for India after the resignation of Lord Lothian and other Liberals over abandonment of free trade by the National Government. At 29, he was the youngest member of the government and was responsible for piloting the Government of India Act 1935 through Parliament in the face of massive opposition from Winston Churchill and the Conservative right. He retained this position in Stanley Baldwin's third government (1935–1937), and when Neville Chamberlain replaced Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, Butler was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Labour. Foreign Office; 1938 to 1941 In the reshuffle that was caused by the resignation of Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary and Lord Cranborne as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in February 1938, Butler replaced Cranborne as Under-Secretary. With the new Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, in the House of Lords, Butler was the main Foreign Office spokesman in the Commons. In internal discussions after Germany's annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938, Butler counselled against giving Czechoslovakia a guarantee of British support and approved the Cabinet decision on 22 March not to do so, facts that he later omitted from his memoirs. During the Sudeten Crisis, he was attending a League of Nations meeting in Geneva but strongly supported Chamberlain's trip to Berchtesgaden on 16 September, even if it meant sacrificing Czechoslovakia in the interests of peace. Butler returned to Britain to make the winding-up speech for the Government in the Parliamentary Debate on the Munich Agreement on 5 October. After Churchill had spoken, Butler said that war solved nothing and that it was better to "settle our differences with Germany by consultation". However, he did not directly defend the Munich settlement; the motion was to support the avoidance of war and the pursuit of lasting peace. Butler became a Privy Councillor in the 1939 New Year Honours list, the youngest person so appointed since Churchill in 1907. After Prague After the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, Butler, like Chamberlain, was shocked at Hitler's duplicity in breaking the Munich Agreement. Driven largely by Halifax, Britain now attempted to deter further German aggression by pledging to go to war to defend Poland and other Eastern European countries. The evidence suggests Butler did not support it and would have preferred Poland also to be sacrificed in the interests of peace. Butler became a member of the foreign policy committee, which agreed