A regular Yankee maiden, she isn’t greatly drawn
To castles, mortgage-laden and coronets in pawn.
A man may swear to heaven to win her or to die
She hears one word in seven and knows that it’s a lie.
It’s just like buying cattle; you bid the right amount
And that is all the battle; you own a Duke or Count.*
8
1895–9
The Unhappy Duchess
No matter what one thinks of Alva Vanderbilt’s motives and actions, the manner in which she educated her daughter, in a prim, almost convent-like environment and with able tutors, undeniably fitted Consuelo well for her adult life as Duchess of Marlborough. In addition to her unusual beauty and graceful carriage, there was a natural nobility coupled with a modest simplicity about this young woman. She lacked Jennie’s sparkle and energy, but this was not considered necessarily a handicap by her new family. Even members of the old aristocracy, predisposed not to like Consuelo because she was a rich American who – everybody knew – had been married for her fortune in order to save Blenheim, found themselves drawn to her. During the Marlboroughs’ honeymoon tour of Spain, France and Italy, where she met European royalty, British ambassadors and numerous high-born travellers, she acquitted herself well. Marlborough quickly saw that he would never have cause to blush for his teenage duchess.
But the four-month honeymoon was anything but happy. The quarrels that characterised this marriage seem to have begun almost immediately. Consuelo and Marlborough were totally different in outlook, and by the time they had reached Italy and were ensconced in the expensive but cheerless hotel suite in Rome where they were to spend Christmas, Consuelo was listless and depressed. A doctor, called in to check her over for a life insurance policy, declared that she was seriously ill and would probably not live longer than six months. A London doctor, hurriedly summoned out to Italy for a second opinion, was more cheerful: he opined that there was no organic problem – she had merely ‘outgrown her strength’ and needed rest. Undoubtedly the stress of the previous few months, about which the doctor knew nothing, was chiefly responsible. And few doctors would ever have been called upon to treat acute misery in a honeymooning bride.
Now, removed from Alva’s smothering influence, for the first time Consuelo began to think about what her life was about and ‘to chafe at the impersonal role I had so far played…first a pawn in my mother’s game and now, as my husband expressed it, “a link in the chain”’.1 By this Sunny Marlborough meant that Blenheim and the family were their first priority; that he and Consuelo were merely the present incumbents in the family’s long history and had to hand it on in good order. From his point of view he had secured enough money to see Blenheim safely through the next decades, but at considerable personal sacrifice; indeed, the reason for their extended honeymoon tour of Europe was that the marriage settlement had enabled him to set in progress some much needed work at Blenheim. He made it clear that he saw ‘no need for sentiment’ and did not waste his time trying to coax Consuelo into an affectionate relationship, but he insisted that their paramount duty was to produce a son.
Perhaps this lay at the root of their first quarrels? Could there be anything more painful – physically and emotionally – for an eighteen-year-old girl raised modestly, presumably still in love with another man at that point, than to be regularly used to produce a child, by a man who made no secret of the fact that he had no love for her and that any sentiment was out of place? She wanted to do her duty and appreciated that she needed to become pregnant quickly, but her illness made this unlikely. She had no one in whom to confide or to turn to in this crisis. For companionship she had only Joanne, the chic French maid chosen by Alva, who accompanied her on the honeymoon. Consuelo does not say whether she liked Joanne or not, but it appears she was never a confidante. Perhaps Alva had instructed Joanne to report back to her. But anyway, Marlborough thought Joanne totally unsuitable as she had no knowledge of ‘the English way of doing things’. He wired his mother to recruit a suitable person for their arrival in England.*
While Consuelo spent days resting in her rooms, Marlborough went on a spending spree, ‘ransacking’ (as she described it) Rome’s antique shops. He was anxious to fill the gaps left by the indiscriminate sale of art treasures by his father and grandfather which had denuded many rooms at Blenheim. Occasionally Consuelo was allowed to accompany her husband on these shopping trips, but he complained that whenever she appeared in her furs the prices rocketed. From Italy they went on to Egypt for a cruise along the Nile, where Consuelo retired to her cabin in dismay when nautch dancing girls were summoned to perform after dinner.
