Churchill's Grandmama Read online

  1877-80

  Disraeli appoints John Winston and Frances Viceroy and Vicereine of Ireland to protect their reputation. They work hard and receive a warm response from the Irish.

  1879

  Irish potato crop fails, raising fears of recurrence of 1840s famine. Frances establishes her Famine Relief Fund, appealing for international support. With her voluntary helpers she raises £130,000.

  1880

  With a change in government the Marlboroughs have to leave Ireland. Queen Victoria awards Frances the Order of Victoria and Albert.

  Disraeli becomes Lord Beaconsfield and moves to the Lords.

  John Winston and Frances return to Blenheim to recover from the heavy expense of the Ireland posting.

  1880-

  The Liberals sweep into power with a majority of 146; Gladstone becomes Prime Minister. Sir Stafford Northcote replaces Disraeli. Randolph forms the Fourth Party and gains support for the Conservative opposition. Randolph and Jennie enjoy a hectic public and social life.

  Frances brings Winston and his younger brother Jack to Blenheim. Winston suffers poor health at school and returns to Blenheim.

  1881-2

  John Winston sells the Sunderland Library.

  1883

  John Winston dies. Randolph begins to rise in Parliament.

  1886-92

  Conservatives return to power with Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. Randolph is appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons.

  George, now 8th Duke of Marlborough, sells off pictures and porcelain from Blenheim. Frances goes to live in the London house.

  Randolph threatens to resign over budget proposals and Salisbury accepts.

  1888

  Winston attends Harrow School.

  1892

  Gladstone becomes Prime Minister (Liberal).

  George, 8th Duke, dies. Randolph’s health begins to decline.

  Frances writes regularly to Winston, now at Sandhurst.

  1893

  Independent Labour Party founded.

  Randolph and family move into Grosvenor Square with Frances for financial reasons.

  1894

  Earl of Rosebery becomes Prime Minister.

  Jennie takes Randolph on a yachting holiday.

  1895

  Salisbury becomes Prime Minister.

  Randolph returns home and dies. His funeral is held in Westminster Abbey and he is buried in Bladon churchyard.

  Winston commissioned into 4th Hussars; he progresses with distinction in his Army career but then decides to settle to writing and politics.

  1896

  Winston serves in Bangalore, India.

  Charles (son of George), now the 9th Duke, brings Consuelo, his wealthy American bride, home to Blenheim.

  1898

  Winston in Sudan, attached to 21st Lancers, takes part in last regimental cavalry charge at Omdurman.

  1899

  Death of Frances in London. Her body is brought back to Blenheim to be buried in the crypt beside John Winston.

  Winston resigns from Army. Fails at first attempt to be elected to Parliament. Goes to South Africa as war correspondent for Morning Post to cover Boer War; is captured and escapes. Commissioned into South African Light Horse.

  1900

  Winston returns to England in July; elected to Parliament in October as a Conservative.

  1901

  Death of Queen Victoria. Accession of Edward VII.

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  This is the biography, and I have found no other, of Sir Winston Churchill’s grandmother, Frances, 7th Duchess of Marlborough. As the eldest daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, popular soldier and diplomat, she grew up in one of the major social and political families of the nineteenth century; in addition, her mother the Marchioness was one of the wealthiest women in England. Her childhood was therefore steeped in great historical occasions and names: the Congresses of Vienna and Verona, Tsar Alexander of Russia (with whom her mother was rumoured to have had an affair), the Duke of Wellington (her godfather), Lord Castlereagh (her uncle), Queen Victoria (a personal friend from childhood), Disraeli (her mother’s grateful protégé) and later Gladstone.

  History has not been kind to Frances. Largely owing to the misinterpretation of early accounts the modern record relegates her to obscurity. This book aims to restore her to the position she deserves. It is based on previously unpublished material at Blenheim Palace, graciously given by the present Duke of Marlborough.

  Frances’ arrival at Blenheim as the Marchioness of Blandford in 1843, at a particularly depressed point in the Palace’s history, resulted in its regeneration as a family home; subsequently, as 7th Duchess of Marlborough, she revived it as the social and political focus of both a neighbourhood and nation. Winston’s mother Jennie reveals that ‘She ruled Blenheim and nearly all those in it with a firm hand. At the rustle of her silk dress the whole house trembled,’ but then she adds that she was ‘a very remarkable and intelligent woman with a warm heart, particularly for members of her family’.

  It is this latter aspect of her which forms the basis of my book. She is revealed not only as a force to be reckoned with but also as a woman of great sensitivity and compassion, responding quickly to the distress of the deprived. As a caring and progressive Duchess, she attended to the needs of her staff and estate workers as well as of those in the neighbourhood. As a loving mother, she was extended at times to the limits of her resilience and knew both pathos and tragedy; she was a caring surrogate mother not only to Winston but also to other orphaned or abandoned members of the family. ‘I keep Winston in order because I know you like it,’ she wrote to Randolph one Christmas, a time which Winston often spent with her. ‘He is a clever boy but he needs a firm hand.’ At times she was simply the rock upon which others found strength.

