Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

I read Paul Johnson’s Modern Times when he published his Revised Edition in 1991. I liked it very much, and I appreciated his heterodox takes on the events of the twentieth century that went against conventional opinion. I decided to reread it and see if it held up after more than three decades. I think it does, but I found it more depressing than I remembered it being the first time I read it.

Johnson begins his history with the scientific verification of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. On May 29, 1919, photographs of a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein’s predictions of light “bending” due to gravitational pull. From this successful experiment, Newton’s description of a deterministic universe governed by mechanical laws was rendered obsolete. Johnson uses this event to put forward his thesis that the turmoil and carnage of the twentieth century resulted from a loss of belief in absolutes – in other words, moral relativism ruled the day.

Over and over again, he makes the case that the horrors of Leninism, Stalinism, Nazism, fascism, and other twentieth century ideologies were simply moral relativism taken to its logical extremes. Even the “good guys” – the Allied Powers that defeated Germany and Japan in WWII, succumbed to moral relativism and committed terrible acts, such as the firebombing of Dresden – an act of war that would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century.

What makes Modern Times such an excellent work is its comprehensive reach; it truly is a world history. While Johnson carefully chronicles the struggles of Europe to recover from WWI, he also spends as much time explaining the agonies China was undergoing at the same time, and how Japan became the belligerent power that thought it could take on the United States. He also devotes many pages to how Africa fared as the colonial powers left and the African nations tried to build workable governing systems.

Even though Johnson is British, he is not afraid to criticize his country when that criticism is justified. Here’s how he describes the British Empire during the interwar era:

There is a vital moral here. Britain could be just to her colonial subjects so long as she was a comparatively wealthy nation. A rich power could run a prosperous and well-conducted empire. Poor nations, like Spain and Portugal, could not afford justice or forgo exploitation. But it follows from this, as many British statesmen had insisted throughout the nineteenth century, that colonies were not a source of strength but of weakness. They were a luxury, maintained for prestige and paid for by diverting real resources. The concept of a colonial superpower was largely fraudulent. As a military and economic colossus, the British Empire was made of lath and piaster, paint and gilding.

Johnson, Paul. Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (p. 239). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

He also has a sarcastic wit, as exemplified by this opening sentence of Chapter 5: An Infernal Theocracy, a Celestial Chaos:

While Winston Churchill was assuring the comatose Baldwin that Japan meant no harm, its economy was growing at a faster rate than any other nation, its population was rising by a million a year and its ruler was a god-king who was also insane.

Johnson, Paul. Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (p. 260). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Another theme that emerges as the reader is guided through the twentieth century is how often missed opportunities led to disaster. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but there are times when it is hard to believe people in positions of power didn’t see what was in front of them. Johnson explains it this way:

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot–and his crimes–so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.

Johnson, Paul. Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (p. 404). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

I mentioned that Johnson often goes against “received wisdom” when it comes to history, and a case in point is his championing of the Warren Harding presidency that followed Woodrow Wilson’s. I know from my own high school experience that I was taught Wilson was an exceptionally good president with many wonderful accomplishments to his credit, while Harding was one of the worst with a corrupt administration. After reading Johnson’s account, I’m much more likely to give Harding credit for allowing the America to grow and develop without government meddling.

Another eye-opening section is Johnson’s explanation of the roots of the seemingly never-ending conflicts in the Middle East.

In 1921 they [Britain} authorized a Supreme Muslim Council to direct religious affairs; and it appointed Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, head of the biggest landowning clan in Palestine, to be senior judge or Mufti of Jerusalem for life. It was one of the most fatal appointments in modern history. … The Mufti outrivalled Hitler in his hatred for Jews. But he did something even more destructive than killing Jewish settlers. He organized the systematic destruction of Arab moderates. There were many of them in 1920s Palestine. Some of them even welcomed Jewish settlers with modern agricultural ideas and sold land to them. Arabs and Jews might have lived together as two prosperous communities. But the Mufti found in Emile Ghori a terrorist leader of exceptional ability, whose assassination squads systematically murdered the leading Arab moderates–the great majority of the Mufti’s victims were Arabs–and silenced the rest. By the end of the 1930s Arab moderate opinion had ceased to exist, at least in public, the Arab states had been mobilized behind Arab extremism, the British Foreign Office had been persuaded that continued access to oil was incompatible with continued Jewish immigration, and the 1939 White Paper virtually brought it to an end and, in effect, repudiated the Balfour Declaration: ‘a gross breach of faith’, as Churchill put it.

