The New World - A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume II

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PREFACE

BOOK I - RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

CHAPTER ONE - THE ROUND WORLD

CHAPTER TWO - THE TUDOR DYNASTY

CHAPTER THREE - KING HENRY VIII

CHAPTER FOUR - CARDINAL WOLSEY

CHAPTER FIVE - THE BREAK WITH ROME

CHAPTER SIX - THE END OF THE MONASTERIES

CHAPTER SEVEN - THE PROTESTANT STRUGGLE

CHAPTER EIGHT - GOOD QUEEN BESS

CHAPTER NINE - THE SPANISH ARMADA

CHAPTER TEN - GLORIANA

BOOK II - THE CIVIL WAR

CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE UNITED CROWNS

CHAPTER TWELVE - THE MAYFLOWER

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - CHARLES I AND BUCKINGHAM

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - THE PERSONAL RULE

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - THE REVOLT OF PARLIAMENT

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE GREAT REBELLION

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - MARSTON MOOR AND NASEBY

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE AXE FALLS

BOOK III - THE RESTORATION

CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE ENGLISH REPUBLIC

CHAPTER TWENTY - THE LORD PROTECTOR

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - THE RESTORATION

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - THE MERRY MONARCH

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - THE POPISH PLOT

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - WHIG AND TORY

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - THE CATHOLIC KING

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - THE REVOLUTION OF 1688

ENDNOTES

INDEX

SUGGESTED READING

Copyright © 1956 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

in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Maps by James Macdonald

ISBN-13: 978-0-7607-6858-7 ISBN-10: 0-7607-6858-7

eISBN : 978-1-41142860-7

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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

M. Young and to Dr Keith Feiling for their assistance before the Second World

War in the preparation of this work; to Mr Alan Hodge, Mr J. Hurstfield of

University College, London, Mr D. H. Pennington of Manchester University,

and Dr A. L. Rowse of All Souls, who have scrutinised the text in the light of

subsequent advances in historical knowledge; and to Mr Denis Kelly and Mr C.

C. Wood. I have also to thank many others who have read these pages and

commented on them.

In composing this volume I have drawn gratefully on the writings of Gardiner,

Pollard and Ranke, on the Oxford History of England and on the works of other

scholars past and present. In the last two chapters I have, with the permission of

Charles Scribner’s Sons, Inc., followed in part the general character of my

Marlborough: His Life and Times.

INTRODUCTION

IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES ENGLAND

underwent a startling series of transformations. The turbulent reigns of the

Tudors and Stuarts witnessed the Protestant Reformation, the growth of powerful

monarchies, the English Civil War, and the colonization of the New World. In

this, the second volume of his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Sir

Winston Churchill turned his considerable rhetorical and analytical acumen to

weaving a compelling and insightful narrative of these formative centuries.

It is amazing to consider that Winston Churchill, despite a busy political

career, had the time and capability to write forty-five books. A number of forces

brought him to such prolific heights. Churchill had a genuine curiosity about

how things happened which reading and writing history helped satiate. Writing

history also served as a way to influence political opinion. But financial

necessity primarily caused Churchill to write so many books, for Churchill’s

personal income could not support his lifestyle. While he was writing A History

of The English-Speaking Peoples, in the late 1930s, his debt was so large that he

took out an ad in the London Times to sell his beloved home of Chatham. He

was bailed out by Sir Henry Strakosh. But he counted on the royalties of the

four-volume work to pay back the loan.

Such a concern with output influenced Churchill’s method of composing

books. Churchill never spent time in the archives, rather he would read general

histories like those written by S. R. Gardiner and Leopold von Ranke and rely on

a team of research assistants who supplied him with memoranda on topics he

found interesting. Some of these assistants were great historians in their own

right. Keith Feiling had already published his influential History of the Tory

Party and Maurice Ashley would eventually write a host of books on the Stuart

era. Luckily Ashley has left a record of what it was like to work for the great

man. In his Churchill as Historian Ashley recalls that Churchill would pace up

and down dictating from eleven at night until two in the morning, when he let his

secretaries go home. Ashley would stay up working with Churchill for another

hour, and Churchill himself would read until four in the morning. Although the

assistants would provide Churchill with the facts, the interpretation was his own.

