Hesketh Pearson

by The Marrying Americans

  The Conservatives were returned, and as Randolph was much too dangerous a man to leave out of the ministry, their chief, Lord Salisbury, gave him the India Office, and even went so far as to shift the leader of the House of Commons to the Upper House because Randolph did not approve of him. In December ‘85 Jenny went to Windsor Castle to receive the Order of the Crown of India. Her black velvet dress was thickly embroidered with jet, and Queen Victoria, in trying to find a penetrable spot for the pin, stuck it into her flesh. But having had almost half a century’s practice at the job of affixing medals to breasts, her Majesty soon rectified the error. During her short stay at Windsor, Jenny was chiefly struck by the habit of conversing in whispers when the Queen was present. She thought this childish.

  Early in ‘86 the Conservative cabinet resigned and Randolph, although secure in his Woodstock seat, stood for a Birmingham constituency, where two radical leaders were all-powerful: John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain. Jenny found industrial voters more difficult to manage than agricultural ones, and when she requested a sulky audience to explain why they were so cross, she was told that they disliked being asked for their votes. “But you have something I want,” she ingenuously replied. “How am I to get it if I don’t ask for it?” They declined to be cajoled, and her husband was defeated by John Bright. But Randolph’s electioneering stunt of Tory Democracy, originally propagated by Disraeli, was fairly successful in other constituencies; and when Gladstone, who was returned to Downing Street, suffered defeat over his Home Rule for Ireland bill, the Conservatives beat their opponents thoroughly in the General Election of July ‘86. Salisbury recognized that Randolph Churchill’s speeches throughout the country had done more than anything else to make them victorious and appointed him not only Chancellor of the Exchequer but leader of the House of Commons.

  We may pause here for a while to consider the curious personality of the man Jenny had married, a man who would almost certainly have become Prime Minister of Great Britain if he had been blessed with good health and the sound political judgment that might have issued therefrom. Physically he was short, like so many men of action, and made up in activity for what he lacked in inches. He had those peculiar popeyes we sometimes see in men of fierce and capricious will power. He once called Gladstone “an old man in a hurry,” but was himself a young man in a hurry. He always gave the impression of being a spoilt child, a mother’s darling, as indeed he was, and possessed the personal charm that often results from the ceaseless gratification of whims. He hungered for the pleasant things of life and usually got them, but displayed pettishness when denied them. He liked good food, complained of poor meals, and Jenny once had to make him apologize to a hostess whose dinner he had criticized. Having an excitable and unbalanced nature, success quickly went to his head, and when Salisbury’s private secretary, George Nathaniel Curzon, met him at Hatfield in January ‘86, degeneration had already set in.

  “I used to know him well and to be on familiar terms with him,” repined the future Viceroy of India; “but since he has become a swell he will scarcely look at his subordinates, and the barest civility is all that one can expect.”

  Now and then his rudeness was justified, as in the case of the club bore who started a yarn that would clearly continue for some time. Randolph rang the bell, asked the waiter to hear the end of the story, and walked out. Like a dictator, the more Randolph was pampered the more he demanded. For eight years prior to his promotion by Salisbury he had been a disruptive force in politics, just like the radical Joseph Chamberlain; but he lacked Chamberlain’s steadiness of purpose and singleness of aim; unlike Joseph he had never disciplined himself; and the result was that all the older men of the party distrusted him while the younger men who admired him also feared him.

  “He is too proud to care for any but the first place,” said Chamberlain; and a caustic Whig of the old regime, Sir William Harcourt, on hearing that Randolph contemplated forming a Centre Party, observed: “Quite so—all centre and no circumference.” When Randolph caught sight of a picture of Louis XVI, in which that monarch looked equally stupid and arrogant, he declared: “Now at last I understand the French Revolution!” Had he been capable of an objective assessment of himself, he might have understood the disaster about to befall him. Instead of which he was dumfounded.

