 | |
| Formation | 1930 |
|---|---|
| Type | Conservatism Toryism Integral nationalism Anti-democracy Neo-feudalism Ultra-royalism White supremacy |
| Purpose | Socio-political organisation and publishing society |
| Location | |
Key people | |
| Part of aseries on |
| Toryism |
|---|
 |
TheEnglish Mistery ("Mistery" being an old word for aguild) was a political andesoteric group active in theUnited Kingdom of the 1930s. A "Conservative fringe group" in favour of bringing back thefeudal system,[1] its views have been characterised as "reactionary, ultra-royalist, and anti-democratic".[2] The organisation was opposed tosocial welfare, theLondon School of Economics, and theUnited States.[3]
The London barrister William John Sanderson (1883–1941) was the son of W. J. Sanderson ofGosforth, educated atMarlborough College, and graduating LL.B. atJesus College, Cambridge; he wascalled to the bar at theInner Temple in 1906. He was beforeWorld War I at the centre of a group of "Royalist andLoyalist" young men. Some of those were associated with the chambers ofF. E. Smith; and very many of them died in the war in France.[4][5][6] In 1917 he founded the Order of the Red Rose, ananti-Semitic group opposed tofinance capitalism, with the zoologist George Percival Mudge, and the academicArthur Gray.[7]
Sanderson had notions that if the mystical "lost secrets" of the English could be discovered, then the sort of society he envisioned could be created or as he saw it recreated.[8] The "lost secrets" of the English that Sanderson sought were the "Secret of Memory" as opposed to the "paraphernalia of learning"; the "Secret of Race" as only Englishmen with good genes would have sex with Englishwomen of equally good genes; the "Secret of Government"; the "Secret of Power" which had been destroyed by "industrial ideals"; the "Secret of Organisation"; the "Secret of Property" (i.e. feudalism as a social system); and the "Secret of Economics" which had lost due to "moneyed interests".[8] He knew ofItalian Fascism through the work ofHarold Goad. In a letter of 1937 he wrote of his personal contacts withCamillo Pellizzi (it:Camillo Pellizzi),Luigi Villari andDino Grandi.[9] He joined theImperial Fascist League.[10] In his pamphletAn Introduction to the English Mistery, Sanderson wrote that there were two types of "aliens", namely "the Dutch, Danes and other peoples of north-west Europe" vs. "some races on the other hand differ very widely from us both in character and tradition".[11] Sanderson was described by all who knew him as a deeply unpleasant man with repulsive views such as his statement that people who became seriously ill did not deserve sympathy and that God only cared about the lives of rich people.[12] The fact that Sanderson was a very small man whose own illness left him confined to a wheelchair did not stop him from preaching the doctrine that only the lives of healthy, attractive, and well off people mattered as he had no compassion for the poor and/or the sick.[12]
Dan Stone has stated that the importance of the English Mistery lay "in the fact that it had links, both personal and ideological, with much wider strands of thought in interwar Britain."[13] Sanderson founded the group in 1930, to promote his view ofleadership.[14] It took its title from his book of that year,That Which Was Lost: A Treatise on Freemasonry and the English Mistery.
Close colleagues of Sanderson in the founding group of English Mistery wereBryant Godman Irvine, Ben Shaw and Norman Swan.[15] Conservative MPsMichael Beaumont andReginald Dorman-Smith joined. Later Beaumont left: both he and Dorman-Smith found the Mistery inactive in practical terms.[16][full citation needed][17] Beaumont in 1930 introducedGerard Wallop (courtesy title Viscount Lymington to 1943) to Sanderson; Wallop found him to be "a very short physically myopic Northumbrian". Wallop accepted Sanderson's offer to become the "executive leader" of the Mistery.[18] By 1933 it was said that Wallop had "attracted around him a band of devoted young men, known collectively as the English Mistery, who seek the ideal of aristocratic rule" in a "semi-masonic order".[19] Wallop eventually split the group in 1936, forming his successor organisation, theEnglish Array.
