mosley's flat",[18] but Sir Oswald would not leave his wife. Quite suddenly, Cynthia died in 1933 of
peritonitis. Mosley was devastated by the death of his wife, but later started an affair with her younger sister,
Lady Alexandra Metcalfe.[19][page needed]
Mitford's parents did not approve of her decision to leave Guinness for Mosley, and she was briefly estranged from most of her family. Her affair and eventual marriage to Mosley also strained relationships with her sisters. Jessica and Deborah were initially not permitted to see Diana, for she was "living in sin" with Mosley in London. Deborah eventually came to know Mosley and ended up liking him very much. Jessica despised Mosley's beliefs and became permanently estranged from Diana in the later 1930s. Pam and her husband
Derek Jackson got along well with Mosley. Nancy never liked Mosley and, like Jessica, despised his political beliefs, but was able to learn to tolerate him for the sake of her relationship with Diana. Nancy wrote the novel Wigs on the Green, which satirised Mosley and his beliefs. After it was published in 1935, relations between the sisters became strained-to-non-existent and it was not until the mid-1940s that they were able to get back to being close again.[19][page needed]
The couple rented
Wootton Lodge, a country house in
Staffordshire that Diana had intended to buy. She furnished much of her new home with much of the Swinbrook furniture that her father was selling.[20] The Mosleys lived at Wootton Lodge along with their children from 1936 to 1939.
The Mitford family in 1928; Front row, from left to right, the mother Sydney Bowles, the daughters Unity, Jessica and Deborah, the father David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd baron Redesdale; second row, Diana and Pamela; back row, Nancy and Tom.
Diana Mitford and Bryan Guinness on their honeymoon in
Taormina, Italy, 1929.
Diana's grave at far right, next to those of her sisters, Unity and Nancy, at St Mary's Church,
Swinbrook in Oxfordshire.
Temple de la Gloire,
Orsay, Paris: Diana's long-term home after the war.
Nazi Germany
In 1934, Diana visited Germany with her then 19-year-old sister Unity. While there, they attended the first
Nuremberg rally after the Nazi rise to power. Unity, a friend of Hitler, introduced Diana to him in March 1935. They returned for the second rally later that year and were entertained as his guests at the 1935 rally. In 1936, he provided a
Mercedes-Benz to chauffeur Diana to the
Berlin Olympic games. She became well acquainted with
Winifred Wagner and
Magda Goebbels.
Diana and Oswald secretly married on 6 October 1936 in the drawing room of Nazi propaganda chief
Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler,
Robert Gordon-Canning and
Bill Allen were in attendance.[21] The marriage was kept secret until the birth of their first child in 1938. In August 1939, Hitler told Diana over lunch that war was inevitable.
Mosley and Diana had two sons: (Oswald) Alexander Mosley (born 1938) and
Max Rufus Mosley (1940–2021). Hitler presented the couple with a silver framed picture of himself. The Mosleys were interned during much of the Second World War, under
Defence Regulation 18B, along with other British fascists including
Norah Elam.[22]
MI5 documents released in 2002 described Lady Mosley and her political leanings. "Diana Mosley, wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, is reported on the 'best authority', that of her family and intimate circle, to be a public danger at the present time. Is said to be far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband and will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions. She is wildly ambitious."[23] On 29 June 1940, eleven weeks after the birth of her fourth son, Max, Diana was arrested (hastily stuffing Hitler's photograph under Max's cot mattress when the police came to arrest her) and taken to a cell in F Block in London's
Holloway Prison for women. She and her husband were held without charge or trial under the provisions of 18B, on the advice of MI5. The couple were initially held separately but, after personal intervention by Churchill, in December 1941, Mosley and two other 18B husbands (one of them Mosley's friend Captain H.W. Luttman-Johnson) were permitted to join their wives at Holloway. After more than three years' imprisonment, they were both released in November 1943 on the grounds of Mosley's ill health; they were placed under house arrest until the end of the war and were denied
passports until 1949.[24]
Lady Mosley's prison time failed to disturb her approach to life; she remarked in her later years that she felt better treated than earlier prisoners.[25]
After the war ended, the couple kept homes in
Ireland, with apartments in London and Paris. Their recently renovated
Clonfert home, a former Bishop's palace, burned down in an accidental fire. In her memoirs, Diana blamed her cook, writing that the fire could have been extinguished had it not been for the cook who ran back to her room to retrieve her possessions and in doing so delayed efforts to control the fire. Following this, they moved to a home near
Fermoy,
County Cork, later settling permanently in France, at the Temple de la Gloire, a Palladian temple in
Orsay, southwest of Paris, in 1950 (built in 1801 to honour the French victory of December 1800 at Hohenlinden, near Munich). Gaston and Bettina Bergery had told the Mosleys that the property was on the market. They were neighbours of the
Duke and
Duchess of Windsor, who lived in the neighbouring town
Gif-sur-Yvette, and soon became their close friends.
