The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (25 page)

But they were, and the suggestion that Woom might constitute a threat is curious. Duchess Fanny agreed. “I hope Everest will be sensible,” she wrote Jennie, “and not gushing so as to excite him. This certainly is not wise.” His nurse was entrusted with his love, but not his health. In an emergency, it was thought, women of her class could not be depended upon to remain stoical. A display of affection could endanger him; only patricians could be counted on to remain poised. Jennie, certainly no gusher, was admitted to the sickroom (Randolph sent her sandwiches and sherry) while the woman who had saved him from emotional starvation was deliberately excluded. A child of the aristocracy was in jeopardy, and the Churchills’ peers were closing ranks. Because Randolph was at the pinnacle of his career that year, powerful men were concerned for Winston’s survival. Sir Henry James prayed for him; so did Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Lord Salisbury, who had succeeded Disraeli as the Tory leader, wrote of his anxiety from Monte Carlo, and Moreton Frewen told Jennie that the Prince of Wales had “stopped the whole line at the levée” to ask after Winston. In a sense, the boy’s recovery was an affair of England’s ruling families, and the humble people whose lives had touched his did not belong.
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At Brighton, in his later words, “I got gradually stronger in that bracing air and gentle surroundings.” Meanwhile, his relatives sententiously vowed to cherish him the more now that he had been saved and urged Jennie to do the same. Frewen thought of “poor dear Winny, & I hope it will leave no troublesome after effects, but even if it leaves him delicate for a long time to come you will make the more of him after being given back to you from the very threshold of the unknown.” Duchess Fanny was “so thankful for God’s Goodness for preserving your dear Child,” and Jennie’s own mother, in London but sick herself, wrote her, “I can’t tell you how anxious we have all been about poor little Winston. And how delighted & thankful now that he is better. And what a relief for you my dear child. Yr whole life has been one of good fortune & this the crowning blessing that little Winston has been spared to you. You can’t be too
grateful
dear Jennie.”
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J
ennie had been scared, and was doubtless relieved, but if gratitude meant changing her life-style, she wouldn’t have it. These were the busiest years of her life, and she was enjoying them immensely. In those days an ambitious woman—and she was very ambitious—could express her drive only by advancing her husband’s career. In the year of Winston’s pneumonia, Anita Leslie writes, “Jennie took it for granted that her husband would reach the post of Prime Minister,” but she was leaving nothing to chance.
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She was active in the Primrose League; she campaigned for Randolph in a smart tandem with the horses beribboned in pink and chocolate, his racing colors; she gave endless dinner parties. No one declined her invitations, for she had become a celebrity in her own right. In the England of the 1880s and 1890s beautiful young genteel ladies diverted the public as film stars do now; their photographs were displayed in shop windows and sold as pinups. Jennie’s was among the most popular. She was also recognized as a gifted amateur pianist, always in demand for charity concerts. In addition there were her social schedules. It was a grand thing to leave each autumn on her annual tour of Scotland’s country houses, grand to receive the Order of the Crown of India from the Queen’s own hands, grand to be courted by Europe’s elegant gallants. There were hazards, to be sure, but they merely added to the excitement. Ironically, the only public embarrassment to arise from Jennie’s catholicity of friendships among the eminent had nothing to do with her role as a romantic adventuress. She cultivated both Oscar Wilde and Sir Edward Carson. Later this proved awkward when Wilde and Carson faced each other in the Old Bailey with the ugly charge of sodomy between them.

In short, Jennie had her priorities to consider, and while the frail child in Brighton was not at the bottom of the list, he scarcely led it. She wrote him, but except when he lay at death’s door and propriety gave her no choice, she avoided the school. Pleas continued to pepper his letters: “Will you come and see me?” “When are you coming to see me?” “It was a great pity you could not come down Sunday,” “
I want you to come down on some fine day and see me,
” he would give her billions of kisses if she came. She never found time. He had the chief role in a class entertainment, and he wanted her in the audience—“Whatever you do come Monday please. I shall be miserable if you don’t.” He was miserable. Another entertainment was planned—“I shall expect to see you and shall be very disappointed indeed if I do not see you, so do come.” He was very disappointed. They were going to perform
The Mikado
—“It would give me tremendous pleasure, do come please.” He forwent tremendous pleasure. He ached for the sight of her—“Please do do do do do do come down to see me…. Please do come I have been disappointed so many times.” He was disappointed once more. Learning that a dinner party at Connaught Place conflicted with a school play, he begged her to cancel the dinner—“Now you know I was always your darling and you can’t find it in your heart to give me a denial.” Nevertheless, she found it in her heart to do just that.
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At times the breakdown in communications was total. He made elaborate plans for Christmas in 1887, only to discover at the last minute that both his parents were away on a seven-week tour of Russia. Jennie’s sister Clarita—now called “Clara,” like her mother—invited him to her home but then fell ill, so he spent the holiday with his brother, Woom, Leonie, and his uncle Jack Leslie. Once he wanted to write his mother but didn’t have her address, didn’t even know which country she was visiting. He was too young to travel in London alone, yet he couldn’t even be sure there would be anyone to greet his train when he arrived: “We have 19 days holiday at Easter. I hope you will send some one to meet me at the station.” Astonishingly, Randolph met an appointment in Brighton a short walk from the school but didn’t bother to cross the street and call on his son. Winston found out about it. “My dear Papa,” he wrote, “You never came to see me on Sunday when you were in Brighton.” It happened again: “I cannot think why you did not come to see me, while you were in Brighton, I was very disappointed but I suppose you were too busy to come.”
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There was a note of resignation here. He was disappointed, but he was not surprised. His father was too busy. His father would always be too busy. Indeed, unlike his wife, he rarely wrote Winston. Jennie was a lax mother, but later, when her situation altered, she became a loving one. In Randolph’s case that was impossible. Randolph actually disliked his son.

