The Age of Revolution - A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume III

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PREFACE

BOOK I - ENGLAND’S ADVANCE TO WORLD

POWER

CHAPTER ONE - WILLIAM OF ORANGE

CHAPTER TWO - CONTINENTAL WAR

CHAPTER THREE - THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

CHAPTER FOUR - MARLBOROUGH: BLENHEIM AND RAMILLIES

CHAPTER FIVE - OUDENARDE AND MALPLAQUET

CHAPTER SIX - THE TREATY OF UTRECHT

BOOK II - THE FIRST BRITISH EMPIRE

CHAPTER SEVEN - THE HOUSE OF HANOVER

CHAPTER EIGHT - SIR ROBERT WALPOLE

CHAPTER NINE - THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION AND THE “FORTY￾FIVE”

CHAPTER TEN - THE AMERICAN COLONIES

CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE FIRST WORLD WAR

CHAPTER TWELVE - THE QUARREL WITH AMERICA

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - THE UNITED STATES

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - THE INDIAN EMPIRE

BOOK III - NAPOLEON

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE YOUNGER PITT

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

CHAPTER NINETEEN - FRANCE CONFRONTED

CHAPTER TWENTY - TRAFALGAR

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - THE EMPEROR OF THE FRENCH

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - THE PENINSULAR WAR AND THE FALL OF

NAPOLEON

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - WASHINGTON, ADAMS, AND

JEFFERSON

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - THE WAR OF 1812

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - ELBA AND WATERLOO

ENDNOTES

INDEX

SUGGESTED READING

Copyright © 1957 by The Right Honourable Sir Winston Churchill, K.G. O.M. C.H. M.P.

This edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc., by arrangement with

Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc.

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2005

by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2005 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I DESIRE TO RECORD MY THANKS AGAIN TO MR. F. W. DEAKIN AND

Mr. G. M. Young for their assistance before the Second World War in the

preparation of this work; to Dr. J. H. Plumb of Christ’s College, Cambridge, Mr.

Steven Watson of Christ Church, Oxford, Professor Asa Briggs of Leeds

University, Professor Frank Freidel, now of Stanford University, California, who

have scrutinised the text in the light of subsequent advances in historical

knowledge; and to Mr. Alan Hodge, Mr. Denis Kelly, and Mr. C. C. Wood. I

have also to thank many others who have kindly read these pages and

commented upon them.

In the opening chapters of this volume I have, with the permission of Messrs.

George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd., followed the character of my Marlborough: His

Life and Times (1933-38), summarising where necessary, but also using

phraseology and making quotations.

INTRODUCTION

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL’S A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING

PEOPLES (4 vols., 1956-8) is the literary masterwork of the twentieth century’s

greatest historical figure. Before the collection reached the press, Churchill’s

stature as a writer was secure. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953,

the same year he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. In the Nobel presentation

speech, a member of the Swedish Academy wrestled with the problem of finding

parallels to Churchill’s combined talents in writing and statecraft. Reaching for

distant, and astonishingly lofty comparisons, author Sigfrid Siwertz thought of

Churchill as “a Caesar who also has the gift of Cicero’s pen.” Maybe Churchill

would have been pleased to be associated with the mere mortals that populate

this book, The Age of Revolution, volume three of A History of the English￾Speaking Peoples. Beginning with Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim in 1704

and ending with Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, Churchill

recounts Britain’s rise to world leadership over the course of the eighteenth

century. In this volume Churchill provides an excellent illustration of his unique

literary voice, together with an introduction to his thoughts on the forces that

shape human affairs. To read it is to savor something truly rare in literary

history, a great book on a great subject written by a great man.