  Towering over all this is her achievement as Vicereine in Ireland, where her husband was serving as Viceroy. Her interest in and care for the weak and deprived are well documented. Her crowning achievement, fully and dramatically retold in this book, is the humanity and leadership together with administrative and organisational skills she showed in effectively averting a potato famine in 1879 which threatened to repeat the wholesale loss of life in the famine of the 1840s. It was this most public international performance which brought her the award of the Order of Victoria and Albert from Queen Victoria herself, normally reserved for members of the Royal Family.

  From her glamorous background, through the dramatic incidents and turmoil of her family and public life, to the years committed to her grandchildren, particularly Winston, this hitherto undisclosed story gives us an indication of the strength of character of this talented woman consigned by history to the shadows. Hers is a story that deserves to be celebrated.

  A note on names: throughout Churchill’s Grandmama I have consistently referred to the 7th Duchess as Frances in order to distinguish her from her mother, Frances Anne, and her daughter Fanny.

  A note on monetary values: figures are quoted as the values of their times; the modern-day equivalent of Frances’ Famine Fund would be approximately £9-10 million and John Winston’s income of £40,000 in the nineteenth century would be equal to around £2 million today.

  Chapter One

  A GLAMOROUS BEGINNING

  * * *

  On a bitterly cold evening in the winter of 1822 a tiny horse-drawn carriage was making its way along a narrow valley in the Austrian Alps, slowly but steadily approaching the small town which still lay a considerable distance ahead. The overhead sky was gradually darkening to leave a clear but heavily frosty night. The distant mountains, so enchanting during the day, seemed to be closing in and threatening those less imposing aspects of nature.

  The most noticeable occupant of this small vehicle, sitting in the corner of the carriage and anxiously watching the approach of night, was a man of average height and weight, dark in colouring but with a rare animation which was o
verlaid by an expression of grief and sadness only discernible at close quarters. This was Lord Charles Stewart, brave and brilliant soldier of the Napoleonic wars, Adjutant-General to the British Expeditionary Force under the Duke of Wellington, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry and, until recently, His Majesty’s Ambassador in Vienna. This was the man who had fought so courageously alongside Wellington at Waterloo. The heartbreak in his face was for his step-brother Castlereagh, British Foreign Secretary, whose sudden death had left him totally bereft, not only in personal terms but also in terms of his career. As a result he was moving his family to the town of Verona in Italy, where he had been directed by Castlereagh’s successor at the Foreign Office to attend the Congress there before he relinquished his duties.

  Not everyone in the carriage bore such responsibilities. The small cradle opposite him contained a very lively occupant, carefully swathed in blankets to protect her from the weather but nevertheless managing to surface sufficiently to take a keen interest in her surroundings. Two huge blue-grey eyes, resting at the moment on her father’s aquiline profile, took in every aspect of the world around her. Lady Frances Anne Emily was very much awake and alive; this was the future 7th Duchess of Marlborough. At present history scarcely acknowledges it, but she grew to be a remarkable and fascinating woman of considerable achievement, not the least of which was the vital influence she was to have on her grandson, Winston Churchill.

  Her elder brother Harry, her father’s son and heir, was sound asleep in the opposite corner, his blonde hair falling across his forehead in an unconsciously innocent way. Last, but certainly not least, the baby’s mother, the new Marchioness of Londonderry, Frances Anne, was fully awake but had her eyes fixed anxiously on her husband’s face, deeply concerned for the man, 20 years older than herself, whom she loved so passionately and had fought to marry against the advice of her guardian aunt; she had slept no more than he had and was increasingly anxious to reach their destination.

  When one enters the chapel at Blenheim Palace, two statues immediately draw the eye: they are of John Winston Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough (1822-83), and his second son Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill (1849-95), father of Sir Winston Churchill. Of the wife and mother who placed them there, very little trace can be found, and yet the infant with the blue-grey eyes in this frail-looking carriage became one of the most influential duchesses ever to rule ‘this wild and unmerciful house’, as Sarah, the 1st Duchess called it.

