This Day in British History (Birth of Brendan Bracken, Diehard Churchill Ally)

Feb. 15, 1901— Brendan Bracken—a mysterious figure who, despite being three decades younger than Winston Churchill, became his closest friend and Minister for Information in his wartime Cabinet—was born in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland.

A lanky, bespectacled redhead with charm and energy to spare, Bracken was hard to miss in any assembly. But, if people had no trouble picking him out, they had plenty in figuring him out. 

Who was he? Where did he come from? How had he become so indispensable to Churchill? Why was there a break in their relationship for five years before Bracken re-committed himself to his mentor in the latter’s darkest political hours?

For a long time during his rise in business and politics, even the last part of that first sentence above—about Bracken’s date and place of birth—would have been murky. 

The truth was that Bracken’s father, a well-to-do builder and member of the Fenian brotherhood that sought Irish independence, died when Brendan was three and that his stepfather years later was likewise of republican sympathy.

But by his teens, Bracken was acting so wildly that his mother packed him off to a Jesuit boarding school in Dublin and, when that effort to curb him failed, even further, to a similar institution in Australia.

At age 18, with Ireland plunged into its war of independence from Britain, Bracken was back in Dublin. He embraced his mother’s Unionist sympathies but not her Catholic faith. In the next several years, he not only rejected his Irish identity but bewildered former and newfound acquaintances by denying he had one, passing himself off as Australian. 

At various times, he also changed his age when the circumstances were advantageous and claimed that a brother had died when actually, like all family members except his mother, Bracken was estranged from him.

In 1923, the most important event in his life occurred when he met Winston Churchill. That December he organized Churchill’s unsuccessful General Election race as a Liberal in Leicester West, then another, four months later, as an independent. Finally by the end of 2024, Churchill won a safe seat in a return to the Conservative Party he had abandoned 20 years before.

An astonishing rumor, fed as much by the pair’s close relationship as by the red hair they shared, was that Bracken was his chief’s illegitimate child. The aide not only didn’t deny it but, some suspect, may have even spread the gossip. 

Churchill’s wife Clementine, already fuming that her husband's newfound friend was sleeping in the house with his feet up on the sofa, demanded answers, only to be blithely assured by the great man, “I looked it up, but the dates don’t coincide.”  

Though the rumor was untrue, it's hard not to think of the two men as surrogate family members. Bracken was more responsible, even-tempered and helpful than Churchill's choleric and alcoholic son Randolph. And in Churchill, Bracken found something of a father figure, an affectionate presence who fully shared his Unionist, even imperial, sympathies.

With Churchill’s return to the House of Commons, their paths diverged for a time, with Bracken displaying a talent for finance and business management. He became a publishing mogul, becoming chairman of the Financial News in 1928 and, 17 years later, merging it into The Financial Times, making that paper with its distinct paper color the institution it remains.

This business acumen and journalistic influence became indispensable to Churchill by the end of the decade, when this lifelong politician struggled through the decade known as his “Wilderness Years,” the period when, his relentless ambitions stymied, he was without a Cabinet post, a mere back-bencher.

In 1929, having won election as a Conservative in the North Paddington seat, Bracken allied himself again with Churchill, becoming for the next 10 years a foul-weather friend who stood by him in his lowest political and financial moments.

It was bad enough that Churchill found himself out of step with Conservative leadership on Indian policy, King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis, and appeasement towards Nazi Germany. But his spendthrift habits put him continually in financial danger.

In 1938, press baron Max Beaverbook, disapproving of Churchill’s increasingly dire warnings about Adolf Hitler’s rearmament campaign, terminated his contract for writing an Evening Standard column. 

Without this desperately needed source of funds, a despondent Churchill made plans to sell Chartwell, the home into which he had poured so much of his money.

It was Bracken who came to his rescue by having his associate Sir Henry Strakosch buy Churchill’s American stocks at their original purchase price and pay him interest to boot.

