King George welcomed the change. He had grown weary of Churchill the upstart. “The Prime Minister is going to have a National Govt.,” the king remarked; “only by that means can we get rid of Churchill from [the] Admiralty.”
Winston tried to plead with Asquith not to replace him, but it was all in vain. “I am finished,” he lamented to George Riddell on May 20. “Finished in all I care for—the waging of war, the defeat of the Germans.” By this point he didn’t expect any help from the prime minister, whom he called “[t]erribly weak—supinely weak. His weakness will be the death of him.”23
Even Violet couldn’t help Churchill this time. She was caught between wanting to serve her friend’s best interests and wanting to see her father survive this crisis. She chose to stand by her father and to make excuses for his decisions. There was a tearful discussion between Violet and Winston in his office on the nineteenth. “I think your father might perhaps have stuck to me,” he told her as he sat looking at the floor, enveloped in gloom. “I felt heart-broken for him,” she confessed in her diary, but there was little she could do except urge her father to find another suitable position for him. Asquith promised her that he would do his best, but in the end he was, as Churchill now knew, too weak to stand up for anyone but himself.24
In the last week of May, the prime minister entered into a wartime coalition with the Tories, who had no use for Winston and wanted him out of the Cabinet. The reversal of fortunes couldn’t have been more shocking. Balfour was brought back from obscurity to take over the Admiralty, and two of Churchill’s worst enemies—the Unionists Edward Carson and Bonar Law—were given positions in the government. Winston was humiliated not only by the loss of his job as First Lord, but also by the offer of nothing better than a minor position as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. Reluctantly, he took it until he could make sense of what had happened and decide how to deal with it.
But the change was hard to justify. A year earlier he had been at the forefront of the preparations for war, when Carson and Bonar Law had been trying to start one. What was even more incomprehensible, Carson—the man who had threatened to break every law if necessary to defend Ulster—was now the attorney general of Great Britain. For good reason, Winston’s enemies were jubilant. He had seemed untouchable, and now they were having their revenge for all his moments of defiance and impudence. Fisher’s comments to Bonar Law were echoed in the Tory press. “The truth is that Winston Churchill is a danger to this country,” said H. A. Gwynne’s Morning Post.
The war was not even a year old—and still had three years to go—but with stunning speed Churchill had become one of its early political casualties. Like Lord Byron, young Winston met tragedy in a fight against the Turks.
Perhaps the people who were happiest over Churchill’s fall were the Germans. Their newspapers were full of taunting remarks and jokes. It was said in jest that Germany had lost one of her “most valuable allies.” Some of his well-known phrases were now used against him. Gloating, one paper remarked, “The coiner of the phrase ‘Germany’s deluxe fleet’ seems himself to have become an expensive luxury for his country.” But Churchill was warned not to enter the battlefield and risk capture. “If he falls into German hands we mustn’t take his sword of honor, for he has broken it.”25
He felt betrayed not only by Fisher, but by his Cabinet colleagues who had supported the Dardanelles mission and then had pretended that it wasn’t their problem. Lloyd George’s failure to support him was especially discouraging, though he pretended to be sympathetic to Winston’s plight. Speaking of Churchill’s loss of the Admiralty, he said, “The Unionists would not, and could not in the circumstances, have assented to his retention in that office. But it was quite unnecessary in order to propitiate them to fling him from the masthead whence he had been directing the fire, down to the lower deck to polish the brass.” Asquith’s excuse for his shoddy treatment of his close associate was that, given the political hostility to Churchill, he really couldn’t have kept him at the Admiralty. Inasmuch as Asquith was now something of a Tory hostage, that was true.26
* * *
For a long time Winston was in a state of shock. He wandered around like a man half alive. “The wound bleeds but does not smart,” he later said of his feelings at this time. Now forty, he suddenly looked older than his years. He walked with a more pronounced stoop, and his eyes grew dull. A war correspondent visiting London was shocked when he saw Winston at a dinner party, and wrote, “I am much surprised at the change in Winston Churchill. He looks years older, his face is pale, he seems very depressed, and to feel keenly his retirement from the Admiralty.”27
It was not simply his misfortune that weighed on him. It was the abrupt loss of purpose. He was like a complex piece of machinery that had been roaring away for ages and was suddenly cut back to a slow spin. “I’m afraid Winston is very sad at having nothing to do,” said Jennie. “When you have had your hand at the helm for four years it seems stagnation to take a back place and for why?” Moreover, because he still held a minor place in the government, he felt tortured by the experience of watching from the sidelines while others blundered ahead with the doomed land battles in the east and west.
“I had to watch the casting away of great opportunities,” he would recall, “and the feeble execution of plans which I had launched, and in which I heartily believed. One dwelt in a sort of cataleptic trance, unable to intervene, yet bound by the result.”
