Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  Mrs. Jerome and her daughters (from left): Leonie, Clara, and Jennie

  Their Cowes home was a “cottage” in the sense that the sprawling Newport châteaux were called cottages. Leonard was seldom there, but when he crossed the Atlantic—usually at the helm of his own yacht—he expected to find his family living in style. He was an American type peculiar to his time, a vigorous, handsome man, a brokerage partner of William R. Travers and a member of the New York Stock Exchange who repeatedly amassed, and then spent, enormous portfolios of wealth. As Winston told the story, “My grandfather would devote himself to work and in a short time make a fortune. Then he would give up the life completely, disappearing for a year or two, generally to Europe. When he came back to New York he might have lost the fortune he had made, and at once set about piling up another. Money poured through his fingers. He generally had an income of about £10,000, perhaps equal to £40,000 now. My grandfather thought nothing of spending $70,000 on a party, where each lady found a gold bracelet, inset with diamonds, wrapped in her napkin.”58

  In his careening career, Leonard seems to have succeeded at almost everything he tried. He founded the American Jockey Club, built a racetrack in the Bronx, supported an opera house, was for a time a part-owner of the New York Times, participated in politics, spent eighteen months as American consul in Trieste, gambled heavily and successfully, and was the first man to drive a team of racing horses four-in-hand down Broadway. Like many other Wall Street millionaires of that period, he held mixed feelings about the English aristocracy. He envied their power; Britain was a mightier nation than the United States, and an English peer was a great figure throughout the Empire and beyond. But Americans were also proud, especially self-made men. Having reached the top of a mobile society, they scorned those whose future had been assured at birth. After all, Britain’s patricians and New York’s financiers came from the same stock. Leonard was the great-great-grandson of a Huguenot who had arrived in what were then the American colonies in 1710. Leonard’s wife’s family had settled in Connecticut by 1650. There was one faint blemish in Clara’s otherwise pure Anglo-Saxon blood, one which later delighted Winston: her grandmother had been an Iroquois Indian. But that merely made her more colorful. Both Leonard and Clara were descended from American officers who had fought in the War of Independence. One, a major in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, had served with Washington at Valley Forge. To be sure, the Jeromes would be unlikely to place obstacles in the path of a titled British son-in-law. Palmerston had predicted: “Before the century is out, these clever and pretty women from New York will pull the strings in half the chancelleries in Europe.”59 Louisa Caton, the daughter of a Baltimore merchant, had been Lady Hervey-Bathurst and then, after her first husband’s death, Duchess of Leeds. Minnie Stevens became Lady Paget; Mrs. Arthur Post, Lady Barrymore; Mary Leiter of Chicago, Lady Curzon and vicereine of India. And Consuelo del Valle, who had been Jennie’s schoolmate, would soon be Duchess of Manchester. So a Jerome girl wouldn’t find herself in altogether unfamiliar company. Leonard and Clara might have been pleased by the thought. At the same time, they would have bridled at the suggestion that she was marrying up.

  The shipboard dance at Cowes aboard the cruiser Ariadne was considered a major social event and even a historic occasion, for the guests of honor were the future Czar Alexander III and his czarina, Maria Feodorovna. Today they are forgotten, part of the legacy which was destroyed with the last of the Romanovs, but one question asked that evening by an acquaintance of the Jeromes, by an obscure dandy named Frank Bertie, is memorable. Although Jennie had a full dance card, she happened to be standing alone, watching the bobbing Chinese lanterns and the entwined British and Russian flags overhead and listening to the Royal Marine band, when Bertie appeared at her elbow with a pale youth. Bertie said: “Miss Jerome, may I present an old friend of mine who has just arrived in Cowes, Lord Randolph Churchill.” Jennie inclined her lovely head. Randolph stared. She was nineteen, at the height of her glory, bare-shouldered and sheathed below in a flowing white gown with flowers pinned to the bosom. After some hesitation, he invited her to dance. The quadrille proved to be beyond him; he tripped and suggested they sit this one out. They did. Her dance card notwithstanding, they sat out the next one, and then the next, talking of horses and mutual friends until Clara, wondering uneasily where her daughter might be among all these virile naval officers, sought her out. Before leaving, Jennie persuaded her mother to invite Randolph to dinner the following evening, accompanied by a British colonel for the sake of appearances. At the dinner Randolph seems to have tried hard to be clever, without much success. Afterward Jennie and Clarita played piano duets. Randolph whispered to the startled colonel: “If I can, I mean to make the dark one my wife.” They left, and Jennie asked her sister what she thought of Randolph. Clarita wasn’t impressed. She thought his manner pretentious and his mustache absurd. She doubted she could learn to like him. Jennie said: “Please try to, Clarita, because I have the strangest feeling that he’s going to ask me to marry him.” If he did, she said, “I’m going to say ‘yes.’ ” Her sister laughed, but in three days, during a stroll in the Cowes garden, the two became engaged.60

