The Irish question was to play an important part in the life of Churchill’s father, a few years after the secretariat in Dublin. Lord Randolph was an immensely gifted man, with a few limiting frailties. Despite the latter, he was to rise to prominence and flash briefly but brilliantly across the British political scene. Important among his frailties was the fact that he was a bon vivant on a grand scale, a man of convivial triumphs. In the England of the late 1800s there was not much employment for the sons of dukes; these unfortunates had to improve the hours as best they could. Some took to the Army, others to growing petunias; still others, such as Lord Randolph, started a career of the clubs and salons. Augmenting the latter, he successfully stood for Parliament soon after his marriage, but his real participation was not to begin until later. Speaking of his post with the new Viceroy, Lady Randolph said that “it proved to be of the greatest interest and value to him, diverting his mind from the frivolous society to which he had till then been rather addicted, and which now had ceased to smile on him.” The demolished smiles were not the result of his marriage to an American but involved his championship of his brother, who had got into a uniquely gaudy scrape. Boiled down, it centered on his importunate wooing of a married lady toward whom the Prince of Wales was directing his equally rakish glances. The situation embraced a fine point of protocol; the lady’s husband objected to being made ridiculous by anything less than royalty. The Prince of Wales, a man of judicial genius, took the side of the husband; as a result, the brothers were banned from court society for a period of eight years.
Lord Randolph and the American beauty, Jennie Jerome, had met at the fashionable English yachting center of Cowes, a spa that has more or less gone to seed in recent years and is now supplanted by Riviera fleshpots like Cannes and Eden Roc. Theirs was a romance to quicken the heart of every true lover of Victorian fiction. In the late 1800s, it was considered routine for all American heiresses to go abroad in search of a title, and for all marriageable European nobility to fix their sights on an American fortune. The arrangement was a sensible one, bringing some badly needed but faintly disreputable culture to American shores and providing a critical transfusion for the Old World gentry, many of whom were living in gigantic entailed palaces but with scarcely a dollar to call their own. Despite the businesslike aspect of these matches — the hint of Cupid firing with a gold-tipped arrow — they enraptured the weary and downtrodden, and furnished the theme of some spectacularly painful novels.
Cowes was a popular covert for the two packs of hunters, but Lord Randolph and Miss Jerome, whatever drew them there originally, had an authentic romance. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that both families opposed a wedding. The duke felt that his son should get elected to Parliament before entering into any entangling foreign alliances, and Miss Jerome’s father displayed a monumental apathy toward the suitor. Just how close the American father and his future son-in-law were may be seen from a description the latter gave of the former to the suspicious duke, as reported around the London clubs. “Mr. Jerome,” said Lord Randolph, “is a gentleman who is obliged to live in New York to look after his business. I do not know what it is.” Notwithstanding this offhand precis, Leonard W. Jerome, the indeterminate businessman, was an American of substance, himself a high liver of cyclonic competence. Besides being the father of Miss Jerome, he was also known as the Father of the American Turf. His diversified parenthood made no difference to the duke, who finally decreed that, if the match must indeed go through, a fat dowry was in order. After the two families had cooled down a trifle, this matter was settled to the satisfaction of all. Jerome’s reasons for feeling able to snoot with the frostiest clans in Britain were perfectly in order. Although he had sprung from humble farming stock, in upper New York State, he had risen to glory. One of ten children, he had worked his way through Union College (generally given out as Princeton afterward), married a neighbor, studied law at Albany and gone into the newspaper business, soon acquiring control of the Rochester (New York) Native American. At some point along the way he had picked up a raging disapproval of slavery, and he filled his paper with such malevolent editorials on the subject that somebody, probably a Southern senator, conceived the idea of paying him honor by appointing him American consul to Trieste. Jerome had a growing family, but he agreed, wrote three or four quick editorials that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin look like the work of a secessionist, and set off for a three-year incarceration in diplomacy. He was miserable. There were no slaves in Trieste, and besides, the place was too quiet. Winston Churchill’s mother, spending her earliest childhood abroad, spoke Italian before she spoke English.
