ON February 4, 1874—the year of Winston Churchill’s birth—British troops led by General Sir Garnet Wolseley entered the small African city of Kumasi, now part of central Ghana, and put it to the torch, thereby ending the Second Ashanti War and winning the general a handsome spread on the weekly page devoted to the Empire in the Illustrated London News. He had worked for it. A melancholy martinet with spaniel eyes and a long drooping mustache rather like that of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, Wolseley had joined Victoria’s army—“putting on the widow’s uniform,” as they later said—while still in his teens. Convinced that the surest way to glory lay in courting death at every opportunity, he had been felled by a severe thigh wound in the Second Burmese War, lost an eye to a bursting shell in the Crimea, and survived hairbreadth escapes while relieving Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny, capturing the Ta-ku Forts and Peking during Britain’s 1860 dispute with the Chinese, and suppressing an insurrection in Canada. After finishing off the Ashantis he fought Zulus and dervishes, and organized campaigns against Boer guerrillas. His concern for soldiers’ welfare won him a reputation among England’s upper classes as a dangerous radical. London’s cockneys loved him, however; their expression for topnotch was “all Sir Garnet.” His great ambition was to die a heroic death in action against the French. That failing, the general, who ended up a viscount, planned to enrich his heirs by writing his memoirs after his retirement. Unfortunately, by then he had completely lost his memory. Visitors who mentioned his conquests to him were met by blank stares. He died in 1913, the last year of England’s golden age.
Wolseley was one of the country’s imperial heroes—others included Clive, Stamford Raffles, Chinese Gordon, Richard Burton, and, of course, Cecil Rhodes—whose feats were held up to the nation as examples of how men of courage and determination could shape the destiny of that noblest achievement of mankind, the Empire. If their lives were metaphors of the Empire’s rise, that of Churchill, their rapt pupil, was the other way around. He entered the world in 1874, when the royal domain was approaching flood tide, and left it in 1965, as the last rays of imperial splendor were vanishing. That is one way of summing him up; it is, in fact, one of the ways he saw himself. Toward the end of his life he told Lord Boothby: “History judges a man, not by his victories or defeats, but by their results.”1 Yet the vitiation of the Empire does not diminish his stature. Alexander was driven out of India; Genghis Khan was undone by his sons; Napoleon lost everything, including France. Indeed, it may be argued that the greater the fall, the greater was a man’s height. If that is true, then Churchill’s stature rises above that of all other statesmen, for no realm, past or present, can match the grandeur of imperial Britain at its sublime peak.
It was the Tory journalist John Wilson of Blackwood’s Magazine who first observed, in 1817, that “the sun never sets upon the Union Jack.” At any given moment, wherever dawn was breaking, Britain’s colors were rippling up some flagpole. If one could have ascended high enough in one of those balloons which fascinated Jules Verne and were actually used in the Franco-Prussian War, the view of Britain’s colonial sphere would have been breathtaking. Victoria reigned over most of Africa, both ends of the Mediterranean, virtually all that mattered in the Middle East; the entire Indian subcontinent, from Afghanistan to Thailand, including Ceylon, which on a map appeared to be merely the dot below India’s exclamation mark but which was actually the size of Belgium; Malaya, Singapore, Australia, islands spread all over the Pacific and the Atlantic, and Canada. The Canadians, proud of their loyalty to the Queen, issued a stamp depicting a world map with the Empire’s lands colored red. It was a study in crimson splotches. Although the British Isles themselves were dwarfed by czarist Russia, and were smaller than Sweden, France, Spain, or Germany, their inhabitants ruled a quarter of the world’s landmass and more than a quarter of its population—thrice the size of the Roman Empire, far more than the Spanish Empire at full flush, or, for that matter, than the United States or the Soviet Union today.
To its classically educated patricians, London was what Rome had once been: caput mundi, the head of the world. The popular aristocrat Lord Palmerston said that colonies were multiplying so rapidly that he had to “keep looking the damned places up on the map.” Disraeli said: “No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar. Its flag floats on many waters, it has provinces in every zone, they are inhabited by persons of different races,… manners, customs.” All this had been acquired by imperial conquest, and young Winston Churchill, writing for the Morning Post from a colonial battlefield on September 12, 1898, took note of “the odd and bizarre potentates against whom the British arms continually are turned. They pass in a long procession. The Akhund of Swat, Cetewayo brandishing an assegai as naked as himself, Kruger singing a Psalm of Victory, Osman Digna, the Immortal and the Irrepressible, Theebaw with his umbrella, the Mahdi with his banner, Lobengula gazing fondly at the pages of Truth, Prompeh abasing himself in the dust, the Mad Mullah on his white ass and, latest of all, the Khalifa in his Coach of State. It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane.”2
All these suzerains lost, and all England rejoiced—loudly. The British were very vocal in their allegiance to their Empire. In public schools and public houses boys and men responded to “Three cheers for India!” and roared, to the music of “Pomp and Circumstance,” Edward Elgar’s patriotic hymn, composed in the last weeks of the old Queen’s reign:
Land of hope and glory, mother of the free,
How shall we extol thee, who art born of thee?
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet;
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!
On declamation days children recited, from Kipling:
Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year,
Our fathers’ title runs.
Make we likewise their sacrifice,
Defrauding not our sons.
Music hall favorites were “The Death of Nelson,” by S. J. Arnold and John B. Raham; “Annie Laurie,” the great hit of the Crimean War; and, later, the rousing “Soldiers of the Queen.” Today their great-grandsons wince at the public displays of patriotism, but the Victorians responded quickly to calls of Duty, the Flag, the Race, the White Man’s Burden; the lot. Far from feeling manipulated—which they were; most Victorians gained nothing from the nation’s foreign conquests—they memorized lines from W. E. Henley, the balladeer of England’s colonial wars:
What if the best our wages be
An empty sleeve, a stiff-set knee,
A crutch for the rest of life—who cares,
So long as One Flag floats and dares?
So long as One Race dares and grows?
Death—what is death but God’s own rose?
Her Britannic Majesty was “by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India.” In thatch-roofed villages of British North Borneo and the steamy jungles of Sierra Leone, her primitive vassals regarded her as divine and slit the throats of propitiatory goats before her image, usually a drab statue of a dowdy woman wearing a tiny crown and holding an orb and scepter. Elsewhere Anglican missionaries prevailed and read their Book of Common Prayer in hundreds of languages and dialects, from Swahili to Urdu, from Maori to Bugi, from Kikuyu to Mandarin, and even, in remote valleys on the Isle of Man, the ancient tongue of Manx. Information from Victoria’s twenty-five turbulent tribal possessions in the Middle East reached Britain from their only contact with the outside world, Aden, on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, which had been acquired as a coaling station for the British fleet. There an Englishman perspiring beneath a gyrating punkah sent the Queen all the news she needed from the sheikhs: “They are content to be governed from London.” No one in Whitehall paid much attention. The only resource the Arabs could offer the Empire was an unpleasant liquid, of limited value, called oil.
Most Englishmen were familiar with scattered facts about the Empire. They had only the haziest idea of where Borneo was, but they had seen its Wild Man exhibited in a traveling cage. They knew the silhouette of lion-shaped Gibraltar, knew the legend that if Gibraltar’s monkeys vanished from its caves, the Empire was finished. (In the midst of World War II Churchill found time to replenish the Rock’s supply of monkeys.) They were proud of the Suez Canal, then considered an engineering marvel, and they were under the impression that all Egypt belonged to them, too. That wasn’t strictly true; Egypt still flew its own flag and paid homage to the sultan of Turkey, but after the Queen’s fleet had pounded Alexandria into submission, the country was run by the British agent and consul general. Thomas Cook and Son, booking clerks for the Empire, reserved Shepheard’s Hotel’s best rooms for Englishmen on official business. Cook’s also ran steamers up the Nile for English tourists, though pilots turned back short of the Sudan border in 1885, after fanatic tribesmen of the Mahdi butchered Chinese Gordon in Khartoum. This tiresome restriction ended in 1898 when Kitchener routed and humiliated the tribesmen under the critical eye of young Churchill.
The British public was aware of the tiny island of Saint Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic, because that was where imprisoned Napoleon spent his last years, but such possessions as Ascension isle, Saint Helena’s neighbor, which provided the turtles for the turtle soup at the traditional banquets of London’s lord mayor, and Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated of the Empire’s outposts, twelve hundred miles south of Saint Helena, in the broadest and most desolate reaches of the Atlantic, were virtually unknown outside the Colonial Office. Yet if ordinary Englishmen were confused about details of their realm, they can scarcely be blamed. The Empire itself was the vaguest of entities. Legally, under the British constitution, it did not exist. It was a kind of stupendous confidence trick. By arms or by arrogance, Englishmen had persuaded darker races that Britain was the home of a race meant to dominate the world. Therefore they ruled by consent. So successful was this bluff that the Mother Country held its possessions with an extraordinarily thin line of bwanas and sahibs; in India, for example, the rule of the Raj was administered by roughly one member of the Indian Civil Service for every 200,000 subjects.
Unless one counts Ireland, England’s first imperial conquest was Newfoundland, discovered by John Cabot in 1497. The East India Company was chartered in 1600, and thereafter explorers like Captain James Cook, roaming the South Pacific, were followed by missionaries and merchants who ruled and exploited the new lands. It is true that the newcomers introduced natives to law, sanitation, hospitals, and, eventually, to self-government, but Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby, neglecting her family while “educating natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” was deceiving herself about her country’s chief imperial motive. Palmerston, under no such illusion, said it was the government’s goal to “open and secure the roads for the merchant,” and Joseph Chamberlain said Whitehall must “find new markets and defend old ones.”3 Expansion of Britain’s maritime strength had led to settlements on America’s east coast and the hoisting of the Union Jack over the West Indies. The conquest of India had begun with a small trading station at Surat, on the west coast. Canada had been an acquisition of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a firm just as zealous in its pursuit of profits as the East India Company. Victorian Australia was built on the need for cargoes of gold and wool. And each new territory meant a further boost of England’s entrepôt trade, expansion of markets for the coal of Wales, the textiles of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the steel of Sheffield and Birmingham. By Churchill’s youth the nation’s foreign trade had reached the astounding total of £669,000,000 a year.
As James Morris pointed out in his masterful Pax Britannica, the Empire’s growth had been “a jerky process,” a formless, piecemeal advance which leapfrogged across continents and was never static. Sometimes imperial possessions were lost—Manila and Java were once British, and so, of course, were the American colonies—but the realm always waxed more than it waned. The great prize, “the brightest jewel in the imperial crown,” as Englishmen said then, was the Indian Empire, comprising the modern nations of India, Burma, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. It was the need to secure their ties to India which, they said, justified holding the southern tip of Africa, Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Port Said, and Aden. But the brightest jewel could also be approached from the other direction, so they had to have Sarawak, the Straits Settlements, and Malaya, too. The fact is that just as all roads had once led to Rome, so did all sea-lanes lead to India. When that argument seemed strained, as in Africa, the Queen’s statesmen explained that they had to move in before other great powers did. With this excuse, Victoria’s Lord Salisbury gobbled up the lion’s share of Africa without igniting a European war.
Imperial unity was a fiction proclaimed every time colonial officials visited London. Usually all they had in common were hats bought in St. James’s Street and gloves and spats from Dents’. Each possession had its own degree of freedom, its own language and customs, its own vision of God. The stable Dominions, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, governed themselves, and Australia even ran its own colonies, the Cook Islands in the Pacific. Most possessions of the Queen were protectorates, territories, or Crown Colonies. Running these was the responsibility of His Excellency, the local governor, who had all the trappings of royalty. On ceremonial occasions he wore a gaudy uniform with a cocked hat sprouting ostrich feathers; he was entitled to a seventeen-gun salute; men bowed to him; and women, including his own wife, curtsied as he led a party into his dining room, where he was served before anyone else. His reward for good and faithful service was inclusion on the Honours List at home. (The irreverent said that CMG stood for “Call Me God,” KCMG for “Kindly Call Me God,” and GCMG for “God Calls Me God.”) This, subscriptions to The Times, the stiff upper lip, the legends of Nelson and the Charge of the Light Brigade, faith in the pound sterling, “Abide with Me,” and a passion for cricket were among the frail linchpins linking imperial lands. Yet even on the administrative level there were exceptions to the colonial pattern. One Asian state was governed from a private office at 37 Threadneedle Street in London. Another, Sarawak, in Borneo, was an independent, third-generation despotism whose 600,000 people were ruled by an Englishman, the “White Raja.” The White Raja, Charles Brooke, had his own flag; national anthem; newspaper, the Sarawak Gazette; and army, the Sarawak Rangers. Since he accepted British “protection”—permitting Whitehall to handle his foreign affairs—Sarawak was considered part of the Empire. Similarly, Nepal had a native sovereign, but the Nepalese cavalry pledged allegiance to the British Resident and bore his personal crest. Native sultans and rajas were accepted as aristocrats and were usually addressed as “Your Exalted Highness.” For diplomatic reasons, however, the islands of Tonga were recognized as an independent kingdom. Tonga’s queen was greeted as “Your Majesty.” When Edward VII, who took the matter of royal blood very seriously, was told that he was about to meet the sovereign of Tonga, he asked suspiciously, “Is she a real queen or just another damned nigger?”4
By then the Empire was on an ebb tide, but even at its peak it was a lurching, reeling contraption, riddled with contradictions and inequities. Matthew Arnold knew how vulnerable it was:
… she
The weary Titan, with deaf
Ears, and labour-dimm’d eyes,
Regarding neither to right
Nor left, goes passively by.
Staggering on to her goal;
Bearing on shoulders immense,
Atlantean, the load,
Well-nigh not to be borne,
Of the too vast orb of her fate.
And yet the thing worked. In those days before the Wright brothers began the annihilation of distance, sea power was everything, and no other nation could match Britain’s. Altogether there were 330 imperial warships, manned by over 92,000 tars, policing the world’s waterways and keeping trade free. Spangling all oceans with their coaling stations and strategic forts, they were the strongest guarantee of the Empire’s integrity, and their men spoke of its far-flung domains with the affectionate familiarity of men supremely confident of their national strength: the sacred Swami Rock in Ceylon was “Sammy Rock”; Barbados was “Bimshire”; Kuala Lumpur was “K.L.”; Johannesburg was “Joburg”; Alexandria was simply “Alex.” When the mighty British Mediterranean Fleet sighted Malta, the whole population turned out for the spectacle. The ships were painted silver, with tars in white in rigid formation on the decks; the procession was led by destroyers, followed by cruisers and then the battleships. Royal Marine bands played “Hearts of Oak” and the ships anchored with their prows pointing seaward, baring their teeth to any challenger.
