The Churchills

by Mary S. Lovell

  There is a good eyewitness description of Jennie during her time in Ireland. She was, recalled her admirer Lord d’Abernon,

  a dark, lithe figure, standing somewhat apart and appearing to be of another texture to those around her, radiant, translucent, intense. A diamond star in her hair, her favourite ornament – its lustre dimmed by the flashing glory of her eyes. More of the panther than of the woman in her looks, but with a cultivated intelligence unknown to the jungle. With all these attributes of brilliancy [she possessed] such kindliness and high spirits that she was universally popular. Her desire to please, her delight in life, and the genuine wish that all should share her joyous faith in it, made her the centre of a devoted circle.15

  Other male admirers noted this pantherine quality in Jennie, and she never lost it.

  When the Conservatives were routed by the Liberals under Gladstone in the general election of April 1880, the Duke and Duchess were recalled from Ireland. No one in the Churchill family was sorry that the viceregency had ended, and against the national trend Randolph was returned as MP albeit with a small majority of sixty votes. As his son wrote many years later, ‘his hour had come’. The Conservatives were in disarray after a long period in office and Disraeli (now Lord Beaconsfield), already ill with the condition that would soon kill him, had practically retired. The Tory backbenchers were discouraged and the former ministers, ‘the old gang’ as Randolph had labelled them, were rudderless. Randolph seized the day, boldly advocating a new, more aggressive and resolute type of Toryism. He attacked and harried not only the new Liberal government but also, frequently, his own party, ably backed by a trio of supporters whose actions were so concerted and focused in the first session of the House after the election that the foursome began calling themselves ‘the Fourth Party’. It is clear that Randolph had correctly gauged the feelings of this parliament because some of his suggestions were even backed by the Liberals. And Disraeli, always a supporter of Randolph, wrote: ‘I am glad he is to speak about Ireland. He will speak on such a subject not only with ability but with authority.’16 Gladstone, however, held quite another view: ‘There never was a Churchill from John of Marlborough down, that had either morals or principles.’

  Jennie was delighted to return to London, where Randolph rented a house at 29 St James’s Place in Mayfair, and although they were still not accepted in court circles she joined wholeheartedly in the excitement of her husband’s burgeoning career. Politics energised her. They lived next door to the house belonging to Sir Stafford Northcote (later the Earl of Iddesleigh), who was then leader of the Conservative Party. He would have been horrified to know what went on in the neighbouring house, where Randolph and his political cabal were plotting to upstage the despised ‘old gang’ of which Northcote was chief protagonist.

  For little Winston it was a bad time. At the age of seven, on a dark winter day, he was uprooted from his comfortable nursery routine, his beloved Nanny Everest, his baby brother and his growing collection of lead soldiers – which occupied him for hours every day – and packed off to a boarding school, St George’s Preparatory School at Ascot. There he would endure several years of a personal hell during which, in the short periods he spent at home each year, everyone except Nanny Everest was far too busy to notice the misery of a small boy.

  It is well known that for Winston, Nanny Everest was the centre of his world, his sole confidante. He never forgot her, and years later wrote: ‘Mrs Everest it was who looked after me and tended to all my wants. It was to her I poured out my many troubles.’ When he was in his seventies he would tell his nephew Johnny: ‘Children very often like their nurses better than their parents. My own nurse, Mrs Everest, was my closest and dearest friend.’17 During Winston’s and Jack’s entire childhoods Jennie was merely a beautiful fleeting luminary, paying flying visits to the nursery dressed to go riding or hunting or in her evening clothes, scented, sparkling with diamonds – untouchable. Small wonder she appeared to her sons as a goddess-like creature to be adored rather than loved. Winston accepted this as normal, and never resented her emotional neglect. And it is important to recognise that this behaviour of Jennie’s was entirely normal for her time and her class. It was also entirely normal to send a seven-year-old boy away to boarding school.