When Jerome returned home he had a great deal of pent-up energy. He settled his family in New York City and went into Wall Street, where he made an immediate million dollars, after the style of the period. He himself acquired style by leaps and bounds and was soon known as one of the brightest lights along the Rialto. Branching out rapidly, he bought a sizable share of the New York Times and began to build race tracks, in the first flush of his Turf-fathering phase. Among the tracks for which he is responsible, for better or worse, were those at Jerome Park, Sheepshead Bay, and Morris Park. Also, he and August Belmont were the principal organizers of the American Jockey Club. Jerome’s horses lost him a fortune, and the New York Times almost lost him his life. Slavery again. In the draft riots of 1862, an armed mob gathered to smash the paper, which had blasted the Copperheads, or Southern sympathizers. Jerome was compelled to rush around the corner and buy some guns. His rewrite men and copy-trimmers took up an uneasy stand at the windows, no doubt peering out mistily through bifocals, and a nasty crisis was averted. A show of strength had kept the peace, as it is always likely to do.
In the following years the Jeromes lived at fashionable addresses — in New York’s Madison Square in the winter and at Newport in the summer. They went out much in society. The Father of the American Turf cut a very gay figure around town, famous for owning the never beaten Kentucky and, later, the Pacific Mail Line. He drove the first “four-in-hand” seen on the streets of New York. Jerome, a robust man, liked to be in the vanguard of events, and when the laughable Cyrus Field finally put to sea with his rickety transatlantic cable, he strode the deck beside him, spurring him on with turfy shouts and promises of financial support. Jerome’s steam yacht, the Clara Clarita, trailed along behind in case of accidents. In 1867 he took his family to Paris, where his ailing wife consulted the celebrated Dr. Sims, confusingly enough an expatriate American. Mrs. Jerome and her two daughters, Jennie and Clare, were to stay on for years, while the husband traveled back and forth at the dictates of his business, whatever it happened to be at the moment. He continued to make and lose fortunes as his family, in the gaudy French capital, rang up social triumphs never before equaled by Americans in Europe. Jerome’s eventual death, at the age of seventy-four, was of more than routine interest. He had attended a circus, in London, and listened indignantly to the strong man’s offer of fifty pounds to anybody in the house who could stay five minutes with him in the ring. Jerome was walking with a cane at the time, but he hobbled up, removed his cutaway, hung his cane on the ropes, and beat the giant senseless. Not long afterward he fell dead of a heart attack. The doctors suggested that he might have strained himself.
His daughter Jennie’s introduction to Lord Randolph Churchill, at a ball aboard a cruiser anchored off Cowes in August 1873, was no new sort of experience for the girl. She had only recently been taken boating by Napoleon III. Like most Americans, she had democratic instincts, and she made the descent from emperor to lord gracefully. Lord Randolph was said to have remarked to a friend directly after the meeting, “There is my future wife.” She was greatly sought after, the confidante of such notables as the Princess Metternich, the Due de Persigny, and the Due de Praslin, whose father had caused a mild stir in French court circles by throttling his wife, thus providing the basis for an American novel and movie of later years, All This, and Heaven Too. The late, hasty due�
��s much-maligned but innocent nurse had gone to America and married the Rev. Henry M. Field, brother of Leonard Jerome’s old friend Cyrus, the Atlantic cable addict.