Once again they became known for entertaining, but were barred from all functions at the British Embassy.[26] During their time in France, the Mosleys quietly went through another marriage ceremony; Hitler had safeguarded their original marriage licence, and it was never found after the war. During this period, Mosley was unfaithful to Diana, but she found for the most part that she was able to learn to keep herself from getting too upset regarding his adulterous habits. She told an interviewer: "I think if you're going to mind infidelity, you better call it a day as far as marriage goes. Because who has ever remained faithful? I mean, they don't. There's passion and that's it."[26] Diana was also a lifelong supporter of the
British Union of Fascists (BUF), and its postwar successor the
Union Movement.
At times, she was vague when discussing her loyalties to Britain, her strong belief in fascism, and her attitude to Jews. In her 1977 autobiography A Life of Contrasts, she wrote, "I didn't love Hitler any more than I did Winston [Churchill]. I can't regret it, it was so interesting." In her final interviews with
Duncan Fallowell in 2002, she responded that her reaction to the newsreels of death camps was "Well, of course, horror. Utter horror. Exactly the same probably as your reactions." However, when asked about having revulsion against Hitler for this, she said that "I had a complete revulsion against the people who did it but I could never efface from my memory the man I had actually experienced before the war. A very complicated feeling. I can't really relate those two things to each other. I know I'm not supposed to say that but I just have to."[26] At other times, however, she behaved so as to suggest intense anti-semitic attitudes; the journalist
Paul Callan remembered mentioning that he was Jewish while interviewing her husband in Diana's presence. According to Callan, "I mentioned, just in the course of conversation, that I was Jewish—at which Lady Mosley went ashen, snapped a crimson nail and left the room ... No explanation was given but she would later write to a friend: 'A nice, polite reporter came to interview Tom [as Mosley was known] but he turned out to be Jewish and was sitting there at our table. They are a very clever race and come in all shapes and sizes.'"[7] Diana offered to entertain her teenage half-Jewish nephew, Benjamin Treuhaft, on a trip to France. The offer was refused by Benjamin's mother,
Jessica, who remained estranged from Diana over the latter's political past.[27] In a 2000 interview with The Guardian, Diana said that "Maybe instead they [European Jews] could have gone somewhere like Uganda: very empty and a lovely climate"[28] (a reference to the
Uganda Scheme proposed by
Zionists in 1903).
After their early twenties, Diana and her sister Jessica only saw each other once, when they met for half an hour as their elder sister, Nancy, lay dying in
Versailles. Diana said of Jessica in 1996: "I quite honestly don't mind what Decca [Jessica] says or thinks," adding that "She means absolutely nothing to me at all. Not because she's a Communist but simply because she's a rather boring person, really."[33]
In 1998, due to her advancing age, she moved out of the Temple de la Gloire and into an apartment in the
7th arrondissement of Paris.[26] Temple de la Gloire was sold in 2000 for £1 million. Throughout much of her life, particularly after her years in prison, she was afflicted by regular bouts of migraines. In 1981, she underwent successful surgery to remove a
brain tumour. She convalesced at
Chatsworth House, the residence of her sister Deborah. In the early 1990s, she was also successfully treated for
skin cancer. In later life, she also suffered from deafness.[34]
Mosley was shunned in the British media for a period after the war, and the couple established their own publishing company, Euphorion Books, named after a character in
Goethe's Faust. This allowed Oswald to publish, and Diana was free to commission a cultural list. After his release from jail, Oswald declared the death of fascism. Diana initially translated Goethe's Faust. Other notable books published by Euphorion under her aegis included La Princesse de Clèves (translated by Nancy, 1950),
Niki Lauda's memoirs (1985), and
Hans-Ulrich Rudel's memoirs, Stuka Pilot. She also edited several of her husband's books.
