Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, To the Parliament of England (1644)
News that there has been a wholesale purge in the Palace of Westminster of works of art depicting some of our greatest historical figures is hardly surprising, though deeply depressing: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/24/churchill-portraits-removed-parliament-labour-victory/
Apparently, after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 there was an audit of the Parliamentary Art Collection, carried out by the Speaker’s advisory committee on works of art, that went searching for paintings and other artefacts with links to slavery and racism. This ‘produced a dossier of artworks depicting historical figures deemed to be controversial’. The Speaker in 2020 was Sir Lindsay Hoyle.
Churchill’s portraits have been removed, of course. The confected controversies over his great life will have made him parliamentary enemy number one. One wonders if those insistent on his cancellation know the history of the welfare state and Churchill’s role in its creation in the Edwardian era? As I wrote last year,
As President of the Board of Trade from 1908 in Asquith’s Liberal government he was responsible for the Trade Boards Act of 1909 which established minimum wages in sweated trades; for the introduction of labour exchanges where the unemployed could be paired with available jobs; and for designing unemployment insurance, which was Churchill’s contribution to the National Insurance Act of 1911. We still have labour exchanges – Job Centres we call them now. The state today guarantees a minimum wage for all. Those in employment still pay National Insurance and can draw benefits if out of work. That’s quite a set of lasting achievements.[1]
Other Prime Ministers join Churchill in parliament’s ‘dustbin of history’[2] though it isn’t altogether clear why. Lord Liverpool, the Duke of Wellington and William Gladstone never owned slaves. Liverpool’s tory administration tried, unsuccessfully, to get the West Indian colonial assemblies to reform slavery under the terms of the so-called 1822 parliamentary ‘Resolutions’. Wellington was certainly inconsistent in his attitudes to slavery, often more concerned with the interests of the slaveholders than the rights of the slaves. But on laying before the Lords two anti-slavery petitions in May 1833 at the climax of slave emancipation, he had this to say in his defence:
With respect to not being friendly to the abolition, he wished to say that he had done more in the way of negotiation, written more notes, and entered into more treaties on the subject of the abolition of the slave trade, and of putting an end to slavery than any man living. A noble friend of his had perhaps done more than he had, but except that noble friend he had done more than any other man to promote the abolition. Nobody had gone further or more strenuously wished to effect that object than he had.[3]
Gladstone is continually tarred by his father’s ownership of slaves. What does it matter that he was four times prime minister; that his budgets as Chancellor furthered the work of free trade and reduced the cost of living (something today’s political class, in all parties, might take to heart); that he removed the ‘taxes on knowledge’, the stamp and paper duties that had put newspapers beyond the reach of the people; that he gave passage to two acts of parliament that allowed women to control their property after marriage; that he spent the second half of his career trying to reform church, land and governance in Ireland, eventually embracing Home Rule? He is held to have benefited from the profits his family made from slavery. On the contrary, he estimated that during his life he gave to charities and good causes some £50,000, perhaps as much as £10 million in today’s money.
Elsewhere, the Chancellor of the Exchequer at Number 11 Downing Street has seen fit to remove a portrait of Disraeli whose government was responsible for the Artisans’ Dwellings Act, the Public Health Act, and the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act (beneficial to trade unions) all in 1875 alone. Good luck to Ms Reeves if her legacy is as many slums demolished, houses built, and as significant an improvement to public health as Disraeli bequeathed to the nation. Worse still, she has taken down Lloyd George, the Chancellor responsible for the introduction of the Old Age Pension. There’s a sin! This is the man whose 1909 People’s Budget introduced to Britain the principle of progressive taxation so that the poor would be supported by the rich. To get it passed he had to fight two elections in 1910 and reform the House of Lords in 1911. If I were Chancellor, I’d be proud to live in his house and see his portrait every day at breakfast. Perhaps Ms Reeves cannot cope with the knowledge that she’ll never come close to Lloyd George’s achievements?
A portrait of Wilberforce has gone, perhaps because he was the wrong sort of abolitionist. Like the rest of the Clapham Sect, he was an evangelical Christian and a Tory: how very inconvenient. Prince Albert has been sent to the store as well, though he was the most progressive and socially-engaged of all modern royals. Whatever his merits, marriage to the later Empress of India apparently damns him. Victoria herself joins him, of course, as does a portrait of the last of her ten prime ministers, Lord Salisbury, who was nearly fourteen years in 10 Downing Street. No doubt Salisbury’s imperialism condemns him in the eyes of the Speaker and his committee. They conveniently overlook his three general election victories in 1886, 1895 and 1901. In the last of these the Conservatives took more than 50% of the vote, to be compared with the 34% of the present government. It is easy to take down a painting. But in doing so the Speaker and his committee display their elite distaste for the political choice of millions of people in the past, the great-grandparents of today’s electorate. To hold imperialists in contempt is to hold all those who supported them in contempt as well.
