Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (7 page)

Despite Jennie’s rebellious nature and shocking social life, or perhaps because of them, Winston knew that she would be an irresistible draw to any public event, even the campaign of a young politician in a cotton mill town. As Election Day drew near, he wanted nothing more than to have his mother by his side.

Jennie arrived in Oldham as she did any place she deigned to appear, with high style and supreme confidence. Dressed all in blue, the Conservative Party color, and carrying a parasol of the same hue, she galloped into town riding in a highly decorated horse-drawn carriage, a postilion sitting stiffly up front, his uniform covered in blue ribbons and rosettes. Turning heads wherever she went, Jennie seemed less like the mother of a political candidate than an American stage star, shipped over for the day to scatter fairy dust on a dreary campaign. “
Lady Randolph Churchill was, naturally enough, the observed of all observers,” a local reporter panted. “Indeed she created quite a sensation in these grimy old streets.”

Neither his mother’s bright glamour, however, nor his own magnetism at the podium could change Churchill’s fate on Election Day. On July 6, the men of Oldham, who filled the city’s polling centers by the tens of thousands—a voter turnout that was “
as big as was
known in England”—gave the Liberal candidates nearly 53 percent of the vote, leaving Churchill thirteen hundred votes short of victory and Mawdsley even more. Churchill left Oldham feeling, he would later write, like “
a bottle of champagne…left uncorked for the night.”

The high-ranking members of his party were not inclined to offer words of comfort and encouragement to a young man who had failed, even if he was Randolph Churchill’s son. On the contrary, Churchill arrived in London in time to learn that Arthur Balfour, Lord Salisbury’s nephew who would himself become prime minister just three years later, had been talking about him in the lobby of the House of Commons. “
I thought he was a young man of promise,” Balfour had sneered, “but it appears he is a young man of promises.”

Balfour’s searing assessment only hardened Churchill’s resolve. He had no money, no occupation and, it appeared, no one who believed in him quite as much as he believed in himself. The only thing he knew with any certainty was that in the end, whatever it took, he would succeed or, quite literally, die trying. “
What an awful thing it will be if I don’t come off,” he had written to his mother just months before. “It will break my heart for I have nothing else but ambition to cling to.”

CHAPTER 4

BLOWING THE TRUMPET

I
f Churchill was looking for a refuge where he might, for a time, forget his failure, even escape the relentless demands of his own ambition, he should not have returned to the place of his birth: Blenheim Palace. Soon after the election, with no home of his own and no real plan, he traveled to the small town of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, where his family’s estate sprawled in ornate splendor across seven acres of a vast, two-thousand-acre park. As his carriage passed the massive stone pillars flanking the entrance to the grounds and rattled down the Grand Avenue, he could see from his window the house itself as it came into view: a massive, stunningly beautiful Baroque palace built of a local cream-colored limestone that over the span of time had turned a radiant golden hue.

It was a sight that had astonished nearly two centuries of visitors, from Alexander Pope, who had written an arch letter about the extreme lavishness of Blenheim after touring it in the early eighteenth century, to Churchill’s own Brooklyn-born mother, who saw it for the first time after her wedding more than 150 years later. “
Looking at the lake, the bridge, the miles of magnificent park studded with old oaks, I found no adequate words to express my admiration,” she would later recall, “and when we reached the huge and stately
palace…I confess that I felt awed. But my American pride forbade the admission.”

Churchill had been born in a relatively modest room on the first floor. Although he had never lived at Blenheim, he had spent much of his childhood there, hunting in the open countryside, fishing in the lake, racing through the grand corridors, and alternately charming and exhausting his famously stern grandmother, the duchess. “
Winston is going back to school today,” she had written to Randolph after one particularly taxing visit from her spirited grandson. “
Entre nous
I do not feel very sorry for he certainly is a handful.”

Churchill had always believed that Blenheim—its history, its grandeur, its power to awe—had molded him, creating the foundation for the great man he was destined to become. “
We shape our buildings,” he would later write, “and then our buildings shape us.”
Now, however, as he wandered around the palace in the wake of his defeat, trying to finish the manuscript for his second book and playing endless rounds of chess with his cousin Sunny, the current Duke of Marlborough, the magnificence of Blenheim seemed less a proud symbol of his exalted lineage than a painful reminder of his inability thus far to live up to it.

Everything Churchill saw as he walked the broad, seemingly endless corridors of Blenheim, everything he admired, everything he was determined to become, was inescapably linked to his illustrious ancestor John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. John Churchill, whose own father had been a man of much more modest means, had won his grand estate through his own courage and hard-edged intelligence. Although he had fallen into and out of favor with every ruler of England from King James II, whom he had at first supported and then helped to depose, to William of Orange to Queen Anne, and had even been imprisoned in the Tower of London, he had one skill that had made him indispensable: He never lost on the battlefield. “
Amid all the chances and baffling accidents of war he
produced victory with almost mechanical certainty,” Winston would write in his biography of John Churchill more than thirty years later. “He never rode off any field except as a victor. He quitted war invincible; and no sooner was his guiding hand withdrawn than disaster overtook the armies he had left.”

