The Churchills Read online

  His eldest son, also named George, succeeded as the 6th Duke. He had not been a happy child and is chiefly remembered for having organised a pupil revolt at Eton and for marrying four times – if one includes a bogus marriage with a beautiful innocent teenager (an affair which reflected no honour on the family name). When he inherited a bankrupt Blenheim, the vast sum of £80,000 (£3.4 million today) was urgently needed for vital repairs, against an annual income of £10,000. His response was to raise mortgages, which – since the estate’s trustees had little option but to concede – he did by changing the conditions of the trust. Had the 6th Duke been a prudent man he might have changed the fortunes of the family, but he was yet another feckless individual who lived to enjoy himself, and while he made some improvements at Blenheim (such as under-floor heating in the freezing corridors) and carried out necessary repairs, they were all financed on borrowings that he could hardly service. One cannot help reflecting that the family motto, coined during the Civil War, ‘Faithful but Unfortunate’, was not entirely apposite, for clearly it was not bad luck but bad management that caused most of the ill-fortune.

  Present-day genealogists of the British peerage have speculated that dominant Spencer genes are responsible for many of the Churchill family’s misfortunes, since the Spencers were not only renowned for their brilliance and charisma, but also, as already noted, for their profligacy and their emotional problems.3 According to one eminent scholar, most of the Dukes of Marlborough from the 3rd Duke to the 8th Duke suffered from a reported ‘melancholia’, which we would today call ‘depression’.4 So it was fortunate for Blenheim that the son who succeeded to the title in 1857 did not share his father’s and grandfather’s thriftlessness. The 7th Duke of Marlborough, thirty-five-year-old John Winston Spencer Churchill, and his Duchess, the former Frances (‘Fanny’) Anne Emily Vane, third daughter of the Marquess of Londonderry, were well matched – a stolid, high-minded, dutiful and deeply religious couple who wholly espoused the worthy Victorian ideals demonstrated by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Under the 7th Duke’s hand, by his policy of spending only income, the estate’s fortunes began to revive.

  Duke John worried a good deal about ‘the Catholic threat’ (he had been educated by an anti-Catholic clergyman) and the lack of morals of the working classes, and entertained a constant fear that the masses might enjoy themselves inappropriately on the Sabbath. He was educated at Eton and graduated from Oriel College, Oxford, sat as MP for Woodstock – still a tied borough in those days – and worked hard during a rather unremarkable political career to strengthen the power of the established Church. His appointments were due to his inherited position rather than his ability, but he was a dutiful and hard worker; he became Lord Steward of Her Majesty’s Household and Lord President of the Privy Council, and has been described by one historian as ‘a complete full-blown Victorian Prig’.5 Some of his letters to his children are a lesson in pomposity, although to be fair to him, he was remembered by his grandchildren as a kindly man.

  His wife Duchess Fanny produced eleven children, eight of whom survived infancy, but the size of her brood did not trouble her unduly since they were raised and cared for by servants, and she rarely saw them except in Blenheim’s chapel each morning when almost every inhabitant – family, friends and servants alike –compulsorily attended a nine o’clock service. Duchess Fanny was slightly deaf, and perhaps as a consequence she was also shy in company. She made little attempt to conduct introductions at her dinners, and conversation with her was something of a purgatory for her dinner partners.

  The mid-nineteenth century, when the 7th Duke presided over Blenheim, was a period of extraordinary prosperity in English history for the well connected. Prince Albert’s sudden death in December 1861 at the early age of forty-two may have left his widow in permanent mourning and condemned her to years of seclusion, but the country was the axis of a vast Empire upon which the sun still blazed, and it was managed for the absent Queen by statesmen of vision. Agricultural income was at its zenith, and although income tax was just a few pence in the pound the rich bristled about this abomination until in 1874 Gladstone proposed its abolition. There was an explosion of technical achievement such as the country-wide railroad system,* and at sea sail gave way to steam. All this wealth and power was mainly vested in the great landowners, who lived in vast and stately country homes and enjoyed opulent town houses in London.

