It did not take Lady Randolph Churchill long to be welcomed in the highest social circles because of her beauty, her vivacity, her enjoyment of life. Seeing her in the center of an admiring group, someone was caught by her dazzling expression and murmured Shakespeare’s phrase:
Stars, stars;
And all eyes else dead coals.
It was rumored that she painted her face, but she declared that she never used rouge: the color evinced her healthy circulation. Her gaiety and vitality attracted the Prince of Wales, who loved to see her among his guests at Marlborough House because she infected the others with her high spirits and could tell risqué anecdotes without offense. She enthusiastically advocated any novelty and embraced every fresh idea. Her large gray eyes sparkled with the sheer pleasure of talk, her contributions being daring, racy, and full of her own excitement. Apart from her social liveliness, she was shrewd, keenly critical, ambitious and humorous, qualities she passed on to her son Winston.
Immediately after her marriage she plunged into the whirl and swirl of London life, balls until five in the morning, dinners, receptions, concerts, operas, plays, Epsom, Ascot, Goodwood, Cowes. Sometimes her dresses aroused comment. She attended a ball at Dudley House in a dark blue dress with crimson roses. Randolph advised her against it, and she was solemnly ticked off by the host, who asked why she had come in “such a monstrous dress.” At first they lived in Curzon Street; then at a larger house in Charles Street, where their guests included the Prince and Princess of Wales, Lord Rosebery and the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. At one dinner Randolph offered the Tory leader some wine. “My dear Randolph,” replied Dizzy, “I have sipped your excellent champagne, I have drunk your good claret, I have tasted your delicious port; I will have no more.” But Jenny had noticed that Dizzy had taken nothing throughout dinner except a sip or two of weak brandy and water.
The friendship with the Prince of Wales was rudely terminated when Randolph took his elder brother’s part in a drama of sex. This elder brother, who would in time become the eighth Duke of Marlborough, was now the Marquis of Blandford and had married a wife whose sense of fun did not amuse him. She was the daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, and finding life dull with her husband she tried to enliven it with practical jokes, some of which might have tried the patience of a less temperamental man than he. For instance, the slices of cheese served on their table were interspersed with pieces of soap of a similar color and shape, and it amused the Marchioness when their guests foamed at the mouth and swallowed the soap whole in order to get rid of it. Her husband also failed to catch the infection of her jocularity when, on entering a room, he received a pot of ink on his head; and he had hoped to be safe from apple-pie beds after leaving school. He was easily bored by life in general and soon tired of this particular manifestation.
To help things along he became intimate with a married woman, the Countess of Aylesford, whose husband threatened proceedings. The Earl of Aylesford was shooting with the Prince of Wales in India when he heard of Blandford’s proximity to the Countess. Returning home, he determined to act, being encouraged by the Prince of Wales, who said that as Blandford had compromised Lady Aylesford he must divorce his wife and marry her. Blandford refused to do so, brother Randolph backing him. At this point it became known that the Prince of Wales had been an admirer of Lady Aylesford and had written her many love letters. No doubt the lady, faced with the prospect of marriage to Blandford, had been prevailed upon to disclose the fact and the evidence. Randolph impetuously took advantage of the letters and threatened to publish them unless the Prince abandoned his attempt to make Blandford divorce his wife. The Prince was furious and there were some warm interchanges, culminating in a challenge to a duel carried by the Prince’s secretary, Lord Knollys, to Randolph, with the suggestion that Rotterdam would be a convenient spot for the fight. Randolph appointed Lord Falmouth as his “second” and sent a message by him indicating that he would fight any nominee of the Prince’s but could not lift a sword against his future monarch. The situation was now so serious that the only alternative to a flagrant scandal was complete oblivion. Wisely the leading actors, having cooled down, determined to suffer from absence of mind; Aylesford separated from his wife, whose friendship with Blandford remained unimpaired, while Blandford and his wife temporarily overlooked their troubles. But it could not last, and a few years later Lady Blandford’s incorrigible waggishness precipitated a crisis. One morning he came down to breakfast, removed a cover beneath which he believed were eggs and bacon, and found instead a naked baby doll. His wife could not have known that Lady Aylesford had just given birth to a baby of which he was the putative father, but she may have guessed at some such happening and decided to observe her husband’s reactions to a wax infant. The result was most satisfactory. He was shocked to the core, left the house, and in due time she obtained a divorce for desertion.
The Aylesford affair meant social ostracism for Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill, because the Prince of Wales announced that he would enter no house to which they were invited; and even though Randolph wrote a letter of apology the Prince sustained his enmity until the other made a success in politics and could no longer be ignored. While Queen Victoria was fulminating with displeasure at Windsor, and her son was cutting Churchill’s friends in London, Lord and Lady Randolph felt in need of a change and paid a visit to Canada and the United States. On their return they accompanied the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough to Dublin. The Duke had been appointed Viceroy, and Randolph acted as his unpaid secretary. They remained in Ireland for three years, and Jenny enjoyed herself immensely. To begin with, she completely eclipsed the Duchess at all the big receptions. Lord D’Abernon, later a famous ambassador, described the effect she had on him:
I have the clearest recollection of seeing her for the first time. It was at the Viceregal Lodge, Dublin. She stood at one side to the left of the entrance. The Duke was on a dais at the farther end of the room, surrounded by a brilliant staff, but eyes were not turned on him or 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 favourite 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.