After her own marriage, Lady Randolph found considerable fault with England and complained of the traditional view the English took of Americans. “The innumerable caricatures supposed to represent the typical American girl depicted her always of one type,” she said. “Beautiful and refined in appearance, but dressed in exaggerated style, and speaking — with a nasal twang — the most impossible language. The young lady who, in refusing anything to eat, says, ‘I’m pretty crowded just now,’ or in explaining why she is traveling alone, remarks that ‘Poppa don’t voyage, he’s too fleshy,’ was thought to be representative of the national type and manners.” Accustomed to the freedom of France, Lady Randolph thought England strait-laced and dull: “The strict observance of Sunday filled me with awe and amazement. I had lived most of my life in Paris, where everything gay and bright was reserved for that day, and could not understand the voluntary, nay, deliberate, gloom and depression in which everyone indulged.”
A young lady never went driving by herself, and feminine smoking was entirely out of bounds. A certain Lord —, visiting at Windsor, was so hard pressed for nicotine that he was found in his bedroom lying on his back and smoking up the chimney. When Queen Victoria (herself a non-smoker) heard of this desperate situation, she installed a smoking room in the castle, one of the first in England. The English masked balls were an especial bane to Lady Randolph, who believed that such frolics warranted a slight relaxation of austerity. She found that, even if a dancing partner were costumed as a Siberian wolfhound, he still insisted on behaving like an Englishman. When she essayed a harmless piece of coquetry with one fellow, he uttered a few strangled cries, in a public school accent, and fled out into the night. “Deficient in humor and not overburdened with brains,” said Lady Randolph, “he could not take the joke, and left the house a miserable man.” Summing up, she added, “Generally speaking, there is no doubt that English people are dull-witted at a masked ball, and do not understand or enter into the spirit of intrigue which is all-important on such occasions.”
All in all, Lady Randolph was vastly pleased when the duke accepted his appointment in Ireland and the family moved to Dublin. Later she came to love England and lived on there the rest of her life, or many years after her husband had died. She was, in those Irish years, a glittering beauty, with a keen wit and a mischievous sense of humor. Like her father, she had little or no awe of the British, despite their sturdily superior manner, and enjoyed treating them as ordinary mortals. She and her husband once went to a Sunday dinner at the Prince of Wales’ in a dilapidated hack, not wishing to interrupt their servants’ holiday. When they left, the prince handed her in and said, “Madam, your conscience is better than your carriage.” “Is it not, Sir, the Queen’s carriage?” she replied, remembering that public conveyances were known as the Queen’s carriages. “How can I have a better?” The prince took it sportingly. The Viscount d’Abernon penned a brief sketch of Lady Randolph in this period. “I have [he wrote] the clearest recollection of seeing her for the first time. It was at the Viceregal Lodge at Dublin. She stood on one side, to the left of the entrance. The Viceroy (the Duke of Marlborough) was on a dais at the further end of the room surrounded by a brilliant staff, but eyes were not turned on him or on his consort, but on 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 favorite ornament — its lustre dimmed by the flashing glory of her eyes. More of the panther than of the woman in her look, but with a cultivated intelligence unknown to the jungle. 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.”
A life-sized, tinted photograph of Lady Randolph now hangs in an antechamber of Winston Churchill’s home. It is one of the first things visitors to the house see as they enter. He was to write of her, years after Viscount d’Abernon composed his sketch, “My mother made a brilliant impression upon my childhood life. She shone for me like the evening star, I loved her dearly but at a distance. She always seemed to me a fairy princess.” The Britons’ attitude toward their young is far less gluey than that of Americans. It is the tribal practice, in England, to pack children off to boarding school as soon as they can be transported without actually endangering their lives, and even at home they are seldom underfoot, the management being given over to a domestic. Perhaps as a result, the English beyond doubt have the best nervous structures of all the civilized races. Churchill, as a child, rarely saw his mother. In this regard, she took easily to the English ways, having been in the first place socially energetic and disposed toward her own amusements.