From Cairo they travelled to Paris to stay at the Hotel Bristol. Consuelo had always enjoyed Paris, and at last she found herself looking forward to something. She was to complete the purchases for her trousseau and it would be the first time she had ever shopped for herself, for Alva had always chosen her daughter’s wardrobe. But even here she was to be disappointed: ‘Marlborough took it upon himself to display the same hectoring rights [Alva] had previously exercised in the selection of my gowns,’ she wrote. ‘Unfortunately, his taste appeared to be dictated by a desire for magnificence rather than by any wish to enhance my looks.’2 Curiously, when Consuelo was able to buy her own clothes, they were the simple, modest styles preferred by Alva. One evening at their hotel they met Angela St Clair-Erskine who was in Paris with her mother to buy her trousseau, and Marlborough invited the two women to dine with them. Having lost Marlborough it had not taken Angela long to find another suitor but it was an awkward moment for Consuelo, knowing that this beautiful English girl was Marlborough’s real love. Angela noted waspishly: ‘Consuelo was very pale, rather shy, and with only the promise of the good looks she afterwards developed…She was quite the thinnest person I have ever seen and she used to wear her pearls sewn up in a horse-hair bag as a bustle tied around her waist – this was partly to insure their safety, and partly to make her look fatter.’3
Meanwhile, Consuelo was being equipped for her new life with sophisticated gowns and furs and amazing jewels at Marlborough’s dictate. The magnificent tiaras gave her a headache, and she instinctively felt that the jewels he bought were not so much gifts for her pleasure as a display of his newly acquired riches. Princess Alexandra had initiated a fashion for rows of pearls worn tightly clasped around the neck – ‘dog collars’, they were called – and many Society women adopted this item of jewellery, wearing up to a dozen rows at a time. Marlborough seemed to know about women’s fashions and commissioned one for Consuelo’s slender neck that contained eighteen rows. She wore it, and though she must have known it suited her, she disliked it because it rasped her skin when she moved her head; also, it was symbolic of what she increasingly felt was her entrapment.
Only when she was properly equipped did Marlborough consider she was fit to meet his family. In March 1896 the couple travelled to London, where a group of Churchills and friends had turned up at the boat-train platform to welcome the newly-weds home. Consuelo had celebrated her nineteenth birthday the previous week but, she later revealed, she still felt like a schoolgirl as she disembarked from the train and faced the scrutiny of many pairs of eyes. There was her mother-in-law Berthe (Goosie), and Marlborough’s two sisters Lilian and Norah (whom Consuelo had already met during her visit to Blenheim the previous year); Ivor Guest, who had been her husband’s best man at their wedding; Lady Sarah Wilson,* Sunny’s hard-eyed, cynical aunt, whom Consuelo instinctively disliked; and Jennie (widowed just over a year earlier) with Winston, now a twenty-one-year-old subaltern in the 4th Hussars, at her elbow. Numerous other friends made up the party, all chattering at once in their distinctive clipped English accents, which instantly made Consuelo feel different and excluded. Surrounded by the strangers who were now her closest family she felt lonelier than ever, but she recognised that she would have to make friends with these people if she was ever to make a life for herself.
&
nbsp; As an onlooker, she saw straight away that there were factions among the group, and noted how most of the Churchills patronised her mother-in-law, who was, in turn, deeply aggrieved that her son had refused to pay the fare for her to attend his wedding in America. But Consuelo instantly liked Winston, describing him as ‘a young red-headed boy a few years older than I’. She had heard much of this young cousin of Sunny’s whom Sunny regarded as his best friend. He had only just missed their wedding and had gone on from New York to Cuba in search of adventure, and found it by involving himself in the Spanish attempt to quell an insurgency there and sending back dispatches to the Daily Graphic, for which he received his first journalist’s fee.*
On his twenty-first birthday Winston had attached himself to the Spanish commander, General Valdez, and found himself ‘in the most dangerous place in the field’ during the fighting. ‘For the first time,’ he wrote in a memoir, ‘I heard shots fired in anger and heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air.’4 He acquitted himself so well that he was decorated by the general (a decoration he was never allowed to wear on his Army uniform), but his Graphic reports of the battle were not received with universal approval by rival newspapers. ‘Sensible people,’ grumbled one leader editorial, ‘will wonder what motive could possibly impel a British officer to mix himself up in a dispute with the merits of which he had absolutely nothing to do…Spending a holiday in fighting other people’s battles is rather an extraordinary proceeding even for a Churchill.’5 Winston was nevertheless happy to have made his first small mark on the world.
