Читать книгу Winston Churchill, A Biography - Rene Kraus - Страница 3

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Life moves in a circle. Him to whom it gives that highest happiness, harmony, it brings back to his starting-point, and to the starting-point of many who went before—fathers and forefathers. The blood of generations renews itself; the destiny of centuries is resurrected. Beginning and end blend into one.

In the beginning was the soil. And the house upon it. Blenheim Palace is an Italian castle, surrounded by an English park. Blenheim embodies in stone all the remembrances of Woodstock, the soil of the oldest English culture. Here the Roman generals built their winter villas two thousand years ago. For a thousand years and more Woodstock has been a focal point of English life; it was noted before the Norman Conquest. Here Saxon, Norman, Plantagenet kings held court. Blenheim was already a borough when the Domesday Book was being compiled. The park housed the wild beasts of Henry I. In the Civil War Woodstock House was held for King Charles until at last it was ravaged by the roundheads.

Winston Churchill, a Captain of Horse, rose up against the roundheads. The defeat of Charles I ruined him. He retired to the home of his wife—who incidentally was a niece of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham—near Axminster. There a son was born to him. After the Restoration he was knighted. Sir Winston adopted the Spanish motto, Fiel pero desdichado, “Faithful, but unfortunate,” which today still is the device of the Dukes of Marlborough. Charles II took the gentle hint, and made the faithful Sir Winston Clerk Controller of the Green Cloth, a resplendent office in the Royal Household. At the same time he appointed him one of the earliest fellows of the Royal Society.

Winston Churchill certainly inherited the blood of his ancestor and namesake, born in 1620. The latter too fought with sword and word and pen. He was in Parliament for Lyme Regis. He was so busy that he forgot about making money. He died happy and penniless, proud of his voluminous historical work, Divini Britannici, being a remark upon the lives of all the Kings of this Isle from the year of the world 2855 unto the year of Grace 1660. The book, indeed, did not receive unmixed praise. It was dedicated to Charles II, “who came when everybody thought that the monarchy had ended,” and upheld the King’s right to raise money without the consent of Parliament so fiercely that those remarks had to be eliminated from later editions. It also had more lasting values. It recalls Tacitus’ Imperium et libertas. Two thousand years or so later the great Disraeli was to remark, “Imperium et libertas—not bad as a programme for a British Ministry.” And the Primrose League, the all-powerful Conservative organization that still guards the Grail of the Tories (it was founded by Lord Randolph Churchill, the father of our hero), took the phrase for its motto.

Macaulay, it is true, says of Sir Winston Churchill, “He made himself ridiculous by publishing a dull and affected folio,” a judgment that probably had much to do with spoiling our own Winston Churchill’s taste for Macaulay; and Gardiner calls him “brilliant but erratic.”

Those were the very two judgments that Winston Churchill the younger was to hear all his life. Here was the same problem. He too is waging a struggle “when everybody thinks that the Monarchy has ended.” He too is an unconditional King’s man; when the British crown reaches the gravest personal crisis of modern history, he proves it. He too is an M.P. for life, and all his life a poor man. He too is a historian and author. He too lives for the marvelous union of imperium et libertas. He too would rather proclaim his faith with a sharp and shining phrase than in long-winded effusions. He has become famous for remarks that are pointed but not wounding, just as was the first Winston Churchill, who expressed the everlasting foundations of war in such sayings as “Soldiers move not without pay; no song, no supper, no penny, no paternoster....” And finally he too, the old gentleman who is still Young Churchill, has always been the butt of mild derision from specialists and experts.

It is a classic example of tradition. And yet it was really only Sir Winston’s son who founded the tradition of the house. John Churchill, the greatest of England’s soldiers, became the First Duke of Marlborough. Queen Anne presented him with Blenheim Palace, the estate of Woodstock, and a dukedom. In private life the glorious general came to be a paterfamilias so thrifty that all over the country people called him “the meanest man in England.”

While still Marquess of Blandford, the seventh Duke of Marlborough married the Lady Frances Anne Emily Vane, eldest daughter of the third Marquess of Londonderry. We must not completely pass over the family chronicle. Grandpapa was the first unforgettable impression in little Winston’s life. And the noble relationships and intermarriages must be clearly before our eyes if we are to understand the full meaning of Winston Churchill’s revolt against his class and then his half-hearted return to the Conservative house of his fathers—undoubtedly the most important two events, psychologically, in his life.

