by Simon Schama
By giving Britons their modern history, it seemed, Macaulay had given them their nationality; a reason to pledge common allegiance; a reason to fight, if they had to, in Peshawar or Penang. In this sense, Macaulay had made history twice over. The writing had moved the soldiers and the administrators, the engineers, even the shipping clerks and the station-masters; and what they wrought in turn would make for more history-writing. You could write the empire, Churchill must have felt; and the empire would write you. Thucydides, after all, had been no cloistered archivist but an actor in the drama of his own work – a fighter, a thinker, a maker of speeches, a mover of men. His immersion in the world had made his work more enduring, not less so.
To be sure, Macaulay’s opus was the history of England. But the Scots, Irish and Welsh who also peopled the barracks and the courthouses; who laid the railways and ordered the excavation of irrigation canals; whose flocks and herds grazed the Australian outback and whose tea plantations prospered in Assam; who sat in parliament; who owned the banks, insurance and shipping companies – all these were surely evidence that Great Britain was indeed a true nation. Was not Macaulay (not to mention Carlyle) himself a Scot by origin? Seeley had even used the analogy of ‘Celts’ who spoke languages ‘quite unintelligible’ to the English, but yet felt themselves to be part of a common nation, as a promising precedent for the possibility of integrating even more apparently diverse peoples – Dutch Boers and ‘Kaffirs’, the Xhosa people – into a true, lasting and ‘unforced’ imperial union.
Churchill, of course, like Macaulay, believed this parallel and mutually self-reinforcing coming together of nation and empire to be a natural process rather than a selfishly constructed one. And the notion that both were provisional unions, conditional on their continued prospering; that the process could, some day in the future, conceivably fold in on itself; that an imperial dissolution might be followed by a national dissolution, would have been utterly inconceivable. Perhaps there had been regrettable coercions such as Culloden en route to the Union, in defence of Protestant liberties and 1688. But once so united, the bond had been sealed by common ideals as well as common interests. After all, had not Flora MacDonald, the protectress of Bonnie Prince Charlie, turned into the most ardent Hanoverian loyalist in North Carolina during the American War of Independence?
Or perhaps, on the other hand, the flourishing of Great Britain did strike Churchill, in his later years at least, as conditional on the perpetuation of the empire. Perhaps that was why he remained so adamant in its defence, so obsessively deluded about its prospects of survival – barking even as late as 1942 that he had not become prime minister in order to preside over its dissolution (although, of course, the terms by which he accepted junior partnership in an American alliance would guarantee just that). By 1965, when he died, however adrift he had been from current events in the last decade of his life, Churchill must have known that Britain’s imperial history was, if not at an end, well beyond the beginning of the end. The Anglo-French invasion of Egypt during the Suez Crisis of 1956, barely a year after Churchill had grudgingly and belatedly handed over power there to his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had been a fiasco: a bungled attack followed by a humiliating withdrawal at Suez. After Eden the two Harolds, Macmillan and Wilson, had committed themselves even more emphatically to the disappearing act. What had once been the Raj was now a friend and ally of the Soviet Union. The statues and busts that had memorialized the great and good all over Delhi had been removed from their pedestals and taken to a railed enclosure at the edge of what had been the durbar field – a ghostly open-air prison compound for the casualties of the modern age. The empire was now Gibraltar and British Honduras, Anguilla and Hong Kong – a scatter of sundowner islands with the occasional isthmus. The Commonwealth was a fig leaf for capitulation, surviving more robustly in Test cricket than in anything resembling shared political community.
And yet in that freezing week of late January 1965, when hundreds of thousands filed past Churchill’s coffin and many more lined the streets to watch it process from Westminster Hall to St Paul’s, and then on to the Thames, British (not just English) history seemed to reconstitute itself in an immense assembly of mourning and memory. This was, for all concerned, an intensely felt demonstration of allegiance. But it also became commonplace, at the time and afterwards, to note that the valediction was being paid, not just to Churchill himself, but to the axiomatic sense of Britishness he had personified – a Britishness defined, above all, by history. Oddly enough the French president, Charles de Gaulle, looming over the congregation in St Paul’s, had provided a back-handed compliment to the Churchillian definition of Britain two years earlier, when he had vetoed the Macmillan government’s application to join the European Economic Community (as it was then called) on the grounds that Britain was, ultimately, an ‘insular’ maritime nation whose traditions and personality disqualified it from authentic European-ness. But many observers represented the funeral as the last hurrah of self-evident Britishness, just as this would be Richard Dimbleby’s last broadcast. The failure of President Lyndon B. Johnson or any major member of his administration to show up at the funeral only sharpened the acute sense that the nation that had been born from imperial wars and sustained by imperial profits had now put itself into American receivership; that the Churchillian illusion of truly independent national self-assertion was being buried along with his Promethean old body.
