IT WAS IN August 1873, at an afternoon ball on board the HMS Ariadne, then at anchor off the Isle of Wight for Cowes Week, that two families from very different worlds collided. Lord Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the 7th duke of Marlborough, had been a natural choice on the guest list of the prince and princess of Wales to meet Grand Duke Cesarevitch of Russia and his duchess. More surprising was the inclusion of Mrs Clara Jerome, the American wife of a colourful Wall Street entrepreneur. It was true that she had featured at the Parisian court of Napoleon III, until the self-styled emperor had been driven from the capital three years earlier, but Mrs Jerome’s place on the royal guest list probably owed more to a shortage of suitable young females. Staying with her for the season in a rented house at Cowes were her three daughters Clarita, Jeannette and Leonie, the first two over eighteen and therefore eligible to attend.
It was Jeannette, better known as Jennie, who caught the eye of Lord Randolph Churchill across the ship’s wardroom that afternoon. She was slim and dark, hinting at her mother’s Indian background; he was slight and narrow-shouldered with the pale, almost translucent skin of a typical Churchill male. After one dance together they spent the rest of the afternoon deep in conversation, which came easily to Jennie, who had been educated in New York and Paris, but which startled Lord Randolph, whose six sisters’ education had been limited to the attentions of a governess inside the confines of the ducal home at Blenheim Palace, although he himself had read history and law at Oxford.
Over the next few days Jennie persuaded her mother to invite Lord Randolph to dinner twice and they managed two more unsupervised conversations. Before he left Cowes the duke’s son proposed marriage and the equally impulsive daughter of Wall Street accepted.
‘Mr Jerome is a gentleman who is obliged to live in New York to look after his business. I do not know what it is,’ Lord Randolph hastily explained in a letter to his father, on whom he remained wholly reliant for the income he would need in order to marry. ‘He is reputed to be very well-off and his daughters, I believe, have very good fortunes, but I do not know anything for certain.’1 In fact, both families had seen better days. ‘Very little money on either side’ was the more accurate verdict, some sixty years later, of the couple’s first son, Winston Churchill.2
Timothy Jerome had set sail for America from the Isle of Wight back in 1710, settling on arrival in Connecticut, before the family later moved up the east coast to the state of New York. Jennie’s father Leonard was born in 1818, the fifth of eight sons and one daughter to Isaac Jerome, a doctor and descendant of Timothy’s. His elder brothers attended the expensive College of New Jersey in Princeton, but Leonard, whose reputation was as a high-spirited nuisance, had to complete his studies elsewhere after family financial support melted away. He emerged, nevertheless, with high enough marks to join his brother Lawrence on the legal staff of his uncle, Judge Hiram K. Jerome, and each was to marry one of the two Hall sisters, whose parents had died early and left them comfortably off.
Clara’s reserve contrasted with Leonard’s charm and extroversion, while her family money helped the brothers buy a local newspaper, the Rochester Daily American, which they sold five years later after trebling its circulation. Leonard moved on to a telegraph company in New York, where he shared a home in Brooklyn with another brother, Addison, who persuaded him to change career and join him buying and selling shares on Wall Street. New York still boasted only nineteen millionaires at the time, but the number was clearly set to grow as the American population increased.
After the birth of their first daughter, Leonard put his business career briefly on hold to answer a call from President Fillmore, whom the brothers had supported as a state politician, to take up a consulship to a European city. Trieste, on the Adriatic coast, attracted the European aristocracy at play during the summer and, although Leonard stayed only eighteen months before he insisted on returning to sort out his affairs in New York, it proved long enough to leave Clara with a lifelong fascination for court life.
Their second daughter,*1 known as ‘Jennie’, was born in 1854, just before a fall in the share price of the Cleveland and Toledo Railroad Company, of which Leonard was a large shareholder. It was the first real check to his career. Unabashed, the brothers combined with a Maryland financier to start a new stockbroking business, Travers Jerome, exploiting their strong newspaper contacts by entertaining editors to excellent lunches where they planted share tips for publication, having first positioned their own portfolios appropriately. By the late 1850s Leonard was reputed to be worth $10 million on paper,3 but progress was uneven and after one less successful episode he deemed it wise to retreat with the family for a few months to Paris, where they rented an apartment on the Champs-Elysées and found themselves, as wealthy Americans, fêted at the Imperial Court.
