The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (38 page)

It was unlikely. By the time this letter reached Randolph he was in no condition to express pleasure or displeasure. Winston knew, however, that his riding skills had reopened the sore subject of whether he should enter the cavalry or the infantry. Earlier in the year, when they had last exchanged views on the subject through Jennie, his father had still been strong for the Sixtieth Rifles. But Winston now wanted nothing to do with foot soldiering. The man responsible for this view was, ironically, an old friend of Randolph’s, Colonel John Brabazon, an impoverished Irish landlord who had seen action during the Afghan War in 1878 and 1879 and during the fierce fighting around Suakin, on the Red Sea, in 1884. Brabazon now commanded the Fourth Queen’s Own Hussars—light cavalry. During Winston’s first months at Sandhurst, this regiment had been transferred from Ireland to Aldershot, and Brabazon had invited Winston to ride over and dine with him in the regimental mess. The young cadet was dazzled. Some thirty officers, magnificently uniformed in blue and gold, gathered around a table which bore the shining plate and trophies won by the Fourth Hussars during two hundred years of campaigning. In Winston’s words: “It was like a State banquet. In an all-pervading air of glitter, affluence, ceremony and veiled discipline, an excellent and lengthy dinner was served to the strains of the regimental string band.” Even the imperfections were charming; the colonel’s lisp, he was delighted to find, was worse than his own. By the time the vintage port was passed, he had lost his heart to his hosts. Brabazon invited him back several times. Early in 1894 Winston had decided that he wanted a commission in the regiment. He had asked his mother to write the Duke of Cambridge, requesting that he be released from his commitment to the Sixtieth Rifles. The duke, however, had been incensed by the threat of defection, and Randolph had sent word to him that “Brabazon, who I know is one of the finest soldiers in the army, had no business to go and turn that boy’s head about going to the 4th Hussars.”
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But turned it was, and it wouldn’t be turned back. When Jennie had reproached him for continuing to accept invitations to the regimental mess, he had replied: “I should not think that Papa would object to my having stayed with Col Brab at Aldershot. How I wish I were going into the 4th instead of those old Rifles. It would not cost a penny more & the regiment goes to India in 3 years which is just right for me. I hate the Infantry—in which physical weaknesses will render me nearly useless on service & the only thing I am showing an aptitude for athletically—riding—will be no good to me.” There was another reason. Ambition was beginning to flame in him. “Promotions much quicker in Cavalry than in Infantry (60th Rifles slowest regiment in the army).” Nevertheless, his father, unconvinced, had closed the subject in May. Now, seven months later, he passed out of Sandhurst with honors, twentieth in a class of 130. He wrote afterward that he passed out “into the world. It opened like Aladdin’s Cave… an endless moving picture in which one was an actor…. All the days were good and each day better than the other, Ups and downs, risks and journeys, but always the sense of motion, and the illusion of hope.”
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What is baffling about this passage is that the weeks after he left Sandhurst were among the most terrible of his life. His parents were away; he had no home. He drifted from his aunt Leonie’s London house at 53 Seymour Street to Deepdene, his aunt’s estate; to his grandmother at Blenheim; to the home of a friend at Bayham; to the estate of Lord Hindlip, another friend; and then back to Deepdene. He had not yet been commissioned. That would come only when he had been gazetted. Eventually he was to serve in nine different British regiments—the Fourth Hussars, the Thirty-first Punjab Infantry, the Twenty-first Lancers, the South African Light Horse, the Oxfordshire Hussars, the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, the Grenadier Guards, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and the Oxfordshire Artillery—but in that winter of his twenty-first year he was an upper-class vagabond, a wanderer with no place to hang his top hat. Not that it much mattered. He was in a state of shock, trying to come to terms with the shattering fact that his father, whom he cherished despite the sad history of their relationship, was about to die.

B
y 1885, when Winston was ten, his father had entered the fourth syphilitic stage, the slow invasion of the nervous system, in which the microorganisms successively attack the membranes, the spinal cord, and, finally, the brain, producing general paresis—total paralysis. Lord Rosebery began to notice physical impairment in his friend early in the year. That summer other friends became disturbed. Dilke, Chamberlain, and Lord James put their heads together in September, shared observations, and broke up after realizing that it was beyond them. Labouchère sent Rosebery a note: “R. Churchill is in a very bad way…. He says he cannot sleep after 6 in the morning and breaks down if he does not go to bed early.” In August and again in November Randolph was confined to his bed. He confided to Lord Dufferin that sessions in the House entailed strain “and the constant necessity of trying to say something new makes one a drivelling idiot.”
