Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  When she began helping Winston to mend his broken heart, Ettie was in her early thirties, but her lithe figure was more like a twenty-year-old’s (“the slenderest waist you’ve ever seen,” said one of her social rivals). She was well experienced at creating powerful relationships on the basis of nothing more than kind words, warm embraces, and fleeting kisses. (In the 1890s she was a leading light of the Souls, the tight-knit group of upper-class aesthetes who cultivated intense friendships with artistic devotion.) “You escape me like one of your own graceful smiles,” wrote a young admirer, unsettled by her flirtations. Others appreciated her restraint and were happy to bask in her smiles without demanding more. One wrote, “I am very, very fond of you, [but] I love my wife first & you second, both far too much to make serious love to you.”3

  What she gave to Winston was probably little more than a sympathetic ear and a soft shoulder where he could rest his head while he poured out his troubles. She seemed to regard him as a wide-eyed boy in need of comfort from someone who knew more of love than he did. And it must have been clear to her rather soon that the end of his relationship with Pamela had not been pretty. The emotional upheaval was so great that even many months later both Winston and Pamela were still flashing wounded looks at each other. He couldn’t suppress a lingering resentment of her rejection, and she was hurt that he had complained of her to Ettie and others.

  Two revealing glimpses of their tense encounters have survived. The first was at a ball when Winston strode up to her and demanded to know “if she had no pride, because he had heard she was going about saying that [he] had treated her badly.” Pamela denied his accusation but confided to others that his words had hurt her deeply. The second incident occurred at a large party hosted by Winston’s aunt Cornelia. Arriving late, he came into a room and saw Pamela standing by the fire with another woman. She was dressed in white satin and her diamonds sparkled in the firelight. He approached her but appeared to be so taken by her beauty that he could barely say a word and failed even to acknowledge the other woman. He offered his hand to Pamela, but she didn’t take it and refused to speak to him. It was a humiliating moment, made even worse when his uncle came to escort her to dinner and she swept past Winston as though he didn’t exist.4

  In early 1902 the announcement came that Pamela would marry an earl—Lord Lytton, who lived in the great Gothic mansion of Knebworth House. “She now makes an alliance,” said the Daily Chronicle, “that was well worth waiting for.” The common view among Churchill’s biographers is that Winston and Pamela simply drifted apart, largely because he let this “dream wife” get away through lack of effort. Sadly, the truth is that he had misjudged her character from the start, attributing qualities to her that she never had. She wasn’t the ethereal creature he had idolized, but a young woman of ordinary desires who always found it hard to limit her interests to one man. What really undermined their relationship wasn’t his supposed “inertia,” or the lack of money and a title, but her inconstancy. She juggled several relationships at once until she finally accepted Lord Lytton’s proposal, and even after marriage she would continue to see other men.

  Jennie’s sister Leonie recalled that Winston was devastated when he learned that Pamela had been misleading him. “Looking ill and distraught” one morning, he had come to Leonie for sympathy, telling her, “I’ve paced my room the whole night through—till dawn came—without lying down.” Blinded by her beauty, Winston may have only guessed at how widely Pamela had spread her affections. But there had been warning signs during their relationship. His normally unassertive brother, Jack, claimed that she wasn’t to be trusted, calling her an “awful humbug” who was “the same to three other men as she is to Winston.” She was even rumored to have had a brief romance with no less a figure than the Liberal statesman Herbert Henry Asquith, twenty-two years her senior. In old age, when asked his opinion of Pamela Plowden, Asquith confided to his intimate circle that she was a stunning woman who had enjoyed “the greatest erotic success of her day.”5

  There were always too many men in Pamela’s life, and that circumstance didn’t end for many years. In fact, one of her most passionate affairs came in her late thirties when she fell in love with handsome Julian Grenfell, one of Ettie’s sons. As a result of her seduction of the younger man, she became known in the Grenfell family as the “wicked countess.”6

  * * *

  When Pamela’s engagement to Lytton was announced, Churchill gave no hint of bitterness or cynicism. Instead he sent the couple a gracious note wishing them happiness and promising to remain a devoted friend. All the same, the end of his long attachment to Pamela was a sobering experience he wouldn’t soon forget. Ettie’s attentions helped to take his mind off his troubles, but she was also the sort of person who could restore some of his faith in the enchanted future he had imagined for himself. After his stormy parting from Pamela, he welcomed Ettie’s style of warm friendship, which wasn’t encumbered by talk of marriage or any serious risk of scandal.

  She shared his Romantic view of life as a heroic endeavor full of grand sentiments. She was fond of reading poetry, and in later years used to end letters with a favorite line from Tennyson in which Ulysses describes the aim of “heroic hearts”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” On a table in her room she kept a copy of an address by her American friend Oliver Wendell Holmes articulating a creed to which Churchill could easily have subscribed. “In our youth,” Holmes said in his address to a gathering of Civil War veterans, “our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. . . . Whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.”7

  Spoken in Ettie’s bewitching fashion, such words worked their magic on Winston, and over the next few years he kept returning again and again to her for encouragement and inspiration. As a friend observed of Ettie, “Sidonie the sorceress she is, the charming of Winston is a large sprig of laurel for her wreath.” Churchill’s friends soon realized that he and Ettie were so close that they were constantly confiding in each other. Soon she was showing off her new friend to the public at large. On July 20, 1901, an illustrated weekly featured a large photograph of “Mr. Winston Churchill, M.P.” in Hyde Park as he sat contentedly in a carriage with Ettie and her husband, Willie.

