Following outrage and accusations of revisionist history, St Paul’s Cathedral has taken down posts that branded — without evidence — British wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill as a “white supremacist” and dubiously claimed that Lord Horatio Nelson had a “personal commitment” to slavery.
In a post on its website detailing three prominent state funerals at the 17th-century London Cathedral, St Paul’s declared that despite fending off the Nazis, Sir Winston Churchill was an “unashamed imperialist and white supremacist”.
In the same post, the Cathedral said that British naval hero Horatio Nelson — later 1st Viscount Nelson — said that since his death “aspects of his character and behaviour have been assessed more critically, particularly his personal commitment to the system of slavery.”
Both claims have been disputed as leftist revisionism and sparked backlash, prompting the Cathedral to remove the passages from its website, the Evening Standard reported.
Sir Winston’s grandson Nicholas Soames said that his family was deeply upset by the “offensive, stupid and ignorant remarks,” and that “even for allowances of some of the sort of more extreme views in the Church of England, this is really going too far.”
The funeral service for Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 30th January 1965. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Responding to the allegations made against Lord Nelson — the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar against Napoleon — the chairman of the Nelson Society, Chris Brett told The Telegraph: “Recent research by the Nelson Society has found little or no evidence that Nelson was personally committed to slavery or the slave trade.
“Indeed their research shows that a private letter to a wealthy Jamaican planter and slave owner, penned in 1805, was altered by the planters after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, in October 1805, in an effort to use Nelson’s posthumous reputation to influence parliamentary debates on the abolition of the slave trade in 1806.
“Unfortunately those forgeries still influence opinion today and have led, wrongly, to the conclusion that Nelson supported the slave trade.”
After suffering a fatal blow in the naval battle of Trafalgar, Nelson was buried in a crypt in St Paul’s following his state funeral in 1806.
Both Viscount Nelson and Sir Winston have become chief targets for iconoclastic attacks from the left in Britain in recent years, with statues of both war heroes being vandalised by BLM-inspired activists.
In 2018, the government-funded organisation tasked with protecting heritage, Historic England came under heavy criticism after posting an image depicting a wrecking ball demolishing the famous statue-topped Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Not to be outdone, the National Trust placed Sir Winston Churchill’s former home on a BLM-style shame list of “colonialism and slavery“.
Condeming the latest round of historical revisionism, Conservative MP Lee Anderson said: “It is getting ridiculous. Anyone publicising information like this needs to take a long, hard look at themselves and ask themselves why they hate this country so much, its history and its heritage. They are idiots.”