When asked in her old age what had been the greatest strain of her husband’s life, Clemmie replied without hesitation, “The Dardanelles. I thought it would break his heart.”28
He could have taken encouragement from the fact that he was still alive, with a devoted wife and now three small children to love and care for. Sarah Churchill—with a good head of fiery red hair—had been born in October 1914 and was beautiful. And Clemmie was so fiercely loyal that she seized every opportunity to defend his reputation. She even wrote a long letter detailing the reasons why he deserved a second chance and sent it to the prime minister. Understanding Winston as well as she did, she told Asquith that her husband had three invaluable qualities that the government couldn’t afford to waste—“the power, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany.” Relieved to have his scapegoat, the prime minister was unmoved by her letter, dismissing it as “the letter of a maniac.”29
Much as Winston loved his family, he was still his old impatient self and wanted to be useful in a larger sphere of action. In wartime there was a simple cure for a restless man with nothing to do. He wanted to fight, but didn’t relish the kind of fighting that trench warfare had become. He wanted a command of some kind and was willing to go almost anywhere and do almost anything to take charge of some promising war effort. But Asquith refused to give him anything of significance. For about five months he was more or less idle, waiting for opportunities that never came. As a way of simply keeping himself occupied in this long lull, he suddenly developed an interest in the art of painting. With a little help from a family friend, he began painting basic portraits and landscapes in oil, and he discovered that he had a talent for it.
Churchill found the work so absorbing that he could forget his troubles at least for a while. Like his passion for building sand castles, painting gave him a way to exercise his imagination in a form that he could control and shape on his own. No Jacky Fisher or Lloyd George could intrude and alter his view of a line of trees, a garden, or a country lane. He saw what he wanted to see and captured it on canvas in his own fashion. He would never have the luxury in public life of such complete authority. Painting became his lifelong passion. As he would later say of the activity, “Every day and all day is provided with its expedition and its occupation—cheap, attainable, innocent, absorbing, recuperative.”30
But in his darkest moments of 1915 even the pleasures of painting would sometimes fail to lift his spirits. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt visited him in August and was surprised to find him in a deep despair. He thought that
the only thing keeping Winston sane was the love of Clemmie. At one point as Blunt was watching him struggle to complete a painting, Winston suddenly turned to him with a sad expression and held up his fingers. “There is more blood than paint upon these hands,” he said. “All those thousands of men killed. We thought it would be a little job, and so it might have been if it had been begun in the right way.” And then his voice trailed off.31
As the summer ended, and the landscapes he was painting turned somber and gray, he knew that he needed to make a change. He made up his mind to start his career all over again at forty. He still held his commission in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. He would go out to the front as an ordinary major if that was the best position he could find. People would laugh at the thought of the once grand First Lord, with his yacht, now reduced to a major standing in a muddy trench waiting to be killed. But people had been laughing at him all along, and there was nothing he could do about that.
On November 11, 1915, he resigned from his do-nothing job in the government, explaining in a letter to Asquith that he did not “feel able in times like these to remain in well-paid inactivity.”
His resignation was announced in the press, along with the news that he was going to fight in France. Before he left, he received a letter from Muriel Wilson. It was a simple but heartfelt farewell. It ended with the words “I just wanted to tell you how much I admired you for your courage.”32
In a war that left so many of its combatants maimed or traumatized for life, Churchill was lucky to escape with merely a wounded career. But he couldn’t be sure at the time that the wound would ever heal and allow him to resume his rise to the top. Because he had been so sure of himself, and had risen so quickly, he was so unprepared for his precipitous fall that few options were left open to him. In peacetime he might have appealed to the country for support, arguing his case in speeches and newspaper articles. But in wartime that kind of personal campaign was unseemly. He was not only out of power, but was effectively silenced—at least for the time being.
It was a surprising turn in a life that had always seemed rich in possibilities. Until the war came along, he had been able to soar from one triumph to the next with a reasonable expectation that something would always catch his fall. As a peacetime hero, he had been ready to suffer many political deaths, knowing that he would fight again. But now the war had left the fallen hero with no place to turn but the very real battlefields of France, where failure was usually fatal. Like a Byronic figure in a novel that he might have written about his own political adventures, he was suddenly confronted with the possibility that he had reached the last chapter, and must now fight or die.
He couldn’t take any comfort from the story of his father’s life, for Lord Randolph had never managed to revive his own career after falling from power in his late thirties. Winston must have been haunted by that fact, and have wondered whether he was simply repeating a family tragedy. His father lingered too long and suffered a slow death. Winston would take his chances in the trenches.
* * *
In the middle of November there was a small party to say good-bye to Winston. Clemmie did her best to hold back her tears, Eddie Marsh wept openly, and Jennie was sad but also angry that her “brilliant son” was “being relegated to the trenches.” Perhaps to Winston’s surprise, Margot and Violet came. Henry didn’t. There was food and drink; Winston tried on his uniform and promised to write.33
His star had grown so dim that he didn’t think his reputation could suffer much more. From this point, it seemed that he could only rise, if he survived. Ever the gambler, he was willing to throw the dice once more and risk everything for another chance to restore his fortunes. He arranged for a letter to be given to Clemmie “in the event of my death.” It had been written earlier in the summer and concerned some insurance details and other financial information, but it closed with a brief attempt to affirm what he really valued in his life, now that the bright lights and storms of his first forty years were behind him. It was supposed to be the voice of a ghost speaking to Clemmie in case his story had reached its end without the chance to add one more chapter.
