Anthony Eden married Beatrice Beckett in 1923, shortly before his election to Parliament. Her father was a Conservative MP - also a banker and Chairman of the Yorkshire Post. Eden was 26 at the time of the marriage, and Beatrice was 18. They had three sons, the second of whom lived for only fifteen minutes.
Beatrice unfortunately disliked politics, and Eden's long hours and frequent absences through work meant that by the early 1930s the marriage was in trouble. Both partners had affairs, but they agreed to lead largely separate lives in private, "maintaining the fabric of their marriage until the strain became intolerable."
Their separation increased in 1941, when the family moved to Binderton House, near Chichester, Sussex, while Eden, to meet his wartime responsibilities as Foreign Secretary, lived in a flat in the Foreign Office. The marriage was dealt its "final blow" in June 1945 when the couple's eldest son, Pilot Officer Simon Eden, was reported missing in action in Burma. Beatrice spent the rest of the war in Paris, and in 1946 she left Eden to live in the United States.
In 1950 the Edens reached an amicable divorce settlement. They remained friends. Beatrice's "eminent American" lover reneged on his promise of marriage; she died in 1957, aged 51, and was buried in the Beckett family plot in North Yorkshire.
Eden married Clarissa Spencer–Churchill in 1952. Being nominally a Roman Catholic, she was fiercely criticised by Evelyn Waugh for marrying a divorcee; while the Church Times despaired that public approval for the marriage "shows how far the climate of public opinion has changed for the worse, even since 1936."
Eden became Prime Minister in April 1955 on Churchill's retirement, but resigned in January 1957 after the failure of the Anglo-French military intervention in Suez. He left Parliament at the same time, and eventually entered the House of Lords in 1961 as the Earl of Avon. His health had been compromised by damage incurred during an operation in 1953, and he died in 1977, aged 79.
In his last diary entry, dated 11 September 1976, Eden referred to his second wife as "beloved C". The youngest wife of an incumbent Prime Minister in the 20th centry, she was only 36 when he resigned and 56 when he died. She has enjoyed unusual longevity for a Prime Ministerial spouse, of whom at the time of writing she has outlived five. In 2005 she made a well-received contribution to a documentary made by Cherie Blair about prime ministers' wives.
The Countess of Avon celebrated her 100th birthday on 28 June 2020.
© Haydn Thompson 2020