It was the old, early Victorian period. (It is characteristic that Winston Churchill, the lifelong rebel, constantly describes himself as a child of the Victorian Era. The further his years advance, the more longingly he looks back.) Houses were still full of children. The ducal grandparents supplied themselves with eight—five sons, three of whom died early, and six daughters. Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill came into the world in London on February 13, 1849.

We must devote a moment to him. Although he died early, Lord Randolph was to influence the whole growth and nature of his son. In all his roamings Winston Churchill has never devoted himself so completely to any mission as to the self-imposed task of being his father’s executor.

The similarity between father and son is sometimes startling. To begin with, both were bad students. “To tell you the truth,” the Duke wrote to his son Randolph at Eton, “I fear that you yourself are very impatient and resentful of any control, and while you stand upon some fancied right or injury, you fail to perceive what is your duty, and allow both your language and manner a most improper scope.”

No question of where Winston got his revolutionary temperament. No question either of where his indifference to the requirements of school came from. One inclines toward mistrust of the world-famous English public school system with its centuries of tradition—of course quite the opposite of public, since it trains only the best of a privileged caste—when one observes its real failure with such brilliant specimens as Lord Randolph and Winston Churchill in two successive generations. True, all over the world some of the worst students are the greatest successes in life. On the other hand Mr. Winston Churchill regrets to this day that he adapted himself so ill to the social structure of his school. The road to the university was thus closed to him, and he confesses that the older he grows, the more deeply he misses the years of academic leadership and discussion.

In the celebrated biography of his father that Winston Churchill published in 1905, he writes: “At Eton he gained neither distinction in games nor profit from studies. He had learned to row and swim without aspiring to renown, and as for cricket and football he heartily detested them both.”

Lord Randolph failed in his entrance examinations for Oxford, although a private tutor had coached him. He had to work for six months under the Reverend Lionel Dawson Damer at Cheddington, near Aylesbury, before he could take the examinations a second time, on this occasion with success.

Whatever young Lord Randolph may have lacked in studiousness and sporting spirit he amply made up for in dash and charm. “There was not a boy in school,” says Brinsley Richards in Seven Years at Eton, “who laughed so much and whose laughter was so contagious. There was scarcely one who was so frolicsome. His preferred method of descending a staircase was to skate down it with a rush, and if he had to enter the room of another boy, he would sooner bound against the door and force it open with his shoulder than go through the stale formality of turning the handle.” Another chronicler of school-days, T. H. S. Escott in his biography of Lord Randolph, recalls: “He was addicted to dressing loudly, and I vividly recollect his appearance one day in a daring violet-coloured waistcoat.”

Perhaps this overflow of youthful spirits was due to a secret knowledge or premonition of the end so near. Lord Randolph Churchill was quite early crippled by paralysis, and for a whole year he died by inches. A meteoric rise and fall gave him scarcely half a life to live—though a life in which every day was filled to the brim. Unquestionably this insatiable hunger for life passed on to the son. Otherwise Winston Churchill could not have squeezed half of his deeds and adventures into the sixty-five years that now lie behind him, in a life that still remains full of expectation.

At Oxford Lord Randolph became more famous as “a very bold and able horseman who also took the greatest interest in hunting,” than as a student. He was nearly the most popular young man in Oxford, but he only squeaked through with his degree in history and law by the skin of his teeth. Nevertheless he was sent on the Grand Tour around Europe in 1870. This was another social triumph. Three years later—His Young Lordship now almost twenty-four, a finished man of the world—he spent the summer at Cowes. H.M.S. Ariadne lay at anchor, and in honor of the Tsarevitch and his exalted consort the commandant gave a ball on board. Of course Lord Randolph attended, although he was a poor dancer. These dizzy waltzes made him positively seasick. Even this tendency to seasickness his son, the regenerator of the British navy, inherited from him.

Lord Randolph danced the opening quadrille with a dark-haired young beauty to whose mother he had just been introduced by a friend. As it transpired between Avant les messieurs! and Arrière les dames!, she was Miss Jennie Jerome of New York City, aged nineteen. An American. How interesting! How peculiar!

The quadrille was followed by the inevitable waltz. “Let’s sit it out. Or rather let’s walk it out,” Lord Randolph suggested. Waltzes made him seasick.

Outside the moon was shining on the deck of the Ariadne. A nineteen-year-old debutante of New York City would not be taken in by nonsense about seasickness. But the nonsense of the moon no girl has yet resisted. They walked three times around the deck.

