The Lion Caged (February/March 1987 | Volume: 38, Issue: 2)

The Lion Caged

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Authors: William Manchester

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February/March 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 2

THE GREAT SANCTUARY

Chartwell 1932. Early morning. The first olive moments of daylight, anticipating the imminent appearance of the sun over the English Channel, disclose a wide, misty, treeless plain descending to the South Downs and the sea. This is the great green Weald of Kent. It is a peculiarity of the Weald’s terrain—demonstrated in the shrouded past by Romans, Saxons, and Normans—that it would be quite defenseless should an enterprising foe cross the Channel. Were any force to prepare for an invasion, its campfires on the far shore would be visible from here. But now, fourteen years after the Armistice of 1918, the Weald is an idyll of peace, and the explorer on foot finds that it possesses camouflaged delights. Its smooth breast, for example, is not entirely unbroken. The pastureland, sloping upward toward London, is cleaved by a shallow valley. This comb rises to a timbered crest. There, among eighty-two sheltering acres of beech, oak, lime, and chestnut, stands the singular country home of England’s most singular statesman, a brilliant, domineering, intuitive, inconsiderate, self-centered, emotional, generous, ruthless, visionary, megalo-maniacal, and heroic genius who inspires fear, devotion, rage, and admiration among his peers.

 

At the very least he is the greatest Englishman since Wellington, a quaint survivor of Britain’s past who grapples with the future because he alone can see it. Yet even as events in Central Europe confirm his warnings, the House of Commons, which didn’t heed them and now ignores them, shouts him down, silencing the old lion who asks but for one more pounce, knowing that if he misses his spring all that he cherishes, including freedom and Western civilization, will be irrevocably lost.

Now in his fifty-eighth year, he is already regarded as an anachronism. He first became a household word as a gallant young British officer, a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, handsome and recklessly brave, serving in battles on India’s northwest frontier, with Kitchener at Khartoum, and in the Boer War—all symbols of the nation’s imperial past, which he fiercely defends despite flagging allegiance elsewhere in the realm. He is mocked for failures that were not his, notably his strategy to force the Dardanelles, which, under competent officers, could have brought the Allied Powers a brilliant, relatively bloodless victory by 1916 but was bungled by timid British commanders at the scene and inadequate support in Whitehall. He seems less a figure of the twentieth century (which he loathes) than of the nineteenth or, reaching even farther back, of Renaissance versatility. The wide sweep of his interests and activities embraces literature, painting, philosophy, hunting, polo, military science, the history of the United States—even architecture, bricklaying, and landscaping. Indeed, many of the shining ponds, pools, and happy waterfalls between the Weald and the manor were created by him, wearing hiphigh Wellingtons and excavating the rich earth with his hands.

Tree-locked and silent at dawn, Chartwell’s grounds further testify to his