Britannia ruled the waves, and Britons knew how important that was; every family with the means clothed its children in sailor suits and sailor dresses, their caps bearing the name of the Queen’s latest battleship. And the warships were only part of it. The other part was the merchant marine. At the peak of its glory, England was launching a thousand merchant ships every year, most of them on the Clyde. More than half the world’s maritime vessels flew the red ensign of British merchantmen; at any given moment they were carrying 200,000 passengers. The Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company’s four-week voyage between the Mother Country and Calcutta, then India’s capital, had become a legend. The worst part of the passage was the crossing of the Red Sea. Those who could afford relative comfort bought—for fifty pounds each way, not counting deck-chair rental—port-side cabins going out to India and starboard cabins for the trip home; in time “Port Out, Starboard Home” became the acronym POSH. Unfortunately the service was anything but posh. Kipling wrote that P & O crewmen behaved “as though twere a favour to allow you to embark.”5
But if the crews seemed high-handed to their British passengers, all Britons had that reputation in other nations. Robert Laird Collier, an American touring England in the 1880s, wrote: “No people are so disliked out of their own country…. They assume superiority, and this manner is far from pleasant to other people…. They are overbearing, and haughty…. I have never seen among any people such rudeness and violation of good breeding…. As a nation they are intensely selfish and arrogant.” In their “Splendid Isolation”—isolationism was British before it became American—Englishmen looked disdainfully across their Channel and said: “The wogs begin at Calais.” Thomas Cook lectured the French on the cancan as a sign of national decadence, performed with “an unnatural and forced abandon,” and when a dispatch from Africa reported a French colonial claim, Joe Chamberlain, the very model of an imperial statesman, scrawled in the margin: “Cheek!” England issued the first postage stamp, the “Penny Black,” in 1847, and in an act of conceit undiminished by the fact that it was unintentional, the stamp bore a cameo of the Queen and nothing else—identification of the country seemed superfluous. Yet sometimes British contempt could be magnificent. Dressed to the nines, buttons glittering and collar starched, Captain William Packenham went ashore to deal with a gang of cutthroats who were massacring Armenians. The leaders of the pogrom gathered around him, glowering and fingering the edges of their bloody knives. Packenham stroked his beard and told the interpreter: “Let us begin. Tell these ugly bastards that I am not going to tolerate any more of their bestial habits.”6
Britons were so sure of themselves. Like today’s Americans, who are also disliked abroad, their dominance was the consequence of a cluster of accidents, among them their tremendous deposits of coal and iron ore—one-third of all the miners on earth were British—and England’s role as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Thus, Britain had naturally become the world’s manufacturer, merchant, shipper, and banker—“the workshop of the world.” Not only were Britons certain that they would keep all they had; they expected more and more—“wider still and wider.” Already English economists were managing Siam’s foreign trade. There were two British colonies, British Honduras and British Guiana, in Latin America. More important, Hong Kong and Weihaiwei were on the Chinese coast; in London, men speculated over when Victoria’s other titles would be joined by “Empress of China.” They also dreamed of a Cape-to-Cairo railway, just as Germans looked toward a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. Englishmen had expelled officious Chinese from Tibet, and the Indian Ocean was already an English lake. Southeast Asia’s future was pretty much settled. The Bank of Persia was a British firm. In Italy, the cable car route up Mount Vesuvius was owned outright by Cook’s. Constantinople had its own judge and jail for Englishmen. The inspector general of Chinese Customs was Irish, and the military adviser to the sultan of Morocco was a Scot. Foreign governments were told where and when to build new lighthouses, and if they weren’t prompt, the British solved the problem in their own way; the P & O put one up in the Red Sea on Dardalus Reef—foreign soil—and hired Englishmen to man it.
London was not only the capital of the world; it was the largest metropolis history had ever known, bigger than most imperial possessions or even some European powers. As we shall see, in matters of sex the Victorians should be judged, not by what they said, but by what they did; during the century before Churchill’s birth the population of the island tripled—then a reproductive record—and London grew from two million souls to five million. (It was also the favorite of expatriates. Over thirty thousand Germans lived there, over fifteen thousand Americans, and more Irishmen than in Dublin.) The advent of trains and steamships had seen London rise as England’s greatest port and the largest exporter on earth. The clocks of the world were measured from Greenwich. The Near East and the Far East were so called because they were near and far from London. Lloyd’s was the world’s insurance agent, and had been for two hundred years. In the vaults beneath the City’s banks, gold bars rose in gleaming stacks; British securities were worth an astounding £11,333,000,000. The interest on foreign investments alone exceeded £100,000,000 a year. The gold sovereign was the strongest currency on earth; the City, the world’s center of finance, commerce, and banking. London was the center of much else. Here, at the time of Churchill’s birth, Joseph Lister was pioneering antiseptic surgery. Here Bessemer had perfected his process. Here Darwin, Tennyson, Browning, and Trollope were at the height of their careers. Dickens had been in his grave only four years; John Stuart Mill less than one. And if distant natives became restless, British ingenuity could be counted on to solve the problem:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not.
In London there were ten mail deliveries a day. “Communications,” Morris wrote, “were the first concern of [the] late Victorian rulers.”7 Letters reached Melbourne in four weeks, and British lines of communications, which had begun with cables to India and the United States in 1866 and were now spanning Australia, would soon gird the entire world. Distant outposts still depended upon native runners, trotting through jungles or over highlands with forty-five-pound leather pouches slung over their shoulders, but the days of isolation for months or sometimes years were past. Lebensraum was one of the Empire’s driving forces; millions of Englishmen lived under its mandates, and serving them was a major industry. If you were posted near one of the population centers, the free ports of Aden, Gibraltar, Singapore, or Hong Kong, for example, you lived in style. The ubiquitous Cook’s would provide you with poultry, vegetables, rowboats, donkeys, servants wearing Cook’s livery, and even the Oxford Marmalade of which Victorians were so fond. Cook’s made the arrangements for Gordon’s and Kitchener’s military expeditions on the Nile and also for troops fighting on India’s frontiers. Cook’s planned Moslem pilgrimages to Mecca and arranged Queen Victoria’s own travels. On one occasion Cook’s mapped out a European trip for an Indian maharaja whose baggage train included twenty chefs, ten elephants, thirty-three tigers, and a Krupp cannon.
Except for the time lag for news from home, which the cables would soon close, Englishmen in the Empire’s settled possessions were well informed about the world’s goings-on. In Cairo, say, you could read the Egyptian Gazette, or in Lahore the Civil and Military Gazette, subedited by young Kipling. The reading room of your club carried Punch, the Book of Horse, Blackwood’s, Wisden, and Country Life. The favorite London paper was the archimperialist Daily Mail, which, typically, said of lascars: “It is because there are people like this in the world that there is an Imperial Britain. This sort of creature has to be ruled, so we rule him, for his good and our own.” Doing so required preservation of the myth of white supremacy; of what we call racism. (Significantly, there was no such word then.) Conditions had improved since pre-Victorian days, when a native could be castrated for striking a white man or hanged for the theft of one shilling and sixpence. Certainly the average Indian or African toiling beneath the Union Jack was far better off than the average Chinese under his warlords, but British colonial hotels still found it necessary to display notices reading: “Gentlemen are requested not to strike the servants.” English soldiers arriving in imperial cantonments were coached in how to avoid inflicting blows on the face, where the bruises would show. And Africans were caned frequently, like unruly boys.8
Playing the role of an Übermensch wasn’t always pleasant. You paid the price of the myth. In Calcutta it meant wearing a frock coat and top hat in the punishing heat. Even the white linen suits and cork topees worn inland could be cruelly uncomfortable. Emotional discomfort could be worse. For loving parents the hardest moment came when a boy reached his seventh birthday, time for him to be sent home to school, never again to be seen as a child. Health was also a problem. Every newcomer could expect to be laid low by diarrhea—“Delhi Belly.” Old-timers suggested Cockle’s Pills, and they seemed to work for some. Others suffered from intestinal upsets, off and on, throughout their colonial years, attended by the native “wet sweepers” who serviced the privies known as “gulkskhanas” or, more vulgarly, as “thunder boxes.” It didn’t help that snakes were said to slither inside sometimes and lurk within the thunder box, coiled there, waiting to bite the next visitor.
The penultimate sin for an Englishman, in all imperial possessions, was to go broke. If it happened, the hat was passed for passage home, and the penniless offender was dumped on the dock like trash, which was how he was regarded. Only cowardice was worse than indigence. Showing a yellow streak was the greatest threat to rule by consent of the ruled, the surest way to shatter the image, and the man guilty of it was lucky to escape unflogged. Absolute fearlessness was assumed. Death in battle was the noblest of ends. In Africa, men’s eyes misted over and their voices grew husky in speaking of Major Allen Wilson’s Last Stand on the bank of the Shangani River during the wars against the Matabele tribesmen in 1896. When Wilson and his thirty-two men had run out of ammunition, the story ran, they shook hands, sang “God Save the Queen,” and stood shoulder to shoulder to meet their doom. There were many similar examples. The Last Stand—resistance to the last man—was in fact a kind of rite, a tableau vivant celebrated in Victorian yarns and ballads, and in Wilson’s case by a famous painting, Allan Stewart’s There Was No Survivor, depicting dauntless men veiled in gunsmoke, surrounded by their dead horses, with their leader stage front, bareheaded, a sublime expression on his face. Such accounts were particularly popular in Chatterbox, a magazine favored by genteel children; they were probably a secular expression of the evangelical Christianity which swept England in the 1870s and 1880s.
Chinese Gordon was the most heroic martyr. His hour of glory struck on January 28, 1885, when Winston was ten. According to one popular account, Gordon waited until the Arabs were storming his Khartoum palace. Then, knowing all was lost, it was said, he changed into his white uniform at daybreak and took up a position at the head of the stairs, “standing in a calm and dignified manner, his left hand resting on the hilt of his sword.” Racing upward, one sneering Arab shouted, “O cursed one, your time has come!” Gordon, according to this version, “made a gesture of scorn and turned away.” Moments later he was impaled upon a half-dozen spears. Queen Victoria wrote his sister: “How shall I write to you, or how shall I attempt to express what I feel? To think of your dear, noble, heroic Brother, who served his Country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so edifying to the World… is to me grief inexpressible!” What is peculiar about this is that Gordon’s garrison, like Wilson’s, had been wiped out. As there were no survivors, there had been no one to tell the world how either had actually ended.9
In India, Last Stand immortality was attained in Burma or on the North-West Frontier, among the Afghans and the warring tribes of the Waziris, the Mahsuds, and the Afridis. It was in Kabul, on September 3, 1879—the year Winston began reading Chatterbox—that Arabs invaded the British legation and put Sir Louis Cavagnari and his staff to the sword. Disraeli had assured the Commons that the position was impregnable, and Gladstone never let him forget it. Yet turning the brittle pages of old newspapers one has the distinct impression that the sentimental Victorians enjoyed their sobs. They erected statues of Sir Louis and went about rejuvenated. The following year they put up another after a gallant young officer named Thomas Rice Henn and eleven men forfeited their lives while covering the retreat of an entire British brigade. Wolseley wrote of Henn: “I envy the manner of his death…. If I had ten sons, I should indeed be proud if all ten fell as he fell.”10 Horatius had held the Sublician Bridge over the Tiber to the last, or so Macaulay had said, and now, over two thousand years later, soldiers of the Queen were inspired by a similar code of valor:
The sand of the desert is sodden red—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke—
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke,
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
This famous stanza strikes an odd note. The typical British soldier, if he had any education at all, had attended a “Ragged School” for the poor, where there were no games and certainly no concept of fair play. Those were the legacy of the public schools—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, Rugby, Shrewsbury—in whose forms the future rulers of the Empire were trained. The Victorian age was the Indian summer of homage, before wars, depressions, and nuclear horrors had destroyed faith in all establishments. The social contract was everywhere honored. England was guided by the self-assured men of the upper classes. They thought themselves better than the middle and lower classes, just as those classes assumed that they were better than the fellahin and the dukawallahs. In both cases the presumption was rarely challenged.
The selection of the Queen’s proconsuls in the colonies was oligarchic, a product of what later generations would call “the old-boy network” or—to use an allusion they would have understood—a philosophic vision not unlike that of Er the Pamphylian in Plato’s Republic, who, watching the souls choosing their destiny, saw the noblest pick power. There were two ways to enter the autocracy of colonial Britain. If you were recommended by your tutor at Oxford, say, or at Cambridge or Edinburgh, and were between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, you could make an appointment at the India Office, situated along one side of the Foreign Office quadrangle at the corner of Whitehall and Downing Street. There you were given the Indian Civil Service examination on subjects ranging from Sanskrit to English literature, and if you passed you were tested on another spectrum of topics, including Asian languages and horsemanship, a year later. Candidates who were accepted were off to Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras on the P & O, probably for good. The “Indian Civil,” or “ICS,” was a much stiffer hurdle than that at the Colonial Office, on another side of the quadrangle. Applicants there needn’t be brilliant; indeed, those with a first-class degree were suspect. The emphasis was on “character” and the “all-rounder,” on being “steel-true and blade-straight.” You were interviewed by the colonial secretary’s assistant private secretary, who never saw a British colony in his life. The atmosphere in his homey office was convivial, clublike, manly. One talked of mutual acquaintances, friends, headmasters, tutors, and engaged in similar rituals of self-reference. In this crucial stage it was important to have the backing of someone whom the interviewer considered a keen judge of men—someone like Benjamin Jowett, the cherubic master of Balliol College, Oxford. Jowett’s maxims tell us much about his protégés. He said: “Never retract. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” And: “We are all dishonest together, and therefore we are all honest.” And, on Darwin’s Descent of Man: “I don’t believe a word of it.” He was partial to peers and noble families on the ground that “social eminence is an instrument wherewith, even at the present day, the masses may be moved.” If Jowett or his sort approved, a stripling just out of the university might find himself ruling a territory twice the size of Great Britain, acting as magistrate, veterinarian, physician, resolver of family quarrels, and local expert on crop blight. The similarity of officials’ backgrounds gave the realm a certain cohesiveness. Morris observed: “All over the Empire these administrators, like members of some scattered club, shared the same values, were likely to laugh at the same jokes, very probably shared acquaintances at home…. Place them all at a dinner table, and they would not feel altogether strangers to each other.”11
It was collusion, of course, and it could lead to highly unsuitable appointments, particularly when a great family wanted to rid itself of a black sheep. But most of the youths grew into shrewd men; the level of performance was very high. And many of them could scarcely be envied. Often they started out living in leaky mud huts, rarely seeing anything of their countrymen except for an occasional trader or missionary with whom, under other circumstances, they would have had nothing in common. They often had only the vaguest idea of the boundaries defining their territories, or the size of the populations for which they were responsible. In Uganda, six months was added to home leave because an Englishman had to walk eight hundred miles to reach civilization. While on leave he had to choose an English wife in a hurry, because it might be years before he saw another white woman. With grit, that quality much prized among the Victorians, he stuck it out, sometimes leaving a benign stamp on his tract of the wild. In Nyasaland, England’s deepest penetration into Africa, you can still find natives who, because their overlord was Scottish, recite Christian prayers with a Scot’s burr: “The Lor-r-r-d is my shepherd…”12 It is difficult to condemn men who followed their star when the temptation to slacken was immense, who daily wore their quaint little uniform of white shorts and white stockings into which the traditional pipe was stuffed, but dressed for dinner whenever possible, to keep a sense of order, and carried collapsible little flagpoles wherever they went, so that the fluttering Union Jack would always remind their wards of their distant Queen.
Uganda and Nyasaland were hardship posts. Elsewhere life was more agreeable. In Kenya, British residents stocked streams with trout, and all the great imperial cities had racecourses and polo fields. John Stuart Mill called the whole Empire “a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes.”13 That was misleading—by their sheer numbers, non-U voices were more audible than the accents of the U—but it was the highborn British who set the tone, which, by the time young Winston Churchill reached India, had become disturbingly insular. In the beginning white men had adopted local ways, learning that in Kerala, for example, it was polite to cover one’s mouth when talking to an Indian of high caste. In 1859 Samuel Shepheard, who built Shepheard’s Hotel, was photographed on an Egyptian divan, wearing a fez, with a glittering brass hookah at one elbow and a parrot at the other. Then, with the invasion of English wives, the memsahibs, all this began to change. Potted plants arrived, and whatnots, and acres of that printed fabric so popular among the natives that its admirers gave it the Hindi name of chintz. The metamorphosis reached its culmination in the hill station of Simla, the cool summer capital of the Raj, in the foothills of the Himalayas, with its Scottish-baronial palace for the viceroy and his vicereine; tea shops; bandstands where Gilbert and Sullivan airs were played; and the Anglican tower of Christ Church, whose bell had been fashioned from a mortar seized in the Second Sikh War.
