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was the most formidable politician I have ever known in public life.’ 1
    There was however a complete and unsatisfactory finality about the end of his premiership. There was no continuing momentum of influence. Not only was the curtain rung down but the opera house was dismantled. Few consulted him. Fewer still quoted him with approval. He had handled many issues with skill and public spirit and good feeling, but he had no publicly recognized parcel of achievement which he could open from time to time and contemplate with satisfaction. As Prime Minister he had mostly been popular and happy, although bearing heavily even the limited press of public work which his economy of effort prescribed. He resented principally the returns to London after his long holidays in France and cherished periods at his house in Worcestershire. In retirement these resentments were removed. But much worse ones took their place. He was lonely, sad, even a little bitter. The eclipse, partly by his own desire, partly because of the overturning of the world in which he had governed, was too abrupt. Within a few months of his resignation he was politically dead; and the repose lost its savour as soon as it was uninterrupted by forced returns to the grindstone.
    Thus the two and a half years between his resignation and the outbreak of the Second World War brought Baldwin, the epitome of a man looking forward to retirement, disappointment and anticlimax rather than satisfactory afterglow. They were however years of pleasure compared with the five which were to follow, when, with his successor NevilleChamberlain first out of 10, Downing Street and then dead in six months, Baldwin became a target of resentment for the perils to which the nation found itself exposed.
    These were only a few of the paradoxes of Baldwin’s life and character. Others found expression in his provenance and education. He was the most self-conscious countryman amongst British Prime Ministers of the past hundred years or more. The unchanging nature of English rural life was one of his more effective and frequently recurring oratorical themes. It reached its apogee in a 1924 speech to the Royal Society of St George. He spoke of:
The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function. For centuries, the one eternal sight of England. 2
     
    This, like many of his other speeches, was prose of a high evocative quality. Its prophecy was inaccurate in both the letter and the spirit. Now, little more than sixty years later, with the Empire admittedly gone and only too many ‘works’ closed down, but with little of eternity used up, the brow of every hill in England may be searched in vain for the sight of a plough team. And the destruction of traditional rural life probably proceeded more rapidly during his premierships than during any other span of fifteen years. When he began, Hardy’s England was little touched. When he ended, it had been deeply invaded by suburbia and the motor car. The change was not his fault, although he was guilty of the self-deception orhypocrisy of pretending that it was not taking place. In 1935 he was still talking of ‘the ploughman “with his team on the world’s rim …”’. His romantic nostalgia was wholly genuine, although his dislike of change from the countryside of his boyhood was probably more acute than that of those whose origins and lives were more deeply rooted in it.
    Stanley Baldwin was not an English country squire. In the first place, although he habitually used the words England and English rather than Great Britain and British, he was doubtfully English, both in blood and temperament. From