“Lady Dorothy arrived of her own accord, alone and independent,” he wrote Clementine (who was also pro-suffrage). One of his campaigners was Lady Dorothy Howard, “last of the great Liberal ladies,” a champion of women’s suffrage. In April 1908, he was simultaneously fighting an election in Manchester and courting Clementine Hozier. An Early AppreciationĬhurchill was soon aware of Joan’s qualities. In January 1946 he told a literary advisor, Professor Denis Brogan, that he had corrected his Joan of Arc section “after reading Anatole France’s highly documented study.” He hoped that Brogan would not think his praise of Joan “excessive.” Nevertheless, he had admired the Maid a long time. It is possible that Churchill’s original opinion was less effusive. She wandered on Sundays into the woods, where there were shrines, and a legend that some day from these oaks would arise one to save France. She rode the horses of travellers, bareback, to water. In the poor, remote hamlet of Domrémy, on the fringe of the Vosges Forest, she served at the inn. …an Angel of Deliverance, the noblest patriot of France, the most splendid of her heroes, the most beloved of her saints, the most inspiring of all her memories, the peasant Maid, the ever-shining, ever-glorious Joan of Arc. Describing Joan, Churchill was at his eloquent best: “The winner in the whole of French history”Ĭhurchill in 1938 was writing of Joan in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Laid aside during the Second World War, it began appearing in 1956. Men, Belloc said, “come to look on the intelligence of women first with reverence, then with stupor, and finally with terror.” Joan of Arc proved this to the English. In fact, no one had a greater respect for women than he-except perhaps Hilaire Belloc. I suppose that will be taken as solid proof that Churchill was an incurable misogynist. We do not relish the idea of her killing strong men by some ingenious apparatus for that strips womanhood of the sex-immunity from violence which is so precious to the dignity of man. We are thrilled by the spectacle of a weak woman leading and encouraging strong men. Less enthusiasm would have been excited if, for instance, Joan of Arc had displayed extraordinary proficiency with the crossbow, and if history recounted the numerous victims who had fallen to her unerring aim. We see her gleaming, mystic figure in the midst of the pikes and arrows, and it needed not her martyrdom to win her canonization as a saint not only from the Pope but from the modern world. His words would likely not pass with today’s minders of Political Correctness: “Her gleaming, mystic figure… ”Ĭhurchill waxed eloquent on Joan of Arc in 1938. For the complete article with endnotes and added illustrations, click here. Excerpted from “Angel of Deliverance: Churchill’s Tributes to Joan of Arc,” published by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project.
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