The Choice

In an original and unusual major television series, Dr David Starkey tells the story of the two greatest war leaders in British history, both of whom were called Churchill. Everyone knows Winston Churchill led Britain and her Allies in their struggle against Hitler; less well known is John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who led Britain and her Allies against an earlier would-be dictator of Europe: the Sun King Louis XIV of France. John Churchill was Winston's ancestor, but he was more than that: he was his inspiration and he was his subject. Winston was a writer and historian before he was Prime Minister, and perhaps his greatest work is his massive, million-word biography of John Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, published in four volumes between 1933 and 1938. As David Starkey argues, it was the ten years he spent working on Marlborough that turned Winston from a politician into a statesman-prophet, and prepared him for the immense task of leading the nation against Nazi Germany. Marlborough is a work of history that changed history, a book about a great war leader that helped to make an even greater war leader in a bigger, bloodier war. The first programme in the series, The Choice, tells the story of how Winston came to write Marlborough. The first volume describes how John Churchill rose from obscurity to be the right-hand man of King James II. But in the crisis of 1688 John chose political principles over personal loyalty and betrayed James in the so-called Glorious Revolution that set Britain on the course to democracy, and committed her to war with the rising hegemonic power of Louis XIV's France. Starkey argues that it was Winston's absorption in the 17th century that helped him to be the first to recognise the menace of a new European hegemony, warning Parliament about the Nazis before Hitler had even come to power.