He once told Ashley, “Give me the facts . . . and I will twist them the way I want

to suit my argument.” Bill Deakin also recounted that when working for

Churchill “One felt exhilarated. Part of the secret was his phenomenal, fantastic

power to concentrate on what he was doing. And he communicated it. You were

absolutely a part of it—swept into it. I might have given him some memorandum

before dinner, four or five hours before. Now he would walk up and down

dictating. My facts were there, but he had seen it in deeper perspective. My

memorandum was only a frame; it ignited his imagination.”

Churchill’s imagination and interpretation draw readers to his histories. His

considerable political experience informs his work especially when he analyzes

the decisions and personalities of the political actors of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries. Reading Churchill’s books, however, reveals more than

how one of the greatest British statesmen viewed the past, it also provides

insight into Churchill’s own character, for A History of the English-Speaking

Peoples shows how the author’s biography influenced his biases, interpretations,

and interests. The rest of this introduction will place The New World in the

context of Churchill’s life experiences.

Churchill was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, the house built by the famous

British general, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. His parents were Lord

Randolph Churchill, who would rise to the heights of Chancellor of the

Exchequer, and the American heiress Jennie Churchill (nee Jerome). In the

circumstances of his birth lies much of his historical interest. For Churchill,

history was a family affair: Two of his books, Lord Randolph Churchill and the

four-volume Marlborough, directly celebrate his ancestors. Even in The New

World where the Churchills played minor roles at best, Winston reserves some of

his most flowery language for his illustrious ancestor when he describes the

future Duke of Marlborough, who was a minor courtier during the reign of

Charles II. Churchill effuses, “in Charles’ Court, at his side, there was already a

young man, an ensign in his Guards, a partner in his games at tennis, and

intruder, as he learned with some displeasure, in the affections of Lady

Castlemaine, who would one day grasp a longer and a brighter sword than

Cromwell’s and wield it in wider fields, only against the enemies of British

greatness and freedom.” Churchill’s ancestral piety brings him to hyperbole.

But for most of the era covered by the book, the Churchills were obscure, and

the community of English-speaking peoples, another idea born of his Anglo￾American birth, captivates Winston. Since this volume ends in 1688 when the

British colonies were quite small, Churchill rarely mentions major events in

colonial history, except when his eponymous ancestor mentions the “sunburnt

America” in his panegyric of Britain. Churchill’s admiration for America can

find some release in his one chapter on the American colonies where he deems

the Mayflower Compact “one of the most remarkable documents in history. . . .”

Churchill mostly explores the theme of commonality among English speakers by

finding the origins of common links that would unite them. For instance, he sees

the American view of the courts being above the central authority as emerging

from the ideas of Edward Coke, a lawyer who opposed some of the arbitrary

measures of Charles I.

The King James Bible serves as the most important link that Churchill

identifies. He considers the Bible “James’ greatest achievement. . . . The scholars

who produced this masterpiece are mostly unknown and unremembered. But

they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English

speaking peoples of the world.” Churchill also argued for the Bible’s importance

by claiming that “if the adventurers to the new world brought any books over

with them it was the Bible, Shakespeare, and later Pilgrim’s Progress.” The fact

that the King James Bible receives a great deal of attention, but neither

Shakespeare nor John Bunyan merit even an entry in the index reveals much

about Churchill’s biases. To Churchill, Shakespeare and Bunyan represented

literary, cultural, or religious figures, but James I was a political actor, and

Churchill was not interested in social or cultural history; his concerns were

politics and war.

His concern with war may have come from his having fought in or witnessed a

host of small imperial wars. As a soldier or a newspaper correspondent Churchill

saw battles in such exotic places as the Himalayas, Sudan, and South Africa.

Later in his career, he served as first lord of the admiralty and founded the Royal

Navy Air Service in 1912. His leadership of the Navy during World War I was

not Churchill’s most stellar moment; he bore the brunt of the blame for the

disastrous Dardanelles campaign and after being dismissed to the lowest cabinet

post, resigned from the cabinet and joined the army serving as a battalion

commander for the Sixth Royal Scots Fusiliers.

