Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

  It 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.”37

  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.”38 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.’ ”39

  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.”40

  Toward the end of her life, the novelist George Moore said that she had slept with two hundred men. That is absurd. She was far too fastidious for that, and only she would have known the figure anyhow. But though far from promiscuous, she had certainly led an active romantic life. Her lovers are known to include Kinsky, Henri Breteuil, Thomas Trafford, Baron Hirsch, Sir Edgar Vincent (later Viscount D’Abernon), Lord Dunraven, Herbert von Bismarck, Henri le Tonnelie, Norman Forbes Robertson, Hugh Warrender of the Grenadier Guards, a cavalry officer named Kinkaid Smith, the American Bourke Cockran, Bourget, William Waldorf Astor, Harry Cust, a soldier named Taylor, a man called Simon, an Italian named Casati, and Albert Edward of the house of Saxe-Coburg, eldest son of Queen Victoria, Prince of Wales and later King Edward VII.

  Jennie was one of those favored ladies who, invited to dinner by His Royal Highness, found that she was the only guest. HRH usually made his royal conquests in a private dining room over a fashionable restaurant; one paneled wall swung down at the touch of a button, exposing a double bed. There was also a settee on one side which was adequate for most lovers, but HRH needed more room; Rudyard Kipling described him as “a corpulent voluptuary.” Jennie was more than paramour to him. He granted her the rare privilege of using Buckingham Palace’s private garden entrance. According to Ralph G. Martin, “she had a significant and lasting influence on him because he respected her judgment. He also knew he could rely on her. If he wanted a small private party arranged, he often asked her to oversee the compiling of the guest list and decide on the menu. Jennie knew his particular friends as well as his favorite foods. She knew what kind of music he liked. She knew the level of his impatience and boredom, the danger point of his anger, and what to do about them. In return, he was lavish in his gifts and in his open affection for her.”41 On his coronation in Westminster Abbey, she sat in the King’s Box with the other women he loved, including Mrs. George Keppel, his current mistress, all wearing diamond tiaras. Edward saw to it that pleasure was not sin’s only reward. So did his wife; like Jennie’s mother, Princess Alexandra understood and forgave her husband. She was on the best of terms with Mrs. Keppel, and always kind to Jennie.

  Randolph had been less forgiving. He had put up with a lot from the prince; first Ireland, and now this. In 1889, when he had nothing left to lose, he ordered HRH out of his Mayfair house. On another occasion, after hearing from Rosebery that Dilke had propositioned Jennie, Randolph attacked him with his fists. This was rather hard on Dilke, who hadn’t even made it into Jennie’s arms, but he seems to have been a chronic loser. So was the man who hit him. And apart from these two episodes, Randolph, at least in his marriage, appears to have
accepted his lot. He dined with men who had lain between his wife’s thighs; he played cards with them; he rode to hounds with them and entertained them in his club. There were those who wondered why. Some speculated that he had become homosexual. That might explain his antagonism toward Winston, but there is no evidence of it. All we can say with certainty is that Winston knew about Jennie’s affairs. The question is when. There is a story, probably apocryphal, that he first learned of her waywardness as a small boy because of a flaw in one of her stockings. In the late 1870s fashionable women in London wore red hose. Red was his favorite color. As she left home one noon, according to this account, he noticed a blemish in her left stocking, just above her shoe, and when she returned several hours later he saw the imperfection had moved from her left ankle to her right. But he would have become aware of her lovers anyhow. He could not have avoided it. In one of his schoolboy letters to his brother he wrote that upon arriving in London for a weekend, “I went, as Mamma had told me to Aldford Street, where I found Mamma & Count Kinsky Breakfasting.” Visiting France, he was entertained by three of his mother’s gallants: Trafford, Hirsch, and Breteuil. In Savrola the character based on Jennie is presented as an adulteress whose husband saw her less and less frequently. Not all this should be entered in the debit column: Jennie’s men, including Edward VII, were to help Winston enormously during his struggle to establish himself. But his knowledge of her guilt undoubtedly contributed to his adolescent turmoil. Even in his early thirties he would have difficulty establishing relationships with young women. “Ambitions I still have: I have always had them,” says Savrola’s hero, “but love I am not to know, or to know it only to my vexation and despair.”42

  His knowledge of romantic love came later, and it was glorious. Because Jennie lived until his late forties, he resolved his relationship with her. It was otherwise with his father. Here the grave denied him any opportunity for reconciliation; his image of Randolph was arrested in time. The crucial years were 1884 to 1886, roughly from Winston’s tenth to twelfth birthdays, when he was in Brighton and beginning to take a serious interest in current events. Randolph was in the news constantly. Paresis, which progresses very slowly, had only just begun to cripple him. Outwardly he was vigorous, witty, powerful; the most spectacular man of the day. Newspapers called him “Gladstone’s great adversary,” and described workmen smiling at his mustache and doffing their caps as his carriage passed by. Winston clipped these stories and cartoons of his father and pasted them in scrapbooks. He next memorized his speeches verbatim. To his father he wrote: “I have been out riding with a gentleman who thinks that Gladstone is a brute and thinks that ‘the one with the curly moustache ought to be Premier.’ The driver of the Electric Railway said ‘that Lord R. Churchill would be Prime Minister.’… Every body wants your Autograph but I can only say I will try, and I should like you to sign your name in full at the end of your letter. I only want a scribble as I know that you are very busy indeed.”43

