It is fitting that a paper to honour a historian of British foreign policy should focus on the role of diplomats and politicians as ‘go betweens’ whose task it is to understand the ‘foreign’ but who must not, in the process, ‘go native’. It is all the more pertinent when that historian has herself approached British foreign policy as an ‘outsider’, though happily she has largely ‘gone native’! This chapter does not attempt a comprehensive study of the ‘mental maps’ of the British foreign-policy-making elite, but rather explores the ways in which ‘the foreign’ was experienced. It asks how far such perceptions, in particular or in general, had any direct or even tangible consequences for the formulation or execution of foreign policy. Perceptions of ‘the foreign’, in turn, presuppose certain assumptions about the nature of ‘Britishness’.

Lord Salisbury surveyed foreigners from the olympian English redoubt of Hatfield House. As prime minister and foreign secretary, he dominated British policy-making for some fifteen years in the late century when Britain's global role was both impressive and burdensome. Foreigners, of some sort, could not be avoided in an imperial outreach which encompassed the world. Yet in the course of his long life his contact with them was relatively limited, though we may also note that he was extraordinarily shy and his contact with ‘the English’ themselves was not excessive – he succeeded his father in the House of Lords in 1868. Foreigners were not conspicuous in the Eton and Oxford of his youth.