The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (21 page)

W
INSTON’S
early appearance, despite its implications, actually improved Jennie’s relationship with her mother-in-law. Frances, Duchess of Marlborough—the “Duchess Fanny”—was a formidable, domineering woman, at the rustle of whose skirt all Blenheim trembled. Had she elected to make an issue of Winston’s conception, life would have been difficult for the young couple. She did the exact opposite. Jennie was now accepted as a full-fledged member of the family. Like many another grandmother the duchess had taken one adoring look at her grandson and capitulated. The infant was no beauty—he had an upturned nose, red curls, and what his daughter Sarah later called “strange pallid eyes”—but Fanny thought him stunning, and she briskly set about seeing to his needs. Someone had to see to them. There had been no preparations for his advent: no diapers, no cradle, nothing. Fannie borrowed these from the wife of the village solicitor, whose baby was not expected until late in January, and dispatched orders for others from London. At the end of the first week Randolph wrote Clara: “The
layette
has given great satisfaction but the little shawls with
capuchons
have not arrived. Jennie says they are much wanted, also the pillow cases have not come.”
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By Christmas the crisis was past, however. On December 27 the duke’s chaplain baptized the infant in the palace chapel, naming him Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.

New Year’s Day found the Randolph Churchills back in Charles Street. Ladies did not feed their babies then, and one of Fanny’s first tasks had been to hire a wet nurse. The nurse was swiftly followed by Elizabeth Anne Everest. Plump, calm, vehemently Low Church, and proud of her origins in Kent, “the garden of England,” as she called it, “Mrs.” Everest—she had no husband; nannies, like cooks, received the honorific as a courtesy—entered Winston’s life when he was a month old. That was the custom. “I had him from the month” was a nanny’s equivalent of “He is my own child.” Violet Asquith wrote: “In his solitary childhood and unhappy school days Mrs. Everest was his comforter, his strength and stay, his one source of unfailing human understanding. She was the fireside at which he dried his tears and warmed his heart. She was the night light by his bed. She was security.” Except at bedtime, when mother appeared for good-night kisses, nurseries, like kitchens, were rarely visited by upper-class parents then. Like popes granting audiences, they received their children at appointed times, when the small ones, scrubbed and suitably dressed, presented themselves for inspection while their nannies reported on their deportment. Randolph and Jennie appear to have omitted even these token meetings. They had no time for them. Every hour appears to have been devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. Randolph all but abandoned politics; in two years he delivered just two speeches in Parliament. Thirty years afterward Jennie wrote in
The Century:
“We seemed to live in a whirl of gaieties and excitement. Many were the delightful balls I went to, which, unlike those of the present day, lasted till five o’clock in the morning.” The Churchills were also lavish hosts. In Winston’s words, “They continued their gay life on a somewhat more generous scale than their income warranted. Fortified by an excellent French cook, they entertained with discrimination. The Prince of Wales, who from the beginning had shown them much kindness, dined sometimes with them.”
²

In London, His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, was the key to social success. Since the Queen had withdrawn from fashionable gatherings after her husband’s death, His Royal Highness and Alexandra, Princess of Wales, had assumed the social duties of royalty. Great prestige therefore accompanied acceptance into HRH’s entourage. The “Marlborough House Set,” to which the Randolph Churchills belonged, was simply a clique of HRH’s friends and their wives or, in several instances, HRH’s mistresses and their husbands. In their dissipation of leisure they seem to have been both vigorous and inane. They studied the finer points of the Venetian quadrille, the Van Dyke quadrille, and—Jennie’s favorite—the cancan. At fancy balls, prolonged discussions examined the merits of holding one’s partner’s hand high, in the polonaise fashion. In Mayfair the Churchills gave grand dinners, hired expensive orchestras, spent fifteen pounds on masked-ball costumes, journeyed to Hurlingham to watch the pigeon shooting, and attended the Derby and races at Goodwood and Ascot. Later Jennie would remember how dinners, balls, and parties succeeded one another without intermission, and “how we all laughed at M. de Soveral, because he looked like a blue monkey and was always called the blue monkey,” and laughed again when “the Grand Duke poured the chocolate sauce over his head,” and applauded HRH’s spectacular attire: “The doublet and cloak were of light maroon satin embroidered in gold, the large black felt hat… had a white feather, and the dress was completed with loose buff boots, steel spurs, and a long sword. On the left shoulder was a diamond star, and the Prince wore the Order of the Garter hanging from a blue riband round his neck. Fair cavalier curls flowing down his shoulder somewhat distinguished H.R.H. [and] were the finishing touch to a very splendid and perfect costume.” In those giddy years, Jennie later recalled, they were confronted by only one serious misfortune: “it was no less than the sudden illness of the greatest hairdresser of his day.”
³