While in France, Mosley edited the fascist cultural magazine The European for six years, and to which she sometimes contributed material. She provided articles, book reviews, and regular diary entries. Many of her contributions were republished in 2008 in The Pursuit of Laughter. In 1965, she was commissioned to write the regular column "Letters from Paris" for Tatler. She reviewed autobiographical and biographical accounts as well as the occasional novel. Characteristically she would provide commentary of her own experiences and personal information of the subject of the book under discussion. She wrote regularly for Books and Bookmen. Her 1980 review of a biography on
Magda Goebbels attracted attention from
Christopher Hitchens.[36] Hitchens objected to a passage where Mosley wrote: "Everyone knows the tragic end. As the Russians surrounded Berlin, the Goebbels painlessly killed their children and then themselves. The dead children were described by people who saw them as looking 'peacefully asleep'. Those who condemn this appalling,
Masada-like deed must consider the alternative facing the distraught Magda." Hitchens insisted that the New Statesman issue an editorial condemning the Masada trope.[37] In her eighties, Mosley became the lead reviewer for the London Evening Standard during
A. N. Wilson's seven-year tenure as literary editor.[38] In 1996, following Wilson's departure, his successor was asked by the new editor of the newspaper,
Max Hastings to stop running Mosley's reviews. Hastings is reported to have said that he did not want any more "bloody Lady Hitler" in the newspaper.[38]
Mosley wrote the foreword and introduction of Nancy Mitford: A Memoir by
Harold Acton. She produced her own two books of memoirs: A Life of Contrasts (1977,
Hamish Hamilton), and Loved Ones (1985). The latter is a collection of pen portraits of close relatives and friends such as the writer
Evelyn Waugh among others. In 1980, she released The Duchess of Windsor, a biography.
In 2007, letters between the Mitford sisters, including communications to and from Diana, were published in the compilation The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley. The Sunday Times journalist
India Knight described her (and Unity) as "both chilling and gruesomely fascinating".[39] A following collection consisting of her letters, articles, diaries and reviews was released as The Pursuit of Laughter in December 2008.
Death
Mosley died in Paris in August 2003, aged 93. Her cause of death was given as complications related to a stroke she had suffered a week earlier, but reports later surfaced that she had been one of the many elderly fatalities of the
heat wave of 2003 in mostly non-air-conditioned Paris.[40] She was buried at St Mary's Churchyard,
Swinbrook, Oxfordshire,[23] alongside her sisters.[41]
She was survived by her four sons:
Jonathan and
Desmond Guinness, and Alexander and
Max Mosley. Her stepson
Nicholas Mosley was a novelist who also wrote a critical memoir of his father for which Mosley reportedly never forgave him, despite their previously close relationship. A great-granddaughter,
Jasmine Guinness, a great-niece,
Stella Tennant and a granddaughter,
Daphne Guinness are models.[42]
British journalist
Andrew Roberts criticised Mosley following her death in the pages of The Daily Telegraph (16 August 2003), reporting that when he interviewed her for his book Eminent Churchillians, she had surprised him by not serving up a "David Irving-style refutation" of the Holocaust by declaring "I'm sure he [Hitler] was to blame for the extermination of the Jews. He was to blame for everything, and I say that as someone who approved of him." However, her other remarks about Hitler showed the lifelong "same disdain for equivocation" she had always displayed, prompting him to call her an "unrepentant Nazi and effortlessly charming", and her views "disgusting, unchanged" and "repulsive".[8] A. N. Wilson wrote for the same newspaper and said that her public loyalty for Oswald and Hitler were disastrous mistakes, claiming that privately Mosley had admitted that the Nazis were "really rather awful".[34] Three days later, letters to the editor from both her son, Jonathan Guinness, Lord Moyne, and his daughter (her granddaughter), Daphne Guinness, attempted to refute Roberts' statements by citing her "lack of hypocrisy", claiming Mosley's "upper-class etiquette" would prohibit giving any sort of explanation or an apology to a journalist, and that regardless of her giving a Hitler salute during the singing of God Save The King in 1935, she was never a threat to wartime Britain.[43]
A sarcastic commentary by Canadian human-rights activist and Telegraph columnist Mark Steyn appeared in the same issue. He described Mosley’s unwavering allegiance to Hitler and fascism as that of "a silly kid".[44] An equally "indulgently dismissive attitude" of her opinions was seconded in the Sunday edition in an interview with her stepson Nicholas Mosley, with whom she had refused to speak for over two decades after the publication of Beyond the Pale, his unfavorable memoir of her husband.[45]
In literature and film
Mosley inspired the protagonist of the 2018 novel After the Party by
Cressida Connolly.[46] She is portrayed extensively in the sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders.[47]
^Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 32826). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.