local anglophiles in order to explain to them the British viewpoint. In 1916, having already been appointed CMG and CVO ten years earlier, he was knighted as KCMG, becoming KCB three years later. In 1919, Sir Esmé Howard was attached to the British delegation during the Paris Peace Conference, also being made British Civil Delegate on the International Commission to Poland. At the Paris Peace Conference, Howard was assigned to drafting sections of the Treaty of Versailles dealing with Poland. That same year, he was sent to Madrid as ambassador there, arriving in August 1919. Being appointed ambassador to Spain was a major step up in the Foreign Office, but Howard knew that Spanish issues were for the most part secondary to Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary. In Howard's first annual summary as an ambassador from Madrid, Howard wrote: "In the first survey of the situation which I wrote after my arrival in this country I drew attention to three dominant factors in the state of affairs then existing: the activities of the juntas, the labor unrest and the bankruptcy of parliamentary institutions. These elements were perhaps not so immediately threatening as they then seemed but they are still elements of mischief". Howard reported that the Spanish economy which depended upon exports of raw materials was collapsing due to the fall in commodity prices, that the politicians were incapable of providing leadership and King Alfonso XIII was not behaving as a constitutional monarch with the king trying to rule by intriguing with various politicians and generals instead of reigning. Howard reported that in 1920 Spain had 1,060 strikes, and predicted that 1921 seemed likely to surpass that record. Through Howard reported almost weekly bombings, assassinations and other "outrages" committed by extreme left-wing groups, in the main he blamed the confrontational relations between unions and businesses on the management, reporting that most Spanish corporations had little interest in compromise. On 9 July 1920, the miners working for the British Rio Tinto company went on strike. Howard's dispatches to London stating that the attitude of Walter Browning, Rio Tinto's manager in Spain, was harming Britain's image in Spain, led to the Foreign Office discreetly pressuring the CEO of the Rio Tinto company, Lord Denbigh, to settle the strike. Much to Howard's satisfaction, the strike was ended in early 1921 with the Rio Tinto company giving wage increases to their Spanish miners. In