Breakfast could be bewildering to outsiders. At the table you were expected to be brusque, even rude, to your companion of the night. “Pass the toast,” you would say crossly, or “I want the salt.” The upper class was always very direct (“I want to pee”), but this went beyond that. It was important to sort out your different roles, to let it be known that you weren’t going to break the rules by being demonstrative, or eloping, or doing anything else rash. One-night stands were very rare, but now and then they happened. The story of one, involving a young Frenchwoman, survives. During an evening musicale a handsome gentleman propositioned her. She accepted, and a memorable night followed. Two hours later she was cracking a soft-boiled egg downstairs when he appeared, took a seat, and arranged his napkin. Still aglow with romance, she bestowed a tender smile upon him. He glowered and growled: “Are you going to hog the butter all day?” She was shocked, then enraged. Hurling the butter in his face, she flew upstairs, summoned her maid, packed, and demanded that she be driven to the station at once. She told their stunned hostess that she would never again visit atroce England. She didn’t. She wasn’t invited.48
The casual promiscuity of the English patriciate over the centuries suggests the need for caution in tracing the bloodlines of Winston Churchill. He himself, while researching his biography of the great duke—the income from which went far toward supporting his family in the 1930s, when pleas for resistance to Hitler made him a political pariah—found “disquieting” evidence of “a rather shady phase” in the 1500s, when the duke’s great-grandmother so forgot herself in the early years of her marriage that she presented the family blacksmith with a sturdy son. On a loftier scale, the duke’s sister gave birth to a bastard son of James II, and the family genes were quickened by the passionate George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham and the confidant of two Stuart sovereigns, whose descendants included both Pitts and several mistresses and lovers in royal households. So although it is theoretically possible to trace our Winston Churchill’s lineage back at least to 1066, here and there skepticism is advisable. As Sarah, the first duchess, said, upon reading an account of her husband’s forebears, “This History takes a great deal of Pains to make the Duke of Marlborough’s Extraction very ancient. That may be true for aught I know. But it is no matter whether it be true or not in my opinion”—the customary riposte when a defense of legitimacy became hopeless. Thus one should, as far as possible, stick to what can be confirmed.49
One may as well begin with the first Sir Winston Churchill (1620–1688), for whom his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson was named. A scholar, this earlier Winston left Oxford to bear arms for Charles I in the struggle between the Royalists and the Roundheads. Wounded after several ferocious battles, he found asylum in the castle of his mother-in-law, Lady Drake, a firm supporter of Cromwell and therefore above Puritan suspicion. After the Restoration, Charles II knighted Churchill. As Sir Winston he became MP for Weymouth, then a fellow of the Royal Society, meanwhile supervising the raising of five children who, because of their mother’s bloodline, were descendants of Sir Francis Drake. One of the five was John Churchill, the future duke. John is one of the great figures in English history, glorious as a soldier, statesman, and diplomat. Though frequently the victim of court intrigue—in 1692 he was arrested, locked up in the Tower of London, and charged with high treason—he was always forgiven by William III and Queen Anne because of his remarkable military conquests. John fought ten campaigns on the Continent and never lost a battle, never even failed to take a fortress to which he had laid siege. His mightiest victory was at Blenheim, on the Danube, in Bavaria. On August 13, 1704, he and Eugene of Savoy risked everything, ignoring a formidable threat to their rear, and led the allied English, Germans, Dutch, and Danes to a historic triumph over the French. Blenheim is regarded as one of the world’s ten most decisive engagements. John had become a duke in 1702. Now he was made a Knight of the Garter and given a palace, which he named after the battle.
This first Marlborough left no sons. The dukedom therefore passed through his daughters to his grandson, a Spencer. The Spencer family had become notable in 1504, when one of them acquired estates in Warwickshire and at Wormleighton and received a grant in arms. Henry VIII knighted him; our Winston Churchill became his direct male descendant through fifteen generations. In his Memoirs of My Life and Writings, Gibbon would write: “The nobility of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the Fairy Queen as the most precious jewel of their coronet.” Like many another historian, Gibbon skidded from time to time. There was no relationship between the poet and these Spencers. But they were remarkable in other ways. One served as ambassador to Spain and France. Another, a contemporary of Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister, was first lord of the Treasury between 1718 and 1721. A third, the second Earl Spencer, was first lord of the Admiralty in Nelson’s great years. The next earl was one of the authors of the reform bill of 1832, and his son became viceroy of Ireland and then Gladstone’s first lord.
