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ISBN-13:

9781418555238

Publisher: Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date: 03/01/2010
Series: Christian Encounters Series
Sold by: THOMAS NELSON
Format: eBook
Pages: 192
Sales rank: 124,657
File size: 360 KB

John Perry graduated cum laude from Vanderbilt University, with additional studies at University College, Oxford, England. Before beginning his career as an author in 1997, he was an award-winning advertising copywriter and radio producer. John has published 21 books as an author, collaborator, or ghostwriter. He is the biographer of Sgt. Alvin York, Mary Custis Lee (wife of Robert E. Lee and great granddaughter of Martha Washington), and George Washington Carver. Among other books, he has also written about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial (Monkey Business, with Marvin Olasky, B&H Publishing, 2005) and contemporary prison reform (God Behind Bars, Thomas Nelson, 2006). He is a two-time Gold Medallion finalist and Lincoln Prize nominee. He lives in Nashville.

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WINSTON CHURCHILL

By John Perry

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2010 John Perry
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59555-306-5

Chapter One

FIRST LESSONS

To his mother's great surprise, Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, in the middle of a party. Jennie Jerome Churchill had been enjoying the St. Andrew's Day ball after a day of shooting at Blenheim, her father-in-law's monumental estate in Oxfordshire, two hours by train from London. Along with the other ladies up for the weekend, she had followed the men on the hunt that morning, then taken a bumpy ride in a pony cart. Once the contractions began, the process advanced so fast she couldn't make it upstairs to her room. Her child was born in a long-vacant bedroom on the first floor serving as a cloakroom for the evening. Originally it had been part of the household chaplain's apartment, though later generations considered it inconvenient and uncomfortable. There were no baby clothes in the house, so the newborn wore an infant's tiny white nightshirt borrowed from a neighbor in the nearby village of Woodstock.

Announcing the news in a letter to Jennie 's mother, her husband wrote that the birth was caused by a fall.

Jennie had been married only seven months when Winston arrived. He could have been premature, yet seemed by all accounts to be a full-term baby. This would explain why his parents'wedding had not been the great society affair typical of the British aristocracy. Jennie was a Brooklyn-born American whose wealthy father, Leonard Jerome, had made and lost several fortunes in stocks, real estate, and trade. He named his middle daughter in honor of the famous soprano Jenny Lind, who was likely his mistress at the time his daughter was born. The Jeromes lived in Italy when Jennie was a girl, and her mother, Clara, loved European society. Mrs. Jerome was a take-charge, self-confident kind of woman whose ancestors included an officer in George Washington's army and a great-grandmother who was full-blooded Iroquois. After two years in Trieste, New York seemed boring and unfashionable, prompting Clara to move with her three marriageable daughters to Paris in search of adventure, culture, and titled husbands.

In the summer of 1873, when Jennie was nineteen, her mother rented a villa for the season on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England. During their stay they were invited to a party aboard the Prince of Wales's yacht, the HMS Ariadne. Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill, second surviving son of the seventh duke of Marlborough and a friend of his royal highness, was also aboard, and Jennie met him that afternoon. Three days later they were engaged.

Neither family got what they expected from the match. The duke saw the Jeromes as crass, self-made American tradesmen; the second son of an English duke was a notch below the French prince or count Clara was trolling for on Jennie's behalf. Even so, each side had something the other badly wanted. Marlborough craved some of that crass American money to shore up his badly depleted finances and maintain his gargantuan estate. And Clara allowed that becoming Lady Randolph Churchill might be a suitable goal for her daughter Jennie after all.

In the end, the Jerome family snagged their noble pedigree, and the duke received a handsome settlement from his new American relatives. Like many old noble families in Britain, the dukes of Marlborough were rich in property and poor in cash. The duke's income from his various estates historically amounted to u40,000 a year, roughly equivalent to $6 million today. This, it turned out, was scarcely enough to keep the lamps lit: some dukes had incomes four or five times as high. For months the Jeromes and Spencer-Churchills haggled over the dowry, with Leonard Jerome finally agreeing to a marriage settlement of u50,000, about $7.5 million in modern dollars, on which Lord Randolph would draw u3,000 per year in interest. The duke added an allowance of u1,200 on top of that.

By tradition the duke's second son should have been wed with all the pomp and panoply Blenheim could muster, a celebration marking one of the highlights of the London social calendar. Instead, Randolph and Jennie were married quietly at the British embassy in Paris on April 15, 1874. The duke and duchess were conspicuously absent. Though the Prince of Wales sent his secretary as his personal representative, the event was so low-key, there wasn't even a wedding announcement in the London Times. The duke and Jerome both seemed eager to hush up the news rather than crow with fatherly pride. At least there was a big welcome-home party for Lord Randolph and his bride at Blenheim, including the traditional honor of estate workers unhitching the carriage horses at the train station and pulling the couple home in the traces themselves.

