Within weeks Leonard Jerome was writing to Clara, who was in London, that he rather thought the Duke would marry Mrs Hammersley. ‘Don’t you fear any responsibility on my part. Mrs Hammersley is quite capable of deciding for herself, besides I never set eyes on the lady but once. All the same I hope the marriage comes off as there is no doubt she has lots of tin.’ Less than a month later he wrote to tell his wife that the introduction had worked, and that the Duke and Lily Hammersley were already married. ‘I went with him to the Mayor’s office in the City Hall at 1 o’clock today,’ Jerome confirmed, ‘and witnessed the ceremony.’5 That was the civil part dealt with, but there was great difficulty in arranging a religious marriage because of the Duke’s divorce. Eventually they found a kindly Methodist minister who consented to marry them. Afterwards there was a grand dinner and two days later Jerome waved them off as they sailed for England aboard the Cunard Line’s three-masted steamship Aurania.*
The new Duchess was in for a series of shocks as she settled into Blenheim. The ‘courtship’, if it could be called such, had been so fast that she had hardly had time to organise a trousseau, and she knew little of her husband’s reputation or his past. The first thing that confronted her was the life-sized nude of Lady Colin Campbell, painted by Whistler, which hung in the Duke’s dressing room. The second thing she noted was the chill of Blenheim and the lack of bathrooms. The third was the fact that she and her husband were not received at court. Jennie had been the first American woman to marry into the British aristocracy; one might say she led the charge. The next American heiress to capture an English lord was the glamorous Consuelo Yznaga who had married Lord Mandeville in New York in 1876 (two years after Jennie married Randolph), to become eventually the Duchess of Manchester when Lord Mandeville succeeded to the dukedom in 1890. So Duchess Lily had several supportive countrywomen willing to give her advice and tell her what she should expect of her bargain.
Jennie worked at getting Lily accepted into society: she introduced her to the Prince and Princess of Wales, and persuaded five of her sisters-in-law to arrange various entertainments and invite the new Duchess. This was no small favour, as the Churchill women constituted a large swathe of the peerage. Cornelia, Lady Wimborne, was the wife of the 1st Baron Wimborne, and had the vast Guest fortune behind her; Anne was the Duchess of Roxburghe, Fanny was the wife of the 2nd Baron Tweedmouth, Rosamund was married to the 2nd Baron Ramsay of Ramsay Abbey, and Georgina had married Richard George Curzon, 4th Earl Howe.* Duchess Lily was thus successfully introduced into society without the need to curtsey to the Queen.
Meanwhile, she was happy for Blandford to spend some of her money on the palace, and when Randolph visited Blenheim in the following year he described some of the new works to his mother. He had looked over the reparations and improvements and was not especially impressed, considering the amount of money spent. He admitted that the electric lighting and heating in the stables had been ‘well-done’, but thought that the huge amount of money lavished on refurbishing the drawing room was rather wasted. He was bored during his visit as Duchess Lily only wished to talk about and praise her husband, who – as a consequence – had come to believe he was a ‘beneficent genius’. The domestic arrangements also left much to be desired, Randolph wrote, since they breakfasted at 11 a.m., lunched at 3 p.m. and dined at 9 p.m.; hours which did not suit his digestion. He could not help remarking that Duchess Lily’s ‘moustache and beard’ were ‘becoming serious’.6
This was unfair, and indeed Randolph would later regret this snap assessment of his sister-in-law; Duchess Lily had also paid to have the palace roof releaded to prevent leaks, as well as for central heating and electricity to be installed. But there was no doubt that she was unused to running an establishment like Blenheim and it was difficult for her to please the Marlborough clan.
