Lynne Olson, the author of Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Winston Churchill to Power and Helped Save England, delivered the first of the 2007-08 Bradley Lectures on September 10. Edited excerpts follow.

The behind-the-scenes story of Winston Churchill's coming to power--which involved twenty to thirty young Tory rebels defying their party and prime minister--is, in its way, just as significant and just as fascinating as the story of Churchill himself. If not for them and their parliamentary colleagues who joined them in voting against Neville Chamberlain in the Norway Debate on May 7-8, 1940, Churchill would never have come to power, and Britain might well have negotiated for peace with Hitler--or gone down to defeat.

Chamberlain was a very powerful prime minister, with a huge Conservative majority in the House. Until just shortly before he resigned, most people thought he was untouchable. He was ferocious in attacking anyone who opposed or even criticized him. He tried to shut down public debate by intimidating the press and claiming that anyone who dared criticize the government was guilty of disloyalty and damaging the national interest in time of war. He and his men tapped the phones of the Tory rebels. The prime minister and the Tory whips did everything in their power to ruin the rebels politically.

The Tory dissidents were members of the "old boy" network that dominated British government and society. Many of them had gone to Eton and Harrow and Oxford and Cambridge, and now they were going against everything they had been brought up to believe in those schools. They were not "playing the game." They were batting against their own side. They were considered disloyal--an arch-crime in the tightknit, clubby world they lived in. Indeed, they were accused of being traitors to their party, government, class, and country.

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One of the rebels, Ronald Cartland, predicted in a debate that very soon, young Englishmen like himself were going to fight--and die. Chamberlain was absolutely furious, and he personally did his best to get Cartland out of the House of Commons. Cartland was not present for the Norway Debate. He was an officer in the Territorial Army, and when the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France on May 10, he and his regiment were part of the British forces trying to stop the German advance. He was thrilled when he heard of Churchill's coming to power. Two weeks later, Cartland was killed while trying to lead his men to Dunkirk. He was thirty-three years old.

Robert Boothby and Harold Macmillan entered Parliament in the same year, 1924. Macmillan was bookish and shy and very repressed; Boothby was handsome and outgoing--and catnip to women. But they were close friends and colleagues. Their friendship ended in the late 1920s, when Boothby fell passionately in love and embarked on a notorious lifelong affair with Macmillan's wife. Macmillan was devastated by the affair, but he continued to ally himself with Boothby in the battle against Chamberlain and appeasement.

In many ways, Leo Amery's career mirrored Churchill's. He had known Churchill since they were schoolboys. They had gone to Harrow together and met when fourteen-year-old Churchill pushed fifteen-year-old Amery into the swimming pool. That incident set the tone for the competitive relationship that they had for the rest of their lives. But it was Amery, more than anyone else, who was responsible for getting rid of Chamberlain and bringing Churchill to power. His greatest contribution was his speech during the Norway Debate. Amery had the reputation of being a stupefyingly boring speaker, but he delivered one of the most electrifying speeches ever heard in Parliament: a savage attack on Chamberlain's policies that helped lead to his downfall. In arguably the most important debate in the history of Parliament, it was the oratory of Leo Amery--not Winston Churchill--that in the end was to have the most lasting impact on the fate of Britain.

These "troublesome young men" were not untarnished heroes. Some of them were timid and cautious on occasion. Some were influenced by the intimidation of Chamberlain and his men. They were worried about their careers and about being branded as pariahs in the House of Commons. But when their country's future hung in the balance in May 1940, they put all those considerations aside. They showed moral and political courage and leadership when it mattered most, during the greatest crisis in their country's history.

There are some historians who argue that Chamberlain was brought down by what one of them called "parliamentary spontaneous combustion"--an impersonal historical force. But that's not true. It was the actions of these men and others like them that brought Churchill to power. In the summer of 1939, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was in London at the time, told one of the Tory rebels, "Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world." He was absolutely right, and that is exactly what they did, and for that, Britain, with the rest of the world, is forever in their debt.