Did that mean, too, that a particular kind of British history – written as well as enacted – was also no longer possible; that its sentimental longevity had far outrun anything resembling honest self-recognition; and that Churchill the historian-leader had been one of the main culprits in perpetuating its illusions? Now, with the patriarch finally gone, perhaps it was time for the country to grow up, face realities, kick away the crutch of sceptred-isle pageantry and take seriously Harold Wilson’s challenge of 1963 to embark on the ‘white heat’ of a second industrial-scientific-technological revolution seriously. Was the condition of national maturity giving British history the boot, once and for all?
Or has there been, might there still be, something more? Might there yet be a Britain, Great or otherwise? And might it cherish, rather than own up to, its history?
Even if he had wanted to, there was no chance that Winston Churchill could have escaped the clutches of history. He had been born to it, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, the swaggering baroque pile designed by playwright-turned-architect Sir John Vanbrugh in the early years of the 18th century and intended as a gift of gratitude from Queen Anne and the nation to the victorious Duke of Marlborough. Since it cost a cool £300,000 (£24 million in today’s value) the reserves of gratitude ran out along with the funds – much to the fury of the formidable duchess, who later complained that the place was grossly unfit for habitation. It was certainly as much an architectural proclamation as a dwelling place: a manifesto in limestone of Britain’s intention of replacing absolutist France as the dominant imperial power. The language of this announcement at Blenheim is unsubtle. At the base of the exterior ceremonial steps of the façade he stone cannon, balls, drums and flags. Atop the triumphal arch of the kitchen court a sharp-toothed British lion, carved by Grinling Gibbons, lunches on a French cockerel. The swaggering bust of Marlborough’s arch-enemy Louis XIV, removed by the duke from the captured fort city of Tournai, protrudes from the roofline of the south front like the decapitated head of a common criminal stuck on a spike as warning and reproof. Inside, one-upmanship on the pretensions of Versailles continues with the parade of captured French flags in the Great Hall, and in the Saloon the illusionistically painted figures of Versailles’s Ambassadors’ Staircase are repeated in Louis Laguerre’s personifications of the Four Continents looking down on Marlborough’s splendour and spoils.
Winston’s birth at Blenheim on 30 November 1874 was a double-shotgun affair. He was delivered, suddenly and prematurely, only seven and a half months after the marriage of his parents, Lord Randolph
Churchill and his darkly beautiful 20-year-old American bride, Jeanette (‘Jennie’) Jerome. Heavily pregnant though she was, Jennie was not one to pass up a shoot at Blenheim. Following the guns, she took a spill. The jolting of the pony trap that took her back to the house brought on the contractions that, eight arduous hours later, produced Winston. As the grandson of the 7th Duke he would not be brought up in Blenheim, but time and again during his long life he would come back to the place in moods of melancholy, elation or despair. In the wintriest years of his career in the 1930s, isolated from power, Churchill would repair his own damaged reputation by vindicating Marlborough’s in a huge four-volume biography (1933–38).
History was always just a shout away from Winston Churchill. His first memories were of the ‘Little Lodge’ near Phoenix Park in Dublin, where his father lived for a while as secretary to the duke, who had been made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Both parents were remote and tantalizingly glamorous. Randolph’s glittering, bulging eyes and oversize whiskers hiding a small, intense face caused him to resemble a tenacious miniature Schnauzer, while ‘darling Mummy’ was another spectacle altogether, remembered by her son as clad in a riding jacket, tight as a second skin, ‘beautifully spattered with mud’; or with a diamond pin in her piled-up, raven hair. Filial longings – of any kind – failed to make any impression on their objects during the Churchills’ dizzying ascent to power and fame. As usual with boys of his class Winston was consigned to a nanny, Elizabeth Everest, nicknamed without a trace of ironic self-consciousness ‘Woom’. It was from Nanny Everest that Winston learned something, though not a lot, about an England sensed dimly beyond places like Blenheim or Banstead Manor, the house near Newmarket that Randolph bought during his pedigree horsey period. According to Woom, essential Britain was Kent, ‘the garden of England’, a bursting cornucopia of strawberries, cherries and plums. At Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, Nanny Everest took the small boy to see her sister and brother-in-law, a retired prison warder who regaled him with lurid stories of gaol uprisings satisfyingly quashed in the name of the queen. He walked the chines with Nanny and family not far from Victoria’s house at Osborne, chased rabbits and scrambled over the cliffs.
