Randolph and Jennie were stunned too, though to Randolph’s credit – despite the opprobrium that would cling to him because of it – he both wanted to help his brother and also try to prevent him doing anything that would cause permanent damage to the family name. Not knowing that Aylesford had already left India, Randolph cabled the Prince of Wales, requesting that he persuade Aylesford not to agree to a divorce. The Prince’s response was to wire Lord Hardwicke, who held the title Master of the Queen’s Buckhounds, instructing him to call on Randolph and directly convey his profound indignation at Blandford’s conduct.
When Randolph subsequently visited his brother he faced the full blast of Blandford’s passion for Edith. He vowed he would ‘never give her up’ whatever happened and that he intended to marry her. Randolph pointed out that the Prince was utterly opposed to the union, and that every member of both families faced social ruin if this course of action was pursued; he suggested that the lovers simply remain in their marriages and continue their affair discreetly, which was what the Duke and Duchess counselled. Blandford railed against the hypocrisy of this suggestion, and in support of his indignation he produced a bundle of letters which he handed to Randolph. Apparently, some years earlier Edith Aylesford had enjoyed a relationship with the Prince of Wales, during which the Prince had written these letters to her, and some of them, apparently,* were indiscreet enough to be embarrassing.
When Aylesford was within days of reaching London, bent on thrashing Blandford and divorcing Edith, Blandford – probably bowing to family pressure to put some distance between himself and Edith, at least temporarily – left for the Low Countries. Perhaps he was fleeing from his wife, as much as anything. Goosie’s sad attempt to bring some humour into the situation had been to place a small pink celluloid doll on Blandford’s toast at breakfast. Anticipating his usual poached egg, when he lifted the domed cover what he saw there proved the last straw – he walked out of the house and would not return for many years.
Randolph’s interview with Lord Hardwicke revealed that the Prince was in favour of Aylesford’s plan to divorce Edith, and this prompted Randolph to make one of the gravest mistakes of his life. In an attempt to persuade the Prince not to goad Aylesford into divorce, Randolph impulsively took the Prince’s love letters to his wife, Princess Alexandra, telling her that if there was a divorce case the letters would be produced in evidence, to prove that Aylesford had condoned his wife’s former relationship with the Prince. If this happened, he said, the Prince would never be allowed to sit on the throne. It was a suicidal move. Surely only someone with Randolph’s arrogance would have attempted to blackmail the heir to the throne.
The Princess, by now no stranger to her husband’s supposedly discreet extramarital affairs, wisely called in Prime Minister Disraeli, who in turn informed the Queen. Victoria had accepted long ago that her thirty-five-year-old son fell far short of her late husband’s standards. She was chiefly concerned that the throne be protected. Having been told that the letters were ‘innocent’ but contained ‘chaff that could be misinterpreted’,1 the Queen wrote to the Prince: ‘What a dreadful disgraceful business about Lady Aylesford and Lord Blandford! And how unpardonable…to draw dear Alix [Alexandra] into it! Her dear name should never have been mixed up with such people. Poor Lord Aylesford shd not have left her [to go to India]. I knew last summer that this [affair] was going on.’2 What had begun as an amorous fling was now a full-blown state crisis.
