Churchill's Eulogy for Chamberlain: The Legacy Test

The Legacy Test

In our internet age, everything we write is forever. ¹ When I think about my writing as everlasting, I’m led to try to be generous and gracious, positive and precise. Because whatever is memorialized and permanent forms our legacy, which I define as a reputation that sticks, both while we’re alive and after.

All of us want a legacy as “lovable,”² someone who embraces the virtues of kindness, loyalty, humility, courage, and charity. The legacies of Prime Ministers and Presidents are subject to the interpretations of historians. The rest of us rely on the people who know us best, our friends and families. 

We all know how often we’re tempted to sacrifice our virtues and give in to our base impulses. To our vengeful anger. To our dissolute cravings for power and gain and cheap esteem. Or, simply, to be rude.

When thoughts flash through my brain to say or do something that would later cause me regret, most often I will take a beat and a breath and check myself. Because I want to be virtuous. I don’t want to fail the Legacy Test. 

In November 1940, Winston Churchill faced his own Legacy Test when he had to deliver the eulogy for his longstanding and bitter political rival Neville Chamberlain. 

Churchill and Chamberlain

The two men were members of the same Conservative political party, but had radically opposed views on the approach to the greatest issue of the 1930s: how to confront Nazi Germany. Chamberlain and most of his Cabinet were appeasers willing to make concessions to Hitler on the chance they could avoid a Second World War. In contrast, throughout the 1930s, Churchill railed from his political “wilderness” against appeasement as a terrible policy. 

Until the few months before war actually broke out, the 65 year old Churchill’s legacy was thought to be beyond repair. He was viewed by most of his Party as an incorrigible and injudicious warmonger with a history of military misjudgments. ³ He was neither trusted nor respected.

We know what happened. Chamberlain’s efforts at appeasement failed. The war began less than a year after the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement, which gave Hitler a large slice of Czechoslovakia in return for “peace in our time.” That phrase and more so “Munich” and “appeasement” quickly became and have remained the worst slurs one can hurl against a foreign policy or a statesman. ⁴

In May 1940, Germany invaded France, and that was the final blow that forced Chamberlain to resign as Prime Minister. He was replaced by Churchill, whose self-predicted hour of destiny had come around at last.⁵ Then, contrary to all expectations, France fell to Germany in six weeks. England had lost its only ally.

So at the time of the eulogy, England’s position was desperate. While the RAF had by then repelled the German attempt to bomb England into submission (the Battle of Britain), England had no viable path to victory on its own. 

Churchill’s eulogy for Chamberlain was a golden opportunity to declare how right he had been all along about Hitler and Germany and how wrong Chamberlain and the other appeasers had been to ignore and often ridicule Churchill’s warnings. He could easily have blamed the appeasers for allowing Hitler to advance to a position that had put England and the rest of Europe in such awful peril.

We know that Churchill considered that theme. After his secretary had complimented him on the draft of his eulogy, Churchill said, “Well of course I could have done it the other way around.” ⁶ As well, we know that Churchill had a low personal opinion of Chamberlain, remembering him privately seven months later in June 1941 as “the narrowest, most ignorant, most ungenerous of men.” ⁷

The Eulogy

Churchill took the eulogy as an opportunity to show an uncommon spirit of generosity and grace toward Chamberlain. And because of that grace, the speech is filled with wisdom. It’s far from his most famous speech, but I believe it to be his finest.

Like America’s Founding Fathers, Churchill was driven to act by how he wanted his legacy to be recorded by history. He knew that his public words during the war and what he wrote in his books ⁸ would determine his legacy almost as much as his deeds. And so that motive triumphed over an urge we’re all familiar with, the urge to say “I told you so.” ⁹

Below are a few of the greatest excerpts from the eulogy followed by my comments. The full speech is attached to this post.

“The fierce and bitter controversies [appeasement] which hung around [Chamberlain] in recent times were hushed by the news of his illness and are silenced by his death.”

After he resigned, Chamberlain continued to work for several months in Churchill’s government, even while his body was painfully wracked by his cancer. ¹⁰

The Flickering Lamp of History

“In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”

With his gorgeous imagery of light and vision, Churchill put history in its proper elusive perspective. As time moves forward, it becomes difficult to understand why people acted as they did in “former days.” And even if you figure out the “why,” how can you be certain that the right or wrong of today will remain the same tomorrow? The passage above is the preamble to Churchill’s defense of Chamberlain and of any leader forced to make difficult, momentous judgments in real time.

However the Fates May Play

“The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.”

If we can never be certain of how history will turn out or how our actions will be judged, then what are we left to hold on to? For Churchill, all we can rely on is our conscience, our rectitude, our sincerity, our honour. Or, in a single word, our character.

The Challenge of History

As one historian wrote, “It is very hard to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future.” ¹¹ In 2023, 83 years after the eulogy, it is almost impossible for us to unspool time and imagine a world today in which Nazi Germany won the war. This is the hardest challenge in studying history: to put ourselves in the time and the place of historical figures who didn’t know then what we know now. To us, what happened next seems inevitable and impossible to “unknow.”

