Winston was in the difficult position of trying to support each of the parties while wishing to retain the friendship of both. He discussed the matter with Lord Hugh (‘Linky’) Cecil, a confidant of his and Sunny’s,* who wrote that Sunny was placing himself in a difficult position which pleased ‘neither the Christians, nor the fast set’. The Christians, he said, felt that whatever Consuelo had done the Duke was equally to blame as he had himself been unfaithful. On the other hand, the ‘fast set’ around the King were annoyed because the usual discretion about such affairs was not being observed and this cast their own behaviour into focus.
[Sunny’s] position, that his wife is unfit to live with him because she went wrong before he did & because the standard for women in these things is higher than for men, is not defensible…I am sure he will do himself harm…A much higher consideration is his children: to break up the home is ruinous to them – sooner or later it will dawn on them what it means – & there will be a third generation of shame. I do feel this very strongly: the children are the only people concerned who are innocent – their well-being ought to be the dominant consideration.19
But matters had gone far beyond the reconciliation urged by their friends. When George Cornwallis-West returned home, Jennie took Consuelo with her to Salisbury Hall. ‘Poor little Consuelo is here,’ George wrote to Winston. ‘I do pity her with all my heart, what a tragedy…Take my advice & if ever you do marry, do it from motives of affection & none other. No riches in the world can compensate for anything else.’20
The following day, however, George was writing again to Winston, angrily this time, about some gossip that had just been repeated to him. The Marlboroughs’ separation was on everyone’s lips that week and Sunny and Winston’s aunt, the redoubtable Lady Sarah Wilson, was in the thick of it, disseminating rumour and innuendo via her friend Minnie Paget. Naturally, most of the Churchill family ranged themselves squarely behind the head of their family, and it was variously alleged that Consuelo had been unfaithful with from three to six lovers. George Cornwallis-West was stunned to hear from someone who had obtained the information directly from Lady Paget that he himself was being mentioned by Sarah Wilson as one of these lovers.
‘Sarah has behaved like a perfect beast,’ he wrote furiously to Winston, ‘and the sooner she is told the better…I naturally did not discuss the case, but merely denied any knowledge of such details. If Sarah thinks she is championing Sunny’s case by casting mud (some of which will undoubtedly come back to him) she is much mistaken. Surely the obvious line for all your family to take is to decline all discussion on the matter, let alone volunteering disgusting gossip with the most renowned of gossip mongers. She actually had the impudence to tell Consuelo,’ he had now discovered, ‘that she was not certain whether I was her lover, and that the only reason she had any doubt about it was because I had borrowed money from Sunny…I am sorely tempted to go and tell Sarah what I think of her…what a liar that woman is.’21
This matter might have been the cause of the serious falling-out between Consuelo and Jennie that week. A month afterwards Jennie wrote to her that she had been ‘deeply wounded’ by Consuelo’s recent treatment of her. Reminding Consuelo that she had always been a ‘true friend’, she continued, ‘had you been a sister [I] could not have shown you more loyalty or affection.’ She did not regret this, Jennie wrote, and ‘God knows you are not in a position to alienate a friend – therefore I will still call myself one.’22 However, the two women were not reconciled and two years later they would still avoid parties and weekends if they learned the other was to be present. The entire family were dragged into the affair in one way or another. Following George’s letter, Winston, who attempted to be scrupulously fair to both parties throughout this marital mayhem, had tackled his Aunt Sarah, and they had also quarrelled. Sunny wrote and told him wearily to drop the matter, which he claimed had all been caused by Consuelo being mischievous and malicious.23 Anne Vanderbilt, Consuelo’s stepmother, in Paris, however, told another member of the Vanderbilt family: ‘The real problem is that [Consuelo] is physically repulsive to [Sunny] and that he cannot bear to be near her.’24
Of course the problem was not quite as clear-cut as that, for the Duke was still in love with Gladys Deacon and wanted no one else. From correspondence between Winston and Lord Hugh Cecil it appears that Sunny and Gladys were lovers and that Consuelo had been willing to bolt with Castlereagh. Furthermore, although no names are mentioned in this correspondence it seems that Consuelo’s dalliance with Paul Helleu was known about and predated Sunny’s first adulterous liaison. ‘The fact that Sunny had married her without loving her,’ Cecil wrote, ‘is not and has not been absolved now by her misconduct, and therefore his unfaithfulness is a thing of which he ought to be seriously ashamed.’25
By Christmas, with Winston’s assistance, it looked as though the matter had been settled reasonably amicably with a legal separation. Their lawyers had agreed that neither party would accuse the other of infidelity, and that they would have equal access to the children who would spend half a year with each. Sunny and Consuelo each wrote to Winston thanking him for this help, but at the beginning of January 1907 any progress achieved had dissipated. Alva (now Mrs Belmont) became involved, insisting on a clause that would prevent Marlborough, under threat of legal enforcement, from making allegations in public about Consuelo, and allow her to visit Blenheim for the sake of appearances. These new terms, which Winston thought reasonable, were read out in the office of the Duke’s solicitors. Infuriated, Marlborough backed down on all the agreements he had made so far and refused to sign. Winston became very angry, went home and wrote his cousin a stern letter. If he would not cooperate with those who had his best interests at heart, he told him, ‘I cannot save you from yourself. If you will not fight and will not make peace you will be hunted down and butchered.’ It made him heartsick, he said, when they were so close to a satisfactory settlement,