Neither of the Churchill brothers came out of it well – Blandford was now an acknowledged adulterer who appeared to be skulking in Holland to avoid facing the irate husband, and Randolph was attempting to blackmail the Prince through his wholly innocent wife. Blandford refused to accept any blame; he wrote to Randolph that as soon as the Prince turned up he intended to come back and tackle him. ‘I shall lick HRH within an inch of his life for his conduct generally,’ he wrote, ‘and we will have the whole thing up in the Police Court!’3 Despite a heavy cold Randolph travelled over to The Hague to discuss the matter with Blandford, but he found his brother’s harangues ‘wearying’. He wrote to Jennie that he would be glad to get back home to her and that she and the baby were always in his thoughts.4
Jennie, meanwhile, was trying hard to cool the situation in London, fully aware that unless she was successful the social life that she adored was as good as dead. She dined with Randolph’s sister Fanny but found no support there; ‘Fanny is the most “bottled up” creature I have ever met,’5 she wrote to Randolph, also warning him that Blandford had raved at his parents who were now staying in Paris for the time being, to avoid any confrontations. ‘You have displayed to me an untold cruelty of intention,’ Blandford wrote to them in an angry fifteen-page letter. ‘What can it affect you who I marry and who my children may be? In what manner do they come into the circle of your life?…For what considerations of a worldly character have you thought fit to step in to sacrifice my whole life?’6
Randolph, meanwhile, had been writing furious letters to Lord Hardwicke, and in one of Jennie’s letters to Randolph she warned against doing so, telling him that she knew Hardwicke would ‘abuse us’.7 She knew and disliked Lord Hardwicke, who had apparently once attempted to force his attentions on her during her first Season in London, before she met Randolph. Now, as Jennie forecast, Hardwicke mischievously worked against them at court.
When the latest situation was relayed to the Prince he was so annoyed at Randolph’s behaviour, and particularly because he had involved the Princess, that he ordered his friend Lord Charles Beresford to travel home ahead of him, at speed, and challenge Randolph to a duel on his behalf. In fact it was Lord Knollys, who had been Randolph’s best man two years earlier, who delivered the challenge. Randolph accepted, but after naming his second (Lord Falmouth) he wrote an arrogant and insulting private letter to the Prince, suggesting that the challenge had been made in the full knowledge that a duel could never take place. Not only had duelling been made illegal by the Prince’s late father, but they both knew that no British subject could take up arms against the heir to the throne.
By now, having acted very foolishly, Randolph was beginning to tire of the matter and wrote to Jennie that he would be pleased to return home because he loved her and hated it when they were parted, but also because his brother had become ‘a horrid bore’. Blandford had raged at him because Lady Aylesford had been advised by her lawyers that she should try to reconcile with her husband. Randolph had been very short and the brothers had quarrelled violently. He signed off lovingly, asking her to kiss the baby for him.8
By the time the Prince returned from India, the Aylesford matter had leaked into Society and gossip was rife. It was essential that it be dealt with urgently. The Princess met her husband’s ship at Portsmouth and at his express instruction she went on board ‘first and alone’ before he made any public appearance. The royal couple were then alone together for some time while, presumably, he told her about his old affair with Lady Aylesford. They were then closeted with Lord Hardwicke, who advised what steps must be taken to limit the damage, since gossip was by now widespread. Only then could the Prince’s siblings go aboard the ship and begin the formal welcome. There was a triumphal procession through London as the couple returned to Marlborough House, and within an hour they left again for a gala performance at Covent Garden Opera. It was a brave test of the Prince’s popularity, but as they entered the royal box (late) the couple were cheered to the rafters – and between every act there was renewed cheering.9 So the matter was handled with the smoothness of today’s spin doctors.
Aylesford made the decision not to divorce Edith, the royal letters disappeared – presumably into the fire or into the deepest recesses of the royal archives – and the Prince declared that henceforth he and the Princess would boycott any function to which the Churchills were invited. This proved very inconvenient for Cornelia, the eldest Churchill daughter, who was married to Sir Ivor Guest, since her long-planned ball in honour of the Prince and Princes
s was imminent. She was very severe with Jennie about it, and Jennie was made to realise that she and Randolph were not even to think of attending. But the whole of Society closed ranks, and despite a worried Sir Ivor being dispatched to speak to the Prince’s secretary after Cornelia’s invitation was declined, her ball had to go ahead without the royal couple.
Edith had now joined Blandford on the Continent and the couple began a series of travels about Europe that would last for some years. Lord Aylesford found himself punished as thoroughly as were the guilty parties; he subsequently travelled to America where he bought some land and settled. He died a few years later of drink-related problems at the age of thirty-six.