I
t is impossible to say exactly when a diagnostician told Lord Randolph Churchill that he was hopelessly afflicted with venereal infection and could not possess his wife without risking her health, too. Before meeting her he had passed through the first two stages of syphilis—the penile chancre and the body rash. After his wedding, according to Frank Harris, he told Louis Jennings that he had followed the physicians’ medical advice for a while, “but I was young and heedless and did not stop drinking in moderation and soon got reckless. Damn it, one can’t grieve forever. Yet I have had few symptoms since.” He added, “The Oxford doctor and the London man said I was quite clear of all weakness and perfectly cured.” Frank Harris asked Jennings if he thought Randolph’s optimism unfounded. Jennings said, “I’m sure of it. He has fits of excessive irritability and depression which I don’t like. In spite of what he told me, I don’t think he took much care. He laughed at the secondary symptoms.”
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Randolph’s assumption that he had emerged from the sinister shadow of the disease was shattered in 1881, when, at the age of thirty-two, he suffered his first paralytic attack. His speech and gait were affected, though at first almost imperceptibly. The following year, however, he was mysteriously absent from London for seven months, and when he returned in October, gaunt and grim, he evaded all questions about where or why he had gone. The fact was that he had entered the third phase of syphilis; the deadly spirochetes had begun their invasion of his blood vessels and internal organs. Less than two months later, on December 12, the London newspapers announced that on the advice of his doctors he was sailing off again, to stay in Algeria and Monte Carlo until February. A remission brought him back, outwardly healthy, apparently his old self.

By now, however, Jennie, too, knew everything. Her source may have been Randolph; it could have been their family physician, Dr. Roose, who had made his own examination of her husband. Henry Pelling of St. John’s College, Cambridge, observes: “The nature of Randolph’s illness, once it had been diagnosed, was such that he could no longer claim his conjugal rights, and it is not surprising that Jennie began to seek the company of other men.”
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She may have begun to seek it earlier in their marriage. Indeed, one of her first admirers, Lieutenant Colonel John Strange Jocelyn, had found her receptive when the Churchills were still in Ireland. Jennie was Jocelyn’s guest on his 8,900-acre Irish estate. She became pregnant in the summer of 1879, and when Winston’s brother was born in Dublin the following February 4, he was christened John Strange Spencer Churchill.

That would not do; it was not done. Back in England, older and more experienced women counseled her in discretion. One disguise for affairs was to effect a lively interest in the arts and so encounter others similarly inclined. So she joined an artistic set called “the Souls.” Reporting one of their parties at the Bachelor’s Club, the London
World
told its readers: “This highest and most aristocratic cult comprises only the youngest, most beautiful and most exclusive of married women in London.” Lady Warwick thought they were “more pagan than soulful.” Sir William Harcourt said, “All I know about The Souls is that some of them have very beautiful bodies,” and George Curzon wrote an ode to them called “The Belles”—a parody of “The Bells” by Poe—which ended: “How delicious and delirious are the curves / With which their figure swells / Voluptuously and voluminously swells / To what deed the thought impels.” Marriage vows were certainly broken, but the fact was not advertised. After Ireland, Jennie never flaunted her lovers. Neither, however, was she furtive. She had superb legs, and she found a way to display them;
Town Topics
quoted a footman who had seen her dance the cancan at a ball: “She suddenly touched the mantelpiece with her foot, making a dreadful exposé.”
Town Topics
also wrote that “Society has invented a new name for Lady R. Her fondness for the exciting sport of husband-hunting and fiancé-fishing has earned her the title ‘Lady Jane Snatcher.’ ” Later she herself published an article slyly observing that some aristocratic wives could “live down scandals, whereas the less-favored go under, emphasizing the old saying, ‘One may steal a horse while another may not look over the wall.’ ”
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She was a cunning thief, and at times piratical, but she learned to observe the rules. If a prospect was happy in marital harness, she did not tempt him to leave it. She was careful to point out that at the time she was meeting Paul Bourget he was “then unmarried.” When another Frenchman married an American girl, she left his bed, though only temporarily; he implored her not to be puritanical, and perhaps because he was charming and a magnificent horseman, she returned. He was a diplomat, with a reputation to guard. That was important. She had an instinct for men who were dangerous. Sir Charles Dilke was attractive, engaging, and apparently on his way to high office. He seemed to have his pick of Souls. When Mrs. J. Comyns-Carr told Lady Lindsay that she was interested in Dilke, she was told: “There’s a waiting list, you know.” But Jennie wasn’t on it. He sank to his knees and beseeched her to become his mistress. She refused, and described the preposterous scene to Lord Rosebery, who put it in his papers. Afterward, when Dilke was trapped in a public scandal woven of testimony about brothels, exotic sex, and some of Jennie’s friends, her foresight was remembered. She always knew just when to stop. It was one of her many rare traits. Shane Leslie recalled: “She didn’t seem to be like other women at all.”
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