When they returned to New York in 1859 it was to a city that stretched no further north than 23rd Street4 and remained the social domain of the 400 descendants of the Dutch settlers who could fit into the ballroom of the former Caroline Schermerhorn, now Mrs William Astor.5 Excluded from the chosen few, Leonard bought land next to their stronghold on the corner of Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, where he built a French-style mansion in red brick and white marble at a cost of $55,000. Its ballroom may have held a mere 300, but alongside it stood a theatre for 600 in which liveried servants led guests to their seats as Leonard hosted the city’s leading musical talent, much of it female.
Leonard Jerome’s fortune was to reach its peak during the American Civil War (1861–5), in the course of which he offered strong support to Abraham Lincoln and the North’s anti-slavery cause through the pages of The New York Times, where he and the family had built up the largest shareholding of almost 20 per cent.6 Just as the American business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt used his position as the government’s shipping agent to expand his fortune during the war, Leonard took advantage of coded information passed from the battlefields by his own telegraph company to deal audaciously on the stock market. He had settled enough money on Clara to make her secure, but contemporaries spoke of an almost blind risk-taking, combined with a complete confidence in his own destiny: ‘He used to paralyse his friends by the magnitude of his transactions,’ wrote his biographer Anita Leslie. ‘Clara said she did not think he himself knew how many millions he had made or lost. Too many other interests held his attention.’7
By the late 1860s, tiring of her husband’s adventures and extra-marital affairs, Clara used her financial independence to remove her daughters from Miss Lucy Green’s boarding school on Fifth Avenue, where they had been taught French, and take them back to Paris, this time without their father. Jennie attended a lycée and studied piano to concert standard under a friend of Chopin’s, while her mother established her own salon at their home on the Boulevard Malesherbes and re-inserted herself at the court of Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie.
Soon afterwards her husband’s fortunes began to falter in New York, where he suffered a serious theft of valuable bearer bonds from his office, followed by the failure of a new share issue that he had underwritten for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in which he was the largest shareholder. His losses were said to have halved his fortune.8 More widespread falls in share prices during 1869 reduced his wealth to little more than the value of his Madison Square mansion, which he let for $25,000 a year to the Union League Club, before leaving to join the family in Paris. He reached the French capital in January 1870, only to be greeted by rioters in the streets protesting against the excesses of the imperial regime. Leonard led his family to temporary sanctuary in Nice, but they were back in Paris – and he in New York – by the summer, when a desperate Napoleon III tried to shore up his crumbling support by declaring war on Prussia. It was a serious miscalculation: within weeks Otto von Bismarck’s forces threatened the French capital, forcing Clara and her daughters to catch the last train to Deauville so that they could cross to safety in England.
Leonard arranged a suite of rooms for them all at Brown’s Hotel off Piccadilly, but after Paris the family found London damp and polluted. Leonard crossed the Atlantic and took them for the summer of 1871 to enjoy the sea air of the Isle of Wight, where he knew the annual Cowes yachting festival would attract the English and European aristocracy that Clara missed. The expedition was such a success that it was repeated each summer, even after the women had returned to Paris. Leonard joined them in 1872, but a slide in share prices prevented him from leaving New York the following year. A telegram bringing news of the first falls had reached Leonard while he was dining with friends. He waited until the end of the meal before announcing its contents: ‘Gentlemen, it is a message in which you are all interested. The bottom has fallen out of stocks and I am a ruined man. But your dinner is paid for and I did not want to disturb you while you were eating it.’9 Clara and their daughters therefore arrived in Cowes on their own for the season of 1873.
