THESE addresses have tried to chart Britain’s rise by the end of the eighteenth century to a position as a worldwide power that eclipsed all her European rivals. In particular they have traced the vicissitudes of an empire of rule over territory and peoples that grew greatly in the aftermath of the Seven Years War, suffered huge amputations in 1783, but was set on further expansion in the 1790s. In this final address I want to turn to Britain itself and the engagement of the British people with their empire.

ON a stifling Saturday in Texas in June 1937 a twenty-six-year-old African-American musician, Robert Johnson, stepped to the microphone in a makeshift recording studio in a disused warehouse atop a Buick showroom. Johnson had grabbed a ride west from his native Mississippi to make it to the recording session in Dallas, one more journey in a life that had been spent by and large on the road. In contemporary parlance, he was a songster: an itinerant guitarist and maker of songs who scraped together a living wherever he found it, performing on street corners and in juke joints in the Deep South, sometimes drifting north, even reaching New York City, but always heading south again. That he recorded at all came down largely to luck; luck, and the exigencies of the Great Depression, which cut deeply into record company profits and forced the so-called ‘race record’ companies, which sold to an almost entirely black market, to look for cheap talent, Southern performers with local reputations who might appeal to regional markets. Johnson was one of many who caught a talent scout’s ear in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1930s. On that Saturday in Dallas he recorded fifteen songs, among them a haunted blues called ‘Hellhound on my Trail’.

IT was a dark November night in 1680 when a gang of masked men burst into Robert Robinson’s isolated house, waking the household with the clatter of their riding boots, swords and muffled curses, and snarling at Robinson, ‘Old rogue, where is thy money?’ After ransacking the room and breaking open a chest, another of the gang ‘did hold a Bible to Robert Robinson to swear whether he had any more gold or silver than what they had taken from him’. Robinson swore that he had no more and ‘Mr Lodge did laugh when he heard Robert Robinson sworn.’ Now the burglary of Robert Robinson’s house near the village of Old Hutton, Westmorland, at about 1.00 am on 4 November 1680 had some very odd features, but none so curious as Mr Lodge’s laughter when the old man was forced to swear. Edmund Lodge was the local schoolmaster and curate. In 1678 he had leased Robinson’s house for three years and the old man was now a ‘tabler’ or lodger in his own home. In time Lodge would move on to be the vicar of Clapham in Lancashire, where he died in 1696. But before then he would be tried and acquitted as one of this band of coiners and robbers. Some of these same desperadoes said that the raid on Robinson’s house had been Lodge’s idea. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Lodge had told the thieves that Robinson had more than £40 in a chest ‘ready to be taken away’; and when the gang broke in, Lodge indulged in a lot of phoney-sounding play-acting with them – one thief shouting at him, ‘damn you for a dog, hold your peace or I will cut your flesh from your bones’.

HISTORIANS are rightly suspicious of axioms, those capsules of historical ‘truth’ that pass into the received wisdom about a particular time period. Part of our job is to explode historical myth, to scrutinise and re-evaluate existing versions of the past. Yet how hard it is to think outside of the paradigms that are the legacy of an impressive bibliography and a legion of footnotes. I myself became aware of one particular paradigm regarding the cultural history of early modern England in the course of postgraduate research. I found myself straying across one of those temporal boundaries that arises from the chronological fragmentation imposed by textbooks and course syllabuses. In short, I moved from the pre-Civil-War period, with which I was then more familiar, into the early years of the long eighteenth century. It appeared to me that the literary sources from the late 1600s, which were the subject of my doctoral research, had much in common with the popular literature of earlier periods – the almanacs and chapbooks so well described by Bernard Capp, Margaret Spufford and others. The popular press of the last quarter of the seventeenth century seemed familiar territory: monstrous births, providential occurrences, and various forms of advice to young people were as much the staple diet for readers of cheap print in late seventeenth-century London as they had been in the era of Gouge and Whateley. The observation of such continuities had little relevance, however, since the preoccupation of historians studying this later period had changed.

IT is remarkable when an historical interpretation has stood almost unchallenged for one hundred years. Yet this is the case with the approach to the history of the county palatine of Durham outlined by G. T. Lapsley in 1900; it is a story of the steady decline of this once highly autonomous jurisdiction which has been retold by virtually all those who have written on the subject since. It is even more remarkable when that interpretation has acted as a vital support for two much more far-reaching paradigms. In the case of Lapsley’s interpretation of Durham, these extend not just elsewhere in the British Isles but also to North America. On the one hand is the approach to the territories of the English crown as a precociously centralised polity, characterised by the effective authority of the crown’s institutions and the rapid decline of what little provincial particularism had once been present. With Lapsley’s Durham a pale shadow of its former self by the fifteenth century, historians have been able to propose that even the strongest of the ancient palatinates was effectively defunct and the power of the centre unopposed. On the other hand, there is the paradigm which sees English North America as the scene of a conflict between the direct authority of an ambitious crown and a burgeoning desire for local self-government which was eventually successful.

