Pre-war activity

Russell was active in politics for much of his life. In his youth he flirted with socialism and even communism but soon abandoned these in favour of Social Credit, establishing his own National Credit Association to promote the ideology.^[4] He addressed the membership of the New Party about Social Credit but the scheme was not taken up by Sir Oswald Mosley's group.^[4] Russell was also a leading figure in the Economic Reform Club.^[5] He admired the growing fascist^[6] movements in Europe and wrote in the New English Weekly in support of the Anschluss in 1938.^[7]

Russell was a founder of the British People's Party (BPP) in 1939 and used his money to bankroll the group from then on.^[8][9] The driving force behind the BPP was John Beckett, a former Labour Member of Parliament who had also been a member of the British Union of Fascists and the National Socialist League. According to his son, Francis Beckett, John Beckett had did not have much real devotion to the unassuming and uncharismatic Russell but was attracted to the BPP as much by the Marquess' money as any real conviction, Beckett himself being virtually penniless at the time.^[10]

During the war

Russell was friendly with Barry Domvile, the founder of the Link,^[11] and had been close to that semi-clandestine group since its establishment in 1937.^[12] In the early months of the Second World War, he attended several meetings of leading figures on the far-right that Domvile had organised, although he was largely unenthusiastic about this initiative.^[13]

Russell chaired the British Council for Christian Settlement in Europe, established immediately after the declaration of war and featuring an eclectic melange of fascists, fascist sympathisers and committed pacifists.^[14] He was a committed pacifist across the board, rejecting war entirely, in contrast to Beckett and several other leading members of the group who were opposed specifically to war with Nazi Germany rather than to war as a concept.^[15] During the early days of the war, Russell was also courted by the British Union of Fascists (BUF), who had changed their name to the British Union, and held meetings with Neil Francis Hawkins, the group's Director-General.^[16] He had earlier been a sometime member of the January Club, a BUF-linked discussion group.^[17] He had grown close to BUF member Robert Gordon-Canning, and under his influence even came to write for the BUF's newspaper Action.^[18] Nonetheless, in private BUF leader Sir Oswald Mosley dismissed Russell as "woolly-headed".^[19]

At the start of 1940, he corresponded with the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson after obtaining a document from the German legation in Dublin that Russell claimed contained Adolf Hitler's draft proposals for peace.^[13] Following the obtaining of this document by Russell, on 13 March 1940 Domvile organised a meeting for both men, Mosley and Imperial Fascist League (IFL) veteran Bertie Mills to discuss their next course of action. At this meeting, Mosley proposed the creation of a "Peace Government" to be led by David Lloyd George, although nothing more came of this initiative as the government soon launched a crackdown on far-right activity.^[20] One of the leading members of the British Union was Edward Godfrey whose political views the Special Branch of Scotland Yard described being less with the British Union and "more with the Duke of Bedford".^[21] The Special Branch described Godfrey as "an embittered and class-conscious proprietor of a chain of fish and chips shops...who is bitterly opposed to the war and violently anti-Jewish".^[21] ON 20 May 1940, a meeting was called at the Dover Castle pub in Bethel Green to discuss forming the British National Party to be led by Godfrey and which was to be funded entirely by Russell's wealth.^[22] At the meeting, Ben Stokes of the BUF who was acting as Godfrey's agent stated that a "monster meeting" would be held in London sometime later that spring under which the new British National Party would be unveiled.^[23] Stokes stated that the executive council of the new party would consist of the Duke of Bedford, the military historian General J. F. C. Fuller, Captain Bernard Acworth, Lord Sempill, the writer John Middleton Murry and Lord Lymington..^[23] A MI5 report noted that every name on the list belonged to the F3 category, which MI5 defined as "terrorism, excluding Irish terrorism".^[23] The plan came to naught when Mosely insisted on being the leader of the new party as a condition of having the BUF join the British National Party while Godfrey continued to insist on his claim to be the leader and that Mosely should step aside.^[23]

Leading figures were interned under Defence Regulation 18B although Russell was not among their number.^[24] Russell's nobility helped to ensure that he avoided arrest^[25] along with other far-right leaning noblemen such as the Lord Lymington, the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Westminster, the Earl of Mar, Lord Brocket, Lord Queenborough and others.^[26] His personal links to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax also helped to ensure his freedom.^[27] He wrote a series of letter to Halifax in the early days of the war expressing his admiration for Hitler and urging him to use his influence to bring the war to a swift conclusion.^[28] Russell was, however, placed on the "Suspect List" by MI5 as some within that group suspected that, in the event of a successful Nazi invasion of the UK, Russell might have ended up as Governor of the territory or even Prime Minister of a puppet government.^[29] Under the suspect list, Russell was to be arrested immediately without charge in the event of a German invasion as a potential traitor and collaborator.^[30]

