In 1921, he returned to the Colonial Office as Secretary of State. In this position he is now notorious among his critics for advocating the use of gas against rebellious Iraqis. The sting of that charge is rather lessened, though, when one remembers that Churchill wanted Britain’s boffins to develop a gas “which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them”9—in other words, a gas like tear gas, used to break up riots. Churchill lost his post simultaneously with losing his appendix in October 1922, and then lost his parliamentary seat to a candidate who favored prohibition (which Churchill of course did not).
By 1924 he was back with the Tories (as he said, anyone can rat, but it takes “a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat” 10) and received a surprise appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Conservative government. On imperial matters, he became known as an ultra-imperialist on India, which he argued was held together only by Britain’s humane and disinterested rule, without which Muslim and Hindu would butcher each other (as indeed happened at partition in 1947) and without which the rights of the “untouchables” could not be protected.
India Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up to Be
“It makes me sick when I hear the Secretary of State say of India, ‘She will do this,’ and ‘She will do that.’ India is an abstraction . . . India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.”
Winston Churchill, 26 March 1931 at the Constitutional Club, London, quoted in Richard Langworth, ed., Churchill By Himself: The Definitive List of Quotations (Public Affairs, 2008), p. 163
This put him at odds with his great World War II ally, President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was obsessed with promoting anti-colonialism, especially in India, which he thought should be reformed “somewhat on the Soviet line.”11 He told this to Stalin, with whom he was in alliance to foster an anti-colonialist future, because, as Roosevelt said, “Of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist.”12 Stalin, of course, was a Communist, which to Roosevelt was a far lesser problem. As author Robert Nisbet noted, during the war, “second only to the defeat of Germany, the independence of India from the British Empire was Roosevelt’s fondest aspiration. His ignorance of the real problems and issues in India was gargantuan.”13 Roosevelt told Churchill he had an “injection of a new thought” to offer on India, which was that the Indians were in the same position as the American colonists of 1776—a comparison that might elude most disinterested historians—and should be treated to a similar independence. To Roosevelt, the Soviet Union fit in well with the world’s democratic future, but the British Empire did not.
An Imperialist Stuck between a Communist and a Liberal
“There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched . . . and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor British donkey, who was the only one of the three who knew the right way home.”
Churchill on his experience at the 1943 Tehran Conference with Stalin and FDR, quoted in Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made (Macmillan, 2010), p. 246
Roosevelt, though he did not live to see it, had his way. After the war, Britain was broke and dependent on American aid. Churchill, whose wartime attitude had been “hands off the British Empire,” was booted from office in 1945, even before the war was over. The new Labour government seemed only too eager to dispense with India and several other troublesome spots, including Palestine. In a speech before Parliament, on 6 March 1947 Churchill said, “It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire, with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.... We must face the evils that are coming upon us, and that we are powerless to avert. We must do our best in all these circumstances . . . to help mitigate the ruin and disaster that will follow the disappearance of Britain from the East.” If ruin and disaster attended independent Burma (which never joined the Commonwealth) and India in the immediate aftermath of independence and partition, ruin and disaster were less in evidence in Malaya, where Churchill (prime minister again, from 1951 to 1955) ensured that the country defeated a Communist insurgency, or in Singapore, or in Hong Kong. Australia and New Zealand remain anchors of British values in the Far East, and India appears to have outgrown its anti-colonial reaction and to be benefiting from British ideas of parliamentary government and free markets.
History Lesson
Franklin Roosevelt: “I do not mean to be unkind or rude to the British but in 1841, when you acquired Hong Kong, you did not acquire it by purchase.”
British Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley: “Let me see, Mr. President, that was about the time of the Mexican War.”
Exchange cited in Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made (Macmillan, 2010), p. 246–67
In the Near East, Churchill approved a coup in Iran that kept that country pro-Western until the fall of the Shah in 1979. In the Middle East, Palestine was a hornets’ nest, and if independent Israel is still bedeviled by enemies, it must nevertheless be considered the democratic and economic success story of the region. British influence has helped to keep the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan more pro-Western than they might otherwise have been. In Africa, the story is certainly mixed, but it is British institutions and ideals that provide the appropriate direction for reform where corruption and dictatorship have held sway. In the Americas it can hardly be said that the United States, which grew from the Empire’s thirteen colonies, or Canada have been anything other than a rousing success; and the Falkland Islands still remain a jolly good place to raise sheep.