The contours of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill’s early life suggest that

he was destined for greatness. His childhood years were set against the backdrop

of centuries of public service in the Churchill line, as with his distant kin, John

Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, the very soldier-statesman who dominates

the opening chapters of this book. Winston Churchill was born November 30,

1874, to Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife, Jennie Jerome. His

parents thus personified a transatlantic connection that later shaped Churchill’s

perspective on world events. But education came hard for Churchill, who

struggled at his preparatory schools, including prestigious Harrow, before

proceeding to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. A military career

followed, though Churchill combined his tours of duty with writing; his service

in Cuba, India, South Africa, Sudan, and elsewhere resulted in newspaper

articles for the Morning Post and Daily Telegraph, as well as books like The

Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), The River War (1899), and Savrola

(1900). Churchill entered the House of Commons in 1900 and several years later

aligned with the Liberal Party. In 1908, he met and married Clementine Hozier,

who eventually bore him four daughters and a son. Churchill acquired his first

important post when he became first lord of the Admiralty in 1912 in order to

hasten naval preparations for the anticipated Great War, only to be fired for

advocating the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of 1915. This began a long

period of estrangement from national politics, with occasional party switching

and short stints in cabinet-level positions. During this period he began work on A

History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and published The World Crisis and

the Aftermath (5 vols., 1923-31) in which he narrated the events of the Great

War and assessed the postwar international situation. Because of this work, and

his consistent voice for preparedness in light of the rising fascist movement in

Europe, Churchill once again became first lord of the Admiralty (1939) and rose

to Prime Minster the next year. Yet, Churchill’s unflinching leadership of the

Allied coalition during World War II could not help the Conservative Party stave

off electoral defeat in 1945. Churchill returned as Prime Minster in 1951, a

position he held until poor health drove him from office in 1955. He died on

January 24, 1965, and his gravesite is located at St. Martin’s Church in Bladon

near his ancestral home and birth-place of Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire.

Given his background, Churchill warmed quite easily to the subject matter of

The Age of Revolution. It is a book of imperial ambitions and epic battles, broad￾minded heroes and self-interested fools. Churchill met the challenge of these

grand themes with true literary craft, occasionally rewarding the careful reader

with the sublime. For example, he described the aftermath of Marlborough’s

greatest victory as a time when Englishmen “yielded themselves to transports of

joy.” Churchill’s talent assiduously matched language with its intended purpose.

William of Orange possessed not mere courage, but a “dauntless heart,” and

William Pitt called “into life and action the depressed and languid spirit of

England.” Here Pitt doesn’t merely inspire, he releases wellsprings of English

virtue that few men could ever summon. As a writer, then, Churchill embodied

the English ideal of subordinating form to function. Churchill was mindful of the

destructive forces that threatened civilization in his own lifetime—nationalism,

industrialism, and fascism. It was his unshaken belief that the character of

individual statesmen inoculated the nation against the dangerous effects of

improper policy in the face of these challenges. This voice pervades Age of

Revolution. Churchill’s intent is captured in his reference to an inscription on

William Pitt’s statue in London: “The means by which Providence raises a

nation to greatness are the virtues infused into great men.” Thus we have

Marlborough’s “serene, practical and adaptive” character providing the antidote

to the spirit of party vexing the court of William and Mary, which was

aggravated by the vacillation of the Dutch, the treachery of the Pretender, and of

course the “perfidity” of Louis XIV. The figures change throughout the

narrative, but Churchill’s voice remains steady.

It is tempting to attribute Churchill’s authorial voice to his advantaged

upbringing. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that “historians of aristocratic ages,

looking at the world’s theater, first see a few leading actors in control of the

whole play.” Put simply, history’s plot is driven by the actions and

preoccupations of her great men. The chief historians of England before

Churchill’s time possessed this vision. Churchill admired the work of Thomas

Babington Macaulay, the gentleman-scholar who also wrote a multi-volume

history, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (5 vols.,

1849-61). Actually, Churchill shared much in common with Macaulay, including

privileged birth, tenure in the colonial service, election to Parliament, cabinet

posts, and of course a passion for the history of the British Isles. One of

Churchill’s biographers noted that as a schoolboy, he impressed his Harrow

headmaster by reciting one thousand two hundred lines of Macaulay’s Lays of

Ancient Rome (1842). In keeping with this tradition of seeing great men behind

the great events of history, the so-called “Great Man” theory appears on every

page of The Age of Revolution. To Churchill, success in the Seven Year’s War

“depended on the energies of this one man,” William Pitt; without him, Canada

would still be French. To the east, Robert Clive was “the man who would

reverse his country’s fortunes and found the rule of the British in India.” Military

history and foreign affairs dominate Churchill’s account, and the generals and

diplomats who carved out an empire for Britain supply the cast of characters.