to see you cast away your last chance of a decent life by folly and weakness…All you were asked to do was give up the pleasure of blackguarding your wife. Rather than surrender that you will immerse yourself in such shame and public hatred that no one will ever be able to help you any more…if you are not equal to the task of settling this social difficulty why won’t you entrust it to Cecil or to Ivor? Let them talk to Mrs B[elmont]…why on earth can’t you face the situation like a man? Do your best to help Consuelo to have a fair chance in life, under the new conditions, and forget for the moment your petty pride, your shoddy consistency…and the damned fools to whom you listen.26
The above draft may or may not have been sent, but either way it provides valuable insight into how matters stood; and Winston may well have realised that such frankness could easily lose him Sunny’s friendship, which meant much to him. The following day he wrote a somewhat less frank letter, offering to come to Blenheim to discuss the problem. Sunny’s answer came indirectly via a note to Winston from Mr Angus at the Blenheim estate office asking if he would suggest a date for the removal of his three polo ponies from the Blenheim stables. After that there was nothing for two weeks until Winston wrote again, asking Sunny if he now felt he had a quarrel with him. The Duke replied at great length:
No, I have no quarrel with you and nor if I had would it be of long duration. I will initiate your suggestion not to enter into a long argument. I will make only one or two brief comments on your communication.
I deny that I gave you previous authority or knew that you were going to suggest…that a visit to Blenheim by Consuelo should be one of the terms of the agreement. But then neither you nor anyone else excluded from the area of possibility that at some future date when I deem it right and proper, I may invite her to visit the children. That invitation will depend on circumstances but it will be at my pleasure and convenience…
I cannot help feeling that if you consulted your political associates and tell them the advice which you offered me, explaining at the same time that you were cognisant of
the reasons which induced me to ask Consuelo to leave Blenheim, that they would reverse their belief in the capacity and probity of your judgement…Your abilities are considerable but my mind is sufficiently active to detect the appearance of infirmities in your case. That is why I would not accept the proposals…though my refusal mostly inflamed you and induced you to leave me in anger…there was policy in my method. I knew that Mrs B…believed that she had intimidated you and she relied on your influence to work on me. The moment she was informed about that broken communication with Ivor and Cecil she dropped all her excuse of social clauses…
My dear, you tried to bring pressure on me to do as you wished, but not what I wanted. You must forgive me if in order to have my way and not submit to pressures I had to pretend to be estranged from you. It was the only way I could triumph over that old Hag. She is now entirely deflated…The hand of reparation you ask for I give you with both of mine, and I suppose that in order to celebrate the termination of my bothers, and the reinstatement of the aims I had in view when these threats began, that we journey to Paris at once…27
Consuelo had already left England by then with their sons, to cruise in the Mediterranean with her father. In the autumn of 1907 she visited her mother. Disembarking at New York she was mobbed by crowds and press. Jennie wrote to Winston when she heard of this, saying that it was far too soon for Consuelo to go back while she was still headline news.28
13
1907–8
Couples
In the spring of 1907 Winston was rumoured to be on the brink of marriage. A Colonial Conference was held in London in April and among the delegates was Louis Botha – the same who had taken Winston prisoner during the Boer War after the train wreck seven years earlier. Now he was General Botha of the Transvaal, and accompanied by his striking and intelligent daughter, Helen. A valued friendship and mutual esteem had grown between these former adversaries, and Winston was so flattering about Botha in his eloquent speeches and so much in Botha’s company that it elicited press comment about the true nature of his interest. This rumour reached Winston’s former girlfriend Muriel Wilson, who wrote both to congratulate him on his engagement to the elegant Miss Botha and also on being made Privy Councillor, a signal honour for such a young man. ‘I hope [you] and Miss Botha, and all the little Bothas will come and see me,’ Muriel wrote teasingly.
The engagement rumour was not true, though Winston had been seen with Miss Botha a few times; but the elevation to Privy Councillor was fact. The King wrote to Winston: ‘We have known your parents for many years (even before their marriage) & you & your brother since your childhood. Knowing the great abilities which you possess – I am watching your political career with great interest.’1 One outcome of the new friendship offered to Botha by the British was the gift from the people of Transvaal of the Cullinan diamond to the King on his sixty-sixth birthday. It was the largest ever discovered, at over 3025 carats (uncut).*
But it was twenty-seven-year-old Jack, not Winston, who found a marriage partner that year. Jack was an unusual Churchill in that he possessed what few of his male relatives did: namely, an endearing and gentle humility. And he was proud to be known as Winston’s brother. Although Jack had once hoped to go to Oxford, his son has written that he ‘was not what I would call intelligent’,2 and his love of music and books was more a flirtation than a deep commitment. Unlike Winston, who had begun to prepare himself for leadership in his teens, Jack had no ambitions other than to marry and be happy and to earn enough to decently maintain a family. Consequently he was content to work ‘laboriously’ for a London stockbroker, enduring a routine that Winston could never have accepted: 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. each day, Monday to Friday, with three weeks’ annual holiday. Although he was earning £500 a year – quite sufficient, when added to his parental allowance, to enable him to live comfortably and elegantly as a bachelor – it would not provide for a wife and family.