The rituals of the upper class proceeded according to time-honoured plan and custom. At eight, Winston was taken from his 1000-strong and expanding army of toy soldiers, his play fort and his real steam engine, and dispatched to what, even by the standards of the day, seems to have been a particularly brutal prep school at Ascot, where he listened to the the screams of small boys being given 15 strokes of the birch by the headmaster. As a prison-reforming home secretary in 1910–11 during the Liberal government of Asquith, Churchill claimed that his sympathies for inmates owed much to his time spent ‘in the private and public schools of England’. Jennie took pity on her terrified and often sickly little boy and transferred him to the tenderer mercies of a school at Brighton run by the Thompson sisters. In the spring of 1888 he entered Harrow, where he would have been just two years ahead of Macaulay’s great-nephew and Charles Trevelyan’s grandson, George Macaulay Trevelyan, one of the few historians in the 20th century whose popularity came near Churchill’s own. The apocrypha of young Winston the Harrovian has him as a dunce, which he certainly was not; but he was clueless at classics, the predictor of statesmen. When told that Mr Gladstone read Homer for fun, Churchill ‘thought it served him right’. But he learned history (as did Trevelyan) from a gifted teacher, George Townsend Warner, and was taught English by Robert Somervell, from whom Winston ‘got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence – which is a noble thing’.
Harrow was the Whig academy to the Tories’ Eton, where Randolph himself had been (although he made sure Winston didn’t know this). But by 1888 Lord Randolph Churchill, MP, and the Tory party were, in any case, no longer hand-in-glove. To the landed grandees Randolph’s demagoguery, artfully vituperative despite the Churchill lisp, had always been suspect. It had taken the broadacres some time to become accustomed to Benjamin Disraeli, whose own doubtful populism had at least been balanced by expressions of gushy reverence for Church, throne and aristocracy. Randolph Churchill, on the other hand, seemed to have dreamed up something called ‘Tory democracy’, which seemed altogether too oxymoronic for its own good, not to mention the good of the party; though they conceded it seemed to go down well in the industrial constituencies of the Midlands and the north. Although he had the Marlborough pocket constituency of Woodstock sewn up, Randolph was spoiling for the kind of fight that would make enough noise to bring him celebrity. At the 1885 general election, he chose – rather brilliantly – the octogenarian Liberal patriarch John Bright for his target and stood against him. In Birmingham, before he lost, he was able to make much of the redundancy of classical radical Liberalism and its promised supercession by Tory social welfare. The crowds loved him; even his lisp. The party elders hummed and hawed and pulled nervously on their beards. In a party of thoughtful worriers – Lord Salisbury, Sir Stafford Northcote, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach – Lord Randolph, still in his 30s, seemed to be a dangerously loose cannon. He was shameless about storming the organizational machinery of the Tories that the party’s reformer John Gorst had put in place for Disraeli; and even more shameless about playing the Ulster card in Ireland. For every sharp play there was a smart epigram that landed like a grenade, none inflicting more long-term collateral damage than ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’.
Miraculously, however – not least because he was soft on a coercive ‘Crimes Bill’ – Randolph managed to be on good terms with Parnell as well as with the Belfast Unionists, to the point of being instrumental in getting the Irish MPs to bring down Gladstone’s government (the ultimate case of cutting off a nose to spite a face). When a Tory administration was established on the ruins of Home Rule in July 1886, Salisbury (perhaps through gritted teeth) felt he had no option but to share power with Randolph Churchill. At 37 years old he became leader of the House of Commons and chancellor of the exchequer. But his appetite grew with the eating. Churchill began to meddle egregiously with foreign policy, the acknowledged preserve of the prime minister. A fight was picked with Salisbury over the army and navy estimates. Failing to get his way, and fatally over-estimating his indispensability, Randolph threatened to resign. The bluff was called. He had been chancellor of the exchequer for just four months. One imagines Salisbury and Northcote lifting a private glass in huge relief.
Lord Randolph’s time in power was over before most politicians had begun theirs. Worse than being kept at a distance from office was his accurate certainty that he would never recover it. He collapsed into a baleful, bitter, taciturn gloom that settled on the whole Churchill–Marlborough clan like a coating of ash. ‘Darling Mummy’ letters from Winston became more pathetically needy while Darling Mummy was taking lovers and failing to show up on parents’ days. Summers at Blenheim presided over by the aged Duchess Fanny, around whom slippered footmen obsequiously shuffled in the candlelight, were especially grim. Encounters between father and son were rare, which was just as well since Winston, physically unprepossessing, halting of speech and, so Randolph thought, irremediably dim, had become an intolerable irritant to his short, sharp temper: ‘I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle useless unprofitable life you have had during your schooldays & later months, you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby unhappy & futile existence.’ Frightened of tongue-lashings, Winston invariably committed the small crimes and misdemeanours that guaranteed them. At Harrow he remained lonely, conscious of his clumsiness (he managed to fall from a tricycle and concuss himself) and carrying the distinction of his birth and rank like a sorry burden. ‘I would far rather have been apprenticed as a bricklayer’s mate,’ he would later write, ‘or run errands as a messenger boy, or helped my father dress the front windows of a grocer’s shop. It would have been real; it would have been natural, it
would have taught me more, and I would have done it much better. Also I should have got to know my father, which would have been a joy to me.’