  Undoubtedly, Randolph and Jennie had done some research and believed they had chosen a good school for Winston. All the masters there were highly qualified, it was bright and modern, had electric light (still considered a wonder and installed in very few homes, let alone in schools), a swimming pool and good sports grounds, and the boys were taken on regular outings. What they could not have known was that the respectably married headmaster, the Revd H.W. Sneyd-Kynnersley, was a sadist. According to the witness statement of a fellow pupil18 (forced by the demands of self-protection to assist the headmaster in these sessions by holding down the terrified victims), Kynnersley took positive pleasure in flogging small boys until they bled, or even excreted through fear and pain. This punishment was administered for the slightest indiscretion – for being late, or performing badly in an exam. Winston was renowned for unpunctuality and regularly had the lowest marks in his class throughout his school career.* He was also, even at this early age, bombastic, self-opinionated and possessed of his fair share of pugnacious Churchill arrogance, which would have marked him out to his ghastly headmaster.

  The following is one of the milder extracts from a fellow pupil’s description of those years at St George’s: ‘The swishing was given with the master’s full strength and it took only two or three strokes for blood to form everywhere and it continued for 15 or 20 strokes when the boy’s bottom was a mass of blood.’19 Winston never complained to his parents – indeed, his letters home (which would have been scanned by masters for spelling, composition and presentation) invariably included a sentence such as ‘I am very happy at school’ but in fact he was one of those regularly singled out for corporal punishments.†

  Not surprisingly, Winston’s work suffered, despite the optimism in his letters in which he wrote about how well he thought he was doing. His poor reports show that he was regarded by his teachers as lazy, arrogant, wilful, naughty and unpunctual, with comments under the heading ‘Headmaster’s Remarks’ such as ‘Very bad – is a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other. He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere’ and, remarkably in view of his subsequent career, ‘He has no ambition.’20 He had a few friends but he was not generally popular. Can his parents never have wondered why this exceptionally bright child was such a duffer at school? Their only reaction was to reprimand and criticise him by letter throughout his school career. His letters to them were a constantly recurring theme (apart from regular requests for more pocket money), begging them, especially his mother, to visit him. Jennie very occasionally made a visit – perhaps once a year – and her replies to Winston were full of excuses such as ‘I can’t come down on Wednesday, darling – I am far too busy.’ Randolph visited his son no more than three times during his years at school.* All this small boy had to look forward to between the ages of seven and nine was the school holidays and half-term breaks, and he counted the days until the end of each term – ‘30 days more and the Holidays will be here’21 – while daydreaming of the sanctuary of his nursery and the loving care of Nanny Everest, of his brother Jack and his collection of toy soldiers on the rug in front of the fire.

  Even during school holidays he saw little of his parents. It was not unusual for Randolph and Jennie to spend most of the holidays visiting friends in their great country houses, or on trips abroad. In the summer the two small boys were often left at Blenheim with Mrs Everest, it being thought better for them to breathe fresh country air than stay in London; they would also often spend two weeks at the seaside with her. Sometimes neither Randolph nor Jennie was even home for Christmas. When Mrs Everest wrote to Winston at school, two or three times a week, she addressed him as ‘My Precious boy’ and ‘My own darling boy’. In her less
frequent letters Jennie wrote ‘Dearest Winston’. In June 1884, nine-year-old Winston wrote forth-rightly to his mother, ‘It is very unkind of you not to write to me before this. I have had only one letter from you this term.’22

  Following the return to London of the Duke and Duchess, the Duke had resumed his seat in the Lords. He had soon realised that he faced a horrendous financial position. It should be explained that the Marlboroughs had never owned extensive income-producing lands as did those much older aristocratic families who had amassed great swathes of land and properties in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially during the Dissolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the Earl of Derby had an annual income of £150,000; the Duke of Northumberland, £160,000; and the Duke of Norfolk netted £231,000 a year.23 By contrast, the Marlboroughs’ income was only £40,000 a year, and out of this the 7th Duke had to maintain a palace covering seven acres and requiring a huge staff, provide significant dowries for six daughters, and periodically bail out his two spendthrift sons.24 The Irish viceregency had been a financial disaster, and he was now forced to adopt a desperate measure. He contacted a friend, Earl Cairns, who was Lord Chancellor, and with his assistance an Act was put through Parliament called ‘The Blenheim Settled Estates Act’. Effectively, this Act dismantled the ‘entail’ created by John Churchill’s will in 1722, which had protected the most valuable contents of Blenheim since the death of the great Duke. Immediately, the 7th Duke began to sell off some of the books in the Sunderland Library and the Marlborough Gems,* as well as a collection of pictures and Limoges enamels.