In 1817, by royal license, the fifth Duke of Marlborough changed his family name to Spencer-Churchill. The arms were quartered beneath two crests, a griffin’s head for the Spencers and a lion for the Churchills. The lion is the traditional symbol of England’s greatness, and a duke outranks an earl, but for over a century the Spencers had outperformed the Churchills as servants of the Crown. One Duke of Marlborough became a mere brigadier of foot guards; another, during his fifty-eight years as master of Blenheim, simply collected pictures. During the Regency, two dukes succumbed to that gambling fever which afflicted so many members of the aristocracy in those raffish years. Rees Howell Gronow, a gossip writer of the early nineteenth century, told of a coach ride with a Marquess of Blandford (the title of the elder son of the Duke of Marlborough before his succession). The marquess produced a wad of fifty thousand-pound notes. He had just borrowed them. He said: “You see, Gronow, how the immense fortune of my family will be frittered away; but I can’t help it; I must live. My father inherited five hundred thousand pounds in ready money and seventy thousand pounds a year in land; and in all probability when it comes my turn to live at Blenheim I shall have nothing left but the annuity of five thousand pounds a year on the Post Office.” When he did become duke, we are told, “he lived in one remote corner of his magnificent Palace, a melancholy instance of extravagance.”50
It was his son, John Winston, who began restoration of the Churchill pride. He and his successors added such luster to the family’s reputation that recent generations have used Spencer only as a middle name or dropped it altogether. John Winston entered politics, was elected MP for Woodstock, and sat in the Commons for fifteen years. Becoming the seventh duke, he moved to the Lords and served as a cabinet minister under Lord Derby and then Disraeli. His elder son, George, was a disappointment. So, at first, was George’s brother Randolph. Randolph was a poor student at Eton. He failed his first examinations at Oxford. But then he picked up. At Merton College he left a creditable record, marred only by an arrest for drunkenness and assault. After the ceremonial grand tour of Europe which had become customary for upper-class youths, and after a brief period as an idler and carouser, he stood for Parliament in 1874 and was elected to his father’s old seat. His first speech went well; Disraeli wrote the Queen: “Lord Randolph said many imprudent things, which is not very important in the maiden speech of a young member and a young man, but the House was surprised, and then captivated, by his energy, and his natural flow, and his impressive manners. With self-control and study he might mount. It was a speech of great promise.”51
Dizzy’s unerring eye had caught the flaws, however. Randolph was “imprudent,” lacking in “self-control.” Later, after disaster had overwhelmed him—after he had first been marked as a future prime minister and had then lost everything—that was all which would be remembered. It is easy to withhold sympathy from him. Surviving pictures do not help. His most stri
king feature was his eyes. They were not attractive; he suffered from exophthalmos, and his protruding eyeballs seem to have surveyed the world with a supercilious, offensive stare. His walrus mustache draws attention to a large head set on a short, frail body. He looks pompous, curt, and rude. And so he was, to those who bored him. Yet his friends have left eloquent testaments to his jauntiness, wittiness, and charm. He was an enthusiastic foxhunter, a splendid horseman. His mind and tongue were quick. He was courtly with the ladies. He had little money; Disraeli, who made it his business to know such things, told the Queen in another letter that Randolph’s father was “not rich for a Duke,” and virtually everything would pass to the new MP’s elder brother anyhow.52 Nevertheless, “Randy,” as he was known to the whispering galleries and sounding boards of London society, was a popular member of the “fast” set headed by the Prince of Wales. Randy’s chief attractions were his social standing, his eligibility, and his faultless dress, for he was very much the dandy. And he enjoyed his kaleidoscopic social role. He detested dancing, yet he never turned down an invitation to a ball.
In time he might have overcome his youthful impetuosity, but time was denied him. His greatest misfortune, though he didn’t know it then, was a consequence of what was surely the cruelest of all Oxford pranks. Years later he described it to Louis Jennings, a close friend, and Jennings passed it along to another of Randy’s friends, Frank Harris, editor of the Fortnightly Review. One evening at Merton a small group of students were discussing a favorite undergraduate topic: the relationship between masters and servants. Randy had firm views on this. He believed the aristocracy knew instinctively how to handle menials and that the rising merchants—he once told Harris that he regarded them as “jumped-up grocers from Ballarat and shopkeepers from Sydney”—would never learn. That evening he was eloquent; he was applauded; a fellow student handed him an enormous stirrup cup of champagne; he drank it off. It had been drugged. He awoke at daybreak with a ghastly taste in his mouth. He was in a strange room. The wallpaper, in his words, was “hideous—dirty.” He turned his head and sat bolt upright, gasping. There was an old woman lying beside him; “one thin strand of dirty grey hair” lay on the pillow. His hopeless questions to Jennings evoked the chilling horror and the pathos of his plight: “How had I got there? What had happened to bring me to such a den?” Did he remember anything? Pas trop; the stirrup cup, and now this. Rising quietly, he slid into his trousers. Abruptly, the hag awoke and grinned. She asked hoarsely: “Oh, Lovie, you’re not going to leave me like that?”53
Lord Randolph Churchill at the time of his marriage
Lord Randolph Churchill in his prime
