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  … consider into the commission of what crimes, impieties, wickednesses, and unheard of villanies, we have been led, cheated, cozened, and betrayed, by that grand impostor, that loathsome hypocrite, that detestable traitor, that prodigy of nature, that opprobrium of mankind, that landscape of iniquity, that sink of sin, and that compendium of baseness, who now calls himself our Protector. What have we done, nay, what have we not done, which either hellish policy was able to contrive, or brutish power to execute? We have trampled underfoot all authorities; we have laid violent hands upon our own Sovereign; we have ravished our Parliaments; we have deflowered the virgin liberty of our nation; we have put a yoke, an heavy yoke of iron, upon the necks of our own countrymen; we have thrown down the walls and bulwarks of the people’s safety; we have broken often repeated oaths, vows, engagements, covenants, protestations; we have betrayed our trusts; we have violated our faiths; we have lifted up our hands to heaven deceitfully; and that these our sins might want no aggravation to make them exceedingly sinful, we have added hypocrisy to them all; and … like the audacious strumpet, wiped our mouths, and boasted that we have done no evil …

  Anabaptist address to Charles II, attacking Cromwell shortly before his death

  Sir, the atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honourable gentleman has, with such spirit and decency, charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of those who continue ignorant in spite of age and experience … Much more, Sir, is he to be abhorred, who, as he has advanced in age, has receded from virtue, and become more wicked with less temptation: who prostitutes himself for money which he cannot enjoy, and spends the remains of his life in the ruin of his country.

  William Pitt, speech, after entering Parliament, to Horace Walpole, who had mocked his youth

  Gentlemen, I received yours and am surprised by your insolence in troubling me about the Excise. You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don’t know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody Else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God’s curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation. Yours, etc., Anthony Henley

  Letter from Anthony Henley, MP for Southampton (1727–34), to his constituents, following their protests over the Excise Bill

  Mr Speaker, I said the honourable member was a liar it is true and I am sorry for it. The honourable member may place the punctuation where he pleases.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan on being asked to apologise for calling a fellow MP a liar. Attrib.

  Therefore I charge Mr Hastings with having destroyed, for private purposes, the whole system of government by the six provincial Councils, which he had no right to destroy.

  I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing.

  I charge him with not having done that bribe-service which fidelity, even in iniquity, requires at the hands of the worst of men.

  I charge him with having robbed those persons of whom he took the bribes.

  I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows.

  I charge him with having, without right, title or purchase, taken the lands of orphans and given them to wicked persons under him.

  I charge him with having removed the natural guardians of a minor Raja, and given his zamindary to that wicked person, Deby Singh.

  I charge him – his wickedness being known to himself and all the world – with having committed to Deby Singh the management of three great provinces; and with having thereby wasted the country, destroyed the landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed the honour of the whole female race of that country.

  Edmund Burke, peroration on Warren Hastings, 1788

  As he rose like a rocket, he fell like a stick.

  Thomas Paine on Edmund Burke

  When I get into Parliament, I will pledge myself to no party, but write upon my forehead in legible characters ‘To Be Let’.

  Tom Sheridan to his father, Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  And under it, Tom, write ‘Unfurnished’.

  Richard Sheridan’s reply

  With death doomed to grapple

  Beneath this cold slab, he

  Who lied in the Chapel

  Now lies in the Abbey.

  Lord Byron on William Pitt

  … two vultures sick for battle,

  Two scorpions under one wet stone,

  Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,

  Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,

  Two vipers tangled into one.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, similes for two political characters of 1819 – the Home Secretary Sidmouth, and Foreign Secretary and Leader of the Commons, Castlereagh

  Why is a pump like Viscount Castlereagh? –

  Because it is a slender thing of wood,

  That up and down its awkward arm doth sway,

  And coolly spout and spout and spout away,

  In one weak, washy, everlasting flood.

  Thomas Moore on Viscount Castlereagh

  I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh …

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy

  Posterity will ne’er survey

  A nobler grave than this;

  Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:

  Stop here traveller, and piss.

  Lord Byron on Viscount Castereagh, who killed himself

  Honest in the most odious sense of the word.

  Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone

  I don’t object to the Old Man always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but merely to his belief that God Almighty put it there.

  Henry Labouchere on W.E. Gladstone

  An old man in a hurry.

