The Heir Apparent (37 page)

Randolph’s claim that Aylesford wanted to throw his wife into the arms of Lord Blandford seems bizarre, and his allegation that Bertie forced Joe to go to India against Edith’s will was untrue. Afterward, Bertie found letters from Edith (which he showed to the Queen), in which she gave up her opposition to Joe’s visit to India, agreeing with Bertie that “it would be greatly to Lord Aylesford’s advantage that he should accompany HRH.”
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When Bertie received a fifty-page letter from Hardwicke reporting Randolph’s threats, he appealed immediately to the Queen. Victoria was staying at Coburg. She unhesitatingly believed his claim that the letters to Edith were innocent. That Bertie said so was enough—true, it was unfortunate that there were any letters at all, but writing letters, said the Queen with a smile, was a family failing.
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The letters that Bertie wrote to Edith Aylesford in December 1873 were preserved by Francis Knollys, tightly folded in a sealed envelope.
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The first, dated 11 December 1873, was written from Blenheim, where Bertie was staying for a shooting party.

Much of this seems a flirtatious code. Edith’s correct title was of course Lady Aylesford, not Lady Joe, and Joe’s first name was actually Heneage. Bertie was a stickler for correctness, so calling Edith Lady Joe was a form of intimate joshing, as presumably was the sixpence.

In his second letter, written a week later from another house party, Bertie enlarges on the theme of “discretions.”

After discussing arrangements, he ends:

The PS is the closest Bertie came to showing his hand, but even this is arch and playful. Letter number three, written from Sandringham on 26 December 1873, firmly closes the correspondence.

Lord Hartington, to whom the letters were later referred for his opinion, considered that they contained expressions which “are imprudent and which, though possibly meaning nothing, are capable of a construction injurious to the character of HRH.”
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The journey to Russia was of course with Joe, not Edith on her own. The sixpence on Bertie’s chain, and the talk of “discretions” and gifts and secrets: None of this is actually incriminating—just as Bertie’s letters to Harriett Mordaunt had been apparently innocent. But it’s hard to believe that Edith sent him a sixpence for his chain without some sentimental reason; and the talk about discretions, innocent though it may have been,
can be construed as flirtatious, if not sexual. The very fact that he wrote the letters at all was damning. Queen Victoria summed up with pithy acuteness. “She quite believes there was no harm in the letters as she always believed what he says, but a chance expression may be twisted and even the fact of the existence of the letters—harmless as they may be—would create a bad effect.”
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But Randolph’s claim that the letters were dynamite that could rock the monarchy seems laughable.

In 1876, Lord Randolph Churchill was twenty-seven and MP for Woodstock. He wore a bristling waxed moustache and he had inherited the gooseberry eyes of the Churchill family, along with their bad temper. Thin, with an electric, restless sort of energy, he looked younger than he was, and people often remarked on his schoolboy charm. He suffered from mood swings, when he became depressed and paranoid, and he could be brutally rude.
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Randolph claimed that his motive in blackmailing Bertie was to protect the honor of the Marlboroughs by preventing Blandford from divorcing and thus disgracing the family name. As the younger, favorite son, he saw it as his duty, or so he said, to save the family from his dissolute brother. He was envious of Blandford and never ceased to complain that he was a “horrid bore,” “heartless,” “selfish,” and “very bad.”
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It was no coincidence that for Randolph, protecting the family honor involved preventing Blandford from getting his way. At once dutiful and rebellious about his background, Randolph was nonetheless closer to Blandford than he was to his distant father the duke or his overbearing mother, at the rustle of whose silk dress the household trembled.
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In September 1873, Randolph had become engaged to the nineteen-year-old American beauty Jennie Jerome after a whirlwind three-day romance. They had met at Cowes, at a reception given by the Prince of Wales. Randolph’s parents opposed the match, especially as Jennie’s father, the New York entrepreneur Leonard Jerome, had just lost his fortune in the 1873 financial crash. Randolph’s brother Blandford did his best to stop the marriage, too. He told Randolph that he was crazy to marry at twenty-five, and Randolph discovered that he “had been talking … most tremendously against me and telling all sorts of lies about me and entreating my father not to allow it.”
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Desperate to obtain his parents’ consent, as the Jeromes would not allow the marriage unless the Marlboroughs agreed to it, Randolph appealed to his friend Francis Knollys to use his influence with the Prince of Wales. Nudged by Knollys, Bertie wrote to Blandford entreating him to support the match. A copy of the correspondence was sent to Randolph, who described it as “quite the most quiet, sensible and altogether the most gentlemanlike letter I ever read.”
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Randolph showed the letter to his parents, and “it produced a good effect and showed them there are two sides to the question. They are in a much more reasonable humour.”
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Soon afterward, they relented and gave their consent.