Randolph vividly recalled that she had “one long yellow tooth in her top jaw that waggled as she spoke.” Obviously, she expected to be paid—this was the ultimate master-servant relationship. Emptying his pockets, he threw all the money he had on the bed. Her leer grew. Speechless, he struggled into his waistcoat and coat and bolted. As he slammed the door he heard her call, “Lovie, you’re not kind!” Then, said Randolph, “Downstairs I fled in livid terror.”* He knew his peril; he made for the nearest doctor’s office. There he was treated with a strong disinfectant, but three weeks later a venereal sore appeared on his genitals, followed by lesions elsewhere. He returned to the physician, who treated him with mercury, warned him to abstain from alcohol, and told him he had nothing to worry about. It was a lie. Victorian medicine, confronted with such symptoms, was helpless. Thus it was that at the height of the 1873 Season, even before his entrance into public life, the elegant twenty-four-year-old bachelor son of a duke, the cynosure of aspiring debutantes and their ambitious mothers, was a doomed syphilitic.54
On this deckle-edged invitation—it still exists; the Churchills, the biographer ardently notes, saved everything—a feminine hand later wrote, below “To meet,” the name “Randolph.” Certainly Clarissa (“Clara”) Jerome hoped that she and her three daughters would meet someone interesting. Lately Europe had been a disappointment to them. Clara had begun to long for Newport, or even the Jeromes’ New York mansion on Madison Square. She took the Franco-Prussian War as a personal affront. She and her daughters—Clarita, Leonie, and Jeanette (“Jennie”)—had adored the Paris of the Second Empire. Beginning in 1858 they had lived in a palatial apartment on the Champs-Elysées. Clarita had made her debut at the Tuileries and had been the guest of Napoleon III and Eugénie at Compiègne. Jennie had been scheduled to come out in 1870. She had already been fitted for her gown when Louis Napoleon sent Wilhelm a rude note. Wilhelm of Prussia replied—at Bismarck’s urging—with the ruder Ems telegram, and suddenly the two armies were lunging at each other. In the beginning Clara saw no need for alarm. French confidence was boundless. And neutral observers thought it fully justified. The Pall Mall Gazette of July 29, 1870, predicted that the first Napoleon’s triumphs were about to be repeated. The Times felt an Englishman would be justified in laying his “last shilling on Casquette against Pumpernickel.” The élan of Louis Napoleon’s soldiery could scarcely have been higher. They pored over the maps of Prussia which had been issued to them, studied German phrase books, and eagerly looked forward to heroic attacks gallantly carried out by them and their comrades crying “En avant! A la baïonnette! A Berlin!” to the strains of “La Marseillaise.”55
It was “unthinkable,” the London Standard said, for the Prussians “to take the offensive.”56 General Helmuth von Moltke and his general staff disagreed. They had built their railroad grid with war in mind, had profited by William T. Sherman’s brilliant use of railways in Tennessee, and had mastered the coordination of telegraph lines and troop trains. Three weeks after war had been declared, Moltke had efficiently mobilized 1,183,000 Germans, backed by more than 1,440 Krupp cast-steel cannon. The French, who regarded efficiency as a pedestrian virtue, weren’t ready. They collided with massed battalions wearing spiked helmets and uniforms of Prussian blue singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” and “Deutschland über Alles” and chanting “Nach Paris!” While their deadly artillery, outranging Louis Napoleon’s obsolete bronze guns, flung shattering barrages ahead of them, they blazed a trail which would be followed by their grandsons in 1914 and their great-grandsons in 1940. Suddenly news reached the Champs-Elysées that half the French army was bottled up in the mighty fortress of Metz. At Sedan the other half, led by Louis Napoleon himself, laid down their arms and accepted humiliating surrender terms. Paris lay open to the invader.
Clara and her daughters fled to Cowes, the fashionable British seaside resort on the Isle of Wight. They moved back to Paris the following spring, taking a house in the boulevard Haussman, but the city had been devastated by the Commune, the leftist regime which had defied the Prussians and their own countrymen until starved into submission. Returning to Cowes, the Jeromes leased what Clara called a “sweet little cottage” and were frequently seen there and in London, attending balls, recitals, receptions, and musicales, and other highlights of the Season. Most weekends found them on the great country estates. Unlike the Frenchwoman whose naiveté spoiled a perfectly good English breakfast, they were not shocked by careless interpretations of the marriage sacrament. Clara’s husband slept with many women in New York; she knew it, knew that he had sired several illegitimate children, and was indifferent. Her grandson Winston relished telling of a meeting between Clara and one of Leonard Jerome’s mistresses; Clara said: “My dear, I understand how you feel. He is so irresistible.” But a lady’s sexual emancipation was possible only after matrimony. As long as the Misses Jerome remained single, they must also be maidens. At least one of them was straining at the leash. A photograph of the mother and her daughters, taken at about this time, shows her seated, facing left, regarding the world with a resolute jaw and eyes like raisins. Clarita, also seated, is holding her mother’s hand and searching her face, as though for guidance. Leonie, standing, leans on her mother’s shoulder for support. Jennie, however, doesn’t seem even to be a part of the group. She was already known as “a grea
t showoff.” Here the show is well worth watching. Dark, vivacious, and magnificent, she stands alone, staring boldly at the photographer, her left arm outflung, the hand atop a furled umbrella, her hips cocked saucily. It is almost a wanton pose, the posture of a virgin who can hardly wait to assume another position.57
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