First Lady Page 5
Winston’s first letter to her, on 16 April, demonstrates a dramatic change in tone from his gushing notes to women such as Pamela. He wrote about how much he had enjoyed their discussions at Salisbury Hall, paying particular tribute to her cleverness. Here at last was a woman he could talk to rather than worship from afar. ‘What a comfort & pleasure it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality & such strong reserves of noble sentiment,’ he wrote, adding that he hoped they would lay the foundations of a ‘frank & clear-eyed friendship’ with ‘many serious feelings of respect’.29 Clementine fired off an equally telling letter to Jennie: ‘You were so kind to me that you make me feel as if I had known you always. I feel no-one can know him … without being dominated by his charm and brilliancy.’
In those days it was customary for MPs elevated to the Cabinet to stand for re-election. So while Clementine was in Germany, Winston began campaigning in his largely working-class seat in north-west Manchester. In one letter to her, he referred in glowing terms to the help given to him on the stump by the famously good-looking Lady Dorothy Howard. Why he thought it fitting to praise this other woman for fighting on his behalf in every slum, crowd or street ‘like Joan of Arc before Orleans’ can only be imagined. As can Clementine’s reaction to his observation that Dorothy ‘is a wonderful woman – tireless, fearless, convinced, inflexible – yet preserving all her womanliness’. On 23 April she replied: ‘I feel so envious of Dorothy Howard – It must be very exciting to feel one has the power of influencing people . . . I feel as much excited as if I were a candidate.’30
This expression of political interest – with its hint of jealous concern – must have greatly pleased Winston, who may have been testing Clementine for her reaction. In a quick crossfire of correspondence, on 27 April he added: ‘How I should have liked you to have been there. You would have enjoyed it I think.’ He exhibited, moreover, a new mood of measured self-revelation, not least when he wrote: ‘Write to me again. I am a solitary creature in the midst of crowds. Be kind to me.’ Here at last the rumbustious adventurer of popular folklore felt safe enough to admit that he was lonely. Indeed, in all the 1700 letters and notes that Winston and Clementine would send to each other over the next fifty-seven years, isolation among people would prove the most persistent theme.
For the woman who had since Kitty’s death felt unneeded, this was a clear signal that she might have found a new role to play at last. Winston loved her not as a goddess, but as a human being. And despite his praise for Dorothy Howard, there was no reason for Clementine to regard the other woman as a threat. Howard was too didactic on both women’s suffrage and teetotalism – neither cause dear to Winston’s heart – and he later referred to her as a ‘tyrant’, if also ‘a dear’. But he was at the same time something of a tease and liked to provoke Clementine to jealousy.
Her commitment was also tried when, for all Howard’s efforts, on 23 April Winston lost the Manchester election. Now Clementine could see for herself the violent reactions he sometimes aroused. The Daily Telegraph, which had never forgiven him abandoning the Tories for the Liberal Party, reported: ‘We have all been yearning for this to happen . . .Winston Churchill is out, Out, OUT.’ She could not help but admire, however, the way he picked himself up from this defeat before winning another election in Dundee the following month. She was now avidly reading the newspapers to monitor his every move.
Unusually self-sufficient, Clementine did not tell even close friends about her feelings, but she was convinced that she was in love. She saw Winston again several times in June and July but never alone. At times she would refuse his invitations, simply to avoid gossip, although she did agree to meet him at Salisbury Hall again in August. In the meantime, she was horrified to discover that a serious fire had broken out at a house where she knew him to be staying. Relieved to read in The Times that no one had been injured, she rushed to the Post Office to wire her joy to him.
Winston took this as a sign and persuaded his cousin Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough, to invite her to Blenheim. She demurred – not least because she was down to her very last clean dress. But Winston was insistent, promising that his mother and Sunny would look after her. Sunny ‘is quite different from me, understanding women thoroughly, getting into touch with them at once’, he wrote rather naively. ‘Whereas I am stupid and clumsy in that relation. . . Yet by such vy different paths we both arrive at loneliness!’31
Clementine could refuse no longer. On 10 August she left the Isle of Wight, where she had been staying, and took the train to Blenheim. As she travelled through the English countryside, she wrote in shaky handwriting to Lady Blanche back in London: ‘I feel dreadfully shy & rather tired . . . I . . . can do nothing more intelligent than count the telegraph posts as they flash by.’ Soon afterwards she was walking up the front steps into the gloom of Blenheim’s great hall. There to greet her, below the muscular Victory Arch, were Winston, Jennie, the Duke, Winston’s great friend F.E. Smith and his wife Margaret, plus a private secretary from the Board of Trade. It was clear this was to be no lowkey visit.
