The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (17 page)

The Barsetshire novels are set outside London, which was one reason for their popularity in the upper class. Out of season, thoroughbreds found the capital’s social life stifling. They felt more comfortable in their country houses, surrounded by parks landscaped in the eighteenth century, where fountains danced, deer darted, and, in the case of Blenheim, peacocks strutted. On foxhunts they galloped past villages whose inhabitants’ forebears had toiled as serfs for their own ancestors—ancestors who now lay in village churchyards beneath marble armor with marble basset hounds at their feet. And the great houses were communities unto themselves, where servants might be waited upon by their own servants and hospitality was almost a secular religion. Chatsworth, seat of the Duke of Devonshire, accommodated almost five hundred guests, but the finest view in England was found at Blenheim, set among the thousand-year-old oaks of what was once a royal forest. When George III saw Turner’s painting of its great lake, its poplared island, and the hanging beeches beyond, he said: “We have nothing to equal this!”
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This was the home of the Duke of Marlborough, head of the Churchill family. Winston once described it as “an Italian palace in an English park.”
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A stupendous castle of almost ominous power, buttressed by massive towers, it is surrounded by courtyards, formal gardens, and 2,700 acres of parkland. Beneath its roof—which covers an incredible 7 acres—lie 320 rooms: bedrooms, saloons, cabinets, state apartments, drawing rooms, a conservatory, the obligatory chapel, and a library 183 feet long. The lock on the main door, copied from the one on the old Warsaw Gate, is turned by a brass key weighing 3 pounds. Within, busts of deceased dukes and duchesses stand in a grand hall whose 67-foot-high ceiling, supported by Corinthian columns, is embellished by a remarkable allegorical painting showing the first duke, John Churchill, kneeling before a figure of Britannia, who is seated on a globe, one hand resting on a lance as the other extends a wreath to him, while a figure holds fire and sword at John’s feet, a white horse prances alongside, and trumpeters hover all around him.

Today Blenheim and other such shrines of the advantaged, with their marble halls and vast distances, seem intimidating. Their inhabitants didn’t feel that way. On the contrary, they found them warm and convivial, bright, for some of them, with the promise of the greatest social gift they could imagine. It was illicit love. Here, too, the privileged enjoyed special privileges. Seen through the prism of a long century, they are hard to comprehend. Nineteenth-century sex, between thoroughbred lovers, was extremely complex, but like everything else they enjoyed, it had its precedents. The British aristocracy had always gloried in its sexual prowess. Exceptional concupiscence was rewarded; John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, first rose to prominence because his sister Arabella, maid of honor to the Duchess of York, became the duke’s most passionate mistress. When Marlborough returned from European battlefields at an advanced age, his wife Sarah proudly wrote: “Today the Duke returned from the war and pleasured me twice in his top boots.” Had she sought lovers during his absence, the social risk would have been slight. For generations before Victoria’s coronation the patriciate had tolerated promiscuity among its more hot-blooded members. Byron wrote his shortest and most eloquent poem as a testament to a titled woman who had taken leave of her husband for a nine-month romp with him:

The Duke of Wellington had his pick of ladies when he returned from his various triumphs, and two of his bedmates expressed their appreciation to him in their memoirs. The duke’s sister-in-law, Lady Charlotte Wellesley, the mother of four young children, left them to sleep with Lord Paget, himself the father of four children by his wife, Lady Caroline Villiers, daughter of Lady Jersey, who was the former “favorite,” as it was then put, of the Prince of Wales. At Waterloo the duke made Paget his chief of cavalry. An aide protested: “Your Grace cannot have forgotten the affair with Lady Charlotte Wellesley?” The duke: “Oh, no! I have not forgotten that.” Aide: “That is not the only case, I am afraid. At any rate [he] has a reputation of running away with everybody he can.” Duke: “I’ll take good care he don’t run away with me. I don’t care about anybody else.”
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During the Regency, upper-class sexual conduct became particularly flagrant. It was then that ladies diverted themselves with the best-selling
Memoirs of Harriet Smith,
which opened with the gripping line: “I will not relate the exact circumstances by which at the age of thirteen I became the mistress of the Earl of Croydon.”