Quickly realising how impossible it was to remain in London where they were nothing less than pariahs, Randolph and Jennie decided that they should also absent themselves for a while, and they too travelled to America. Jennie’s father still lived there and she had not been ‘home’ since she was a child. It was no great punishment for her.
In the autumn of 1876 the Duke of Marlborough was summoned by the Queen, who was anxious to help her old friend. Disraeli had suggested a solution. After insisting that Randolph must make a formal apology for his attempt to involve the Princess,* the Duke was offered the post of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Goosie’s father, the Duke of Abercorn, was the retiring incumbent and it was a viceregal post; but the Duke could not regard the office as an honour, having already refused it a few years earlier on the grounds that he could not afford it. This time Marlborough felt obliged to accept. It meant selling off a number of works of art to fund the necessary expenditure, but at least the family could remove themselves with some vestige of dignity from an insupportable situation. In Ireland they would be not merely acceptable in Society, but the formal representatives of the Queen.
Appalled and hardly able to believe the mess in which his sons had landed the family, the Duke insisted (again at Disraeli’s urging) that when Randolph and Jennie returned from America they and little Winston must join himself and the Duchess, their three unmarried daughters and Goosie and her children in Dublin. There, Randolph was to work as his father’s unpaid private secretary. It was essential, they felt, to present a united family front.
On the night before they left England in January 1877 for what would prove a costly three-year exile in Ireland, the Duke and Duchess stayed at Windsor with the Queen, who noted in her diary that the poor Duchess (the same one who made servants tremble when they heard the rustle of her skirts) had been so distressed and wretched that she could scarcely control her tears.10
As an adult, Winston Churchill’s first memories would be of the years his family lived in Ireland when he and his parents occupied a lodge in Phoenix Park, Dublin. Mostly these memories were of playing with his cousin Sunny, son and heir of his Uncle Blandford, and of his mother dressed for hunting in her severely cut riding habit, often mud-spattered as she blew into the nursery exhilarated after a day spent following the hounds. For anyone who enjoyed foxhunting, Ireland was the place to be. It was not a wholly elite activity even then, and though one was likely to meet a good sprinkling of the aristocracy in the field, anyone of any class who had a horse capable of galloping and jumping could be a foxhunter. A bold-riding farmer was as respected as any other member of the field.
It was just as well that Jennie enjoyed hunting, for there was little else to occupy her time. As representatives of the sovereign the Marlboroughs were virtual rulers of Ireland and obliged to entertain despite the constant drain on the Duke’s purse. But Jennie found these balls and drawing rooms parochial. She later wrote that she found the women, in their ‘home-made clothes’, boring. However, there is perhaps another clue to her character in that she also wrote that in the three years she lived in Ireland she could not recall meeting one dull man. She had her own court of admirers when out hunting, which included Colonel Forster, who was Master of Horse to the Duke, and Viscount Falmouth, who was the Duke’s military adviser, as well as Lord d’Abernon.
When Randolph was not working as his father’s secretary he was paying one of his increasingly regular visits to London where, during the next few years, he would find his feet in politics. Amazingly, considering his first stumbling speech to the House, he would emerge as one of the greatest political orators of his day and perhaps of any era in English history, excelled only by his son.
With hindsight Jennie realised that his post as his father’s secretary played a large part in creating this new Randolph, for his isolation diverted his mind ‘from the frivolous society to which he had till then been rather addicted, and which now had ceased to smile upon him’.11 It also brought home to him the appalling lot of the Irish peasantry. The country was still feeling the effects of the potato famine, during which a million people died and another million emigrated. Now, twenty-five years on, there was a smouldering resentment that the country was still governed by mainly absentee English landlords. There were two words on everyone’s lips: ‘Home Rule’.