But a genuine crisis loomed in 1876. What HRH gave, HRH could take away. It was in his power to consign any member of his set to social oblivion. It happened to the Churchills. In his biography of his father, Winston wrote: “Engaging in his brother’s quarrels with fierce and reckless partisanship, Lord Randolph incurred the displeasure of a great personage… London became odious to him.”
⁴
Or vice versa. The fact is that Randolph had acted badly, as a consequence of his brother George’s having acted badly and the Prince of Wales, impetuously. All of them had broken the thin membrane of contrived deceit which permitted adultery and civility to coexist. Since the details became public in subsequent divorce proceedings, it is possible to reconstruct the chain of events which led to the Churchills’ exile and meant that Winston’s first childhood memories would be of Dublin.

On October 11, 1875, when Lord Heneage, Earl of Aylesford, left England with the Prince of Wales to hunt in India, his wife, Edith, Countess of Aylesford, moved to Packingham, the family seat, with their two daughters. George Churchill was living in a nearby inn. As heir to the dukedom, George bore the title Marquess of Blandford and lived more or less independently. Each evening he entered an unused wing of the hall, using a key which, in the words of the divorce court, he “had obtained… with the knowledge and sanction of Lady Aylesford, with whom he passed many nights.” There was nothing indiscreet here. As a marquess, George was a suitable lover for a lonely countess. Unfortunately, the two of them couldn’t leave it at that. In February they decided to leave the children with Edith’s mother-in-law and elope. Edith imprudently wrote her husband, telling him this, and he hurried home from India. Meanwhile, the Duke of Marlborough sent one of his sons-in-law to persuade his son to abandon the impossible affair. The emissary reported: “I think that any steps you may take to influence Blandford to give up Lady Aylesford would be for the present at any rate entirely thrown away.”
⁵

Edith’s brother then challenged George to a duel, and that brought Randolph, as George’s brother, into the drama. Randolph told all interested parties that his brother could be called out by Lord Aylesford and no one else. Then he hired private detectives to watch both George and his challenger, “to prevent,” he said, “a breach of the peace.” Had he stopped there, his social position would have remained intact. But Randolph discovered that George’s predecessors in Edith’s bed included none other than the Prince of Wales. The breakdown in decorum was complete; Edith had saved HRH’s love letters, which she turned over to Randolph. Incredibly, Randolph then called upon Alexandra, Princess of Wales, asking her to use her influence with the prince and see to it that Lord Aylesford canceled plans to divorce his erring wife. Whether he showed her the love letters is unknown, but he did tell friends about them, boasting that “I have the Crown of England in my pocket.” Victoria heard of this; indignant, she wrote her son: “What a dreadful disgraceful business!” But her anger was a moonshadow on that of the prince. Enraged, HRH arrived home and wrote the Earl of Beaconsfield—Disraeli—that “Ld B. and Ld R.C.” were spreading lies about him and that “it is a pity that there is no desert island to which these young gentlemen (?) could be banished.” He then settled for the next best thing. Lord Blandford and Lord Randolph Churchill, he announced, were in Coventry. Not only would he refuse to see them; he would not enter the home of anyone who had entertained them. Socially they had ceased to exist. Jennie was grief-stricken. She wrote her husband: “
C’est trop fort
—my own darling dear Randolph I shd give anything to have you here tonight I feel so wretchedly.” As for Randolph, Winston wrote, “The fashionable world no longer smiled. Powerful enemies were anxious to humiliate him. His own sensitiveness and pride magnified every coldness into an affront…. A nature originally genial and gay contracted a stern and bitter quality, a harsh contempt for what is called ‘Society,’ and an abiding antagonism to rank and authority.”
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Even Randolph realized that he had gone too far, however. He turned the letters over to a royal emissary, Lord Hartington, later Duke of Devonshire. Hartington—who himself had been sleeping with another duke’s duchess for thirty years—burned them in Randolph’s presence. But HRH was unappeased. To untangle the mess, he sent another letter to Disraeli, the wisest man in the kingdom, begging his advice. Dizzy told Duchess Fanny, “My dear Lady, there’s but one way: make your husband take the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland and take Lord Randolph with him. It will put an end to it all.” Randolph, he said, could leave Parliament to serve as his father’s unpaid secretary. At first the duke said no. He was loath to move from Blenheim to Dublin, which he regarded as a primitive outpost of Empire, and an expensive one at that, but he had never been able to deny Disraeli anything. As Winston once said, “He always did whatever Lord Beaconsfield told him to do.” On July 22 he wrote Beaconsfield from his town house in St. James’s Square: “The acceptance of such a high office, is as you say a matter of much moment, and the change, I may almost say the sacrifice of one’s ordinary habits and engagements in England is not an insignificant one, but as you have again done me the honour to repeat the offer, you previously made, I should not feel it my duty on the present occasion to stand aloof, and I shall be therefore happy to place myself at the disposal of the Queen’s service.”
⁷

