One case haunted Churchill for the rest of his life. It concerned a confessed murderer, Edward Woodcock, who was an obscure former soldier living in Leeds with a woman he never married. During a drunken fight he killed her with a knife, and he was devastated when he realized what he had done.
“After the crime,” Churchill recalled, “he walked downstairs where a number of little children to whom he used to give sweets awaited him. He took all his money out of his pocket and gave it to them saying, ‘I shall not want this any more.’ He then walked to the police station and gave himself up. I was moved by the whole story, and by many features in the character of this unhappy man. The judge who tried the case advised that the sentence should be carried out. The officials at the Home Office, with their very great experience, suggested no interference with the course of the law. But I had my own view, and I was unfettered in action in this respect.”
By Churchill’s order—and to the consternation of his subordinates—the man was reprieved in early August 1910 and imprisoned for life. But at the beginning of the next month the Home Secretary was shocked to learn that the man had managed to hang himself and was found dead in his cell with a suicide letter addressed to his family.
Thirty-eight years later, when Winston Churchill was internationally famous as the defender of his country against the evil of Nazism, he still had a copy of Edward Woodcock’s suicide note and brought it with him to the House of Commons, where he read it as evidence for capital punishment. The country had survived the carnage of two world wars, large parts of Europe were still in ruins, but Winston had not forgotten the man who had committed a crime of passion in 1910, and had given all his money to some street children as he walked off to surrender to the police. What had stuck in his mind was Woodcock’s despair at a life sentence.
“I wonder myself,” he told the House, “whether, in shrinking from the horror of inflicting a death sentence, hon. Members who are conscientiously in favour of abolition do not underrate the agony of a life sentence. To many temperaments—to some at least—this is a more terrible punishment.”
Winston spoke, of course, as someone who had made his name in his twenties as a prisoner who had risked everything to escape confinement, hiding out and traveling by the stars to reach freedom. In Woodcock’s dread of a long imprisonment he saw a desperation that he had felt himself in South Africa. Restless and reckless, Winston was never going to be anyone’s prisoner for long, either figuratively or literally. He had thought he was doing Woodcock a favor to spare him the death sentence, but the man’s suicide had come to serve for him as an important reminder—some things were worse than death.
Perhaps few in the House on July 15, 1948, understood that the man who had led them through the worst days of the war—who had fought so hard to avoid capitulation—was revealing to them in this debate something of his own personality. When he insisted on reading Edward Woodcock’s suicide note to them, they must have thought it was just an old man revisiting the past for his own eccentric reasons. But he was sharing with them an image that filled him with a particularly intense dread—the hopeless man with nowhere to run.
It is the only reasonable explanation for why one of the most accomplished orators of the age, in the years of his greatest fame, would pause to read out loud to the House of Commons the rough prose of an Edwardian suicide. “I was pleased at the reprieve,” Woodcock had written to his relatives, “for the sake of you; not for myself, because I knew it meant ‘for life’ in gaol, and there is no pleasure in that. I think I had rather be dead than be in gaol for life. I’ve been studying ever since how to do away with myself. . . . I think I will be a lot better off in my grave, because if I had to get out with 15 years I should be 61 years old. Where could I find work at that age? So I hope I manage alright, so goodnight and God bless you all. Your poor unfortunate brother, E. Woodcock.”
Churchill put down the letter and looked at the House. “I mention this case,” he said, “in order that those who shrink from the horror of inflicting the death penalty may not underrate the gravity and torment of the alternative.”8
* * *
Edward Woodcock had been arrested at the end of May, but the murder of his victim, Elizabeth Ann Johnson, received little notice, and his quick conviction went almost unreported. The whole country was too absorbed in grief over the sad end of another Edward—the king—to care about the small, daily tragedies of the slums. It was on May 6, 1910, that Edward VII died at Buckingham Palace.
Even though his reign had been relatively short, the king had come to seem a towering figure to his subjects, a reassuring, avuncular character who did his duty but also lived on a grand scale—indulging his gargantuan appetite with all the gusto of a Tudor monarch. It was the good life that ruined his health, adding so much bulk to his modest frame that he could barely move at the end. As a German diplomat observed of the king in his last year, he was “so stout that he completely loses his breath when he has to climb upstairs.”
Life had become one long feast, much of it served to him by a parade of society beauties who added their fond caresses to his many other comforts. Winston’s mother was one of those women, and had managed to stay on good terms with the king even when her son was causing him distress. At his death she called him “a great King & a loveable man.”9
Jennie had understood how to keep him happy. The right kind of pampering went a long way. Once she had advised Winston on the best method of handling him, saying of the king, he “only wants a little cosseting to be kept quite tame.” No doubt her softer touch had helped to calm his temper on the many occasions when Winston upset him.10
The problem was that in his last year the king regarded her son as one of his most troublesome subjects. In September 1909 Edward had taken the extraordinary step of directing his private secretary to rebuke Winston publicly. After a Scottish paper reported that Churchill had ridiculed the Conservatives for having created peerages for their friends in the newspaper business, Lord Knollys fired back with a response on behalf of the king. Published in the Times, it was terse: “I beg to inform you that, notwithstanding Mr. Winston Churchill’s statement, the creation of peers remains a Royal prerogative.”
