John Churchill

“ MARLBOROUGH, JOHN CHURCHILL, 1st Duke of (1650–1722) , English soldier, was born in the small manor house of Ash, in Musbury, Devonshire, near Axminster, in May or June 1650. Arabella Churchill, his eldest sister, and the mother of the duke of Berwick, was born in the same house on the 28th of February 1648. They were the children of Winston Churchill of Glanville Wotton in Dorset and Elizabeth the fourth daughter of Sir John Drake, who died in 1636; his widow, after the close of the civil war, received her son-in-law into her own house. ”

“ There is no such thing as trial here: we hang the good folk without it, which saves them much anxiety. But quicken thy step, good John; I have influence with Lord Churchill, and we must contrive to see him, ere the foreigner falls to work again. Lord Churchill is a man of sense, and imprisons nothing but his money.'
We were lucky enough to find this nobleman, who has since become so famous by his foreign victories. ”

“ July 1679 his colleague in the representation of Newtown was John Churchill, afterwards duke of Marlborough. In June a scandalous adventure of Churchill's was related to the king by Holmes in a manner which Churchill thought to his prejudice. He accordingly challenged Holmes, ‘who, fighting, disarmed him, Churchill’ (Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. App. 473 a) . He was buried at Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight on 23 June 1683 (Yarmouth Register, communicated by the Rev. G. Quirk) ”

“ In 1756 he was ordained priest by Sherlock, and took his father's curacy at Rainham. In 1758 the father died, and the parishioners of St. John showed their respect for him by electing the son as his successor in the curacy and lectureship. Churchill was now the fether of two children. His income was only 100l. a year, and he tried to eke out his means by opening a school (at Westminster or at Rainham) , and by teaching in a ladies' school kept by a Mrs. Dennis. At Westminster he renewed his old friendship with Robert Lloyd, who had succeeded his father as usher. ”

“ Churchill,” she said, “your daughter has been here, but she is not here at present.”
“Where is she now, then?” asked Mr. Churchill, somewhat roughly. “For I mean to find her. I have come up to London to find her, and also to find Mr. John Temple, who, I suppose, has taken her away if she has gone from here.”
Again both the sisters gasped. This big strong man seemed to overwhelm them, and they felt themselves almost powerless in his hands.
“The long and the short of it is,” continued Mr. Churchill, “I mean to call Mr. John Temple to account for his conduct to May. ”

“ Whereas Sir Winston Churchill, a son of America though a subject of Britain, has been throughout his life a firm and steadfast friend of the American people and the American Nation; and
Whereas he has freely offered his hand and his faith in days of adversity as well as triumph; and
Whereas his bravery, charity and valor, both in war and in peace, have been a flame of inspiration in freedom's darkest hour; and
Whereas his life has shown that no adversary can overcome, and no fear can deter, free men in the defense of their freedom ”

“ Churchill’s success in holding his audiences: a sort of unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in. Never once has Mr. Churchill like a philosopher or a seer, run off alone. ”

“ Churchill the respect due a sincere, [32] scrupulous, and upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his lights.... The sounds which have reached him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire and intend better than they think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill. ”

“ The dispute was continued passionately at Birmingham. Mr. John Albert Bright was duly brought forward as the Liberal-Unionist candidate for the Central Division. The Conservative leaders there—Rowlands, Sawyer, Satchell-Hopkins, Moore Bayley—utterly refused to support him. They were local men, and against them were arrayed the whole authority of their party chiefs and the force and influence of a great national politician. But they had fought hard battles before, and although they thought themselves deserted by Lord Randolph Churchill they faced the situation with obstinacy. ”

“ To those who do not understand him, the impetuous disposition, which is one of his strongest characteristics, is apt to throw into shadow the indomitable courage, tireless energy, marvellous perspicuity and quick virile brain-power which are the main features of Winston Churchill's extraordinary personality. ”