Johnson, Paul. Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (pp. 703-704). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

As the twentieth century progressed, Johnson laments the rise of the “professional politicians” – men who never worked at any job except running for office, and as a result have no idea how to start and maintain a small business, run a farm, distribute goods efficiently, or protect property. It’s a sad fact that today we take it for granted that nearly all of our elected representatives these days come from this professional politician class.

Modern Times concludes with a long chapter that covers the mid-eighties to the early nineties. It’s bittersweet to read how optimistic Johnson was after the successful alliance that expelled Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait. He thought the world had learned from the mistakes it made in the twentieth century, and a new era of turning away from government-led solutions of society’s ills to individual empowerment was dawning. Despite that not exactly materializing, Modern Times is a clear-eyed account of an amazing century. It saw the invention of the electric light bulb, radio, television, airplanes, nuclear power, microchips, and home computers. There were incredible discoveries in medicine. The per capita wealth of the entire planet began to rise rapidly. Life expectancy made huge gains. Communism rose and fell. And yet, it was also the deadliest century in humanity’s history. Hundreds of millions of people were killed by their own governments or in wars. Let’s hope the twenty-first century avoids that fate.

Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed: A Classic Italian Novel

Alessandro Manzoni published his magnum opus, The Betrothed, in 1824. At the time, Italy was composed of many different states with different dialects. Through the popularity of his novel, Manzoni forged a uniform version of the modern Italian language. As such, The Betrothed is one of the most important literary works in Italian culture. It’s also a delightful and wonderful novel.

It is set in northern Italy in the early seventeenth century – 1628 to 1630, to be exact. Technically, the Spanish empire is in charge of the region, but the towns are ruled by local lords – some benevolent and fair, some cruel and despotic. In a small town in Lombardy near Lake Como, young and honest Lorenzo “Renzo” Tramaglino, and the pretty and pious peasant girl, Lucia Mondella, are planning to get married. Unfortunately, the local ruler, Don Rodrigo, has noticed the beauty of Lucia, and he has a bet with his decadent cousin, Count Attilio, that he will seduce Lucia. He sends two of his “bravi” (basically thugs) to threaten Don Abbondio, the priest who is supposed to perform the wedding. Don Abbondio is a self-centered coward who takes the bravi’s warnings to heart and tells Renzo that the wedding must be postponed.

On this basic event, a massive, sprawling chronicle unfolds that takes in a famine, a plague, and political upheaval. Renzo and Lucia, with the help of her mother, Agnese, first try to trick Don Abbondio into marrying them by a subterfuge, but he sees through them, and his frantic cries for help awaken the entire village. At the same time, Don Rodrigo’s head henchman, Griso, is leading a group of bravi to kidnap Lucia. Lucia, Agnese, and Renzo barely escape, after being warned by a good friar, Fra Cristoforo. He arranges for Lucia and Agnese to take shelter at a convent, while Renzo heads to Milan seeking work.

While in Milan, the innocent and naive Renzo gets caught up in some bread riots, because prices have risen due to flour shortages resulting from the famine. Manzoni has some fun here at the expense of clueless political leaders who try to curry popularity by defying the laws of economics:

Ferrer [the Grand Chancellor of Milan] saw – and who would not? – that a fair price for bread is a very desirable thing. He thought – and this was his mistake – that all it would require was an order from him. He set the bread meta (as they called the tariff of foodstuffs) at a price that would have been fair if the average price for grain had been thirty-three liras a bushel, when in reality it sold for as much as eighty. He acted like an aging woman who thinks she can be young again by simply altering her birth certificate.

As a result of Ferrer’s folly, the bread shortages worsen, and the chapters describing the horrors of a city in the throes of a deep famine are incredibly moving. Thousands of people die from starvation, and the scenes Manzoni describes are heartrending.

As soon as there is some relief from the famine, the Thirty Years War intrudes in the form of German mercenaries who ravage and pillage the countryside. They also bring another wave of the bubonic plague, and when it strikes the densely populated city of Milan it practically wipes out everyone. Renzo manages to get out and head to the town of Bergamo, where a friend is able to employ him as a silk weaver.

