Sometimes a phone call or email just doesn’t have the gravitas of a weighty letter that arrives with a thud on the doormat or is put into your hand. Here are a few letters from history that might just inspire you to put pen to paper, whether your aim is to change Government policy, declare your love or just to cheer someone’s day.
Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn
What began as a mere love letter went on to change the shape of Britain for ever. When the infatuated Henry wrote to Anne Boleyn begging her to return his love in 1527, he was in fact still married to Catherine of Aragon. He was unlikely to have been the first or last to philander on the throne, but he was certainly the first to divorce and so this letter marks the beginning of the Reformation. It is signed “written with the hand of him who wishes he were yours”. It sounds like the words of a man who has entirely lost his head to love… sadly, that was precisely the case for poor Anne as it turned out.
Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker
Darwin and his friend the botanist, Joseph Hooker exchanged some 1,400 letters with each other but one he wrote in January of 1844 stands out as a bit of a game-changer for science. He wrote: “At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable… I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends. - You will now groan and think to yourself ‘on what a man have I been wasting my time in writing to…” Fifteen years later, that letter became the basis of On The Origin of Species.
Siegfried Sassoon to his Commanding Officer
While recovering from injury in hospital, poet and soldier Sassoon met some pacifists and began to think more about the horrors he had witnessed on the battlefields. He wrote to his Commanding Officer to express his beliefs in a letter that became known as ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’. “I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it… I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.” A month later, the letter made it into the British newspapers and was read in Parliament to the horror of the upper classes, but by speaking out in letter form, Sassoon began to change the opinion of the public who ceased to see war as romantic and noble, and began to see the damage it caused.
Winston Churchill to Eliot Crawshay-Williams
When Churchill took power in May 1940, his private secretary, Crawshay-Williams, wrote to him entreating him to make a deal with the Nazis and end the war. He was not alone. Churchill was under enormous pressure to do a deal quickly. Had Churchill done as his secretary suggested, we might be living in a very different Europe now. Instead, he wrote back, by hand. The letter in its entirety read: “I am ashamed of you for writing such a letter. I return it to you - to burn and forget.” Short and to the point.
Marcus Rashford to Parliament
In June 2020 in the midst of the Covid pandemic, England footballer, Marcus Rashford, then 22 years old, wrote to ‘all MPs in Parliament’ to urge the Government to change its mind on its plans to stop school meals for children in poverty over the summer holidays. He wrote: “Understand: without the kindness and generosity of the community I had around me there wouldn’t be the Marcus Rashford you see today: a 22-year-old Black man lucky enough to make a career playing a game I love. My story to get here is all-too-familiar for families in England: my mum worked full-time, earning minimum wage to make sure we always had a good evening meal on the table. But it was not enough. The system was not built for families like mine to succeed, regardless of how hard my mum worked.” His campaign forced the Government into a u-turn and secured free meal vouchers for 1.3 million children in poverty across the country over school holidays.
If this has left you inspired to pen an important letter of your own - or to simply drop a mate a line - you might like to read our feature, All the Letter, in our April issue, which is all about the joy of letter-writing.
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