Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill (5 page)

Lord Randolph Churchill, the brilliant, talented and arrogant third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, had had an extraordinary political career, made even more remarkable by the fact that he had lived to be only forty-five years old. He had won his first seat in Parliament in 1874, the same year in which he had married an American beauty named Jennie Jerome and his first child, Winston, had been born. By the time he was thirty-six, he was secretary of state for India. A year later, the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, appointed him leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, just one position below Salisbury himself.

Although Churchill had never had the close relationship with his father that he longed for, he had been fiercely proud of Lord Randolph’s public position and had dreamed of one day becoming, if not a trusted adviser, at least a help to him in his meteoric career. “
To me,” Churchill would write years later, “he seemed to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having.” He would never forget walking down the street as a child and watching as men doffed their hats in respect as his father passed by. He scanned the papers, hungrily reading every mention of Lord Randolph’s name, every quotation from his speeches, every word of criticism or admiration. “
Everything he said even at the tiniest bazaar was reported verbatim in all the newspapers,” Churchill would proudly recall, “every phrase
being scrutinized and weighed.”
When at Harrow, the public school he attended as a boy, Churchill had repeatedly begged his mother to send him not just his father’s autographs but even her own so that he could give, or perhaps sell, them to his classmates.

Lord Randolph’s career, however, had been as brief as it was blazing. “
The darling of democracy,” one contemporary writer called him, “a wayward genius who flashed across the political firmament like a dazzling meteor burning himself out too soon.” Famously outspoken and sharp-tongued, he had, from the beginning of his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer, publicly and unapologetically disagreed with many of the other members of Lord Salisbury’s administration. When his first budget was rejected, Randolph, in a cold rage, had written Salisbury a letter of resignation, confident that it would not be accepted. It was.

Years later, Churchill’s mother could still vividly recall her own horror and that of Randolph’s private secretary, A. W. Moore, when they realized what he had done. “
Mr. Moore, who was devoted to Randolph, rushed in, pale and anxious,” she wrote, “and with a faltering voice said to me, ‘He has thrown himself from the top of the ladder.’ ” Not only would Randolph never rise again, he would die eight years later following a long, frightening and excruciatingly public mental decline.

Although the memory of Lord Randolph still haunted the House of Commons, lingering in every spiral of smoke, scribbled note and murmured comment, it was his son who now had Ascroft’s full attention. He had invited Churchill there to ask him a question that could greatly affect both of their political careers. The city of Oldham would be holding a by-election that summer, and Ascroft’s counterpart, James Oswald, who was sixty years old and had long been chronically ill and conspicuously absent, had made it clear that he would not be seeking reelection. Ascroft was, he told Churchill, “on the look-out for someone to run in double harness with him.” Would he like to join the race?

The only barrier now between Churchill and his place on the Conservative ticket was a trial speech, which Ascroft suggested he give in Oldham before the campaign began in earnest. Then a final decision would be made. It was a reasonable and customary formality, but for Churchill the uncertainty was almost unbearable.

It went against every instinct Churchill had to sit still and wait to be called to the test. Desperate to do something, he decided that although he had faith in his star, it couldn’t hurt to peer into the misty future to make sure it was still shining. He was not without connections in this unusual area of expertise. The year before, his American aunt Leonie Jerome had taken him to a mysterious little house on Wimpole Street in the West End of London, just one block from the lushly green and stubbornly round Cavendish Square. This was home, at least temporarily, to Mrs. Charlotte Robinson, arguably the most famous palm reader of her day.

Although the Victorian era is most often associated with scientific progress—the establishment of scientific principles, the advancement of medicine, the development of railroads, steamships, telephones and radios, even the publication of Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
—it was also a time of growing interest and belief in mysticism. Attempting to look into the future and to make contact with the spiritual world was considered a serious pursuit by everyone from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the editors of the prestigious magazine
Scientific American
, who sponsored a contest among mediums to see who could show “conclusive psychic manifestations.” Even Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, had taken part in séances, and when Albert died in 1861 of typhoid fever, the queen had invited to Windsor Castle a thirteen-year-old boy who claimed the prince had sent her a message through him during a family séance.