Meanwhile, Don Rodrigo has not given up his obsession with Lucia. He calls on the most powerful gangster in the area to kidnap her from the convent and bring her to him. This gangster is so feared, he is only referred to as “The Nameless One”. He pulls the strings of every prominent person in northern Italy, and he is incredibly powerful. He succeeds in kidnapping Lucia, and when he first confronts her, her helpless purity and piety somehow warm his cold heart and begins a long process of repentance.

I’ll stop there, because I don’t want to spoil the tale any more. Manzoni does a masterful job of portraying the horror and suffering of those struck by the plague. Nevertheless, this is, at heart, a comic novel, so there are some truly humorous characters and scenes. The aforementioned Don Abbondio is hilarious in his efforts to avoid responsibility and save his skin. He’s a scoundrel, but a lovable one. The Archbishop of Milan, Federigo Borromeo, is a heroic an inspiring man who does everything in his power to alleviate the suffering of those around him. The underlying message throughout the book is that the meek and powerless, through the mercy of God, can eventually triumph.

Many of Manzoni’s characters are based on actual historical figures, and he has a lot of fun making comments on their actions and behavior. The premise of the novel is that he has discovered a lost manuscript, and he is retelling the story related in it to a nineteenth century audience. There are many clever asides to the reader that make the book very enjoyable.

Finally, I must praise the translator of the latest version of The Betrothed, Michael F. Moore. He has made a 200-year-old novel sound as new and up to date as any contemporary writer without losing any of Manzoni’s power and morality. Even though it is 650 pages, I zipped through it in a few days. My all-time favorite author is Charles Dickens, and The Betrothed is on a par with Dickens’ best. It’s a wonderful and moving novel that should be as widely known as any well-loved and revered English language classic.

Paul Johnson’s Creators – Portraits of Incredibly Creative People

Paul Johnson is my favorite historian. He takes complicated subjects, makes them understandable, and he does it in an entertaining way. He’s British, but he has written a fantastic history of the United States, A History of the American People. Other excellent books of his are The Birth of the Modern: World History 1815 – 1830, and Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties.

Creators was written after his book, Intellectuals, received some criticism for focusing too heavily on the hypocrisy of some of history’s most famous and influential intellectuals. As he explained, “I defined an intellectual as someone who thinks ideas are more important than people.” I, personally, appreciated learning about the moral failings of Rousseau, Marx, Ibsen, Sartre, and other thinkers who have been lionized by our intelligentsia. It’s the eternal story: “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Anyway, Creators is, on balance, a more positive and inspiring collection of portraits. In it, Johnson gives us brief descriptions of Chaucer, Durer, Shakespeare, J. S. Bach, Turner and Hokusai, Jane Austen, A.W.N. Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, Tiffany, T.S. Eliot, Balenciaga and Dior, and Picasso and Walt Disney. Throughout these portraits his admiration for these artists’ work shines clearly.

Johnson is the master of providing the interesting anecdote that humanizes and makes real his subject. For example, he writes that the composer Wagner

required a beautiful landscape outside his windows, but when he wrote music, the silence had to be absolute and all outside sounds, and sunlight, had to be excluded by heavy curtains of the finest and costliest materials. They had to draw with “a satisfying swish.” The carpets had to be ankle-deep; the sofas enormous; the curtains vast, of silk and satin. The air had to be perfumed with a special scent. The polish must be “radiant.” The heat must have been oppressive, but Wagner required it.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 9). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Johnson praises Chaucer for creating the very idea of English literature. Before him, all politics and creative arts were conducted in French and Latin. He was the first to proudly use English in his poetry, and his portrayals of various classes of people are unparalleled.

In my opinion, Creators is worth reading for his chapter on Shakespeare alone. Johnson does a wonderful job explaining how a man with humble beginnings could attain such incredible heights of literary excellence. Interestingly, he makes the case for Shakespeare not being an intellectual. In other words, for Shakespeare, people  were more important than ideas.