Alone in her high-ceilinged bedroom, she found a fire in the grate despite the August heat – an extravagance that no doubt offended her frugal nature. She looked in dismay at the bath-tub, the hot and cold water jugs, towels and sponges knowing she had no way of dressing to the standards her hosts would expect. Her spirits were lifted only when there was a knock at the door; noticing her unusual lack of a lady’s maid, Jennie had discreetly sent her own. Yet despite this act of kindness, Clementine failed to sparkle at dinner, feeling impossibly shy in that cavernous Blenheim saloon with its forbidding military frescoes. Winston talked so much that perhaps he never noticed. He did, however, promise to show her the famous rose gardens overlooking the lake the following morning.
Punctual as ever, Clementine descended to breakfast at the appointed hour only to be left waiting and waiting. Fearing that she would flounce out at any moment, Sunny hastily invited her for a drive around the estate while sending word of the emerging crisis up to Winston – who was still slumbering in his bed. The walk was hastily rearranged for the afternoon, when finally Winston escorted Clementine to the gardens. They strolled down the hill, following the twists and turns in the path through the cedars and oaks planted for suspense and drama by the great landscape architect Capability Brown. They toured the rose garden, only some of its flowers drooping from the heat, and admired the glimpses of the great lake through the leaves. Yet by the time they began to make their way back up to the house, still nothing of much import had been said.
Finally, a summer shower drove the couple to take shelter in a little Greek temple folly, but there was by now a certain tension between them. Clementine spotted a spider scuttling across the floor, and with steely determination quietly decided that if Winston had not declared himself before it reached a crack in the flagstones she would leave regardless.32 Happily, just in time, Winston asked at last if she would marry him. Without any further unnecessary hesitation she agreed, on condition that he promise to keep their betrothal secret until she had asked for her mother’s consent. But as they were leaving the temple, a seemingly intensely relieved Winston spotted Sunny and could not help himself, shouting: ‘We’re getting married! We’re getting married!’ Despite this minor betrayal, she later sent him a note via the footman: ‘My dearest One, I love you with all my heart and trust you absolutely.’33
The next day Clementine left Blenheim with a letter from Winston asking for Lady Blanche’s permission to marry her daughter and promising to give his prospective bride a ‘station’ in life worthy of ‘her beauty and virtues’. He could not bear to wait for the answer, though, and at the last moment jumped on the London-bound train beside her.
Lady Blanche considered Winston just right for her unusual offspring. He did not have the fortune she would have liked, but he was brilliant and ambitious and could earn his own living – and at least he was marrying for romance rather than money. In an approvi
ng letter to her sister-in-law, she said: ‘I do not know which of the two is the more in love.’34 Soon afterwards Winston wrote to Clementine that there were ‘no words to convey to you the feelings of love & joy by wh my being is possessed. May God who has given to me so much more than I ever knew how to ask keep you safe & sound.’35 Clementine responded gleefully: ‘I feel there is no room for anyone but you in my heart – you fill every corner.’36
News of the engagement drew mixed reactions. In Dieppe, Mme Villain ran through the streets crying out the news in delight; the chattering classes in London took a more negative view of the marriage’s prospects, deciding that Clementine would either be crushed or prove insufficiently malleable. Her grandmother predicted that the woman she’d known as such a fearful child would obediently ‘follow’ Winston and ‘say little’.37 Lord Rosebery, the former Prime Minister, forecast the pair would last six months, because Winston was ‘not the marrying kind’.38
Clementine meanwhile told people that she was under no illusions that being married to Winston would be easy but she did think it ‘would be tremendously stimulating’. She was also excited about her ring – ‘a fat ruby with two diamonds’, she boasted to Nellie. But somehow, now that she was engaged she was more reticent with him, writing: ‘Je t’aime passionément – I feel less shy in French.’ And it appears her reserve worried Winston; he wrote to F.E. Smith: ‘Is it fair to ask this lovely creature to marry so ambitious a man as myself?’39
Even so, he would not brook a long engagement. A date was fixed for the wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, for a month’s time. Clementine wanted everything to be perfect, but as the days flew by with so much to be done she felt herself sinking. The newspapers were now following her every step. She was young, beautiful and marrying a celebrity; she was news, with all the personal invasion that entails. Photographs of her face were everywhere. The Daily Mail took a particular interest in a dress fitting that lasted, by its calculations, six hours. By contrast, Winston – tied up with his politics as ever – was rarely to be seen. There were moments when she began to falter, but her brother Bill steadied her. He reminded her that she had already broken off at least two engagements and that she could not humiliate a public figure like Winston Churchill.