Occasionally the narrative mentions other items of importance, pausing to assess

the political effects of the South Sea Bubble, and casually mentioning the litany

of heroes that populate the English cultural pantheon—Swift, Pope, Defoe,

Newton. The Industrial Revolution gets its own paragraph, nothing more. None

of these themes can divert the author’s attention from the story of great men who

steered England to the brink of global domination in the early nineteenth

century.

It is even more tempting to attribute Churchill’s voice to his own experiences

as a statesman during a time of great calamity for his people. He began History

of the English-Speaking Peoples in 1932 as a way to produce much-needed

income. He agreed to a contract worth twenty thousand pounds sterling and a

five-year deadline, but events intervened. He continued to work part-time on the

project in 1940 and 1941, despite the many demands on his time, though he set it

aside after the war to complete his voluminous memoir of World War II. When

opportunity arose to finish it, he was keen to revisit his earlier perspectives in

light of the world-changing events during his tenure in office. The subject matter

of the series, and The Age of Revolution in particular, suddenly took on new

meaning. As such, Churchill saved his worst condemnations for spineless

commanders like Rooke and Ormonde and for trimming ministers like Hawley,

rather than known evils like Louis XIV or Napoleon. In the eighteenth century,

Churchill saw a faint echo of his own, more contemporary difficulties in rousing

a sleepy nation to meet the grave threats gathering in Europe. He lamented the

“weakness and improvidence” in England’s leadership that followed the Treaty

of Ryswick (1697), just as he castigated the English upper classes who “seemed

to take as much interest in prizefighting and fox-hunting as in the world crisis”

created by the French Revolution. Churchill’s moral calculus weighed the

selfishness and treachery of one’s own kind as heavier than the predictable

malevolence of England’s historic rivals.

Churchill benefited from the advice of professional historians in the creation

of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, but this series was very much a

product of his own thinking and his own labours. By the end of his life,

Churchill witnessed the advent of Social History among the academic historians.

These writers were more apt to invest causal agency in broad, impersonal forces

than in the genius of particular men and women. Christopher Hill, Keith

Wrightson, John Brewer, Linda Colley, and others drew attention to class

formation, urbanization, consumerism, and other sociological and economic

phenomena, and along the way, they soft-pedaled political, military, and

diplomatic themes. When the academy demanded renewed attention to politics,

scholars responded with books on political culture, or political ideology, as in

the work of Geoffrey Holmes, W. A. Speck, and J. C. D. Clark. In The Age of

Revolution, there are hints of the changes that would eventually remake the

world, and ultimately shape the consciousness of these postwar historians.

Churchill traces the progress of freedom and equality through the American and

French Revolutions in this volume, leading up to a climax in which liberty itself

is imperiled by bloodthirsty Jacobins and would-be dictators. As the book closes,

revolutionary nationalism is in the air, and Churchill dreads the coming of mass

movements that will seek to undermine the gift of stability and peace that

Castlereagh and Wellington brought to Europe. Socialism, communism,

syndicalism, fascism, and the like came to dominate European politics, and

prompted historians after Churchill’s time to interpret history’s plot as driven by

underlying structures and forces.

Again, Tocqueville anticipated the degree to which historians of democratic

societies—the kind of society England had become over Churchill’s lifetime—

would be entranced by “general causes,” rather than the “actions of individuals.”

So, Churchill didn’t succumb to democratizing fashions in historical

scholarship, either because of his elitist background or the perspective he

acquired as Britain’s leading statesman. We should be glad he didn’t. This

reprint of Churchill’s literary masterpiece makes available to modern readers a

strong moral voice that is as relevant to our troubled times as it was to his own.

Churchill’s insights justified the massive initial printing of one hundred thirty

thousand copies. He illustrates, through his study of Britain’s leading eighteenth￾century figures, how strength of character and commitment to principle can raise

a nation to greatness. Then too, these virtues can be twisted into dogmatism and

inflexibility in the absence of moderation and sound judgment. The value of

Churchill’s narrative lies in the discovery of what he called “practical wisdom”

in Thomas Jefferson and other leading figures of the age. Although it is a rare

commodity, Churchill recognised—and we too must recognise—that it is the

precious coin of democratic leadership, the thing that sustains the values and

traditions of the Anglo-American world.

