and Göring was of the kind that does sometimes flourish be-
tween gentleman and gangster. Whatever his timetable, each
would always make time to receive the other. Henderson found
the general’s questions shrewd, his humor irresistible, his frank-
ness disarming. At their first meeting on May , , Göring
repeated what he had told Phipps and the former air minister
Lord Lothian. “Germany can’t even pick a flower,” he grum-
bled, “without Britain saying es ist verboten.” He emphasized
that the Führer was besotted with Britain hence the naval
agreement; and he himself, he added, had forbidden his Luft-
waffe to designate Britain as an “enemy” in war games. (This was
true.) When he mentioned the irksome Anglo-French alliance at
a further meeting, on July , the ambassador responded with a
critical allusion to the axis between Berlin and Rome. “That’s just
the point,” sighed Göring “If it weren’t for your London–Paris
axis, we in Germany would never have taken up with those Ital-
ian s.o.b.’s we don’t trust them an inch!”
In September he would confess to Henderson that he ad-
mired Sir Francis Drake precisely because he was a pirate. It was
a pity, he added, that the British had now gone soft (or been
“debrutalized,” as he put it).
Henderson was bedazzled by this astute ex-aviator. In
September , in a letter to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden,
he would call Göring “the frankest and most sincere of these
Nazi leaders with the exception of Hitler.” Eden must have
choked on his porridge at this line he himself classed the
Führer at that time as only marginally less frank and sincere
than Machiavelli. Four years later, composing his memoirs in
wartime retirement, Henderson would still confess to unrepent-
ant admiration for Hermann Göring and everything that he
had done for Germany.