He [Shakespeare] rarely allows his opinions open expression, preferring to hint and nudge, to imply and suggest, rather than to state. His gospel, however, is moderation in all things; his taste is for toleration. Like Chaucer, he takes human beings as he finds them, imperfect, insecure, weak and fallible or headstrong and foolish—often desperate—and yet always interesting, often lovable or touching. He has something to say on behalf of all his characters, even the obvious villains, and he speaks from inside them, allowing them to put forward their point of view and give their reasons.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 54). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

I also learned that no one has created as many words and phrases that have entered common use as Shakespeare. Some estimate he coined as many as 6700 new words!

Like Harold Bloom, Johnson has nothing but praise for the two Henry IV plays and Hamlet. Johnson’s explication of the psychological and moral dilemmas explored in Hamlet  is fantastic. 

It is characteristic of this stupendous drama that the long passages of heroic reflection, which never bore but stimulate, are punctuated by episodes of furious action, the whole thing ending in a swift-moving climax of slaughter. No one can sit through Hamlet and absorb its messages—on human faith and wickedness; on cupidity, malice, vanity, lust; on regeneration and repentance; on love and hate, procrastination, hurry, honesty, and deceit; on loyalty and betrayal, courage, cowardice, indecision, and flaming passion—without being moved, shaken, and deeply disturbed. The play, if read carefully, is likely to induce deep depression—it always does with me—but if well produced and acted, as Shakespeare intended, it is purgative and reassuring, for Hamlet, the confused but essentially benevolent young genius, is immortal, speeding heavenward as “flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.” It is, in its own mysterious and transcendental way, a healthy and restorative work of art, adding to the net sum of human happiness as surely as it adds to our wisdom and understanding of humanity.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 75). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Johnson’s next subject, Johann Sebastian Bach, was a solidly middle class man who was confident in his extraordinary ability to compose music, even if he wasn’t recognized for it during his lifetime.

Bach was by far the most hardworking of the great musicians, taking huge pains with everything he did and working out the most ephemeral scores in their logical and musical totality, everything written down in his fine, firm hand as though his life depended on it—as, in a sense, was true, for if Bach had scamped a musical duty, or performed it with anything less than the perfection he demanded, he clearly could not have lived with himself. It is impossible to find, in any of his scores, time-serving repetitions, shortcuts, carelessness, or even the smallest hint of vulgarity. He served up the highest quality, in performance and composition, day after day, year after year, despite the fact that his employers, as often as not, could not tell the good from the bad or even from the mediocre.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (pp. 82-83). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

It’s almost a miracle that we have as many works of his today to perform, as they were scattered amongst his descendants after he died. If not for the efforts of Mendelssohn to restage Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1827, we might not have had the revival of his music that we enjoy so much today. Johnson uses this event to share another fun anecdote:

Afterward, at Zelter’s house, there was a grand dinner of the Berlin intellectual elite. Frau Derrient whispered to Mendelssohn: “Who is the stupid fellow sitting next to me?” Mendelssohn (behind his napkin): “The stupid fellow next to you is the great philosopher Friedrich Hegel!”

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 93). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The chapter on the artists William Turner and Hokusai is very interesting. Both began drawing from the age of three. Turner was somewhat controversial because of his new and unusual way of painting light, but he ended up one of the most popular and wealthy artists in history. Unfortunately, time and bungling “restorers” have kept us from appreciating his radical use of color. Even his contemporaries could see how his paintings faded not long after he finished them. 

Hokusai never profited much from his prodigious output, always begging benefactors for money. According to Johnson, he pretty much invented landscape art in Japan. He was quite a character:

There was a restless rootlessness to him, reflected in the fact that he changed his name, or rather the signature on his works, more than fifty times, more often than any other Japanese artist; and in the fact that during his life he lived at ninety- three different addresses. The names he used included Fusenko, meaning “he who does only one thing without being influenced by others”; “The Crazy Old Man of Katsushika”; and “Manji, the Old Man Mad about Drawing.” After he fell into a ditch, as a result of a loud clap of thunder, he signed himself “Thunder” for a time.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 108). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Johnson’s chapter on Jane Austen is the slightest one, not because of any fault of Johnson, but because we know so little of Austen. Her family suppressed most of her personal correspondence, and they tried to make her into a Victorian woman, rather than the Regency one she was. However, according to Johnson, we can glean some personality traits from the letters and reminiscences that do exist and conclude that she was fun-loving young woman, which was the source of her genius:

Laughter was the invariable precursor, in Austen’s life, of creative action—the titter, the laugh, the giggle, or the guffaw was swiftly followed by the inventive thought. Once Austen began to laugh, not with the melodramatic novels she read, but against them, she began to look into herself and say, “I can do better than that.”