Not surprisingly, warfare and the technology of warfare dominate this book.

Advanced weaponry and tactics repeatedly appear as the reasons for military

success. In the 1490s, for instance, English cannons “spoke to Irish castles in a

language they readily understood,” and enabled the English for the first time to

truly dominate Ireland. In the battle of Flodden, the Scottish forces drawn up in

the traditional circles around their king and armed with spears could not fend off

the English bowmen, cavalry, and infantry armed with bills and axes. The

greatest English victory, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, occupies nine pages

of the book and Churchill delves into every detail. Technology, once again, plays

a major role. Churchill emphasizes Hawkins’ installation of long-range canons,

military tactics, and the weather. Churchill’s obsession with technology is so

intense that even in cases where technology was not employed he speculates

what would have happened. Even though the English troops of 1512 were

defeated by dysentery not the French, Churchill mentions that they would have

been ill-equipped to deal with the professional French army, who were armed

with pikes and marched in squares.

In 1900, Churchill returned to England after escaping from a Boer POW camp

in South Africa and he entered Parliament as a Tory, beginning his mercurial,

distinguished, yet topsy-turvy political career. Four years after his election by the

constituents of Oldham he switched from the Tory party to the Liberal party,

then, in 1924, he switched again to the Tories. Such frequent changes of alliance

may explain Churchill’s favorable views of Henry VIII and the Earl of Stratford.

Henry VIII is notorious for inconstancy with his foreign policy, his view of the

Church, and his wives. Churchill may have seen bits of himself in the great

Tudor monarch, describing the king as having “bursts of restless energy and

ferocity . . . combined with extraordinary patience and diligence . . . an

indefatigable worker, he digested a mass of dispatches, memoranda, and plans

each day without the help of a secretary.” Churchill also gives Henry VIII much

credit. After describing the executions of queens, ministers, nobles, and

commoners in detail (he was after all trying to sell books), Churchill relates that

Henry “succeeded in maintaining order,” avoided religious warfare, laid the

basis for British sea power, revived Parliament, gave the English Bible to the

people, and strengthened a popular monarchy.

Such praise for Henry while not universal is certainly not unique, but

Churchill’s view of Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Stratford, is certainly

unusual. Stratford had begun his parliamentary career as a member of the

opposition, attacking Charles I’s favorite and chief minister the Duke of

Buckingham. But in late 1628 Wentworth joined the court party and later served

as Charles I’s right-hand man in Ireland where he introduced the policy of

“thorough,” the rebuilding of the position of church and state through “a little

violence and extraordinary means.” When Charles I faced a rebellious Scotland,

Stratford was called back to England where he advocated using more than a little

violence against the Scots and perhaps England as well. This advice leaked out

and Stratford was tried for treason and then declared guilty by a bill of attainder.

Churchill strongly maintains Stratford’s innocence, claiming “there was no doubt

he had won his case.” But he also realizes that if Stratford’s policies were

implemented, the common freedoms which he sees as binding the English￾speaking peoples together would have had a lot harder time developing. In a

muffled condemnation of Parliament he stated, “They slaughtered a man they

could not convict, but that man if given his full career, would have closed

perhaps for generations the windows of civic freedom upon the English people.”

While Churchill’s empathy for Stratford is muted by his sense that his policies,

if successfully implemented, would have sounded the death knell of English

freedoms, his admiration for Stratford’s boss, Charles I, knows no bounds.

Perhaps because his family fought on the royalist side, perhaps because growing

up under Queen Victoria enhanced his monarchism, or perhaps because of his

hatred of Oliver Cromwell, Churchill’s view of Charles I is favorable in the

extreme. His view of England during Charles’ personal rule is idyllic and quite

wrong. Churchill states, “the land was good, springtime, summertime, autumn,

had their joys; in the winter there was the Yule log and new amusements.