That settled it. On a bitter morning the following winter the duke, Fanny, Randolph, Jennie, and various other relatives—
The Times
incorrectly identified the youngest of them as “Lord Winston Spencer Churchill”—left London in a private saloon carriage attached to the Irish Mail. At Holyhead they boarded the mail steamer
Connaught
and crossed to Kingstown, where a delegation greeted them and led them to a special train. In Dublin the duke was greeted by a salute of twenty-one guns, invested with the Collar and Insignia of the Order of Saint Patrick, and installed in the Vice Regal Lodge. The Randolph Churchills moved into the Little Lodge nearby. Back in London the bad Aylesfords left England forever. Lord Aylesford sailed off to America, bought twenty-seven thousand acres at Big Spring, Texas, and flourished as a dude rancher until his death, at thirty-five, of cirrhosis of the liver. As Miss Edith Williams—her divorce had gone through—Lady Aylesford emigrated to Paris, where she bore George’s child. She had wanted to marry him, but he had grown weary of her, and she died an unwed mother.

V
olatile Ireland was enjoying one of its periods of quiescence. The problems were there, and Randolph, for whom these were maturing years, began a serious study of the social unrest. Jennie didn’t. During her three years there it is doubtful that she saw a typical Irishman, except when trampling potato fields beneath the hooves of her favorite stallion. The Dublin she beheld was a creation of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. To her surprise and delight, she found it very like Mayfair: balls, theaters, dinner parties every evening, amusing friends to be made, and splendid steeplechasing, point-to-points, and foxhunting. Winston’s picture of her in Ireland was “in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud. She and my father hunted continually on their large horses; and sometimes there were great scares because one or the other did not come back for many hours after they were expected.”
⁸

His mother was only in her early twenties, approaching the height of her beauty. Viscount D’Abernon, seeing her for the first time in the Vice Regal Lodge, wrote that although the duke sat at one end of the room on a dais, “eyes were turned not on him or on his consort, but on a dark, lithe figure, standing somewhat apart and appearing to be of another texture to those around her, radiant, translucent, intense. A diamond star in her hair, her favourite ornament—its lustre dimmed by the flashing glory of her eyes. More of the panther than of the woman in her look, but with a cultivated intelligence unknown to the jungle.” Later Margot Asquith met her at a racecourse and thought: “She had a forehead like a panther’s and great wild eyes that looked through you.” Pantherlike women do not project maternal images, and two notes she wrote Randolph when he was absent from Dublin reinforce the impression that she had grown no closer to her son. In the first she reported: “Winston is flourishing tho’ rather X the last 2 days more teeth I think. Everest has been bothering me about some clothes for him saying that it was quite a disgrace how few things he has & how shabby at that.” In the second she wrote: “Winston has just been with me—such a darling he is—‘I can’t have my Mama go—& if she does I will run after the train & jump in’ he said to me. I have told Everest to take him out for a drive tomorrow if it is fine—as it is better the stables shd have a little work.”
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