Mosley - My Life autobiography of Oswald Mosley, the British Adolf Hitler

WE began with 'Ernald, a Saxon', who lived in the reign of King John at Moseley, a hamlet in Staffordshire four miles from Wolverhampton. The descendants of this 'Ernald de Moseley' moved to Lancashire and other parts of Staffordshire, married Normans and later added a slight mixture of Scotch and Irish. The 'e' was dropped from the family name in deference to a Latin epigram of the erudite Queen Elizabeth when an ancestor defied the law and organised a privateer fleet against Spain. My own strong feeling that I am a European appears to have some foundation in ancestry and family experience. I have never made a close study of the family lineage, which is on record in various books of reference, but in my youth I remember a great-uncle who was a considerable authority on the subject. Facts no doubt in the course of time had become freely embroidered. It seems clear, however, that our family played a fairly distinguished part in the Civil War, though I have never tested by the record their claim to have defended Tutbury Castle until it was the last Royalist stronghold to fall in that bitter conflict. The reliable witness of my grandfather and great-uncle assured me that they had seen letters written by Cromwell when he was besieging Tutbury, threatening to burn down the nearby family home at Rolleston if we did not surrender the castle. It was in this ancestral pride that I made the daily march of a mile and a half and back from my grandfather's house at Rolleston to Tutbury each afternoon of my Staffordshire childhood under the watchful eye of my first sergeant-major, a kindly nanny. Fortunately Cromwell did not fulfil his threat, but contented himself with removing all the lead from the Rolleston roof to make bullets. Yet the fate of this fine old Tudor house was only delayed, and it was burned down in the latter half of the last century, together with the Cromwell letters and many other treasures. I never saw it.

All that remains of the house is a drawing of the Georgian facade which had been added in the eighteenth century. The main feature was reputedly a long, oak-panelled gallery which contained the best pictures, including several Van Dycks; this may well be, as the period was an apogee of family fortune, though knowledge of the breeding of shorthorns and shire horses was more conspicuous in my immediate forbears. We still have a Stubbs, which must have been tucked away in some back room; a Mosley boy, holding his horse, is accompanied by his dogs on the slopes of Tutbury Castle, perennial scene of reverent recollection and pilgrimage. The Van Dycks have disappeared without trace, except for an odd freak of fate; it may possibly prove that fire gave back what it took away. We suffered a second fire in 1954 at a house we had at Clonfert in Ireland where some of the remaining family pictures were hung. A large portrait which we always believed to be a copy of one of the Van Dycks was badly singed. It was sent to Dublin for cleaning and excision of the unimpaired centre, and in the process was pronounced original by the Irish experts.

Because of the burning of Rolleston we have few relics of the Cavalier period. Still less have we any record of the next upheaval in which we were involved. It is in the manner of English families, and indeed of the British nation, that long, slumbering periods of quiet life are followed by moments of abrupt awakening and sometimes of dramatic action. There was always a tradition that we were much engaged in the 1745 rebellion of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The only evidence of this produced to me in my youth was a pin-cushion embroidered by some ancestress with the words 'Down with the Rump and God bless Prince Charles'. We still possess this pin-cushion, but of course it clearly refers not to Prince Charles Edward of the '45, but to Charles II when he was 'on his travels' as a fugitive from the 'Rump' of the Cromwellian Parliament. I was, therefore, inclined to discount the tradition that in 1745 we were armed and ready to come out with the Young Pretender on his march south as soon as he reached our house at Rolleston. We were saved from the subsequent disaster because he and the Highlanders turned back at Derby, eleven miles to our north.

This topic revived vividly when I addressed a public dinner in the thirties at which as usual I expressed my loyalty to the Crown. Sir Compton Mackenzie was present, and subsequently put the teasing question whether this declaration had any reference to the fact that Prince Charles Edward had spent the night in our family house on his secret visit to England the year before the '45. He referred later to this historical incident in a book on the subject of Prince Charles's well-concealed survey of the field of action for the following year. I had never heard this, but it was not difficult to understand how careful the family had been to destroy all record of the period.

The romantic tradition of opposition and insurgence - embodied in the grace and charm of the Stuarts and their cause - evidently moved our family at this stage, but the reader would be mistaken in thinking this accounts for the course of my political career. A portentous change followed, when the Mosleys became the incarnation of contrary English qualities. Perhaps we had after all the happy quality, the redeeming grace, of learning from experience.

The culmination was my great-great-grandfather Sir Oswald Mosley whose fire-inviolate portrait gazes down on me in his red robes of learning with massive reassurance of English stability, albeit with a certain whimsical charm as if he almost admitted it was not quite so serious as he made out. With him we enter a very different period of the family history, an unaccounted metamorphosis from the Jacobite, romantic Tory tradition to the solid, stolid respectable Whig. We are surrounded not by emotional revolutionaries but by squires and parsons, and by professional soldiers of the orthodox variety, like my father's two first cousins who were killed in the First World War, and my own brother Ted, who spent his life in the army.

This very worthy person, my great-great-grandfather, was indeed a pillar of the State in the Midland counties. It was he who appears first to have established that our Saxon family could prove its ancestry to the thirteenth century and trace it to before the Norman conquest. It seems in any case that the family is of a respectable antiquity, for works of reference and public monuments show that it was playing some role at least in Elizabethan times. My great-great-grandfather fortified his Saxon lineage by marrying an Every from a neighbouring family of Norman descent; this desirable out-cross - in agricultural language - appears to have occurred more than once. Armed then with an imposing presence and a weighty erudition in his own sphere, he entered the House of Commons in the Whig cause during the Reform Bill period. Apart from this concession to progress he showed little sign of possessing a radical frame of mind.

I have often been reproached in my political life with the rough part the family played in repressing the Chartist riots in Manchester, although I was never able to understand why I should be held responsible for events so many years before I was born. After all, Peterloo was a mild exercise in violence compared with some of the British doings in India and elsewhere during subsequent years. For all they knew, my indignant interlocutors on the alleged performance of my ancestors might themselves have been able to trace descent from those who during the Indian mutiny bound Sepoys to the muzzles of guns for the purpose of blowing them into the next world in unidentifiable pieces, thus robbing them not only of life but of their chance of paradise. Many of us Europeans would be in for a thin time in this world or the next if we were held responsible for all the dark deeds which adorn our family trees. The real matter of regret and reproof is that our generation has not progressed beyond the wickedness of our antecedents, and has even regressed by comparison with some of mankind's more enlightened periods.