D’Abernon goes on to say that she was full of kindliness and high spirits, that her courage was as great as her husband’s, and that “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.”
Next to her social success she loved hunting, which almost became a passion. She hunted with nearly every pack of hounds in Ireland, and took innumerable tosses. Randolph usually accompanied her and they seemed an ideally matched pair, but they cannot have been wholly in tune with one another because they did not exchange vital confidences. “I do like him,” she told her mother: “he has such a lovely mustache.” She admired his intelligence and independence as well as his mustache; just as he admired her beauty and charm as well as her vitality; but admiration can never be more than a part of love, and need not exist with it.
Randolph began to take a keen interest in Irish politics while stationed in Dublin, and such was his mental independence that he criticized the English Government in a public speech for “inattention to Irish legislation,” which had “produced obstruction.” That a Conservative M.P., the son of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, should dare to do such a thing was considered an outrage, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, was gravely concerned. Randolph’s father, the Viceroy, explained the situation in a letter to the Secretary. Randolph, said he, was either mad or drunk. In any case his opinions were entirely his own, and they had come as a complete surprise to the Duke, who wholly disowned them: “I am extremely annoyed at the folly of his utterance, which I believe on reflection he will regret himself.” But Randolph’s ambit
ion was stirring and he had decided to be a thorn in the side of the Government. Jenny backed him up tacitly but did not discuss his attitude with him. She was too wise to start a marital argument on politics, but she agreed with what he said. Indeed his views seem to have affected Hicks-Beach, who became very unpopular in the House of Commons when he later declared that he would refuse absolutely to use the forces of the Crown to collect the debts of an Irish absentee landlord, Lord Clanricarde, and soon resigned his office.
Jenny was more interested in collecting junk from the Dublin antique shops than in discussing political junk. Not content with furs and furbelows, she wanted furniture for her new home, and in 1880 they were back in London for the General Election, when Beaconsfield’s party was thrown out and Gladstone’s took over.
After the birth of a second son the Churchills settled down at 29 St. James’s Place, which Jenny furnished and decorated with her usual energy and enthusiasm, one room being converted into an artist’s studio, for she had suddenly been smitten with the notion that she could paint and under this delusion she covered miles of canvas with much daubery. She had not yet managed to tone down her behavior to the moderation expected from British hostesses. On May 29, 1880, Lord Falmouth was having tea with them when a very smart carriage drove up to their door. Jenny caught sight of a fat and ancient lady being assisted to the pavement by two footmen in silk stockings and powdered wigs. “Who on earth is this old demon?” she cried.
“It’s my mother,” said Falmouth.
Life suddenly became very strenuous for Jenny. There was a great deal of entertaining to be done. Randolph had formed what was soon to be known as the Fourth Party, a small group of intransigent Conservative M.P.s who intended to attack the new Liberal Government on pretty well every measure in addition to gingering up the Conservative Opposition. The group consisted of four members: Randolph Churchill, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, Sir John Gorst, and Arthur J. Balfour, though the last was the nephew of Lord Salisbury, the Conservative leader, and could not wholly be relied upon. Their meetings often took place at Randolph’s house, Jenny making a lively and attractive hostess. Sharing Balfour’s love of music, she often played the piano and went to concerts with him. The conversation at her dinner parties was fairly free, though when Lady Mandeville dined with them and told “roguey-poguey” stories which astonished one or two peers, Jenny thought it bad taste to talk like that before men.
Both Randolph and Jenny were extravagant by nature and constantly hard-up. Her affectionate father could not resist appeals for financial help and spent several weeks every year on the Atlantic Ocean, crossing to New York to make some money and returning to England when he had made it. She disliked discussing money because it always reminded her that she wanted more. Occasionally she sent brief bulletins to her mother about the children. Winston was a very good boy and getting on quite well with his lessons, she reported, but he was a most difficult child to manage. The new baby, John, was in the hands of a nurse; and there seemed to be another baby in the house, because she expressed a fear that Randolph would become spoilt, adding that he would lose half his talent in that event and she constantly told him so. After one season in London she came to the conclusion that parents were silly to compel their daughters to marry against their will, though she had to admit that it was difficult enough to get married at all.
The periods of her enforced residence at Blenheim were penitential. She longed to have someone in whom she could confide; she had almost forgotten what it was like to live with people who loved her. True, Randolph was invariably kind to her, but he was distressed by her abuse of the Duchess. “I loathe living here!” she blurted out to her mother, not merely on account of the routine, the formalities and the invariable dullness, but chiefly because she could not endure living with someone she hated. There was no doubt too that the Duchess returned her hostility, partly perhaps because she outshone her sisters-in-law, and never lost an opportunity to comment unfavorably on what she said or how she dressed. Jenny noted that “we are always studiously polite to each other, but it is rather like a volcano, ready to burst out at any moment.” She did her best to brighten things up by inciting a few of the more adventurous female visitors to masquerade in old clothes, and when the palace was open to public inspection to wander round it with the trippers, making odd comments on the furniture and pictures. This would not have helped to endear her to the Duchess, had that lady got to hear of it. In spite of “Papa’s most generous tips,” Jenny was perpetually impecunious, and during one winter at Blenheim she was only able to spend 25/-at Woodstock on some dark red thin flannel which was made into a dress by her maid. She asked her mother to send a barrel of American eating apples to her London home.