  Blandford, waiting in the wings for the time when he would become the 8th Duke, was especially interested in the spectacle of his parsimonious father selling off heirlooms to raise money. He filed the information away for future use.

  5

  1880–7

  A Career Thrown Away

  Having redeemed himself with his parents, Lord Randolph was busy furthering his reputation in Parliament as architect of what he called ‘Tory Democracy’. Between May and August 1880 he made seventy-four speeches and asked twenty-one questions in the House. Boyishly slim, he would be dressed in his customary beautifully tailored grey frock-coat and coloured waistcoat. His waxed and twirled moustache and his protruding eyes distinguished him from his colleagues, and his ironic jay-like laughter ‘in its weirdness was merriment itself’.1 Although still a backbencher, with characteristic aplomb Randolph had already made the move to a seat on the front benches, below the gangway beside his ‘Fourth Party’ cohorts Arthur Balfour, Sir Henry Wolff and John Gorst. Together, nightly, they harried and teased Mr Gladstone, and whenever Randolph caught the Speaker’s eye the word would go out, ‘Churchill’s up!’ and the Chamber would rapidly fill in the hope of a firework display of wit, sarcasm and perfect delivery. He was also a persistent heckler, always delighting in waking up the House with an interjection such as the following, recorded in Hansard, when a member was droning on during his speech about there being ‘two great parties in the State’. The response from the Chamber:

  Mr Parnell [Leader of the Irish Party]: ‘Three!’

  Lord Randolph Churchill: ‘FOUR!!’

  (laughter)

  Randolph was master of the short, memorable phrase, and one such, which stuck and did the victim little good, was his description of Gladstone, the ‘Grand Old Man’, as ‘an old man in a hurry’.

  Jennie now came into her own as a political hostess, and in this guise she made her own impression on British politics. True, her father-in-law worried about her guest lists. He believed she too often invited the wrong ones – ‘dangerous radicals’ like Joseph Chamberlain and Charles Dilke* who, he felt, exerted the wrong kind of influence on Randolph (Dilke was rumoured to have made advances to Jennie that were not entirely unwelcome). But Jennie was sure-footed, and she made certain her salon also included leading artists, journalists and writers – people who had a say in shaping public opinion. She flirted – of course she did – but her work in the background helped Randolph immeasurably – even busy important men did not decline her invitations. Her life was not entirely happy, though. She was sometimes obliged to take the two boys to Blenheim and she came to detest her visits to her worthy but dreary parents-in-law who still disapproved of her, or at least made her feel they did. During one stay at Blenheim, in November 1880, she wrote frankly to her mother in Paris, who had proposed that she come to visit Jennie in London. ‘I’m so delighted…’ Jennie replied. She sometimes quite forgot what it felt like to be with people who loved her and longed to have someone in whom to confide. Of course Randolph always backed her, but she felt she could hardly abuse his mother to him when the Duchess was totally devoted to him and would do anything for him.

  ‘The fact is I loathe living here,’ she wrote. Not because it was deadly dull – she could tolerate that – but it was no use denying the truth. It was, she said, ‘gall and wormwood’ to accept hospitality and to be living within a family she hated and who hated her. She believed the Duchess disliked her just because she was what she was: prettier and more attractive than the Duchess’s own daughters. Everything she said and did was noted and found fault with, she wrote. They were all always studiously polite, but the atmosphere was like a volcano, just waiting to erupt.2

  One of the biggest problems for Jennie, attempting to make a reputation as a political hostess at that time, was the fact that she and Randolph were still personae non gratae with the Prince of Wales, which meant that the most important doors were closed to them.