Strakosch performed similar financial magic in 1940, as Churchill moved to the forefront of the movement to fight the Nazi war machine no matter the cost.

Had these arrangements been revealed at the time, they might have opened Churchill up to attempts to discredit his wartime efforts—as indeed has happened now from the American far right, with Darryl Cooper labeling Churchill “the “chief villain of the Second World War” in an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson.

Bracken was as instrumental in ensuring that Churchill finally became Prime Minister as he had been in keeping him from declaring bankruptcy. 

With Neville Chamberlain’s leadership fatally undermined by a closer-than-expected no-confidence vote in the House of Commons, Churchill told Bracken he was willing to serve under Chamberlain’s desired successor, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. 

Bracken got his friend to remain silent in the high-level meetings if Halifax were proposed to lead the new government. In the end, Halifax, saying it would be difficult to lead the war effort as a House of Lords member, left the field effectively open to Churchill.

In 1941, Churchill named Bracken his Minister of Information—in effect, in charge of wartime propaganda. Two authors distinctly unimpressed by what they learned about Bracken at close range in the war obliquely targeted him in their novels.

Evelyn Waugh told future biographer Christopher Sykes that Brideshead Revisited’s Rex Mottram was his only character fully drawn from life. Though he tried to disguise the source by making Mottram a Canadian, other details—notably, the character’s colonial origins, opportunism, overwhelming business success, and lack of devotion or even interest in Catholicism—pointed towards Bracken. 

And George Orwell was so incensed by the restrictions under which he labored in Bracken’s Ministry of Information, it was said, that he was inspired to create Big Brother in 1984, with the character’s kinship with the politico hinted at in their initials: B.B.

Churchill’s landslide defeat in the 1945 General Election—in a campaign not helped by Bracken’s advocacy of an overly negative, partisan tone—left the two men out of power.

When Churchill returned to Downing Street six years later, Bracken announced that ill health precluded his continuation in politics. But he was not done serving his mentor and hero.

In June 1953, Bracken joined the Prime Minister’s inner circle in covering up the news of Churchill’s massive stroke, claiming only that the leader required “complete rest” for a while, ensuring that there would be no accurate UK coverage of the problem. 

It wasn’t until a year passed that Churchill, having made a great recovery in the meantime, gave even a hint of his health crisis.

By this time, the health of Bracken himself, a lifelong chain smoker, was in more serious danger. Upon hearing the news of the death of his stalwart friend in 1958 from lung cancer, Churchill lamented the loss of “poor, dear Brendan.”

This Day in British History (Charles I Execution: From Monarch to Martyr?)

Jan. 30, 1649—Irreconcilable differences on the prerogatives of the British crown and Parliament, worsened by century-old sectarian divisions, reached a bloody climax as King Charles I was beheaded, in a public ceremony that backfired on the Puritan Parliament contingent that pressed for his execution.

Over the last three decades in Great Britain, with the mystery that long protected the Windsor dynasty dissipating, sentiment has risen for an end to the monarchy. But with the execution of Charles and the subsequent inability to replace it with a truly democratic, republican alternative, that opportunity may well have been squandered for good.

One of Charles’ most significant military opponents, Oliver Cromwell, the third member of Parliament to sign the king’s arrest warrant, emerged from the post-execution turbulence as the leader of the government. Poor health limited the “Lord Protector” to a reign of only nine years.

With Cromwell’s son Richard unable to wield power effectively as his successor, adherents of the monarchy helped bring back the Stuarts. The subsequent “Restoration” with Charles’ son, Charles II, at its center, inaugurated an era far removed from the Puritan piety preached and enforced by Cromwell--until, that is, James II--with little of his brother's political nimbleness, and openly professing Catholicism--ran afoul of Parliament, just as his father had, and likewise lost his throne 40 years later.