Knowing that Winston was Marlborough’s heir until she produced a son, Consuelo had wondered before meeting him whether he would be her enemy, but his open, friendly and self-confident welcome invigorated her. And after all, she reflected, he was half-American. ‘He struck me,’ she wrote, ‘as ardent and vital and seemed to have every intention of getting the most out of life, whether in sport, or in love, in adventure or in politics.’6 During the years Consuelo spent at Blenheim, Winston would be one of the most regular visitors, staying there at least several days each month and always taking centre stage in conversation. She enjoyed the fact that his views were sharp and well informed, and not delivered with the sense of self-importance that her husband’s were.
Consuelo’s relationship with her mother-in-law was also comforting. ‘Her outlook was limited, for she had received an English girl’s proverbially poor education,’ she wrote. And she was more amused than shocked to find that Goosie believed all American families lived on large plantations with slaves for servants, and ‘that there were Red Indians ready to scalp us round every corner’. But she quickly realised that Goosie was not as stupid as was usually suggested: ‘She possessed shrewd powers of intuition and observation, and…she liked me.’7
The following day Consuelo was formally presented to Marlborough’s formidable grandmother, the Dowager Duchess Fanny* who had caused Jennie so much heartache in her early years among the family. Still dressed in mourning for Randolph, and using an ear trumpet, the Duchess made the meeting resemble a royal audience. She had been strongly in favour of Sunny’s marriage because of the financial advantages, but she was eager to see what the bargain was like and frankly inspected Consuelo, her clothes and demeanour. She was apparently not dissatisfied with the slim, tall girl, who had a modest grace, and she told Consuelo how she hoped to see Blenheim soon restored to its former glory. ‘Then,’ Consuelo wrote, ‘fixing her cold grey eyes upon me she continued, “Your first duty is to have a child and it must be a son, because it will be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke. Are you in the family way?”’8
This recollection sits oddly with the fond letters in the Churchill archive written by Duchess Fanny to Winston from his childhood onwards. She was certainly annoyed with him on occasions because she thought he spent his small allowance too freely, and she loathed the fact that after he left school he liked going to the races and gambling (a trait shared by most Churchill men). Her affection may have changed during Lord Randolph’s final illness when Winston could do nothing to please his father, and – almost emotionally estranged from Jennie – it had been to Duchess Fanny that Randolph frequently wrote to complain about Winston and express his disappointment in his elder son. Randolph had been Duchess Fanny’s favourite child, the star in her brood, and she never recovered from his early death. She may have blamed Winston for causing his father such worry, but on the other hand she often invited him to stay and reported to Jennie that he was ‘affectionate and pleasant’. Her letters to Winston at that time certainly did not lack warmth: ‘Do be careful dear of bathing not to catch cold or otherwise come to grief,’ she had written a few months earlier, signing herself ‘Ever your affectionate Grandmother’.9 Perhaps she had intended her remark to Consuelo to be taken humorously? No other explanation makes sense.
After the ordeal of meeting the Churchills, Consuelo was taken to meet Marlborough’s maternal family, the Hamiltons, at the home of Berthe’s brother the Duke of Abercorn. Consuelo liked the Hamiltons better than the Churchills and was pleased to note that Marlborough was more Hamilton in appearance and mannerism than Churchill. But again, the conversation was soon brought round to the subject of an heir and Consuelo found herself infected with everybody’s anxiety on that topic. Berthe’s sister the Marchioness of Lansdowne, whom Consuelo had met in India, was a surrogate mother to Marlborough – and indeed he told Consuelo he much preferred this aunt to his mother. Lady Lansdowne was very like Berthe ‘but much better looking’, and she, like her sister, showed some kindness to the newcomer.