There was a reason other than nerves for her wobble. Shortly after their engagement, Winston had embarked on a 1100-mile round trip to a Scottish castle on a rocky promontory north of Aberdeen, where another beautiful young woman was waiting for him. Over the past year he had become close friends with Violet, the slender-waisted twenty-one-year-old daughter of his relatively new boss, the Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith. Although spoilt and immersed in a life of almost royal luxury, Violet was a brilliant mind – in her stepmother Margot’s view ‘alas too brilliant’ – and found most men her age dull. She held Winston, however, in the ‘high esteem he held himself’. In fact, they were remarkably alike – opinionated, garrulous, idealistic, wilful and pugnacious. Both, moreover, loved and lived politics. She met him at balls and dinners, or when he came to visit her father; soon she was clearing her diary to see him all the more. Later Violet would insist they had always been just friends, but all the signs are that she was deeply in love. She declared herself ‘inebriated’ by the way he talked and ‘enthralled’ by his genius. Unfortunately, Winston was not looking for a female version of himself.
Upon learning of the engagement on 14 August, Violet had reputedly fainted and then written a venomous letter to Clementine’s cousin Venetia Stanley, who was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding. Winston’s new fiancée, said Violet, was as ‘stupid as an owl’, no more than ‘ornamental’, and incapable of being ‘the critical reformatory wife’ Winston badly needed in his career to ‘hold him back from blunders’. Venetia replied by noting that the Manchester Guardian had (generously) included in a list of Clementine’s accomplishments six languages, music and brilliant conversation, adding, ‘I think he must be a good deal in love with her to face such a mother in law.’40 Even so, Violet’s stepmother Margot remained convinced that Clementine had no brains, character or strength and was in fact ‘mad’, whereas Violet’s patronising view was that she was ‘sane to the point of dreariness’. Asquith himself predicted merely that the match would be a ‘disaster’.
Clementine later admitted finding such a reception as Winston’s new fiancée ‘petrifying’ and had instinctively opposed his decision to go ahead with his long-planned visit to Violet’s holiday retreat – where Miss Asquith was caustically remarking that at least the engagement would provide ‘the Hozier’ with a rest ‘from making her own clothes’. Winston fatefully concluded it was still his duty to make his peace with the other woman who loved him, and once there, he and Violet went for romantic cliff-top hikes – but their time together soured when she slipped and cut her face, leaving her miserable and, in her own words, looking ‘worse than the vampire in Jane Eyre’.41 By the time he left a few days later, she was almost hysterical.
Although the Asquiths were invited to the wedding, they did not come. Not that Violet had done with Winston; far from it. But Clementine would soon discover that she had more than one rival on her hands for his attentions.
Chapter Two
More Than Meets the Eye
1908–14
Waking up at dawn on her wedding day in a large chilly room at Lady St Helier’s mansion did nothing to boost Clementine’s spirits. Exiled by her mother from her own home to make room for guests, she was cut off in Portland Place from the bustle of family life. She longed to return, even if only for breakfast, for one last taste of the familiar before taking the leap into the unknown as Mrs Winston Churchill.
