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The Last Lion Born 150 Years Ago
Blenheim Palace is a sprawling mansion near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England, built between 1705 and 1724 to commemorate the Battle of Blenheim won by a combined Anglo-Dutch-Austrian army led by John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, over Louis XIV’s army and Bavarian troops in the War of the Spanish Succession on Aug. 13, 1704. It was at Blenheim Palace 150 years ago on Nov. 30, 1874, that Winston S. Churchill, arguably Britain’s greatest prime minister and arguably the savior of Western civilization during World War II, was born. In the United States, where citizens celebrated the Thanksgiving weekend, the sesquicentennial of Churchill’s birth was mostly ignored, though Larry Arnn wrote a fine piece about Churchill in the New Criterion, and Robert Schmuhl penned an op-ed about the great leader in the Wall Street Journal.
William Manchester in his magnificent three-volume biography (the third volume completed by Paul Reid after Manchester’s death) called Winston Churchill the “last lion.” Churchill was, wrote Manchester, “like the lion in Revelation, the ‘first beast,’ with ‘six wings about him’ and ‘full of eyes within.’” The lion in Revelation represents authority, majesty and power. Churchill had all of those, but he also had, in Manchester’s judgment, “intuitive genius” and “inflexible resolution” that enabled him to “gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends.”
At the time of Churchill’s birth, Great Britain ruled an empire greater in size than that of Rome or Spain at their zeniths. The British Navy ruled the waves. British statesmen like William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, and later Lord Salisbury, jealously guarded Britain’s role as the “holder” of the European balance of power. But unbeknownst to a young Winston Churchill, the empire’s days were numbered. Three years before Churchill’s birth, Bismarck fought his final war to unify Germany in central Europe, while Romanov Russia continued to challenge Britain in central Asia’s “great game.” Meanwhile, Japan was awakening in Asia and the Pacific, while the United States began, in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s words, “to look outward.”
Churchill’s father, Randolph, was an up-and-coming member of the Conservative Party, destined, however, to fall from grace after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer and dying in 1895 at the young age of 45. Winston’s mother was the American Jennie Jerome, who used her intellect and feminine wiles to advance Winston’s career. Neither parent had much personal time for Winston, who was reared by Elizabeth Everest, his nanny. At an early age, Churchill took to playing with soldiers and reading history. History would become Churchill’s lodestar. As a teenager, he believed he was destined to save Britain from extreme peril. As a young man and military officer, he repeatedly sought out danger and fame — in Cuba during the revolt against Spain, in India on the Northwest frontier, and in Africa in the Sudan and later South Africa. His daring escape from the Boers during the war in South Africa helped to launch his political career, which ultimately spanned seven decades. Churchill also wrote books about his adventures.
Churchill switched political parties twice in his career, earning the undying suspicion and distrust of parliamentary colleagues. As First Lord of the Admiralty during the early stages of the First World War, Churchill had the fleet ready to transport the British armies to the Western Front to help stop Germany’s advance. Frustrated by the bloody stalemate of the Western Front, Churchill championed the Dardanelles campaign, which turned into a disaster and nearly ruined his political career. The “man of destiny” was sacked and went to the front for several months. When he returned, the war’s tragedies continued, his talents were still needed, and he wound up back in the war cabinet.
After the war, Churchill switched parties again and rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he took a knife to the defense budget in the belief that there would be no war in the foreseeable future. He also began writing a history of the Great War called The World Crisis. Churchill intended that history would treat him well, so he wrote the history. As one colleague remarked: “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it The World Crisis.”
Churchill speculated in the American stock market and faced financial ruin when the market crashed in 1929. He survived financially on his meager parliamentary salary and his authorship of books and essays. He suffered serious injuries when he was struck by an automobile on the streets of New York in 1931. In the 1930s, Churchill was relegated to the political “wilderness” by leaders of the Conservative Party. As war clouds gathered in Europe and the Pacific, Churchill repeatedly sounded the alarm in parliament and to the world, but in Western capitals, appeasement reigned.
Churchill’s warnings of the gathering storm went unheeded until Hitler’s intentions became too clear to ignore. But by then it was too late to avoid the tragedy of global war. Appeasement’s failure led to the British government’s collapse and the king reluctantly summoned Churchill to form a wartime government. It was Britain’s “darkest hour,” and the survival of Western civilization stood in the balance. It was May-June 1940. Britain stood alone against Nazi-dominated Europe aligned with Soviet Russia. Many of Churchill’s colleagues in the war cabinet urged him to negotiate peace with Hitler. Churchill refused to parley with “that man” and pledged to “never surrender.” In those few days, he saved Western civilization from succumbing to all of the horrors of what he called a “new Dark Age.” But he couldn’t prevent all of the horrors — the murder of some six million Jews, the bombing of cities, the atrocities of Nanking, the expansion of the Gulag Archipelago, Soviet control of Eastern Europe, communism’s triumph in China, the coming of the nuclear age.
After Germany’s surrender but before victory over Japan, Churchill was turned out of office by the voters. He subsequently wrote his six-volume history of the Second World War, which earned a Nobel Prize for literature. He served another term as prime minister in the early 1950s, but by then he was an old and tired lion. The empire was virtually gone. Britain’s role as the “holder” of the balance of power was assumed by the United States.
History is so contingent upon events. No one could have foreseen that the little baby born 150 years ago in Blenheim Palace would someday save our civilization. What would the world be like today if Churchill had been killed on the Northwest frontier, or if he never escaped from the Boers in South Africa? What would the world be like if he had been shot and killed on the Western Front during World War I? What would the world be like if he hadn’t survived the auto accident in New York in 1931? What would the world be like if the king had summoned Lord Halifax, instead of Churchill, on May 10, 1940?
In William Manchester’s third volume of The Last Lion, he identifies perhaps Churchill’s greatest quality: courage. He quotes Churchill from Great Contemporaries: “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because … it is the quality which guarantees all the others.” Those of us who live in, and enjoy the culture and values of, Western civilization — or at least what is left of them — owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Winston Churchill.
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The post The Last Lion Born 150 Years Ago appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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