Winston Churchill's birthplace was (and remains) one of the largest and most opulent private homes ever built. Blenheim had been conceived as a gift from a grateful nation to the first duke of Marlborough, John, and his wife, Sarah, for the duke 's victory over the French during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1704. The king of Spain had died without an heir, and various European powers, including England and France, were jockeying to take advantage of the situation. Marlborough defeated the armies of Louis XIV in the Battle of Blenheim, which gave its name to the palatial home.

The house was unfinished and hopelessly over budget when the duke and duchess fell out of favor with their benefactor, Queen Anne, and all work on the project ground to a halt. Later, King George I helped them finish construction. By the time all was completed, the house had cost the modern equivalent of $100 million, not counting the many bills that were never paid.

Succeeding generations of dukes found the house ill suited for daily living and ruinously expensive to maintain. The kitchen and dining room were on separate floors; the lead roof covered three acres; the painters counted a thousand windows; the library was 180 feet long, or about two NBA basketball courts end to end.

Over the generations the house changed along with succeeding dukes' interest in art, architecture, spiritual matters, gardening, hunting, politics, and various aspects of family life. John, the first duke, commissioned magnificent tapestries illustrating his famous battlefield victories. Later dukes added great paintings, libraries, sculpture, and other treasures to the house and grounds. John also employed a personal chaplain (whose apartment his ninth-generation grandson Winston would be born in) and tempered his military outlook with a genuine sense of piety. His wife, Sarah, had a different view of religion, declaring that the church was "a spell to enchant weak minds."

Winston's grandfather, John Winston Spencer-Churchill, the seventh duke, had a religious viewpoint that picked up where the first duke left off, though none of it seems to have rubbed off on his son Randolph, Winston's father. Inheriting the dukedom in 1860, he declared, "I cannot be grateful enough to God for all the goodness He has shown me. My position here is really, of its kind, quite perfect, and if only I keep well I am thoroughly satisfied."

The seventh duke seems to have been pious in the extreme. His first bill in the House of Lords after taking his ancestral seat was to observe the Sabbath by forbidding military bands to play in parks on Sundays. And he shared the disapproving Victorian view of any art from earlier times that displayed voluptuous, sensual nudes, regardless of its quality or value. He ordered nine Titians and a Rubens removed from his walls and locked in a room above the bakery. When the bakery caught fire in 1861, the paintings were destroyed. The next day at morning prayers the family sang, "God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform."

Blenheim was a historic, grand, influential little world safely enfolded in the arms of the mighty British Empire. Great Britain was the most powerful nation in history, eventually commanding one-fourth of the world's population and almost a third of its land mass. For nearly three hundred years since defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588, Britain had been the unchallenged ruler of the oceans as well. In the imperial balance, the British demanded raw materials and cheap labor from their far-flung colonies in return for the blessings of civilization: roads, railways, schools, hospitals, Western-style government (whether they wanted it or not), and the Christian religion (ditto).

It was, in fact, a culture awash in the trappings of Protestant Christianity. At her coronation thirty-seven years before Winston was born, Queen Victoria swore the monarchs' ancient oath to uphold the Anglican Church. Winston's father and every other member of Parliament recited an oath of loyalty in the name of God before they took office. Yet for all its part in the fabric of public life in Victorian England, religion meant little to most people. It was so commonplace as to be invisible. As it has through so much of history, a mask of religious conformity and moral propriety hid people 's true thoughts and actions.

It was thanks to a slip of that mask that Winston's earliest childhood memories were not of Blenheim or his parents' home in London, but of Ireland. Winston's uncle Charles, Marquess of Blandford and heir to the dukedom, was a notorious womanizer who had a liaison with the Countess of Aylesford. The countess was also a mistress of the Prince of Wales, whose long list of affairs was an open secret. When the countess became pregnant, the prince wanted the marquess to divorce his wife and marry the countess to relieve him from any implied responsibility. The marquess refused, and Lord Randolph, trying to help his brother, foolishly went to the Princess of Wales threatening to publish her husband's letters to the countess. He warned that if he did, her husband "would never sit upon the throne of England," adding, "I have the crown of England in my pocket."

When the prince, oldest son of Queen Victoria and later King Edward VII, learned what Lord Randolph had done, he challenged him to a duel. Randolph refused to risk killing the heir apparent and offered an apology instead. The prince accepted, but the doors of high society slammed shut on Randolph and Jennie; they became instant social outcasts. Victoria's prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, came up with a face-saving solution that would get Randolph out of the public eye long enough for tempers to cool. He appointed the Duke of Marlborough Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the king's viceroy, with Randolph going along as his private secretary. And so young Winston, who by then had already sailed the Atlantic to meet his American relatives, moved to Dublin a month after his second birthday.

Since 1801 Catholic Ireland had been an unwilling member of the Protestant United Kingdom. By the time Lord Randolph took up his duties in Dublin, a movement by Catholics promoting Irish autonomy was well established and sometimes violent. Years later Churchill remembered walks outside the vice-regal lodge in Phoenix Park and seeing men his nurse told him were members of Sinn Fein, which she considered a dangerous pro-independence, anti-British mob of hooligans. A friend they met in the park one afternoon was murdered days later, possibly by the same people. In the nurse 's mind there was no doubt those young thugs were murderers.