The best early sources concur that the boy Winston Churchill was marked by an almost unique intransigence. He was mule-headed to a degree. His appearance left no doubt of the smoldering fires within: he was small, red-haired, peppered with freckles, had a slightly pug nose and a mouth that signaled competition as plainly as a signpost. His eyes were blue and gazed out with unflinching calm, and a touch of impatience, on children and grownups alike. The composite message of his countenance was strongly reminiscent of South Carolina’s unpacific slogan: “Don’t tread on me.” Even at his tender age in Ireland he was too much for the average nanny. One of the richest compliments to his young life was paid him years afterward by a woman who had contracted to teach him some rudiments of good behavior. “I used to think him the naughtiest little boy in the whole world,” she wrote, with a strong suggestion of relief that the ordeal was behind her. Authority acted on Churchill like magnesium on water. Nannies, governesses, and nurses followed one another in pretty rapid succession. One day, learning that a new warden — somewhat younger and stronger — was expected, he followed the only course possible to a boy of such spirit: he borrowed a donkey and ran away. It was bad judgment, however, for he had not taken the precaution of learning to ride. He fell off on his head and suffered a concussion, which healed.
Happily, both for Churchill and the countryside, he was at last provided with a nurse of real ability, a Mrs. Everest, who took him in hand with great tact. It was the beginning of a relationship that was to play an influential part in his life. Mrs. Everest encouraged him at innocuous pursuits, such as collecting lead soldiers. The military passion of the first Marlborough, long latent in the line, suddenly sprang to life in the child. He was attracted immediately to the fascinating game of war, and has had a good deal to do with it ever since. Altogether, he rounded up fifteen hundred beautifully made toy figures, which he formed into an infantry division with a cavalry brigade. He also got some toy cannon and other fighting equipment. So elaborate and ingenious were his maneuvers with this array of miniature might that his father, ordinarily aloof, one day consented to visit the battlefield. Lord Randolph stood solemnly studying the terrain, asking questions and watching his son. He said at length, “Would you like to go into the Army?” Churchill replied affirmatively, and the father said the matter would be arranged. Some years afterward, Lord Randolph confided to a friend that he had considered his son a little retarded and thought that the Army might be an easy solution all around.
Life passed pleasantly enough in those days in Ireland. Churchill has retained memories of a social bustle around the Viceregal Lodge, of Mrs. Everest talking endlessly about a wonderland called Kent (where he was later to establish his house of Chartwell), and of his grandfather unveiling a statue to Lord Gough, saying, “and with a withering volley he shattered the enemy’s line.” The whole family enjoyed the place. Lady Randolph later said that she had never met a dull Irishman. She apparently never met a dull Irish fox, either, for her memoirs are crammed with rhapsodies to the local sport. In perhaps no other country of the world does the urge to get out and chivvy foxes so closely approach a mania. The average upper-class Irishman finds it
impossible to live in the same county with a contented fox; he has to round up some hounds and show it who’s boss. Taken all around, if foxes were as smart as they’re traditionally supposed to be, the ones in Ireland would have joined the snakes in the general walkout at the time of Patrick’s tantrum. “Hunting became our ruling passion,” wrote Lady Randolph. “Many were the tosses I took,” she added gaily. Probably the worst rider in the neighborhood, and possibly in the world, was the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who had come over for the express purpose of fox hunting and taken a house nearby. The Empress may safely be written down as a devotee on a par with the slavering Irish. In arriving, she had changed to the ritual garb on the train, pulled up at a suburb, and slid onto a horse’s back from the vestibule. Voicing the horrid cry of the chase, she had lit out down the road, holding the reins in one hand and carrying a fan in the other. The horse then rounded a sharp curve and the Empress sailed on straight, landing on the imperial behind in a ditch. Nothing like it had ever been seen around Dublin, but she was greatly applauded for having a congenial anti-fox bias. The Empress ordered a gymnasium built onto her house and worked out with bar bells every morning to condition herself for the crunching spills she took. She was very popular. The only disparaging comments heard about her involved her use of rice paper instead of handkerchiefs. She littered the countryside like a billposter. The Empress was finally assassinated, but the tragedy had nothing to do with foxes.
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 4