CHURCHILL DESCRIBES THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 28008, 30 June 1956, Page 5

CHURCHILL DESCRIBES THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Volume I: The Birth of Britain. By Winston S. Churchill. 1 Cassell. 416 pp.

As a representative of both main branches of the English-speaking peoples, Sir Winston Churchill has long wished to present his personal view on the processes by which these peoples achieved their distinctive position and character. As he says in his preface, his book does not seek to rival the work of professional historians. It is necessarily selective to illustrate his theme. •

No-one, perhaps, could perform the task as well. Sir Winston Churchill is not only a student of history and a distinguished writer; he has for more than 50 years been at the centre of politics, and experience can support intuition in understanding how political decisions were made and why. This unique combination of gifts accounts for the clarity and economy with which he presents his ’picture. The publishers’ notes on the dust jacket claim that historians who saw the proofs of the book said that for the first time the convolutions of the Wars of the Roses had become clear to them. However this may be for serious students, it will certainly be true of the laymen, who will enjpy the clear expositions as well as the sharp, Anglo-American wit that enlivens the whole book.

This volume is perhaps open to the criticism that Sir Winston Churchill deals overmuch with the great people of early Britain and too little with the social development of the realm. It is, for instance, a little startling to find no index reference to Caxton and the following brief mention of another great Englishman in the text: “A purge of the Civil Service, supposed to be a source alike of the king’s errors and of his strength, was instituted; and we may note that Geoffrey Chaucer, his equerry, but famous for other reasons, lost his two posts in the Customs.”

To many readers it will seem a much livelier, unbowdlerised, and logical version of the history they learned at school. And so it is, but it is none the worse for that. Sir Winston Churchill’s methods need no defence. This is history as the

man of action and the man of letters sees it. And is he not right that the character and the position attained by the English-speaking peoples were built on the twin pillars of Church and State? On these were founded the languages, the customs, the laws, and the rights of two great commonwealths, embracing the greatest numbers of human beings ever to share a common language and a common culture. They made possible the triumph of the common man. The barons at Runnymede, for example, gave little thought to the commonalty, but they did establish the principle that the king should not be below man but’ should be below God and the law—a principle that has not yet been learned in some countries. Nor does Sir Winston Churchill really ignore the social life of the kingdom. His account of Roman Britain (when a much higher proportion of the population enjoyed central heating than does so today) is a gem. It is a distant period, but it comes as a shock to recall that this golden age (when a man could travel across Europe as fast and more safely than when Victoria came to the throne) lasted almost as long as the period separating the reigns of the first and second Elizabeths. No-one could have made it plainer that “Christendom has no equal to the Black Death. ... A whole generation is slashed through by a hideous severance. . . . The calamity which fell upon mankind reduced their numbers and darkened their existence without abating their quarrels.” The book can be opened at random to find passages that tempt quotation. As on the Pelagian heresy, “which in spite of other preoccupations our Christian island had been able to evolve. This doctrine consisted in assigning an undue importance to free will, and cast a consequential slur upon the doctrine of original sin. It thus threatened to deprive mankind from its very birth of an essential part of our inheritance.” Or this reference to a great figure, who happened not to be English at all, but from whom the English may have learned something: “Joan . . . embodies the natural goodness of and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection Unconquerable

courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which sprang.” Warwick’s claim to his title of Kingmaker has never been put more succinctly than in this: “At this moment therefore Warwick the Kingmaker had actually the two rival Kings, Uenry VI and Edward IV, both his prisoners, one in the Tower and the other at Middleham. This was a remarkable achievement for any subject.”

The real Churchill speaks plainly when he rebukes the historians who for fear of being contradicted have stripped themselves “of almost all sense and meaning” when they speak of the legendary King Arthur, who saved Britain from the Saxon invaders for a spell. “This is not much to show after so much toil and learning . . .”

he says. “If we could see exactly what happened we should find ourselves in the presence of a theme as well founded, as inspired, and as inalienable from the inheritance of mankind as the Odyssey or the Old Testament. It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides. And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round. Let us then declare that King Arthur and his noble knights, guarding the Sacred Flame of Christianity, and the theme of a world order, sustained by valour, physical strength, and good horses and armour, slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time.” Although Sir Winston Churchill writes mostly of great lawgivers, statesmen, soldiers, and prelates, his instinctive feeling for the moods and wishes of the mass of the people is implicit on almost every page. It was the common man, after all, who inherited the greatness forged in these small islands by the uncommon men of whom he tells.

This first volume is but the prelude to the bursting of their narrow bounds by the people of Britain and Ireland, taking their history up to the “glare of a new day. The stir of the Renaissance, the storm of the Reformation, hurled their new problems on the bewildered but also reinspired mortals of the new age upon which England entered under the guidance of the wise, sad, careful monarch who inaugurated the Tudor dictatorship as King Henry VII.” For the story of the new age we must wait for Sir Winston Churchill’s second volume.