“There is one great resource which I trust will never abandon us, and which has shone forth in the English character, by which we have preserved our existence and fame as a nation, which I trust we shall be determined never to abandon under any extremity, but shall join hand and heart in the solemn pledge that is proposed to us, and declare to His Majesty: ‘that we know great exertions are wanted; that we are prepared to make them; and are, at all events, determined to stand or fall by the laws, liberties, and religion of our country’.”

—William Pitt the Younger, House of Commons, November (1797)[1]

Introduction

The year is 1943. Great Britain and her empire is at war with Germany. Initially a lone beacon of democracy and tolerance in Europe during the early years of the war, by 1943 Britain and her Commonwealth of Nations had been joined by the United States and the Soviet Union to resist Hitler’s tyranny. Patriotism, understandably, ran high—from its working class to its elites, the British people, united in one cause, stood firm against Hitler’s war machine.

To be sure, the personal sacrifices which each of Britain’s citizens made at this point for the war effort varied according to their social class, the city in which they lived, and there have been recent historiographical attempts to downplay Britain’s national solidarity at this time, notably with the publication of Angus Calder’s Myth of the Blitz (1992).[2] As another historian notes, furthermore,

“Our [modern] heritage industry has encouraged a ‘Myth of the Blitz,’ that differs from the actual wartime experience.”[3]

Myth of the Blitz?

“Myth” in our modern era has come to be synonymous with “untrue,” which is unfortunate for the thing about myths is that they usually contain general or universal truths.[4] It is true that on occasion the likes of Churchill and the Royal Family were booed by frustrated and anxious people who just lost their homes in a bombing raid, but very few people disagreed with the overall aims of the war.

Those older ones who could not fight for their country, at least they could write for her. This was the case with W.L. Hanchant, the curator of Wisbech and Fenland Museum who, in 1943, with a patriotic spirit, compiled a little popular book, titled England is Here: A Selection from the Speeches and Writings of the Prime Ministers of England containing the speeches of all of Great Britain’s prime ministers, from Sir Robert Walpole down to Winston Churchill.

It’s a fascinating book which I came across in York, England, while browsing some of that wonderful city’s second-hand bookstores.

Patriotism

Hanchant was upfront with his patriotic reasons for collecting and publishing these speeches and declared in the introduction that

“As during the long years of war with France, sometimes under the menace of invasion, we went forward together inspired by the patriotic fervour of the younger Pitt; as in 1914 we went to our task stirred by the eloquence of Asquith and Lloyd George; so in the dark days of 1940, when England stood desperately alone against the dread forces of Nazi despotism, we were heartened in our endeavours by the high heroic words of Mr Churchill. All that we are as a nation is owed in great measure to such words as these. It thus seemed fitting to collect from the speeches and writings, political and non-political, of our prime ministers those passages which, showing forth the Spirit of England in the past, best serve our present recollection.”[5]

Thus the book celebrates three of England’s “Zeal for freedom” and arranges the selections of our prime ministers’ speeches into three broad themes:

• The progress of democracy and principles of good governance;
• The enlargement of civic, religious, and political liberties;
• The progress of domestic and imperial foreign policies.

Even nowadays, many of those even casually interested in history will remember the names of some of Britain’s most illustrious prime ministers from the nineteenth century—perhaps, if quizzed on the names of some of them, they might say Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, or William Ewart Gladstone or a Robert Peel. Even as someone interested in political history, however, even I might need to check a few names of the eighteenth century.

The Nature of Good Governance

Highlights include, for me personally, the selections of speeches and writings from our eighteenth-century prime ministers. The Duke of Newcastle, or Henry Pelham-Holles, on 21 December 1742, for instance, outlined his thoughts on the purpose of government and its relation with the pursuit of “the popular good”:

“That every government ought to endeavour to gain the esteem and confidence of the people, I suppose we are all equally convinced; but I am very far from thinking that measures ought only to be pursued or rejected as they are immediately favoured or disliked by the populace. For as they cannot know either the causes or the end of public transactions, they can judge only from fallacious appearances, or the information of those whose interest it may perhaps be to lead them away from the truth. That monarch will be certainly and most permanently popular who steadily pursues the good of his people, even in opposition to their own prejudices and clamours; who disregards calumnies which, though they may prevail for a day, time will sufficiently confute, and who slights objections which he knows may be answered, and answered beyond reply.”[6]

It was of course easier for an eighteenth-century statesman to say that good governance sometimes involves doing something that the people don’t want. He lived at a time when only forty shilling freeholders had the right to vote in general elections. Be that as it may, the principle is no less true. Governments cannot and should not change course just because there are murmurings of disagreement with its actions from various quarters. I think it is something that our modern politicians have lost sight of—perhaps the last prime minister to truly understand this was Margaret Thatcher who famously uttered the phrase “You turn if you want to; the lady’s not for turning.”