The tradition has continued to flourish in the twentieth century, a colorful example being the beautiful and wanton Edwina Ashley, Lady Mountbatten. When Lord Louis Mountbatten was viceroy of India, negotiating the terms for Indian independence, the sessions went much more smoothly because the vicereine, with her husband’s resigned knowledge, was sleeping with Jawaharlal Nehru. Earlier she had been even more headstrong. At one point she vanished from London society for four months. Friends in Park Lane found Louis extremely vague when asked his wife’s whereabouts. Actually, he didn’t know. Later he learned that Edwina had shipped aboard a fifty-ton trading schooner, bound for the South Seas, as an ordinary seaman. Night after night, as they cruised among the lush islands, she gratified herself with her fellow crewpersons.

Victoria’s reign was a hiatus, not in extracurricular upper-class ardor, but in the flagrant practice of it. Her ascent saw the triumph of the puritans—of what Melbourne called “that d——d morality.” In the 1840s and 1850s debauchery went underground. By the time of Winston Churchill’s childhood and early youth it had become prudent to keep mum about your love affairs. Gladstone in a candid moment said he had known “eleven prime ministers and ten were adulterers”; nevertheless, he joined in the persecution of Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish MP who had been the lover of Kitty O’Shea with Mrs. O’Shea’s husband’s consent. In 1887 Sir Charles Dilke, at one time regarded as a future prime minister, was ruined by a divorce trial. He lost his cabinet post, then lost his seat, and eventually became a social pariah. One modern British scholar is convinced that “Disraeli slept his way to the top,” but Dizzy was too crafty to be caught. Gladstone made a curious practice of prowling the London streets at night and holding long, intimate conversations with prostitutes. Sometimes he brought them home and Mrs. Gladstone gave them hot chocolate. It was assumed that he was trying to convince them to mend their ways. If so, he doesn’t appear to have been discouraged by his failure to produce a single convert. Indeed, after these talks he always appeared beaming, animated, and flushed. No one thought that odd. Nor could anyone pass judgment on affairs of which they knew nothing. The key to successful extramarital sex, therefore, was discretion. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, perhaps the most outspoken woman in polite society, said dryly: “It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom, as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”
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The difficulty lay in finding the bedroom. Mrs. Campbell also said, after maneuvering one man out of his marriage to a Churchill and up the aisle with her: “Ah, the peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue!” It was all very well for a Forsyte to tuck away a common mistress in Chelsea, but that couldn’t be done with a lady. In the city she was under observation all the time. Her gown, her coif, her bearing, gestures, and diction testified to her class, and she couldn’t be seen outside her aerie. Her very presence in a hotel lobby would invite scandal. Thus the preference of the aristocracy and gentry for their homes in the country. London society was too ritualized; there was little privacy, unless you were an unmarried bachelor, like young Freud, who informed his housekeeper that he expected a woman for tea and was told: “Right, sir, I’ll change the sheets on the bed.”
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The servants knew of most dalliances. They even understood why there was one standard for their masters and mistresses and another for the rest of England. Victorian morality arose from the needs of the new middle class. As the lord chancellor explained when divorce courts were established in 1857, a woman lost nothing by her husband’s infidelity and could absolve him “without any loss of caste,” while “no one would venture to suggest” that he could pardon her adultery, which “might be the means of palming spurious children upon him.” This was important; such children shared a middle-class legacy. In titled families it was meaningless. Only the legitimacy of the first patrician child counted. Professor McGregor writes: “The sexual waywardness of aristocrats… did not endanger the integrity or succession of family properties regulated by primogeniture and entail. Countless children of the mist played happily in Whig and Tory nurseries where they were no threat to the security of family property or to the interests of the heirs.” Pamela Harriman, a Digby who was Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law before she married New York’s former governor, takes the traditional light view of such sex: “They went to bed a lot with each other, but they were all cousins, so it didn’t really count.” It was their insularity that largely limited them to cousins; among the great families, Barbara Tuchman notes, “everyone knew or was related to everyone else…. People who met each other every day, at each other’s homes, at race meetings and hunts, at Cowes, for the Regatta, at the Royal Academy, at court and in Parliament, were more often than not meeting their second cousins or brother-in-law’s uncle or stepfather’s sister or aunt’s nephew on the other side.”
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One area of scholarly inquiry being explored by today’s sexologists is how the voluptuaries of the Victorian upper class led such colorful sex lives and produced so little issue. The average British wife then conceived ten times during her childbearing years. But the great thoroughbred beauties, who treasured their figures, carried far less often. After giving birth to Winston, Jennie Churchill was in and out of lovers’ beds all her life, yet she bore only one more child. And she was not exceptional.