Ireland's history was peppered with religion-inspired violence. Young Winston went to visit Emo Park, seat of Lord Portarlington, who, Churchill later wrote, "was explained to me as a sort of uncle. Of this place I can give a very clear description, though I have never been there since I was four or four and a half. The central point in my memory is a tall white stone tower which we reached after a considerable drive. I was told it had been blown up by Oliver Cromwell. I understood definitely that he had blown up all sorts of things and was therefore a very great man."

Typical of the Victorian upper-class attitude about children, Lord and Lady Randolph spent almost no time with Winston or his little brother, John Strange Spencer-Churchill, born in 1880 in Dublin. Randolph busied himself with his duties and his politics while Jennie moved in the British social circles and became renowned for her grace and skill at fox hunting. Winston's first memory of his mother was "in Ireland in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud.... My mother seemed to me like a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power. She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly-but at a distance."

It was Elizabeth Everest, the boys' nurse, who took care of them day and night and gave them the love, affection, attention, affirmation, and instruction they needed and that no one else was there to give. Trying to say "woman," Winston christened her "Woomy," and addressed her and wrote to her as "Oom," "Woom," or "Woomany" for the rest of her life. Woomany fed the boys their meals, took them on their walks, and held them when they cried. Woomy was with Winston when he was tossed from a donkey in Dublin and got a concussion.

Early on in their lives she gave the boys generous doses of her own religious viewpoint, which was Low Church (simple in practice as opposed to the pageantry of official Anglicanism) and anti-Catholic. Winston remembered her being "nervous about the Fenians" in Ireland. "I gathered these were wicked people and there was no end to what they would do if they had their way."

Woomany also taught Winston his first lessons, until Lady Randolph felt it was time to begin a more formal education and hired a nursery tutor named Miss Hutchinson when Winston was five or six. While he had loved learning by doing and exploring with Woomany, something approaching real schoolwork was a bore. The tutor started teaching Winston reading and arithmetic, an irritation that prompted him to hide outside in the shrubs when it was time for class. Preshadowing both his trouble in school and his natural inclination to command, he rang for the maid after one especially dreary session. When the servant arrived he instructed her, "Take away Miss Hutchinson. She is very cross."

The duke and Lord Randolph returned to England in 1880, Randolph to immerse himself in national politics and, along with his wife, gradually rejoin the social set his conflict with the Prince of Wales had closed off to them four years before. Lord and Lady Randolph settled into a fashionable house in London, constantly on the go, entertaining frequently, and making up for lost time during their Irish exile. Under Woomany's care, their sons divided their time between London, Blenheim, and summer trips to Mrs. Everest's relatives on the Isle of Wight. Her brother-in-law, John Balaam, took Winston on long walks and told him stories about shipwrecks and the Zulu wars in Africa. At Blenheim there was always riding and games, along with swimming and boating in the lake.

This idyllic life ended abruptly when his parents decided to send him away to boarding school, the standard for educating older boys from wealthy families while the girls continued with tutors at home. Winston dreaded the idea of leaving the comfort and familiar surroundings of the nursery for an unknown place filled with strangers. His mother took him to St. George's School in Ascot, one of the most fashionable and expensive schools in the country, and stayed for tea with the headmaster before she left. Winston was, he later recalled, "miserable at the idea of being left alone among all these strangers in this great, fierce, formidable place. After all I was only seven, and I had been so happy in my nursery with all my toys. I had such wonderful toys: a real steam engine, a magic lantern [an early form of slide projector], and a collection of soldiers already nearly a thousand strong. Now it was to be all lessons."

The next two years were among the most miserable of Winston's life. The headmaster at St. George's, Herbert Sneyd-Kynnersley, was a high Anglican, anti-Catholic archconservative who has gone down in history as a wild-eyed sadist. Though at least one of Winston's classmates considered the headmaster "the only real positive influence" on Winston during his years there, and another student decided Kynnersley was "stupid rather than sadistic," Churchill's recollection in My Early Life, an autobiography published in 1930, leaves an indelible mental image. The headmaster's floggings, with a birch rod, typically consisted of twenty strokes on a boy's bare bottom, though by the third blow or so the rod was drawing blood. The beatings were, Churchill believed, more severe than anything that would be tolerated in a state reformatory.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from WINSTON CHURCHILL by John Perry Copyright © 2010 by John Perry. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

1. First Lessons....................1
2. Brighton and Harrow....................14
3. Sandhurst....................27
4. Angling for Adventure....................40
5. Fighting and Writing....................52
6. From Prison to Parliament....................65
7. This Delicious War....................77
8. In and Out....................91
9. Wilderness Years....................104
10. His Finest Hour....................119
11. Victory and Defeat....................134
12. Well Worth Making....................145
Notes....................159
Bibliography....................165
About the Author....................167

Winston Churchill

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