John Platts-Mills belonged to the group;[20] he was recruited in 1931 via theApollo University Lodge in Oxford and Godman Irvine, being driven toLincoln's Inn to meet Sanderson.[6] His autobiography records that at this time Sanderson held weeklysoirées, largely social, and more intense Thursday meetings at which short papers were read. He gained apupillage in 1932, at 5Essex Court Chambers, and almost simultaneously had an offer to stand for parliament from theDuke of Devonshire, to replaceEdward Marjoribanks. He left the Mistery over its anti-Semitism, with the rise of Hitler.[21] His flat at 2,Paper Buildings,Inner Temple, was reportedly used for meetings of the Mistery for a time.[22] He mentions as members John de Rutzen, John Davenport, andJohn Dennis Fowler Green (1909–2000) who became a BBC radio producer.[21]
The Mistery's members included the British NietzscheanAnthony Ludovici,[23][full citation needed] a prolific writer for the movement and former of its ideology, and the journalistCollin Brooks, member of both the Grosvenor Kin and St James Kin in London.[24][25] Others wereRolf Gardiner,Peter Kemp,[26] andGraham Seton Hutchison,[27] founder in 1933 of the pro-Nazi and anti-SemiticNational Workers' Movement,[28] and the retired army officerCecil de Sausmarez.[29] Hutchison worked in the pay ofAlfred Rosenberg, the "official philosopher" of the NSDAP who also headed theAußenpolitisches Amt (Foreign Policy Office) of the NSDAP.[30]
As for theBritish Union of Fascists, many of the group's members were "aristocratic revivalists and Diehard peers of theEdwardian period".[15]Henry William John Edwards wrote in 1938 (referring though to 1935) of "a Nietzschean Tory of the kind which finds a way into membership of the English Mistery".[31] A private dinner for the English Mistery took place on 29 April 1939, in the Grand Hotel,Hanley, Staffordshire. The 40 to 50 men who attended wore red roses. The officers of the Mistery wereThomas Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden (High Steward), with William Sanderson,Roger Gresham Cooke, John Green and Henry Snell.[32]
Sanderson was aFreemason but disaffected, and author of a bookStatecraft (1927).[10] Bernhard Dietz has describedStatecraft as a "racist, antisemitic and misogynistic fundamental critique of modern industrial society", where Sanderson offered up as an alternative "the mythical fantasy of a masculine, military society".[33]
The English Mistery envisioned their ideal England as a country with a strict hierarchy and inhabited by a nation of "racially pure" Englishmen who were led by an absolute monarch and supported by strong leaders. It was elitist and consciously chose not to become a mass movement, because, as one of its pamphlets stated, "we do not want millions of ineffective members".[33] It was organised into "kins" with an average of 10–30 or so members.[8] Being firmly anti-democratic, the group regarded the emergence of modernparliamentary democracy anduniversal suffrage as disasters.[33]
In the group's view, "submissive" races and peoples could be the victim of brutalities and slaughter, but to them this was a good thing:
Surely, therefore, the time has come to recognise the inevitability of violence and sacrifice, and consciously to select the section or elements in the world or the nation that should be sacrificed.[34]
Stone comments: "The slaughter of primitive peoples as a way of venting the Englishman's excess energy, has been long a mainstay of British imperial thinking."[35] The Mistery was quite sexist and did not accept women as members.[36] The British historian Daniel Stone noted thatantifeminism was one of the strongest motivations for the Mistery as the group's publications, especially those byAnthony Ludovici brim with resentment and fury over women making demands for equality.[37]
One of the English Mistery's leaders,Rolf Gardiner, wrote about the group in the April 1936 edition of theDeutsche Akademische Austauschdienst journal where he declared:
The members of this organisation, which brings together employers and workers in organic groups and constellations, call themselves 'Royalists'. They want to make the king once again the leader of the English people. The king should no longer simply be the bearer of the Crown, but the living embodiment of the State's power and of the deepest will of the people. From criticism of the Conservative Party, liberal through and through, they have moved towards a contemplation of the forms of English government before Cromwell. They want to revive long lost Germanic traditions in the English social order.[33]
In 1936, the English Mistery fell apart owing to a dispute between Sanderson and Lord Lymington.[38] The vast majority of the English Mistery led by Lymington left to found a new group,English Array while Sanderson remained the leader of a rump.[39]
