Diana, Lady Mosley (née Mitford; 17 June 1910 – 11 August 2003), known as Diana Guinness between 1929 and 1936, was a British fascist, aristocrat, writer and editor. She was married to Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Diana was one of the Mitford sisters, six girls born to David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, and his wife Sydney Bowles (1880–1963), namely Nancy (born 1904), Pamela (1907), Diana (1910), Unity (1914), Jessica (1917) and Deborah (1920). The sisters had one brother, Tom (born 1909) who was killed in action in 1945.
She was initially married to Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and they both became part of a social group of young Bohemian socialites in 1920s London known as the bright young things. 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 guest.
Mosley's involvement with Nazi figures and 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 fascist magazine The European. In 1977, she published her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, and in the 1980s she wrote two biographies of leading figures.
Mosley's 1989 appearance on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs caused controversy. Mosley did not quite express Holocaust denial but went as far as to question the extent of Hitler’s involvement, and often stressed in interviews that her own association with Hitler occurred before the Holocaust. She was a regular book reviewer for Books and Bookmen and later at The Evening Standard in the 1990s. Of her beauty, family friend James Lees-Milne wrote "She was the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen". She was described by obituary writers such as the historian Andrew Roberts as "unrepentant" about her previous political associations.Roberts, Andrew. (13 August 2003). Diana Mosley, unrepentantly Nazi and effortlessly charming The Telegraph. Gentleman, Amelia. (13 August 2003). Diana Mosley, Hitler's angel, dies unrepentant in Paris The Guardian.
Early life
Diana Mitford was the fourth child and third daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale (1878–1958), and his wife Sydney (1880–1963). She was a first cousin once removed of Clementine Churchill, second cousin of Sir Angus Ogilvy, and first cousin, twice removed, of Bertrand Russell. She was raised in the country estate of Batsford Park, Gloucestershire, then from the age of 10 at the family home, Asthall Manor in Oxfordshire, and later at Swinbrook House, a home her father had built in the nearby village of Swinbrook in Oxfordshire.
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, France. 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 Guinness.
Marriages
Guinness was an Irish aristocrat, writer and brewing heir who would later inherit the barony of Moyne. Diana's parents were initially opposed to the engagement, Sydney being particularly uneasy at the thought of two such young people having possession of such a large fortune, but in time they were persuaded. The marriage took place on 30 January 1929, her sisters Jessica and Deborah being too ill to attend. With an income of £20,000 a year, the couple maintained houses in London and Dublin as well as an estate at Biddesden in Wiltshire. In 1930, Diana's sister Pamela settled in a nearby cottage to run the Biddesden farm.
The Guinnesses were well known for hosting "bright young things" social events. 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. Portraits of Diana were painted by Augustus John, Pavel Tchelitchew and Henry Lamb. She was one of a series of society beauties photographed as classical figures by Madame Yevonde.
The couple had two sons, Jonathan (born 1930) and Desmond (born 1931), but increasingly tensions arose between the sensitive and diffident Guinness, who preferred to remain at home with his family, and Diana, who wanted to travel and to fill the house with her friends. In February 1932, at a garden party at the home of the society hostess Emerald Cunard, Diana met Sir Oswald Mosley who was soon to become leader of the newly formed British Union of Fascists. Although Mosley was already married to Lady Cynthia Mosley, Diana was enamoured and 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". Mosley, however, refused to leave his wife. In 1933, Cynthia quite suddenly died of peritonitis. The now widowed Mosley continued to refuse to commit to Diana, starting an affair with his late wife's younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe. Nevertheless, in June 1933, some four years after their wedding, Diana divorced Guinness.
Diana's parents did not approve of her decision to leave Guinness, and Diana became a "social pariah" and was briefly estranged from most of her family. Her affair with 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 on the other hand despised Mosley's beliefs, and became permanently estranged from Diana in the later 1930s. Pamela and her husband Derek Jackson got along well with Mosley. Nancy despised Mosley's political beliefs, but tolerated him for the sake of her relationship with Diana. After the publication of Nancy's 1935 novel Wigs on the Green, satirising Mosley and his beliefs, 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.
Between 1936 and 1939 Diana and Mosley rented Wootton Lodge, a country house in Staffordshire. She furnished her new home with some of the Swinbrook furniture that her father was selling.
Nazi Germany In 1934, Diana visited Germany with her then 19-year-old sister, Unity Mitford. While there, they attended the first Nuremberg Rally after the Nazi rise to power. Unity later befriended Adolf Hitler and introduced him to Diana in March 1935. Both sisters returned to Nuremberg for the second rally, later in 1935, where they were entertained as guests of the Nazi dictator. In 1936, he provided a Mercedes-Benz to take Diana to the Berlin Olympic games. She became well-acquainted with Winifred Wagner and Magda Goebbels.
Diana and Sir Oswald Mosley married secretly on 6 October 1936 in the drawing room of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels in Berlin. Hitler and British fascists Robert Gordon-Canning and Bill Allen were in attendance. The marriage was kept secret until the birth of their first child, Alexander, in 1938. In August 1939, Hitler told Diana over lunch that war was inevitable. Hitler presented the couple with a silver framed picture of himself as a wedding gift.
World War II Internment For much of World War II (1940-1943), the Mosleys were interned under Defence Regulation 18B, along with other British fascists. Oswald was interned on 23 May 1940 and on 29 June 1940, eleven weeks after the birth of her fourth son (Max), Diana was also arrested. She was 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.
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." This however was disputed by Diana's sister Deborah in her memoirs, claiming their sister Nancy was inaccurate in her views of Diana Mosley as a national threat.
The couple were initially held separately but, after personal intervention by Prime Minister Winston 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 due to Oswald's ill health; they were placed under house arrest until the end of the war, and were denied passports until 1949.
Diana's prison time failed to disturb her approach to life nor alter her fascist politics; she remarked in her later years that she felt better treated than earlier prisoners.
Post-war 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. There 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. 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, Oswald 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." Diana was also a lifelong supporter of the 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."