Like the Jeromes’s, the Churchills’ fortune had also been built within a generation, although it took longer to dissipate. Born in 1650, its chief creator John Churchill had grown up in the shadow of deprivation after his father Winston was fined three times the annual income from his small estate, all because as a young captain in the king’s army he had fought on the losing side during the English Civil War (1642–51). The experience shaped what his biographer and direct descendant Winston Churchill described as an ‘iron parsimony and personal frugality, never relaxed in the blaze of fortune and abundance’.10
Following the Restoration in 1660, the sixteen-year-old John Churchill’s elder sister managed to secure him an appointment as a page at the court of Charles II’s younger brother James, duke of York, a Catholic. Within a year John had shrewdly learned to combine twin incomes from simultaneous court and military service by gaining a commission in the King’s Own Company of the First Guards (later the Grenadier Guards). A third stream of earnings (some claim as the most lucrative) came from services provided in the bedroom of the king’s former mistress Barbara Villiers; however, these ceased on his marriage to the sixteen-year-old Sarah Jennings, an attendant to the duke’s younger daughter Princess Anne. Sarah came without dowry or family connections, but with an astuteness and independence of mind that never left her.
By the time their patron had succeeded his brother on the throne in 1685 as James II and Princess Anne had formed her own court on marriage, the newly ennobled Lord Churchill and his wife employed seven liveried servants at homes in London and the countryside. The smooth progress of their twin careers met its first serious challenge when Prince William of Orange, who was married to the king’s elder daughter Mary, raised the standard of Protestant revolt against his Catholic father-in-law, presenting Churchill with a difficult choice. A committed Protestant himself, yet one of the king’s most senior military officers, he waited to see which way the wind was blowing before switching allegiance on the battlefield, a manoeuvre that required his wife to escort Princess Anne from London at the same moment, for their safety.
After the Glorious Revolution (1688–9) pragmatism dictated that the victorious new joint monarchs William III and Mary II should offer Churchill an earldom, which he took in the name of Marlborough. They also awarded him the lucrative task of reviewing his fellow officers’ fitness to retain their commissions. However, William and Mary never entirely trusted Marlborough, who kept lines open to the former king’s exiled supporters in France, and Mary engineered his dismissal from all court and military appointments in 1692.
Marlborough’s rehabilitation began after her death two years later, but it was not complete until Princess Anne came to the throne in 1702, when she showered the earl and countess of Marlborough with appointments. The countess earned £6,000 a year from combined positions as groom of the stole, mistress of the robes and keeper of the privy purse, while Marlborough became responsible for equipping and supplying Queen Anne’s army as master of the ordnance, a post that no predecessor had left without becoming a great deal richer.
Their joint income, already estimated at £64,000 a year,11 rose still further when Marlborough was given command of the combined armies of Britain, Holland and some German principalities that were to fight France in the long War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). Marlborough not only earned a salary of £10,000 a year, but received a commission of 2½ per cent of the payroll of his combined armies; in theory this was intended to fund his headquarters and intelligence staff, but no detailed accounting was required.
Early military success, during which Marlborough outmanoeuvred the French Marshal Boufflers to capture Liège in the Low Countries, brought an offer from the queen of elevation from earl to duke. The countess advised against it, on account of the expense of a ducal lifestyle, but Marlborough accepted, after negotiating a lifetime pension of £5,000 a year from Post Office revenues. Parliament had refused Queen Anne’s initial request that the pension should be extended in perpetuity to Churchill’s heirs, but changed its mind after a clear military victory against Franco-Bavarian forces at the Battle of Blenheim (13 August 1704) in Bavaria.
The queen marked this success by a grant of land at Woodstock, near Oxford, where Marlborough could build a commemorative palace at public expense. Marlborough continued his series of victories over French commanders at the battles of Ramillies (23 May 1706), Oudenarde (11 July 1708) and Malplaquet (11 September 1709), each of which expanded the list of his spoils from grateful European princes, but none was decisive enough to bring the campaign to an end. Eventually the political tide at home began to turn against proponents of the costly war, with the result that the duke and duchess of Marlborough found themselves mercilessly lampooned by Jonathan Swift and other satirists for ‘profiteering’ at the public expense.
The queen put a stop to the payment of bills at Blenheim, where construction had already cost £130,000, and parliament went further in 1712 by calling for Marlborough to reimburse more than £400,000 to the public purse. Taking refuge in Europe, where he was widely fêted, the duke carefully cultivated the support of the House of Hanover, to whom the British throne would pass on Queen Anne’s death because none of her children had survived childhood. Although his health was too poor for a return to public life, Marlborough returned to London on the day after Anne died, as work resumed on his palace at Blenheim. He finally moved into part of the building three years before his death in 1722.