In the spring of 1882 Randolph fell ill and Jenny took him to America for a long rest. Her father liked Randolph but observed that he drew on his wife’s strength. That autumn they spent some weeks in Germany and Switzerland. They had tea at Gastein with the Emperor of Germany, William I, who was on a diet which consisted of poached eggs, potted meat, several curious German dishes, many cups of strong tea, strawberries, ices and sweet tepid champagne, a fairly sound foundation for an invalid, who probably followed it with a really substantial dinner.
When the Duke, her father-in-law, died in 1883, his widow retired to London and Jenny’s brother-in-law became Duke of Marlborough. Though the latter’s divorce was not made absolute until after he had succeeded to the title, his ex-wife refused to call herself a duchess, preferring to remain Lady Blandford. Jenny acted as temporary chatelaine of Blenheim for Randolph’s elder brother, but she did not make a success of the part, saying that “my American efficiency will out and they call me bossy.”
Meanwhile Randolph was making a name for himself in politics, and Jenny kept pace with him as a popular political hostess. He was the only man in Parliament who dared to ridicule Gladstone and some of his shafts plainly discomposed that remarkable figure, who had not been so harried since Disraeli left him in peace. For five years the Fourth Party made itself extremely disliked by Conservatives as well as Liberals. Randolph sometimes appeared as a radical, sometimes as a Tory; no one knew what he would attack or defend from one moment to another. He became friendly with radicals like Joseph Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke, with Whigs like Sir William Harcourt, with the diehards of both parties. Owing to the attitude of the Prince of Wales, “much of the vain and foolish excitement of London society was closed to us, and politics became in fact our entire and all-absorbing interest,” recorded Jenny; and at a later date Randolph claimed that he had fought Gladstone at the head of a great majority, as well as the leaders of the Opposition, in addition to the ostracism of society imposed by the heir to the throne. A speech he made on the subject of Bradlaugh, who as an atheist refused to take the oath which enabled him to sit in the House of Commons, caused a sensation, and so many people rushed up to congratulate Jenny that she felt she had made it. She was informed that “Tum-tum,” as she called the Prince of Wales, had expressed his pleasure with the speech, and they were invited to a ball given by Lord Fife at which the Prince and Princess of Wales were to be present. But unfortunately they were also invited to a levee held by the Prince, who had not been warned of their presence and stared unknowingly at Randolph, who was furious, said he had been insulted, and fulminated at such length that Jenny took refuge in the country while he simmered down.
Queen Victoria quickly heard of this displeasing episode; and as Churchill would almost certainly be a minister of the Crown if the Conservative Party returned to power, she decided to call her son and heir to order. Diplomatic intermediaries were detailed for duty, and as a result of various exchanges compliments were soon flying between the insulted parties, the Prince announcing his unqualified admiration for Churchill, who proclaimed his unreserved loyalty to the Prince. Following these commendable transactions Jenny gave a dinner to the Prince and Princess, among their guests being Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone and Lord Rosebery. The party went with
a breeze and the future looked rosy.
In 1883 the Churchills moved to No. 2 Connaught Place, Marble Arch, a house built on the site of a huge grave wherein the malefactors or martyrs executed at Tyburn had been buried. Theirs was the first private house in London to be fitted with electric light, but in the course of their first dinner party, given with the object of displaying the novel illumination, all the lights went out and there was a hurried search for candles while the guests had to be witty in the dark. Jenny was by now a person of note in the social and political worlds, her picture as a professional beauty being exhibited in shop windows, and when Randolph again stood for Parliament at Woodstock in the election of ‘85, she ran the entire campaign. Her headquarters were at the Bear Hotel and she collected a number of attractive women to help her. She used to say that whenever she felt in the dumps she bought a new dress, but now she was in soaring spirits and a new dress every day.
Driving around the constituency in a landau, the horses decorated with Randolph’s racing colors, she addressed groups of agricultural laborers from hayricks or in barns or standing on a trestle in the center of a field. One of her electioneering tricks was both novel and successful. For some years she had kept all the abusive remarks about Randolph that had appeared in the press, pasting them into scrapbooks. From these she read the choicest specimens of invective, which were well received and established the victim as a much-persecuted man. The sporting sense of the voters once aroused, the leitmotif of her discourses ran: “Please vote for my husband; I shall be so unhappy if you don’t.” As she was pretty, they did their best to make her happy and returned her husband to Parliament with a handsome majority, for which she thanked them “from the bottom of my heart.”
Hesketh Pearson Page 7
