Remilitarization of the Rhineland 1935. On 7 June 1935, MacDonald resigned as British Prime Minister due to ailing health and was replaced by Stanley Baldwin of the Conservative Party; the leadership change did not affect British foreign policy in any meaningful way. On October 3, 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and thus began the Abyssinia Crisis. Under strong pressure from a moralistic British public opinion, which was very much in favor of collective security, the British government took the lead in pressing the League of Nations for sanctions against Italy. The decision of the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to take a strong line in
Stanley Baldwin fight if attacked. Though known for his magnanimity toward political rivals such as Chamberlain, Churchill had none to spare for Baldwin. "I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill," Churchill said when declining to send him 80th birthday greetings in 1947, "but it would have been much better had he never lived." Churchill also believed that Baldwin, rather than Chamberlain, would be most blamed by subsequent generations for the policies that led to "the most unnecessary war in history". An index entry in the first volume of Churchill's "History of the Second World War" ("The Gathering Storm") records Baldwin "admitting to putting