  Hugh Cecil worried that Churchill was sharing confidences too freely, particularly since Ettie’s friends included politicians on both sides of the House. “Let me repeat again the desirability of great reserve in conversation,” he lectured Winston, fearing that Hooligan confidences were being shared. “I tremble as to what you may have said to Mrs. Grenfell!”8

  For Churchill, the air of enchantment surrounding Ettie had much to do with the way she lived and entertained at Taplow Court, a redbrick mansion above the Thames, with high gables and a corner tower with a tall spire and “a view that stretches the soul.” On summer weekends the house would fill up with guests who were treated to massive breakfasts and dinners, boating parties on the river, long walks in the woods, tennis matches, tea-table conversations on the lawn, and late-night charades. “No one entertained more delightfully,” Consuelo Marlborough recalled of Ettie. “There was the Thames, lovely in summer . . . shady walks in the woods and always an agreeable cavalier as escort.” It was on such walks that Winston and Ettie forged their friendship, discussing politics and life as they strolled together, with romantic glimpses of Windsor Castle a few miles away.

  Sometimes the parties were rowdy, and on one occasion Churchill was unceremoniously thrown into the river when he arrived from London wearing his top hat and frock coat. He took it well, and was generally a good sport, though he tended to monopolize the after-dinner discussions. “Winston leads general conversation on the hearth-rug,” an amused Ettie wrote after one evening at Taplow, “solely addressing
himself in the looking-glass—a sympathetic & enthusiastic audience.” When the talk turned to nicknames, Winston was asked if he had ever acquired one, and he shot back, “No, except ‘that young beast Churchill.’ ”

  Churchill biographies rarely mention her, but Ettie was to remain his friend and supporter for the rest of her life, and she had the satisfaction in old age of knowing that her early faith in him had been vindicated. In 1947, after the Second World War had been won, she was approaching eighty and the glamour of her time as a society figure had long since faded. But she had not forgotten the intimacy that she and Churchill had shared in earlier times. To her “beloved Winston,” she sent a few words of appreciation, telling him: “I think of you so often, & of all the old days, & of all you meant to me & mine.”9

  * * *

  For Churchill, one feature of Taplow Court with special importance was that it belonged originally to a general who served with the Duke of Marlborough at the Battle of Blenheim. A ten-year veteran of the European fighting in the opening years of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Orkney was a fearless leader of infantry who is described as the “gallant Orkney” in Winston’s 1930s biography of Marlborough. After his retirement from the army, the earl acquired both the Taplow estate and the neighboring one of Cliveden, and divided his time between them for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. For most of Ettie’s guests, the woods and the river were simply a playground, but to borrow the phrase that Churchill applied to Rosebery, the Past stood ever at Winston’s elbow, and each visit to Taplow was enriched by its association with his illustrious ancestor.

  Of course, this legacy was best appreciated about forty miles away, at Blenheim Palace, where Churchill delighted in studying the family history and in gathering inspiration from its countless reminders of Marlborough’s glory. But the significance of Blenheim was not merely historical. As the family demonstrated in the summer of 1901, the triumphs of the past still had their uses in the present.

  An enormous political rally on the grounds of the estate was planned for August. Its main purpose was to promote Conservative Party unity, but no one stood to benefit from the event more than Blenheim’s native star, Winston Spencer Churchill. It was the kind of vast celebration that only a few families in the land could stage. And thus it was a reminder to the party that, however young and troublesome Winston appeared, his family was still a force to be reckoned with, and he had as much reason to expect preferment as any member of the Hotel Cecil.

  Designed by a dramatist turned architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, Blenheim was always meant to have a theatrical quality. It is a baroque fortress with a great courtyard in which arriving visitors can’t help but be overwhelmed by the towering colonnades on either side and the Corinthian portico looming straight ahead, with its statue of the goddess Minerva standing like a sentinel at the top. Carved emblems of Marlborough’s military triumphs decorate the façade, including suits of armor, spears, swords, drums, and battle flags. As symbols of the duke’s victories over Britain’s enemies, two bound captives sit in stark isolation behind Minerva. Everything is meant to inspire awe for the conquering hero whose palace was intended as a grand tribute from the nation—his last trophy.