It had been during the War of the Spanish Succession, in fact, following Churchill’s extraordinary defeat of the French in the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, that Queen Anne had given him, as a token of gratitude, the royal manor of Woodstock, on which he had built Blenheim Palace. He had also been made a sovereign prince of the Holy Roman Empire by the emperor Leopold and given a gift of land—the principality of Mindelheim in Bavaria, Germany—for his accomplishments as commander in chief of the Grand Alliance’s armies. Even those who hated and envied him believed him to be the greatest general in England and perhaps, before Napoleon, even the world.

Nearly two hundred years later, the weight of John Churchill’s legacy followed his ambitious young descendant wherever he went. If Winston entered the Great Hall, his shoes echoing on the marble floors, an elaborate mural depicting the 1st Duke kneeling before Britannia, unfurling his grand plan for the Battle of Blenheim, loomed above him from the room’s breathtaking sixty-seven-foot-high ceiling. If he wandered into the Green Writing Room, whose walls were covered in a rich green silk damask, he was confronted by an enormous, incredibly detailed tapestry depicting John Churchill’s triumph at Blenheim. If he escaped the palace to stroll across the enormous park with its arboretum, vast lake and elaborate, themed gardens—the Italian and the Rose—he could see, from almost any direction, the Column of Victory, a soaring Doric column that loomed over the grounds and lifted 134 feet into the sky a statue of the 1st Duke clothed as a Roman general, two proud eagles at his feet and a Winged Victory held aloft in his hand.

John Churchill had been fifty-four years old during the Battle of Blenheim, but Winston refused to accept his own youth as an excuse for inaction. His father had been a member of Parliament
at twenty-five, barely a year older than Churchill was now. Earlier in the year, before Winston had even been asked to run for Parliament, Lord Salisbury had appointed Sunny, who was just three years older than Winston, paymaster general. Sunny, in fact, had had a political career for seven years, after inheriting his title and accompanying seat in the House of Lords from his father, who, like Winston’s, had died an early death. “
You are young to be in the ministry,” Churchill had congratulated Sunny after his appointment, “but this is an age of youth, so accept my tribute not only as coming from a friend but from one of the generation that has yet to divide the world.”

Although Churchill believed that his youth was an advantage that it would be foolish to squander, the constant reminders at Blenheim of the 1st Duke’s extraordinary achievements could not help but serve as a stark lesson: He had leaped too soon. By running for Parliament on the strength of his father’s name rather than his own, Churchill had made a serious miscalculation. “
It is a fine game to play—the game of politics,” he had written to his mother from India, “and it is well worth waiting for a good hand—before really plunging.” This time, as desperate as he was to dive back in, he was determined to take his own advice and distinguish himself first. All he needed was an opportunity. All he needed was another war.

Before the summer was out, Churchill would not only find the spark he needed to begin again, he would fan the flames himself. The idea would come to him not in the hallowed halls of Parliament or the stately rooms of Blenheim Palace but on a boat adrift in the slow-moving waters of the Thames.

In late July, Churchill received an invitation to a dinner party at the riverside home of his friend Lady Jeune. It was an invitation that no one, not even those in Churchill’s rarefied social sphere, would ever refuse. Although the widow of a colonel and the wife of a barrister,
Lady Jeune owed her fame not to her husbands’ titles or achievements but to her own sparkling intellect. Known for her sharp mind and quick wit, she wrote for some of the most prestigious society journals of the day and was one of the most formidable hostesses in London, drawing to her the greatest minds in the empire. Her gatherings were famous and frequent, and a place on her guest list, which included everyone from Thomas Hardy to Robert Browning to even Mrs. Robinson’s devoted client Oscar Wilde, was nearly as coveted as an invitation to Buckingham Palace. “
An introduction to her became a passport to many social privileges,” a contemporary American writer would recall. “Her intellectual and political influence was as great as the charm which made her salon so brilliant.”

Churchill knew that by attending one of Lady Jeune’s gatherings, he was certain to meet someone interesting, and quite possibly useful. He might not have been surprised, therefore, but he was certainly thrilled when, soon after arriving at her home, he stepped onto a launch for an afternoon cruise on the Thames and found none other than Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies and one of Britain’s most powerful politicians. Churchill quickly took a seat next to him, and the two men were soon lost in conversation.

Had he been delivering a lecture to a crowded amphitheater, Chamberlain could not have had a more eager audience than he had in Churchill alone. “
His conversation was a practical political education in itself,” Churchill would later recall. “He knew every detail, every turn and twist of the game.” Chamberlain also knew how to fight, although apparently not when to lay down arms. A radical politician and a fierce competitor who had worked his way up through the narrow British hierarchy from his father’s shoe factory to mayor of Birmingham to Parliament, he kept careful track of his grudges, even those that had long since ceased to be a threat.
When Lady Jeune pointed out in surprise an old political enemy of Chamberlain’s who happened to be sitting in a chair near the river as they glided by, Churchill was astonished by Chamberlain’s reaction. The famously dignified man, often caricatured for his carefully combed hair, long,
patrician face and glinting monocle that trailed a silky ribbon down his cheek, glared at his now elderly and harmless rival and spat, “A bundle of old rags!” before turning away in disgust.