When they came back to the ballroom, Lord Randolph said to his friend Colonel Edgecomb: “See those two girls standing with their mother? The dark one I’ll make my wife!”

The dark one took a little longer to announce her decision. First the two had to encounter each other on a morning stroll, thanks to a lucky accident—one of those whims of fate that seem unfortunately to have gone out of fashion since the Victorian Era. Then he had to come to dinner—that same evening, of course—and listen raptly to the playing of the two sisters. For two minutes the young couple were left alone in the park of “Rosetta Cottage,” where the Jerome ladies were stopping. And when Lord Randolph politely took his leave, Jennie confessed to her elder sister, “I think I shall marry our new friend.”

Pictures taken about that time show a young girl of rarely harmonious beauty. It was not then customary to be photographed with sparkling rows of teeth and an expressionless poster smile. From her yellowed snapshots Miss Jennie Jerome looks at us reflectively, almost with melancholy. The playful ringlets in which she wears her rich, dark hair are the only piece of coquetry that a young lady allows herself. Above a conspicuously high, regular forehead arch strong, almost masculine eyebrows. The eyes are large, dark, full of mute interrogation. The face is slim, the nose Grecian except for a funny little point that abruptly jumps out. The girl keeps her lips firmly closed. The short, prominent chin she must have inherited from a very energetic father. The figure, of medium stature and light as a feather, is clad in the evening gown of the time—black silk, high-necked, long sleeves flowing with folds and ruching and ribbons, bell-shaped, trailing. A heavy black silk dress such as this betrays no secrets. It asks riddles. Of such stuff is the young American made who is to be for decades one of the most-courted women of royal London.

Who is she, and whence does she come?

Lord Randolph wrote to his father on August 20, 1873, that he had found his happiness, the daughter of a certain Mr. Jerome. “This Mr. Jerome is a gentleman who is obliged to live in New York to look after his business.” (The seventh Duke of Marlborough would scarcely have understood living in America for any other reason.) “I don’t know what he is. He is reputed to be very well off, and his daughters, I believe, have very good fortunes, but I don’t know anything for certain. He generally comes over for three or four months every year. Mrs. Jerome has lived in Paris for several years and has educated her daughters there. They go out in society there, and are very well known.”

As a matter of fact Mr. Leonard Jerome was a prominent figure in America. He was publisher and co-editor of the New York Times, a big man in politics and at the race tracks. Winston Churchill has obviously inherited so many qualities from his American grandfather that it is worth while tracing these sources.

Leonard Jerome was the descendant of a certain Timothy Jerome who emigrated from England in 1717, and settled in the village of Pompey, in the colony of New York. Leonard, after graduating from Princeton College, moved to Rochester. Here he married a Miss Hall. In 1854 Jennie, Winston Churchill’s mother, was born to the couple. She was but two years old when the Jerome family moved to New York City. Here the father, who had been very successful even in Rochester, among other things founding a paper that still survives as the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, built what has been called an American career. He made a fortune, lost it, made a second and greater one. Later in life he owned the controlling interest in the Pacific Mail Line. As a newspaper publisher and in the real-estate business he had fantastic successes. By the time the Civil War broke out he was a leading citizen.

For a time the views that he maintained on the Civil War in his New York Times were decidedly unpopular. There was daily danger of the mob’s storming the building. Leonard Jerome remained unperturbed. He armed himself and his staff, turning his offices into a fortress defended by artillery. Once he had actually to beat off the rabble, not without bloodshed. With all his patriotic passion Jerome never sank to the level of a mere politician. He subscribed half his fortune to the Federal war funds.

When the national crisis passed, he devoted himself by preference to his two interests as a Maecenas—the promotion of art and sport. He was among the founders of the Academy of Music in New York, helped to start an opera, and had Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti, and other great singers of the time as frequent guests at his house in Madison Square.

Next to it stood the Manhattan Club House, which Leonard Jerome built. Incidentally he organized the Jockey Club, and was for many years its vice-president. The turf was more than his hobby; it was the great passion of his life. Jerome Park, the first American race track, was named after the “king of the American turf.” An impressive figure with sharply chiseled profile, endless moustaches, and sharp eagle eyes, he drove about New York on the box of his own carriage with a team of six horses.

Photos from European

LORD AND LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL

This free citizen in the American era of giants had no objection to his daughter’s marrying a British lord. No doubt he would have preferred American grandchildren who might grow up to be men of his own kind; naturally he could not foresee how true the offspring would be to his vigorous, onrushing, unyielding, lavishly gifted American type. But he was one of those fathers who can reconcile themselves. He never tolerated tyranny, and never exercised it. Even when his wife took her daughters to Paris just before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War for the final polish that young girls could obtain only in the vicinity of the Empress Eugénie, he foresaw with resignation the disaster of European marriages for the children. All right, let it be this Lord Randolph Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough’s son.

