BRAVE NEW WORLD

A review of Winston Churchill’s The New World (1956)

Part of the A History of the English-Speaking Peoples series

(Rating 4 of 5)

                Churchill’s first volume, The Birth of Britain, covers thousands of years.  This second volume covers only a little over two centuries.  What a few centuries it was!  The book begins with the rise of Henry VII and the Tudor dynasty and ends with the fall of James II in the Glorious Revolution.  In this volume the English monarchy rises to its highest of heights achieving near absolute power.  The three great Tudors Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I were magnificent monarchs whose power went unquestioned.  Their feeble replacements, the Stuarts, would struggle to hold onto what they had inherited and the monarchy would fall to its lowest states with one king being executed and another dismissed.   Churchill captures all with magnificent style.  As I noted earlier the best part about reading Churchill’s work is you get to see how a famous historical figure views other historical events. 

               

Henry VII

The book begins with the aftermath of the War the Roses.  With his new crown, King Henry VII, picks up the pieces of the short-lived York dynasty and sets the foundations of a powerful monarchy.  During his reign Henry gave the reputation of being a something of a miser, but doing this help stabilize his regime.  Churchill notes that although he was nice famous as some of his European cousins his achievements were no less impressive.

“His achievement was massive and durable.  He built his power amid the ruins and ashes of his predecessors.  He fiercely and carefully gathered what seemed in those days a vast reserve of liquid wealth.  He trained a body of efficient servants.  He magnified the Crown without losing the cooperation of the Commons.  He identified prosperity with monarchy.  Among the princes of Renaissance Europe he is not surpassing achievement in fame by Louis XI of France or Ferdinand of Spain.” (pg.20)

                

                   When any historian writes about King Henry VIII they all follow the same trap.  What you talk about?  Henry VIII had a lot of legitimate achievements during his reign.  He set the foundation that would lead England on the road to become a modern state.  Yet, we think of Henry is hard not to go over the six wives.  Only the first three are important those marriages and how they ended change the road England would be on forever.  Churchill does a good job covering the reign despite his limited space. (After all he still has over two centuries to cover with only a couple hundred pages to do it.)

“Henry’s rule saw many advances in the growth and character of the English state, but it is a hideous blot upon his record that the rain should be widely remembered for its executions.  Two Queens, two of the King’s chief Ministers, a saintly Bishop, numerous abbots, monks and many ordinary folk who dared to resist the Royal will were put to death.  Almost every member of the nobility in royal blood ran perished on the scaffold at Henry’s command.  Roman Catholic and Calvinist alike were burned for heresy and religious treason.  These persecutions, inflicted in solemn manner by officers of the law, perhaps in the presence of the Counsel or even the King himself, form a brutal sequel to the bright promise of the Renaissance.  The sufferings of devout men and women upon the faggots, the use of torture, and the savage penalties imposed for even paltry crimes, stand in repellent contrasts the enlightened principles of humanism.  Get his subjects to not turn from Henry in loathing.  He succeeded in maintaining order amid the turmoil in Europe without Army or police, and he imposed on England a discipline which was not attained elsewhere.  A century of religious wars went by without Englishmen taking up arms to fight their fellow-countrymen for their faith.  We must credit Henry’s reign with weighing the basis of sea-power, with a revival of Parliamentary institutions, with the giving of the English Bible to the people, and above all with strengthening a popular monarchy under which the seating generations worked together for the greatness of England while France and Germany were wracked with internal strife.” (pg. 66)

               

Queen Elizabeth I

                     Like any good English patriot Churchill has a warm spot for the year 1588 the defeat of Spanish Armada.  It was an important victory from England, they were only all half an island against the great imperial power.  Arguably, the threat the Spanish represented was a greater threat to England as a threat Churchill himself faced in his own time.  Despite his feelings he doesn’t go overboard with the legend, as fun as it would be to tell the story of the smashing of the great Spanish fleet he realizes history does not always work like that.  Nevertheless, it was crowning achievement for Queen Elizabeth I.