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (pp. 130-131). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Pugin and Violett-le-Duc were both architects, the former responsible for the Gothic revival in England. We have Pugin to thank for the beautiful Houses of Parliament in London.

The chapter on Victor Hugo is a very interesting one. In it, Johnson poses the question, 

That Hugo was phenomenally creative is unarguable: in sheer quantity and often in quality too, he is in the highest class of artists. But he forces one to ask the question: is it possible for someone of high creative gifts to be possessed of mediocre, banal, even low intelligence?

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 156). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Johnson does not have a lot of admiration for Hugo, pointing out how contradictory his political opinions were, depending on what party was in power. He also kept many mistresses, well into his eighties!

Mark Twain comes in for more respectful treatment. Johnson posits that his genius was as a storyteller – to truly appreciate his work, we need to hear it “performed”. He also had a knack for making great literature out of almost nothing:

His creativity was often crude and nearly always shameless. But it was huge and genuine, overpowering indeed, a kind of vulgar magic, making something out of nothing, then transforming that mere something into entire books, which in turn hardened into traditions and cultural certitudes.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 171). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

T. S. Eliot was a paradox – very conservative in his personal life, yet revolutionary in his poetry:

Eliot was never once (except on holiday) photographed without a tie, wore three-piece suits on all occasions, kept his hair trimmed, and was the last intellectual on either side of the Atlantic to wear spats. Yet there can be absolutely no doubt that he deliberately marshaled his immense creative powers to shatter the existing mold of poetical form and context, and to create a new orthodoxy born of chaos, incoherence, and dissonance.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 204). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The turning point in Eliot’s career came when he met Ezra Pound, who introduced him to lots of European literary stars and convinced him to emigrate to England. He married Vivian Haighwood, but it doesn’t sound like the relationship was much fun:

From the early days of their marriage they engaged in competitive hypochondria. Both became valetudinarians and were always dosing themselves, complaining of drafts, and comparing symptoms.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 213). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

However, this dismal marriage, coupled with his job at Lloyd’s bank in London, spurred Eliot to create his masterpieces, The Waste Land and Four Quartets. As Johnson puts it, The Waste Land‘s strength is its elusiveness:

The greatest strength and appeal of the poem is that it asks to be interpreted not so much as the poet insists but as the reader wishes. It makes the reader a cocreator.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 219). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Four Quartets solidified Eliot’s position as the leading poet of the twentieth century, even though, in Johnson’s words, “they are not about anything”. What they are is evocative of a nihilistic mood that dominated mid-twentieth century western culture. The appalling meaninglessness and slaughter of WWI that led into WWII left a cultural elite with almost no hope. Eliot was their spokesman.

I wish I could have been present at the gathering Johnson describes below!

The Four Quartets were much discussed when I was a freshman at Oxford in 1946, and they, too, were still fresh from the presses. I recall a puzzled and inconclusive discussion, after dinner on a foggy November evening, in which C. S. Lewis played the exegete on “Little Gidding,” with a mumbled descant from Professor Tolkien and expostulations from Hugo Dyson, a third don from the English faculty, who repeated at intervals, “It means anything or nothing, probably the latter.”

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 223). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

In his chapter on Picasso and Disney, Johnson praises Picasso for his incredible creativity and canny judgment:

… Picasso became the champion player, and held the title till his death, because he was extraordinarily judicious in getting the proportions of skill and fashion exactly right at any one time. He also had brilliant timing in guessing when the moment had arrived for pushing on to a new fashion. Although his own appetite for novelty was insatiable, he was uncannily adept at deciding exactly how much the vanguard of the art world would take.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 253). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

But he also exposes a very dark side of Picasso; how he abused women and men, stabbed friends in the back, and seemed to have no moral sense.