Churchill, writing from Bangalore, told his brother Jack: “Labour here is cheap and plentiful—existence costs but little and luxury can be easily obtained. The climate is generous and temperate. The sun—even in the middle of the day—is not unbearable and if you wear a ‘Solar topee’ or a cork hat—you can walk out at any time.” And then he reported: “I have just been to luncheon at the Western India Club—a fine large building where every convenience can be obtained.”14 The Raj was beginning to sink its hooks into him. He had been disarmed “up at the Club,” a phrase familiar all over the Empire. There, surrounded by paneled walls, deep leather chairs, and cut-glass decanters, a fresh subaltern like Winston could step up to the bar and find himself, if not among friends, at least among friends of friends. It was an important moment in Churchill’s life. Only by understanding the spell of the Empire, and particularly the Raj, can one begin to grasp the Churchillian essence.
It is a way of life which has vanished, and now, in the heyday of liberal piety, it is considered disreputable, even shameful. Yet there was an attractive side to the Raj, and its vitality is preserved in our language, in such words as bazaar, bungalow, pajamas, punch, dinghy, khaki, veranda, sandals, gingham, shampoo, jodhpurs, and chit. For young patricians who had passed the Indian Civil, or, like Churchill, had passed out of Sandhurst, the adventure began in London, with a shopping expedition in Oxford Street. There you bought your topee, in white or tan, at Henry Heath’s Well Known Shoppe for Hattes. Also available were clever contrivances for coping with the tropics—Churchill had been wrong about the heat, and soon acknowledged it (“Imagine… a sun 110 in the shade!”).15 Among these were antitermite matting, mosquito netting, thorn-proof linen, canvas baths, and patent ice machines. Quinine was essential, but the thrifty postponed ordering tropical clothing until they docked in India, where they would also hire a tropical servant, the first of as many as twenty-five servants. Help was cheap, as Churchill had observed; a lower-middle-class mem who had slaved over a washtub at home would supervise a whole staff, and even British privates had bearers who polished their brass and boots and blancoed their webbing. Once ready for the next leg of his journey, the tyro would travel by train, chugging along at twenty miles per hour, his blinds securely locked at night, telegraphing ahead for a light breakfast (which he would learn to call chota hazri) and for lunch (tiffin). Detraining, he might cover as much as a hundred miles on horseback before reaching his appointed bungalow or, if he were a serving officer, his cantonment. By then he might be ready for his first trip to the thunder box, but if he still felt fit he would be introduced to the more welcome ritual of the “sundowner.” This was the daily drink, and it was served in style by a bearer in a gown and turban. His tray would support a variety of paraphernalia: a carafe, linen napkin, gasogene, and ice bucket. Seasoned sahibs might add a nip of their quinine, as insurance against fever. Indeed, that is how the sundowner custom had begun, when men believed that alcohol was preventive medicine in the tropics.
It was an exotic, colorful life, and at a time when masculinity was valued, its greatest appeal was to men. The mems established their own conventions, their weekly At Homes and dances, their solemn talks with the C of E vicar, and, during the lawn tennis craze of the 1870s, a little exercise. But it was their husbands and the bachelors who thrived in India. They could retreat to their club, where women were of course forbidden, and they had polo, tiger hunting, golf, and all the glory, fireworks, and bunting that were manifestations of virile patriotism. If they were lucky and industrious, one day their names would appear on an Honours List. They were absolutely incorrupt, and the best of them were devoted to the natives in their charge. They adored their Queen, they knew that God was an Anglican, they believed in courage, in honor, in heroes. They could no more have identified with an antihero than with the Antichrist. In retrospect they all appear to have been gallant figures in one of history’s greatest Last Stands. Of course, they didn’t think of it that way. It never occurred to them that they, and all they represented, would one day be disowned, as the result of a national défaillance, within the lifetime of young Lieutenant Churchill, the polo star in Bangalore.
If you were passed back through a time warp and set down in Victorian London, your first impressions would depend upon where in the city you were, and under what circumstances. Henry James saw it at its most inhospitable, while riding in a “greasy four-wheeler to which my luggage had compelled me to commit myself” from the Euston train station to Morley’s Hotel in Trafalgar Square. Night had fallen. It was a cold, damp March Sunday. Recalling the scene in 1888, James wrote: “The weather had turned wet…. The low black houses were as inanimate as so many rows of coal-scuttles, save where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still than the darkness.” He felt “a sudden horror of the whole place… like a tiger-pounce of homesickness which had been watching its moment. London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming.”16
The city itself was also overwhelmed, engulfed by changes with which it had not learned to cope, and which were scarcely understood. Some were inherent in the trebling of the population, some consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Particles of grime from factory smokestacks, blending with the cold fogs that crept down from the North Sea channel, produced impenetrable pea-soupers which could reduce visibility to a few feet—“London particulars,” Dickens called them in Bleak House. They could be dangerous; it was in one of them that Soames Forsyte’s wife’s lover was run down by horses and killed. Much of London stank. The city’s sewage system was at best inadequate and in the poorer of neighborhoods nonexistent. Buildings elsewhere had often been constructed over cesspools which, however, had grown so vast that they formed ponds, surrounding homes with moats of effluvia. Thoroughfares were littered with animal excrement. Gaslight was not yet the clear piped white light which arrived with the invention of the incandescent mantle in the 1890s. It was smokier, smellier, and yellower; some smudged lanterns dating from the reigns of George IV and William IV may still be found in Regent’s Park. And the narrow, twisted streets were neither sealed nor asphalted. Victorians are often mocked for locking their windows, even in summer, but they had a lot to keep out: odors; dust; gusts of wind that could turn the open flames of candles or kerosene lamps into disastrous conflagrations.
In affluent neighborhoods windows were barred during most of the Queen’s reign, for no policemen pounded beats until late in the century. James recoiled from the gin shops, but he didn’t see the worst of it. The worst was in the blackened, brooding slums of Bluegate Fields, Cheapside, Wapping Docks, Bleeding Heart Yard, Mile-End Road, Maiden Lane, Paddington; St. Giles’s, along Saffron Hill; Westminster (“the Devil’s Acre”); Granby Street, beneath what is now Waterloo Station, with its bolt-holes for criminals; and Whitechapel, where the heaviest concentration of London’s eighty thousand prostitutes lived and Jack the Ripper stalked his prey. At night the East End was eerie. Here the bricks which built the rising city were hardened in kilns like those in Bleak House and in Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, where fugitives found warmth at night. Workingmen were no longer paid in pubs, but that was where many headed when they had their money. There cheap gin, the curse of their class, fueled murderous fights and, by blurring judgment, converted men into easy recruits for criminal schemes—burglaries, typically, or pocket picking in Piccadilly. London’s vast slums terrified respectable Londoners. Even the huskiest gentlemen refused to enter them without a heavy police escort.
The center of London was a hive of hyperactivity. If, like Henry James, you were an American who had spent his first night beneath Nelson’s column and rose in the morning for a stroll along the Embankment, you might first become aware of a familiar quickness in the air. “Mon Dieu, ces anglais, comme ils travaillent!” wrote a French tourist.17 London then had the push and bustle foreign visitors began to note in New York in the 1920s. You could hear it; Londoners called it “the Hum.” This was the busiest metropolis in the world; men were all in a hurry, doing the world’s work. And in this part of the city they were men. If you wanted to see women you would have to stroll toward the shopping district and its center, Piccadilly Circus, then named Regent Circus, with its beguiling statue, now called Eros but then, more primly, Charity. Wealthy ladies would be accompanied by servants carrying their parcels and followed, at a respectful distance, by their carriages (hence “the carriage trade”), which, if they were upper class, bore heraldic crests on the doors and were driven by coachmen wearing livery. Middle-class women hired their “Parcels Men” by the hour and usually shopped in pairs. An extraordinary number of them were pregnant, though propriety forbade them from venturing out in public after their third month. Whatever their condition, they would be tightly corseted in armor of whalebone and steel, a cruel fashion which was responsible for internal injuries even among women not carrying children. The point was to show the world that your husband had a comfortable income, that you didn’t have to work. So styles were wildly impractical: great loops of ribbon, hoopskirts, lacy caps, silken parasols, dangling ringlets, blunt bustles, frills, petticoats, and layers of silk and satin heavily trimmed with bugles and beads.
None of them made women attractive to men. That was, or was thought to be, their last objective. Men were “the coarser sex”; women, as Janet Horowitz Murray found in her study of gender attitudes in nineteenth-century England, were thought to be “softer, more moral and pure.” The very existence of sexual desire was denied. It says much about the Victorians that none of them recognized the Ripper murders as sex crimes. This was part of what O. R. MacGregor calls “the Victorian conspiracy of silence about sex.” Occasional male lubricity was grudgingly accepted for the future of the race, though men who lacked it were reassured by William Acton, a distinguished surgeon of the day: “No nervous or feeble young man need… be deterred from marriage by any exaggerated notion of the duties required of him.” For a wife, her husband’s animal drive was a cross to be borne. Dr. Acton wrote: “As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband but only to please him; and, but for the desire for maternity, would far rather be relieved of his attentions.” A Victorian mother prepared her daughter for the marriage bed with the advice: “Lie still, and think of England.” It was in this spirit that Thomas Bowdler, earlier in the century, had published The Family Shakespeare, bearing the subtitle: “In which nothing is added to the Text; but those Words and Expressions are omitted which cannot with Propriety be read aloud in a Family.” By contrast, the distributors of a pamphlet which advised couples not ready for children to practice douching were indicted for scheming “to vitiate and corrupt the morals of youth as well as of divers other subjects of the Queen and to incite… to indecent, obscene, unnatural, and immoral practices” by publishing an “indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy, and obscene book.” During the year before their trial, the pamphlet, which the jury agreed was salacious, had sold 700 copies. In the four months of notoriety, sales leapt to 125,000. The issue, it should be noted, was a middle-class issue. Sex was one of the few pleasures not denied to working-class women, and they hadn’t the slightest intention of abandoning it. (Their word for lustful was gay.) As for the patricians—ladies like Winston’s mother—the upper class had, as it had always had, a moral code all its own.18
Identifying a stranger’s class has always been a social challenge for Londoners. Today it is a matter of vowels. In those days it was far easier, and would usually be accomplished by a glance. J. M. Bailey, an American visitor to London in the 1870s, wrote that he could find “traces of nobility” in an aristocrat’s “very step and bearing.” He asked mischievously: “Can you conceive of a bowlegged duke? Or is it possible for you to locate a pimple on the nose of a viscount? And no one, however diseased his imagination, ever pictured a baron with an ulcerated leg, or conceived of such a monstrous impossibility as a cross-eyed duchess.”19 That was Yankee wit, but the plain fact was that you could tell. At least you could tell the difference between a gentleman and a man who was not. Partly it was a matter of genes. The Normans had introduced high cheekbones, Roman noses, an abundance of equine chin, and hooded, sardonic eyes to the Anglo-Saxon nobility. Diet was more important. Generations of malnutrition and, more recently, of stooping in mines or bending over looms had given workmen’s descendants slight stature, poor posture, and coarse complexion. They aged prematurely; they needed the attention of doctors they could seldom afford. The gentry were tall, fair, and erect. Although they may not have been godlike, they were certainly far healthier than their social inferiors, and by today’s standards, even the genteel were sick a great deal. The groaning tables on Victorian Christmas cards groaned beneath platters of food that would be condemned as unfit by modern public-health officials. Preventive medicine was in its infancy. The twentieth-century visitor to the Strand would be startled by the number of pitted faces there. Smallpox was still rife. There were far more pocked features among the workmen, however. They simply lacked the resistance to affliction. They also lacked running water. Cholera hit them harder; so did diphtheria; so did infant mortality. In all of London, more babies died than adults. We cannot even guess at the toll in the slums, but it must have been appalling.
Gentlemen, no less than ladies, could be identified by their clothing. They wore top hats, indoors and out, except in homes or churches. Cuffs and collars were starched, cravats were affixed with jeweled pins, waistcoats were white, wide tubular trousers swept the ground at the heel but rose in front over the instep, black frock coats were somber and exquisitely cut. Swinging their elegant, gold-headed canes, gentlemen swaggered when crossing the street, dispensing coins to fawning men who swept the dung from their paths. (These men were followed by nimble boys with pans and brushes, who collected the ordure and sold it in the West End for fertilizer.) Bowlers were worn by clerks and shopkeepers and caps by those below them. Switching hats wouldn’t have occurred to them, and it wouldn’t have fooled anyone anyway. Despite advances in the mass production of menswear, dry cleaning was unknown in the London of the time. Suits had to be picked apart at the seams, washed, and sewn back together. Patricians wore new clothes or had tailors who could resew the garments they had made in the first place. The men in bowlers and caps couldn’t do it; their wives tried but were unskillful, which accounts for their curiously wrinkled Sabbath-suit appearance in old photographs. Toward the end of Victoria’s reign games and cycling modified gentlemen’s dress. The Prince of Wales introduced the lounge coat. Short loose breeches and Norfolk jackets were worn on bikes, football players and runners and jumpers appeared in shorts, and cricketers and tennis players adopted long pants of white flannel. Except at regattas, none of this was matched in feminine fashions. Not only were bustles worn on the tennis court; a woman had to use her free hand to hold her trailing skirt off the ground. And the lower classes were unaffected because they had neither the money for fashions nor the time for sports.