The dowager duchess had always considered the building a wasteful extravagance, but dutifully used the £50,000 set aside in her husband’s will to complete it in his memory. Justifiably nervous that it would prove an expensive liability in the long term, she set about building up the surrounding land to strengthen the finances of the estate while she still remained its trustee and tenant for her remaining years.
As an additional precaution against profligate heirs, she arranged for the building itself, her husband’s prizes inside (such as the paintings, jewellery and porcelain presented to him after his victories), and the core surrounding estate to be protected from sale in perpetuity by a special Act of Parliament. Although she outlived her husband by twenty-two years, during which her determination to secure the future of Blenheim never flagged, the estate reached no more than half the size of its conterparts owned by the longer-established dukes of Devonshire, Norfolk and Northumberland, each of whom owned more than 100,000 acres of land.12
In addition, her determination to maintain an iron control over the Blenheim estate proved ill-suited to the family unity required to consolidate its recent origins. Exceptionally, Parliament had allowed the Marlborough title to pass down the female line, after the Churchills’ only son had died of smallpox aged seventeen. The dowager duchess, however, was not on speaking terms with her elder daughter Henrietta, who succeeded to the dukedom on her father’s death. The dowager duchess disapproved equally strongly of her younger daughter Anne’s son Charles Spencer, who became the next in line to take over the dukedom after Henrietta’s only surviving son died in 1731.
Charles had already assumed the smaller Spencer family fortune before he became the 3rd duke of Marlborough in 1733. He could expect to inherit the further £60,000 a year which the Blenheim estate yielded the dowager duchess died, but he unwisely paid little attention to her views on a suitable marriage partner or to her threats to disinherit him of her personal share of the estate unless he gave up an addiction to gambling. When she finally died in 1744, the dowager duchess was as good as her word: in the first fateful weakening of the Marlborough fortune, the twenty-sixth version of her will left almost half of the estate, the portion that she had accumulated and personally controlled, not to the 3rd duke but to his younger brother Johnny.13
During the fourteen years that he had left to run Blenheim, the 3rd duke economized sufficiently to pass on an estate producing an income of £45,000 a year, of which half was required to meet allowances for members of the family. The 4th duke, a man of charm and a great connoisseur, spent the first part of his sixty-year reign at Blenheim building up its collection of books and gems and remodelling its landscape with the help of the landscape architect Capability Brown, before he, too, was forced to economize by cutting the size of the household staff to seventy-five.
It was his son, the future 5th duke, who was to prove the main agent in the decline of the family fortunes. Forced to wait in the wings for several decades on an allowance of £2,000 a year, George Spencer-Churchill indulged himself in expensive passions for books, plants and women by borrowing ever greater sums against his eventual inheritance. When his father allowed the family trustees to buy him the 2,580-acre Whiteknights estate on his marriage, George was spurred into spending a further £25,000 on books and £50,000 on plants, which needed a team of fifty gardeners to look after them.14
Whiteknights had to be mortgaged to raise £45,000 to reduce his debts in 1815, two years before he announced his succession at Blenheim by redesigning its gardens with cash raised by the sale of land. Within three years Whiteknights was seized by its mortgagors and bailiffs arrived at Blenheim to claim any fittings not protected by the ancient Act of Parliament: the 5th duke hired replacements for the furniture they seized from a firm of Piccadilly upholsterers at a cost of £50 a year.15 ‘The family of the great Duke is gone sadly to decay and are but a disgrace to the illustrious name of Churchill,’ the duke of Wellington’s companion Mrs Arbuthnot wrote after visiting Blenheim. ‘The Duke is overloaded with debt and very little better than a common swindler.’16
When he died in 1840 his successor the 6th duke was confronted by urgent repairs costing £80,000 on an estate reduced to an income of £10,000.17 He had no option but to accelerate the sale of assets unprotected by the Act of Parliament and to start borrowing against whatever remained.18 Confined to a wheelchair for the last years of his life, he parted with rare books, engravings, musical instruments, clocks, china and porcelain before leaving the stage in 1857 to Winston Churchill’s grandfather.