“Do not grieve for me too much,” said the letter. “I am a spirit confident of my rights. Death is only an incident, & not the most important which happens to us in this state of being. On the whole, especially since I met you my darling one I have been happy, & you have taught me how noble a woman’s heart can be. If there is anywhere else I shall be on the look out for you. Meanwhile look forward, feel free, rejoice in Life, cherish the children, guard my memory. God bless you. Good bye. W.”34
EPILOGUE
Though Churchill survived his time in the trenches and slowly succeeded in rebuilding his career, he lost something in 1915 that he never regained. At forty, youth begins to slip away from most people, but what Winston lost was not merely a matter of looks or energy. It was a spirit that had once seemed so vital and inexhaustible, a lively spark that had served him well from crisis to crisis. But it flickered and went out in 1915 and Churchill was never the same.
He remained a romantic at heart, a great patriot, and a courageous fighter, and he persevered in politics until his moment in the sun came again in 1940. But by that time he was a harder, much less exuberant character, whose boyish innocence and earnestness survived only in the occasional mischievous smile and thoughtful frown. He had learned the tough lessons of a long life lived at a high level—that even the best plans go awry, that even the best friends prove unreliable, and that even the best intentions may be misunderstood. It was better for the world that he had known failure and suffered moments of self-doubt, but the magical, sparkling qualities of vision and leadership that so many of his Edwardian contemporaries had found in him were mostly muted or absent after the First World War.
What took the place of this glamorous charm was the cumulative force of a character that had been tested and strengthened over time. Balfour, Chamberlain, Lloyd George, and Asquith had taught young Churchill invaluable lessons. Often, a politician who fights on equal terms with such giants is already in his prime, and will be too old to apply the lessons of his experience in a second career like that which Churchill enjoyed as prime minister in the 1940s. But having matched wits with the best of the Edwardian statesmen, he brought to his position of mature leadership a level of skill and understanding that few politicians could rival. And there was still enough drive left in him to keep him from becoming a fossilized figure like Lloyd George, whose views were largely irrelevant in the days of Winston’s premiership.
For twenty-five years after the end of his first rise to power, Churchill was frustrated to sit and watch as others reached the top while he seemed to languish in lesser positions or with no ministerial authority at all. He was forced to learn patience, and to ponder the meaning of his early experiences by writing about them in various volumes, including My Early Life and his works on the history of the First World War. One by one, the old giants faded as he waited. Asquith lost power in 1916 and was replaced by Lloyd George, who used all his wiles to remain prime minister for almost six years. Asquith died in 1928, and Lloyd George lived until 1945. Balfour died in 1930.
Winston the Liberal politician died in the mid-1920s and a Conservative Winston was reborn to take his place. Of course, he was attacked for changing his stripes once again, but the combined efforts of Lloyd George and Asquith had reduced the Liberals to a minor party with little future. There were good reasons to think that Churchill was fooling himself to believe that he could heal the deep wounds created during his Liberal battles against the Tories, but he refused to accept that the promise of his early career was dead and gone. He continued to guard that legacy even when few believed it was worth guarding. His treasure was his past, and he always came back to it, cherishing it on the hope that others would one day see its value.
His old enemy Edward Carson seemed to understand that there was something in Churchill’s character that simply wouldn’t allow him to giv
e up. At a dinner not long after Winston was dismissed as First Lord of the Admiralty, a journalist asked Carson, “What is the trouble with Churchill?”
The unsentimental Carson thought for a second and shot back a perceptive reply that would have made Winston smile:
“He is a dangerous optimist.”1
(1) Young Titan: Winston Churchill in Boston on his speaking tour of North America, December 1900.
(2) Victorian Beauty: Winston’s mother, Jennie Churchill, in her prime.
(3) Edwardian Star: Churchill in 1901 at the beginning of his political career.
(4) Pamela Plowden was the great love of Churchill’s early life. She married the Earl of Lytton in 1902, and is shown here with her first child.
(5) The Duchess: Consuelo Vanderbilt regretted marrying the Duke of Marlborough, but was fond of his cousin Winston, whose “ardent and vital” nature she admired.
(6) Winston Churchill fell in love with Ethel Barrymore the moment he saw her wearing this dress on the London stage.
(7) House Rivals: Conservative Leaders Joseph Chamberlain (left) and Arthur Balfour were exasperated by Churchill’s independence and soaring ambition.
(8) Eccentric Lord Hugh Cecil joined Winston’s political “hooligans” and helped him shake up the complacent Tory Party.
(9) Rich, talented, and beautiful, Muriel Wilson once played the “muse of History” in an amateur theatrical. Winston couldn’t resist her and pleaded for her to marry him.
Young Titan Page 38