  At the time of his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer he was the most popular young politician in the country; and since he quickly controlled the Commons as leader of the House, he became “the favorite” in the political steeplechase. As an orator he could draw larger crowds than anyone else; he was not a spellbinder like Gladstone but a hard-hitter like Chamberlain; and as no one knew whose turn it would be next for a good drubbing, his appearance on platforms was breathlessly awaited. His physical make-up was familiar to the mob, the large mustache, popeyes, and perky manner being a godsend to cartoonists.

  Trouble started with his budget proposals in the spring of ‘86. He wished to cut expenditure on the armed forces, which aroused opposition from the War Minister, which spread to the Cabinet. He had now reached a state of paranoia whereat disagreement with his policy was construed into personal hostility, and feeling that he was indispensable to the Party, that in fact the world could not get on without him, he decided to bring his opponents to heel by threatening to resign. The threat was unavailing, and in an impulsive moment, such as occurs when a man is intoxicated with champagne or self-importance, he sent Lord Salisbury a letter of resignation. This act was committed while Randolph was staying at Windsor Castle. The Prime Minister expressed regret, perhaps in the hope that Churchill would reconsider his decision; but driven on by the thought that no one in the Party could take his place, Randolph refused to climb down, and Salisbury informed the Queen, who had already seen it in The Times and was furious at the breach of etiquette.

  On December 23, 1886, the night before the statement appeared in print, Randolph and Jenny, with Sir Henry Wolff, were at a theatre together. After the first act Randolph suddenly announced that he was going to the club. Actually he went to see the editor of The Times, to whom he gave a copy of the letter he had written at Windsor Castle three nights before. Not a hint of what he intended to do had he let fall to Jenny, which shows that the sympathy and confidence of love between the two were incomplete. When she arrived with the paper at the breakfast table next morning, she found him calm and smiling. “Quite a surprise for you,” was all he said.

  “He went into no explanation,” she afterwards avowed, “and I felt too utterly crushed and miserable to ask for any, or even to remonstrate.”

  He made a feeble attempt to put himself right with the Queen, Government and country, by explaining that he had pledged himself to effect economies. But as no minister ever redeems his pledges unless it happens to suit his purpose, the explanation carried no conviction. The realistic and hard-headed Salisbury must have chuckled over the naive notion that a politician’s promises were made to be kept.

  The truth is that Churchill wanted to ride roughshod over everyone else and probably dreamed of displacing Salisbury. It is charitable and even probable to suppose that he was already beginning to suffer from the dreadful disease which killed him. It is certain that the complete failure of his action staggered him. Two days after his resignation a Liberal M.P. named Brett (afterwards Lord Esher) found him lying on the sofa in his large gray library, completely prostrated and smoking cigarette after cigarette. He told Brett that he was being shunned like the pest and no one had been near him, not even those who owed everything to him. It was a dreadful time for Jenny, who heard her husband abused on every side, often “by men who owed their political existence to him.”

  “Men shut their doors against a setting sun,” says Shakespeare, and Randolph’s sun had set in the prime of life. He remained in the Commons for the rest of his career, but his was a spent force. A good deal of his time was now to be devoted to travel and the turf. He bought a mare for £300. Jenny christened her L’Abbesse de Jouarre
from Renan’s work of that name which she had just read, but the bookies called her “Abscess on the Jaw.” She won the Oaks as an outsider in ‘88, after which Randolph sold her for £7,000.

  Soon after his disappearance from the front bench Randolph took Jenny to Russia, where she was described as “the most beautiful black-haired woman ever seen, who danced light as a moth on skates.” On their return to England she still hoped that her husband would be asked to join the Government in a different office, and she tried to pump Lord Salisbury on the subject; but the P.M. was cagey and she got the impression that they would never work together again. “I had the greatest difficulty to get him to speak of Randolph,” she told her sister. She felt convinced that her husband had completely lost his head before resigning, believing he could do whatever he wished. But she admitted that he had been “so much easier and nicer since that I ought not to regret the crisis.”