Alas, a maid had taken away her day clothes leaving her nothing to wear but her wedding dress. Feeling trapped, Clementine crept down the majestic staircase in her dressing gown while the house was still in shuttered darkness and Lady St Helier asleep. The only soul about was a young under-housemaid blacking the grate in the morning room. Seeing a friendly girl of similar age, if not of prospects, Clementine unbottled her troubles. The good-hearted servant quickly abandoned her work to scurry upstairs to her attic.
Minutes later, a figure slipped out of a back door in the classic uniform of an off-duty maid. Wearing a dark, close-fitting cheap coat over a pretty print dress and black-buttoned boots she hopped on a bus west to Kensington. A conductor, recognising his famous passenger from the newspapers, suggested Clementine must have made a mistake. London was abuzz with the excitement of an aristocratic beauty marrying a global celebrity. Crowds of the scale normally seen only at a royal wedding were already beginning to take up their positions on the streets. But now here was the bride riding a bus away from where the ceremony was due to take place.
Nothing would deter her from returning to Abingdon Villas, however, and she arrived to astonished gasps, not only at her presence but also her unexpected attire. A merry time with Nellie and Bill restored her resolve and she soon headed back (by horse-drawn brougham this time) to prepare for the 2 p.m. service at St Margaret’s in Parliament Square.
It was 12 September and many grandees were still away on holiday, including half the Cabinet who had sent their regrets. Among the 1300 guests who did turn up to Parliament’s parish church were David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, F.E. Smith – one of the few Tories who had forgiven Winston’s defection to the Liberals – and General Sir Ian Hamilton from his Army days.
A number of places on the bride’s side – it was anyone’s guess exactly how many – were occupied by her mother’s former admirers. Some were mischievously placed together, such as the gossipy poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and the Scottish peer Hugo Charteris, but significantly it was Bertie Mitford who sat in the front row beside Lady Blanche; she resplendent in a purple silk gown trimmed with white fur. On the groom’s side of course was Winston’s mother Jennie, competitively dolled up in beaver-coloured satin and a hat decorated with dahlias. A fading beauty of fifty-four, she was
now married to a man a mere fortnight older than Winston, by the name of George Cornwallis-West.
The bells of Big Ben struck two o’clock, and four minutes later Clementine entered the fifteenth-century white-stone church on the arm of her handsome brother Bill, now an officer in the Royal Navy. She walked down the aisle framed by rows of soaring white Gothic arches and bathed in the autumn sun streaming through the windows. Draped in shimmering white satin, her veil of tulle was clipped to her hair by a coronet of fresh orange blossom. She was wearing diamond earrings from Winston and clutching a bouquet of fragrant white tuberoses and a white parchment prayer book. Behind Clementine were five bridesmaids – Nellie, cousins Venetia Stanley and Madeleine Whyte, Winston’s cousin Clare Frewen and a friend, Horatia Seymour. All wore amber-coloured satin gowns and carried bunches of pink roses. More roses and camellias tumbled across their large black satin hats.
The choir sang the hymn ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father’ while members of the congregation climbed on their seats for a better look. In the presence of such elegance, and flanked by his dapper best man, the mustachioed Lord Hugh Cecil, many thought Winston fell short as the dashing groom. He was losing hair and gaining weight, his face already ‘settling into the attitude of pugnacity it was to become famous for’.1 Tailor and Cutter magazine branded his morning suit ‘one of the greatest failures as a wedding garment we have ever seen’, claiming that it lent Winston the appearance of a ‘glorified coachman’. When Clementine reached this unprepossessing figure before the altar, he somewhat bizarrely held out his hand and warmly shook hers.
Dean Welldon, who had been Winston’s headmaster at Harrow, proceeded to size up what was now expected of his bride. A statesman, he declared, should be able to depend ‘upon the love, the insight, the penetrating sympathy and devotion of his wife’. Her role, and the influence she exercised in her husband’s future public life, would be so important as to be ‘sacred’. Winston’s vows after this portentous address were loud and clear, hers so soft as to be barely audible. The whole ceremony was a rehearsal for her future; even when signing the register, Winston deserted her for an animated political discussion with Lloyd George.