The strategy pursued by Cromwell and his followers—end Charles I’s life publicly, for all to see—differed from how Charles’ grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been dispatched by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, for plotting her assassination.

That beheading occurred in Fotheringhay Castle, in Northamptonshire, with a limited number of eyewitnesses—and a good thing, too, because Mary’s death was regarded as unusually brutal even by the standards of her time.

Cromwell and his Puritan "New Model Army" convincingly defeated Charles on the battlefield, but the king's trial and execution were far less adroitly handled. 

Consider the following, all of which undermined the legitimacy of the case for many onlookers:

*The government had to be dissolved by force;

*The House of Lords would not sanction the trial, so that had to be dissolved;

*The House of Commons had been purged of opponents of the New Model Army, leaving only a "Rump Parliament":

*The House of Commons had never before served as a judicial body.

*New procedures had to be devised.

All of this provided Charles with grounds to argue that the proceedings were illegitimate. He even had unexpected support from a member of the packed gallery: Lady Fairfax, the wife of the commander-in-chief of the New Model Army, loudly explained the absence of her husband from the proceedings: "He has more wit than to be here!"

Following this unprecedented royal trial for treason, Charles—the second in the Stuart dynasty uniting the thrones of England and Scotland, deposed as ruler shortly before his death— stunned opponents used to his stammer with unexpected dignity and eloquence on the scaffold.

He had successfully prevailed upon his captors to allow him to wear a second shirt, lest onlookers misinterpret his shivering in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall as cowardice rather than the human body’s natural reaction to a bitterly cold afternoon.

With time running out for him, he made his case once again, this time in more concise form, for the divine right of kings. This was the notion that royalty derived their authority from God, not an earthly power--or, as he expressed more emphatically, “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.”

Above all, he claimed that he could not fulfill his duties as a sovereign by yielding to those who had defeated him in the English Civil War.

Were he “to have all laws changed according to the Power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here, and therefore I tell you ... that I am the martyr of the people,” he declared.

A single swing of the axe removed Charles’ head. But it could not so easily detach his hold on many onlookers, some of whom dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood spilled on the scaffold, a portent of the cult of martyrdom that began to build around him. Nor did it neatly eliminate class and religious differences that had roiled the kingdom, even after the so-called Glorious Revolution 40 years later—commonly hailed as the indispensable step toward a constitutional monarchy.

I titled this post “This Day in British History,” not “This Day in English History,” in recognition of the fact that Charles’ fate also affected Scotland and Ireland, two sources of unrest in the British Isles during the war and afterward.

Vacillating, equivocating, quibbling over nuances, telling successive audiences what they wanted to hear: Charles was all of this, and more (traits listed by the Victorian public intellectual Thomas Babington Macaulay, in my quote three years ago from his History of England from 1485 to 1685).

All the same, was he, as the charges against him stated, “a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public and implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England”?

That phrase might have applied, with far greater justice, to Henry VIII. To be sure, Charles irritated virtually every faction in the kingdom that could have allowed him to preserve his authority and his life. But Henry had done far more: increasingly as the years went on, he made his subjects, from the humblest to the mightiest, fear for their lives because of his capriciousness.

In an article first published in the Winter 1997 issue of Modern Age and republished 17 years later in The Imaginative Conservative, Jeffrey Hart regarded traditional conservative hero Edmund Burke with some asperity for his once-over-lightly treatment of the execution of Charles in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Unlike the myth that Burke constructed that Britain had proceeded carefully from precedent to precedent, Hart noted, the nation was embroiled in revolutionary turmoil not unlike what occurred across the English Channel late in the eighteenth century. Indeed, until the advent of Robert Walpole, “England had the politics of a banana republic.”

This Day in British History (Spanish Armada Meets Its Match)

August 8, 1588—At the Battle of Gravelines, two great naval forces, each led by an inexperienced commander and swearing allegiance to an absolute monarch, clashed off the coast of England. When it was over, the English fleet watched as the Spanish Armada, under the direction of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, limped off, a threat postponed but not ended, from a diminished but still dangerous force.