At the wedding in Paris in April 1874, Francis Knollys was best man. Bertie gave Randolph a silver cigarette box from Moscow; Randolph told Jennie that HRH was “very cordial and nice, asked much after you and said that … he was very glad that everything was so pleasantly settled at last.”
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Not without reason, Bertie considered that Randolph owed him a debt of gratitude. Thirty-five years later, he remarked of Winston Churchill: “If it had not been for me and the Queen, that young man would never have been in existence.” How so? “The Duke and Duchess [of Marlborough] both objected to Randolph’s marriage, and it was entirely owing to us that they gave way.”
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Jennie’s first child was born at Blenheim in November 1874 after only seven months of marriage. The family insisted that the baby Winston was premature, though it is often suggested that Jennie was already
pregnant when she married.
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No suspicions were raised, however, about the baby’s paternity.

Shortly after the birth, the Churchills returned to their London house on Charles Street. Jennie’s sister Clara, who stayed for six months, wrote: “I don’t know why it is but people always seem to ask us when HRH goes to them. I suppose it is because Jennie is so pretty, and you have no idea how charming Randolph can be.”
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HRH’s engagement diary for 1875 reveals that he dined with the Randolph Churchills on 21 March; they dined with him in Paris on 4 April; he drank tea with Jennie at her house on Charles Street on 15 August.
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The young Lady Randolph had entered Bertie’s life, and would remain his friend on and off for thirty-five years.

Jennie Churchill wrote an autobiography. Published in 1908, this volume of society memoirs is predictably discreet. Bertie’s name barely features, but if, as her great-niece Anita Leslie suggests, he was “toying with the idea” of an affair with her in 1875, her memoirs give a good idea as to what attracted him.
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An American in London, Jennie found herself cold-shouldered as a cross between a “Red Indian” and a Gaiety Girl. She had spent her teenage years in Paris, growing up in the scented hothouse of the imperial court, where her mother was a friend of the Empress Eugénie. As Lady Randolph Churchill, Jennie found herself plunged into the chilly, Old World stateliness of Blenheim Palace. At luncheon, massive silver covers were placed in front of both the duke and the duchess, each of whom carved a vast joint to feed the entire household. Every night at eleven, the family trooped out to an anteroom and, lighting candles, each in turn kissed the duke and duchess good night.
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Jennie scorned the strict etiquette that dictated that Englishwomen, even when married, must always travel chaperoned by a maid. Her “pantherine” style, Native American bone structure, and Paris fashions made her conspicuous among the dowdy Englishwomen in their muslin and sealskin. One of the first of the American women whose invasion
of London society caused a minor social revolution, Jennie had a New World energy and brio that Bertie found irresistible.
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Randolph’s extraordinary anger against Bertie is more understandable if it was fueled by sexual jealousy. If Bertie really was flirting with his wife, then social suicide was perhaps not too high a price to pay.
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Bertie was still fond of Randolph, but Randolph’s ungrateful insolence and his bullying of Alix enraged him. When Lord Charles Beresford returned bearing Randolph’s non-apology, the
Serapis
was at Malta. Bertie decided on a sudden change of plan, delaying his return by an impromptu visit to Spain.

Queen Victoria worried that Bertie would make himself unpopular with the animal-loving English by witnessing a bullfight in Spain.
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The prince refused all bullfight invitations, but his actual destination was far more compromising. He spent three days sightseeing at Seville. Here, as the foreign secretary, Lord Derby, related, he had arranged to meet “a certain Madame Murieta [
sic
], well known in London society.”
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Jesusa Murrieta was the Spanish wife of José de Murrieta, a South American merchant living in London.
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Bertie had scandalized the Foreign Office by traveling to France with Madame Murrieta before he left for India.
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The Murrietas belonged to the London smart set and entertained lavishly at their houses in Kensington Place and Wadhurst in Sussex. They were friends of Jennie Churchill’s, and if Bertie intended by his visit to Madame Murrieta to put Jennie’s nose out of joint, he certainly succeeded. “I have no doubt [HRH] will abuse me,” she told Randolph when she heard about the visit, “as most likely she will talk about me.”
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“Pray be careful your Royal Highness is not taken prisoner like Coeur de Lion on your return from your Crusade,” wired Disraeli to Bertie in Seville.

“Much amused by your telegram,” telegraphed Bertie in reply, but he perhaps did not appreciate the joke.
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Disraeli’s mocking irony always
set him on edge, especially as he suspected the prime minister was laughing behind his hand about the Randolph Churchill affair.

Equally infuriating, someone had leaked the Aylesford affair to the press.
Vanity Fair
carried a titillating paragraph: “With reference to the return from the East there is much talk of the three letters which are said to have been dispatched.” This seems harmless innuendo by comparison with the savage satire of Regency cartoonists or the vile comments in
Reynolds’s Newspaper
about the death of the baby Prince John, but Bertie exacted his revenge. The following year, he refused to meet the connoisseur Lord Ronald Gower, brother of the Duke of Sutherland, on the grounds that he contributed to
Vanity Fair
. When Gibson Bowles, the editor, asked for an explanation, HRH refused to give one; and he had Bowles kicked out of his club, having first checked with his solicitor Arnold White, who gave his opinion that Bowles had “abused the hospitality extended to him, and made public matters which came to his knowledge through a courteous admission into a private society.”
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Bertie’s social sovereignty gave him extraordinary powers to cut, snub, and ostracize.