At his best, Lord Randolph was witty, urbane, eloquent, and passionate. At his worst, he was so impulsive and reckless that some of his contemporaries thought he was deranged. Lord Derby wrote of him in 1885, “With all his remarkable cleverness, [he] is thoroughly untrustworthy: scarcely a gentleman, and probably more or less mad.” Even his good friend Lord Rosebery wrote that Randolph always suffered from a certain “waywardness,” which grew worse in his last years when his mind seemed “unbalanced and almost unhinged.”5
What Winston knew, and what some of his father’s contemporaries must have assumed, was that Randolph suffered for years from the debilitating effects of the syphilis that killed him. Though recent efforts have been made to suggest that a brain tumor may have been the cause of his troubles, this is mostly speculation. The subject of venereal disease was such a taboo in Victorian and Edwardian societies that Winston was forced in the biography to explain his father’s death in the most awkward euphemisms, saying that Randolph was the victim of a mysterious “ghastly disease” that caused those “who loved him [to be] consumed with embarrassment and grief.”6
In a much shorter book on Randolph, Lord Rosebery used language that was more conclusive. Writing that his friend “died by inches in public,” he described the malady as a “cruel disease which was to paralyse and kill him.” More telling, he wrote that Randolph grew steadily worse from “the stealthy poison of his illness.” Randolph’s best modern biographer, Roy Foster, has written that the specialist in the case, Dr. Roose, believed that his patient had syphilis and “ministered to him accordingly.”7
In the last year of his life Lord Randolph was closely attended by Dr. George E. Keith, a fellow of the British Gynecological Society, whose expertise in venereal cases apparently led him to treat both sexes. He was Jennie’s doctor, and in the weeks leading up to Randolph’s death one of her great fears was that the nature of her husband’s illness would become widely known. She wrote her sister Leonie, “The General Public and even Society does not know the real truth . . . it would be hard if it got out. It would do incalculable harm to his political reputation & memory & be a dreadful thing for all of us.” (How and when Randolph was infected is unknown, but for a long period his relations with Jennie had been distant, and she was immersed in love affairs of her own, seemingly unharmed by her husband’s disease.)8
Winston discovered the truth while his father was still alive. Even at twenty he was good at getting what he wanted from his elders, and had talked Dr. Roose into showing him the medical reports and telling him “everything.” Afterward, he explained to his mother what he had done. “I have told no one,” he wrote her. “I need not tell you how anxious I am.”9
Winston was always haunted by his father’s death. It had been disturbing to observe Randolph’s deterioration; and for his family, the whole experience was—as Winston says in the biography—an “embarrassment.” It was also heartrending to a son who wanted to idolize his father. He never forgot the snowy morning that Lord Randolph died. More than half a century later, when he was prime minister for the second time, he surprised his doctor by suddenly remarking, “My poor papa died on January 24, 1895. It is a long time ago.” The date was seared into his memory.10
Strangely, his own death would fall on the same day. In a future that would have seemed light-years away to the Edwardians, Winston Churchill took his last breath at the age of ninety on the morning of January 24, 1965, the seventieth anniversary of Randolph’s death.
* * *
Churchill finished the biography as the summer of 1905 was coming to an end. Writing it was an emotionally and physically draining experience, and at times he had been so overworked that his haggard appearance shocked those who happened to see him at a bad moment. Exaggerating the effect, one journalist seemed eager to write young Churchill’s obituary: “There is nothing of ‘the Boy’ left in the white, nervous, washed-out face . . . It is a tired face . . . worn, harassed. He talks as a man of fifty talks—a little cruelly, slowly, measuring his words, the hand for ever tilting the hat backwards and forwards or brushing itself roughly across the tired eyes.”
Such was Winston’s physical resiliency, however, that he could look completely exhausted one day, and the next have all the necessary energy for playing polo or giving a couple of speeches two hundred miles from home. It was this deep well of strength that often left his contemporaries in wonder, and that set him apart from so many other sons of the aristocracy who thought it vulgar to appear too energetic. It also distinguished him from his father, who liked to play hard but wasn’t known for his dedication to hard work. “Mr. Churchill is superior to his father,” wrote A. G. Gardiner, the editor of the London Daily News. “For to Lord Randolph’s flair and courage and instinct for the game he adds a knowledge and industry his father did not possess. He works with the same fury that he plays, attacks a subject with the intrepidity with which he attacks an opponent in the house.”11
It helped him at one point to find what he called “an American rubber”—or in modern terms a “massage therapist,” who also happened to be an older American woman. She was a miracle worker, he told all his friends. Recommending her to Hugh Cecil, he assured him that the woman was thoroughly respectable—a “venerable God-fearing old lady”—who could do wonders to cure Linky’s chronic “debility.” After just “four rubbings,” by which he meant four sessions, Winston boasted that his circulation was better than ever and his heart was beating strongly. Teasing his friend, he told Hugh that she would “compel you to circulate and digest properly. You would then be certain of surviving Joe.”12
Despite all the time and energy invested in the biography, Churchill wasn’t sentimental about letting go of it. He was glad to be done with such an enormous task, and to have on paper at last the story that had been simmering in his head for years. Now he was eager to see what publishers were willing to pay for it. At a time when many established writers were happy to make several hundred pounds from a new book, Winston was expecting several thousand. One publisher had already offered £4,000 but he was sure he could get more.
