Since she had let her house in Cumberland Place, Jennie hated not having a house of her own where she could repay some of the entertainment she and George regularly accepted. She was always looking for somewhere they could settle, outside London but within easy reach of it. In January 1905 she had found Salisbury Hall, a beautiful moated, red-brick Tudor house near St Albans.† By car it was seventeen miles from the centre of London, but felt deeply rural.
George and Jennie moved to Salisbury Hall that spring. Jennie always had the knack of making a comfortable and impressive home and the Hall gave her ample scope. George had already realised that in money matters Jennie was even less adept than he was. ‘The value of money meant nothing to her,’ he wrote. ‘What counted with her were the things she got for money, not the amount she had to pay for them. If something of beauty attracted her, she just had to have it; it never entered her head to stop and think how she was going to pay for it…her extravagance was her only fault.’9 Hence, with Salisbury Hall she acted as though she was as rich as the grand names she regularly entertained there, from the King and his entourage (including his mistress, Mrs Keppel) to the Dukes of Connaught, Marlborough, Manchester and Roxburghe, Lords Curzon, Lennox and Lytton and a myriad other glittering Society names. It quickly became a much loved second home to Winston and Jack, somewhere they could respectably take any girlfriends or repay hospitality.
Their Guest cousins, Ivor and Freddie, became engaged that year. Ivor was a special friend, often forming a trio with Winston and Sunny to travel in Europe. He was, like Winston, in favour of free trade and stood as a candidate for Cardiff on that platform, with Winston’s strong support.10 Both brothers were politically knowledgeable, and they were often at Blenheim when Winston visited. In June 1905 Freddie married an American heiress, Amy Phipps, at St George’s Church, Hanover Square. All the Churchill cousins were there.
Freddie was an Army captain serving in India when he first met Amy, who was touring with her father Henry Phipps, the steel industrialist turned philanthropist, and the multimillionaire partner of Andrew Carnegie. Having crossed the floor at the same time as Winston, Freddie would make a successful career as Liberal MP for East Dorset, much to his mother’s annoyance, for Cornelia (who had been a close friend of Disraeli) was an arch Tory. She tried hard to persuade Winston to return to the Conservative benches and blamed him for Ivor’s Liberal views, but in fact Ivor was more Liberal than Churchill.* It is to his Aunt Cornelia’s credit that though she deprecated Winston’s political ideology, she was generous with her support and not only invited him often to stay at Canford, her home in Dorset, but several times sent him cheques at critical moments. ‘You know how much we care for you and your career, not only for your dear father’s sake, but also for yours, for you are always very dear to us and we want to be of a little help to you,’ she wrote affectionately in April 1905. ‘Now I know elections & Parliament in general all mean a great deal of expense & so we want…to send [you] a little present.† When the heiress is found, I think the good fortune will not be only on your side.’11 Freddie, having already found and married his own heiress, would later attain high office in government, and at various times act as Private Secretary and confidant to Winston. Ivor would later become 2nd Baron Wimborne, a junior minister and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
It is difficult to know why, in view of his failing marriage, Sunny Marlborough decided soon after Freddie’s wedding that summer to commission John Singer Sargent to paint a family portrait as a companion piece to one of the 4th Duke painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. At first glance, though stunning, it seems a fairly conventional representation. But knowing the emotional stress the main subjects were experiencing at the time, one perceives the sense of estrangement. Consuelo’s swan-like beauty draws the eye first, as intended. She stands gracefully wistful in a dark gown with a fur trim which, although opulent, manages not to detract from its wearer. She wears no jewellery. The artist has placed her at the top of a short flight of steps in the great hall, the others grouped around her. Sunny is to the left of her, dressed in his Garter‡ robes and standing on a step below Consuelo to disguise the fact that he was considerably shorter than his Duchess. Between them, held against his mother, is the heir, Lord Blandford, and to the right is the younger son Ivor with his Blenheim spaniels* – both children are dressed in costumes that would not have been out of place two centuries earlier. The only cohesion between these subjects is that between Consuelo and her elder son (in fact Ivor was her favourite child), and there is a general sense of unease despite – perhaps highlighted by – the sumptuous background, the beauty of the composition and the genius of the artist. ‘[Sargent] was very self-conscious,’ Consuelo recalled, ‘and his conversation consisted of brief staccato remarks of a rather caustic nature…as I got to know him better, I came under the spell of his kind-heartedness, which not even his shyness could disguise.’ It was almost the last thing Sunny and Consuelo would do together. After the portrait was completed Consuelo spent most of her time at Sunderland House and unless Sunny was away, she returned to Blenheim only when required to act as hostess there.