With the introductions over, Marlborough took Consuelo home to Blenheim. The whole of Woodstock and nearby villages turned out to greet them. Consuelo recalled standing tired and cold, though dressed in fabulous furs, in the sharp April wind, waiting while the Mayor and every other local dignitary welcomed her with what each considered an appropriate speech. At the railway station the Mayor suggested that the Duchess might be interested to know that Woodstock had a mayor and corporation before America was discovered. Consuelo recalled that she ‘seethed’ with an unspoken riposte, which seems an oversensitive reaction to an obviously well meant piece of information, but again she felt patronised. Each speech delivered along their route under triumphal arches bedecked with early spring blooms was cheered by flag-waving crowds, enchanted by the youth and beauty of the new Duchess. And after each speech Consuelo was presented with a bouquet, until her arms were full of flowers.
At last they were in the carriage for the drive to Blenheim, and – just like Jennie before her – Consuelo was taken aback when the horses were unhitched and ‘our employees proceeded to drag us up to the house’.10 Although touched by the warmth of the welcome, Consuelo was ‘discomfited by this means of progress, at which my democratic principles rebelled’. The last time she had seen Blenheim had been on her first visit as an awestruck guest who had nevertheless disdained the domestic arrangements, which were not up to Alva’s standards. Now it was her home, under her management, and she had to make the best of it.
She was relieved to get to her room, where her new maid had a hot bath ready and had laid out her gown for dinner. But she was not much impressed with her accommodation. High above her, a plaster frieze of garlands held by golden cupids seemed to suggest that some thought had been given to cheering the new occupant; but her bed faced a fireplace upon which the inscription ‘Dust, Ashes, Nothing’ was carved in black letters. It was the first thing that greeted her each morning, and Consuelo often thought longingly of her own bright, modern, warm suite in New York.
That evening was the first of the dinners à deux that were to become a purgatory to Consuelo over the years. Cartoons depicting a long table with a diner at either end, unable to converse with each other because of the distance between them, were simply art imitating life as far as Consuelo was concerned. She wrote of Marlborough’s curious habit of loading his plate with food before dismissing the servants. Then h
e would move his plate away, along with all the cutlery and the glasses, and push his chair back, while twirling his signet ring and contemplating some train of thought, often getting up and walking about the room for five or ten minutes. Afterwards he would return to his place and eat his dinner very slowly, complaining that the food was cold. ‘As a rule neither of us spoke a word. I took to knitting in desperation.’11 Their butler – equally bored – used to sit outside the door reading detective novels.
The strict hierarchy of the servants was something else that Consuelo had to learn, and to survive. This was quite as rigid as the English class system itself, and Consuelo, used to Alva’s well run homes, knew what was needed but found it hard at first to achieve. Quarrels between the chef and the housekeeper were frequent, and required careful adjudication. Each servant had their allotted tasks and for one to do the work of another – perhaps someone lower in the pecking order – was to cause a loss of face. Hence, if Consuelo wanted someone to set a match to the fire in her sitting room, the butler, who might be in the room at the time, would have to gravely send for a footman to do so. On one occasion, at least, Consuelo lost patience and sprang up to light the fire herself rather than wait. We do not know what the butler thought of this act of lèse-majesté.
Fortunately, whenever Marlborough made one of his frequent trips to London, his sisters Lilian and Norah stayed with Consuelo so that she was not always left alone, and Consuelo tried to learn from these two women who had spent their childhood at Blenheim. She was quick, bright and dutiful – ‘watchful as a child is watchful’ is how one visitor described her – so that although she received no formal instruction she began to pick up the running of the great household. She learned to live with its inconveniences – though always inwardly resentful about all the same things that Jennie had complained of years earlier: the insularity of life at Blenheim, the stuffiness and arrogance of the family, the acute discomfort of a house with impossibly high ceilings, insufficient heating and limited bathroom facilities. To fill her days she visited the sick and elderly in the neighbouring villages (not, one would suppose, an occupation any nineteen-year-old newly-wed would choose willingly). But with a resilience typical of her youth, Consuelo came to terms with her bad bargain and began to look forward to weekends when visitors came and alleviated the dullness. As far as she was able she worked at her marriage and came eventually to believe that she had stimulated some affection in Marlborough, if not love. She concluded that a woman could only really be happy living at Blenheim if she were in love with the Duke, but that never happened to Consuelo.
The Churchills Page 17