Despite these problems the marriage seemed to be a reasonably happy one, which was a rare enough event in the Churchill family. Blandford seemed content at last, pottering around Blenheim free of money worries and unhampered by his compliant Duchess. This was more than could be said for Goosie, who in 1891 went to court to petition her former husband for money for their son’s education. She lost her case, but as the boy was still able to go through Cambridge, probably her family stepped in to help. Blandford’s new-found sense of ease was, though, to be short lived. To everyone’s great shock, on 9 November 1892 at the early age of forty-eight, he was found dead in his laboratory on the top floor of Blenheim with – as the housekeeper told members of the family – ‘a terrible expression on his face’.7
This left Blandford’s son Charles – universally known as ‘Sunny’ – to succeed as the 9th Duke. It was a week before his twenty-first birthday and he was still up at Cambridge. Described as ‘proud, offhand and frequently offensive’,8 no one could have been less prepared to take on the onerous task of looking after Blenheim. Needless to say, his coming-of-age celebrations had to be delayed for some months because of the requisite period of mourning, but one of his first visitors at Blenheim was his cousin Winston, who became a frequent guest thereafter and a close friend for the next forty years. At his belated birthday party the new Duke received his guests with his mother at his side. Goosie was still regarded as faintly ridiculous by most of the Churchill family, and almost immediately after the party it was his grandmother, Dowager Duchess Fanny, who took on the task of finding Sunny a suitable wife.
Apart from Duchess Lily, Randolph was probably the person most affected by Blandford’s death. Upon receiving the news he had gone immediately to Blenheim to help, if he could, and the following day he wrote from there to Jennie admitting he had been wrong about Lily: ‘Nothing could exceed her goodness and kindness of disposition,’ he wrote. He also prepared Jennie for possible scandal, because Blandford’s will contained a large bequest to his former mistress, Lady Colin Campbell. Duchess Lily seemed genuinely broken-hearted at her loss. Jennie later told her sisters that the widow had torn Blandford’s collection of photographs of Lady Colin into shreds and posted them without any explanatory note to her rival in Venice. The Whistler nude was never seen or heard of again. It was generally assumed that it had been burned.
The shock of his brother’s death seems to have precipitated the final chapter of Randolph’s worsening health. The symptoms of the third stage of syphilis can last from a few months to many years, and are so varied, resembling those of so many other illnesses, that physicians used to call syphilis ‘the great mimicker’. This final phase can take up to twenty years to develop, so that many older patients never suffered some of the symptoms. But those who did would have experienced rashes and ulcers on the skin, and lesions on ligaments, joints and bones causing reduced and painful mobility. But the worst feature, and the one that all syphilis patients feared before the discovery of antibiotics, was the threat of madness, which doctors referred to as ‘a general paralysis of the brain’. It was a good descriptive term, given that tertiary syphilis attacks the entire nervous system as well as the heart and blood vessels. Sufferers often become blind, paralysed in various parts of the face and body, and speech becomes slurred. Mood swings and violent anger lead to, at worst, clinical insanity. One of the features is a sort of hypermania in which the patient experiences great optimism alternating with depression. Randolph was noted by his physicians, family, friends and acquaintances as showing all these symptoms.
As early as 1888 ‘Randy’ Churchill’s increasingly slurred speech was beginning to cause comment; ‘indistinct utterances’ was how journalists put it, and he began apologising during his speeches for his poor hearing and articulation. However, this was still only the beginning of his problems.
During that year, when he visited the nursery on Winston’s fourteenth birthday, Lord Randolph found his elder son confidently recreating a famous battle with his huge collection of lead soldiers, including all the accoutrements of war that he had been amassing since the age of seven. After watching this for twenty minutes, he had smiled at
Winston, an unusual event on its own, and asked if he would like to enter the Army as a career. Carried away by the moment, Winston said he would – and that was his career decided upon, to Winston’s later regret.
By 1893 Lord Randolph was suffering the onset of paralysis of his extremities – a recognisable symptom to Dr Roose, given the patient’s history. In the five intervening years those closest to Randolph – Jennie, Winston and Jack, Duchess Fanny and his sisters – had had to watch him inexorably failing as he attempted to carry on with his career. In his biography of his father written many years later, Winston, who was occasionally present when Randolph gave a speech and studied them in the newspapers, loyally contended that his father’s performances were just as brilliant and hard-hitting as always. Contemporary evidence does not bear this out. Randolph may well have still been capable of putting his thoughts on paper in a cogent manner, but he could no longer present them to the House in a fashion that impressed his listeners. Even his letters to The Times had become rambling and lacked his former incisiveness. His insistence on attending the House, punctuated by frequent visits to European spas for ‘convalescent’ treatments, made his gradual breakdown very public. His bursts of bad temper were legendary. Friends who did not see him for a few months were invariably shocked at the deterioration. He was forty-four and looked twenty years older, with thin greying hair and his skin hanging in folds.