Having this opportunity to study the Irish problems at first hand, Randolph found himself in great sympathy with those affected, and though opposed to Home Rule he favoured a form of local self-government that would mitigate the damage caused by short-sighted British politicians and officials. He soon became known in Parliament for his views on the subject and for his confidence in his political opinions. On 7 March 1878 he made some enemies when he launched a furious attack on some of the respectable but perhaps not very able ministers in Disraeli’s government, to whom he referred as ‘the old gang’, who were, he said, characterised by having a double-barrelled name, almost always ‘a badge of intellectual mediocrity’. Clearly, he did not feel this extended to the name Spencer Churchill; nor did he include Disraeli in his onslaught, for he admired his leader; but the speech nailed Randolph as a Young Turk.
For Jennie, the only alternative to hunting lay in assisting her mother-in-law with a fund aimed at alleviating the dreadful hardships of the poor. Called the Irish Relief Fund, it was a huge success and raised £135,000 (£6.5 million today), and the Duchess was decorated by the Queen not only for her fund-raising but for the commonsense manner in which she distributed the money.* But Jennie preferred hunting, often riding to hounds four or five days a week. Later she would claim that during this period she had hunted with every pack in Ireland. She was a brave rider and did not mind falls, which won her more admirers. Once, when she fell and was knocked unconscious, she woke to find that Randolph had believed her dead. In his relief at seeing her move he grabbed the flask of a friend ‘and emptied it’. It became a family joke that Jennie had the bad fall and Randolph had the whisky. It was while out hunting that Jennie met the beautiful Empress Elizabeth of Austria, generally accepted as the best woman rider in Europe. With her famous ‘pilot’ (and, some say, lover), the dashing, hard-riding Bay Middleton, the Empress hunted six days a week during her visit to Ireland and caused deep offence by not making time to visit the Marlboroughs at the viceregal court in Dublin.
In 1879 Jennie was pregnant again, and on 4 February 1880 she gave birth to another seven-months child whom they named John Strange Churchill. Eyebrows have been raised about this child: Jennie was said by a number of biographers to have enjoyed a friendship with John Strange Jocelyn, 5th Earl of Roden, in the year before the baby’s birth. Although it is not impossible that she was unfaithful to her husband, the content and loving tone of their correspondence at this point in their marriage make it extremely unlikely. Also, Lord Roden was godfather to this baby who bore his Christian names, and surely if Jennie had had anything to hide she would not have advertised the possibility quite so blatantly? And would Colonel Roden – a Crimean War veteran more than thirty years older than her and sometime confidant of the Queen – have been so cool about participating in the baptism had the child been his? Again, it is very unlikely – especially as the gentleman was also a very close friend of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. In fact, the 5th Earl was not even in Ireland at the ti
me Jack was conceived.12 He had inherited the title only a month earlier from his sickly thirty-three-year-old nephew – a friend and supporter of Randolph in Parliament, who had died childless – and it was this much younger deceased Lord Roden (the 4th Earl), a leading light in the Conservative Party despite his frailty, with whom Jennie had been friendly before the Randolph Churchills left for Ireland.
The baby, always known as ‘Jack’,* was heartily welcomed by five-year-old Winston into the small almost separate household of the children and the nursery staff. He would always recall the moment when his father came into the nursery to tell him that he had a baby brother, and throughout Jack’s life Winston loved him dearly and was never slow to tell people this.*13 Winston saw almost nothing of the grown-ups beyond the daily formal visit to see his parents in the time after tea and before they dressed for dinner. His mother was remote to him: ‘My mother always seemed…a fairy-princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power…she shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly – but at a distance.’14 Children of their class were not cuddled by their mothers; such a thing would have been regarded as certain to spoil. Jennie was always prepared to rebel over something she did not like or really want, but she was clearly happy to adopt this nursery regimen and so the conclusion must be that it did not especially bother her. Despite her happy personality and ability to charm the opposite sex it is difficult for a modern-day researcher to regard her as other than an extremely self-centred young woman at this time.
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