Thanks to the feud between the Liberals and the Lords, the protocol of creating peers had become a touchy subject. The king wanted to remind Churchill and the rest of the Cabinet that, strictly speaking, the decision to grant a peerage belonged to him and not to the politicians. Winston thought the king was being too sensitive. Everybody knew, he complained to Clemmie, that “the Royal prerogative is always exercised on the advice of Ministers, & Ministers & not the Crown are responsible.” Revealing a little aristocratic disdain of his own, Winston dismissed the rebuke as beneath his consideration. “I shall take no notice of it,” he told Clemmie.11
Though the royal lion was on a tight constitutional leash, he could still roar and snarl, and Edward did a little of each in his final months. Asquith wanted his agreement to create hundreds of Liberal peers if the House of Lords refused to limit its veto power over the Commons. The idea was that the mere threat of flooding the upper chamber with Liberals would be enough to make Conservative peers surrender their veto. But the king hated the idea, fearing that it would make a mockery of the royal prerogative and lead “to the destruction of the House of Lords.” His strategy was to stall as long as possible and to hope that the struggle between the two chambers resolved itself without drawing the monarchy into the fight.
But Churchill insisted on dragging him into it and bringing the dispute to a prompt conclusion. Though Lloyd George had started the fight with the upper chamber, Winston thought he knew the fastest way to finish it. Buckingham Palace had warned him not to use “nebulous allusions to the Crown” in his speeches, saying that the king found them “most distasteful.” Such a warning would have stopped most Cabinet ministers, but not Churchill. Only five weeks before the king’s death he stood on the floor of the Commons and declared, “It has now become necessary
that the Crown and the Commons, acting together, should restore the balance of the Constitution and restrict for ever the Veto of the House of Lords.”
On his own authority Winston was claiming that Edward had already taken a stand and was ready to fight with the people against the peers. It was a daring affront to royalty.12
If he had not been so ill at the time, the king would surely have made Churchill pay for his impertinence. His courtiers were so outraged that some of them later said such antics had hastened Edward’s death. By mid-May, when the nation was in deep mourning, rumors were spreading in London that the king had been pushed toward his grave by the Liberal troublemakers who had filled his last years with anxiety over threats of class warfare and assaults on the House of Lords.
On May 9 the Tory politician Lord Balcarres noted in his diary, “There is certainly a feeling widely prevalent in lower middle class circles in London, that the King’s death was accelerated by anxiety caused by Asquith’s announcement that the Cabinet intend to bring pressure on the Throne. That the King was upset we all know: he was for instance furious when Churchill indicated an alliance between the Throne and the Commons.”
Poor health—not the supposedly poor manners of Liberals—killed Edward. But the rumors persisted all the same. Eddie Marsh complained to a friend, “The cock-and-bull stories that are going about as to the King having been killed by the Liberals are too amazing. The Queen . . . is supposed to have taken the P. M. and [Reginald] McKenna into the [king’s] room and said, “Look at your work!”13
In fact, Edward’s death was a blow to the Liberal cause. Churchill and others had been hoping that the threat of Crown and Commons in league against the Lords would be enough to settle the question of the veto power. It didn’t matter that Edward had wanted to remain neutral. It was only important to make the Lords believe that their constitutional position was impossible and thereby force them to capitulate. Churchill was pursuing this goal when Edward surprised everyone by dying. Until that point the strategy appeared to be working. In April, Lloyd George’s budget, which had started all the trouble, finally won approval in the House of Lords, a full year after it was introduced.
Now the larger question of whether their lordships might ever again kill any bill was going to have to wait. Such a momentous issue couldn’t be considered in the immediate aftermath of Edward’s death, and certainly not before politicians could take the measure of the new monarch—George V. No one knew his intentions. But all knew that the stakes were high. Receiving the news of Edward’s death while on a Mediterranean cruise, Asquith stood on deck and stared at the night sky, wondering what the future would hold. There was a sign in the heavens, but there was no way to know whether it portended good or ill.
“I remember well,” he recalled of that night in May, “that the first sight that met my eyes in the twilight before dawn was Halley’s comet blazing in the sky.” It was a moment that seemed ready-made for a scene in a history play, modeled on one of Shakespeare’s. The fate of the nation swayed in the balance as one monarch died and another took his place.
“At a most anxious moment in the fortunes of the State,” continued Asquith, “we had lost, without warning or preparation, the Sovereign whose ripe experience, trained sagacity, equitable judgement and unvarying consideration, counted for so much. . . . We were nearing the verge of a crisis almost without example in our constitutional history. What was the right thing to do?”14
It would cost Asquith many more sleepless nights before that question was resolved.