Only a few minutes into this latest post of mine and you’re already reading two things that might not meet your expectations! First, there’s that line, “absolute monarch.” Sure, historians have applied it without thinking twice to King Philip II of Spain, but the idea of affixing the label to Queen Elizabeth I of England still makes some shudder. Not Good Queen Bess! Not a ruler bound, as all English monarchs have ostensibly been since 1215, by the Magna Carta. But she gets off easily by virtue of having a father (Henry VIII) for a psychopath. She was every bit as intent on having her way as the male Tudors—and, in fact, the Stuarts, down to unlucky, foolhardy James II—were. Former favorites could tell you that. So could Roman Catholics and Puritans, neither of whom were allowed to worship as they wished.

Second, there’s that phrase about a “diminished but still dangerous force.” What? Didn’t British seamanship and know-how kill the threat from Spain decisively?

To be sure, the English naval force frustrated the Spanish fleet. But in the nine-day campaign that began in Calais in late July and ended at Gravelines, the English succeeded in sinking only six ships. Allow me to place that number in better context: six ships out of nearly 130.

Even after the disaster that met the fleet after Gravelines (more on that shortly), Philip was still able to launch two more attempts to take England in the remaining 10 years of his reign. But those, too, failed.

“It was bad luck, bad tactics and bad weather that defeated the Spanish Armada - not the derring-do displayed on the high seas by Elizabeth's intrepid sea dogs,” wrote Robert Hutchinson, author of a new history of the encounter between the two navies, on “England’s Lucky Escape” in the April 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine. “But it was a near-run thing.”

Let’s start with that “bad weather” part, because it’s by far the easiest to understand. Somewhere between 50 and 64—i.e., nearly half—of the Spanish fleet foundered either on the way to England or as it rounded Scotland on the way home. After his two encounters with the English ships, Medina Sidonia set sail for the Atlantic, but was blown by treacherous winds into a force he greatly feared: the stormy shores of Ireland’s west coast. A hurricane, no less, scattered some two dozen ships as far north as Donegal and as south as Kerry. Approximately 5,000 men drowned or, if captured, were executed when caught onshore.King Philip's two attempts over the next several years to take Spain likewise failed because of bad weather.

“Bad tactics?” Yes. How else can you describe a situation in which the Armada managed to surprise the English in Plymouth Harbor—despite invasion warnings received almost daily by Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham—and still lost the battle? 

The Armada’s crescent-shape formation and the unwieldy size of their ships would have made it possible to come alongside the British vessels, grapple and board them, then sweep across the English coast like a scythe, but it never got that far. The English used their galleons to fire on the Spanish from long range, picking them apart bit by bit—and then sending nighttime fireships their way, spreading terror.

“Bad luck”? Yes, that played a part, too. Had the Armada been able to land troops on British soil, they would have found a nation ripe for the taking: one with terrible coastal defenses, virtually no local militia, a population still deeply divided over Elizabeth's move toward Protestantism, and an unbelievable willingness to rely on bow and error rather than gunpowder. One of the Spanish vessels that blew up early in the fighting, taking down all 200 on board, caught fire because of the carelessness of one of its own sailors, it was discovered later. Worse than that, had the Spanish known that the English were all out of ammunition at the end of the encounter at Gravelines, they could have still borne down on the galleons and won the day.

Winners write history, and it was no different in this case. Accounts of the battle years later were written by the English. Particularly in the cases of Thomas Babington Macaulay and Edward S. Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo, both writing as Britain herself became an imperial power, the tone is both triumphalist and anachronistic, reading history backward from a later event—i.e., Spain’s decline in the 17^th century.