  Leonard’s first response was apprehension. When Jennie wrote him the news he replied, “You quite startle me. I shall feel very anxious till I hear more. If it has come to that—that he only ‘waits to consult his family’ you are pretty far gone…. I fear if anything goes wrong you will make a dreadful shipwreck of your affections. I always thought if you ever did fall in love it would be a very dangerous affair.” Letters from her and her mother brought him around, however. Once persuaded, his optimism was irrepressible. In Wall Street the panic of ’73 was at its peak. He had been all but wiped out. But he never doubted that he would win it all back—as he did—and on September 11, giving the marriage his blessing, he wrote Jennie: “I must say I have been very happy all day long. I have thought of nothing else. I telegraphed your mother immediately that I was ‘delighted’ and that I would arrange £2,000 a year for you which she says in her letter will do. The letter I recd from you the other day only filled me with anxiety. I feared nothing would come of it and that you would be left shipwrecked. The situation as related by you today leaves no reasonable doubt of the accomplishment of your hopes. The consent of his paternal [sic] I should say must follow when he learns that moderate provision can be made for you and that our family is entirely respectable—all that can be said for any American family.”61

  Jennie as drawn by John Singer Sargent

  It wasn’t enough. At Blenheim the duchess was muttering angrily about “dollars and impudence.” On August 25 Randolph’s brother had written him: “I tell you that you are mad simply mad. I don’t care if la demoiselle was the incarnation of all moral excellences & physical beauties on God’s earth. My opinion is the same.” If he wanted to run off with a married woman, George said, that would be one thing. “But my friend le mariage! It is a delusion and a snare like all the rest, and in this disagreeable addition [sic], that it is irrevocable…. You really only want to marry because you are in love with an idea ‘une phantasie….’ ” Meanwhile, Randolph had written his father of his plans. He told him: “I love her better than life itself,” then added with exasperating vagueness: “Mr. Jerome is a gentleman who is obliged to live in New York to look after his business. I do not know what it is.”62

  The duke meant to find out. He wrote Randolph: “I can’t say that what you have told me is reassuring…. This Mr. J. seems to be a sporting, and I should think vulgar kind of man. I hear he drives about 6 and 8 horses in N.Y. (one may take this as a kind of indication of what the man is). I hear he and his two brothers are stock brokers, one of them bears a bad character in commercial judgement in this country, but which of them it is, I do not know, but it is evident he is of the class of speculators; he has been bankrupt once; and may be so again: and when we come to think of N.Y. speculators & their deeds look at Fisk and hoc genus omne.”63
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  Randolph besieged Blenheim. A month later he wrote Clara that although his father still deplored “the suddenness & rapidity of the attachment formed… he wld give his consent if we were of the same mind in a year hence.” Neither Randolph nor Jennie would agree to wait. They were both hot-blooded and impatient; with each passing day they wanted each other more. Weeks dragged on, and then months. Randolph’s election to Parliament in February seems to have improved his standing in his father’s eyes, and presently the duke, mollified if not reconciled, was getting down to the bedrock issue. It was money. He had decided to give Randolph £1,000 a year, which, with the £2,000 from Leonard, seemed ample for the couple. The issue was who should control it. Lawyers were consulted. The Churchill family’s solicitors took the position that settling any money on the bride was inconsistent with English practice. The groom, they said, should get everything. Leonard offered a split between husband and wife, writing: “My daughter although not a Russian princess is an American and ranks precisely the same and you have doubtless seen that the Russian settlement recently published”—this was between the Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna and Victoria’s second son, the Duke of Edinburgh—“claims everything for the bride.” It was now April 7, and Jennie and Randolph could scarcely control themselves. Indeed, as we shall see, they probably couldn’t, and didn’t. A compromise was reached involving settlements on children to be born of the union. On April 14, 1874, Randolph wrote his mother: “Things are now going as merrily as a marriage bell. I expect the settlements over tonight and they will be signed tomorrow.”64

  They were. The next day, Wednesday, April 15, the Reverend Dr. Edward Forbes united them during a ceremony in the British embassy in Paris—Paris, which had become civilized once more, having been Clara’s suggestion. Present were the bride’s parents, the groom’s brother George, and Francis Knollys, private secretary to the Prince of Wales. Absent were the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. This was an extraordinary snub, for Randolph was their favorite son. But they had made it quite clear that they had no intention of attending the service. Leonard had sent the duke a chilly note the previous Tuesday. (“I am very sorry you are not able to come over to the wedding. We had all hoped to have had the pleasure of seeing both yourself & the Duchess.”) There is no record of a reply. But the inhabitants of Woodstock—which lies outside Blenheim’s grounds and was the new constituency of Randolph Churchill, MP—were overjoyed. When the couple arrived there on Monday, May 25, the train station was decorated with bunting and crowded with well-wishers. Cheering broke out as Jennie appeared carrying a lacy parasol mounted on a tortoiseshell rod trimmed with gold, a present from her father. (“Just the sort of bit of nonsense you like,” he had said.) The parasol was inadequate that day. A heavy rain was falling, split by bolts of lightning. Nevertheless, the throng, undaunted, unhitched the horses from the carriage which had been sent from the palace and pulled it through the narrow streets. They paused at the Bear Hotel, where the mayor spoke briefly, telling them that Woodstock “cannot be unmindful of anything which concerns the happiness of the noble house of Churchill,” and wishing them many years of “unclouded” joy. Then they were off again, through the triumphant arch dividing the town from the palace grounds. “As we passed through the entrance archway and the lovely scenery burst upon me,” Jennie later wrote, “Randolph said with pardonable pride, ‘This is the finest view in England.’ Looking at the lake, the bridge, the miles of magnificent park studded with old oaks… and the huge and stately palace, I confess I felt awed. But my American pride forbade the admission.”65

