The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [2]
British history, with its story of the evolution of parliamentary democracy from the Magna Carta to the 1832 Reform Bill, was the subject at which Churchill excelled. At Harrow School he won the prestigious school prize two years running. When he was fourteen he told one of his aunts: “If I had two lives I would be a soldier and a politician. But as there will be no war in my time, I will have to be a politician.” His father did not think him clever enough to go to university, so he was put in the “army class” at school.
Churchill followed his father’s House of Commons speeches in the newspapers, commenting on them with enthusiasm. After reading one in The Times, he wrote to his father: “If you will let me say so, I thought it better than anything you have done so far.” The eighteen-year-old could frequently be seen listening to his father in the House of Commons, always able, because of his father’s prominence, to find a place in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery.
Not only was the parliamentary process becoming familiar to him but, on several social occasions, he met leading politicians at his parents’ house. They included two future Liberal Prime Ministers, Lord Rosebery and H.H. Asquith, both of whom were impressed by his keenness and interest in the political world. On 21 April 1893, at the age of nineteen, Churchill was in the Gallery of the House of Commons when Gladstone made his masterful speech on the Second Reading of the Irish Home Rule Bill. Three decades later, Churchill was able to look at his own parliamentary work on the passage of the Irish Free State Bill as one of his most notable achievements, something Gladstone had striven for but failed to accomplish.
Edward Marjoribanks, later Viscount Tweedmouth, was Liberal Chief Whip in Gladstone’s Liberal administration. In May 1893 he spent half an hour with his young nephew Churchill, describing how the Liberals could overcome the power of the House of Lords, which was refusing to vote the money needed by the Liberals for social reform. Although on that particular occasion the Conservative Peers defeated the Money Bill by 419 to 41, the battle cry “Overcoming the Peers” was to be Churchill’s own cry fifteen years later, when, having left the Conservative Party, he emerged as a leading Liberal opponent of the power of the House of Lords.
While Churchill was working for his army examination, a newly elected Conservative Member of Parliament, Edward Carson, invited him to dine in the House of Commons and took him to listen to a Home Rule debate. Eighteen years later, when Carson took up Lord Randolph Churchill’s slogan “Ulster will Fight, Ulster will be Right,” Churchill was his leading parliamentary opponent. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, challenged Carson’s paramilitary Ulster Volunteers and was willing to use the power of the Royal Navy to prevent a violent and unconstitutional attack on the British forces in Ireland.
Three weeks before his forty-sixth birthday, Lord Randolph Churchill died. Churchill was then nineteen. From that moment, although about to become a soldier and set off to distant wars, he was determined to have a parliamentary career. He wanted to fight for the policies his father had so strongly believed in: Tory Democracy and prudent government spending. After Churchill had been a cavalry officer for only two weeks, the electors of the Barnesbury constituency asked him to address them. It was his first invitation to give a political speech, but, he explained to his brother, Jack, “after much communing with myself, I wrote