“ His services as embassador to Constantinople had to be declined, and “The North Briton” to be called into existence to avenge the slight. Poor, deluded Churchill, was sitting on the forms at Westminster with Lloyd, Cowper, and Warren Hastings. The time had to come when he could “blaze the comet of a season,” by applying such terms as “the poor, proud children of leprosy and hunger,” to the natives of an ancient and noble land, whose powers he did not comprehend, and whose achievements in art, science, law, letters, and commerce, he possessed not the prescience to divine. ”

“ But the results of their invasion were gathered at the decisive point. The nerve of the German Headquarters failed. On August 25 two army corps and a cavalry division of the German right were withdrawn from France. On August 31 Lord Kitchener was able to telegraph to Sir John French: ‘Thirty-two trains of German troops were yesterday reported moving from the western field to meet the Russians.’ [50]
Awful was the responsibility of General Joffre and the French High Command for the decision which must now be taken. To turn too late was to risk the demoralisation of the armies. ”

“ He proclaimed that Churchill would be Premier. John Dillon, the Nationalist leader, said he never before had seen a young man, by means of his maiden effort, spring into the front rank of parliamentary speakers. ”

“ Churchill was introduced to the Steaks by his friend Wilkes; but his irregularities were too much for the Society, which was by no means particular; his desertion of his wife brought a hornets' swarm about him, so that he soon resigned, to avoid the disgrace of expulsion. Churchill attributed this flinging of the first stone to Lord Sandwich; he never forgave the peccant Peer, but put him into the pillory of his fierce satire, which has outlived most of his other writings, and here it is:
"From his youth upwards to the present day,
When vices more than years have made him grey ”

“ Churchill, indeed, seems to have been ignorant, incapable, and overbearing, and to have rendered himself hated by almost all who came in contact with him.
He accumulated a large fortune, no doubt garnered from the thousand nameless perquisites of office. On the death of Prince George in October 1708 he retired from the admiralty and lived mostly at a villa in Windsor Park, where he occuppied himself with the care of a magnificent aviary, which at his death, 8 May 1710, he bequeathed to the Duke of Ormonde and the Earl of Torrington. ”

“ Other poems are “The Conference” (1763) ; “The Author” (1763) , highly praised by Churchill’s contemporaries; “Gotham” (1764) , a poem on the duties of a king, didactic rather than satiric in tone; “The Candidate” (1764) , a satire on John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich, one of Wilkes’s bitterest enemies, whom he had already denounced for his treachery in the Duellist (Bk. iii.) as “too infamous to have a friend”; “The Farewell” (1764) ; “The Times” (1764) ; “Independence,” and an unfinished “Journey.”
In October 1764 he went to Boulogne to join Wilkes. ”

“ After the service, far into the afternoon, he had walked the wet streets heedless of his direction, in an exaltation that he had felt before, but never with such intensity. It seemed as though he had always wished to preach, and marvelled that the perception had not come to him sooner. If the man to whom he had listened could pour the light into the dark corners of other men's souls, he, John Hodder, felt the same hot spark within him,—despite the dark corners of his own! ”

“ In November 1699, being, it is said, dissatisfied at the appointment of Admiral Churchill to the admiralty, he retired from active service, though he continued to act as one of the commissioners of the navy till July 1702. He took no part whatever in naval affairs beyond sitting in parliament as baron or member for Dover, till after the death of Prince George, and the retirement of Churchill in November 1709, when he was appointed commander-in-chief of the fleet. ”

“ Island,' a ridiculous pastoral drama.
[88] 'Modern tragedy:' Mr Murphy again.
[89] 'Vain tyrant,' &c.: Garrick is here meant; he had displeased Churchill by pretending that he had written 'The Rosciad' to gain the freedom of the playhouse. He apologised very humbly to Churchill, and a reconciliation took place.
[90] 'A man:' Dr Smollett again.
[91] 'Expose the man:' referring to some personal lines on one Mr John Palmer, which occurred in the first edition, but which he expunged.
NIGHT. [92] AN EPISTLE TO ROBERT LLOYD. Contrarius evehor orbi.—OVID, Met. lib. ii. ”