“The English had not lost a single ship, and scarcely 100 men.  But their captains were disappointed.  For the last thirty years they believe themselves superior to their opponents.  They had now found themselves fighting a much bigger fleet than they had imagined the Spaniards could put the sea.  Their own ships have been sparingly equipped.  Their ammunition had run short at a critical moment.  The gunnery of the merchant vessels had proved poor and half the enemy’s fleet had got away.  There were no postings; they record their dissatisfactions.
“But to the English people as a whole the defeat of the Armada came as a miracle.  For 30 years the shadow of Spanish power had darkened the political scene.  A wave of religious emotion filled men’s minds.  One of the metals strike to commemorate the victory bears the inscription ‘Afflavit Deus et dissipantur’—‘ God blue and they were scattered.’” (pg. 102)

               

Spanish Armada 

As England was getting to its feet the world the Europeans knew was expanding.  The voyages of Columbus opened up to new continents that the people did not know existed.  This created opportunity for the Europeans to create colonies. For certain English subjects it represented the opportunity to begin the world anew.  For those who are proud of their Englishness but found England unbearable due to whatever corruption they viewed as inexcusable, such as the Puritans they no longer had to hang out in Holland.  They now had the opportunity to build their own version of England in the form of a colony.  In his previous work the English-speaking peoples they were just one people confined to one island, now they were many expanding across the globe.  It was this phenomenon that Churchill gives the books title.

                The first half of the book covers the English monarchy at its highest; in the second half we could see it at its lowest.  Queen Elizabeth I died without heir.  The crown of England passes to the King of Scotland.  King James VI becomes King James I and moved from Edinburgh to London.  Churchill had some fun poking fun at this joke of a dynasty in his last volume.  As the Stuarts come to England they do not get any smarter.  Churchill portrays these sovereigns as being out of touch with reality and not up to the task of governing England.

King James I

“James and his Parliaments grew more and more out of sympathy as the years went by.  The Tudors have been discrete in their use of the Royal Prerogative and had never put forward any general theory of government, but James saw himself as a schoolmaster of the whole island.” (pg. 120)

                Despite his flaws, I personally have some sympathy for King Charles I and it appears in the book that Churchill does as well.  I have always found Cromwell to be an utter hypocrite and his regime to be more tyrannical than any king ever dreamed of being.  While reading this book it seems Winston Churchill was of the same opinion.

King Charles I

Oliver Cromwell

“We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides end of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams.  It was the triumph of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined, military fanatics over all that England has ever willed or ever wished.  Long years in unceasing irritations were required to reverse it.  Thus the struggle, in which we have in these days so much sympathy in part, begun to bring about a constitutional and limited monarchy, had led only to autocracy of the sword.  The harsh, terrific, lightning – charged being, whose erratic, opportunist, self- centered course is laid bare upon the annals, was now master, in the next 12 years of the record of well – meant, puzzled plungings and surgings.” (pg. 212)

                Earlier in this book we see King Henry VIII sending everyone and anyone including his own ministers and two of his queens to the scaffold to have their heads cut off.  In a completely different turn of events a King of England is sent to his death in the very manner that his predecessor had imposed onto others.  Yet this King, who many fought against him under the banner of fighting against tyranny, would be viewed as a martyr for liberty.

“A strange destiny had engulfed this King of England.  None had resisted with more untimely stubbornness the movement of his age.  He had been in his heyday the convinced opponent of all we now call our Parliamentary liberties.  Yet as misfortunes crowd upon him he increasingly became the physical embodiment of the liberties and traditions of England.  His mistakes and wrong deeds had arisen not so much for personal cravings for arbitrary power as from the conception of kingship to which she was born it was along with the settled custom of the land.  In the end he stood against the Army which had destroyed all Parliamentary government, it was about to plunge England into a tyranny at once more irresistible and more petty than any seen before or since.” (pg. 216)

After the fall of the protectorate, Churchill tells the story of how the monarchy was restored.  The king in exile, Charles II, was simply invited back by his people and not retuning at the head of conquering army.  For a Stuart, King Charles II was not that bad of a ruler.  He was fairly competent, unlike his younger brother, the Duke of York, who would succeed him as king, ruling as James II.  Despite his historical importance Churchill tells the story of the Glorious Revolution very quickly.  I expected it would be more detailed considering the involvement of his famous ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.

I found this book to be a great summary of two chaotic and messy centuries in the history of Great Britain.  It tells a story of a powerful dynasty that rises and dies off, a Scottish dynasty which unifies the kingdoms, and a civil war that tore the nations apart.  It is a brief and great read.