Randolph’s behaviour towards Winston after his illness took hold was colder than ever, and usually critical. Of Jack he often said, ‘He is no trouble’, but Winston came in for a cascade of angry notes for his lack of achievement at Harrow, his spendthrift habits, his carelessness and lack of application generally. Randolph even wrote to his mother to complain about him: ‘He has little [claim] to cleverness, to knowledge or any capacity for settled work. He has a great talent for show-off exaggeration and make-believe.’ This, he wrote, was proved by Winston’s ‘total worthlessness as a scholar…at Eton or Harrow’ (he seemed not to know at this point which school Winston attended). ‘He need not expect much from me…I will not conceal from you it is a very great disappointment to me.’9 In fact, Winston’s reports were above average, but there were frequent comments that he was not performing to his full capacity, although he shone at history, English and fencing. His compositions showed an original mind, and hints of the great writer and orator he was to become. His biggest crime was unpunctuality – and he was obstinate, rebellious of authority and very mischievous. Alas, when Winston was in trouble for joining other boys in breaking the windows of an abandoned factory, his father evidently failed to recall that as a student at Oxford he had himself been in trouble for breaking windows, and he came down hard on the boy.
Mrs Everest was still the centre of Winston’s and Jack’s world. Invariably they spent Christmas with her while Jennie visited grand friends and Randolph recuperated somewhere in the sunshine. Randolph and Jennie were on a visit to Russia together when Winston wrote to his mother in December 1887: ‘I must tell you about Christmas Day. Aunt Clara [Clarita] was too ill to come so Aunt Leonie and Uncle Jack were our only visitors. We drank the Queen’s health. Your health and Papa’s, then Everest’s…It is very dull without you. But after all we are very happy.’10
When, after Jack went away to school and the nursery was empty, Randolph sold the house at Connaught Place and he and Jennie moved in with Duchess Fanny in her leased mansion at Grosvenor Square, Mrs Everest moved with them as housekeeper, and although the two boys were upset at the sale of their own home the presence of Everest at Grosvenor Square made the move bearable. Before long, however, the Dowager Duchess decided to end this arrangement so as to save money – a sixty-year-old woman was unlikely to be able to do the work of a thirty-year-old in those days before household appliances.* Indeed, Mrs Everest had already left the family some weeks before Winston heard about this decision, but when he did he raged at his mother in a letter:
At her age she is invited to find a new place & practically begin all over again…I think such proceedings cruel and rather mean…The Duchess has every right to discharge a servant for whom she has ‘no further use’. But I do think that you ought to arrange that she remains at Grosvenor Square – until I go back to Sandhurst & Jack to school. In the meantime she will have ample time to make up her mind where to go – to find a place & resign herself to a change…Then, when a good place has been secured for her she could leave and be given a pension which would be sufficient to keep her from want & which should continue during her life…It is in your power to explain to the Duchess that she cannot be sent away until she has got a good place…I cannot bear to think of Everest…being got rid of in such a manner.11
Jennie’s conscience must have been pricked, because soon afterwards Randolph sent Everest a gift of £17 (six months’ salary); it was little enough reward for a loyal servant of almost twenty years, who had acted as mother to his two sons. Jennie would have paid as much for a new hat. Mrs Everest found herself some rooms and thereafter Winston regularly sent her small sums of money, although he was himself always overdrawn on his allowance. ‘My darling Precious Boy,’ she wrote on 1 April 1895. ‘I have just received £2.10s from Cox & Co [bank], Charing Cross on your account. I thank you very much indeed dearest it is awfully kind and thoughtful of you. My dear dear Boy you are one in ten thousand but I am afraid you will find your income [insufficient]…for your expenses dear. It really is too good and kind of you I don’t know how to thank you enough.’12
In June 1894 Randolph insisted on making what he termed a round-the-world fact-finding trip. Not only could he not afford the expense of such a trip, but Dr Robson Roose and Dr Thomas Buzzard, the specialist who was treating him for syphilis, had written him a letter signed by them both, advising against such a plan.13 When Randolph rejected their concern out of hand they wrote again, this time to Jennie, advising her that if the trip went ahead she must take a private physician in the party.14 Jennie went along with Randolph’s wishes reluctantly, convinced by what Dr Roose told her, that her husband would probably die during the journey. Consequently they not only travelled with a full-time doctor and nurse, but during the final stages of their trip their mountain of luggage included a lead-lined coffin. During the early stages of the journey Randolph had good remissions, periods of normal lucidity during which he wrote long letters to friends as if there was nothing wrong with him. And amazingly, he survived the long journey – just.
