The Early Churchills

A. L. Rowse

английский

MAGMILLAN

История рода Уинстона Черчиля с 1620 по 1744 годы.

Издание включает 15 иллюстраций с портретами членов семейства, а также фамильное древо Черчилей.

PREFACE

For a number of years now I have had this book in mind. It is not inappropriate, I hope, for a West Countryman to write the story of this West Country family whose origins lie across my road from Cornwall to Oxford, through country fought over by the Cavalier Sir Winston in the Civil War, familiar to many earlier generations of Churchills. It is a long way from Churchill in the parish of Broad Clyst to Blenheim, from the slow diurnal routine on the land through immemorial centuries in Devon to the sudden ascent of John Churchill in one generation to European eminence.

Dr. W. G. Hoskins finds the origin of the stock in a family of freehold farmers, firm as the landscape that bore them, going right back to Norman times in Devon. I am grateful to him for his information and hope that he will write us an essay on those earlier forgotten folk. But I hope it is not out of the way for one who lives in All Souls College to write about the Churchills, when a painting of John hangs on my staircase and I pass it a dozen times a day, while a portrait of Queen Anne's husband, Prince George of Denmark, that good friend to the Churchills, hangs in the Warden's lodgings; or for an Oxford man, who has lived on the threshold of Woodstock and roamed in the park since undergraduate days, to write about Blenheim.

It is a great pleasure to be allowed to inscribe this book to Sir Arthur Bryant, whose own books on the seventeenth century give one so intimate a feeling of the life and landscape of the age. A sense of humour is not the least delightful feature of his writings and he will appreciate more than most the fun of my very different inflexion from his, the divergence of our interpretations. Where he sees these events from the point of view of the Tories, my (political) sympathies are on the whole with the Whigs; where he depicts things from the standpoint of the Stuart monarchs, I consider that Parliament was a better interpreter of the interests of the nation. Where he prefers Charles II and his foibles, I prefer William III in spite of his. The latter, for all his bad manners, was a great man; for the rest, there is much to be said for a certain judicious ambivalence.

My chief obligation in writing this book is to Sir Winston Churchill himself, for his interest and warm encouragement and help; some of my earlier pages have had the honour, and the benefit, of his corrections. His own researches and those of Archdeacon Coxe before him, in the Blenheim archives are basic for the story of John and Sarah, and I am deeply in their debt, as all writers on this subject must be. But I have been able to bring to light a good deal of new material on other members of the family: on old Sir Winston the Cavalier Colonel, Arabella, Admiral George, General Charles and their families. I am most grateful to the Duke of Marlborough for permission to work in his archives — indispensable for my second volume.

I have received much help from many quarters, for which I should like to record my thanks: to the Countess Zamoyska for her hospitality and help in Dorset; to Lord and Lady Digby for their kindness in showing me their Churchill treasures at Minterne; to the Honble. Mrs. Cubitt for putting me on the track of some Churchill portraits; to Mr. Howard Colvin and Mr. W. C. Costin, Senior Tutor of St. John's College, Oxford, for information about Winston ChurchilPs residence there; to Miss Grace M. Briggs for information as to Sir Winston's reading at the Bodleian; to Professor H. G. Hanbury for clearing up an antiquarian legal point; and to Professor Robert W. Rogers, of % the University of Illinois, for some new light on Pope and the Marlboroughs.

My obligations to libraries and manuscript collections are considerable, particularly to the Bodleian and Codrington at Oxford, the Public Record Office in London, the National Library of Wales, the Huntington Library in California. At the last Mr. Tyrus Harmsen drew my attention to some unpublished letters of Sarah, upon which I have drawn, by no means exhaustively. I am much indebted to Miss N. McN. O'Farrell for constant help with original documents at the Public Record Office, British Museum and Somerset House.

A prime obligation is to Professor Jack Simmons of Leicester University, who has greatly improved the shape of the book by pruning the earlier chapters of much that was not the more interesting for being new. Mr. K. B. McFarlane of Magdalen has conducted a masterly massacre of my commas ; but I am grateful to him, too, for some neat corrections both of fact and style.

A. L. R.