He would create situations in which one mistress angrily confronted another in his presence, and then both rolled on the floor, biting and scratching. On one occasion Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter pounded each other with their fists while Picasso, having set up the fight, calmly went on painting. The canvas he was working on was Guernica.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 256). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Walt Disney, on the other hand, comes in for quite a bit of praise. I really enjoyed Johnson’s detailed explanation of just how revolutionary Disney was when it came to combining sound and animation in a film. Practically all animated content we enjoy today owes a debt to Disney. What was his strength as a creator? According to Johnson,

Whereas Picasso tended to dehumanize the women he drew or painted. Disney anthropomorphized his animal subjects; that was the essential source of his power and humor.

Johnson, Paul. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (p. 258). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The final chapter, Metaphors in a Laboratory, addresses the idea of scientific creativity. Johnson argues that through the use of metaphors, scientists are able to communicate their ideas and spur others to innovate. A lot of this chapter rehashes persons and topics he covers in The Birth of the Modern – how Wordsworth and the scientist and inventor Humphrey Gray were great friends and shared ideas with each other, how the engineer Telford transformed the British landscape with canals, roads, and bridges of simplicity and beauty.

Creators is a wonderful celebration of one of the greatest human characteristics: the ability to create. Even though some of the creators were not the nicest people who lived (such as Picasso), their works survive to inspire others. 

Churchill’s Marlborough II: An Extraordinary Man For His Time

In 2024, I read the first volume of Winston Churchill’s biography of his ancestor, Lord Marlborough. In the second volume, Marlborough finally comes into his own. After successfully navigating the perilous political waters of the reigns of Charles II and William III (including The Glorious Revolution), Marlborough and his wife, Sarah, are now in the innermost circle of the newly crowned Queen Anne.

It falls on Marlborough to continue the Grand Alliance that is opposed to France’s Louis XIV. He assumes command of the allied forces of Holland, the Austrian/Hungarian Empire, and various German states, and he hopes to strike a mortal blow against Louis XIV and Spain. Unfortunately, he is hobbled by the timidity of his Dutch allies, who would prefer to maintain a merely defensive position.

In 1702, Marlborough is finally allowed to go on the offensive, and with hardly any resistance from the French he quickly takes several fortresses and towns along the Meuse river. He is so successful that he becomes a hero back in England, and Queen Anne wants to make him a Duke. However, the complicated politics and machinations of the Whig and Tory factions in Parliament prevent her from bestowing the necessary funds to run an estate, so he is denied that honor.

Meanwhile, there are all kinds of smaller alliances being made and broken throughout Europe, depending on which side seemed to be ascendant. In the North, King Charles XII of Sweden was wreaking havoc in Scandinavia and the Baltic States. The Hungarians were rebelling against the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor. And the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus, in northern Italy was contemplating switching allegiance from France to the Maritime Powers (England and the Dutch). Once again, Churchill employs his wicked wit when describing the duke:

Victor Amadeus was a proud and courageous turncoat. While weaving his webs of intrigue in the interests of his small country he never forgot that he was a soldier with a sword at his side. Indeed, he was capable of fighting with the utmost personal valour in the forefront of a battle which his policy required him to lose.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL. Marlborough II (Kindle Locations 2842-2844). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

The reluctance of the Dutch to engage the French armies eventually led to a stalemate at Antwerp. Marlborough kept trying to convince them to let him take that strategic city, but they hemmed and hawed until, in the fall of 1703, it was too late. Meanwhile, the French were able to meet up with the traitorous Elector of Bavaria, and pose a real threat to the Empire:

A Franco-Bavarian army far stronger than any force of which the Empire could dispose stood in the centre of Germany with power to move in any direction.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL. Marlborough II (Kindle Locations 3402-3403). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

By the winter of 1703/04 things were at a low ebb for Marlborough. The reluctance of the Dutch to approve a decisive military campaign against the French meant that a golden opportunity to end Louis IV’s globalist ambitions was lost. The hapless Empire of the Hapsburgs was under threat of collapsing from threats within and without. In England, the Tories and the Whigs decided to pin the blame for the lack of progress on both Marlborough and his closest ally, the royal treasurer Godolphin. But even worse than the political and military headwinds was the fact that Marlborough’s beloved Sarah was convinced that he was carrying on an affair. Ever since the death of their only son, and the onset of menopause, Sarah had had serious physical and emotional issues, and no amount of assurances from John could convince Sarah of his fidelity.