Surely the worst of it is the treatment of those great tribunes of the people and prophets of liberty, Cromwell and his Latin Secretary, John Milton. Cromwell has been listed in the audit (sic) as someone who ‘supported slavery, [and] had financial or family interests in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery’. It was during the Protectorate that Jamaica was taken. He was also ‘God’s Englishman’, the hammer of royal privilege and proto-absolutism in parliament and on the battlefield, and a champion of religious freedom. Has there ever been a more lastingly divisive figure in our history than the Lord Protector? Even the great statue of him looking out from the Palace of Westminster across Parliament Square was highly contentious when erected in the 1890s.[4] But if the Dictionary of Irish Biography has made its peace with the victor at Drogheda and Wexford so can the new Labour administration. Cromwell has not been scrubbed from Irish history: he is now the subject of a most balanced and insightful national biographical essay.[5] Why, then, should he be erased from the British Parliament?
Worst of all, John Milton has gone. It would be interesting to know why the great poet, the friend and supporter of many a radical and leveller in the English Revolution, should lose his place in the national pantheon.[6] Perhaps it was for having published Areopagitica in 1644, one of the greatest defences of free speech and a free press ever penned. In Britain today that would never do.
How do we explain these attacks on our national history? Ignorance is part of it. Governments no longer contain people with historical awareness or sensitivity. The number of people in political life who have studied history at university or who have developed a strong understanding of the past, is ever diminishing. Partisanship is to blame, as well: past generations could put aside differences to honour the achievements of their predecessors of whatever party, and recognise greatness even in those whose legacies were complicated. Immaturity must be part of it, also: anyone with genuine experience of life and insight into human affairs would know not to judge the past by present standards. Indeed, anyone of any experience would know not to judge, period.
But there is something else here that requires comment. The domestic achievements of these many figures, their contributions for good and ill to specifically British history and the welfare of their fellow citizens, count for nothing. They are being cancelled because of their associations with slavery and colonialism, though in almost all these cases there are no direct links to the former. Saving the nation in battle (Wellington); reforming our institutions (Gladstone); fighting for the supremacy of parliament (Cromwell); designing the original welfare state (Lloyd George and his young assistant, Winston Churchill); arguing for freedom of expression and thought (Milton) are as nothing in the balance.
If what now counts in the parliamentary estate is how our leaders behaved overseas to other nations rather than in their governance of the people who put them in power and to whom they were politically obliged, then the Speaker has been badly advised. British electorates have rarely been influenced by what happens abroad and political reputations were always made here, not there. If this is how achievement is now to be assessed, Tony (Afghanistan and Iraq) Blair beware: your three election victories will count for nothing.
A final comment is directed at those historians and civil servants, whoever they are, who will have advised the Speaker and helped to draw up the dossier of shame. Do they really believe that this is the way to do history and to be historians? To find fault with the past? To point the finger of blame at figures whose abilities and significance far outweigh those of our current leaders? Historians should not make their expertise available to people who approach the past with a political agenda or who have made up their minds irrespective of the evidence. Our job is to educate and inform them, not to satisfy their prejudices. This is another example of the many treasons of contemporary intellectuals.
Lawrence Goldman was General Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004-14.
[1] https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/churchill-derangement-syndrome-pride-and-prejudice-in-the-scottish-national-portrait-gallery/
[2] The term has been used by a many different authorities and public figures from Leon Trotsky to Ronald Reagan.
[3] ‘Abolition of Slavery’, House of Lords, 17 May 1833 vol 17, 1341. The noble friend Wellington referred to was probably the then Lord Chancellor, Henry Brougham.
[4] Blair Worden, ‘The Victorians and Oliver Cromwell’ in S. Collini, R. Whatmore and B. Young (eds.), History, Religion and Culture. British Intellectual History 1750-1950 (Cambridge, 2009), 112-35.
[5] ‘Cromwell, Oliver’, J. S. Morrill, Dictionary of Irish Biography, https://www.dib.ie/biography/cromwell-oliver-a2209
[6] Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977)