  Long afterward he recalled that his father seemed to him “to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having.” He could imagine nothing more exalted than to stand in the House of Commons, guiding the course of England and Empire. Taken to Marylebone swimming baths, he asked the attendant whether he was a Liberal or a Conservative. The unfortunate man replied that he didn’t “bother myself about politics.” Winston was outraged. “What?” he cried. “You pay rates and taxes and you don’t bother yourself about politics?” He broke off his friendship with a playmate. The playmate’s father asked his son why. The boy answered, “Winston says you’re one of those damned Radicals and he’s not coming over here again.” Probably the man believed in nothing more rabid than Gladstonian liberalism, and possibly the bath attendant wasn’t even allowed to vote, but a boy couldn’t be expected to know that. He was his father’s staunchest supporter. He yearned to battle for him. He was obsessed with his image. He had placed him on a high pedestal. He worshiped at the altar of a man he did not, in fact, even know.44

  He tried to know him; tried, in his childish way, to draw Randolph into the family. “We had a Christmas tree and party here this year,” he wrote, “which went off very well. My Stamp Book is gradually getting filled…. Jack had such a beautiful box of soldiers sent him from Lady de Clifford.” Winston might have been a foreign correspondent sending word of developments from abroad, and indeed at times Randolph was a stranger to Connaught Place. Once he arrived home with a full beard—“a horrid beard so raged [ragged],” Jack wrote his brother at Brighton, and Jennie wrote that “his beard is a ‘terror.’ I think I shall have to bribe him to shave it off.” Most of the time Winston could keep track of him in the newspapers. Apparently he did not find it peculiar that Randolph, who had been too occupied to visit him in Brighton, should have journeyed to speak to another school: “I went to see Grandmamma a fortnight ago, & she read me your speech on the Distribution of Prizes at the school of Art, it was just the sort of speech for school boys.” Then, wistfully: “You had great luck in Salmon fishing. I wish I had been with you I should have liked to have seen you catch them.”45

  To a ten-year-old English boy in the 1880s, India was enthralling, and Winston was transported by news that his father was actually on his way there. “Will you write and tell me all about your voyage, was it rough at all?” he asked. “I wrote to you once when the ship stopped at Gibraltar. How nice for sailing all over the sea.” Then, six weeks later: “I hear you have been out shooting at Calcutta and shot some animals. When are you coming home again. I hope it will not be long. I am at school now and am getting on pretty well. Will you write and tell me about India what it’s like…. Will you go out on a tiger Hunt while you are there? Are the Indians very funny?… Try and get me a few stamps for my stamp album, Papa. Are there many ants in India if so, you will have a nice time, what with ants mosquitos [sic]…. I am longing to see you so much.”46

  At the end of this letter he again raised the question of autographs, asking, “Every body wants to get your signature will you send me a few to give away?” How anxious the other boys were is moot. We do know that later, at Harrow, subjects which interested schoolmates and those Winston thought should interest them were not always identical. It seems unlikely that many could have shared his passion for politics. Boys aren’t like that now; they weren’t then. But Winston was rapt in the world he had fashioned for himself, surrounded by scrapbooks, pastepots, scissors, and cuttings. His father thought he would have to go for a soldier, that he was too stupid for anything else. Yet politics already held him in its spell. He wrote his mother: “I am very glad Papa got in for South Paddington by so great a majority”—Randolph had polled 77 percent of the vote—“I think that was a victory. I hope the Conservatives will get in, do you think they will?” And three months later, on October 19, 1886, he wrote his father, “I hope you will [be] as successful in your speech at Bradford as you were at Dartford, and regularly ‘cut the ground from under the feet of the Liberals.’ ” That winter he campaigned tirelessly among the other boys, bullying or cajoling them into making a Conservative commitment, and a handful yielded. The following May 24 he jubilantly informed Jennie that “about a dozen boys have joined the Primrose League since yesterday. I am among the number & intend to join the one down here, and also the one which you have in London. Would you send me a nice badge as well as a paper of Diploma, for I want to belong to yours most tremendously.”47

  It was an act of faith in his father’s destiny, and it came too late. Not for the last time in his life, Winston had boarded a sinking ship. Randolph’s political career had ended five months earlier.

  Disraeli, whose memory the Primrose League was meant to perpetuate—it had been his favorite flower—had in his last days pointed Randolph out to a young colleague and said: “He can have anything he asks for, and will soon make them take anything he will give them.” Gladstone had called him the greatest Conservative since Pitt. Lord Hartington had said that Randolph knew the House of Co
mmons better than it knew itself; it always filled to hear him speak. Harris thought that “from his entrance into the House till 1886, it was Randolph’s courage chiefly that commended him to the House of Commons. It may have been mainly aristocratic morgue, but Englishmen liked it none the less on that account.” After a century which has seen countless changes in oratorical style, it is difficult to account for his appeal, but men of all political persuasions testified to it. He wrote his speeches out and learned them by heart; then he spoke at great speed, with daunting vehemence and compelling intensity. In debate his acid tongue set the House roaring. Once the Liberals thought he was napping. They introduced a specious motion, concealing a trap. He said: “Surely in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird.” In a typical thrust he attacked George Sclater-Booth, a ponderous Liberal minister: “I don’t object to the Head of the Local Government Board dealing with such grave questions as the salaries of inspectors of nuisances. But I have the strongest possible objection to his coming down here with all the appearance of a great law-giver to repair, according to his small ideas and in his little way, breaches in the British Constitution.” Then, almost as though speaking to himself, he added: “Strange, strange how often we find mediocrity dowered with a double-barreled name.”48