The War on Christmas

You’d think that with all his Ciceronian rhetorical skill and all his Plutarchian knowledge of history, Winston Churchill would have written the definitive history of England. But his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (i.e. History of England with Notes on Places that Ended Up Speaking Its Language) has some problems. Churchill assumes much of his reader; it’s his right since his original readers had all been educated in English public schools in the early twentieth century. But for me, the book has gaps, abridgements, unexplained terms. Even though the work is four volumes long, it still reads at times like summary notes for people who already know the story. When James I dies, for instance, he says, “The first king of Great Britain was dead.” That reference to “Great Britain” jarred me when I read it several days ago because it reminded me of the significance of the united crown, which he had not explained (or even mentioned in the chapter). Yes, he said that James was King of Scotland and that he inherited the English crown. But he didn’t stop to highlight it: “Now for the first time one person reigned as monarch of both Scotland and England.” In a history for the uninitiated, the author would at the very least have introduced the term “Great Britain” at the beginning of James’s reign. OK, so maybe “Great Britain” isn’t all that hard to understand. But several other terms, even more cryptic to the American, appear without explanation: “Black Rod” (a person?), “the Chapel” (which he opposes to the Church), and “the Ironsides” (apparently a nickname for both Cromwell and, in some instances, for his cavalry).

Now I learned all about these problems thirty years ago when I first read the HESP. But I still wanted to read it again. Maybe I know enough now that reminders are all I need. Or maybe I just wanted to enjoy the stodgy eloquence again. In any case, this year, I reread The New World, volume 2 of the HESP, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The stories were good, and the missing bits didn’t bother me so much this time around since I wasn’t reading to learn this history for the first time.

But I actually started learning things (or relearning, I guess) in chapters 19 and 20, covering the English Civil War. “Here,” Sir Winston says in almost the last good thing he has to offer about Oliver Cromwell, “is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it would give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition.” The rebel forces may at first have tried to find legal precedent for their treason and may have sought a new stability that fit into their interpretation of existing law. But it goes downhill from there. After the King’s forces have been totally defeated, the Roundhead (i.e. rebel) army won’t disband because they have not been paid. Now begins what Churchill calls the Second Civil War. (So much for “irresistible physical force” respecting “law and tradition.”) Once Cromwell and his army takes over, he says, “We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides and of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams. It was the victory of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined, military fanatics over all that England ever willed or ever wished. . . . Thus the struggle, in which we have in these days so much sympathy and part, begun to bring about a constitutional and limited monarchy, had led only to the autocracy of the sword.”

Again, Churchill assumes things. I don’t know who those Victorian writers were. I didn’t grow up thinking of Cromwell as a lightbearer for democracy and parliamentarism. But I get the idea. I live in a free democracy, as well, and I want those who established my freedom to have had no flaws and to have labored and bled solely for the abstract cause of freedom for future generations. So I can see why historians of a previous age would want to make heroes out of very flawed humans who fought for their own purposes and yet, even on a route as indirect as that leading from Oliver Cromwell, paved the way for the progress of greater freedom from tyranny. But when Cromwell and his brand of Puritanism won the rule of a Brave New England, he wanted no such thing as personal liberty for all. Among all the tyrannical policies enacted by this regicide and traitor, none seems more telling to me than his war on Christmas. A literal war. On Christmas. His understanding of Christianity dictated that this holiday smacked of Catholicism and should not be celebrated by him or by anyone he had power over. So the armed forces of the English government entered English homes on December 25 without a warrant and examined dinners. If a goose was involved, they confiscated the goose and sometimes took into custody the perpetrators of the lewd crime of being merry about the birth of Christ.

As I think about it, I want Churchill to be perfect, too. I actually believe I owe my freedom partly to him and his stalwart stand against Hitler, lonely but unwavering until the rest of the English-Speaking Peoples (i.e. us) went shoulder-to-shoulder with him. So I want him to be a paragon, even though I know that in reality he was human, as broken and self-centered as the rest of us. And yet I must admire the good and the noble in the man, and high among those admirable qualities is his understanding that shutting down Christmas with guns is an atrocity.