  But there was a greater reason for Jennie’s unhappiness than she admitted to her mother. At some point in 1880 or 1881, shortly before she returned from Ireland, Randolph had – in the tactful words of Jennie’s great-niece Anita Leslie in her memoir – ‘separated himself from her physically’.3 Jennie had come to accept that for all his declarations of love early in their relationship, for all the small ‘kisses’ he still enclosed at the bottom of his letters to her, Randolph was not capable of love in the generally accepted meaning of the word, or at least as she interpreted it and hoped for. Randolph unquestionably still admired and respected her, and would always come to her defence and wrote dutifully that he loved her. Furthermore, he had come to rely upon her support and help. He was proud of her beauty, and her abilities, proud that other men admired her. But in their relationship there was none of the close affection, the loving intimacies and shared laughter, the gentleness between lovers that she had seen even between her own mother and father when she was a child. And any passion in the bedroom had fled even before he deserted Jennie’s bed. Yet it is clear that they had not fallen out, for in one of a series of tender letters when she was unwell over the New Year in 1883 he wrote that she must take the very greatest care of herself and not be careless with her health. If anything were to happen to her, he told her, his life would be ruined.4

  Randolph did not even show affection to his children, appearing to be little interested in them: when forced to confront Winston and Jack during ‘the children’s hour’ he treated them, one of Jennie’s sisters noted, like a general reviewing his troops. So although she remained proud of him and loyal, Jennie simply accepted that Randolph was a physically cold man, totally absorbed in his political world. At first when he stayed away from her bed she had, not unnaturally, suspected an affair with another woman, but with the benefit of hindsight it seems more likely that Randolph had already been told that he had been infected with a form of venereal disease and had been given the usual advice by his physicians to abstain from sexual relations with his wife. Jennie was not taken into his confidence for some years. Anita Leslie – granddaughter of Leonie – later wrote that it was known that Randolph had been keeping a mistress in Paris at the time,* and it was believed in the Leslie family that it was from this woman that he had acquired venereal disease.5

  It must be said that while she was in Ireland the passionate and impulsive Jennie, so attractive to men, had herself engaged in a number of
friendships which may or may not – according to which gossip one believes – have resulted in discreet love affairs. Hunting weekends were an ideal cover for such interludes. It is quite possible that Randolph somehow heard of one or more of these and that this is what lay behind his self-exile from his wife’s bed. Jennie was distressed that her marriage was in trouble and confided in her sisters, but there was little, apparently, that she could do about it, for Randolph simply refused to discuss the matter with her, and to outward appearances all was well with the couple. Randolph was the rising star in Parliament, with a beautiful, charming and able wife at his side and two healthy sons. Family rumour suggests that the couple were never sexually reconciled after this date. Jennie was not yet thirty.

  Blandford was still the black sheep. He had been living for some years with Edith Aylesford in Paris where they called themselves Mr and Mrs Spencer, to the distress of the Duke and Duchess who managed to avoid the couple whenever they travelled on the Continent. Other members of the family met them, and every time that Jennie and Randolph holidayed in France, Blandford always managed to join them, whether they wanted him to or not. He was still very attracted to Jennie.

  On 4 November 1881 at 8 Avenue Friedland in Paris, Edith gave birth to a son, Guy Bertrand Aylesford, whom Blandford professed to love more than all of his other four children. Somewhat cheekily, two years later they bestowed upon him the title of Lord Guernsey, belonging to the Aylesford family. Unsurprisingly, since Aylesford had not clapped eyes on his wife for several years before the birth of the child, the Aylesford family contested the matter. It was taken up in the House of Lords,* with the result that Guy Bertrand was formally declared illegitimate and the title was disallowed.

  During the eighteen months of legal infighting over this matter, which caused yet further inevitable gossip distressing to the Marlboroughs, Blandford’s passion for Edith unaccountably cooled. Soon after the verdict was reached by the House of Lords about baby Guy Bertrand, Blandford ignobly abandoned Edith and his son in Paris, and with the encouragement of the Marlboroughs he returned permanently to England.