If you tour the magnificent Blenheim Palace, you will see the room where 150 years ago Winston Churchill was born — Nov. 30, 1874. A short distance from the palace is the very modest Bladon churchyard where Churchill was buried 90 years later on Jan. 24, 1965. Though he lived most of his life in the 20th century, Churchill was and remained a 19th-century man, with 19th-century values and a 19th-century worldview. The contrast between Blenheim Palace and Bladon churchyard symbolizes the history of Great Britain during Churchill’s life — a history that he helped shape and explain. At his birth, the British Empire governed vast expanses of the globe, commanded the seas, and anchored the always fragile global balance of power. At the time of his death, all of that was gone. As the king’s first minister, Churchill had — despite his vigorous protestations — presided over the end of the British Empire. 

William Manchester, in volume 1 of his brilliant three-volume biography The Last Lion, compared Churchill to the “lion in Revelation, ‘the first beast,’ with ‘six wings about him’ and ‘full of eyes within,’” and described him as an “artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends.” History was Churchill’s center of gravity, the defining aspect of his character, the lodestar of his actions as a statesman, the prism through which he viewed England and the world. In yet another irony, Churchill patterned his own writing of history after Edward Gibbon, especially Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Churchill, who energetically strove to prevent England from suffering Rome’s fate, lived himself through the decline and fall of the British Empire. His last great act of statesmanship on behalf of Britain was to forge the “special relationship” with the United States so that what he called the “English-speaking peoples” would continue to protect Western civilization from foreign challengers.

Churchill believed from an early age that he was a man of destiny. And he was a man in a hurry. His father Randolph — a rising star of the Tory Party — had died at the young age of 45, and Churchill early on sought out military adventure, glory, and political success because he feared that he might die young too. He traveled to Cuba as a young officer with the 4th Hussar regiment to see what war was like as Cuban rebels sought independence from Spain. He traveled to India as a war correspondent, came under fire in Sudan, and was captured, then made a daring escape in South Africa during the Boer War. Those adventures and his mother’s contacts launched both his writing and political careers.

In 1898, Churchill recounted his adventures on the Northwest Frontier of India in The Story of the Malakand Field Force. The next year, he wrote The River War about his adventures in Sudan. In 1900, Churchill produced two books about the Boer War: London to Ladysmith Via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton’s March. Next came a two-volume biography of his father Randolph (Lord Randolph Churchill), which sought to rehabilitate his father’s tarnished political career and further Churchill’s own.

Winston Churchill’s political career had its ups and downs. He switched parties (from Conservative to Liberal) in the early 1900s; gained offices with Liberal governments, culminating in being appointed First Lord of the Admiralty just as war clouds were gathering over Europe; was forced to resign from the Admiralty when the Dardanelles campaign (which he championed) ended in failure; served for a few months in the trenches on the Western front; and returned to office toward the end of the war serving as minister of munitions, as secretary of state for air and war, and, after the war, at the Colonial Office. In the 1920s, he switched back to the Conservatives and was appointed chancellor of the exchequer. When a Labor government returned to power in 1929, Churchill began his “wilderness years” out of office, which continued when the Conservatives regained control of the House of Commons in 1932. Churchill “the lion” roared warnings against the “gathering storm” in Europe and Asia as the 1930s wore on, but no one in power listened. He also damaged himself politically by championing the King Edward VIII during the controversy over his proposed marriage to divorcee Wallis Simpson, and with his vocal opposition to Indian self-rule. (READ MORE: What Does It Take to Be a Statesman?)

Churchill’s appreciation of the German threat to England and the world was informed by his sense of history. He had written a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, whose armies anchored coalitions to defeat Louis XIV’s quest for European hegemony. He had written The World Crisis — a six-volume history of World War I, whose outcome set the stage for the geopolitical drama of the 1920s and 1930s. During the 1930s, he was busy writing a History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which had chapters on Britain’s role through the centuries as “holder” of the balance of power in Europe, including its role in the defeat of Napoleon. Hitler’s challenge was geopolitically no different from previous attempts at European hegemony, but added to it was the specter of Nazism destroying Western civilization. Churchill made that latter aspect of the stakes of World War II clear in his early speeches after being named prime minister. The choice, he said, was between the “sunlit uplands” of the Judeo-Christian heritage or a “new Dark Age” of Nazism.

At the end of World War II, an exhausted Great Britain voted Churchill out of office and gradually withdrew from its empire. But Churchill understood that the war produced yet another challenge to the balance of power and another threat to the Judeo-Christian heritage in the form of the Soviet Union. In his famous “iron curtain” speech, he urged the United States to assume the burden of leading the defense of Western civilization. Meanwhile, he wrote his Nobel Prize-winning Second World War in six volumes. The Second World War is history written in the grand style of Gibbon, though from the personal perspective of the leader of one of the combatants. 

In his second premiership in the early 1950s, the lion’s roar grew weaker because Churchill was aging and Great Britain was no longer at the center of global events. World politics was being shaped by the United States and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s experience and his writings, however, remained relevant to the Cold War era. The challenge of the Soviet Union in some ways mirrored the previous challenges of Nazism, Imperial Germany, Napoleonic France, and Louis XIV. 

In a brilliant reconsideration of Churchill in the late 1960s, British historian J.H. Plumb noted that it was above all Churchill’s “sense of history” that “enriched his strategic thinking” as a statesman, but, even more fundamentally, “[h]istory was at the heart of his faith; it permeated everything which he touched, and it was the mainspring of his politics and the secret of his immense mastery.”

One hundred fifty years later, we who cherish the Judeo-Christian heritage that Churchill championed and saved, and that is again under attack by enemies foreign and domestic, can still be thankful that, in the words of General Sir Alan Brooke, “occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.”