“ But I think the American people expect more from us than cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high – to permit the customary passions of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future. As Winston Churchill said on taking office some twenty years ago: if we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.
Today our concern must be with the future. For the world is changing. ”

“ Aristocratic to the core, with the blood of the Marlboroughs in his veins, and a snob of snobs in his personal relations, it is an anomalous fact that Churchill is an endlessly popular figure with the crowd. Whether it is his youth--he is only forty-one, was a soldier of no mean renown at twenty-three, a Member of Parliament at twenty-six, a Cabinet Minister at thirty-two and a force in Imperial politics long before he was forty--or his impetuous devil-may-care make-up, or his bombastic platform style, the masses like him. ”

“ He would be much happier in the Conservative camp. It would be better for all parties if he took the plunge. To a proud man profoundly attached to historic Liberalism, painfully conscious of the increasing difficulties of his position, these taunts were galling in the extreme. In more than one speech he denounced the New Conservatives, of whom he said that they arrogated to themselves the title of Tory Democracy, had no distinctly marked political opinions, and looked on politics only as a game by which they might attain office. ”

“ Winston Churchill is not of the party in the interests of which his father ran his brief political career insures for this work non-partisan treatment. It deals with Lord Churchill’s public rather than his private life, and is in the main a record of ten brief years of an effective career. During this period Lord Churchill became leader of the House of Commons and chief exponent of the so-called Tory democracy, attempted the reform of the Conservative party from within and in the end broke with all his former leaders and colleagues. “The atmosphere is from start to finish severely political.” ”

“ Winston Churchill may turn out to be a stronger and abler politician than his father."
It was all a part of Churchill's "luck" that when he entered Parliament the subject in debate was the conduct of the war.
Even in those first days of his career in the House, in debates where angels feared to tread, he did not hesitate to rush in, but this subject was one on which he spoke with knowledge. Over the older men who were forced to quote from hearsay or from what they had read, Churchill had the tremendous advantage of being able to protest: "You only read of that. ”

“ My dear, you wish to rescue him, to disguise him, send him south by way of Colonel Carvel's house at Glencoe. Then he will be killed. At least, he will have died for the South.
First politics, and then war, and then more politics, in this our country. Your masterful politician obtains a regiment, and goes to war, sword in hand. He fights well, but he is still the politician. It was not a case merely of fighting for the Union, but first of getting permission to fight. Camp Jackson taken, and the prisoners exchanged south, Captain Lyon ”

“ The collapse of the French was the signal for Churchill to display the finest quality of his character. Senator Gerald P. Nye once, with the good taste characteristic of our isolationists, said: “Britain is a dead horse. America should not team up with a lost cause.” To France in her death agony Churchill made the offer that she merge with Britain and establish a single Franco-British government and cabinet, unite the resources of the French and British Empires, and fight on to the last drop of British blood, even if all France were occupied. ”

“ Every Londoner thought as the bombs fell, “Churchill is there; he can’t be beaten; we can’t be beaten.” Churchill “became” England. This is the experience that has elevated him above himself, fulfilled his character, made him great. Today Churchill’s every faculty of soul, mind, and body is devoted to the service of the British Commonwealth. Today every soul and resource in the German Commonwealth is devoted to the service of Hitler.
Churchill actively directs the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force but his love is the Navy. ”

“ Churchill has a profound historical sense and the thought of himself as a part of the broad stream of the British people, flowing from the distant past into the limitless future, is never absent from his speaking and writing. He is never just Churchill, he is Churchill of British history, of the Marlboroughs, but now more than ever Churchill of the British people, with whom he has established a community of feeling seldom equaled in the relationship of leader to people. It has always been Hitler’s boast that “I am Germany!” ”