It has been suggested by several biographers that the girl Jack fell in love with, Lady Gwendeline Bertie, was interested at first in Winston, and he in her. She wrote a number of spirited letters to him during 1907, but they are simply that – spirited, but with no hint of romance. It is evident from her girlish prattle that she would never have suited Winston as a wife. It would seem that there was probably a sort of youthful hero-worship on her part, except for one microscopic piece of evidence. John (‘Jock’) Colville, who knew Churchill intimately in later life, suggested in one of his books, but without providing any explanation, that Winston had ‘succumbed to her charms’ before he met Clementine Hozier.
Nowhere in her letters to Winston does Lady Gwendeline hint that she and Jack were romantically involved, although later the two would state that they had been secretly in love for six months (which covered the period she was writing to Winston), and even earlier before they had told each other. Jack had felt he could not honourably make overtures to Gwendeline because he could not support a wife, and also there were religious differences. Gwendeline (universally known as ‘Goonie’) was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon, who expected his daughter to marry suitably – that is, someone with prospects, but, primarily, a Catholic. It looked hopeless, and Jack told Winston he had not been able to see any way forward.3 A friend who knew Goonie when she was a debutante described her thus: ‘Her alluring mermaid beauty has a strange translucent quality…Her wide-opened eyes are like blue flowers…[her] enigmatic loveliness casts so subtle and so lasting a spell…A gift for making whatsoever she might choose to wear seem exactly right, was part of Goonie’s magic.’4 John Singer Sargent caught these qualities in a family portrait of her.
One biographer has suggested that Winston vanished to Paris at this point so as to avoid any romantic complications with Goonie; however, his trip had been planned for a long time beforehand and could not have been connected (though it may have been convenient). Winston had worked hard and efficiently that year and had organised a five-month overseas fact-finding trip beginning with his official participation in a series of Army manoeuvres in France, which would have fascinated him. He had correctly calculated that Lord Elgin’s social and domestic commitments in Scotland meant that he himself effectively ran the Colonial Office. The archives of that department clearly demonstrate Winston’s energetic and knowledgeable leadership; and his command of the English language is evident even in his routine interdepartmental memoranda.
From France he travelled on to Italy, where he met Sunny in Venice before setting out for East Africa, a region only recently colonised and about which Winston was curious. There was a warm letter from Pamela Lytton to speed him on his way, addressed to ‘Winston mine’. She told him that she had been to Doncaster races with Goonie: ‘We talked about you. There were endless cats…chief among them sly Sarah – whose evil eye shines ever brighter and harder.’5 Sarah Wilson, whose undertakings in South Africa had proved her to be brave, intelligent and resourceful, took huge pleasure, as already noted, in spreading stories about Consuelo. Her constant mischief-making suggests that she may have been bored with life in peacetime England.
Winston replied to Pamela, referring to her as a ‘kitten’ and thanking her for her always constant friendship. ‘I have vy few friends’, he wrote from Venice:
I could make more, but…alas with my busy selfish life – I fear, as it is, I fail too often in the little offices which keep friendship sweet & warm. But you always understand me & pardon, because you know me & care about me; & upon my word you are almost the only person who does – except Jack & my mother – which is different: & Sunny, who also is different again…Sunny is vy glad to get me here. All his old friends are in the canals [in Venice] – but he does not dare to go to see any of them except for a minute or two because of gossip. He is all alone: & quite embittered. But he has only to keep his head high
& to hold firm for two or three years – for all to come right for him.6
Among Sunny’s friends in Venice that year was Gladys (to whom Winston referred as �
��a strange glittering being’). She and Winston spent a morning together in a gondola, but he reported that he had nothing in common with her. Did he realise what was going on between Sunny and her? For all his political precocity, Winston was rather naive in emotional terms. Perhaps he was simply being diplomatic, but he was one of the very few men who did not fall at Gladys’s feet. The only time Sunny ever lived up to his nickname was when he was in her company. Sunny’s misery at his situation was compounded by jealousy. He was only too aware that he was merely one of a legion of admirers, which included Marcel Proust* and the Russian philosopher Hermann Keyserling – who had asked Gladys to marry him, but his proposal was left unanswered for a year. Others were Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian playwright and poet who wrote libretti for some of Richard Strauss’s operas, and even the seventy-year-old sculptor Auguste Rodin. Winston did not dislike Gladys, but he was not attracted to her and did not know how to react to her. Probably, too, his loyalty to Consuelo affected his reaction. As for Gladys herself, her dislike of Winston may have stemmed from her failure to enslave him. In conversation with Hugo Vickers, one of her biographers, she delivered a scathing attack on Winston, claiming that he was cold and self-obsessed. ‘He was incapable of love,’ she said. ‘He was in love with his own image…he took an instant dislike to me…he was entirely out for Winston.’7
The Churchills Page 26