I'm as sure as I can be of anything that every major historical or biographical work that deals with Winston Churchill as its major subject has made at least one, usually several, references to the fact that the man was chivalrous and magnanimous to a fault. This is borne out by his speech to the House upon the death of Neville Chamberlain (in which Churchill's generosity about a man who had tried repeatedly to keep him out of government and had scorned him on many an occasion is astounding), his generosity and near-adulation of Asquith - a man who had abandoned Churchill over the Dardanelles affair; his knight- errant championing of Edward in the abdication crisis; his suicidal advocacy of Admiral Fisher's recall to the Admiralty in WW2 (and unstinted praise of him) - after that serpentine ingrate's spectacular apostasy and personal treachery over the Dardanelles mission; his admiring essay on Lord Balfour - a man who had personally maligned WSC; and numberless other instances in which he delivered glowingly generous appraisals of figures who would ordinarily have merited nothing but words of terse censure, and whose own treatment of WSC had been anything but generous.
We have all knocked about in this world enough to have noticed that a generous or magnanimous temperament is incompatible with a treacherous one. That is a truism that needs neither explaining nor proving. Winston Churchill was cast in heroic mould: his tastes, his judgements, his aims, his actions, his failings and his strengths, and above all, his motives - were all on a superlative, outsize scale. He was a Titan - if anybody can be called that. Churchill had grandeur and nobility in his nature. Something as base as 'treachery' is impossible in such a man. On Apr 23, 6:00 am, Perpetuo991 <[email protected]> wrote: > Beaverbrook wrote that Churchill, "was always free from rancor and > never treacherous." Does anyone know of additional resources and > examples that supports and augments this contention? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat?hl=en.