Churchill’s Legacy
“He presided, in fact, over the inauguration of an American empire.”
John Grigg, in an essay marking Churchill’s death, published 25 January 1965 in The Guardian
If there was any consolation for Churchill in the retreat from empire, it was that Britain’s global role had been transferred from one English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon people to another, his mother’s people in fact. Churchill had long believed that “The British Empire will last so long and only so long as the British race is determined to maintain it.”14 More than anything else this was why Britain had to shear itself of empire: the burden had become too great. In many parts of the world, Britain made a gallant fighting retreat against evil forces that threatened to derail a peaceful transfer of power, but the transfer itself had become inevitable.15
To return to the question Churchill posed himself—was his life a failure, because he oversaw the demise of the British Empire? No, because the Empire was not a failure. And no man better represented that Empire than Sir Winston Churchill—its military adventures, its high ideals, its humane spirit, and its vision of the English-speaking peoples acting as an enduring global force for good.
NOTES
Chapter 1
1 Letter from John Adams to Nathan Webb, 12 October 1755.
2 Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809.
3 John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (Random House, 1989), p. 367.
4 Worse if they are sentimental about, sympathetic to, or supportive of the murderers belonging to the Irish Republican Army.
5 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic Books, 2002), p. 113.
6 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848 (Verso, 2000), p. 472, n. 55.
7 Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into Religion and Culture (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), p. 17.
8 George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (Barber Press, 2008), p. 32.
9 L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa, 1870–1914 (Croom Helm, the Hoover Institution, 1978), p. 202.
Chapter 3
1 The reference here is to British F
oreign Secretary George Canning’s famous affirmation of his de facto support for the Monroe Doctrine in a speech in the House of Commons on 12 December 1826: “I resolved that, if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.” Winston Churchill echoed the famous phrase in his “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech to Parliament on 4 June 1940: “we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjected and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue of the old.”
2 It really was an English empire at this point; the union with Scotland was in 1707, after which the Scots took a disproportionate role in the British Empire.
3 “The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of the Empire in the Atlantic,” by Anthony Pagden in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I, The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 35.
4 Many half-educated people will protest here that Scotch is a drink and one should refer to the Scottish, but this is a myth propagated by chippy Scotchmen, as any reader of English literature can attest; see also Welch, as in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, rather than Welsh.
5 Except for galley slaves who were captured in wars against the Muslims.
6 Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 23.
7 Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (HarperCollins, 1997), p. 124.
8 Imperial military service ran in the family. Washington’s half-brother and unofficial guardian, Lawrence, from whom George inherited Mount Vernon, had served from 1740 to 1742 in a disastrous British campaign in the Caribbean that included an assault on Cartagena and a hostile landing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
9 Walter O’Meara, Guns at the Forks (Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 89.
10 Chris Wrigley, Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion (ABC-CLIO, 2002), pp. 88–89.
11 Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, (The Library of America, 1983), vol. II, pp. 1325–56.
12 Geoffrey Treasure, Who’s Who in Early Hanoverian Britain (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1992), pp. 228–89.
13 Geoffrey Regan, The Guinness Book of Decisive Battles (Canopy Books, 1992), p. 135.
14 Parkman, op. cit., p. 1400.
15 Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World (Funk & Wagnalls, 1955), vol. II, p. 270n.
16 David Horowitz, The First Frontier: The Indian Wars & America’s Origins, 1607–1776 (Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 206.
17 Ibid., pp. 203–04.
18 Dan Cook, The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies, 1760–1785 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), p. 123.
19 J. M. Roberts, The Pelican History of the World (Penguin, 1985), p. 693.
20 Victor Brooks and Robert Hohwald, How America Fought Its Wars: Military Strategy from the American Revolution to the Civil War (Combined Publishing, 1999), p. 162.
21 Edmund Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with America, 22 March 1775.
22 Taxation No Tyranny was a pamphlet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775 rebutting the charges of the American colonists against the British government.
23 Claire Berlinski, There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (Basic Books, 2008), p. 173.
Chapter 4
1 Francis Drake at Nombre de Dios, 1572, quoted in Dudley Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way: The Biography of Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–1684 (House of Stratus, 2001), p. 34.
2 Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (Yale University Press, 1998), p. 109.
3 Stephen Coote, Drake: The Life and Legend of an Elizabethan Hero (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2003), p. 179.