We’re 40% of the way through this volume of Churchill’s biography of Marlborough, and it’s been pretty slow going. Marlborough has been prevented from wielding his military genius by Dutch obstinance, and things have been in pretty much in stasis. In the spring of 1704, that is about to change, and things start to heat up. Marlborough finally arranges it so that he can command forces down to the Danube and relieve the pressure on the Empire.

At this point, Marlborough forces the issue, and wins an overwhelming battle against the French: the Battle of Blenheim. If most Americans are like me, even though they studied European history, they are probably not aware of the  world-shaking consequences of this battle. I’ll let Churchill explain, in his inimitable style:

Blenheim is immortal as a battle not only because of the extraordinary severity of the fighting of all the troops on the field all day long, and the overwhelming character of the victory, but because it changed the political axis of the world. This only gradually became apparent. Even a month after all the facts were known, measured, and discounted, scarcely any one understood what transformations had been wrought. Until that August day the statesmen of every country must contemplate the prospect of the Elector of Bavaria supplanting the House of Hapsburg in the Imperial crown, with Munich instead of Vienna as the capital of Central Europe. Yet this Prince, should he become so bright a luminary, would be himself a planet only in the system of the Sun King. Spain and Italy would have their appointed orbits around the parent of light. The vast new regions opening beyond the oceans to the consciousness of man, those distant constellations, would shine with brightening gleams upon a French Monarchy of Europe and a dominant Gallican Church. The sullen and awkward Dutch and boorish English would perforce conform to the august design. Their recalcitrancy would be but the measure of their sufferings.

All this glittering fabric fell with a crash. From the moment when Louis XIV realized, as he was the first to realize, the new values and proportions which had been established on August 13, he decided to have done with war. Although long years of bloodshed lay before him, his object henceforward was only to find a convenient and dignified exit from the arena in which he had so long stalked triumphant. His ambition was no longer to gain a glorious dominion, but only to preserve the usurpations which he regarded as his lawful rights, and in the end this again was to shrink to no more than a desperate resolve to preserve the bedrock of France.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL. Marlborough II (Kindle Locations 7471-7484). Delphi Classics.

After his victory at Blenheim, Churchill was one of the most popular men in Europe (except in France, of course). Even though he was a “commoner”, he was feted and honored by all the courts of the Grand Alliance.

Alas, in the next military campaign season, the Dutch soon returned to their overly-cautious ways and prevented Marlborough from winning a decisive victory over the French in Flanders. According to Churchill, the Dutch general Slangenberg actively sabotaged Marlborough’s efforts to put a final nail in the coffin of Louis XIV’s continental ambitions. So, the second volume of Churchill’s biography of his ancestor ends on a bit of a down note. However, the reader is assured that Marlborough will return to wreak havoc on the French on the field of Ramillies.

One thing that comes through clearly in this volume is Marlborough’s absolute devotion to his wife, Sarah. Churchill quotes many personal letters he sent to her while he was on the continent campaigning. In every single one there is an overriding concern for Sarah’s wellbeing, and an intense desire to retire and spend the rest of his life with her in peace and quiet.

Finally, I end with a quote that illustrates Churchill’s sardonic sense of humor. Early on, he explains England’s reasons for allying with the Dutch and entering into war against France:

The causes of England’s quarrel were set forth in a proclamation which is a model of forceful historical compression. Its conclusion should be noted.

We henceforth strictly forbid the holding of any correspondence or communication with France or Spain or their subjects. But because there are remaining in our Kingdoms many of the subjects of France and Spain, We do declare our Royal intention to be, that all the subjects of France and Spain, who shall demean themselves dutifully towards us, shall be safe in their persons and estates.

This passage will jar the modern mind. We see how strong was the structure of Christendom in these times and with what restraints even warring nations acted. Of course, nowadays, with the many improvements that have been made in international morals and behaviour, all enemy subjects, even those whose countries were only technically involved, even those who had lived all their lives in England, and the English women who had married them, would, as in every other state based on an educated democracy, be treated within twenty-four hours as malignant foes, flung into internment camps, and their private property stolen to assist the expenses of the war. In the twentieth century mankind has shaken itself free from all those illogical, old-world prejudices, and achieved the highest efficiency of brutal, ruthless war.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL. Marlborough II (Kindle Locations 1457-1468). Delphi Classics.