Jeffrey B. Webb is Associate Professor of History at Huntington College

(Indiana). He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago

(2001), specializing in eighteenth-century American and British History.

PREFACE

DURING THE PERIOD DESCRIBED IN THIS VOLUME, NAMELY, FROM

1688 to 1815, three revolutions profoundly influenced mankind. They occurred

within the space of a hundred years, and all of them led to war between the

British and the French. The English Revolution of 1688 expelled the last

Catholic king from the British Isles, and finally committed Britain to a fierce

struggle with the last great King of France, Louis XIV. The American

Revolution of 1775 separated the English-speaking peoples into two branches,

each with a distinctive outlook and activity, but still fundamentally united by the

same language, as well as by common traditions and common law. In 1789, by

force of arms and a violent effort, unequalled in its effects until the Bolshevik

Revolution of 1917, France proclaimed to Europe the principles of equality,

liberty, and the rights of man. Beneath these political upheavals, and largely

unperceived at the time, other revolutions in science and manufacture were

laying the foundations of the Industrial Age in which we live to-day. The

religious convulsions of the Reformation had at last subsided. Henceforward

Britain was divided for practical purposes by Party and not by Creed, and

henceforward Europe disputed questions of material power and national pre￾eminence. Whereas the older conceptions had been towards a religious unity,

there now opened European struggles for national aggrandisement, in which

religious currents played a dwindling part.

When this tale begins the English Revolution had just been accomplished.

King James II had fled, and the Dutch Prince of Orange, soon to be King

William III, had arrived in England. He was immediately involved in mortal

combat with France. France tried to bring Europe again into a frame, and under

an hegemony which Charlemagne had scarcely attained, and for an example of

which we must look back to Roman times. This vehement French aspiration

found its embodiment in Louis XIV. The ruin of Germany by the Thirty Years’

War, and the decay of Spain, favoured his ambitions.

Meanwhile the rise of the Dutch Republic had brought into existence a

Protestant state which though small in numbers was by valour, sea-power, and

trade one of the Great Powers of the Continent. The alliance of England and

Holland formed the nucleus of the resistance to France. Aided by the political

interest of the Holy Roman Empire, the two maritime countries of the North Sea

faced the genius and glory centred at Versailles. By the swords of William III,

Marlborough, and Prince Eugene the power of Louis XIV was broken.

Thereafter England, under the Hanoverian Dynasty, settled into acceptance of

Whig conceptions. These gathered up all the fundamental English inheritance

from Magna Carta and primitive times, and outlined in their modern form the

relations of the State to religion and the subordination of the Crown to

Parliament.

All this time the expansion of British overseas possessions grew. The British

Islands were united, and though inferior in numbers exercised a noticeable

guiding influence upon Europe. But they pursued a development separate and

distinct from the Continent. Under the elder Pitt vast dominions were secured in

the New World and in India, and the first British Empire came into being.

The ever-growing strength of the American colonies, uncomprehended by

British Governments, led to an inevitable schism with the Mother Country. By

the War of Independence, better known to Americans as the Revolutionary War,

the United States were founded. France and Western Europe combined against

Britain, and although the Island command of the sea was unsubdued the first

British Empire came to an end.

Upon these changes in world-power there came the next decisive, liberating

movement since the Reformation. The Reformation had over broad areas

established liberty of conscience. The French Revolution sought to proclaim the

equality of man, and at least set forth the principle of equality of opportunity

irrespective of rank or wealth. During the great war against Napoleon Britain

contended with almost the whole of Europe, and even with the United States of

America. Napoleon was unable to found a United States of Europe. The Battle of

Waterloo, a far-sighted Treaty of Peace, and the Industrial Revolution in

England established Britain for nearly a century at or around the summit of the

civilised world.

W.S.C.

Chartwell

Westerham

Kent

December 24, 1956

BOOK I

ENGLAND’S ADVANCE TO WORLD POWER

CHAPTER ONE