Download - Winston Churchill

“The monarchy signified for himsomething of infinite value, atonce numinous and luminous; and if youwill allow the remark in parenthesis,ladies and gentlemen, do you not sometimeslong for someone at the summit ofour public life who can think and writeat that level?”SADNESS: TheQueen returnshome after thedeath of herfather, GeorgeVI, Feburary1952. At thefoot of thestairs (r-l) arethe PrimeMinister,OppostionLeader Attlee,and ForeignSecretary Eden.realized how much the King meant to him,” we find inSir John Colville’s diary. “I tried to cheer him up by sayinghow well he would get on with the new Queen, butall he could say was that he did not know her and thatshe was only a child.” 7This was merely a momentary expression, utteredat a moment of profound sadness, and not one by whichChurchill would have wished to stand once his spirit wasless troubled.It is a measure of his longevity in politics thatwhen he proposed the motion for addresses of sympathy,he could remind the House of Commons that he hadbeen an MP whenever such a motion had been movedin the past, in 1901, in 1910, and in 1936. It now fell toChurchill to describe Queen Elizabeth as a fair andyouthful figure, Princess, wife and mother, “heir to allour traditions and glories, never greater than in herfather’s days, and to all our perplexities and dangers,never greater in peacetime than now. She is also heir toall our united strength and loyalty.” 8The new monarch was ascending the throne, heremarked, at a moment when tormented mankind stoodpoised uncertainly between worldwide catastrophe onthe one side and a golden age on the other. In speakingof catastrophe, he had in mind the enmity between thewest and Russia, and the awful prospects opened up inthe age of nuclear warfare; whereas if only a true andlasting peace could be achieved and if “the nations willonly let each other alone,” undreamed-of prosperity,with culture and leisure ever more widely spread, mightcome to the masses of the people everywhere. 9Churchill adored the Queen. You will perhapsthink the language unsuitable or even a little disrespectful;but no lesser expression will do. Gazing at a photographin 1953, the one which shows her in a white dressand with long white gloves, displaying that enchantingsmile which lights up her face as if a blind had suddenlybeen raised, the Prime Minister mused, “Lovely, she is apet. I fear they may ask her to do too much. She isdoing so well.” 10And again a week or two later, as he contemplatedthe same photograph, “Lovely, inspiring. All the filmpeople in the world, if they had scoured the globe, couldnot have found anyone so suited to the part.” 11 Thereuponhe immediately began to sing from the hymn, “Yetnightly pitch my moving tent/A day’s march nearerhome.” (If you object that this piece of informationseems scarcely relevant to my theme, I merely rejoin thathistorians are sticklers for completeness and love goingoff at a tangent.)The Queen wished to confer the Order of theGarter, which he had declined when offered in 1945,upon Churchill. He had then felt that it would be inappropriateto receive such a distinction upon the morrowof his rejection at the General Election; whereas in thesummer of the Coronation, the moment seemed morepropitious. Her Private Secretary broached the matterwith the Prime Minister in persuasive terms. This time,Churchill capitulated without much resistance but witha good deal of emotion. Then he said with a grin, “NowClemmie will have to be a lady at last.” 12Churchill travelled far less than he had done duringthe war and when Parliament was sitting would normallywait upon Her Majesty at Buckingham Palaceeach week. Her Private Secretary remained in an anteroom,unable to hear the conversation but catching pealsof laughter. “Winston generally came out wiping hiseyes,” Sir Alan Lascelles once recorded. “‘She is en grandebeauté ce soir,’ he said one evening in his schoolboyFrench.” 13In those final years of office, Churchill had combinedrearmament and the strengthening of NATO witha prolonged effort to build some kind of bridge toRussia. He repeatedly postponed resignation andendured some sharp passages with his colleagues in consequence.By the spring of 1955, he knew it was time togo. A few days after his departure, the Queen wrote inher own hand from Windsor to say that while her confidencein Anthony Eden was complete, “it would be uselessto pretend that either he or any of those successorswho may one day follow him in office will ever, for me,be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister, toFINEST HOUR 135 / 52