  Blenheim Palace

  Another admission, which she preferred to keep from her husband’s family, was that she was bearing their grandchild. Indeed, it is virtually certain that she had been pregnant for three months, and soon it would begin to show. Randolph had leased a house in Mayfair, at 48 Charles Street, off Berkeley Square; they planned to return to London and await the delivery there, explaining, when invited to Blenheim, that his political duties required his presence in town. But when Parliament rose, the duke and duchess would hear no excuses. Having accepted the marriage grimly, they wanted a long close look at their new daughter-in-law. As the weeks passed, they were pleasantly surprised. They found her charming. The increase in her girth appears to have been slight; the time for consulting the calendar hadn’t yet arrived. Ironically, she no longer cared. Free of her cloying mother, she also felt free of her in-laws. By October she was her own woman, independent and headstrong. She would never change again. It would be characteristic of her that she would always do exactly as she pleased, flouting convention and tossing her head when met by disapproval. Expectant mothers—she was very heavy by now—were supposed to remain quiet and, so far as was possible, immobile. But she was her father’s daughter; she had always been lively; she loathed inactivity, and gave it the back of her hand now. On Tuesday, November 24, she left the palace on a shooting party, stumbled in a field, and fell. Shaking off anxious hands, she said she was fine. On Saturday, as Randolph later wrote Clara, she took “a rather imprudent & rough drive in a pony carriage.” That evening the annual St. Andrew’s Ball was held in the palace. To the astonishment of everyone, including her husband, she appeared in a loose gown, holding a dance card. She was actually on the floor, pirouetting, when the pains started. Randolph wrote his mother-in-law: “We tried to stop them, but it was no use.” It was, in fact, time to choose a birthplace. Her grandniece, Ann Leslie, afterward described Jennie’s search for one. Attended by servants and by Randolph’s aunt Clementina, Lady Camden, she stumbled away from the party—which seems to have proceeded gaily without her—and lurched “past the endless suite of drawing-rooms, through the library, ‘the longest room in England,’ ” toward her bedroom.66

  She didn’t make it. She fainted and was carried into a little room just off Blenheim’s great hall. Once it had belonged to the first duke’s chaplain; tonight it was the ladies’ cloakroom. Sprawling, she lay on velvet capes and feather boas, which were deftly drawn from beneath her when the ball ended and the merry guests departed. It was a long night, with servants hurrying in and out with poultices and towels. The pains, Randolph told Clara, “went on all Sunday.” He had telegraphed the London obstetrician Jennie had consulted, but, Sunday train schedules being what they were, the doctor couldn’t arrive until Monday. Thus, the historic role of delivering England’s greatest prime minister fell to Frederic Taylor, a Woodstock physician. “The country Dr is… a clever man,” Randolph reported, “& the baby was safely born at 1.30 this morning after about 8 [sic] hrs labour. She suffered a good deal poor darling, but was vy plucky & had no chloroform. The boy is wonderfully pretty so everybody says dark eyes and hair & vy healthy considering its prematureness.”67

  Premature? The Times bought it. At the head of its birth notices it reported: “On the 30th Nov., at Blenheim Palace, the Lady Randolph Churchill, prematurely, of a son.” But no one believed it, not the patrician friends of the family, chuckling over the announcement, nor even the yeomen of Woodstock who, the Oxford Times reported, rang “a merry peal on the church bells… in honour of the event.” Winston was full-term. It was generally believed that sometime the previous February, during the maddening negotiations over the marriage settlement, Jennie had eluded her mother, divested herself of the incredible layers of clothing then worn by young ladies, and received Randolph’s seed. Indeed, it was thought the duke and duchess had known Jennie was pregnant at the time of the wedding; that was why they had boycotted it. Sly allusions to the circumstances of his birth followed Winston all his life. He enjoyed them. He would reply: “Although present on the occasion, I have no clear recollection of the events leading up to it.”68 Of course, it is possible that his parents have been slandered. Periods of gestation do vary. He may have been premature. It would have been just like him. He never could wait his turn.

  ONE

  HEADWATERS

  1874–1895

  WINSTON’S early appearance, de
spite 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.”1 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.