  Lord Randolph Churchill on W.E. Gladstone

  Gladstone … founded the great tradition … in public to speak the language of the highest and strictest principle, and in private to pursue and possess every sort of woman.

  Peter Wright on W.E. Gladstone

  Mr Peter Wright,

  Your Garbage about Mr Gladstone in ‘Portraits and Criticisms’ has come to our knowledge. You are a liar. Because you slander a dead man, you are a coward. Because you think the public will accept invention from such as you, you are a fool. GLADSTONE

  I associate myself with this letter.

  H.N. GLADSTONE

  W.E. Gladstone’s son

  The Right Honourable Gentleman’s smile is like the silver fittings on a coffin.

  Benjamin Disraeli on Sir Robert Peel

  … the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.

  Walter Bagehot on Sir Robert Peel

  Mrs Thatcher is a woman of common views but uncommon abilities.

  Julian Critchley on Margaret Thatcher

  If a traveller were informed that such a man was the Leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an insect.

  Benjamin Disraeli on Lord John Russell

  He has committed every crime that does not require courage.

  Benjamin Disraeli on the Irish agitator Daniel O’Connell

  He is a liar. (Cheers) He is a liar in action and in words. His life is a living lie. He is a disgrace to his species … He is the most degraded of his species and kind; and England is degraded in tolerating or having upon the face of her society a miscreant of his abominable, foul and atrocious nature. (Cheers)

  Daniel O’Connell on Benjamin Disraeli, at a meeting of trades unions in Dublin

  London, May 6 [1835]

  Mr O’Connell:

  Although you have long placed yourself out of the pale of civilization, still I am one who will not be insulted, even by a Yahoo, witho
ut chastising it … Listen, then, to me. If it had been possible for you to act like a gentleman, you would have hesitated before you made your foul and insolent comments … With regard to your taunts as to my want of success in my election contests, permit me to remind you that I had nothing to appeal to but the good sense of the people … I am not one of those public beggars that we see swarming with their obtrusive boxes in the chapels of your creed …

  We shall meet at Philippi; and … I will seize the first opportunity of inflicting upon you a castigation which will make you at the same time remember and repent the insults you have lavished upon

  BENJAMIN DISRAELI

  Benjamin Disraeli to Daniel O’Connell

  As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench, the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coast of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes, not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest, but the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.

  Benjamin Disraeli on the Liberal Government

  There is not a criminal in an European gaol, there is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged; which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions that produced it, and which may again spring up, in another murderous harvest, from the soil soaked and reeking in blood, and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once, is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that a door should be left open for their ever-so-barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the whole …

  W.E. Gladstone on the Turks, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East

  He made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice.

  Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone

  … What should we do with others to confront this threat to our citizens, our nation, other nations and the people who suffer under the yoke, the cruel yoke, of Daesh?

  … We know that in June four gay men were thrown off the fifth storey of a building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. We know that in August the 82-year-old guardian of the antiquities of Palmyra, Professor Khaled al-Assad, was beheaded, and his headless body was hung from a traffic light. And we know that in recent weeks there has been the discovery of mass graves in Sinjar, one said to contain the bodies of older Yazidi women murdered by Daesh because they were judged too old to be sold for sex … Given that we know what they are doing, can we really stand aside …?

  Hilary Benn MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary, defending air-strikes on Syria in a Commons Speech on 2 Dec 2015

  He has not a single redeeming defect.

  Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone

  If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune, and if anybody pulled him out that, I suppose, would be a calamity.

  Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone asked to distinguish misfortune and calamity

  He was without any rival whatever, the first comic genius who ever installed himself in Downing Street.

  Michael Foot on Benjamin Disraeli

  A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination, that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments, malign an opponent and glorify himself.

  Benjamin Disraeli on W.E. Gladstone, parodying his style

  Gladstone … spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the question.

  W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman in 1066 and All That

  Mr Gladstone speaks to me as if I were a public meeting.

  Queen Victoria on W.E. Gladstone

  If you weren’t such a great man you’d be a terrible bore.

  Mrs W.E. Gladstone to her husband

  Mr Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.

  Winston Churchill on W.E. Gladstone

  He spent his whole life in plastering together the true and the false and therefrom extracting the plausible.

  Stanley Baldwin on David Lloyd George

  Not even a public figure. A man of no experience. And of the utmost insignificance.