* * *
A few months before the prime minister found himself gazing up at the comet under the Mediterranean sky, a plain-looking woman in an old tweed hat and scruffy clothes was being arrested in Liverpool for leading a suffragette protest. The police found three rocks in her cloth coat and charged her with a breach of the peace. Brought before a magistrate with other suffragettes, she was quickly convicted and sentenced to fourteen days at hard labor. In her cell she was given meals of porridge and meat and potatoes, but she refused to eat. After four days on a hunger strike she was force-fed by a doctor and four women guards, but she resisted this treatment every day for a week. Then, abruptly, she was released after a surprising discovery was made about her identity.
She had given the authorities a false name, telling them she was “Jane Warton,” a seamstress. But her family—worried by her disappearance—had tracked her down and rescued her. When she was released, she was still suffering from the violent methods of the force-feeding, and her mistreatment exploded into a major scandal. For the supposed seamstress was none other than Lady Constance Lytton, of Knebworth House, the forty-year-old sister of Victor, Earl of Lytton, and therefore sister-in-law to the former Pamela Plowden.
As fate would have it, Winston became Home Secretary three weeks after her release. For the next few months—while trying to keep up with all his other work—he was involved first in a brief investigation of Lady Constance’s mistreatment, and then in a longer disagreement with Lord Lytton over the best way to handle the suffragette protests and to begin enfranchising women. Lady Constance suffered from a bad heart, and her brother was angry that she had not received proper medical attention in prison. He wanted heads to roll and accused Winston of failing to crack down on those responsible.
But it was difficult to charge anyone for abuse when, as Victor Lytton acknowledged, “my sister concealed her identity & refused to answer medical questions.” Churchill was sympathetic to the family but couldn’t do much to satisfy them, and Victor resented him for it. The whole unpleasant episode was especially hard on Eddie Marsh, who wrote Victor: “Nothing in my life has pained me so much as the hideous breach between you and Winston, two of my dearest friends.”15
Part of Lord Lytton’s anger toward Winston—which became exceptionally intense—may have been rooted in deeper frustrations. His sister’s mistreatment came at a bad time. He was going through his own troubles at home with the woman whom Winston had once hoped to marry. Pamela had turned out to be not the best of wives and was now in the middle of one of her most passionate affairs. Ettie Desborough’s twenty-two-year-old son Julian was constantly finding excuses to be with Pamela, and it would have been difficult for her husband not to notice the growing attachment. Certainly Ettie was aware of the relationship because her son couldn’t hide anything from her, much to Pamela’s dismay.
“Oh Mummie,” Julian wrote his mother in 1910, “I had such a wonderful two days at Knebs [Knebworth House]. You will be sorry (or not sorry?) to hear that I love Pamela better every time I see her.”16
Though Winston couldn’t understand why Victor was now so difficult and intemperate, he tried to treat him well. When he gave directions to his staff for drafting a letter to him, he cautioned them: “Endeavour to couch it throughout in a manner which will safeguard our position while showing consideration to Lord Lytton.”17
The government’s lack of progress on the suffrage question was one of its greatest failures, and Lady Constance’s experiences highlighted the absurdity of punishing women for demanding their rights. Though the violence of some militant suffragettes alienated the Cabinet, the issue wasn’t going to disappear and needed to be resolved as urgently as the other pressing problems. Asquith, Churchill, and Lloyd George would have better served the Liberal cause if they had devoted as much attention to suffrage for women as they gave to the veto in the House of Lords.
But, as Winston made clear in a memo summarizing his differences with Lord Lytton, his view of the question had been so poisoned by personal attacks that he couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for legislative action. Cast in the third person, his memo of July 19, 1910, reveals the depth of Churchill’s bitterness toward the militant suffragettes: “They have opposed him with the whole strength of their organisations at four successive elections. . . . They have at all times treated him with the vilest discourtesy and unfairness. They have attacked him repeatedly in the most insulting terms. They have assaulted him phys
ically.”
Though not mentioned in the memo, the last straw was a threat made against his daughter, Diana. As the press later revealed, “For a long time . . . Mr. Winston Churchill’s baby was carefully protected by police because of a suffragette plot to kidnap the little one.” When Churchill met with a group of suffragettes at the end of 1910 to discuss their concerns, he emphasized that he had lost patience with their tactics. “Every step taken in friendship,” he complained, “had only met grosser insults and more outrageous action.”18
Writing to a supporter of the suffrage movement, Lloyd George warned that Winston had been humiliated too often by protestors. It was a mistake to target him, he said, and explained, “He is not the kind of man to overlook that.”19
PART III
1910–1915
XX
VALIANT
A violent energy had been building in Edwardian society for years, the result of expectations raised too high and harsh realities neglected far too long. Change was wanted, but it was slow in coming. Perhaps the greatest measure of discontent was found not in the growing antagonisms between classes, political parties, the sexes, or the rich and the poor, but in the sheer numbers of people who were fleeing the country each year for better lives elsewhere. In the ten years following the death of Queen Victoria, when the population of the United Kingdom averaged 43 million, 7 percent—three million people—chose to emigrate. The exodus was so great in Glasgow, for example, that the number of vacant houses soared to twenty thousand in 1910.1
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