  She continued to play the piano, attend concerts and help struggling musicians. A young Polish pianist arrived with a letter of introduction. He was so nervous that, to put him at his ease, she suggested they should play a Beethoven duet together. He was too good for her and she refused to play with him any more. She got a number of people to attend his first concert at St. James’s Hall, but the house was only half full and the audience critical. A year later he gave another concert and the audience went delirious with enthusiasm. He called on Jenny and hinted that they might play the same duet together. “I shall not feel so shy this time,” he said. His name was Paderewski.

  Winston was causing his mother some anxiety on account of his bad school reports, and as brains were not necessary in the army she thought he had better become a soldier. Randolph advised her to leave the boy alone, adding acutely: “Boys get good at what they find they shine at.” With less foresight Leonard Jerome prophesied that Randolph was sure to be offered a governmental post, but by then Jenny knew the nature of her husband’s affliction and had ceased to hope. Randolph showed no parental feeling for Winston, his attitude being aloof and indifferent, but Jenny caught the boy’s fancy and many years later he recalled: “She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly but at a distance.”

  Randolph spent a good part of 1891 in South Africa, returning home in time for the General Election of 1892. Being re-elected he took part in the attack on Gladstone’s Home Rule and Welsh Church Disestablishment bills. But the insidious and incurable disease of general paralysis was making his thoughts and utterances incoherent, and Jenny was begged by his former friends to keep him away from the Commons. In a last attempt to restore his health they started on a trip around the world in June 1894, visiting America, Japan, China and Malay; but his condition suddenly deteriorated and they had to hurry home. He lingered for a few weeks, mostly in a semiconscious condition, and died on January 24, 1895.

  Jenny’s had been a frustrated life for eight years, for however brilliant the foreground, doom and despair had shadowed the background. The amount of hatred and envy her husband had aroused was paid back with interest. “It was gall and wormwood to me,” she confessed; but no one who saw her during those years could have guessed that beneath the dazzling exterior she suffered from a desolating sense of failure. A thrilling political career and a future of untold glory had been sacrificed by a fit of petulance, and she recognized the truth of the hackneyed quotation that “the fault...is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.” Upon no one had the stars shone more refulgently than on Randolph, whose momentary tantrum had eclipsed their light. But she was too vital to indulge in self-pity, and for the remainder of his life she helped to keep up his interest in what was left to him of interest.

  After his death she managed to reshape life for herself. She worked hard for the Primrose League; she started a quarterly magazine The Anglo-Saxon Review and got all sorts of people to contribute, from eminent authors to well-known peers; she made speeches, wrote articles, arranged interviews with herself, and became a sort of unofficial public figure. She invited all sorts of people to her lunches and dinners, actors, painters, musicians and politicians. She even tried to get Bernard Shaw to one of her functions, but he declined the invitation, saying it was contrary to his habits, upon which she wired: KNOW NOTHING OF YOUR HABITS HOPE THEY ARE BETTER THAN YOUR MANNERS—which was not a good example of manners but brought a lengthy explanation of his habits. Eventually she managed to extract an article from him on Verdi.

  The Boer War which broke out in 1899 supplied a fresh outlet for her energies. She influenced a number of American women to subscribe enough money for the purchase and equipment of a hospital ship. Over £40,000 was raised and the Maine sailed for South Africa under a Union Jack given by Queen Victoria. Jenny would have liked the Stars and Stripes to float with the Union Jack, but the American President, Theodore Roosevelt, was not in a mood to oblige her. She sailed on the ship’s first voyage to Durban, where she saw her two sons, Winston and John. She also met a young officer in the Scots Guards, George Cornwallis West, who was being invalided home with enteric fever. She returned with him and by the end of the voyage they were engaged to be married. Since he was the same age as Winston it was agreed that no one should hear of their engagement until the announcement was made public; but she was much too excited to keep the secret to herself and told everyone about it in the strictest confidence, swearing each not to mention it to a soul. Naturally all of them passed it on, only to find that everyone already knew of it.