Still, it’s hard to argue with Macaulay’s description of the advantages enjoyed by King Philip as the two navies prepared for their epic clash:

“In America, his dominions extended on each side of the equator into the temperate zone. There is reason to believe that his annual revenue amounted, in the in the season of his greatest power, to four millions sterling,— a sum eight times as large as that which England yielded to Elizabeth. He had a standing army of fifty thousand excellent troops, at a time when England had not a single battalion in constant pay. His ordinary naval force consisted of a hundred and forty galleys. He held, what no other prince in modern times has held, the dominion both of the land and of the sea. During the greater part of his reign he was supreme on both elements.”

Well, there is one thing on which nearly all historians can agree: Elizabeth had all kinds of reasons to dread the wrath of Philip and his “invincible Armada”:

·          

      *Her refusal to acknowledge her debt of gratitude to Philip when he persuaded her sister (and his wife), Queen Mary, to reconcile with Elizabeth—an act that paved her way to the throne upon Mary’s death in 1558;

·         *Her steering of England away from Catholicism and toward Protestantism; 

·         *Her aid to Dutch Protestants who, for the past two decades, had been in full revolt against Philip;

·         *Her decision to execute Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic co-religionist of Philip’s;

·         *Her official sanctioning of privateering by Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and others, who burned and looted Spanish towns and brought the booty home for the Crown.

Back to my opening paragraph, and especially the part about each navy being led by an “inexperienced commander.” I’ve already alluded to Medina-Sidonia, but his English counterpart needs to be accounted for. 

That would be Lord Howard of Effingham. He had nowhere near the amount of sea experience as the second in command of the English navy, Francis Drake, but his innate caution meant that his chief early decision—staying beyond the reach of Spanish guns—meant that the enormous advantage enjoyed by Spain (an army on board its vessels) would be effectively neutralized. He listened carefully to his council of war. Thus, he decided to send fireships at night against the Spanish at Calais when told that an attack would be better early rather than later, since his navy would have lost strength. (Both sides were losing a fifth of their forces due to sickness up to that point.)

 

(The image accompanying this post is of the oil-on-canvas painting Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 8 August 1588 (1796), by Philip James de Loutherbourg, in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Hospital Collection)

This Day in British History (Elizabeth II Crowned, in Ancient Rite for Modern Age)

June 2, 1953—As daughter of the Prince of York, outside the direct line of descent to the British throne, Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary spent her first 10 years with no expectation that she would ever wear the crown. But, 17 years after her uncle’s affair with an American divorcee prevented him from becoming King Edward VIII, the dutiful, decent child of King George VI was formally crowned Queen Elizabeth II—in, arguably, the watershed event in British television history.

As an American of Irish descent, I come from a dual tradition of fierce anti-royalism. That, combined with an aversion to the hype surrounding Prince Charles and then-Lady Diana Spencer, led me to write an all-stops-out attack on the British monarchy for my college newspaper. Without taking back my general feelings about the institution (in fact, my prediction of unhappiness for Charles and Diana was, sadly, all too prescient), I have come to soften my view of the queen herself. While I won’t bow before her, then, I will tip my hat to her.

Some of this crystallized for me this past January, when I toured the site of Elizabeth’s formal installation, Westminster Abbey. No matter how magnificent its statuary, I knew all too well that many of Elizabeth’s predecessors could not have survived today’s searching moral scrutiny, with all those Star Chamber proceedings, executions, robberies of the public purse, invasion of foreign lands, and the like. In comparison, with what seems like a genuine and becoming modesty, Elizabeth cannot help but look good.

Elizabeth also looks great by comparison with those around her now. Anyone with a cross to bear has my sympathy, and Elizabeth has had several, including during what she called, with an almost palpable shudder, the "annus horribilis" of 1992, when the domestic affairs of her offspring virtually guaranteed full employment to Fleet Street “journalists” and somewhat better behaved members of the “chattering classes.” And I don’t even want to think about what life must be like when you’re married for 66 years to Prince Phillip, he of the “What in thunder are you doing here? What am I doing here?” scowl.