SOME of the most cherished arrangements, the most comforting statements, the most confident claims about the nature of a society living under a divinely sanctioned sacramental–sacerdotal order, were given very different meanings in late medieval Prague, Paris and Pontefract. Such divergence and difference had always been a pattern of European life, as variety applied not only to climate, economic systems, language and political institutions, but also to devotional styles. The consolidation of sameness which was attempted – and to a significant extent achieved – by the church between 1100 and 1300, was offered through a single system of law, of preferment, of ritual. This was embedded within a set of understandings about the relationship of ecclesiastical hierarchy to salvation as well as to social order. Yet by around 1400 doubt and discomfort had attached to several of the touchstones of this world view – eucharist, pope, clergy – and thus hindered the flow of communication and cooperation which both underpinned and represented it. The authority to discern truth was in the hands of rulers and prelates who, in turn, were empowered or catalysed by professional thinkers and communicators – scholars, preachers, teachers, lawyers and poets. Words mattered greatly because they could conjure a vision of possible peace and remedy. They were spoken in tens of universities, hundreds of city councils, in a growing number of representative assemblies. Polities – be they territorial lordships, cities or even at times the Emperor – were pressing these thinkers and communicators to help in the work towards revival, purification and healing, away and against schism, pollution and war. How is the confidence to judge and discern spiritual and ethical truth ever regained by institutions or by individuals? More than ever before we witness preoccupation with the re-ordering of a Christian world through the re-establishment of social, economic and ethical order.

THIS lecture is named for George Walter Prothero (1848–1922), historian and editor: and one excuse for giving a lecture on W. B. Yeats to an audience of historians is that Yeats actually knew Prothero. They both sat on the Academic Commttee of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1912, after a meeting of this body, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory:

THIS conference considered major aspects of Winston Churchill’s career and re-assessed his contribution to modern history from the perspective of the twenty-first century. For this purpose a diverse group of historians was brought together who are all experts either on Churchill or on issues with which he was closely associated. Since few people are still alive who personally knew Churchill, the opportunity was also taken to ask Tony Benn MP, Lord Carrington, Lord Deedes and Lady Soames to give us their recollections of him. We are deeply grateful to them for sharing with us their vivid and insightful memories of Churchill. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance the conference received from the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society. Their support was appropriate because Churchill was made an Honorary Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society in 1936 (for his biography of his famous ancestor John Churchill, duke of Marlborough) and he passionately believed in the value of historical study of the kind promoted by the Institute of Historical Research.

FOR twenty years after the Second World War Winston Churchill’s status as ‘the greatest living Englishman’ was seldom questioned. Biographers celebrated his life, contemporaries paid tribute in their memoirs, and potters designed Churchill toby jugs adorned with quotations from his speeches. As a general rule, historians had little to say about him. They regarded events since 1914 as too recent for historical enquiry: hence the leading authority on Churchill’s life and times was the great man himself. His six volume historyThe Second World War, was generally accepted as a definitive interpretation.

CHURCHILL’S views on democracy – both in theory and in practice – are of interest for many reasons. He played a leading role in the ideological battles between democracy and dictatorship in the first half of the twentieth century and he was one of the principal architects of the modern democratic world order. Yet Churchill was widely regarded, particularly in the middle phase of his career, as a reactionary and anti-democratic figure. This conundrum will be examined by considering Churchill’s attitude to the concept of democracy and democratic reform – both at home and abroad – over his long career. Churchill was born in 1874 when the great majority of adults in Britain were still disenfranchised and he died in 1965 the year when the Voting Rights Act ended electoral racial discrimination in the United States. Thus his life roughly spanned the period during which universal suffrage democracy became the basis of political legitimacy in the western world.

CHURCHILL’S life was politics. His career as an MP ran, virtually unbroken, from 1900 to 1964 – almost the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. But although Churchill lived for politics, he lived by writing. Much of his income was earned as a journalist and author. At one end of the spectrum were scores of newspaper columns assessing contemporary events and politicians, summarising the plots of great novels, or just musing for money – as in ‘Have You a Hobby?’ or ‘Are There Men in the Moon?’ At the other extreme are large books such as the biographies of his father (1906) and of his martial ancestor, the first duke of Marlborough (1933–8), and his History of the English-Speaking Peoples(1956–8). Somewhere in between are autobiographical vignettes such asThe Malakand Field Force(1898) andMy Early Life(1930). But it is for his two sets of war memoirs that Churchill the historian is most remembered – six separate volumes on World War I (1923–31) and its aftermath, six more on World War II and its origins (1948–54).

In early April 1955, on the eve of his retirement as prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill gave a farewell dinner at 10 Downing Street, at which the principal guests were Queen Elizabeth II and the duke of Edinburgh. At the end of the evening, as he escorted his sovereign to her car, the cameras caught the leave-taking scene: Churchill, full of years and honour, wearing the Order of the Garter which she had given him, and the Order of Merit which her father had bestowed, bowing to the queen, whom he had earlier saluted as ‘the young, gleaming champion’ of the nation’s ‘wise and kindly way of life’. This sunset tableau, combining regal youth and statesmanly age, was reminiscent of Winterhalter’s picture, painted one hundred years before, which had depicted the venerable duke of Wellington doing homage to the young Victoria, to Prince Albert, and to their son, Prince Arthur of Connaught, on the first of May 1851. For Churchill, like the Iron Duke before him, was not only her majesty’s greatest subject: he was also an ardent admirer of the institution of monarchy, and of the person and the character of the last British sovereign he himself would live to serve. Indeed, according to his wife, Clementine, he was ‘Monarchical No 1’.