  It was a way of life designed by, and for, the rich and titled; a world in which the working classes and the poor were set as far apart from the aristocracy as if they had been a different species. Just a few members of the successful meritocracy – brilliant writers, engineers, orators, architects, musicians, artists and so on – managed to scale the greasy pole that divided the classes, for the family histories and antecedents of the privileged were well chronicled, and without suitable provenance, acceptance into the upper ranks was rare. In the countryside and in the burgeoning cities, the huge mass of the working population described by contemporary writers such as Charles Dickens worked a ten-hour day, six and a half days a week (once a month they had a whole day off), in return for what was barely a living wage. There was no concept of leisure time for this class; Sundays were spent church-going and praying, there were no annual holidays other than Christmas Day, and no pensions. Those in service with the great families often fared slightly better. The assistance of scores of willing servants was essential to run the great houses, gardens and stables smoothly, and to provide the lavish entertainments which were a necessary part of that society. Then, too, these country houses were not used continuously and were often empty for months, so work was lighter at those times. Meanwhile, those employed there were comparatively well housed and fed.

  It was into the very top of this world of rank and privilege that the children of the 7th Duke were born – the sons, George in 1844 and Randolph in 1849, and the daughters: Cornelia in 1847, Rosamund in 1851, Fanny in 1853, Anne in 1854, Georgina in 1860 and Sarah in 1865.

  The Duke and Duchess entertained regularly but within their income, and some of their entertainments showed financial prudence taken to what sounds like an extraordinary degree. Among the comments of visitors in the guest book was one from a Lord Chief Justice, who said that he was happy to share almost everything in life, even his wife, but felt that being served half a snipe for dinner was a step too far. The menu for a dinner and dance thrown for the Prince of Wales indicates that offerings were not always shaved quite so thinly, for there was lobster soufflé and stuffed quails and truffles in champagne, but the chronicler on this occasion also mentioned that at a dinner given that November the guests needed ‘furs and hot water bottles’ in order to eat in comfort in the chilly palace.6

  The 7th Duke’s heir, George, who was always known as Blandford* to his intimates, even after he succeeded to the title, was a disappointment to his parents. He was a rebellious, unhappy boy, and whatever maternal love Duchess Fanny could bring herself to demonstrate was all directed at her favourite child, the second son, Lord Randolph. Both boys were educated at Eton, where Latin and Greek as well as maths and science were crammed into unwilling heads. Though children from comfortable and happy homes might well regard a boarding school in Victorian England as a form of imprisonment, the two Spencer Churchill boys found instead a freedom they had not realised existed.

  Their rank and titles made it almost inevitable that they could get away with much: they ran wild, and recruited multiple ‘fags’ from among younger fellow pupils whom they treated as servants.* Eventually Blandford went too far and was expelled. Randolph, rebellious of rules and arrogant to the point of imperiousness,7 could, however, exert extraordinary charm when he wished, and it was this, plus frenzied intervention by the Duke, that saved him from the same fate. He went on to Merton College, Oxford, where he continued his career of rule-breaking: windows were meant to be broken, sobriety was a joke, and he was fined for such misdemeanours. Nevertheless, the university exerted some good influence on
Randolph and his tutor stated that he was ‘much impressed with his…ability and mental alertness’. He read for honours in jurisprudence and modern history, which led to a deep lifelong interest in British history; and he cannot have been entirely feckless, for in the Michaelmas Term of 1870 he obtained a good degree, only narrowly missing out on a First. He also developed a love of the historian Edward Gibbon, and memorised long passages of text from The Decline and Fall which he could recite at will.