While ‘not rich for a Duke’ (as Benjamin Disraeli drily observed to Queen Victoria),19 the 7th duke made a determined effort to match expenditure to income. Eventually, however, he had to resort to more asset sales. First to go, in 1862, were peripheral estates in Wiltshire and Shropshire; next, in 1870, more books; early in 1873 it was the turn of the gemstones collected by his great-grandfather, which fetched 35,000 guineas.20 By the time his younger son Lord Randolph announced his unexpected plans to marry an American, the duke was planning the sale of more land in Buckinghamshire, which Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bought for £220,000. The Blenheim estate was reduced to 23,000 acres in Oxfordshire, well below the 30,000 acres that marked out Britain’s top 250 landowning families.21
American heiresses had become increasingly attractive to the straitened aristocracy,*2 but in this case neither the duke nor the duchess approved of their son’s match. After making early enquiries in London about the background of Jennie Jerome’s family, the duke was not encouraging: ‘From what you have told me & what I have heard,’ he wrote to Randolph, ‘this Mr J seems to be a sporting, and I should think, vulgar kind of man. It is evident he is of the class of speculators; he has been bankrupt once; and may be so again.’22 Leonard Jerome, by contrast, initially approved, telling his wife to agree an allowance of £2,000 a year for their daughter, but changed his tune abruptly on hearing that the duke had extended the investigation of his family to America, using the help of the British Embassy in Washington.
Undeterred, Lord Randolph returned to Cowes where he managed to secure the approval of the prince of Wales for his choice of bride. It was a signal for his parents to concede that the match should proceed if both parties wished it to do so after waiting for a full year. His father had always earmarked him for a career in politics and Lord Randolph managed to reduce the waiting time by half by agreeing to stand for what amounted to the family seat in Parliament at Woodstock, near Blenheim, when an unexpected election was called before the end of the year. His victory duly achieved, the duke and duchess agreed to visit Jennie in Paris, where her prowess in playing Beethoven sonatas on the piano and in discussing British politics led them to approve the start of formal negotiations between the two families for a marriage settlement, a form of legal agreement used in England at the time to set out each family’s financial contributions to a marriage and to determine their distribution among future generations.
The duke’s lawyers opened the bidding by suggesting that he would contribute an income of £1,000 a year, secured by a £20,000 charge against the Blenheim estate.23 Leonard Jerome’s team talked of contributing an income twice as high, $10,000 a year, backed by $200,000 of capital.24 His enthusiasm for the match had been rekindled, as he told his daughter: ‘Between you and I and the post – and your mother etc I am delighted more than I can tell. It is magnificent. The greatest match any American has made since the Duchess of Leeds.’25
When the duke’s advisers held out for a capital sum of $250,000 – to be secured on Leonard’s New York racetrack and remaining railroad shares, as well as his Manhattan mansion – the negotiations became more difficult. It was partly a matter of distance and partly of each family’s fanciful ideas of the other’s wealth. There was an added complication when Leonard made it clear that he expected to pay his allowance to his daughter and not to her husband. The Churchill solicitor warned Lord Randolph of the consequences: ‘Miss Jerome is made quite independent of you in a pecuniary sort of way, which in my experience is most unusual.’26
The impasse continued until a week before the wedding, when Leonard suggested a compromise under which half his contribution went to each side, but he told the duke that he thought ‘your English custom of making the wife so utterly dependent upon the husband most unwise’.27 The duke responded by agreeing to clear his son’s debts and promising to provide £10,000 towards the couple’s purchase of a London house.28
The settlement documents reached Paris for signing on the eve of the wedding at the chapel of the British Embassy on 15 April 1874. ‘I am quite decided that Jennie will have to manage the money,’ Lord Randolph told his father afterwards, ‘and I am quite sure that she will keep everything straight, for she is clever, and like all Americans, has a sacred, and I should almost say, insane horror of buying anything she cannot pay for.’29 It was a monumental misjudgement, a hint of which lay in the twenty-five gowns from leading Parisian couturiers that made up Jennie’s trousseau.
*1 A third, Camille, followed in 1855, but died in 1863; a fourth, Leonie, was born in 1859.
*2 By 1907 more than 500 ‘dollar princesses’ are said to have married titled Europeans, taking some $220 million with them to their adopted continent. This trend led to the launch of a quarterly magazine, Titled Americans: A List of American Ladies Who Have Married Foreigners of Rank, which was published in America.