Jennie behaved with supreme patience. She put her life on hold to nurse Randolph through his terminal illness and she was touchingly devoted and loyal to him, but later she would say that it had cost her ‘everything’. During the year before their departure her life had become extremely complicated. Charles Kinsky had given her an ultimatum – either she leave Randolph for him or their relationship was over. The first she could not do in the circumstances and instead, during one of Kinsky’s long absences from England, she embarked upon a new sexual relationship, this time with a young man called Freddy Wolverton who begged her to end her relationship with Kinsky. It must be remembered that the Churchill marriage was an ‘open’ one, that Randolph and Jennie had ceased all sexual relations many years earlier, and that Jennie was a passionate woman who needed a man in her life and in her bed. But with all her domestic troubles she could evidently not juggle her lovers as well. When she embarked on the world trip in June she had simply hoped that her tangled affairs would wait in limbo until her return to London.
Five months later, in November, the couple had reached Rangoon when Jennie heard from Charles Kinsky that he had become engaged to a young Catholic countess from an eminent Austrian family, Elizabeth Wolff-Metternich. It was a massive shock to Jennie, and she wrote to her sister Leonie that she was entirely ‘crushed’. It was an outcome for which she had not prepared, for although she had recently taken another lover she still regarded Kinsky as the great love of her life. She assumed he felt as she did, and perhaps he did share Jennie’s passion, but financial cons
traints inevitably obliged him to agree to marry as his family wished. It is arguable whether he would have married Jennie, anyway; she was not a Catholic and was unlikely at forty to give him children.
Jennie wrote in a fit of anxiety to Leonie, frantically begging her to contact Kinsky and plead with him to wait for her return to England. ‘Oh, Leonie darling,’ she scrawled, her pen dashing across the page in her frenzy, ‘do you think it is too late to stop it…can’t you help me? For heaven’s sake write to him…use all cleverness & all strength & urge him to put off his marriage. Anyhow until I have seen him.’15 It would be only about another month, she added. The news from Charles Kinsky, she explained to Leonie, had come on top of a lesser blow that had nonetheless affected her badly because she now saw it as all part of a contraction of her options. It concerned Freddy Wolverton. She had not written to him since leaving England, and when she and Randolph reached Hong Kong there had been a cable from him, advising in abrupt telegraphic jargon that he considered their relationship at an end. There was little she could do, as she escorted her dying husband around the world.
It was only a matter of time, she reflected, before she was left a widow, and as Randolph could not leave her much to live on she would be a widow in very reduced circumstances. Jennie knew that it was all her own fault for not writing to Freddy and the only thing she blamed him for was his insisting on her giving up Charles Kinsky when he did not intend his own relationship with her to be a long-term one. Charles was the only man she could ever envisage starting a new life with, and if she had lost him then she had been well punished for her treatment of him. She was convinced that Charles had cared for her in the same way until recently, and that if she was only given another chance she would make up for her past mistakes. She believed that society would soon forgive Kinsky if he ended his engagement, and that the girl – knowing how he felt about her – would surely be willing to give him up.16
The Churchills Page 13