It is worth noting that these small victories of desire were achieved, not by men, but by prudent women. One would expect that Victorian gentlemen, proud of their protective instincts, would have shielded their mistresses from impregnation. The means were at hand. Condoms, originally thin sheaths made from the visceral tissue of sheep, had been used for two centuries; Casanova mentions them, and so does Boswell. (“French letter” was the term used in England; across the Channel it was
“la capote anglaise.”
) But Victorian males were also romantics, and they found condoms distasteful. Therefore their partners turned to faithful douching with a solution of sulfate of zinc or alum, rigid austerity during their ripe periods each month, beeswax disks which blocked the entrance to the uterus, sponges moistened with diluted lemon juice and inserted into the vagina, and, increasingly, the Dutch cup, a primitive diaphragm designed to fit longitudinally in the vagina with the forward end under the pubic bone and the back end in the posterior fornix. Aletta Jacobs introduced this device in the Netherlands in the early 1880s. The cup comprised a steel ring with rubber stretched across it—a painful expedient, but passion overrode the discomfort. Mere possession of a Dutch cup was a sign of privilege in London. The vast majority of Englishwomen didn’t know they existed and would have had difficulty acquiring one anyhow; the cups were available, only to those who furnished respectable references, at a Mayfair bookshop.

Partly because they bred less, ladies flourished. They were so much healthier and more active than their unprivileged sisters that they almost seem to have belonged to a different species. Lower-class women weren’t envious; they adored them. An article in
Graphic Magazine
described in the saccharine prose of the time how such social celebrities were regarded:

Among the most sophisticated of these women, often bored partners in arranged marriages, the affairs which were joyously celebrated during weekends were sometimes launched in wife-to-wife conversations. “Tell Charles I have designs on him,” one would tell Charles’s lady, who would acknowledge the proposal with a nod and an amused smile; she herself already had a lover or had designs of her own on someone else’s husband. But you had to be very secure to take that approach—had to be, say, one of that select circle of ladies who took turns sleeping with Victoria’s eldest son. More often an understanding would have been reached in advance between the primary partners. Some affairs were known to everyone. General Sir Neville Bowles Chamberlain, for example, always slept with the Duchess of Manchester, and the Duke of Marlborough with Lady Colin Campbell. Of course, they didn’t cross a bedroom threshold together. On Thursdays each of the hundred-odd guests was assigned a room; a tiny brass frame on the door held a card with his or her name written on it. Wise and worldly hostesses knew who should be paired with whom. Vita Sackville-West later described how they served as accomplices to Victorian and later Edwardian intrigue: “This question of the disposition of bedrooms always gave the… hostesses cause for anxious thought. It was so necessary to be tactful, and at the same time discreet. The professional Lothario would be furious if he found himself in a room surrounded by ladies who were all accompanied by their husbands. Tommy Brand, on one such occasion, had been known to leave the house on the Sunday morning…. Tommy’s motto was ‘Chacun a sa chacune.’ Then there were the recognised lovers to be considered; the duchess herself would have been greatly annoyed had she gone to stay at the same party as Harry Tremaine, only to find that he had been put at the other end of the house…. It was part of a good hostess’ duty to see to such things; they must be made easy, though not too obvious.” After lights were out, shadowy figures would glide through the darkened hall and everyone would settle in for the night’s pleasure. An hour before dawn the butler would appear in the hall bearing a gong. He would strike it once and depart. The same tiptoeing figures would reappear. Presently they would all meet at the breakfast table.
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