Churchill’s chosen palmist, Mrs. Robinson, had risen to fame largely because one of her most devoted clients also happened to be one of England’s best-known and most infamous authors: Oscar Wilde. Robinson had told Wilde, who was already famous for his controversial and only novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, that he would “
write four plays, and then you will disappear. I cannot see you at all
after that.” After this prophecy, between the years 1892 and 1895,
Wilde wrote
Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
, all of which were enormous theatrical successes. In April 1895, just two months after his last play debuted at the St. James’s Theatre in London, Wilde was arrested and later convicted of “gross indecency” for his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. He died three years after leaving prison, having written, as Mrs. Robinson foretold, no other plays.

In the wake of Wilde’s conviction, Robinson gained a power and prestige that set her apart from even the most celebrated palmists. She charged exorbitant rates, “
expecting four guineas for the first visit, two for the second, and ten if she writes down her prognostication,” one contemporary newspaper marveled, and refused to appear at parties or private homes, demanding that even her most exalted clients come to her. She had even begun to write a book,
The Graven Palm
, which would become the standard for palmistry in its day.

Unlike her predictions for Oscar Wilde, Mrs. Robinson saw in Winston Churchill’s pale young palm so extraordinary a future that she wanted to describe it in her book. In early May 1899, soon after taking leave of Robert Ascroft in the House of Commons smoking room, Churchill sent Mrs. Robinson a check for £2 2s., presumably in payment for a second, more recent session, and wrote in a letter labeled “Private” that he wished to take the opportunity to compliment her on her “
strange skill in Palmistry.” Three days later, he wrote to her again, turning down her request to tell his story in her book, explaining that he “
would rather not have my hand published to the world,” but confessing that he was impressed by what she had told him. “I trust,” he wrote cheerfully, “you may be right in your forecast.”

Churchill’s rise to prominence was to begin even sooner than he, and perhaps Mrs. Robinson, had predicted. Just a few weeks after
Churchill dropped his letter in the mail, the town of Oldham, in a stunning turn of events, lost one of its representatives to sudden death. It was not, however, the aged and feeble James Oswald, who had long appeared to be at death’s door, but his robust and charismatic partner, Robert Ascroft. Stricken with pneumonia on June 12, Ascroft quickly fell into a semiconscious state. By the eighteenth, his doctors acknowledged that there was “
very little hope,” and by the nineteenth he was dead.

There was less than a month before the election, and the Conservative Party now needed not one candidate but two. The trial speech was forgotten, and Churchill was on the ticket, whether he was ready or not. In his own mind, of course, he was more than ready. He was chomping at the bit. “
There is no doubt,” he wrote to his mother, “that if anyone can win this seat I can.”

CHAPTER 3

THE SCION

A
few days after Robert Ascroft’s death, Churchill arrived in Oldham for the first time in his life. Although the town held none of the glitter of London or the mystery of Bangalore, it was gritty and real, and, in its own way, powerful. Founded in the Middle Ages, Oldham had transformed during the Industrial Revolution from a tiny, thin-soiled hamlet good for little more than grazing sheep to a powerhouse of the textile industry, widely recognized as the cotton-spinning capital of the world. “
If ever the Industrial Revolution placed a town firmly and squarely on the map of the world,” a local historian would declare some seventy years later, “that town is Oldham.”

Churchill, however, was in Oldham for only one reason: to win an election. His first speech there was to be given at the most impressive building in town, the Theatre Royal. Rebuilt after a fire had burned it to the ground twenty years earlier, the theater, a four-story redbrick building, was now perched somewhat awkwardly on Horsedge, a precariously steep cobblestoned street in the middle of town. Its massive front doors, however, flanked by two ornate pillars, its keystone inset with a carved bust of William Shakespeare, opened onto a lavish, Italianate hall.

Inside, three horseshoe-shaped galleries faced the curtained stage, stacked one on top of another and held up by ten Corinthian columns. Although the lower galleries were ostentatiously decorated, the third was noticeably more modest, and the fourth, just visible beneath a large chandelier that hung from the arched ceiling, did not even have seats, only wooden steps on which the audience stood. Every row, from the first to the fourth, was completely filled for the night’s event. In fact, so great was the interest that even in this cavernous hall there was not enough room to accommodate everyone, and hundreds of people had to be turned away.