Social mobility, as we understand it today, was not only unpursued by the vast majority; it had never existed. For centuries an Englishman’s fate had been determined at birth. The caste system was almost as rigid as India’s. Obedience to the master had been bred in childhood, and those who left the land for the mills as the agricultural class seeped into the cities were kept in line by custom and the example of all around them. Successful merchants were an exception, and a significant one. They built mansions, bought coaches, and hired servants, yet they were never fully accepted by the patriciate. As late as the spring of 1981 a New Yorker writer attributed Britain’s sagging economy to the fact that a stigma was still attached to men “in trade.” Similarly, the British trade unions’ twentieth-century truculence may arise from the lower classes’ inability to transfer their allegiance from aristocrats to merchants. In Victorian England, the chimney sweeps, ragpickers, chip sellers, dustmen, coachmen, and sandwich-board men who hired out at one-and-six a day were no more rebellious than the serfs from whom they were descended. They did what they did well, and that was enough for them. Richard Harding Davis wrote from England: “In America we hate uniforms because they have been twisted into meaning badges of servitude; our housemaids will not wear caps, nor will our coachmen shave their mustaches. This tends to make every class of citizen look more or less alike. But in London you can always tell a ’bus-driver from the driver of a four-wheeler, whether he is on his box or not. The Englishman recognizes that if he is in a certain social grade he is likely to remain there, and so, instead of trying to dress like some one else in a class to which he will never reach, he ‘makes up’ for the part in life he is meant to play, and the ’bus-driver buys a high white hat, and the barmaid is content to wear a turned-down collar and turned-back cuffs, and the private coachman would as soon think of wearing a false nose as a mustache. He accepts his position and is proud of it, and the butcher’s boy sits up in his cart just as smartly, and squares his elbows and straightens his legs and balances his whip with just as much pride, as any driver of a mail-cart in the Park.”20
London’s massed horsepower made a lively spectacle, bewildering and even frightening to visitors. Each morning some twenty thousand vehicles drawn by steeds lumbered and surged over the toll-free London Bridge—Tower Bridge would not be ready until 1894—and fanned out into the wakening city. The rigs varied. At this hour, in this tumult, you would see few private carriages. They sat parked in the West End and could be seen in large numbers only when they assembled for such liturgical upper-class ceremonies as the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match at Lord’s, in St. John’s Wood, where over six hundred of them were counted in 1871. Much of the bridge traffic carried essentials. There were convoys of carts bearing galvanized tanks, headed for neighborhoods which still had no running water. Produce and livestock accompanied them, including, once a year, sheep on their way to an enclosure near Kensington Palace. A contemporary account tells of the annual sheepshearing: “Thousands of sheep are brought from Scotland and distributed over London wherever grazing can be obtained. After the shearing, the sheep are kept awhile in the park for fattening, and thence gradually find their way to the butchers’ shops.”21
In the city these wagons mingled with public transport and cabs. The first electric tramcar was built in 1883—electric lights had made their appearance two years earlier, for the Savoy Theatre’s premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience—but London wasn’t introduced to trolleys until 1900. Before that, horse-drawn streetcars crawled along tracked paths in the center of the streets, maddening obstacles to the faster hansoms, growlers, and flys. Flys were usually rented. The Coupé and Dunlop Brougham Company in Regent Street would hire one out at seven shillings and sixpence for the first two hours. But the smartest and fastest way to travel was in the two-wheeled hansom cabs, “the gondolas of London,” as Disraeli called them. Harnesses jingling, horses trotting briskly, and lamps and brass work polished to a blazing finish, there were over three thousand hansoms in London, charging a shilling for two miles and sixpence a mile over that, though the driver could charge more if he traveled beyond the “Four Mile Radius” from Charing Cross, which was (and still is) the geographic center of the city. The cabman sat high in the back, holding reins which passed through a support on the front of the roof, and the front of the cab was open except for two folding doors which came halfway up and protected the passenger from dust and mud. This feature was important. Trains had been so successful that other forms of transportation had hardly changed since Victoria’s coronation. Country roads were surfaced with grass, earth, and stones. Downtown London’s streets were cobbled, but unless you were in an enclosed coach you were lucky to arrive at your destination unstained.
Alighting at Charing Cross, a visitor from the 1980s would quickly become aware of a gamy tang in the air—blended aromas of saddle soap, leather, brass polish, and strong tobacco; scents of wood fires; the fragrance of baking bread and roasting meat manipulated by street chefs. All sorts of entrepreneurs were active on the pavements, and they fascinated Gustave Doré, who executed a series of engravings of them in the early 1870s: dog sellers, flower girls, flypaper merchants (who wore fly-studded samples on their dilapidated top hats), hardware dealers, tinkers, ragmen, knife grinders, ginger-beer men, apple sellers, oyster men, match vendors, “lemonade” men who mixed their chemicals on the spot in portable tubs, and some four thousand hawkers of oranges. The popularity of oranges was due less to their taste than to their smell. Even where sanitation existed, not all street odors were pleasant. Deodorants were unknown. The poor reeked, which was why they were unwelcome in Victorian churches. Nell Gwyn had carried oranges to cut the stench of sweat, vermin, and manure. Before that, the Elizabethans had used pomanders, small balls of pierced metal packed with fragrant herbs. To this day, London judges mount their benches bearing nosegays—hence the name—and once a year herbs are scattered in courtrooms.
Among the other peddlers were salesmen exhibiting great bolts of black broadcloth. The Victorians were very open about death. Today people die in hospitals, where children are “shielded” or “protected” from them; graveyards are landscaped like parks, and mourning is seldom worn. In those days a demise was an important, fascinating event. Typically it occurred in the home, in bed, with the whole family in attendance and little ones held up for a final embrace from the departing parent or grandparent. The pavement chapmen made garments of deep mourning available to the lower classes. Patricians bought their black, gray, and deep purple clothes and black ostrich feathers in Oxford Street shops devoted solely to that trade. Men draped sashed crepe “weepers” around their hats. Even cousins sewed black armbands on their sleeves. Englishmen were more preoccupied with death then than we are, partly because there was much more of it. In 1842 a royal commission had found that the average professional man lived thirty years; the average laborer, seventeen. By the year of Churchill’s birth about fifteen years had been added to these, but it was still not unusual for a middle-class man to die at thirty-nine, as Arthur Sullivan’s brother Fred did in 1877, inspiring Sullivan to write “The Lost Chord.” Another reason for bereavement had nothing to do with delicacy of feeling. The loss of a father was disastrous. There was seldom any financial net beneath the survivors of a wage earner. Jobs were at a premium; artisans provided or rented their own tools, and one mill outdid Scrooge, issuing the notice: “A stove is provided for the clerical staff. It is recommended that each member of the clerical staff bring four pounds of coal each day during cold weather.”22 Except for the thriftiest of savers, however, no class was immune to the catastrophe which followed the passing of a head of household. If a man had been a successful physician, say, or a respectable barrister, his family might have belonged to the upper middle class as long as he was alive, living in the Wordsworthian tranquillity of a leafy Georgian square, with a coach in the mews and a boy at Winchester. All that vanished with his last breath. The family was evicted from the house; the son took a job as a clerk; his mother made what she could as a seamstress, or, in that bitterest refuge of shabby gentility, as a governess in a bourgeois home.
Prosperous homes could be identified by their bay windows, as much a status symbol as the eight-paned window had been a century earlier. The skyline was dominated by St. Paul’s, Wren’s fifty other baroque churches, Big Ben, and the Gothic Houses of Parliament. In Pall Mall were the Athenaeum and the Reform Club, the home of the Liberal party; the Conservatives’ Carlton Club; and the great imperial clubs: the Oriental, the East India, and the Omar Khayyam. The city was a mass of poles and crossbars that bore telegraph wires and the boisterous excesses of Victorian advertising. Napoleon had scorned England as “un pays de marchands.” Actually, it was more a nation of hucksters. Billboards, or “sky-signs,” celebrated the virtues of Salada Tea, Waltham Watches, Cook’s Tours, Thurston’s Billiard Tables, Brinstead Pianos, and Good-dall’s Yorkshire Relish. Bumping down London’s streets came remarkable vehicles shaped like Egyptian obelisks, cabbages, and huge top hats, each of them bearing a brand name. The front of opticians’ shops looked like the lenses of gigantic spectacles. Of all the forms of ads, the cheapest and wildest was the “fly-poster,” which could be plastered on any “dead wall” in public view. Gangs pasted these up at night, so that early risers would be greeted, typically, with: “Good morning! Have you used Pears’ Soap?” Sometimes householders would find their windows, even their doors, papered over. Other times gangs from different agencies would clash in the dark, tearing down the others’ posters or obliterating them with buckets of black tar.
Optical illusions, red puzzle signs, posters gummed to public monuments or the hulls of ships anchored in the Thames—anything went. A young advertising man said: “Any fool can make soap. It takes a clever man to sell it.” One innovation, still with us, was the endorsement of a product by a celebrity, which in those days meant such notables as Eugene Sandow, the German strong man, and Captain Webb, the Channel swimmer. Ambitious copywriters aimed even higher than that. We think of the Victorians as deferential toward the royal family. So they were, but some admen, who weren’t, exploited that deference. The Queen was depicted holding a cup of Mazawatta Tea or presiding over the legend: “ ‘The Subject’s Best Friend’—HUDSON’S DRY SOAP—Home and Clothes as Sweet as a Rose.” The Prince of Wales was shown handing a glass of Bushmills Whiskey to the shah of Persia at the Paris Exhibition in 1889, and saying: “This, your Majesty, is the celebrated Bushmills Whiskey which you tasted in England and liked so much. I feel sure it will win the Gold Medal.” A florist, pushing corsages, quoted the Duchess of York—without her approval; none of the luminaries were consulted—“She thinks the Flower Shield a most ingenious invention and wishes it success.” Even the pontiff was identified as an admirer of a popular drink: “Two Infallible Powers. The Pope and Bovril.” The soap manufacturers knew no shame. Sir John Millais, a successful artist, painted a portrait of a boy making soap bubbles with a clay pipe. The boy’s bar of soap lay on the ground. To Sir John’s astonishment, the picture was reproduced all over the country with “Pears” painted on the bar. In Berlin, Heinrich von Treitschke told a class: “The English think soap is civilization.”23
One device the advertisers missed was the jingle, and this is puzzling, because Victorians loved melodies. Garibaldian organ-grinders stood on every downtown London street corner, bawling ballads. Gilbert and Sullivan were national figures. Not counting the Salvation Army and the military, there were over five thousand bands in the country, and on holidays Londoners crowded around the bandstands in their parks. This was the golden age of the music halls. Between 1850 and 1880 about five hundred new ones were built—with the city’s fifty theaters, this meant that 350,000 Londoners were entertained every night—of which the most famous were the Alhambra, the London Pavilion, the Empire, and the Tivoli. Each hall had its portentous chairman, with his candle, his gavel, and his vast expanse of shirtfront; each encouraged its audiences to join the choruses. The stars were famous enough to endorse soap and whiskey, though unlike the eminent they expected their cut and got it. (Lillie Langtry got it and lost it; her signature was reproduced in an ad, and a forger copied it and cleaned her out.) High on the lists of sightseers arriving from the far reaches of the Empire were evenings hearing the “lion comiques”: Harry Clifton singing “Knees Up, Mother Brown,” George Layborne leading “Champagne Charlie Is My Name,” Jenny Valmore whispering “So Her Sister Says,” and Marie Lloyd:
Only fancy if Gladstone’s there,
And falls in love with me;
If I run across Labouchère
I’ll ask him home to tea.
I shall say to a young man gay,
If he treads upon my frock,
“Randy pandy, sugardy pandy,
Buy me some Almond Rock.”
Henry du Pré Labouchère was an advocate of Home Rule for Ireland. And “Randy pandy” was Lord Randolph Churchill. Music hall performers were keenly aware of politicians and public events, of England’s power around the world, of London’s role as an imperial capital. Britain was hardly a democracy, at least as we understand it; only 16.4 percent of the people could vote. But Britain’s people counted because they, like the distant races toiling beneath the same flag, consented to be ruled as they were. Not the Queen, not peers, not the Commons, and not public-school men wrote the ditties that celebrated the nation’s glory and defied those who sought to curb the growth of an Empire which they believed belonged to them. It was G. H. “the Great” Macdermott, the most celebrated of the music hall performers, who, singing the lyrics of George William Hunt, gave voice to their determination in the 1878 crisis which arose during the Russo-Turkish War:
We don’t want to fight, but by jingo, if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money, too.
We’ve fought the Bear before,
And while Britons shall be true,
The Russians shall not have
Constantinople.
The British soldier was given a small island for his birthplace and the whole world as his grave. Including Indian sepoys, there were about 356,000 soldiers in the army—at the time of Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, Rome’s legions had numbered 300,000 men—including 55 line battalions scattered about India, Ireland, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Ceylon, Malta, Egypt, Gibraltar, Canada, Singapore, the West Indies, South Africa, Barbados, and Mauritius. Their epitaph may be found today on sinking gravestones: “For Queen and Empire.” It is inadequate. They died for more than that. So vast an Empire, so vigorous a society, could have been neither built nor held without staunch ideological support, a complex web of powerful beliefs, powerfully held. Alfred North Whitehead defined a civilization in spiritual terms, and Christopher Dawson, in The Dynamics of World History, said: “Behind every great civilization there is a vision.” What was the vision of imperial Britain?
Jingoism was part of it, or rather one of its outward manifestations, and it wasn’t confined to the music halls. On the slightest excuse, Londoners in the city’s rookeries hung out bunting and gay streamers, crisscrossing mews and alleys where washing was usually hung to dry. Behind the calls to honor, duty, and glory lay the Victorians’ firm belief in obedience—absolute obedience to God, the Queen, and one’s superiors, in the family as much as in the army. It was a time of pervasive authoritarianism. The Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon wrote of the Victorian wife that her husband “has many objects in life which she does not quite understand; but she believes in them all, and anything which she can do to promote them, she delights to perform.”24 Unquestioning submission to orders was taught to schoolboys as soon as they reached the age of awareness; they recited “The Death of Nelson,” “Drake’s Drum,” “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Every story for Victorian children had a point, a moral; usually one of dutifulness. Winston Churchill was four years old when the most popular glorifier of discipline, G. A. Henty, published the first of his eighty novels for children. With loyalty went courage, as witness Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Alice, the Ugly Duckling, and Tom Thumb.
War was Henleyized, and such ancient institutions as the Crown, the aristocracy, and the Church of England were venerated. This allegiance to tradition accounts for the immense popularity of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and the flood of best-selling historical novels: Scott’s Ivanhoe, Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Charles Reade’s Cloister and the Hearth, Stanley Weyman’s Under the Red Robe, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and Harrison Ainsworth’s Old St. Paul’s. Reverence for the past was especially strong in the church. The devout took the Bible literally, assumed the existence of an afterlife, and believed that the only significance of life on earth was as a preparation for eternity. That blind faith could have flourished in an age of intellectual ferment may be puzzling, but the Victorians could rationalize anything; for them, doubts raised by evolution, for example, were resolved by Tennyson’s In Memoriam. By the time a youth of good family had reached manhood, he had heard more than a thousand sermons. He could not matriculate at Oxford, or graduate from Cambridge, until he had signed the church’s Thirty-Nine Articles. Days of Humiliation, such as the one commemorating the Mutiny martyrs, signified national atonement. The Sabbath was sacred. To be sure, half the population stayed away from weekly services—when the Archbishop of Canterbury grieved that the church was losing the working people, Disraeli replied, “Your Grace, it has never had them”—but this was a matter of propriety, not piety.25 The poor were only too well aware that they were unwelcome. Nevertheless, they knew their Bible, knew their hymns; the ancestors of workmen who read nothing today were familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost and could quote from them.
The middle classes, who were always in their pews, if not singing in choirs, cultivated evangelical seriousness, Arnoldian earnestness, and the eagerness of Bagehot. They loved maxims. “Attend church, abstain from drink, read a serious newspaper, put your money in the bank,” they told one another. And:
Staid Englishmen, who toil and save
From your first childhood to your grave,
And seldom spend and always save—
And do your duty all your life
By your young family and wife.