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By now Dr. Roose had thrown in his hand. Although chiefly known in the West End for his successful treatment of gout, Roose had also researched neurasthenic diseases and was, for his time, an accomplished diagnostician. He had bluntly told Randolph that he believed his disease to be incurable, then sent him to Dr. Thomas Buzzard, a VD specialist, for another opinion. Buzzard shared Roose’s pessimism. In the 1880s anyone who had reached the quaternary stage of syphilis was beyond hope. The two doctors proscribed alcohol and tobacco, and prescribed early bedtimes and doses of potassium iodide, mercury, and digitalis. They might as well have done nothing. Except for the digitalis, which fought the cardiac weakness accompanying the affliction, their drugs merely produced embarrassing side effects: hoarseness, dizziness, darkened skin, and progressive deafness—all of which were observed by Randolph’s acquaintances in subsequent years and noted in their diaries and letters.

Paresis, though fatal in the end, is interrupted by frequent remissions, thereby encouraging false hope. It is also characterized by spells of feverish energy alternating with despair; by poor judgment, violent rages, and moodiness. In 1892, as general paralysis slowly approached, these were joined, in Randolph’s case, by palpitations and slurred speech. Jennie was in torment. She was nursing her husband, keeping up a brave front, trying to pretend that life was normal, and wondering what to tell the children. Her sons were not only unaware that their father had an irremediable social disease; they didn’t even know he was seriously ill. On the face of it this is inexplicable. Others watched Randolph’s deterioration for ten years. But the boys rarely saw him. Most of what Winston knew about his father’s activities now came from his mother. Randolph did write to him from time to time, and with hindsight we can trace his deterioration in those letters. Winston didn’t, or couldn’t. There had always been a wild streak in his father’s scrawled notes to him anyhow. Those who saw Randolph more frequently, however, had long since despaired of him. It had been more than a year since his friends had been able to endure hearing him speak in Parliament. “R. C. terrible,” James wrote Chamberlain after one scene in the House. After another,
The Times
parliamentary correspondent wrote that “nothing more tragical has been seen in the House of Commons in our generation.” Randolph became completely unpredictable. In a shrewd moment he drafted an amendment to the Parnell Report, shifting responsibility for the witch-hunt from the government to one of his favorite bêtes noires,
The Times
. Louis Jennings was to speak first; Randolph was to follow. The House was full. Before the Speaker could recognize Jennings, Randolph was on his feet, denouncing the government in the crudest language members had heard there. Jennings never spoke to him again. Others left the chamber whenever he rose, not out of anger, but because they knew they could not suffer what they knew would follow. Rosebery said: “There was no curtain, no retirement. He died by inches in public.”
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The final symptoms were now evident. As his brain and spinal cord rotted, he became subject to unexpected attacks, facial tremors, tremors of the lip and tongue, abrupt changes in the pupils of his eyes, impaired vision, splitting headaches, lapses of memory, delusions, depressions, and dementia. At times he could not engage in coherent conversation. William H. Rideing, who sat at his right during a dinner party, later recalled: “Lord Randolph was plainly a doomed man. He shook as if in a palsy; his voice was woolly and stuttering, almost unintelligible.” On May 27, 1894, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary: “Wednesday I called on Randolph Churchill in Grosvenor Square (his mother’s house) and had some political talk with him. He is terribly altered, poor fellow, having some disease, paralysis, I suppose, which affects his speech, so that it is painful to listen to him. He makes prodigious efforts to express himself clearly, but these are only too visible…. As he came to the door with me he tried again to explain to me what he wanted to tell me about Egypt, but broke down and said, almost in tears, ‘I know what I want to say, but damn it, I can’t say it.’ ” Frank Harris, another caller at 50 Grosvenor Square, wrote of Randolph that he was “appalled by his appearance. In a couple of years he had changed out of character, had become an old man instead of a young one. His face was haggard; his hair greyish and very thin on top; his thick beard, also half-grey, changed him completely…. As I took his hand and looked at him I felt sick: the deep lines on his face, the heavy gummy bags under his miserable eyes, the shaking hand…. A moment later he put his hand over his eyes and sat down heavily. ‘I have slept badly and I don’t feel well today,’ he went on in trembling, indistinct tones…. He filled me with pity and regret—such an end to such a great career!”