  Blessed with such a monument, the great duke had gone to his grave without bothering to explain his deeds to posterity. “About his achievements he preserved a complete silence,” Churchill noted of his ancestor. “His answer was to be this great house.”10

  Winston was in no danger of remaining quiet about his own achievements, but the house could still speak volumes on his behalf as a testament to the fighting spirit and boundless ambition of his breed. Like the duke, he had won fame on battlefields; like his father, he wanted to be the dominant political figure of the time. It was easy for his critics in London to scoff at his pretensions and to ridicule his youthful impudence. It was much harder to mock him at Blenheim amid the grandeur of the surroundings. The romance of epic endeavor speaks from every stone, and the vast solidity of the structure gives an air of permanence to the successes of the Churchill family.

  Now the great question hovering over both the house and its latest champion was whether the old heroics had much significance in the twentieth century. At the dawn of an age of steady improvement through commerce, technology, and social reform, where was the need for another Marlborough subduing foes with, as Churchill once put it, “island blades”? Heroes still had their part to play in a limited military action like that of the Boer War, but why would anyone want another conquering goliath like Marlborough? The Continent didn’t appear to be in any danger from the rise of a new political tyrant. The next battlefront seemed to lie at home in the growing discontent over questions of economic justice and basic human rights. Though the values enshrined at Blenheim had not lost their power to impress, they were now in danger of becoming merely quaint remnants of an irrelevant age. For much of his life Winston would have the uneasy task of trying to straddle the old world of smoke-and-thunder heroics and the new world with its expectations of a quieter valor.11

  * * *

  On the Saturday morning of the August rally, workmen were busy arranging long rows of chairs in Blenheim’s great courtyard to seat an expected crowd of 120 MPs and three thousand of their supporters from around the country. At the base of the portico a stage had been built over the steps and a large sounding board was positioned in the middle for projecting the speakers’ voices to the last rows. To provide a luncheon for such a big assembly, a small army of servants had been working since dawn under a large tent on the lawn, where the guests would soon be able to enjoy a feast of roast chicken and Yorkshire ham, followed by cheesecakes and French pastries. More than a thousand bottles of champagne were on hand to wash it all down.

  Winston’s cousin was paying for much of this hospitality. Sunny seems to have believed that the rally would enhance his influence among the Tories and their Unionist allies (independent-minded Liberals who opposed Irish Home Rule). But few had a high opinion of his political skills. It seems more likely that Jennie—who was to play a large part in the day’s festivities—had used her charm to make Sunny think he was serving his own interests when he was really serving Winston’s. His tasks for the day were merely to play the gracious host and to give a short speech welcoming his guests. The main event was reserved for speeches by Arthur Balfour and the powerful Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain (“Minister for Empire,” as some called him).

  But a third speaker was also invited to deliver a few brief concluding remarks. In the normal arrangement of such events that third slot would have been filled by another senior member of the government. Instead, to no one’s surprise, it was given to Winston. The other MPs—including fellow Hooligans Hugh Cecil and Ian Malcolm—had to be content with sitting and cheering, but they were treated so hospitably that there was little cause for resentment. They were entertained in the main dining hall instead of the tent. A musical concert was given in the long library, and this was followed by special tours of the state rooms. Moving among them the whole time were three glamorous women doing their best to keep the politicians happy—Jennie, Consuelo Marlborough, and Millicent Sutherland.

  Jennie was well versed in the history of the house and liked to play tour guide. In earlier years—for simple fun—she and her friends would sometimes dress in old cloaks and hats and join one of the groups of tourists who were led around the house by volunteer guides on certain days of the month. They enjoyed eavesdropping on the groups to discover what outsiders really thought of the place. One day she nearly gave herself away by bursting into laughter when she overheard an American visitor’s reaction to one of the family portraits. “My,” exclaimed the tourist, “what poppy eyes these Churchills have got!”12

  When the courtyard began to fill up shortly after two o’clock, the sun was shining brightly, and everyone agreed the weather was ideal. Well fed and “clad in coolest country attire,” the party faithful talked and sang patriotic tunes while they waited for thei
r leaders to appear on the platform. As soon as the grounds were opened to the general public, the crowd swelled to more than seven thousand. To keep order, a few mounted policemen patrolled the grounds. A snobbish critic complained afterward that too many of the wrong sort of people had been allowed in, noting icily, “One thought one detected several publicans.”13

  A great roar greeted the entry of Chamberlain—accompanied by his American wife—and Balfour, who took a seat in the center of the stage with Millicent on one side and Jennie on the other. The usual group of news photographers was nearby, but there was a relatively recent addition to their ranks—a “motion picture man” furiously turning the handle of his machine to capture all the action for the new cinema halls opening up in London and other big towns. As if for the benefit of the movie camera, a few lazy clouds drifted by and were reflected in the tall windows of the palace.

  Having given their foes two thumping defeats in the general elections of 1895 and 1900, the alliance between Balfour’s Conservatives and Chamberlain’s Unionists looked invincible to many, and the leaders were happy to encourage that view on this fine summer day. They characterized their Liberal opponents as “Little Englanders,” petty critics of the South African conflict who were incapable of appreciating Britain’s glowing future as an imperial power. Balfour claimed that the public no longer had confidence in the “hopelessly divided” Liberals, and Chamberlain boasted—to great cheering—that the Tory-Unionist alliance was the only “truly national party.”