When the parliamentary session was over, Winston relaxed as the guest of Sir Ernest Cassel at his Swiss villa perched at seven thousand feet in the mountains near the Italian border, and in early September he travelled to meet Sunny in the Massif du Mont d’Or near the French–Swiss border. The two men were still the best of friends, and they spent some time together before returning to London. Ahead of them, they knew, was a period of hard electioneering for a general election in which Winston was to stand as Liberal candidate in the Tory stronghold of Manchester. When Sunny returned from Switzerland Consuelo went to America to have a minor operation on her throat which, it was believed, might relieve her deafness. She stayed with her mother, and soon the American papers were gossiping that all was not well between the Marlboroughs, that Consuelo was badly treated by the Duke, and there were hints of divorce. The gossip was echoing around London too, but the papers there would not have dared to be quite so open. At Christmas Consuelo tried to fill Blenheim with family members whom she could rely on to support her and help lighten the atmosphere. ‘Consuelo tells me she is going to bid you to Blenheim for Christmas,’ Winston wrote to Jennie. He was going there himself, and he begged her to join the party;12 Jennie’s bright conversation and her musical contributions were always a welcome addition to any country house party.
By the end of 1905 Winston had completed his masterly biography of his father, and recognising that publishing was outside his area of expertise he had contacted the Irishman Frank Harris,* a literary agent who had formerly been editor of the Evening News, the Fortnightly Review and Vanity Fair; he had also been one of the first to detect the genius of George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Winston had hoped to sell the book for as much as £5000, but Harris told him: ‘Properly worked this book should bring you in £10,000, or I’m a Dutchman.’ In fact Harris achieved £8000, and Winston was delighted. ‘I could certainly never have made such a bargain for myself,’ he wrote to Jennie. On 2 January 1906 the two volumes were published to critical acclaim, and remain the standard work on the subject. One of those who had opposed Winston when the project was initially suggested was Lord Rosebery, a close friend of Lord Randolph. Now he wrote that to his surprise the book had enthralled him. It had seemed to him an almost impossible book to write, but having read it,
I must congratulate you without qualification or reserve. I am I think naturally a cold-blooded critic. But here I can only dwell on one long monotonous note of praise. The plan was beset with difficulties. A son, who hardly knew his father as a public man or not at all, writing his father’s life; the story only ten years old and full of delicacies & resentments; many survivors of those times, whose toes it was impossible to avoid treading upon, still in existence. Moreover the career to be written about was full not merely of dazzling successes, but of perturbances and infirmities…. And what is the result? I cannot find a fault.1
3
January 1906 was an important month for Winston’s political life, too. With polling day a mere nine days off, he arrived in Manchester on the 4th. Having checked into the Midland Hotel, he went immediately to tour the worst slums of the city. ‘Fancy living in these streets,’ he remarked to a companion, ‘never seeing anything beautiful – never eating anything savoury – never saying anything clever!’ The last phrase being most important to Winston, he stressed it.*
Manchester was the home of the women’s suffrage movement led by the remarkable Mancunians Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel who founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). A bill for women’s suffrage had been filibustered in May of the previous year, after which Emmeline Pankhurst and other WSPU members began a loud protest outside the Parliament building. The bill was lost but Pankhurst considered it a successful demonstration of the organisation’s power to capture public attention. At the time of the 1906 election she declared: ‘We are at last recognized as a political party; we are now in the swim of politics, and are a political force.’ One of their earliest attempts to infiltrate a public meeting had occurred at one of Winston’s addresses three months earlier, and from a publicity viewpoint it had been a huge success. Accordingly, they now ignored most other candidates and concentrated on Winston’s higher-profile speeches, waving ‘Votes for Women’ banners and repeatedly heckling him – ‘Will you give us the vote?’ – which irritated the mostly male audience and at times even disconcerted Winston. At one meeting he invited a woman on to the platform to have her say. Before being forcibly ejected by the chairman she was given a rough time by the audience, especially the few women there: ‘Be quiet!’ – ‘You are disgracing us!’ – ‘Leave it to the men!’ When finally allowed to speak she asked Winston if, as a member of the Liberal government, he would ‘give a vote to the women of this country’. He replied: ‘The only time I have voted in the House of Commons on this question I have voted in favour of women’s suffrage, but having regard of the perpetual disturbance at public meetings in this election, I utterly decline to pledge myself.’ The term ‘henpecking’ came into popular usage as one consequence of these demonstrations.