  In 1869 at the age of twenty-five, Blandford – under pressure to marry suitably and produce an heir – dutifully allowed himself to believe that he had fallen in love with Albertha (‘Berthe’), a daughter of the Duke of Abercorn.† Although their subsequent marriage, happily accepted by all the parents, quickly produced an heir, Charles Richard (universally known as ‘Sunny’ because of his title Earl of Sunderland), the mild affection – for that is more descriptive of Blandford’s feelings for Berthe – was short-lived and the relationship became not merely loveless but one of intense irritation on the part of the young husband. Poor Berthe, who did not know how to cope with Blandford’s animosity, bumbled unhappily about, playing endless childish and tiresome practical jokes on visitors which took the form of cutting pieces of soap into lifelike wedges and introducing them on to the cheeseboard at dinner parties, balancing pots of ink on the tops of guest-room doors, as well as making apple-pie beds, to name but a few. She is said to have been beautiful as a young woman, perhaps to explain Blandford’s initial attraction to her, but photographs show this to be exaggeration, and ‘handsome’ is probably the most generous description for her. She was kind-hearted but had received almost no education, and her nickname ‘Goosie’ probably says it all. In any case Blandford very soon tired of her and began seeking his sexual comforts elsewhere, to the shock and dismay of his parents.

  By the time Randolph reached twenty-four years old, though not under the same pressures as Blandford, he was nevertheless expected to find a suitable wife from within the peerage. Because of his rank he could expect to marry someone with sufficient money to keep them both in the manner in which, as the son of a duke, he had been raised, and not to be a financial burden on his father. He had devoted his life so far to the pleasures of hunting his own pack of harriers, reading ‘omnivorously’ (his son would later write), and the delights of society and London’s all-male clubland. He was welcome in most company for his intelligent conversation, and he moved easily within the exclusive Prince of Wales circle known as ‘the Marlborough House set’. It was in this context that in 1873 Randolph joined the annual pilgrimage of English ‘society’ to Cowes.

  For fifty weeks each year the small town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight is a sleepy backwater on the shore of the stretch of water called the Solent, which separates the island from the south coast of England. The Solent has four tides a day with highly complex tidal patterns, huge sandbanks which dry out sufficiently to allow the odd short cricket match to be played on them, and channels deep enough to accommodate the world’s largest liners making for the port of Southampton. These tidal anomalies provide some of the best yacht racing in the world, and for a brief period, in early August each year, the famous Cowes Regatta propels the town and its harbour into international importance. The event is almost two hundred years old in its present form, and was already well entrenched by the middle of the nineteenth century when Albert, Prince of Wales, a keen yachtsman, became a regular visitor and competitor.

  It was then that the lavish balls, parties and concerts, still held today during the Regatta, became an intrinsic element of the English social Season,* attracting yachtsmen, the cream of society and the socially ambitious. Yacht clubs burgeoned, but only one really counted: membership of the Royal Yacht Squadron, housed in an ancient fort built by Henry VIII at the mouth of the River Medina as part of the Solent defence system, alone conveyed the social cachet that is beyond purchase. With typical Victorian confidence, numerous large hotels as well as villas and boarding houses sprang up to accommodate the Cowes Week visitors; then as now, these commanded almost enough income during the Regatta to cover their running costs for the entire year.

  In 1873, an American family called Jerome rented Villa Rosetta for the hot summer months. They had stayed there in the previous two years and enjoyed its location on the seafront, a pleasant half-mile walk from the town. There was no esplanade then and the lawns of Villa Rosetta ran down to the footpath skirting the beach, where the occupants could sit and watch the yachts racing. Mr Leonard Jerome, whose Huguenot ancestors had taken shelter on the Isle of Wight before emigrating to America in 1710, was a clever entrepreneur. Brought up on a family farm in Syracuse, Upper New York State, Leonard had attended Princeton before going into law. He was twenty-seven when he bought the local newspaper, the Daily American, with one of his brothers. In 1849 he married Clarissa Hall, an orphaned heiress whose elder sister was already married to Leonard’s brother Lawrence.* Clarissa – always called Clara – was darkly good-looking, and the couple moved to New York where their first child, Clarita, was born. Here Jerome rapidly made and lost the first of two fortunes on the stock exchange where he was known by journalists as ‘the King of Wall Street’.