Agriculture and fox hunting cast their compulsive or soothing balms upon

restless spirits. Harvests were now abundant and the rise in prices had almost

ceased. There was no longer a working class problem. The poor law was

administered with exceptional humanity.” Of course such an England never

existed except in fiction. England experienced bad harvests from 1629 to 1631

and the constitutional controversies and Charles I’s policies of granting

monopolies hurt the cloth and soap industries causing unrest among workers.

Churchill does more than ignore the economic history of Charles I’s reign

replacing it with the imagery of Merrie Old England; he heaps praise upon the

unsuccessful king who “had been in his heyday the convinced opponent of all

we now call our parliamentary liberties.” Churchill tries to mitigate Charles I’s

actions by claiming that his mistakes came not from craving for power but from

“the conception of kingship to which he was born and which had long been the

settled custom of the land.” Churchill further claims that Charles in fact

“increasingly became the physical embodiment of the liberties and traditions of

England.” Certainly Charles’ bravery at the scaffold, and the book Eikon

Basilike, written in his name, helped preserve the institution of monarchy, but

Churchill goes too far when he claims that by dying “he preserved English

liberties.” Of course, Churchill’s view of Charles was greatly influenced by his

seething hatred of Charles’ political opponent, Oliver Cromwell.

Such hatred sprang forth in part from the author’s belief that the Lord Protector

was a seventeenth-century version of Hitler and Mussolini and also because at

the time of the composition of the book, Churchill was out of the cabinet and

could do nothing to stop the Axis dictators except occasionally rail against them

in the House of Commons. His leftover vitriol he reserved for Cromwell.

Churchill paints Cromwell as the other, as not English. For in Churchill’s mind

Englishness meant the defense of liberty and Cromwell was its opponent. He

calls Cromwell “a representative of dictatorship and military rule who . . . is in

lasting discord with the genius of the English race.” In fact, he further claims

that the English could not be ruled by a tyrant for long: “In harsh or melancholy

epochs free men may always take comfort from the grand lesson of history that

tyrannies cannot last except among servile races.”

The fact that Churchill composed his books during the late 1930s, the time of

the Austrian Anschluss and Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, explains

much of the author’s biases. One can imagine the out-of-work statesman, certain

that a war to save liberty against tyranny was right around the corner, turning to

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples for strength and inspiration. His

assertions—whether they be the importance of technology for successful

warfare, the unity of Anglophones, or the inevitable fall of tyranny—all speak to

the concerns that were no doubt percolating in the mind of this Member of

Parliament who continuously warned the House of Commons of the dangers of

Fascism. It is hard to determine to what degree Britain’s future war leader’s

resolve and insight was enhanced by composing this book and, since the

outbreak of war delayed the publication until 1956, it certainly had little effect

on the English-speaking people during World War II. Yet the concerns that drove

Churchill to write this book led him to create a compelling read that is at once an

articulate narrative of the past, a meditation on some timeless issues of politics

and war, and a window into the great statesman’s mind.

Brian Weiser is Assistant Professor at Metropolitan State College-Denver

where he teaches early modern British and European history. He is the author of

Charles II and the Politics of Access and of several articles that analyze the

representations of monarchy.

PREFACE

FAR-REACHING EVENTS TOOK PLACE IN THE TWO CENTURIES

COVERED by this volume. The New World of the American continent was

discovered and settled by European adventure. In the realms of speculation and

belief, poetry and art, other new worlds were opened to the human spirit.

Between 1485 and 1688 the English peoples began to spread out all over the

globe. They confronted and defeated the might of Spain. Once the freedom of

the seas had been won the American colonies sprang into being. Lively and

assertive communities grew up on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean,

which in the course of time were to become the United States. England and

Scotland adopted the Protestant faith. The two kingdoms of the Island became

united under a Scottish dynasty. A great civil war was fought on abiding issues

of principle. The country sustained a Republican experiment under the massive

personality of Oliver Cromwell. But, at the nation’s demand, the royal tradition

was revived. At the end of this volume the Protestant faith has been secured

under a Dutch monarch, Parliament is far advanced on the road to supremacy in

the affairs of State, America is fast developing, and a prolonged and world-wide

struggle with France is close at hand.

W.S.C.

Chartwell

Westerham

Kent

September 4, 1956