Not so for Churchill in November 1940. He must have been aware that his leadership and the fate of his country might still end in disastrous defeat. England had no allies. The entry of Russia and America into the war depended on future and unforeseen strategic blunders by Germany and Japan. Around the time of the eulogy, it seemed to many people a matter of when, not whether, England would lose the war. That was the view of the American ambassador to England, Joe Kennedy. ¹²

When Churchill wrote, “however the fates may play” he may as well have said “however the war might turn out.” Even if England lost, however, and Churchill’s policy of victory at all costs turned out to end in bloody, costly defeat, he was protecting his own legacy with the only thing he could truly control, the “shield” of his character, i.e., his reputation and legacy.

And part of that shield was his generosity to Chamberlain, a man he disagreed with and disliked.

Churchill’s Attempt to Rescue Chamberlain’s Legacy

“It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed?...the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril…This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.”

Here again, Churchill placed virtuous motive over outcome. But despite his words of praise for Chamberlain’s character, Churchill’s words did not alter history’s verdict on Chamberlain as Hitler’s dupe. ¹³

To repeat the wisest thing Churchill said in the eulogy, “The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.” Because that is the only thing we can control.

Link to the eulogy: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/neville-chamberlain/

Question for the Comments

Which person’s legacy, public, private, or both, do you admire most and why? I start us off with my answer in the Comments.

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Notes

1. One of the appeals of writing on substack is creating a recorded legacy of what we were thinking and what was happening in our lives, not only for those close to us, but for our future selves.

2.

Virginia's Newsletter

has a great post from August 27th that discusses the difference between Merit and Value. She references Adam Smith who in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” emphasized people’s desire to be “lovable,” meaning admired for their virtues.

3. Churchill’s most infamous military misjudgment was his advocacy and overseeing of the failed 1915 invasion of the Dardanelles Strait in Turkey, which led to the British disaster at Gallipoli. The 1981 movie “Gallipoli” is a devastating depiction of that battle and a study of the tragedy and insanity of war. (We watched it last night, and it holds up excellently.)

4. The indiscriminate, pejorative use of Munich and appeasement to summon up the horrors of World War Two does a tremendous disservice to modern diplomatic efforts to avoid or end wars. Every situation is different and of course there are times when conciliation is the correct policy to pursue. See the August 28th article by

Ross Barkan

about our current era’s misuse of World War Two memes. 

Moreover, by 1950, even Churchill had developed a more nuanced view of appeasement. He is quoted as saying, “The word appeasement is not popular, but appeasement has its place in all policy. Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong.” Source: Churchill In His Own Words; Ed. Richard Langworth; 2008.

5. Churchill had always believed that he would lead England in a moment of great peril. At the age of sixteen, he told a friend he would save England from a foreign invasion. Fifty years later, in the dark days of 1940, when he was appointed Prime Minister,  he wrote, “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.”  His historical legacy was always on his mind. Source: Andrew Roberts’ majestic biography, Churchill: Walking With Destiny, 2018.

6. Source: Martin Gilbert; Churchill: A Life; 1991

7. Source: Roberts; Churchill: Walking With Destiny; 2018.

8. Churchill had already written a number of acclaimed history books, including his massive, multi-volume biography of his illustrious ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. So as a historian, he was well aware of how history can judge and decide legacies.

9. In the investment business and generally in life, “I told you so” are four of the most annoying words anyone can say.

10. Chamberlain had inoperable bowel cancer, diagnosed that summer. In September, two months before he died, Chamberlain wrote in his diary that he had “to adjust to the new life of a partially crippled man, which is what I am.” As well, he wrote that he had to give up any hope of returning to politics. That he still had hope of a return up until that point is a testament to both his self-confidence and the difficulty for any politician to step away from high office. Source: Walter Reid; Neville Chamberlain: The Passionate Radical; 2021

11. Source: Quote from Maitland by A.J.P. Taylor in his masterful and iconoclastic “The Origins of The Second World War,” 1960.

12. From a cable Kennedy wrote in September 1940: “I cannot impress upon you strongly enough my complete lack of confidence in the entire conduct of the war.” Kennedy was convinced that England had already lost and if America entered the war, they would have to fight without any British help. Source: David Nasaw; The Patriarch; 2012

13. I think history’s verdict on Chamberlain has been unduly harsh; it assumes that Chamberlain should have been able to see into the future after Munich. The verdict conflates outcome with analysis. It also ignores the horrors of World War One, still in recent memory, horrors that the English men in power had lived through and wanted with good reason to avoid repeating.

As well, Chamberlain’s foreign minister Halifax viewed the Munich agreement in probabilistic terms. Halifax was against “a certain war now [versus] the possibility of war, perhaps in more unfavorable circumstances later.”  Source:  A.J.P. Taylor; The Origins of the Second World War; 1960.