  In New York, fashionable society was run by ‘the Patriarchs’, the old Knickerbocker† families who occupied the most fashionable areas of Manhattan. They were headed by a formidable grande dame, Mrs William Backhouse Astor (known as the Mrs Astor). So proud was Mrs Astor of her ancestry that she made it her life’s work to ensure that no ‘outsiders’ were admitted to the select circles of the old families. Fabulously rich (she had been fortunate – or designing – enough to marry a hugely successful man who indulged her whims), she was the undoubted queen bee of Society. Her ballroom held four hundred people – all those who ‘mattered’, in fact. If you were not listed among these four hundred you were ‘new money’, an arriviste. Any Patriarch hostess, sympathising with someone newly arrived in New York, no matter how cultured or rich, was castigated if she dared to invite a man or woman outside the four hundred to a function. Naturally, every woman wanted to be on Mrs Astor’s list, including Clara Jerome, who unfortunately was not considered acceptable. Imagine if this clique, to whom Clara so badly wished to belong, had discovered she had Native American blood.‡ This was a sufficiently good reason for Clara to keep her antecedents secret, only confiding the information to her daughters when they were adults.*

  Leonard Jerome was not daunted by Mrs Astor’s snubs, though he was undoubtedly annoyed when it caused his Clara such distress. Supremely confident and energetic, he was happy to lead his own set, and if necessary to outdo the Knickerbockers. He built great new houses at the most prestigious addresses, the latest being in ultra-smart Madison Square on the corner of 26th Street, cheek by jowl with the Knickerbocker houses. A few doors away he built a six-hundred-seat theatre for private operatic productions, and his three-storeyed marble-faced stables, erected even before the house was completed and said to be the finest in the world, were stocked with the best bloodstock and the latest design in carriages. When he entertained, newspaper reports revealed that huge indoor fountains cascaded with champagne or eau-de-cologne amidst banks of scented hothouse flowers, and every woman guest found a gold bracelet with a jewelled pendant concealed in her napkin. He was a founder of the American Jockey Club, built Jerome Park – one of the most important racecourses in the United States, near what is now the Bronx – and owned Kentucky, arguably the greatest racehorse of his day. An expert horseman, Jerome rode mettlesome horses with ease and drove a four-in-hand, always with his trademark nosegay of flowers in his lapel or attached to the handle of his whip.

  Apart from horses Leonard Jerome loved the opera, and, at a more personal level, opera divas, for he was an inveterate womaniser. Among the many ladies to be seen on his arm were the singers Jenny Lind (called ‘the Swedish Nightingale’, and an international sensation), Adelina Patti, who was only seventeen when she met Jerome, and Fanny Ronalds (a long-term mist
ress),† all of whom gave solo performances to invited audiences in Jerome’s private theatre, as did Minnie Hauk (born soon after Jenny Lind’s visit to New York, which may or may not be significant), who was probably Jerome’s illegitimate child. Clara, who loved Minnie and helped to educate her, described her as ‘so like Jenny, but less good-looking’. Jerome’s other serious passion was sailing, and he owned a succession of fast racing yachts which he had built to his own extravagant designs, rivalling even William Astor’s vessels.

  In 1851 Jerome was appointed American Consul at Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it was while her husband occupied this post, from April 1852 until November 1853, that Clara developed an infatuation with court life and the glamour of European royalty and aristocracy. Here she was accepted as an equal in the very top levels of society, even by royalty. A change of government in the United States meant that Jerome was recalled along with all political appointees, and the family returned to the USA, travelling via Paris. Clara, who was seven months into a pregnancy, wanted to stay there and even make her home in Europe, but Jerome insisted they return to New York where his financial affairs – which had been in the care of a brother – were in a poor way. He promised, however, to bring his wife back to Paris. The couple’s second daughter, Jennie (named after Jenny Lind), was born on 9 January 1854 in New York.* By 1858 Jerome had fully restored his fortunes and bought a substantial shareholding (25 per cent) in the New York Times.