Beckett however was among those held, and Russell attempted to intervene on his behalf, assisting Beckett's common-law wife Anne Cutmore in a letter-writing campaign to secure his release.^[31] When Beckett was released Cutmore again asked Russell, by then Duke of Bedford, for help as they were penniless and he agreed to allow them to live in a cottage in the village of Chenies, at the time entirely owned by the Duchy.^[32] He would continue to underwrite the Becketts until his death in 1953, even purchasing a large house in Rickmansworth for the family's use in 1949.^[33]

On 18 November 1941, speaking in the House of Commons, the Lord Chancellor, Sir John Simon, noted that the duke was lucky to be British as he noted "If he was a German and was in Germany, and if he gave expression to the reverse opinion and denounced Hitler and all his works, and found excuses for Hitler's enemies", he would have been sent to a concentration camp or executed.^[34] On 3 December 1941, Russell took up his seat in the House of Lords, and immediately attracted attention for a series of speeches that condemned the Churchill government and the war.^[30] His speeches in the House of Lords were noted for their pro-Axis tone as he blamed the war on "the attempt by the moneylending financers and big business monopolists to destroy the relatively sane financial system of the Axis powers".^[35] Bedford used his great wealth during the war to fund a number of fascist groups such as the British National Party and the English Nationalists Association..^[36] The British historian Richard Giffiths noted that the groups that Lord Bedford funded were "remarkably unsuccessful", which led to suggest that the way he poured millions of pounds into such groups reflected his convictions rather than any hope of power.^[36] In a letter to the pro-Nazi historian Sir Arthur Bryant dated 5 July 1944, Bedford bemoaned that the Allies were winning the war.^[36] On 12 April 1945, he learned that American President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In an obituary of Roosevelt published in The Word magazine, Bedford gloated over his death and wrote he had been "an inveterate and unscrupulous war-monger and a tool of Big Finance".^[36] On 30 April 1945, he learned that Hitler had committed suicide. In an obituary of Hitler published in Talking Picture News, Bedford wrote that "Hitler's virtues had caused his destruction to be ordinated by the financers of the City and Wall Street using the politicians as their puppets".^[36] In contrast to the gloating tone in his obituary of Roosevelt, there was a sad tone to his obituary of Hitler. On 8 May 1945, he responded to the news that Germany had surrendered by writing that the war was "a glorious victory" for "Soviet tyranny and Big Finance".^[36]

Post-war

Russell re-established the BPP in 1945, the group having been in abeyance during the later years of the war.^[37] Party activity was limited and often restricted to irregular party functions hosted at the Becketts' house in Rickmansworth.^[38] Increasingly associated with the anti-Semitism espoused by leading BPP figures, Russell stated that the figure of six million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust was "grossly exaggerated" and argued that a figure of 300,000 concentration camp deaths, drawn from all those interned rather than just Jews, was more likely.^[39] He also denied that any concentration camp had a gas chamber, claiming they were just showers.^[39] He also funded the publication of Failure at Nuremberg, a pamphlet authored by the "BPP Research Department" (effectively Beckett, A. K. Chesterton and former IFL member Harold Lockwood) which denounced the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis as a series of show trials that started from the basis of presumed guilt on the part of the defendants.^[39] Unusually, he also contributed articles on Social Credit and pacifism to anarchist Guy Aldred's journal, The Word, between 1940 and his death.^[40]

Death

Russell died in 1953, aged 64, as a result of a gunshot wound in the grounds of his Endsleigh Estate in Devon. The coroner recorded his death as accidentally inflicted,^[45] but his elder son suggested it may have been deliberately self-inflicted.^[46] Griffiths wrote that his death was almost certainly suicide as the duke had been extremely depressed in the days prior to his death.^[35] Griffiths wrote: "When we try to assess the Duke of Bedford's motives, we are confronted with a very complex picture. He was a lonely, introverted character, unable to forge human relationships, possibly a result of his strange upbringing. This lack of human contact may have contributed to his conviction that he was right in all he thought and did, and that it was the world that was out of step, not him. And then there was the succession of obsessions that ruled his life-evangelical Christianity, pacifism, Social Credit, financial reform".^[34] Griffiths wrote that "many of his underlaying attitudes were of themselves admirable", but that Russell's tendency to explain everything in terms of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as he believed that the Jews had vast secret powers that they used to dominate the world both politically and economically led him straight into the embrace of Nazism..^[34] Griffiths wrote that Russell was tenacious and obstinate, which led to express pro-Nazi views in the midst of the war, despite all of the opprobrium that it brought him as wrote concluded that he "had ideas that blended ill with his real Christian beliefs".^[34]