To help him negotiate the best deal, he turned to a man he barely knew who wasn’t a proper literary agent, and who had a reputation for mismanaging money, both his own and other people’s. He had boundless enthusiasm, however. “Properly worked,” the author and editor Frank Harris wrote Winston, “this book shd bring you in £10,000, or I’m a Dutchman.”13
Frank Harris was a controversial figure in literary London whose career was on the decline in the early 1900s after he had taken a break from editing magazines to open a hotel in Monaco. He had gone bankrupt in that venture and was back in London, struggling to earn his living by his pen, when Winston entered his life. Almost fifty, he was said to resemble a superior kind of bartender, with his handlebar mustache, his dark hair parted in the middle, and his worldly air. He had not yet written the erotic memoir that would win him his greatest notoriety—My Life and Loves. That book was a product of the 1920s, when he was near the end of his life and desperate for money.
Like Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Harris was an old friend of Lord Randolph. He had been one of his seedier companions, living by his own rules and reveling in the pleasures afforded by the usual trilogy of wine, women, and song. Harris was never respectable, but now that his days were over as a prominent editor of the Victorian era, he was increasingly seen in literary circles as a dissolute has-been. George Bernard Shaw described him as “neither first-rate, nor second-rate, nor tenth rate . . . just his horrible unique self.”
But there was an all-important reason that Winston was willing to risk using Harris as a literary agent. In better days, when he was editing the Saturday Review, Harris had written a glowing tribute to Lord Randolph, which had appeared on January 26, 1895. It was in this article that he had made the impassioned argument for Randolph as the Lord Byron of the late-Victorian political world. That comparison had been resonating in Winston’s imagination for a decade, and now he wan
ted Harris to play a part in this new biographical tribute to Randolph.14
Of their brief work together Harris recalled, “He knew me, it appeared, chiefly through the article I had written in the Saturday Review on the occasion of his father’s death. He was kind enough to call it ‘the best article which had appeared anywhere,’ and added that the Duchess of Marlborough, Randolph’s mother, always showed it about as establishing her estimate of her favorite son’s genius.”
Whatever anyone else may have thought of Harris, Winston trusted that his father’s old friend would understand the point of the biography and would be able to sell others on it. And, as it happened, his faith wasn’t misplaced. Harris was surprisingly successful at representing the book to publishers. He played all the right cards, emphasizing Winston’s celebrity; the great potential for publicity; the book’s intimate understanding of political life; the son’s sympathetic treatment of his famous father’s tumultuous and tragic career; and the many quotations from letters by a host of famous Victorians, including the queen herself. Harris didn’t get an offer of ten thousand, but he came close. At the end of October the prestigious firm of Macmillan agreed to buy the rights for £8,000.
Winston was overjoyed and told Harris, “That’ll make me independent; you’ve no idea what it means to me; it guarantees success; I am extremely obliged to you.”
He paid Harris £400, in keeping with an agreement they had made at the outset. (His “agent” was to receive 10 percent of any money that topped the earlier offer of £4,000.) Their business done, the two went their separate ways, and thus Winston became one of the few who ever escaped without a scratch from a financial arrangement with Frank Harris. Improvident all his life, Harris died virtually penniless, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that he recalled listening scornfully one day to Churchill lecture him on the virtue of planning ahead. “Get enough to live on, without asking anybody for anything,” Winston had advised him. “That’s the first condition of success, or indeed, of decent living; that’s the prime necessity of life. Every man of us should think of nothing but that till it’s achieved. Afterwards one can do what one likes—please keep that in front of you as the object of your life!”15
Such words were wasted on Harris, but as Winston proved with his prodigious labors as a paid speaker and author, he was practicing what he preached, “getting enough to live on, without asking anybody for anything.” In the end, Lord Randolph, the father who died without providing much for his family, left Winston a gift more valuable than mere money. He left the example of his own life. It gave the son a story worth telling—financially and otherwise—and one worth reshaping to suit his own views and his own aims.
* * *
While he was taking the biography through its final stages in 1905, Winston did not fail in his promise to bedevil the government at every opportunity. In March he had made a lively indictment of Balfour and company as undemocratic obstructionists afraid “to face the verdict of the country” in a new election. The prime minister held office only because his uncle had handed him the job “as a private inheritance,” Churchill said. But that title would soon be taken away after the electorate—“the high court of appeal”—rejected him. In this taunting way, Churchill cast Balfour as a man with power but no true authority.
