In the published letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, there is a gap between the years 1925 and 1937, and so most of the years when Stanley Baldwin served as Prime Minister are missing.  Although our shelves of Tolkien thus lack the professor’s thoughts about that politician, we do have four volumes of Baldwin’s collected speeches.  From them we can glean what a hobbit gone into Parliament might be like, Tolkien and Baldwin having grown up in the same neck of the woods.

Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947) now gets at best a mediocre press.  He is overshadowed by his great contemporary, Winston Churchill, and Baldwin’s reluctance to re-arm Britain has been damned as criminal failure to prepare against the ravenous National Socialism of Adolf Hitler.  To be fair to Baldwin, he was part of a nation grieving because of the Great War:  John, the only child of his cousin, Rudyard Kipling, had been among the millions killed in the war.

Oft-quoted is his belief, stated in 1936 in a speech to Canadian veterans, “If the dead could come back today, there would be no war.”  Also, in the 1920s and 1930s people across the political spectrum thought that opposing re-armament was the most sensible way to ensure peace.  Fewer weapons meant less chance of using them, or so the thinking went.  Leftists in particular insisted that talk of re-armament benefited only lunatic war-mongers and greedy arms manufacturers.

Whereas Churchill saw himself as the last of the great Cavaliers, Baldwin cultivated a persona of the simple country squire.  While Baldwin appeared reserved and avuncular, behind the curved briar pipe and the ironical smile was the shrewd mind of a successful businessman who for fun read ancient Greek and Latin authors in the original.

He had studied at Cambridge, and he has been the last Prime Minister from that university.  While in office, he served as Chancellor of the University.  He had been one of the first members of the Classical Association, and in 1926 he served as its president, delivering a witty address on his love of the classics.  Upon his retirement as Prime Minister, having carefully navigated the country through the Abdication Crisis, he was made first a Knight of the Garter, then Earl of Bewdley, his home village in Worcestershire.

Part of Baldwin being the kindly country squire was his deep love for the countryside where he had grown up and then made his home.  When he spoke about his shire, Baldwin thought in poetic terms.  “It is an unchanging countryside,” he observed in 1927 in a speech about Worcestershire.  “There is a field near me at home more than a mile long, curving through woods down to the river, which I never enter without feeling that I have stepped back into the days of Chaucer.  It would never surprise me to meet his pilgrims ambling on their palfries over the greensward.”

That landscape had for him other associations with medieval English literature.  Baldwin reminded his audience that William Langland “lay on the slopes of Malvern Hills looking over the vast expanse of forest, and wrote Piers Plowman, and so handed down the ages, in contradistinction to Froissart’s history of the chivalry of that age, the history of our common people, and we learn from him of their patience and their sufferings, and their virtues and their faults.”

Regarding those local common people, Baldwin had endless admiration.  “What shall I say of our people?” he asked in that same speech about his native shire.  “Steadfast and loyal, . . . [w]e are a silent people among strangers.  We do not contradict people.  We are not litigious, and when folks talk about the garden of England being in Kent, we never say anything.  There is no need, because we know that there is but one garden, and that we live in it.  Because we are uncommunicative, people sometimes think we are stupid. . . . We are gifted with apt speech among ourselves.”

In a speech made in 1929, Baldwin spoke again about the people of his shire.  “I learned very early,” he recalled, “that a Worcestershire man cannot be ‘druv’.”  He explained, offering a scene worthy of the likes of Sam Gamgee:  “I well remember what an old driver said to me on the road one day.  When driving some pigs to market, he was experiencing more than the usual difficulty in getting them along the road—it was more than forty years ago and he said to me:  ‘A hard thing to drive many on ’em very is a pig’.”

He added that such stubborn reticence had its advantages.  “We all of us,” he said, “come up from our native shire [to London] quiet folks, silent, not given to wearing our hearts on our sleeves, not confiding in the stranger we meet, never believing a word that is said to us, we have some of the essential qualities for success in politics.”

As much as he enjoyed the privileges and power of Downing Street, his heart was back home.  In that speech from 1929 quoted above, Baldwin evoked scenes now better known from Tolkien’s fiction and the poems of A. E. Housman.  He looked ahead to his declining years, expressing a hope to have “a few peaceful years of life once more in that country in which one was brought up, to look out once more upon those hills, and ultimately to lay one’s bones in that red soil from which one was made, in the full confidence that whatever happens to England, . . . the apple blossom will always blow in the spring; and that there whatsoever is lovely and of good report will be born and will flourish to the world’s end.”

He got his wish.  Despite having to hear harsh criticism of himself and his policies, his retirement was one of quiet days in his old stone country house, long hours of tea and pipe tobacco, a favorite chair and re-reading ancient and English classics.  A devout Anglican, Sundays meant for Baldwin church and the sonorous phrases of his beloved Book of Common Prayer.  Although there is at Westminster Abbey an inscription commemorating him, he and his wife are interred in Worcester cathedral.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.