Actually, Prince Phillip figured prominently in the event that made his wife a global superstar. Viewers noticed that he was the first person to render homage to the new queen. What many, if not most, didn’t realize was that behind the scenes, he assumed an even larger role. In essence, he was first among equals on the Buckingham Palace committee organizing the event.

To start with, there was the notion, based on tradition, that the new queen must be crowned in the sight of the people. The belief in those days was that this required the transformation of Westminster Abbey’s space to accommodate more than 8,000 guests in a “theater” of tiered seating for 8251 guests, staircases, and an annex. The church was shut down in January to give the 200-man labor force enough time to complete the work.

That wasn’t the end of it. Reading about the event’s preparations, it reminded me less of a coronation than of the kind of multimillion-dollar spectacle that continues to give Broadway producers agita:

*With travel less swift than today, foreign dignitaries required months in attendance to clear their calendar for the event.

* In Glasgow 31 blue-and-gold carpets for the nave and “theater,” totaling 2,964 square yards, were made.

* Four thousand yards of velvet, covering 2,000 chairs and 5,700 stools, were woven in Bradford.

* In Braintree, Essex, a 10-week operation was required to hand-weave 20 yards of purple velvet for the Queen's coronation robe, 1,500 yards of silk for the hangings that would adorn the Abbey, and material for the peers' robes.

* The nation’s finest musicians and composers—including Sir William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams—contributed their talents to the musical program.

All of this meant that, though Elizabeth had been notified immediately in February 1952 that her father was dead and she was the new monarch, it would be more than a year before the official ceremony would take place.

It sounds as if the young woman was more frightened by this event than by her wedding to the blunt, officious Phillip six years before. Many of her anxieties stemmed directly from what her father had told her about the mishaps that had occurred at his coronation in 1937. (Among the foul-ups: The Archbishop of Canterbury thought the Dean had given him St. Edward’s crown the wrong way round; one bishop stepped on the king’s train; another put his thumb over the words of the oath when George VI was about to read it.)

All of this made Elizabeth reluctant to stage the event live on the new medium of television. Newsreels were fine, she thought, as they afforded the opportunity to edit out the glitches, but not something happening in real time.

When word got out that television cameras would not be present, a hue and cry ensued. Elizabeth’s PR handlers huddled, then came up with a new strategy and story. Of course the event would be televised; in fact, it had been the queen’s intention all along, they said. As by-no-means-iconoclastic royal biographer Robert Lacey observed in a BBC News interactive forum a decade ago, “We didn't discover until about the 1980s what really went on behind the scenes. So it was lit and designed for the old-fashioned newsreel cameras, and then at a later stage, the TV was fitted in.”

With Elizabeth’s reluctant approval, then, preparations were launched for this 38^th coronation in the legendary British church to be the first to air on television.

For us rudely plebeian Americans, the tipping point in the acceptance of television was probably Milton Berle’s show, which persuaded countless numbers to purchase TV sets. For the British, it was the coronation, which is believed to be the first time that a television audience outnumbered radio listeners in the nation. (In fact, according to the BBC, the number of TV licenses in Britain rose from 763,000 in 1951 to 3.2 million in 1954 thanks in part to the coronation.) An estimated 27 million people watched the 26-year-old Elizabeth in the centuries-old ceremonies, conducted by Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury.

I mentioned that the extensive preparations was one reason why the coronation date was pushed so far back from the date Elizabeth was notified she was the new monarch.  The particular date was chosen because that was believed to be the day least likely to rain. Of course, as millions of viewers soon saw, it was one of the soggiest days that year in the realm.

For a nation in the midst of angst over withdrawal from its empire, the coronation represented proof that some things in the realm endured. The event also highlighted how the monarchy would react under its latest representative: Perhaps not always sure-footed at first on how to deal with intrusive new media, but able to rebound and continue to hold onto her subjects’ affection.