Carlyle implored them to devote themselves to work, which was sending coals to Newcastle. They had already made a cult of toil. It dominated their lives, and not just in London. A French visitor to the Midlands in the 1870s wrote: “On entering an office, the first thing you see written up is: ‘You are requested to speak of business only.’ ” Bradshaw’s Handbook to the Manufacturing Districts described “the utmost order and regularity” in the enormous textile mills of Ancoats and Chorlton, and said that visitors were discouraged because they “occupy the time of an attendant, and disturb the attention of operatives throughout the mill. The loss accruing from this cause is frequently more than can be readily estimated.” Until the year of Churchill’s birth, working-class children started in the mills on their ninth birthday; then the age was raised to ten. When Parliament passed a “short-time” bill limiting workers to a sixty-hour week, employers were outraged. Safety measures, as the term is understood today, were unknown. This led to what Professor Geoffrey Best calls “Death’s continuing Dance around the scene of labour.” Toilers in phosphorus factories suffered from “fossy jaw.” A thousand miners were killed each year, and more than three thousand railway workers killed or maimed. The proliferation of moving parts was lethal, but mill owners airily dismissed the problem: “Workers will be careless.” Protests were few and unheard. Writing in The Uncommercial Traveller, Dickens quoted a Shoreditch woman: “Better be ulcerated and paralyzed for eighteenpence a day… than see the children starve.” Yet, astonishingly, she made no complaint. Like her Queen, she believed that all work, even drudgery, was sacred. The Victorians were never more Victorian than when they stood in church, or around a Salvation Army band, belting out “Art Thou Weary?”26
Though safer than mill hands, the middle classes drove themselves just as hard in pursuit of “respectability,” which was not, as Shaw acidly noted, the same thing as morality. Gilbert’s Pirate King sang that piracy was more honest than respectability, and in H.M.S. Pinafore the reproachful Captain Corcoran tells Buttercup that it would have been “more respectable” if she had gone ashore before nightfall. Respectability, in short, was largely a matter of appearances. It was fragile; the slightest lapse could shatter it. Those who retained it were, in G. M. Young’s words, forever fearful that “an unguarded look, a word, a gesture, a picture, or a novel, might plant a seed of corruption in the most innocent heart, and the same word or gesture might betray a lingering affinity with the class below.” Ridiculing the Victorians is easy, and nearly everyone who has written of them since their departure has done it. They were hypocritical, snobbish, maudlin, fanatical about “moral rectitude” and the superiority of the British “race,” devoted to Augustan “order, regularity, and refinement of life.”27 The books on their shelves told you that they played their games according to Hoyle, toured England as directed by Bradshaw’s Weekly Guide to the Railways, were instructed in housekeeping by Mrs. Beeton and guided abroad by Baedeker and Cook. Always deferential (Bagehot’s favorite word), they dreamed that their daughters might marry someone in Who’s Who or, even better, in Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage. At the table they watched their tongues. Legs were “limbs,” and anyone wanting to use such words as “disemboweled” or “pelvis” employed another language or remained silent.
Palmerston had pointed the way for those who obeyed the rules; he extolled the nation’s social system as one “in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness the lot which providence has assigned to it; while at the same time each individual is constantly trying to raise himself, not by violence and illegality, but by preserving good conduct and by the steady and energetic exertion of the moral and intellectual faculties with which his creator has endowed him.” This sent them to public reading rooms, Mechanics Institutes, mutual improvement groups, and public lectures and displays. Not only did they intend to better themselves; they insisted that the lower classes follow their example, until Dickens protested: “The English are, so far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement and do no worse. They are born at the oar, and they live and die at it. Good God, what would we have of them!”28
Yet even Dickens believed that true love and marriage led to a horse and carriage—that respectability was rewarded by a rise in social standing. The nouveaux riches Victorians, with their sudden access to prosperity and power, were certainly naive, and often vulgar. They worshiped false gods (the theme of Dombey and Son) and they failed to meet the standards they set for themselves. But certainly that is loftier than the abandonment of all standards. The stars of social navigation which they tried to follow were stars—genuine ideals, even if unattainable. Their “civilizing mission” in far lands was not only well-meant; at its best it was also noble. The English way of life, which they believed was exportable, was at least as estimable as the way of life the Americans tried to export a century later, with less success. When the Romans conquered a province, the glories of Roman citizenship were slow to follow. The moment the Union Jack raced up a colonial flagstaff, speech was free and habeas corpus the right of all. Among distant people a parliament became a status symbol, like having a national airline today, but more admirable. And if the Victorians’ system was flawed, they knew it. Believing in individual and collective reform, the best of their intellectuals, like the Americans who followed them, practiced vigorous, often savage, self-criticism. In the fine arts, London was a suburb of Paris and Berlin, but in literature it led the way. Carlyle, Dickens, John Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Herbert Spencer, and the contributors to Yellow Book were all Victorian rebels.
The chief difference between rebels then and rebels now is that they saw the world as rational, harmonious, teleological. Cartesians to a man, they believed that life was rational and mechanical and that progress was as inevitable as evolution and moved in the same direction. Their world, in Hans Koning’s happy phrase, was “an unthreatened world.” The earth seemed to be on the verge of being totally understood. Its flora, fauna, tides, and mountain ranges had been catalogued, measured, and minutely described. Some parts were still unexplored, but steamships would soon fix that. So the Victorian intellectuals felt a sense of confidence and optimism. They never doubted that the globe would always be dominated by Caucasian men. If the white masters differed among themselves, their governments would resort to arms. That prospect didn’t alarm them. “Unwarlike,” indeed, was a pejorative. It signified vitiation. The prime weakness of the darker races was their lack of martial spirit. Kipling urged England’s youth: “Bite the bullet, old man, and don’t let them think you’re afraid.” Not that there was much to fear; the Industrial Revolution had not yet caught up with weaponry. The Gatling and the Maxim were clever gadgets but, it was thought, without potential. Bloodshed in Britain’s little colonial wars was relatively light. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica actually told its readers that “losses in battle are… almost insignificant when compared with the fearful carnage wrought by sword and spear.”29
If any Victorian institution was cherished above all others, it was the home. “Home Sweet Home”—which sold 100,000 copies in its first year—was the most popular song of the century, even among workingmen who sang it in pubs because their own homes were unbearable. When an Englishman crossed his threshold he was in his castle, with almost absolute power over everyone within. That wasn’t true of his wife, but if diaries and letters are to be trusted, she enjoyed their hearth even more than he did. It was a good thing they liked it. They hadn’t much choice. Divorce usually meant ruin. It was almost impossible to obtain; a woman had to prove, not only that her husband was an adulterer, but that he was also guilty of desertion, cruelty, incest, rape, sodomy, or bestiality. Simple infidelity on his wife’s part was all a man need show. However, the moment he picked up his decree, he was an outcast. Victoria dismissed one divorced member of her court even though he was the injured party. Often families turned a divorced relative’s picture to the wall and spoke of him, if at all, as though he were dead.
Home was sanctuary, a place of peace and stability with sturdy furniture, in which evenings were spent reading aloud, whence the family departed for church and reunions with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, and where children were trained to assure the continuity of generations to come:
sic fortis Etruria crevit,
scilicet et facta est rerum pulcherrima Roma.
Keeping the Empire growing “strong and most beautiful” would be the solemn legacy of these children. Middle-class Victorian parents had no Rousseauistic illusions about youthful innocence; their young were never allowed to stray from adult supervision. The inference of repression is not necessarily justified. Children were taken to Punch-and-Judy shows, “suitable” plays in Drury Lane, and summer holidays at the seashore. But their lives revolved around the family. London evenings found them in the parlor, the boys in Norfolk jackets and the girls in beribboned bonnets and buttoned boots, joining in indoor games, handicrafts, watercolors, tableaux vivants, and, most colorfully, standing around the cheap upright pianos which began to be mass-produced in the 1870s, singing ballads. Over seven hundred publishers thrived in the city selling sheet music, including such favorites as “Danny Boy,” “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” “Yes, Let Me Like a Soldier Fall,” “I’ll Sing Three Songs of Araby,” “Annie Laurie,” “Oft in the Stilly Night,” “Come into the Garden, Maud” (from Tennyson), selections from Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Sullivan’s “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “The Lost Chord,” which sold a half-million copies before Victoria’s death.
The music would be read—and everyone with social aspirations could read music—by gaslight. By the 1880s gas had been installed in most middle-class neighborhoods. (Lower-class illumination was still provided by wax, oil, and tallow; penny-in-the-slot meters did not arrive until 1892.) The light flickered on gleaming brass coal scuttles and much that would seem stifling today: heavy repp curtains; reproductions of pre-Raphaelite paintings; patterned carpets, patterned wallpaper, even patterned ceilings; overstuffed Tavistock chairs with the new coiled springs; ebonized Chippendale music stools; and almost unbelievable clutter, with whatnots displaying bric-a-brac, ostrich feathers in vases, fans fastened to the walls, and marble-topped tables crowded with family photographs, china nodding cats, vases of flowers, and, on the mantel, a “Madeleine” clock in black marble with bronze columns from Oetzmann’s which cost thirty-two shillings and sixpence.
All this required a great deal of dusting. That was the point of it. Keeping it clean, and polishing the brass knockers, bedsteads, taps, and andirons, required servants, and the number of servants was a sign of status. They were cheap. A clerk making seventy or eighty pounds a year could afford a charwoman or a scullery maid (“skivvy”) at twelve pounds a year, less than five shillings a week, plus such fringe benefits as broken dishes and cast-off clothes. At the very least, a middle-class family would have a staff of four—cook, housemaid, parlormaid, and kitchen maid—and many homes would have six or seven bustling around in their lavender-print dresses and freshly laundered Breton caps. There were also butlers, footmen, and coachmen, but most domestic servants were young women. In 1881 there were 1,545,000 Englishwomen “in service”; one of every three girls between fifteen and twenty years of age was waiting on someone. Their employers complained endlessly about their dishonesty, their incompetence, and the expense of them. (A first-class cook made nineteen pounds a year, ninety dollars, though experienced lady’s maids earned more.) Punch was always having fun with them, depicting them as insolent and pretentious. Actually, they were almost pathetically servile. They had little choice. To be dismissed without a reference was a girl’s nightmare. Moreover, in her situation she was learning domestic arts and might attract the eye of a promising footman. If that led to matrimony it meant a step up. It was the responsibility of the butler, or the housekeeper, to see that it led nowhere else, though sometimes it did. One’s heart is wrung by the plea of a maid begging her mistress to let her keep her illegitimate baby: “It’s only a little one, ma’m.”
Doubtless many of them did steal from the pantry. They would have been inhuman not to have done it; outside in the dark and cold were relatives who had left the land, like them, and had found no jobs. These were the drifting poor who could not even afford a twopence Whitechapel breakfast and whom Shaw and H. G. Wells would soon discover. During the day they lived in London’s parks, but when the parks closed at sunset they would shuffle out and huddle in doorways or on Embankment benches, wrapped in rags and newspapers against the cold, until 4:15 A.M., when the gates of the first to open, Green Park, were unbolted. Primitive as street life was, it was considered preferable to the desperate workhouses. Now and then these institutions created by the Poor Law were humane; Maggie, Little Dorrit’s protégée, was so thankful for her treatment in a workhouse hospital that she called all kindness “hospitality.” But to most of the suffering masses they meant pitilessness and terror and were a major reason for the emigration of nearly three million Englishmen between 1853 and 1880. The system was against them. The purpose of law enforcement was the protection of property. Policemen deferred to top-hatted gentlemen and hounded wretches in ragged clothes. Under the Master and Servant Law, employees could be arrested in the dead of night for disobeying the most outrageous of orders, and under the Prevention of Poaching Act, suspicious constables could stop and search anyone in “streets, highways, and public places.” The woman in a middle-class servant’s hall, warm and well fed, not only knew her place but was grateful for it.
Her mistress had solved the middle-class woman’s greatest challenge just by reaching the altar. With so many men of her social standing abroad in the Empire, the supply of bachelors was limited, and marriage was the only respectable occupation open to her. Failing that, she was doomed to lifelong submissiveness in her parents’ home, serving as an unpaid servant. There were many like her. Indeed, W. L. Burn noted in The Age of Equipoise that “the dependent daughter was one of the fundamentals on which the mid-Victorian home was based.” Not all daughters suffered in silence; Florence Nightingale denounced “the petty grinding tyranny of a good English family. What I complain of… is the degree to which they have raised the claims upon women of ‘Family.’ It is a kind of Fetichism.”30 Miss Nightingale is one of the few women whose names have survived, an outrider of twentieth-century feminism. Another, who was actually more useful to her sisters, was Isabella Beeton, born within the sound of London’s Bow Bells and therefore a cockney. Like Florence, Isabella was a human dynamo. Before her death at twenty-eight of puerperal fever, that assassin of Victorian mothers, she had given birth to four children, served as fashion editor for her husband’s periodical, the British Domestic Magazine, and produced a tremendously successful volume of her own, her 1,111-page Household Management, with fourteen color plates and hundreds of black-and-white illustrations. (It weighed two pounds and cost seven shillings and sixpence.) By 1871, six years after her funeral, two million copies had been sold.
“Mrs. Beeton,” as Englishwomen called the book, was to them what “Dr. Spock” became for American mothers four generations later. The needs it filled tell us a great deal about their circumstances. As wealth poured into England from its colonial possessions abroad, the waves of growing affluence enriched and complicated life in a nation arriviste. Brides had no precedents for orchestrating sophisticated social skills; their mothers, having lived in simpler times, were of little help. So Mrs. Beeton explained when to wear gloves, how to maneuver on the pavement so that gentlemen escorts walked on the street side, and what the French names for courses of food meant. The British were still an insular people. (A headline of the period was FOG IN THE CHANNEL, CONTINENT CUT OFF.) And serving as hostess at dinner parties was a wife’s most important role. Ladies did not eat out until the Savoy Hotel opened in 1889, with César Ritz as the headwaiter. Entertaining was done at private residences only. Mrs. Beeton told her readers, in extraordinary detail, which wines to serve with meat and fish, when the ladies should leave the gentlemen to their brandy, and how to cope with a party of three dozen, counting the coachmen who had to wait for their masters and mistresses. She provided recipes, information on how much to order, and what to do with the leftovers. One entry was: “Bill of Fare for a Picnic for Forty Persons.” It recommended, among other things, 122 bottles of refreshment for the entire group, including servants, coachmen, and lady’s maids. The food was absurdly cheap, but the logistics were staggering. Moreover, this was a middle-class affair. The upper class entertained on a scale unmatched today. It was expected of them, which sometimes presented difficulties. Winston Churchill, born to a noble family, simply could not afford it. He had to live by his wits most of his life.
Upper-class hostesses had no need to plan picnics in the country. They were already there. They had London mansions, too, but the soul of the leisure class was in the land. It always had been. Chaucer wrote of his medieval franklin, or landowner, that “It snewed in his hous of mete and drinke, / Of alle deyntees men coude thinke.” Arundel Castle, in Sussex, goes back even farther. It is mentioned in the will of King Alfred, who reigned eleven centuries ago. An ancestor of the present tenant, the sixteenth Duke of Norfolk, won it when an arrow from the bow of one of his archers pierced the eye of Harold in the Battle of Hastings. Socially, a duke in the country has always had the best of all possible worlds. In the British aristocracy the twenty-seven dukes are outranked only by members of the British royal family; the College of Arms advised a hostess, who was worried about seating arrangements for her dinner party, that “the Aga Khan is held to be a direct descendant of God,” but “an English Duke takes precedence.” The other degrees of the British peerage, in descending order, are marquess, earl, viscount, and baron, and though these don’t carry as much weight as they once did, in Victoria’s time to be titled, in most instances, still meant to be landed. On the estates of the nobility stood the great country houses, where England’s three hundred ruling families celebrated the weekly three-night British holiday, which is popularly thought to have been a brainchild of the Queen’s hedonistic Prince of Wales, but which was actually created by, of all people, Oliver Cromwell; in 1899 one of Cromwell’s biographers, S. R. Gardiner, found that “Oliver… may be regarded as the inventor of that modified form of enjoyment to which hard-worked citizens have, in our day, given the name of ‘week-end.’ ”31
But upper-class Victorians weren’t hard-worked. Most of them didn’t work at all. That was what set the upper class apart from the upper-middle class. The two mingled, but never as equals; as Lady Warwick explained to Elinor Glyn, “Doctors and solicitors might be invited to garden parties, though never of course to luncheon or dinner.” The elite kept themselves to themselves. This small, select, homogenous patriciate, this “brilliant and powerful body,” in Churchill’s admiring phrase, passed most of their time by passing the port, sherry, and claret; by discussing cricket; by playing billiards, admiring their horses, and shooting grouse—a thousand grouse were felled in a single shoot attended by Churchill’s mother. Unlike the French, they did not cultivate tête-à-têtes; Robert Laird Collier found that “they are poor talkers as a rule, and conversation seems to be a labor to most of them,” that they “never express the least feeling in their social intercourse,” and that “all the social talk is stupid and insipid.” In an age which cherished the Latin motto laborare est orare, when Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help could be found in almost every middle-class home, an idle nobility seemed an affront to social critics. In Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense the likable figures are Floppy Fly and Daddy Long Legs, who are ejected from court because their legs are ill-made. Lewis Carroll depicted patricians as tyrants and muddlers. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe described the House of Lords as a body that “did nothing in particular and did it very well.” But the ruling class was unperturbed. Ideas bored them. “As a class,” Lady Warwick said, “we did not like brains.” A contemporary work, Kings, Courts and Society, saw Britain comprising “a small, select aristocracy, booted and spurred to ride, and a large, dim mass, born, saddled and bridled to be ridden.” On Sunday the weekenders gathered in the chapels found under every country-house roof and sang:32
The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And orders their estate.