However, if a government does want to be esteemed (not loved) by its people, it could guarantee their—

Civic, religious, and political freedoms.

Our historic prime ministers were rarely silent on such topics. Some patriotic writers of the Victorian period certainly thought that they lived in the country which was the best guarantor of individual liberty in the world and, drawing on a rich history from Magna Carta in 1215, through to the Bill of Rights, and their own present, they made that point forcefully in the press, their history and philosophy books. In the preceding century William Pitt the Elder made this point eloquently in the House of Commons:

“We have a law of Parliament, we have a code in which every honest man may find it. We have a Magna Carta, we have the Statute Book, we have the Bill of Rights […] the people when they choose their representatives never mean to convey to them a power of invading their rights, or trampling upon the liberties of those whom they represent.”[7]

Yet this freedom, guaranteed by the English constitution, could only be maintained through a constant and vigilant desire on the part of its citizens to safeguard its principles, as Stanley Baldwin pointed out:

“The whole world today, with one or two exceptions, is singing loudly the praises of democracy. The whole world renders lip service to democracy. It has learned that cry from the English-speaking peoples … Freedom today can be maintained only by constant vigilance. A democracy can be maintained only when every man, woman, and child in that democracy mean to do everything in their power to make that community better, stronger, freer.”[8]

Democracy—and Britain could indeed be described as a democracy by 1867—and liberty needed to always be defended, then, for as David Lloyd George once quipped,

“It is all very well to worship at the shrine of liberty, but you cannot defend it with garlands.”[9]

The SPIRIT of the English constitution guaranteed liberty, though many times it was imperfectly realised and not followed fully to the letter. As Benjamin Disraeli once pointed out, British statesmen and ministers had often, in times past, been too willing to “modify” and “interfere” with these liberties, and they allowed certain injustices to proceed for much longer than they should have.[10]

It was not until 1829 that Roman Catholics—England’s biggest minority until that point—gained civil liberties and ceased to be second-class citizens in their own country. It was not until 1833 that slavery became illegal throughout the British Empire. Those familiar with the history of the repression of radical activities in the 1820s and 1840s will no doubt raise an eyebrow at Pitt’s words. It was not until 1832, 1867, 1884, and 1918 and 1928 that gradual increases to the franchises were made—it took a long time after Pitt was writing for Britain to become a democracy in which all enjoyed political rights. Nevertheless, for much of modern British history, and especially so in the twentieth century, at least in theory, the press was free, conscience was free, and individual liberties were fully guaranteed in law.

On the Liberal Empire

The prime ministers in Hanchant’s book lived during the age of the British Empire. Many of these statesmen believed that there was something truly special about it, bringing commerce, Christianity, and civilisation to the world. It was also, as the Lloyd George Liberal Magazine declared in 1926, “the Liberal Empire”:

“The Liberal Empire stands in for world peace, for right, for freedom, for fair play. It is the great ‘Fair Play’ Empire of the world.”[11]

Gladstone laid down the rules in a speech at Chester in 1855 and articulated how this empire might, if it truly wanted to be a “Liberal Empire,” conduct itself:

“Experience has proved that if you want to strengthen the connection between the colonies and this country—if you want to see British law held in respect and British institutions adopted and beloved in the colonies, never associate them with the hated name of force and coercion exercised by us, at a distance, over their rising fortunes. Govern them upon a principle of freedom. Defend them against aggression from without … make the name of England yet more and more an object of desire.”[12]

From Empire to Commonwealth

Yet the British Empire, in the words of Arthur James Balfour, “is but a transitory arrangement.”[13] An interesting feature of the book is that, while all of the prime ministers referred to the British Empire in some way, the terminology used with reference to it changed across the centuries.

