Harold Macmillan spouse Lady Dorothy Macmillan
Canadian aide-de-campship
Of the scholars and exhibitioners of his year, only he and one other survived the war. As a result, he refused to return to Oxford to complete his degree, saying the university would never be the same; in later years he joked that he had been "sent down by the Kaiser".Owing to the impending contraction of the Army after the war, a regular commission in the Grenadiers was out of the question. However, at the end of 1918 Macmillan joined the Guards Reserve Battalion at Chelsea Barracks for "light duties". On one occasion he had to command reliable troops in a nearby park as a unit of Guardsmen was briefly refusing to reembark for France, although the incident was resolved peacefully. The incident prompted an inquiry from the War Office as to whether the Guards Reserve Battalion "could be relied on".Macmillan then served in Ottawa, Canada, in 1919 as aide-de-camp (ADC) to Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire, then Governor General of Canada, and his future father-in-law. The engagement of Captain Macmillan to the Duke's daughter Lady Dorothy was announced on 7 January 1920. He relinquished his commission on 1 April 1920. As was common for contemporary former officers, he continued to be known as 'Captain Macmillan' until the early 1930s and was listed as such in every general election between 1923 and 1931. As late as his North African posting of 1942–43 he reminded Churchill that he held the rank of captain in the Guards reserve.Marriage
Macmillan married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, the daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, on 21 April 1920. Her great-uncle was Spencer Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire, who was leader of the Liberal Party in the 1870s, and a close colleague of William Ewart Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Salisbury. Lady Dorothy was also descended from William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, who served as Prime Minister from 1756 to 1757 in communion with Newcastle and Pitt the Elder. Her nephew William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, married Kathleen Kennedy, a sister of John F. Kennedy.
In 1929, Lady Dorothy began a lifelong affair with the Conservative politician Robert Boothby, an arrangement that scandalised high society but remained unknown to the general public. Philip Frere, a partner in Frere Cholmely solicitors, urged Macmillan not to divorce his wife, which at that time would have been fatal to a public career even for the "innocent party". Macmillan and Lady Dorothy lived largely separate lives in private thereafter. The stress caused by that may have contributed to Macmillan's nervous breakdown in 1931. He was often treated with condescension by his aristocratic in-laws and was observed to be a sad and isolated figure at Chatsworth in the 1930s. John Campbell suggests that Macmillan's humiliation was first a major cause of his odd and rebellious behaviour in the 1930s then, in subsequent decades, made him a harder and more ruthless politician than his rivals Eden and Butler.The Macmillans had four children:
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