Kemper Lectures
Sir John H. Plumb , F.B.A. , May 8, 1983 - Continued
Of course, that essentially simple belief that British history had witnessed the slow unfolding of parliamentary democracy which protected not only property but also the liberties of the individual – free speech, free trial, free assembly – is no longer held by any, or scarcely any, professional historian. Indeed, by scarcely, any popular historian either. Its greatest popular exponent today is Sir Arthur Bryant but his books belonged to a previous age – to the age of Churchill for whom the British past was a part of his daily life. There is a myth, which I myself held for time, that Churchill only found the delights and the truths of history as a young subaltern in India when he spent long afternoons in his hammock reading Gibbon, Macaulay, and ancient volumes of the Annual Register, living again the grim parliamentary battles of his father’s day. But this is not true. He was far from being a model schoolboy – he was idle, willful, self-involved and quite stupid about mathematics or Latin, but he was well-ahead of his class at Harrow in history and top of the examination in history for the examination of Sandhurst every time he took it: he failed of course, many times, but never in history. So his reading in history in India strengthened and furthered attitudes that were already burgeoning in childhood and adolescence. History for Churchill was not a subject like geography or mathematics, it was a part of his temperament, as much a part of his being as his social class and indeed closely allied to it. It became a part of his politics, his diplomacy, his strategy and tactics: I think that it is extremely difficult for anyone not born into Churchill’s world or time to realize what a dominance the past had over all of his thinking and action. And one should recall that for Churchill the past was very personal. Think, merely, of Blenheim Palace where he was born, which is not so much a house as the greatest war memorial ever built, by a grateful nation for his ancestor, indeed, to proclaim Marlborough’s victories over Louis XIV. And the extent of his personal commitment to his family’s, as well as his country’s past, can be measured by his refusal to acknowledge Marlborough’s greed, his vaunting ambition, his capacity for duplicity, even his treachery. In Churchill’s Life of Marlborough, he certainly becomes sans peur and almost sans reproche. And what was true of Churchill was true of so many of his political colleagues: some like the Salisburys to a greater, some like the Chamberlains, to a lesser degree. The former could claim the great age of Elizabeth, the latter merely Birmingham in the nineteenth century. A man like Churchill with an intensely creative mind, a natural capacity for the resplendent phrase and a huge need for money was drawn to the writing of history live a lover. His success, as we know, was prodigious. He certainly sold more books on history than any historian in this century and perhaps any century. And yet I am sure that these books could not be written today as they were written, even by a Churchill; I doubt whether, if submitted, any publisher would accept today – were it by an unknown author – The History of the English Speaking Peoples.