Empires fall, and until the nineteenth century many had. New countries would emerge. The United States had made a violent separation from Britain in 1776. Balfour was aware of the fact that soon the dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the many other colonies would one day, and more peacefully than the United States,

“go [their] own way like the adult members of a human family”.[14]

The idea that the colonies and dominions would eventually be fully free and independent of the British Parliament, and equal to the United Kingdom in status, is a fundamental point in the development of the idea of a Commonwealth of Nations. It is striking to see just how early this idea was hinted at, specifically by the Earl of Roseberry in 1884 when, on a speaking tour of New Zealand and Australia, he remarked that

“These are no longer colonies in the ordinary sense of the term. [They are] a nation—a nation not in aspiration or in the future, but in performance and fact … But there is a further question and it is this: Does this fact of your being a nation, and I think you feel yourselves to be a nation, imply separation from the Empire? God forbid! There is no need for any nation, however great, leaving the empire, because the empire is a Commonwealth of Nations.”[15]

Conclusion

Hanchant’s book offers a mere glimpse of the accumulated eloquence and combined wisdom of some of our great historical statesmen. It is also a recovery of a lost art—of fine speechwriting, written during times when speeches delivered by politicians in parliament were supposed to be rousing and inspiring, designed with a view of convincing the other side of a particular point. It is difficult to imagine any MP today delivering a speech which packed a punch like these statesmen of old. In fact, research backs it up—it seems that MPs are speaking more frequently these days, but for less time:

“Parliamentary debate is being reduced to token noises about nothing … ‘speaking’ [in a debate] can mean uttering no more than a few platitudinous syllables.”[16]

This being said, not everyone in the nineteenth century was impressed with what they saw in the House of Commons either. Samuel Bamford, a veteran of the Manchester radical scene in the 1820s, recalled once seeing a debate in the House and quipped

“And are these, thought I, the beings whose laws we must obey? This the ‘most illustrious assembly of freemen in the world?’ Perish freedom, then, and her children too! O! for the stamp of stern old Oliver on this floor; and the clank of his iron scabbard, and the rush of his iron-armed band, and his voice to arise above this babel howl—‘Take away that bauble’—‘Begone; give place to honester men’.”[17]

References

[1] William Pitt, ‘The Rupture of the Negotiations for Peace with France’, in Treasury of British Eloquence: Specimens of Brilliant Orations by the Most Eminent Statesmen, Divines, etc. of Great Britain of the Last Four Centuries, ed. by Robert Cochrane (Edinburgh: Nimmo Standard Library, 1887), p. 306.

[2] See Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1992)

[3] J. Richards [online], ‘The Blitz – Sorting the Myth from the Reality’, accessed 14 October 2013, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwtwo/blitz01

[4] On meanings of ‘myth’ see the following: Peter T. Struck, ‘The Invention of Mythic Truth in Antiquity’, in Antike Mythen: Medien, Transformationen und Konstruktione, ed. by Ueli Dill and Christine Walde (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 25–37 (p. 25)

[5] W.L. Hanchant, ‘Preface’, in England is Here: A Selection from the Speeches and Writings of the Prime Ministers of England, ed. by W.L, Hanchant (London: Bodley Head, 1943), 18.

[6] Thomas Pelham Holles, ‘The Popular Good’, in Hanchant, p. 40.

[7] William Pitt, ‘No Free Man’, in Hanchant, p. 49.

[8] Stanley Baldwin, ‘Service of Democracy’, in Hanchant, p. 229.

[9] David Lloyd George, ‘Liberty’, in Hanchant, p. 219.

[10] Benjamin Disraeli, ‘Liberty to Know, to Utter, and to Argue Freely’, in Hanchant, p. 166.

[11] Anon. ‘The Liberal Empire’, Lloyd George Liberal Magazine, 1926, cited in Stephen Basdeo, Heroes and Villains of the British Empire: Their Lives and Legends (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2020), p. 82.

[12] William Ewart Gladstone, ‘England and her colonies’, in Hanchant, p. 175.

[13] Arthur James Balfour, ‘A Vision of Empire’, in Hanchant, p. 199.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Earl of Roseberry, ‘The Commonwealth of Nations’, in Hanchant, pp. 189–90.

[16] Caroline Battacharya and Stephen Holden Bates [online], ‘Why are MPs speaking more often but for less time? Five possible reasons’, Hansard Society, 16 January 2024, accessed 14 April 2024, available at: https://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/blog/house-of-commons-speeches-members-of-parliament-data

[17] Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, 2 vols (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1844), I, p. 27.