Sunday, 16th February 1901
Two days ago, on Valentine’s Day — a coincidence no one remarked on, though the Ghost finds it quietly appropriate — Edward VII opened Parliament for the first time. The first King’s Speech in sixty-four years. The peers in their robes, the Commons summoned by Black Rod, the Crown on a cushion, the ritual machinery of constitutional monarchy creaking back to life like a clock that has been wound after a long stillness.
He did well. Better than most expected, which is the story of Edward VII in miniature: a man perpetually underestimated who will consistently exceed the low bar his mother set for him. He spoke of national sorrow and his beloved Mother and his earnest desire to walk in Her footsteps, which is the sort of thing kings must say whether they mean it or not. He does mean it, partially. He also means to be a very different kind of monarch — louder, warmer, more visible, more interested in pleasure and diplomacy and the smell of cigar smoke than in the austere, cloistered widowhood that characterised his mother’s last four decades. Victoria reigned from behind curtains. Edward will reign from the centre of the room.
He spoke about the war. The war in South Africa has not yet entirely terminated, he said, which is a masterpiece of royal understatement. It has not yet entirely terminated the way a forest fire has not yet entirely gone out while it is still consuming the forest. He spoke of fruitless guerilla warfare maintained by Boer partisans and expressed his great regret at the loss of life and expenditure of treasure. He wants the Boers to submit. He wants equal rights for all the white inhabitants — note that word, white — and protection and justice for the native population, which sounds almost progressive until you understand that protection means paternalism and justice means the right to be governed by people who consider you a child.
He mentioned China — the capture of Peking and the release of those who were besieged in the Legations — and India, and Australia. He did not mention oil. He did not mention Texas. He did not mention the substance that, even as he spoke, was transforming the economy of the American Southwest and beginning the slow process of making his empire’s coal-based supremacy obsolete. Kings do not discuss commodities. Commodities do not discuss themselves. They simply flow, and the world reshapes itself around them, and by the time anyone in a palace notices, the reshaping is already done.
I want to tell you about a young man who was sitting in the chamber during that speech. He was not speaking — not yet. He will speak on Monday, two days from now, his maiden speech in the House of Commons, and it will be about the war, and it will be confident and elegant and slightly too clever, and it will mark the beginning of the longest, loudest, most consequential political career in British history.
His name is Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. He is twenty-six. He is a Member of Parliament for Oldham, a two-member constituency in Lancashire, and he arrived at this seat by a route so improbable it seems designed for a novel that nobody would believe.
His father was Lord Randolph Churchill — brilliant, erratic, self-destructing, dead at forty-five from what was euphemistically called general paralysis of the insane, which meant syphilis. His mother was Jennie Jerome — American, beautiful, ambitious, mostly absent. Winston’s childhood was a study in privileged neglect: the best schools, the coldest affection, a boy writing desperate letters to parents who were too busy being glamorous to visit. He was a poor student. His father told him he was a disappointment. He joined the army because no one thought he was clever enough for anything else.
And then he went to wars. Cuba. India’s northwest frontier. Sudan, where he charged with the cavalry at Omdurman. South Africa, where he got himself captured by the Boers and then escaped — climbed over a wall, walked through enemy territory, hid in a coal mine, and made it to Portuguese East Africa — and came home a celebrity. He turned the celebrity into a parliamentary seat. He turned the parliamentary seat into what he considers the beginning of a very large story.
He is right. He has no idea how right.
I have seen this man’s future. I have seen him cross the floor of the Commons, twice. I have seen him fail catastrophically at Gallipoli in 1915, sending thousands to die on a Turkish beach because he believed his own cleverness was the same thing as a military plan. I have seen him wander in the political wilderness for a decade, dismissed as a relic, a drunk, a blowhard. And then I have seen him stand in the House of Commons in the summer of 1940, when Europe has fallen and Britain stands alone against a darkness so total that reasonable men are advising surrender, and I have seen him say we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, and I have seen a nation decide, on the strength of a voice, to not give up.
He will also preside over the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million Indians will starve while grain is exported from their country, and when told of the scale of the dying he will blame the Indians for breeding like rabbits. He will hold views on race that are vile even by the standards of his own time. He will be a drunk and a bully and a narcissist and a snob and the most important human being of the twentieth century, and the twentieth century will never quite work out whether to thank him or curse him, because the answer is both, always, simultaneously, and that is what it means to be Churchill and that is what it means to be human: magnificent and monstrous in the same body, sometimes in the same sentence.
He is twenty-six. He is sitting in the Commons. He is preparing his speech. He has practised it in front of a mirror, because he has a slight lisp and a fear of public speaking that he will spend his entire career disguising with preparation so thorough it looks like spontaneity.
Two days from now, he will stand up and begin. The century will lean forward.
On the veldt, in South Africa, Christiaan de Wet’s attempt to invade the Cape Colony has failed. He was forced back across the Orange River this week, losing his guns and his supply convoy. The British are reinforcing — the War Office has committed thirty thousand more mounted troops, because the Empire apparently believes that the solution to being humiliated by farmers on horseback is to send more men on horseback to be humiliated.
But the failure is de Wet’s, not the war’s. The war grinds on. The farms keep burning. The camps keep filling. Emily Hobhouse — a Cornish woman, a campaigner, a person of the type that empires simultaneously rely on and despise — is preparing a report on what she has seen inside the concentration camps. She has seen children dying of measles and malnutrition. She has seen women sleeping on bare ground. She has seen rations cut as punishment. She will publish her findings, and they will cause a scandal, and the scandal will lead to improvements, and the improvements will come too late for the twenty-eight thousand who have already died, and the tens of thousands of Black Africans in separate camps whom almost nobody in England is discussing at all.
I mention Hobhouse because history remembers the generals and forgets the witnesses. I am a witness. I know the value of witnessing, and I know its limits: you can see everything and change nothing. Hobhouse will see, and she will speak, and speaking will help, partially, eventually. But the dead will still be dead, and the camps will still have existed, and the lesson — that empires devour the civilians they claim to protect — will still need to be learned again, and again, and again, in every century, on every continent, until the species either learns it permanently or runs out of continents.
The Edwardian age is four weeks old. A king has spoken. A young man is about to speak. The war continues. The camps fill. The oil flows. Chekhov coughs. The Black Dragon Society draws its maps. Carnegie counts his money. And somewhere in England, on a quiet Sunday in February, a woman whose name nobody will ever know hangs laundry in a garden behind a terraced house, and the sheets are white, and the wind catches them, and for a moment they look like sails.
I am the ghost. I see everything. I cannot touch the sheets. I cannot tell her what is coming. I can only watch the sails fill with wind and know, as she does not, that the wind is already changing direction.
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