Winston’s prime platform, however, was free trade, and it was on this issue that he carried the day. He was returned with a clear majority of 5639 votes over his opponents’ collective 4398, but of the nine parliamentary seats in the Manchester and Salford constituencies his was the only Liberal victory, all the others remaining resolutely Tory. Outside the Manchester area, though, the Liberals under Henry Campbell-Bannerman swept to victory with a landslide majority of 125 seats over all other parties, while the Tories under Arthur Balfour lost more than half of theirs.*
If Winston ever needed any justification for having crossed the floor (though there is no evidence that he agonised about it), this must have settled the matter. Some months before the election he had been offered an important Shadow post. And he knew what victory in the election meant for him – it was a stepping stone to his main goal, a Cabinet post. Now, with his election victory, he assumed for the Liberals the position that Sunny formerly held for the outgoing Tories, Under-Secretary for the Colonies. Originally he had been offered the post of Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and though this was technically a superior post it would have meant working under the formidable Herbert Asquith, giving him little chance to shine. At the Colonies, however, even as an under-secretary Winston would have as his chief Lord Elgin with whom he knew he could work in harmony, but who was also frequently absent visiting his Scottish estates. This would provide Winston with a far greater degree of autonomy. Elgin had been Viceroy in India when Winston was a lowly subaltern there, and since then a mutual respect had developed. Elgin would write later that he knew at the outset that it would be no easy task to work with Winston, but he had taken a keen interest in the younger man’s ability, and liked him.
Sunny wrote in a note of congratulation: ‘I am truly glad…You don’t realise yet what a position is now offered to you. Your speeches will be read throughout the Colonies, and you alone will be the mouthpiece of the Govt.’ On the contrary – Winston, having engineered it, fully realised what he had been offered. Acceptance put him in need of a good Private Secretary, and the two women whom he trusted above all others, his Aunt Leonie and Pamela Lytton, each separately encouraged him to select a man just a little older than himself – Edward (‘Eddie’) Marsh. The two men had first met at a dinner party in December 1905, and later in the evening Marsh saw Winston sitting on a sofa with Leonie. They were obviously discussing him, Marsh thought, because they kept looking over at him and nodding. Marsh had heard of the appointment but the gossip about Winston was not flattering. ‘Next morning [Churchill] paid his first visit to the Office,’ Marsh recalled, ‘and asked the Permanent Under-Secretary* to appoint me as his Private Secretary! This was quite out of the ordinary course, as I was no longer in the class of “Juniors” to whom such posts, with their extra pay, are a perquisite.’14
Without knowing of her championship, Marsh took himself off to Pamela Lytton to voice his misgivings and ask her advice. ‘Her answer,’ he wrote, ‘was one of the nicest things that can ever have been said about anybody. “The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues” and so it proved.’ Marsh was to work for Winston as his Private Secretary on and off throughout his working life, one of the handful of totally trusted people in Winston’s inner circle.
It was soon after the election that Consuelo began a passionate affair with Charles, Viscount Castlereagh, who was a friend of Winston’s and also his second cousin. Charles was married to Edith (‘Edie’) Chaplin,* but he already had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Like Sunny and Winston, he had been busy electioneering in January 1906 and had been elected MP for Maidstone, but by springtime people in their own close circles had become aware that Charles and Consuelo were involved in a romantic relationship. For Consuelo it was not her first affair. There had almost certainly been Paul Helleu, and there may have been other harmless flirtations. But she was now twenty-nine, a vulnerable, unfulfilled and lonely woman, deeply in need of tenderness. When she fell in love with Charles Castlereagh, all common sense was ignored in the thrill of passion. The lovers were spotted together in Paris at the end of March. But they had not been very discreet before that, in London, and when Consuelo returned home to Sunderland House, apparently after receiving a telegram from Sunny telling her not to bother to return at all, it was to face not only his wrath but that of Charles’s formidable mother, Theresa, Lady Londonderry.
