# Churchilll and Macaulay

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/churchilll-and-macaulay/807914>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 31, 2018, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/churchilll-and-macaulay/807914 "2018-01-31T22:55:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![APB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8e8cbc/32.png) [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2018, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/churchilll-and-macaulay/807914/1 "2018-01-31T22:55:04Z")

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This is prompted by the problematic Underground scene in _Darkest Hour_. Churchill quotes the famous lines from Macaulay’s _Horatius_ (‘For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods’). The thing is that exactly the same lines were quoted by him (with rather better dramatic effect) in the 2009 TV film _Into The Storm_, in which Brendan Gleeson played Churchill.

So my question is this - did Churchill ever actually use that quote? He certainly claimed to have memorised much of _The Lays of Ancient Rome_ as a schoolboy. But is he known to have quoted those specific lines on any particular occasion in later life?

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**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2018, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/churchilll-and-macaulay/807914/2 "2018-01-31T23:26:01Z")

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He certainly knew the quote, but I can find no evidence that he ever actually said it in public. It seems he did not have a high opinion of Macaulay.

> [@](#):
>
> ‘I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all. I scribbled all my opinions on the margins of the pages, and very soon found myself a vehement partisan of the author against the disparagements of his pompous-pious editor.… From Gibbon I went to Macaulay. I had learnt [as a boy] The Lays of Ancient Rome by heart, and loved them; and of course I knew he had written a history; but I had never read a page of it.…I accepted all Macaulay wrote as gospel, and I was grieved to read his harsh judgments upon the Great Duke of Marlborough. There was no one at hand to tell me that this historian with his captivating style and devastating self-confidence was the prince of literary rogues, who always preferred the tale to the truth, and smirched or glorified great men and garbled documents according as they affected his drama.’
> 
> – Winston S Churchill, My Early Life, 1930.

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**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2018, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/churchilll-and-macaulay/807914/3 "2018-01-31T23:58:17Z")

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Note that Churchill was a descendant of Marlborough.

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**Author:** ![APB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8e8cbc/32.png) [@APB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/APB)\
**Post date:** [February 1, 2018, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/churchilll-and-macaulay/807914/4 "2018-02-01T16:54:33Z")

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> [@Quartz](#):
>
> Note that Churchill was a descendant of Marlborough.

Yes, and one of the main reason he wrote his \*Marlborough: His Life and Times \*was to try to refute Macaulay’s criticisms as an act of ancestral piety.

I can easily believe that the use of the quote is just dramatic licence on the part of the scriptwriters. It’s the fact that it’s been done twice by two different scriptwriters that is so striking. Striking enough that one might suspect an element of plagiarism!