Later Churchill wrote: “The old world in its sunset was fair to see.” It doesn’t seem very fair to us. In their portraits titled Victorians, particularly the men, seem to be oozing complacency and self-esteem, wholly indifferent to the fact that 30 percent of the inhabitants of their capital city were undernourished while they feasted, at a typical lunch for six, on cold pheasant, a brace of partridges, a pair of roast fowls, steak, salmon, and a choice of two soups. As late as 1940 Clare Boothe Luce, though an anglophile, fumed: “Sometimes they are so insolent, so sure of themselves, so smug, I feel as though it would do them good for once to be beaten.” But by then they had become an anachronism, and the brightest among them knew it. To put them in context is to see them against the background of nineteenth-century Eurasia. From the Barents Sea to the Mediterranean, from the Rhine to Vladivostok, monarchs not only reigned but ruled through bewildering hierarchies of grand dukes, archdukes, princelings, and other hereditary nobles—twenty-two dynasties in Germany alone. The masses having accepted the saddles and bridles, threadbare commoners also sang about God making men high and lowly. It was, James Laver writes, “probably the last period in history when the fortunate thought they could give pleasure to others by displaying their good fortune before them.” Bagehot wrote: “The fancy of the mass of men is incredibly weak; it can see nothing without a visible symbol…. Nobility is a symbol of mind.” So ingrained was the habit of forelock-tugging that by 1875, when Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now, that society accepted the exploitation of titles by impecunious nobles who sold their prestige by consenting to serve as directors of businesses in wobbly shape.33
This did not declass them. Their social status was their birthright, and nothing could deprive them of it. Even if a peer committed murder, he was entitled to a trial by the House of Lords, and if sentenced to the gallows he was hanged with a silken rope. Of course, most of the upper class was merely related to peers. Given primogeniture, with all property going to the eldest son, including the title, the patriciate was heavily populated with younger sons who had inherited nothing and usually entered the navy, army, church, or diplomatic corps—the traditional order of preference. (Two generations passed before a descendant became a commoner. The firstborn son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough was his heir. The second son was called Lord Randolph Churchill. Randolph’s wife was Lady Randolph Churchill. Their son was simply Mr. Winston Churchill.) Yet all retained the life-style of the aristocracy. Characteristically, members of the upper class never lifted an unnecessary finger. It was said of Lady Ida Sitwell that she not only did not know how to lace up her own shoes; she would have been humiliated by the knowledge. Churchill’s cousin, the ninth duke, while visiting friends and traveling without his valet, or “man,” complained that his toothbrush didn’t “froth properly.”34 He had to be told gently that toothpaste had to be applied to the brush before it would foam. His man had always done that, and he hadn’t realized it. Winston himself lived ninety years without once drawing his own bath or riding on a bus. He took the tube just once. His wife had to send a party to rescue him; helpless, he was whirling round and round the tunnels under London. And all his life he was dressed and undressed by someone else, usually a valet, though during one period by a secretary in her twenties. There are those among his friends who believe that this sort of thing taught him how to use people properly.
It was during the London “Season”—from the Queen of Charlotte’s Ball in mid-spring to the Goodwood races in midsummer—that the great peers were to be found in their town houses. These were surrounded by barbered gardens, high walls, and gates manned by gatekeepers who fought off beggars and other street people. Sometimes they shot them. This aroused neighbors, who knew their station but believed a line should be drawn short of homicide. Actually, the very sites of many of the huge homes were outrageous. In Mayfair, Belgravia, Marylebone, and St. Pancras, streets maintained at public expense had been included within such walls, which meant that fire engines were blocked and buildings burned down. All attempts at legislation outlawing this extraordinary practice were defeated in Parliament.
In London the upper classes had their stylized rituals, most of them frivolous. Every morning after breakfast processions of victorias—low four-wheeled carriages with folding tops—debouched from the West End and trotted along Park Lane, gay harnesses tinkling and erect postilions wearing uniforms, glistening high boots, and varnished, high-crowned hats. Daughters were presented at court; the ladies, en grande toilette, wore three ostrich feathers in their hats if married, two feathers if not. Wasp-waisted, their gowns off the shoulder, skirts voluminous and rustling, the debutantes would be waited upon by uniformed members of the Corps Diplomatique, Gentlemen of the Household in full court dress, and Yeomen of the Guard in scarlet and gold. The fathers of the girls being brought out would be absent, loitering in their clubs: the Athenaeum, White’s, the Carlton, the Reform, and the rest. They did not care to be “seen” then. But the sexes did mingle on other public occasions. Everyone enjoyed the royal enclosure at Ascot, gorging on champagne, strawberries, and lobster mousse. And—rowing being considered manly—it was rather a good thing to turn out for the Henley Regatta. Dress there was about as informal as it ever got for that class. Ladies appeared in blouses and long linen skirts; their husbands, in straw boaters, blazers, and flannels.
The best club in London was Parliament, which, by no coincidence, held its key sessions between Easter and August—in effect, the Season. At the time of Winston Churchill’s birth, MPs were not only unpaid; they were expected to contribute generously to charities in their constituencies. So the upper class controlled both the Lords and the House of Commons. B. Cracroft, analyzing the House in his Essays on Reform, found that 326 members were patricians, including 226 sons or grandsons of peers, and a hundred others “connected with the peerage by marriage or descent.” Over a hundred more belonged “substantially to the same class,” which meant that three out of every four MPs were linked to each other and to the older generation in the Lords by blood as well as by conservative outlook. Between a third and a half of all cabinet members were from the upper house—six of Disraeli’s thirteen ministers, five of Gladstone’s fourteen. As we have seen, their hold on key posts in the Empire was even greater. Every viceroy of India was a peer by inheritance. In Little Dorrit Dickens wrote caustically of the Barnacle “clan, or clique, or family, or connection” that “there was not a list, in all the Circumlocution Office, of places that might fall vacant anywhere within half a century, from a Lord of the Treasury to a Chinese Consul, and up again to a Governor-General of India, but, as applicants for such places, the names of some or every one of these hungry and adhesive Barnacles were down.”35
So the opening of Parliament, or a heralded debate in the Commons, was not unlike a family reunion. Broughams, landaus, barouches, victorias, and hansoms tingling their unmistakable bells clattered over the cobblestones of New Palace Yard and drew up in front of the Westminster Hall entrance. Men in striped trousers and frock coats descended carrying bulky red leather boxes stuffed with state papers, then disappeared into lobbies brightened by flaring gas jets. In the Strangers’ Dining Room wives and daughters awaited them, wearing flowing skirts of tulle and hats as large as the displays at the Chelsea Flower Show. Gossip was exchanged, outcomes predicted, Liberals scorned by Tories or Tories by Liberals—it scarcely mattered, since their interests and social positions were virtually identical. The mighty seemed completely secure. Yet there were those who worried. Macaulay had warned against “the encroachments of despotism and the licentiousness of democracy.” Bagehot said “sensible men of substantial means are what we wish to be ruled by” and cautioned that “a political combination of the lower classes… is an evil of the first magnitude…. So long as they are not taught to act together there is a chance of this being averted, and it can only be averted by the greater wisdom and foresight in the higher classes.” The Queen, alarmed, let it be known that “a democratic monarchy is what she will never belong to.”36 Skittish patricians held their breath when the franchise bill of 1884 swept away 216 seats in rotten boroughs and increased the electorate. One man in five now had the vote—but at the next election the Conservatives were returned to power, with Lord Salisbury succeeding Disraeli. Salisbury was eminently a patrician of his time. A descendant of the two Cecils who had been Elizabeth I’s and James I’s chief ministers, he was a towering, massive man—acerbic, gauche, preoccupied, disdainful, and possessed of a penetrating intellect. He declined to live at 10 Downing Street, preferring his own more elegant London home, in the chapel of which he prayed each morning upon arising. He suffered spells of depression which he described as “nerve storms.” It was Salisbury’s firm belief that only uncontentious legislation should be brought before Parliament. If it was controversial, England wasn’t ready for it.
In one of those little paragraphs that illumine the era, The Times, reporting on a public trial, noted that “Viscount Raynham, MP, and other gentlemen present were accommodated with seats on the bench.”37 Given the system, it is unsurprising that the judge moved over for men whose social rank was equal to, or more likely greater than, his own. The key word is “gentlemen.” What was a gentleman? Even then the term was inexact, and it has been the despair of sociologists ever since. Some cases were easy. Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was almost an archetype. In 1872 he lived in Burlington Gardens, in the house at No. 7 Savile Row—flats didn’t become respectable till the mid-1870s—and he was a member of the Reform Club. His financial independence permitted him to be indifferent to public opinion (though not to his conscience and his fellow gentlemen) and his arrogance and eccentricity arose naturally from his absolute security. Other cases were marginal. You could be a gentleman in one place but not in another. In a small community the word would be applied to a physician, a lawyer, a country squire, a master of foxhounds, or just a man who had a little money and good manners. In London, or in the great country homes, that wasn’t enough. Samuel Smiles to the contrary, the mantle did not fall upon every responsible, brave, selfless Englishman. If gentlemen were those who were treated as such—the best definition—the standards were usually higher than that.
The high-born and members of the landed gentry were gentlemen by birthright. Stupidity—even illiteracy—did not disqualify them. But they were exceptions. It was generally understood that a “gentleman’s education” meant Oxford or Cambridge, admittance to which was still largely limited to public-school boys. During their heyday, roughly from Waterloo to the outbreak of World War I, the self-contained public schools were the ruling class’s boot camps. Their autocratic headmasters, Church of England clerics, taught austerity, loyalty, honor, and the virtue of “service.” Theoretically this meant serving those not lucky enough to see the inside of a public school; in practice it came down to defending the established order. Since the tuition exceeded the annual income of the huskiest workman, the pool of applicants was limited, as it was meant to be, to the affluent. The teaching of Latin and Greek was thought useful in disciplining young minds, but the playing fields were at least as important. The Duke of Wellington had said that the schools should produce the kind of youth who could go straight from his sixth form to a convict ship and, with the help of two sergeants and fifteen privates, transport a shipload of convicted criminals to Australia without incident. Thomas Arnold of Rugby told his faculty: “What we must look for… is, first religious and moral principles; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability.” At Harrow it was said that a boy might spend fifteen hours a week at cricket or, if he took “every opportunity,” twenty hours. Sports were believed to be peculiarly suitable to the building of character. A small boy learned to submit to the authority of older boys because they were physically stronger than he. As he moved up through the higher forms, it was reasoned, he himself matured and became a “natural ruler,” a self-reliant gentleman, disciplined by what Irving Babbitt later called the “inner check.” Thus, though his family may have had no aristocratic connections, he joined the gentry and was accepted as a member of the ruling class. Merchants couldn’t make it, but their sons could.38
In a revealing aside, John Buchan wrote: “In the conventional sense, I never went to school at all.” In fact, he had received an excellent education in a Glasgow day school, but socially that didn’t count. Yet Buchan rose to become Lord Tweedsmuir, governor-general of Canada. So it was possible to bypass the Etons and Harrows. Even an American could do it; in 1879 Henry James dined out 107 times. There were a thousand little ways, some of them extraordinarily petty, by which one gentleman identified another. One’s vocabulary was important. Mantelpieces were “chimney-pieces,” notepaper was “writing paper,” mirrors were “looking glasses.” But there was a catch. If you worried about such things, your concern showed, and you were dismissed as a swot. The true gentleman emanated a kind of mystique. He always belonged wherever he was. If he was intellectual he did not hide it; in Paracelsus Browning had told him: “Measure your mind’s height by the shadow it casts.” And somehow he always recognized his equals, whatever the circumstances or attire. When two strangers meet in Doctor Thorne, Trollope says of one: “In spite of his long absence, he knew an English gentleman when he saw one.” Even penury was no obstacle. At the end of Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset Josiah Crawley meets Archdeacon Grantly. The archdeacon is about to become Crawley’s daughter’s father-in-law. Crawley is wearing seedy clothes and “dirty broken boots.” He is suspected of being a thief. He is quirky and perverse. But he was a scholar at Oxford and has “good connections,” and when he apologizes because he is too impoverished to provide a dowry, the archdeacon replies: “My dear Crawley, I have enough for both.” Crawley says: “I wish we stood on more equal grounds.” Rising from his chair, the archdeacon tells him: “We stand on the only perfect level on which such men can meet each other. We are both gentlemen.” Crawley, also rising, replies: “Sir, from the bottom of my heart I agree with you. I could not have spoken such words; but coming from you who are rich to me who am poor, they are honourable to the one and comfortable to the other.”39
The Barsetshire novels are set outside London, which was one reason for their popularity in the upper class. Out of season, thoroughbreds found the capital’s social life stifling. They felt more comfortable in their country houses, surrounded by parks landscaped in the eighteenth century, where fountains danced, deer darted, and, in the case of Blenheim, peacocks strutted. On foxhunts they galloped past villages whose inhabitants’ forebears had toiled as serfs for their own ancestors—ancestors who now lay in village churchyards beneath marble armor with marble basset hounds at their feet. And the great houses were communities unto themselves, where servants might be waited upon by their own servants and hospitality was almost a secular religion. Chatsworth, seat of the Duke of Devonshire, accommodated almost five hundred guests, but the finest view in England was found at Blenheim, set among the thousand-year-old oaks of what was once a royal forest. When George III saw Turner’s painting of its great lake, its poplared island, and the hanging beeches beyond, he said: “We have nothing to equal this!”40
This was the home of the Duke of Marlborough, head of the Churchill family. Winston once described it as “an Italian palace in an English park.”41 A stupendous castle of almost ominous power, buttressed by massive towers, it is surrounded by courtyards, formal gardens, and 2,700 acres of parkland. Beneath its roof—which covers an incredible 7 acres—lie 320 rooms: bedrooms, saloons, cabinets, state apartments, drawing rooms, a conservatory, the obligatory chapel, and a library 183 feet long. The lock on the main door, copied from the one on the old Warsaw Gate, is turned by a brass key weighing 3 pounds. Within, busts of deceased dukes and duchesses stand in a grand hall whose 67-foot-high ceiling, supported by Corinthian columns, is embellished by a remarkable allegorical painting showing the first duke, John Churchill, kneeling before a figure of Britannia, who is seated on a globe, one hand resting on a lance as the other extends a wreath to him, while a figure holds fire and sword at John’s feet, a white horse prances alongside, and trumpeters hover all around him.