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Shortly afterward, Harris was a guest at one of Sir Henry Thompson’s “octave” dinners, so called because of the number of guests. He sat almost opposite Randolph. “His face was drawn and his skin leaden grey,” he wrote; “there were gleams of hate, anger, and fear in his eyes, the dreadful fear of those who have learned how close madness is.” After one course Randolph pointed at grouse on the sideboard and squealed, as if in pain, “E-e-e-e-e-e!” Sir Henry asked quietly, “What is it, Lord Randolph?” Randolph squealed “E-e-e-e!” again, pointing at the footman who was carving. “I want that—e-e-e! Some of that—e-e!” Sir Henry said, “It shall be brought back. I’m very glad you like it.” Served, Randolph ate greedily, then suddenly dropped his knife and fork and glared at each face in turn around the table. Harris was convinced he had seen “what I called ‘the malignant monkey stage’ of insanity. His shrill prolonged squeal is always in my ears when I think of him.” But Harris, though a gifted editor and confidant of gentlemen, was a native of Ireland and a naturalized American. In a word, he was not British. The distinction became apparent to him when, after the dinner, he approached a fellow guest and asked whether he had noticed the incident with the game. The man replied, “No, I didn’t remark anything, but the grouse was excellent.” Harris then asked another man whether he had thought anything strange in Randolph’s behavior. “No,” he was told, “except that he seems to be in a d——d bad temper.” Harris persisted: “Didn’t you notice how he squealed and pointed? He’s mad!” The man chuckled and asked lightly, “Was he ever sane?”
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If Randolph’s friends refused to discuss his deterioration with one another, they certainly weren’t going to acknowledge it in front of his son. The fact that others, including Jennie, treated his conduct as normal, and that Winston apparently never witnessed one of his father’s seizures, contributed to the boy’s inability to grasp the gravity of his illness until the end approached. He was solicitous, but not alarmed, when Jennie told him that his father’s doctors had recommended that he take a long sea voyage, and that she would accompany him. Actually, there was more to it than that. The doctors’ chief concern had been persuading Randolph to give up politics for a year, and this was the solution. At the last minute they worried about losing touch for so long. Therefore, a young physician, Dr. George Keith, would accompany the Churchills. The family was worried for another reason. Jennie’s presence at his side troubled them; as Marjoribanks wrote Rosebery, she “always grates on his nerves.” Nevertheless, she was going. Her marriage to this strange man had become a brittle shell, but she felt she owed him this. They would circumnavigate the globe via the United States, Canada, Japan, Burma, India, and the P & O route home, with frequent stops along the way. Winston, Jack, and Rosebery, now prime minister, saw them off at the station, and they sailed aboard the S.S.
Majestic
on June 27, 1894. Their first stop was New York, where reporters met them. One observed that Randolph, who had appeared “gay, clever and vivacious” when he had visited the city a decade earlier, was now “restless, nervous and irritable, and walks feebly, with jerky steps, like a man uncertain of where he is putting his feet. His whole manner indicates a painful nervousness and mental irritation, from the querulous tones of his voice to his compressed lips, which he keeps drawn over his teeth in an apparent effort to control their trembling.” After that it was all downhill. By the time they reached Asia,
Harper’s Weekly
reported, it was the opinion of his fellow passengers “that he would not leave Japan alive. He grew very much worse on the voyage. At the outset he was petulant and irritable, but soon an ominous calmness, at times almost a lethargic quietness, grew upon him. His malady was one of the forms of softening of the brain, and this change was called a very bad symptom. His face, thin and wrinkled, was pitiful to look upon.” Sometimes, behind closed doors, his lethargy vanished. Jennie later told Leonie that her husband, now paranoid, had come to believe that she was his persecutor. Once in their cabin he produced a loaded revolver and threatened her; she grabbed it, shoved him on his berth, and left, locking the door behind her. She later said: “At first, when he was practically a maniac and very strong, it was bad, but as soon as he became weak and idiotic, I didn’t mind.”
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