WINSTON CHURCHILL combined a rhetoric of Tory democracy with a shrewd political realism in his approach to the trade unions. When class conflict was strong and law and order under threat, as in 1911–26, the rhetoric evaporated and Churchill became the champion of the anxious propertied classes. So much so that his persistent Dundee opponent, Edwin Scrymgeour, observed during the 1922 general election campaign, shortly after Mussolini took power in Italy, that it would not surprise him in the event of civil war in Britain ‘if Mr Churchill were at the head of the Fascisti party’. While this view ignored Churchill’s deep commitment to democracy and the British constitution, it did reflect concerns about his apparent revelry in the role of Defender of Order. Yet both before and after 1911–26 his approach to the trade unions was emollient.

A POLITICAL and literary life of such extraordinary longevity, variety and richness of vocabulary leaves anyone seeking a consistent theme among any of Winston Churchill’s verbal puddings with a bowlful of paradox. The conduct of the premiership and the management of cabinet government are no exceptions. Among the papers his no. 10 private office produced for Harold Macmillan in the summer of 1960 when his appointment of a peer (Alec Home) to the foreign secretaryship led to accusations of excessive prime ministerialism, is a Hansard extract for 1938 in which Churchill defends the appointment by Chamberlain of Lord Halifax to the same post on the grounds that the prime minister sat in the House of Commons. ‘What is the point of crying out for the moon’, Churchill inquired of the Lower House, ‘when you have the sun and you have that bright orb of day from whose effulgent beams the lesser luminaries drive their radiance?’ And his most famous characterisation of the premiership seems to treat it as a post of licensed overmightiness. ‘The loyalties’, he declared in his war memoirs, ‘which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed’ – a case, to adopt a phrase of John Ramsden’s, of ‘autocracy tempered by assassination’.

THE words ‘Churchill’ and ‘party’ lie in uneasy company. Winston Churchill is regarded as the least orthodox and party-minded of all those who stood in the front rank of British politics during the twentieth century, always navigating by his own compass. This view is shaped by Churchill’s remarkable egotism and the well-known incidents of his career: the two changes of party allegiance, the coalitionism of 1917–22, the rebellious ‘wilderness’ years of the 1930s, and the premiership almost above party in 1940–5. It has been reinforced by the preponderance of biography in the writing about Churchill, and especially by those which regard him as a ‘great man’. Churchill tends to be removed from his political context and separated from his peers, and there is a reluctance to see him in any conventional light. As a result, by far the most neglected aspect of Churchill’s life has been his party political role, and in particular his relationship with the Conservative party.

When, on 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill’s public response was immediate and unambiguous: in a broadcast to the nation he proclaimed that ‘any man or state who fights on against Nazism will have our aid ... It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.’ He also referred to his own past as an opponent of Communism: ‘I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it, but all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.’ This seminal broadcast has cast a long shadow both backward and forward from 1941 in its effect on how most historians and biographers have seen Churchill’s attitude to the two principal dictatorships of the twentieth century.

THE influence of Churchill’s account of the appeasement years on the public mind has long been recognised and has been rehearsed here by David Reynolds. Equally influential in moulding the present view of the past has been the account of the Anglo-American alliance given by Churchill inThe Second World War. One healthy change that the twenty-first century might bring is a less romanticised and more realistic account of the so-called special relationship. Like all good revisionism, this essay will attempt to clear away some of the rich Churchillian detritus, before trying to trace some of the outline of a different version of events. Such, however, is the artistry of the Churchillian version, and so strong the need of the British to believe it, that only the boldest of seers would wager on the chances of it being dislodged in the near future.

AS with many aspects of his career, Churchill’s attitude towards the Soviet Union and Communism has generated considerable debate. The same statesman who urged war on the Bolshevik regime in 1919 – likening it to ‘troops of ferocious baboons’ or ‘a culture of typhoid’ – also urged co-operation with Stalin in the 1930s; he spent his last years in office calling for a summit meeting to reduce Cold War tensions, having himself stirred up those tensions with the 1946 Fulton Speech, where he coined the term ‘Iron Curtain’. Where one historian has concluded that ‘ideologically- based anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism were Churchill’s most abiding obsession for some forty years’, placing emphasis on the rhetoric of the intervention period; another historian recognises that Churchill’s language never reached such intensity again, that he sought to work with Stalin despite the latter’s purges and that even the Fulton Speech praised the Soviet war effort, welcoming ‘Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world’.

[The following is a transcription of a panel discussion chaired by Professor David Cannadine in the Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, University of London, on Thursday 11 January 2001].