Today Blenheim and other such shrines of the advantaged, with their marble halls and vast distances, seem intimidating. Their inhabitants didn’t feel that way. On the contrary, they found them warm and convivial, bright, for some of them, with the promise of the greatest social gift they could imagine. It was illicit love. Here, too, the privileged enjoyed special privileges. Seen through the prism of a long century, they are hard to comprehend. Nineteenth-century sex, between thoroughbred lovers, was extremely complex, but like everything else they enjoyed, it had its precedents. The British aristocracy had always gloried in its sexual prowess. Exceptional concupiscence was rewarded; John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, first rose to prominence because his sister Arabella, maid of honor to the Duchess of York, became the duke’s most passionate mistress. When Marlborough returned from European battlefields at an advanced age, his wife Sarah proudly wrote: “Today the Duke returned from the war and pleasured me twice in his top boots.” Had she sought lovers during his absence, the social risk would have been slight. For generations before Victoria’s coronation the patriciate had tolerated promiscuity among its more hot-blooded members. Byron wrote his shortest and most eloquent poem as a testament to a titled woman who had taken leave of her husband for a nine-month romp with him:
Caroline Lamb,
Goddamn.
The Duke of Wellington had his pick of ladies when he returned from his various triumphs, and two of his bedmates expressed their appreciation to him in their memoirs. The duke’s sister-in-law, Lady Charlotte Wellesley, the mother of four young children, left them to sleep with Lord Paget, himself the father of four children by his wife, Lady Caroline Villiers, daughter of Lady Jersey, who was the former “favorite,” as it was then put, of the Prince of Wales. At Waterloo the duke made Paget his chief of cavalry. An aide protested: “Your Grace cannot have forgotten the affair with Lady Charlotte Wellesley?” The duke: “Oh, no! I have not forgotten that.” Aide: “That is not the only case, I am afraid. At any rate [he] has a reputation of running away with everybody he can.” Duke: “I’ll take good care he don’t run away with me. I don’t care about anybody else.”*42 During the Regency, upper-class sexual conduct became particularly flagrant. It was then that ladies diverted themselves with the best-selling Memoirs of Harriet Smith, which opened with the gripping line: “I will not relate the exact circumstances by which at the age of thirteen I became the mistress of the Earl of Croydon.”
The tradition has continued to flourish in the twentieth century, a colorful example being the beautiful and wanton Edwina Ashley, Lady Mountbatten. When Lord Louis Mountbatten was viceroy of India, negotiating the terms for Indian independence, the sessions went much more smoothly because the vicereine, with her husband’s resigned knowledge, was sleeping with Jawaharlal Nehru. Earlier she had been even more headstrong. At one point she vanished from London society for four months. Friends in Park Lane found Louis extremely vague when asked his wife’s whereabouts. Actually, he didn’t know. Later he learned that Edwina had shipped aboard a fifty-ton trading schooner, bound for the South Seas, as an ordinary seaman. Night after night, as they cruised among the lush islands, she gratified herself with her fellow crewpersons.
Victoria’s reign was a hiatus, not in extracurricular upper-class ardor, but in the flagrant practice of it. Her ascent saw the triumph of the puritans—of what Melbourne called “that d——d morality.” In the 1840s and 1850s debauchery went underground. By the time of Winston Churchill’s childhood and early youth it had become prudent to keep mum about your love affairs. Gladstone in a candid moment said he had known “eleven prime ministers and ten were adulterers”; nevertheless, he joined in the persecution of Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish MP who had been the lover of Kitty O’Shea with Mrs. O’Shea’s husband’s consent. In 1887 Sir Charles Dilke, at one time regarded as a future prime minister, was ruined by a divorce trial. He lost his cabinet post, then lost his seat, and eventually became a social pariah. One modern British scholar is convinced that “Disraeli slept his way to the top,” but Dizzy was too crafty to be caught. Gladstone made a curious practice of prowling the London streets at night and holding long, intimate conversations with prostitutes. Sometimes he brought them home and Mrs. Gladstone gave them hot chocolate. It was assumed that he was trying to convince them to mend their ways. If so, he doesn’t appear to have been discouraged by his failure to produce a single convert. Indeed, after these talks he always appeared beaming, animated, and flushed. No one thought that odd. Nor could anyone pass judgment on affairs of which they knew nothing. The key to successful extramarital sex, therefore, was discretion. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, perhaps the most outspoken woman in polite society, said dryly: “It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom, as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”43
The difficulty lay in finding the bedroom. Mrs. Campbell also said, after maneuvering one man out of his marriage to a Churchill and up the aisle with her: “Ah, the peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue!” It was all very well for a Forsyte to tuck away a common mistress in Chelsea, but that couldn’t be done with a lady. In the city she was under observation all the time. Her gown, her coif, her bearing, gestures, and diction testified to her class, and she couldn’t be seen outside her aerie. Her very presence in a hotel lobby would invite scandal. Thus the preference of the aristocracy and gentry for their homes in the country. London society was too ritualized; there was little privacy, unless you were an unmarried bachelor, like young Freud, who informed his housekeeper that he expected a woman for tea and was told: “Right, sir, I’ll change the sheets on the bed.”44
The servants knew of most dalliances. They even understood why there was one standard for their masters and mistresses and another for the rest of England. Victorian morality arose from the needs of the new middle class. As the lord chancellor explained when divorce courts were established in 1857, a woman lost nothing by her husband’s infidelity and could absolve him “without any loss of caste,” while “no one would venture to suggest” that he could pardon her adultery, which “might be the means of palming spurious children upon him.” This was important; such children shared a middle-class legacy. In titled families it was meaningless. Only the legitimacy of the first patrician child counted. Professor McGregor writes: “The sexual waywardness of aristocrats… did not endanger the integrity or succession of family properties regulated by primogeniture and entail. Countless children of the mist played happily in Whig and Tory nurseries where they were no threat to the security of family property or to the interests of the heirs.” Pamela Harriman, a Digby who was Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law before she married New York’s former governor, takes the traditional light view of such sex: “They went to bed a lot with each other, but they were all cousins, so it didn’t really count.” It was their insularity that largely limited them to cousins; among the great families, Barbara Tuchman notes, “everyone knew or was related to everyone else…. People who met each other every day, at each other’s homes, at race meetings and hunts, at Cowes, for the Regatta, at the Royal Academy, at court and in Parliament, were more often than not meeting their second cousins or brother-in-law’s uncle or stepfather’s sister or aunt’s nephew on the other side.”45
One area of scholarly inquiry being explored by today’s sexologists is how the voluptuaries of the Victorian upper class led such colorful sex lives and produced so little issue. The average British wife then conceived ten times during her childbearing years. But the great thoroughbred beauties, who treasured their figures, carried far less often. After giving birth to Winston, Jennie Churchill was in and out of lovers’ beds all her life, yet she bore only one more child. And she was not exceptional.
It is worth noting that these small victories of desire were achieved, not by men, but by prudent women. One would expect that Victorian gentlemen, proud of their protective instincts, would have shielded their mistresses from impregnation. The means were at hand. Condoms, originally thin sheaths made from the visceral tissue of sheep, had been used for two centuries; Casanova mentions them, and so does Boswell. (“French letter” was the term used in England; across the Channel it was “la capote anglaise.”) But Victorian males were also romantics, and they found condoms distasteful. Therefore their partners turned to faithful douching with a solution of sulfate of zinc or alum, rigid austerity during their ripe periods each month, beeswax disks which blocked the entrance to the uterus, sponges moistened with diluted lemon juice and inserted into the vagina, and, increasingly, the Dutch cup, a primitive diaphragm designed to fit longitudinally in the vagina with the forward end under the pubic bone and the back end in the posterior fornix. Aletta Jacobs introduced this device in the Netherlands in the early 1880s. The cup comprised a steel ring with rubber stretched across it—a painful expedient, but passion overrode the discomfort. Mere possession of a Dutch cup was a sign of privilege in London. The vast majority of Englishwomen didn’t know they existed and would have had difficulty acquiring one anyhow; the cups were available, only to those who furnished respectable references, at a Mayfair bookshop.
Partly because they bred less, ladies flourished. They were so much healthier and more active than their unprivileged sisters that they almost seem to have belonged to a different species. Lower-class women weren’t envious; they adored them. An article in Graphic Magazine described in the saccharine prose of the time how such social celebrities were regarded:
For the fashionable beauty, life is an endless carnival, and dress a round of disguises. She does everything and the wings of Mercury might be attached to her tiny bottines, so rapid are her changes of scene and character. She is a sportswoman, a huntress, a bold and skillful swimmer; she drives a pair of horses like a charioteer, mounts the roof of a four-in-hand, plays lawn tennis, is at home on a race course or the deck of a fast yacht. She is aware of the refinements of dining and has a pretty taste in vintages. She is a power at the theater or the Opera; and none is more brilliant at a supper party. Of the modern young lady a la mode, who wields alike the fiddle-bow, the billiard-cue, and the etching-needle, who climbs mountains and knows the gymnasium, none but herself can be the prototype.46
Among the most sophisticated of these women, often bored partners in arranged marriages, the affairs which were joyously celebrated during weekends were sometimes launched in wife-to-wife conversations. “Tell Charles I have designs on him,” one would tell Charles’s lady, who would acknowledge the proposal with a nod and an amused smile; she herself already had a lover or had designs of her own on someone else’s husband. But you had to be very secure to take that approach—had to be, say, one of that select circle of ladies who took turns sleeping with Victoria’s eldest son. More often an understanding would have been reached in advance between the primary partners. Some affairs were known to everyone. General Sir Neville Bowles Chamberlain, for example, always slept with the Duchess of Manchester, and the Duke of Marlborough with Lady Colin Campbell. Of course, they didn’t cross a bedroom threshold together. On Thursdays each of the hundred-odd guests was assigned a room; a tiny brass frame on the door held a card with his or her name written on it. Wise and worldly hostesses knew who should be paired with whom. Vita Sackville-West later described how they served as accomplices to Victorian and later Edwardian intrigue: “This question of the disposition of bedrooms always gave the… hostesses cause for anxious thought. It was so necessary to be tactful, and at the same time discreet. The professional Lothario would be furious if he found himself in a room surrounded by ladies who were all accompanied by their husbands. Tommy Brand, on one such occasion, had been known to leave the house on the Sunday morning…. Tommy’s motto was ‘Chacun a sa chacune.’ Then there were the recognised lovers to be considered; the duchess herself would have been greatly annoyed had she gone to stay at the same party as Harry Tremaine, only to find that he had been put at the other end of the house…. It was part of a good hostess’ duty to see to such things; they must be made easy, though not too obvious.” After lights were out, shadowy figures would glide through the darkened hall and everyone would settle in for the night’s pleasure. An hour before dawn the butler would appear in the hall bearing a gong. He would strike it once and depart. The same tiptoeing figures would reappear. Presently they would all meet at the breakfast table.47
Breakfast could be bewildering to outsiders. At the table you were expected to be brusque, even rude, to your companion of the night. “Pass the toast,” you would say crossly, or “I want the salt.” The upper class was always very direct (“I want to pee”), but this went beyond that. It was important to sort out your different roles, to let it be known that you weren’t going to break the rules by being demonstrative, or eloping, or doing anything else rash. One-night stands were very rare, but now and then they happened. The story of one, involving a young Frenchwoman, survives. During an evening musicale a handsome gentleman propositioned her. She accepted, and a memorable night followed. Two hours later she was cracking a soft-boiled egg downstairs when he appeared, took a seat, and arranged his napkin. Still aglow with romance, she bestowed a tender smile upon him. He glowered and growled: “Are you going to hog the butter all day?” She was shocked, then enraged. Hurling the butter in his face, she flew upstairs, summoned her maid, packed, and demanded that she be driven to the station at once. She told their stunned hostess that she would never again visit atroce England. She didn’t. She wasn’t invited.48
The casual promiscuity of the English patriciate over the centuries suggests the need for caution in tracing the bloodlines of Winston Churchill. He himself, while researching his biography of the great duke—the income from which went far toward supporting his family in the 1930s, when pleas for resistance to Hitler made him a political pariah—found “disquieting” evidence of “a rather shady phase” in the 1500s, when the duke’s great-grandmother so forgot herself in the early years of her marriage that she presented the family blacksmith with a sturdy son. On a loftier scale, the duke’s sister gave birth to a bastard son of James II, and the family genes were quickened by the passionate George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham and the confidant of two Stuart sovereigns, whose descendants included both Pitts and several mistresses and lovers in royal households. So although it is theoretically possible to trace our Winston Churchill’s lineage back at least to 1066, here and there skepticism is advisable. As Sarah, the first duchess, said, upon reading an account of her husband’s forebears, “This History takes a great deal of Pains to make the Duke of Marlborough’s Extraction very ancient. That may be true for aught I know. But it is no matter whether it be true or not in my opinion”—the customary riposte when a defense of legitimacy became hopeless. Thus one should, as far as possible, stick to what can be confirmed.49
One may as well begin with the first Sir Winston Churchill (1620–1688), for whom his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson was named. A scholar, this earlier Winston left Oxford to bear arms for Charles I in the struggle between the Royalists and the Roundheads. Wounded after several ferocious battles, he found asylum in the castle of his mother-in-law, Lady Drake, a firm supporter of Cromwell and therefore above Puritan suspicion. After the Restoration, Charles II knighted Churchill. As Sir Winston he became MP for Weymouth, then a fellow of the Royal Society, meanwhile supervising the raising of five children who, because of their mother’s bloodline, were descendants of Sir Francis Drake. One of the five was John Churchill, the future duke. John is one of the great figures in English history, glorious as a soldier, statesman, and diplomat. Though frequently the victim of court intrigue—in 1692 he was arrested, locked up in the Tower of London, and charged with high treason—he was always forgiven by William III and Queen Anne because of his remarkable military conquests. John fought ten campaigns on the Continent and never lost a battle, never even failed to take a fortress to which he had laid siege. His mightiest victory was at Blenheim, on the Danube, in Bavaria. On August 13, 1704, he and Eugene of Savoy risked everything, ignoring a formidable threat to their rear, and led the allied English, Germans, Dutch, and Danes to a historic triumph over the French. Blenheim is regarded as one of the world’s ten most decisive engagements. John had become a duke in 1702. Now he was made a Knight of the Garter and given a palace, which he named after the battle.
This first Marlborough left no sons. The dukedom therefore passed through his daughters to his grandson, a Spencer. The Spencer family had become notable in 1504, when one of them acquired estates in Warwickshire and at Wormleighton and received a grant in arms. Henry VIII knighted him; our Winston Churchill became his direct male descendant through fifteen generations. In his Memoirs of My Life and Writings, Gibbon would write: “The nobility of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the Fairy Queen as the most precious jewel of their coronet.” Like many another historian, Gibbon skidded from time to time. There was no relationship between the poet and these Spencers. But they were remarkable in other ways. One served as ambassador to Spain and France. Another, a contemporary of Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister, was first lord of the Treasury between 1718 and 1721. A third, the second Earl Spencer, was first lord of the Admiralty in Nelson’s great years. The next earl was one of the authors of the reform bill of 1832, and his son became viceroy of Ireland and then Gladstone’s first lord.