Sunny had not remained faithful, but he did not believe that his wife should be granted the same privilege. Lady Londonderry had had at least two notorious liaisons, one of which permanently estranged her husband who, although they continued to live together, never spoke a word to her again for the rest of his life. This, however, did not make her especially sympathetic to the position in which Consuelo now found herself; rather, her chief concern was to avoid a scandal that would put an end to the political career of her son, who had recently been made a permanent under-secretary.
Theresa Londonderry apparently asked the Prince of Wales to bring pressure on the lovers to break up the affair. She also remonstrated with Consuelo who, notwithstanding their disagreement, continued to admire and like the older woman for many years afterwards. Consuelo was so smitten that she would have been willing to sacrifice her loveless marriage for this relationship, had it not been for her children. But letters between Charles and his wife Edie make it clear that, if not love, at least a great affection still existed between them. Edie was deeply hurt by the affair and took a long time to forgive her errant husband, despite letters from a contrite Charles pleading with her to pardon him. At the end of May a chastened Charles travelled to Spain with his wife to attend a royal wedding and Consuelo, wounded by the fact that Charles had chosen to return to his wife, was left to face Sunny.
&
nbsp; There is no formal record of the clash between the Duke and Duchess after Consuelo returned from Paris, but there evidently was one, and letters within the family mention the worsening situation between them throughout that time.15 A visitor to Blenheim in May, at the height of the trouble, without knowing the cause, wrote to a correspondent: ‘There is no affection in the atmosphere [here]; the poor Duke looks ill and heartbroken.’16
Later that year American Society columns reported several incidents that had apparently occurred during the summer of 1906. At a dinner party at Blenheim, it was reported, Consuelo had mentioned casually that she was intending to go to Paris to order her wardrobe for the following winter. The Duke – perhaps suspicious that she was planning to meet Charles there – flew into a temper and roared that she ought to go to Paris and stay there. It was also claimed that during that same summer Consuelo and Gladys Deacon had met in Paris and had quarrelled violently after Consuelo had accused Gladys of improper behaviour with her husband. From that date onwards Consuelo and Gladys were estranged.
How could the papers have known about these incidents – which, with hindsight, have the ring of veracity – unless someone had primed them? It would not have been the Duke, or Consuelo or Gladys; but in all probability it was Alva, who had heard Consuelo’s side of the story and was now as keen on her daughter obtaining a divorce from the Duke as she had once been that they should marry. Alva and the Duke were no longer on speaking terms – he now referred to her in his correspondence as ‘the old hag’. It is probable that Alva saw no reason why bad behaviour on the part of the Duke should be kept secret, and her contacts with Society-column editors were such that it was said of her that ‘she could write her own headlines’.
Winston considered both Sunny and Consuelo as his friends and he tried hard to effect a reconciliation, but in mid-October he accepted defeat and wrote to Jennie from Blenheim: ‘Sunny has definitely separated from Consuelo…Her father returns to Paris on Monday. I have suggested to her that you would be vy. willing to go and stay with her for a while, as I cannot bear to think of her being all alone during these dark days. If she should send for you, I hope you will put aside other things & go to her. I know how you always are a prop to lean on in bad times. We are vy. miserable here. It is an awful business.’17 But Jennie had heard the news and had already joined Consuelo at Sunderland House, from where she wrote to Winston, saying that it was a very painful experience. Mr Vanderbilt was also staying with Consuelo in order to work with the solicitors on his daughter’s behalf. A few days were still needed before the legal separation could be signed and although Consuelo was being dignified and calm, she was utterly miserable. Jennie wrote that she avoided asking any direct questions because she felt as sorry for Sunny as she did for Consuelo. She was inclined to believe that Consuelo had brought this all about by her affair with Charles Castlereagh, but she was sympathetic to the fact that Consuelo would be ostracised by women who had had twenty lovers, but had behaved discreetly and kept their husbands.18
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