4 Coote, op. cit., p. 233.
5 H. E. Marshall, Our Island Story (Yesterday’s Classics, 2006), p. 428.
6 Both quotations are in John Cummins, Francis Drake: The Lives of a Hero (St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 256. I have modernized the spelling.
7 Alfred Noyes, from his poem “Drake” in Collected Poems (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1913), vol. I, pp. 366 and 369.
Chapter 5
1 Dudley Pope, Harry Morgan’s Way: The Biography of Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–1684 (House of Stratus, 2001), p. 70.
2 Pope, op. cit., pp. 96–97.
3 As per the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 in which the pope divided the western and eastern hemispheres between the then-dominant maritime powers of Spain and Portugal. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an oft-invoked phrase was “no peace beyond the line” (or “lines”)—roughly speaking, west of the Canary and Cape Verde Islands.
4 Edward Morgan arrived in Jamaica in mourning. His eldest daughter, held to be a beauty and of good character, had died during the voyage. The cause: “a malign distemper by reason of the nastiness of the passengers.”
5 David F. Marley, Pirates and Privateers of the Americas (ABC-CLIO, 1994), p. 265.
6 Both letters quoted in Peter Earle, The Sack of Panama: Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1981), pp. 110–11. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.
7 Morgan had no children, but in his will stipulated that upon his wife’s death his estate would pass to his nephew, Charles Byndloss, if he agreed to change his surname to Morgan.
Chapter 6
1 Franklin and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 79.
2 Letter from the First Earl Cornwallis to the First Duke of Newcastle, 15 July 1758.
3 Letter from Charles to William Cornwallis, 21 October 1779.
4 Franklin and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis and the War of Independence (History Book Club, London, in conjunction with Faber and Faber Ltd., 1970), p. 221.
5 Ibid., p. 171.
6 Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 184.
7 Though any enthusiasm for “Bloody Ban” must be tempered by the fact that he was a Whig rather than a Tory (indeed, his chief opponent in debating the slave trade was the Tory William Wilberforce) and as a Whig he had the temerity to criticize Arthur Wellesley’s military operations in Portugal, to which criticism the Iron Duke had the perfect reply, saying that “he would much rather follow his [Tarleton’s] example in the field than his advice in the senate.” Quoted in Anthony J. Scotti, Brutal Virtue: The Myth and Reality of Banastre Tarleton (Heritage Books, 2007), p. 242.
8 His American opponent was wily old Daniel Morgan.
9 Letter from Cornwallis to Lord Rawdon, 21 January 1781.
10 Franklin and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis and the War of Independence, p. 289.
11 Franklin and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years, p. 77.
12 Ibid., p. 248.
13 Geoffrey Treasure, Who’s Who in Late Hanoverian Britain (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1997), p. 184.
14 Ibid., pp. 182 and 185.
Chapter 7
1 Norman Lloyd Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh (Cassell Biographies, 1988), p. 20.
2 Kipling was not opposed to all things Irish. His son served in the Irish Guards and he wrote a history of the Irish Guards in World War I. He liked the Irishman’s fighting virtues as long as they were not directed against England.
3 As for “the Irish saving civilization” during the Dark Ages, it would be more accurate to say that through Irish monks, the Catholic Church saved civilization. A hat tip goes to the Irish, and they deserve to be bought a round at the pub, but a full genuflection belongs to the Church.
4 Paul Johnson, Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1996), p. 34.
5 Peter Neville, A Traveller’s His
tory of Ireland, 4th ed. (Interlink Books, 2003), p. 93. Despite its title this is a rather well done, if brief (278 pages), history of Ireland.
6 The Treaty of Limerick (1691) allowed Irish Catholic soldiers and their families to exile themselves to France—the so-called “Flight of the Wild Geese”—the Wild Geese being the name given to Irish mercenaries who fought throughout Europe. It would take the lifting of penal laws against arming the Catholic Irish (in 1793, though the laws were ignored, when convenient, before that) for the British themselves to make use of these tremendous fighters.
7 Neville, op. cit., p. 114.
8 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, abridged and ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Penguin Classics, 1986), p. 146.
9 Ibid., p. 143.
10 In signing this measure into law, then-governor George Pataki discarded real history and replaced it with a paranoid, but politically popular, conspiracy theory, saying, “History teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” Raymond Hernandez, “New Curriculum from Albany—The Irish Potato Famine, or One View of It,” The New York Times, 1 December 1996.
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