  Lord Curzon on Stanley Baldwin

  A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war.

  Stanley Baldwin, referring to the post-First-World-War Commons

  English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions.

  Lord Salisbury

  He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

  Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin

  Like a cushion, he always bore the impress of the last man who sat on him.

  David Lloyd George on Lord Derby; also attrib. to Lord Haig

  This goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and uncharted woods of Celtic antiquity.

  John Maynard Keynes on David Lloyd George

  He aroused every feeling except trust.

  A.J.P. Taylor on David Lloyd George

  The tenth possessor of a foolish face.

  David Lloyd George on any aristocrat

  When they circumcised Herbert Samuel they threw away the wrong bit.

  David Lloyd George. Attrib.

  He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

  Margot Asquith on David Lloyd George

  The Right Honourable gentleman has sat so long on the fence that the iron has entered his soul.

  David Lloyd George on Sir John Simon. Attrib.

  It is fitting that we should have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by the side of the Unknown Soldier.

  Herbert Asquith at Andrew Bonar Law’s funeral. Attrib.

  For twenty years he has held a season-ticket on the line of least resistance.

  Leo Amery on H.H. Asquith

  If I am a great man, then a good many of the great men of history are frauds.

  Andrew Bonar Law. Attrib.

  I must follow them; I am their leader.

  Andrew Bonar Law

  I met Curzon in Downing Street, from whom I got the sort of greeting a corpse would give to an undertaker.

  Stanley Baldwin. Attrib.

  One could not even dignify him with the name of a stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air.

  George Orwell on Stanley Baldwin

  I would rather be an opportunist and float, than go to the bottom with my principles round my neck.

  Stanley Baldwin

  Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

  Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin

  He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind … Listening to a speech by Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth’s; everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.

  Aneurin Bevan on Neville Chamberlain

  The people of Birmingham have a specially heavy burden for they have given the world the curse of the present British Prime Minister.

  Sir Stafford Cripps on Neville Chamberlain

  There but for the grace of God goes God.

  Winston Churchill on Sir Stafford Cripps

  Well, he seemed such a nice old gentleman, I thought I would give him my autograph as a souvenir.

  Adolf Hitler on Neville Chamberlain

  He saw foreign policy through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.

  Winston Churchill on Neville Chamberlain; also attrib. to David Lloyd George

  He was a meticulous housemaid, great at tidying up.

  A.J.P. Taylor on Neville Chamberlain

  WANTED! Dead or alive! Winston Churchill. 25 y
ears old. 5 feet 8 inches tall. Indifferent build. Walks with a bend forward. Pale complexion. Red-brownish hair. Small toothbrush moustache. Talks through his nose and cannot pronounce the letter ‘S’ properly.

  Jan Smuts on Winston Churchill

  I thought he was a young man of promise; but it appears he was a young man of promises.

  Arthur James Balfour, writing in his diary of Winston Churchill’s entry into politics

  His style … is not very literary, and he lacks force.

  The Daily News on Winston Churchill’s Maiden Speech

  His impact on history would be no more than the whiff of scent on a lady’s purse.

  David Lloyd George on Arthur Balfour

  Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness, grass never grows again.

  Colm Brogan, in ‘Our New Masters’

  I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities; but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

  Winston Churchill on Ramsay MacDonald

  Sit down, man. You’re a bloody tragedy.

  James Maxton, Scottish Labour leader, heckling Ramsay MacDonald during the latter’s last Commons speech. Attrib.

  Winston had devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches.

  F.E. Smith on Winston Churchill

  Tell the Lord Privy Seal I am sealed to my privy, and can only deal with one shit at a time.

  Winston Churchill when interrupted on the toilet in his wartime bunker and told the Lord Privy Seal wished to see him. Attrib.

  A glass of port in his hand and a fat cigar in his mouth, with a huge and bloody red steak which he puts in his mouth in big chunks, and chews and chatters and smokes until the blood trickles down his chin – and to think this monster comes of a good family.

  Joseph Goebbels on Winston Churchill

  A sheep in sheep’s clothing.

  Winston Churchill on Clement Attlee

  A tardy little marionette.

  Randolph Churchill on Clement Attlee

  Dear Randolph, utterly unspoilt by failure.

  Noël Coward on Randolph Churchill