But when he heard that the British duke was making difficulties, the king of the American turf pounded on the table. Whose business was it to talk of mésalliances when the most beautiful girl in New York condescended to an English country squire?

On his father’s and on his mother’s side Winston Churchill comes of generations of arrogant, haughty, stiff-necked forebears—but at the bottom of their hearts they were good-natured and thoroughly generous souls. He springs from the typical Anglo-American cousinly battle. When he came to New York for his first American lecture tour, in December, 1900, white-haired Mark Twain introduced him to the audience with the kindly joke, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the son of an American mother and an English father—the perfect man!”

Of course the lovers were not to be intimidated by parental protests. Although Mrs. Jerome at once returned from Cowes to Paris with her daughters, and all correspondence was strictly prohibited, the couple wrote to each other regularly. Even in these early letters Jennie showed that she was to be the uncrowned queen of the Mayfair salons. No crumb of the gossip of Paris in that autumn of 1873 escaped her critical attention. Bazaine stood trial for his life, Gambetta revolutionized the Assembly. All the drawing-rooms of Paris were heavy with bittersweet mysteries. Lord Randolph replied that he would love her forever, and that the hare-coursing was good, but the grouse-shooting not very.

After an eternity of five weeks’ separation he was able to write that at last everything would be all right. The Duke had implored him to contest Woodstock, the hereditary constituency, in the coming elections. Only he, the young darling of the countryside, could snatch the seat from the Liberal influences to which, oh, horrors!, even the incumbent Member, the Duke’s younger brother, was not altogether inaccessible. Very well, replied Lord Randolph, he would sacrifice himself on the altar of Parliament, but only if Papa stopped objecting to the American marriage. It was a gentlemen’s bargain, kept to the letter.

“Public life has no great charms for me,” wrote Lord Randolph in telling his sweetheart the glad news, “as I am naturally very quiet and hate bother and publicity, which, after all, is full of vanity and vexation of spirit. Still it will have greater attraction for me, if I think it will please you.”

Why must even true love lie? Public life not only turned out to have great charms for Lord Randolph Churchill; public life enslaved him. To it he sacrificed his life, every penny of his money, his health, his happiness. But no one understood this better than the woman in his life who became his most enthusiastic helper. Later she accompanied him to all his meetings, canvassed for him tirelessly, sometimes even stood on the platform herself. A ditty made the rounds in England:

Bless my soul, that Yankee lady,

Whether day was bright or shady,

Dashed about the district like an oriflamme of war.

When the voters saw her bonnet

With the bright pink roses on it

They followed as the soldiers did the helmet of Navarre.

The Duke, it must be said to his credit, felt the magic of his future daughter-in-law the moment he saw her. As if to apologize for his previous imperviousness, the old cavalier personally went to Paris on behalf of his son’s suit. He took her to his veteran heart on the spot.

Now there was only Father Jerome on the other side still to be soothed. He bore no grudge; he was merely a little dogged. He displayed obstinate American views about a married woman’s property, and made some propositions that Lord Randolph considered derogatory. All right, replied the young lord by letter, “I am determined to earn a living, in England or out of it, a course in which, I am bound to say, she thoroughly agrees with me.” The old American fighter for freedom was not prepared, after all, to risk his daughter’s having to depend on a “living in England or out of it.” For the first time in his life he yielded—even with a grin, it is reported, and smiling his satisfaction. Twenty-four hours after the arrival of Lord Randolph’s ultimatum, the last points of difference were settled.

On the fifteenth of April, 1874, the marriage of Lord Randolph Churchill and Miss Jennie Jerome was performed at the British Embassy in Paris.

On the third of December, 1874, the Times of London printed among its birth notices the following:

“On the 30th November at Blenheim Palace, the Lady Randolph Churchill, prematurely, of a son.”

The heir of British courtiers, marshals and dukes, the descendant of American puritans and burgess kings, the child of a father who was fated to illumine English politics like a meteor and a mother who was to be a radiant fixed star in the London firmament, the bearer of a heritage of endless, breathtaking struggle, victory, glory, had no time to waste. Winston Churchill began as a seven months’ child. From the hour of his birth they called him “Young Man in a Hurry.”