In 1817, by royal license, the fifth Duke of Marlborough changed his family name to Spencer-Churchill. The arms were quartered beneath two crests, a griffin’s head for the Spencers and a lion for the Churchills. The lion is the traditional symbol of England’s greatness, and a duke outranks an earl, but for over a century the Spencers had outperformed the Churchills as servants of the Crown. One Duke of Marlborough became a mere brigadier of foot guards; another, during his fifty-eight years as master of Blenheim, simply collected pictures. During the Regency, two dukes succumbed to that gambling fever which afflicted so many members of the aristocracy in those raffish years. Rees Howell Gronow, a gossip writer of the early nineteenth century, told of a coach ride with a Marquess of Blandford (the title of the elder son of the Duke of Marlborough before his succession). The marquess produced a wad of fifty thousand-pound notes. He had just borrowed them. He said: “You see, Gronow, how the immense fortune of my family will be frittered away; but I can’t help it; I must live. My father inherited five hundred thousand pounds in ready money and seventy thousand pounds a year in land; and in all probability when it comes my turn to live at Blenheim I shall have nothing left but the annuity of five thousand pounds a year on the Post Office.” When he did become duke, we are told, “he lived in one remote corner of his magnificent Palace, a melancholy instance of extravagance.”50
It was his son, John Winston, who began restoration of the Churchill pride. He and his successors added such luster to the family’s reputation that recent generations have used Spencer only as a middle name or dropped it altogether. John Winston entered politics, was elected MP for Woodstock, and sat in the Commons for fifteen years. Becoming the seventh duke, he moved to the Lords and served as a cabinet minister under Lord Derby and then Disraeli. His elder son, George, was a disappointment. So, at first, was George’s brother Randolph. Randolph was a poor student at Eton. He failed his first examinations at Oxford. But then he picked up. At Merton College he left a creditable record, marred only by an arrest for drunkenness and assault. After the ceremonial grand tour of Europe which had become customary for upper-class youths, and after a brief period as an idler and carouser, he stood for Parliament in 1874 and was elected to his father’s old seat. His first speech went well; Disraeli wrote the Queen: “Lord Randolph said many imprudent things, which is not very important in the maiden speech of a young member and a young man, but the House was surprised, and then captivated, by his energy, and his natural flow, and his impressive manners. With self-control and study he might mount. It was a speech of great promise.”51
Dizzy’s unerring eye had caught the flaws, however. Randolph was “imprudent,” lacking in “self-control.” Later, after disaster had overwhelmed him—after he had first been marked as a future prime minister and had then lost everything—that was all which would be remembered. It is easy to withhold sympathy from him. Surviving pictures do not help. His most striking feature was his eyes. They were not attractive; he suffered from exophthalmos, and his protruding eyeballs seem to have surveyed the world with a supercilious, offensive stare. His walrus mustache draws attention to a large head set on a short, frail body. He looks pompous, curt, and rude. And so he was, to those who bored him. Yet his friends have left eloquent testaments to his jauntiness, wittiness, and charm. He was an enthusiastic foxhunter, a splendid horseman. His mind and tongue were quick. He was courtly with the ladies. He had little money; Disraeli, who made it his business to know such things, told the Queen in another letter that Randolph’s father was “not rich for a Duke,” and virtually everything would pass to the new MP’s elder brother anyhow.52 Nevertheless, “Randy,” as he was known to the whispering galleries and sounding boards of London society, was a popular member of the “fast” set headed by the Prince of Wales. Randy’s chief attractions were his social standing, his eligibility, and his faultless dress, for he was very much the dandy. And he enjoyed his kaleidoscopic social role. He detested dancing, yet he never turned down an invitation to a ball.
In time he might have overcome his youthful impetuosity, but time was denied him. His greatest misfortune, though he didn’t know it then, was a consequence of what was surely the cruelest of all Oxford pranks. Years later he described it to Louis Jennings, a close friend, and Jennings passed it along to another of Randy’s friends, Frank Harris, editor of the Fortnightly Review. One evening at Merton a small group of students were discussing a favorite undergraduate topic: the relationship between masters and servants. Randy had firm views on this. He believed the aristocracy knew instinctively how to handle menials and that the rising merchants—he once told Harris that he regarded them as “jumped-up grocers from Ballarat and shopkeepers from Sydney”—would never learn. That evening he was eloquent; he was applauded; a fellow student handed him an enormous stirrup cup of champagne; he drank it off. It had been drugged. He awoke at daybreak with a ghastly taste in his mouth. He was in a strange room. The wallpaper, in his words, was “hideous—dirty.” He turned his head and sat bolt upright, gasping. There was an old woman lying beside him; “one thin strand of dirty grey hair” lay on the pillow. His hopeless questions to Jennings evoked the chilling horror and the pathos of his plight: “How had I got there? What had happened to bring me to such a den?” Did he remember anything? Pas trop; the stirrup cup, and now this. Rising quietly, he slid into his trousers. Abruptly, the hag awoke and grinned. She asked hoarsely: “Oh, Lovie, you’re not going to leave me like that?”53
Lord Randolph Churchill at the time of his marriage
Lord Randolph Churchill in his prime
Randolph vividly recalled that she had “one long yellow tooth in her top jaw that waggled as she spoke.” Obviously, she expected to be paid—this was the ultimate master-servant relationship. Emptying his pockets, he threw all the money he had on the bed. Her leer grew. Speechless, he struggled into his waistcoat and coat and bolted. As he slammed the door he heard her call, “Lovie, you’re not kind!” Then, said Randolph, “Downstairs I fled in livid terror.”* He knew his peril; he made for the nearest doctor’s office. There he was treated with a strong disinfectant, but three weeks later a venereal sore appeared on his genitals, followed by lesions elsewhere. He returned to the physician, who treated him with mercury, warned him to abstain from alcohol, and told him he had nothing to worry about. It was a lie. Victorian medicine, confronted with such symptoms, was helpless. Thus it was that at the height of the 1873 Season, even before his entrance into public life, the elegant twenty-four-year-old bachelor son of a duke, the cynosure of aspiring debutantes and their ambitious mothers, was a doomed syphilitic.54
On this deckle-edged invitation—it still exists; the Churchills, the biographer ardently notes, saved everything—a feminine hand later wrote, below “To meet,” the name “Randolph.” Certainly Clarissa (“Clara”) Jerome hoped that she and her three daughters would meet someone interesting. Lately Europe had been a disappointment to them. Clara had begun to long for Newport, or even the Jeromes’ New York mansion on Madison Square. She took the Franco-Prussian War as a personal affront. She and her daughters—Clarita, Leonie, and Jeanette (“Jennie”)—had adored the Paris of the Second Empire. Beginning in 1858 they had lived in a palatial apartment on the Champs-Elysées. Clarita had made her debut at the Tuileries and had been the guest of Napoleon III and Eugénie at Compiègne. Jennie had been scheduled to come out in 1870. She had already been fitted for her gown when Louis Napoleon sent Wilhelm a rude note. Wilhelm of Prussia replied—at Bismarck’s urging—with the ruder Ems telegram, and suddenly the two armies were lunging at each other. In the beginning Clara saw no need for alarm. French confidence was boundless. And neutral observers thought it fully justified. The Pall Mall Gazette of July 29, 1870, predicted that the first Napoleon’s triumphs were about to be repeated. The Times felt an Englishman would be justified in laying his “last shilling on Casquette against Pumpernickel.” The élan of Louis Napoleon’s soldiery could scarcely have been higher. They pored over the maps of Prussia which had been issued to them, studied German phrase books, and eagerly looked forward to heroic attacks gallantly carried out by them and their comrades crying “En avant! A la baïonnette! A Berlin!” to the strains of “La Marseillaise.”55
It was “unthinkable,” the London Standard said, for the Prussians “to take the offensive.”56 General Helmuth von Moltke and his general staff disagreed. They had built their railroad grid with war in mind, had profited by William T. Sherman’s brilliant use of railways in Tennessee, and had mastered the coordination of telegraph lines and troop trains. Three weeks after war had been declared, Moltke had efficiently mobilized 1,183,000 Germans, backed by more than 1,440 Krupp cast-steel cannon. The French, who regarded efficiency as a pedestrian virtue, weren’t ready. They collided with massed battalions wearing spiked helmets and uniforms of Prussian blue singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” and “Deutschland über Alles” and chanting “Nach Paris!” While their deadly artillery, outranging Louis Napoleon’s obsolete bronze guns, flung shattering barrages ahead of them, they blazed a trail which would be followed by their grandsons in 1914 and their great-grandsons in 1940. Suddenly news reached the Champs-Elysées that half the French army was bottled up in the mighty fortress of Metz. At Sedan the other half, led by Louis Napoleon himself, laid down their arms and accepted humiliating surrender terms. Paris lay open to the invader.
Clara and her daughters fled to Cowes, the fashionable British seaside resort on the Isle of Wight. They moved back to Paris the following spring, taking a house in the boulevard Haussman, but the city had been devastated by the Commune, the leftist regime which had defied the Prussians and their own countrymen until starved into submission. Returning to Cowes, the Jeromes leased what Clara called a “sweet little cottage” and were frequently seen there and in London, attending balls, recitals, receptions, and musicales, and other highlights of the Season. Most weekends found them on the great country estates. Unlike the Frenchwoman whose naiveté spoiled a perfectly good English breakfast, they were not shocked by careless interpretations of the marriage sacrament. Clara’s husband slept with many women in New York; she knew it, knew that he had sired several illegitimate children, and was indifferent. Her grandson Winston relished telling of a meeting between Clara and one of Leonard Jerome’s mistresses; Clara said: “My dear, I understand how you feel. He is so irresistible.” But a lady’s sexual emancipation was possible only after matrimony. As long as the Misses Jerome remained single, they must also be maidens. At least one of them was straining at the leash. A photograph of the mother and her daughters, taken at about this time, shows her seated, facing left, regarding the world with a resolute jaw and eyes like raisins. Clarita, also seated, is holding her mother’s hand and searching her face, as though for guidance. Leonie, standing, leans on her mother’s shoulder for support. Jennie, however, doesn’t seem even to be a part of the group. She was already known as “a great showoff.” Here the show is well worth watching. Dark, vivacious, and magnificent, she stands alone, staring boldly at the photographer, her left arm outflung, the hand atop a furled umbrella, her hips cocked saucily. It is almost a wanton pose, the posture of a virgin who can hardly wait to assume another position.57
Mrs. Jerome and her daughters (from left): Leonie, Clara, and Jennie
Their Cowes home was a “cottage” in the sense that the sprawling Newport châteaux were called cottages. Leonard was seldom there, but when he crossed the Atlantic—usually at the helm of his own yacht—he expected to find his family living in style. He was an American type peculiar to his time, a vigorous, handsome man, a brokerage partner of William R. Travers and a member of the New York Stock Exchange who repeatedly amassed, and then spent, enormous portfolios of wealth. As Winston told the story, “My grandfather would devote himself to work and in a short time make a fortune. Then he would give up the life completely, disappearing for a year or two, generally to Europe. When he came back to New York he might have lost the fortune he had made, and at once set about piling up another. Money poured through his fingers. He generally had an income of about £10,000, perhaps equal to £40,000 now. My grandfather thought nothing of spending $70,000 on a party, where each lady found a gold bracelet, inset with diamonds, wrapped in her napkin.”58
In his careening career, Leonard seems to have succeeded at almost everything he tried. He founded the American Jockey Club, built a racetrack in the Bronx, supported an opera house, was for a time a part-owner of the New York Times, participated in politics, spent eighteen months as American consul in Trieste, gambled heavily and successfully, and was the first man to drive a team of racing horses four-in-hand down Broadway. Like many other Wall Street millionaires of that period, he held mixed feelings about the English aristocracy. He envied their power; Britain was a mightier nation than the United States, and an English peer was a great figure throughout the Empire and beyond. But Americans were also proud, especially self-made men. Having reached the top of a mobile society, they scorned those whose future had been assured at birth. After all, Britain’s patricians and New York’s financiers came from the same stock. Leonard was the great-great-grandson of a Huguenot who had arrived in what were then the American colonies in 1710. Leonard’s wife’s family had settled in Connecticut by 1650. There was one faint blemish in Clara’s otherwise pure Anglo-Saxon blood, one which later delighted Winston: her grandmother had been an Iroquois Indian. But that merely made her more colorful. Both Leonard and Clara were descended from American officers who had fought in the War of Independence. One, a major in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, had served with Washington at Valley Forge. To be sure, the Jeromes would be unlikely to place obstacles in the path of a titled British son-in-law. Palmerston had predicted: “Before the century is out, these clever and pretty women from New York will pull the strings in half the chancelleries in Europe.”59 Louisa Caton, the daughter of a Baltimore merchant, had been Lady Hervey-Bathurst and then, after her first husband’s death, Duchess of Leeds. Minnie Stevens became Lady Paget; Mrs. Arthur Post, Lady Barrymore; Mary Leiter of Chicago, Lady Curzon and vicereine of India. And Consuelo del Valle, who had been Jennie’s schoolmate, would soon be Duchess of Manchester. So a Jerome girl wouldn’t find herself in altogether unfamiliar company. Leonard and Clara might have been pleased by the thought. At the same time, they would have bridled at the suggestion that she was marrying up.
The shipboard dance at Cowes aboard the cruiser Ariadne was considered a major social event and even a historic occasion, for the guests of honor were the future Czar Alexander III and his czarina, Maria Feodorovna. Today they are forgotten, part of the legacy which was destroyed with the last of the Romanovs, but one question asked that evening by an acquaintance of the Jeromes, by an obscure dandy named Frank Bertie, is memorable. Although Jennie had a full dance card, she happened to be standing alone, watching the bobbing Chinese lanterns and the entwined British and Russian flags overhead and listening to the Royal Marine band, when Bertie appeared at her elbow with a pale youth. Bertie said: “Miss Jerome, may I present an old friend of mine who has just arrived in Cowes, Lord Randolph Churchill.” Jennie inclined her lovely head. Randolph stared. She was nineteen, at the height of her glory, bare-shouldered and sheathed below in a flowing white gown with flowers pinned to the bosom. After some hesitation, he invited her to dance. The quadrille proved to be beyond him; he tripped and suggested they sit this one out. They did. Her dance card notwithstanding, they sat out the next one, and then the next, talking of horses and mutual friends until Clara, wondering uneasily where her daughter might be among all these virile naval officers, sought her out. Before leaving, Jennie persuaded her mother to invite Randolph to dinner the following evening, accompanied by a British colonel for the sake of appearances. At the dinner Randolph seems to have tried hard to be clever, without much success. Afterward Jennie and Clarita played piano duets. Randolph whispered to the startled colonel: “If I can, I mean to make the dark one my wife.” They left, and Jennie asked her sister what she thought of Randolph. Clarita wasn’t impressed. She thought his manner pretentious and his mustache absurd. She doubted she could learn to like him. Jennie said: “Please try to, Clarita, because I have the strangest feeling that he’s going to ask me to marry him.” If he did, she said, “I’m going to say ‘yes.’ ” Her sister laughed, but in three days, during a stroll in the Cowes garden, the two became engaged.60
Leonard’s first response was apprehension. When Jennie wrote him the news he replied, “You quite startle me. I shall feel very anxious till I hear more. If it has come to that—that he only ‘waits to consult his family’ you are pretty far gone…. I fear if anything goes wrong you will make a dreadful shipwreck of your affections. I always thought if you ever did fall in love it would be a very dangerous affair.” Letters from her and her mother brought him around, however. Once persuaded, his optimism was irrepressible. In Wall Street the panic of ’73 was at its peak. He had been all but wiped out. But he never doubted that he would win it all back—as he did—and on September 11, giving the marriage his blessing, he wrote Jennie: “I must say I have been very happy all day long. I have thought of nothing else. I telegraphed your mother immediately that I was ‘delighted’ and that I would arrange £2,000 a year for you which she says in her letter will do. The letter I recd from you the other day only filled me with anxiety. I feared nothing would come of it and that you would be left shipwrecked. The situation as related by you today leaves no reasonable doubt of the accomplishment of your hopes. The consent of his paternal [sic] I should say must follow when he learns that moderate provision can be made for you and that our family is entirely respectable—all that can be said for any American family.”61