  They were married at St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, and spent their honeymoon at Lord Saye and Sele’s home, Broughton Castle, lent them by the tenants, Lord and Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox. Jenny let it be known that she did not wish to keep her title, upon which some gossip-writer delivered himself (or herself) of the following:

  The papers give this information,

  At Lady Randolph’s own request,

  That now her proper designation

  Is Mrs. George Cornwallis West.

  But when a woman marries a man young enough to be her son, she must not be surprised if he goes off with somebody else’s daughter. Jenny was shrewd enough to recognize the possibility, but she was one who lived for the day and perhaps she enjoyed her experiences all the more because she knew they could not last. Throughout the Edwardian era she continued to be a popular hostess as well as a famous beauty. She organized balls and parties for charities, and her sayings and doings were reported in the press of two continents.

  In 1908 she wrote her reminiscences. Always interested in the drama and a strong supporter of the movement for a National Theatre, she wrote a play in 1909 called His Borrowed Plumes, much to the disappointment of one dramatic critic, Max Beerbohm, who hoped that at last he would see a play about peers and peeresses written by someone who knew her subject; instead of which Jenny’s play dealt with middleclass people of whom she knew nothing. She had “let herself be led into the temptation that awaits everyone who essays dramaturgy for the first time,” wrote Max, “the temptation to write not as a seer of life, but as a playgoer who knows all about the theatre....I dare say she thought that the strange things which happen in His Borrowed Plumes were really not less usual in the middle class than in the theatre. That is a notion which she must banish for ever from her mind.”

  The inevitable divorce took place in 1913, and in April of the following year, to everyone’s amazement, George Cornwallis West again married a woman older than himself, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, whose appearance as Eliza Higgins in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion took place the same month. Jenny’s comment ran: “Well, George evidently has a penchant for brunettes. I’m always taken for a gipsy, but as for Mrs. Pat—why, she’s nothing more nor less than an ink-bottle!”

  Jenny resumed her old title of Lady Randolph Churchill, and when she died in 1921 was buried by the side of the man who gave it her, at Bladon, near Blenheim.

  CHAPTER 4—Marlboroughs and Millionaires

  Lily Hammersley and the 8th Duke of Marlborough

  Consuelo
Vanderbilt and the 9th Duke of Marlborough

  It will be convenient to complete at this point the story of what may briefly be described as the union between Broadway and Blenheim.

  The eighth Duke of Marlborough, Randolph’s brother, seems to have been of a melancholic disposition, and he was more interested in experiments than equestrianism. The porcelain and pictures which had been collected by his forebears and which had turned the palace into a famous art exhibition made little appeal to him and he sold them. He then started looking for a new wife, his desiderata being that she should be rich and as unlike his previous wife as possible: he did not wish to find frogs in his bath. Somehow, possibly through Jenny Churchill’s father Leonard Jerome, he heard of Mrs. Hammersley, a wealthy widow who had won notoriety by the simple method of having the walls and ceiling of the room behind her box at the opera completely covered by orchids. She had changed her name from Lilian to Lily because the former rhymed with million and she regarded poetry with suspicion. “She has lots of tin,” reported Jerome to his wife. Leonard was in New York, and his wife, then in Europe, thought he was neglecting himself. Would he like her to join him? she wondered. Certainly not, he rejoined: he did not want to be fussed over and coddled. She suggested that he should have a valet. He pooh-poohed the idea. On the other hand Marlborough was the sort of fellow who ought to be looked after and he wholly favored an alliance with Mrs. Hammersley.

  In due course Marlborough crossed the Atlantic and took stock of the lady and her fortune. She most certainly did not resemble his first wife, and there was no doubt that Lilian rhymed with million; so a marriage was arranged. But it could not take place as quickly as they desired because there was some difficulty in fixing a religious ceremony, the Duke having been divorced. However “a parson of the Methodist persuasion” with a wider outlook agreed to marry them as Christians, and Leonard witnessed the event at the Mayor’s office in the City Hall of New York, afterwards attending a wedding dinner at Delmonico’s. We may here take leave of Leonard Jerome, whose death in England, at Lyon Mansions on the Brighton front, took place in 1891.