By the middle of the summer, Balfour had been castigated so often by Churchill that he seemed impervious to further attacks. Winston suggested that the prime minister and his allies had fallen into a trance and were behaving like a half-dead character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” making “certain feeble and erratic motions” but leaving everyone guessing “whether death had or had not supervened.”16
Churchill’s ridicule was so stinging that some of his new Liberal friends pleaded with him to ease up. “I like the fighting portion of your speeches,” a well-meaning Liberal member told him, but then advised that others on their side with “more tender susceptibilities” were becoming uncomfortable with the way Winston “scourged” the Tory leaders. As the year drew to a close, even the king himself felt obliged to give Winston a warning.
They dined together at the end of October, and Edward spent half the time castigating Churchill for the virulence of his attacks on Balfour. It was a painful experience, and Winston came away feeling like a disgraced schoolboy leaving the headmaster’s study after a heavy reprimand. “I accepted it all with meekness,” he wrote afterward. To make sure that Winston behaved himself, the king later sent him a newspaper article containing an ordinary journalist’s admonitions and rebukes. His majesty seemed to think that Winston still needed more instruction in civility. “It might be worthwhile,” said the journalist, “to suggest to [Churchill] that hysterical violence of language is not usually regarded as evidence of statesmanlike qualities, and that the country expects those who aspire to govern it to show some signs, at least, of their ability to govern themselves.”17
It was doubtful, however, whether Churchill would be able to restrain himself if Balfour managed to cling to power much longer. But the pace of events suddenly picked up at the end of the year, and the prime minister finally found himself cornered. Support in his own ranks was beginning to crumble, and Chamberlain—weary of Balfour’s prevarications—wanted him to take decisive action. Dissolve Parliament, he told him. “You will wreck the Party if you go on.”18
But the prime minister preferred to resign rather than call an election. He wasn’t eager to face that “high court of appeal” and wanted to force the Liberals to go into the next general election as a caretaker government. So he went to the king on the first Monday in December to submit his resignation. Word having leaked that he was contemplating this step, the country wasn’t taken by surprise. When he arrived at Buckingham Palace, there were no crowds. The king had just returned from visiting a cattle show, and the moment lacked a sense of grandeur. It took only twenty minutes for Edward to accept the resignation, and for Balfour to slip away quietly.
His resignation didn’t cause much rejoicing nor much sorrow. Having failed to unite his party and to save his old partnership with Chamberlain, he was forced to confront his failure and make his overdue exit. To his critics, it was a dismal end to a do-nothing administration. The Manchester Guardian saw his departure as an occasion that deserved a damning verdict borrowed from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “When beggars die, there are no comets seen.”
The king sent for the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to form a new government. All the newspapers were full of speculation about the various leaders who might be included in the new Liberal Cabinet. One name missing from most lists was Churchill’s. The Daily Mirror was an exception, suggesting his name for postmaster general. After all his efforts to topple Balfour, such a dull office wasn’t what he had in mind. But he seemed content to wait patiently for a worthy offer, confident that one would be forthcoming. “I await with composure,” he wrote his mother in early December, “the best or worst that Fortune has in hand.”
Jennie wasn’t as composed. Whitelaw Reid, the American ambassador, heard that she was telling her friends, “The next Government will have to put Winston in the Cabinet. If it doesn’t, God help them!”19
PART II
1906–1910
X
WINNERS AND LOSERS
To some in his party, the man who sailed straight to the premiership was a plodding, unremarkable old man with a sunny but shallow personality. They made fun of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman behind his back and called him “Aunt Jane.” One of his strongest critics—the cerebral Richard Haldane, an MP with a habit of quoting German philosophers—later complained in his memoirs that Sir Henry “was not identified in the public mind with any fresh ideas, for indeed he had none.”
In the end, C.B.—as he was often called—gave some of the top jobs to his strongest critics. Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Edward Grey the head of the Foreign Office, and Haldane the head of the War Office. Lloyd George was also b
rought into the Cabinet as president of the Board of Trade.1
Though many in the party didn’t think Churchill was ready for office, C.B. understood what Balfour had not—that it would be a mistake to ignore Winston. He needed a reward, and the new prime minister saw a way to bestow it without appointing him to the Cabinet. What C.B. offered was the position of Financial Secretary of the Treasury, a prestigious job with a handsome salary of £2,000. It meant that Winston would be serving as Asquith’s deputy and would have immense responsibilities. This was a magnificent offer to a young man who had just turned thirty-one, and who had been a Liberal for only a year and a half.
Yet Churchill turned it down, and asked instead for a slightly less impressive job that paid only £1,500. It was a risky move, but it made sense. He had little experience of dealing with the Treasury and didn’t think his ambitions would be served by laboring in Asquith’s shadow. What he wanted, he told C.B., was the position of undersecretary to the Colonial Office, a department he understood far better than the Treasury. The old man thought it over and said yes.
There was a certain satisfaction in taking the number-two job at a department that Chamberlain had run for eight years as his own fiefdom. If the Liberals could finally deal a crushing blow to Joe’s imperial dreams, Winston wanted to do his part from within the Colonial Office. There was also the added advantage that the new man appointed to head the department was in the House of Lords, which meant that Churchill would be its spokesman in the House of Commons. In effect, he would be doing much of what Chamberlain had once done.
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