  Duchess Frances, as she came to be known in later life, was born Frances Anne Emily Vane-Tempest-Stewart on 15 April 1822 at 21 St James’s Square, London, into a family which had always been significant both socially and politically. The house was rented for her birth by her parents, who wished to be near Charles’ step-brother and his wife, Viscount and Lady Castlereagh, and it cost what her mother described as the ‘immense’ rent of £500 per month. Frances, the second child and eldest girl in a family of six children, was the daughter of two very interesting parents, both of whom emerge from nineteenth-century history as highly colourful characters who certainly left Frances with significant genes to enjoy and pass on to her descendants. Her background provides considerable insight into how she became the remarkable force she did. The qualities and personality she grew up to demonstrate are founded in her own family and the life and experience she gained with them: her strength of character, her strong sense of family, her confidence, her poise, her fortitude, her compassion for the deprived, all were the product of the inheritance and environment which surrounded her childhood.

  Her father, Lord Charles William Stewart, was a member of the Scottish-Irish family of Stewart of Mount Stewart in Ireland, whose members made substantial contributions to British national life in both military and political matters. His reputation was that of a glamorous British soldier, fighting companion of the Duke of Wellington in the Napoleonic wars against France. Born in 1778 and younger by nine years than Castlereagh, his step-brother, he was deeply devoted to him. Although not as intellectual as Castlereagh, he acquired a reputation at Eton for courage and physical prowess, narrowly escaping death when he rescued a schoolfellow from drowning.

  His military career reads like a roll of honour. He joined the 18th Dragoons and in 1803 was made a colonel and ADC to George III. He preferred action to office and in 1809 joined Sir John Moore in Portugal, distinguishing himself in battle and, after Sir John’s death at Corunna, becoming Adjutant-General (i.e. second in command) of the British Forces in the Peninsula to Sir Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington. At the age of 32 he was promoted to Major-General and only ended his military career when, three times wounded, he was invalided home in 1812. At almost the same moment his wife died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving him with one son, Frederick. Castlereagh, at that time Foreign Secretary, made Charles a Knight of the Bath and sent him to Berlin to liaise diplomatically with the Prussian and Swedish armies. In 1814, as the war with Napoleon was brought to an end, he entered Paris with the conquering forces. He was given the position of Privy Counsellor GCB, the title of Baron Stewart of Stewart’s Court and Ballylawn in County Donegal, and appointed British Ambassador to Austria, with special reference to the Congress of Vienna.

  Such a man, of sound character and well respected, could expect to be welcomed by the family of his future wife, but her aunt and guardian, Mrs Angelo Taylor, showed considerable resistance. Lady Frances Anne Vane-Tempest was descended from more than one distinguished line and was one of the wealthiest heiresses in the country. The Vanes were Earls of Darlington; in the seventeenth century Sir Henry Vane of Raby Castle in Durham was Secretary of State to Charles I. The Tempests dated from medieval times in both Durham and Yorkshire; Sir Piers Tempest had fought with Henry V at Agincourt and had been knighted on the battlefield. The vast estates of her grandfather, John Tempest of Wynyard Hall and Brancepeth Castle, came to Frances Anne’s father, Sir Henry, on condition that he added the name of Tempest to his own name of Vane. He also ‘inherited’ John Tempest’s parliamentary seat for Durham City and later, in 1799, married the 18-year-old heiress Catherine, Countess of Antrim. Frances Anne, born in 1800 in St James’s Square, was the only child of this wealthy pair; she did not see much of her mother, who led a frantic social life, but became very attached to her aunt, her father’s sister Frances, Mrs Angelo Taylor, who nursed her through smallpox and later became her guardian. This was the lady who questioned the marriage: Frances Anne was fatherless, she was extremely wealthy, there were almost 20 years between Frances Anne and Charles Stewart, and he already had a son by his first marriage who was only a little younger than Frances Anne.

  Frances Anne did not inherit the exceptional beauty of her aunt or the arresting good looks of her father, but her portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence at the time of her engagement to Charles Stewart shows an attractive young woman with considerable humour and character in her face, a gift which was to serve her much more effectively than beauty, and would be inherited by her daughter Frances. This was the woman and role-model Duchess Frances had before her eyes for the first half of her life; it must have had a profound effect on her.

  What is now known of Lady Frances Anne Vane-Tempest is to some extent drawn from her Journal, which she wrote in 1841 at Wynyard Hall, the family home near Durham, towards the end of her life, because it would be a ‘souvenir of a long, brilliant existence’, intended only for her children.

  Lord Charles Stewart and Lady Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, aged 17, met in 1818 at her mother’s house in Bruton Street, Mayfair. At the age of 41 he was a dashing, handsome man with a brilliant career as soldier and diplomat already established; he was British Ambassador to Austria, based in Vienna, a post from which he supported Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Their further acquaintance led to attachment, but Frances Anne’s aunt and guardian was not impressed. Frances Anne was heiress to an immense fortune in land and productive collieries, providing her with an annual income of £60,000 compared with Charles’s £18,000 and, under
the law as it then stood, on marriage her property would belong to her husband; furthermore, she was a ward in Chancery, which enabled her aunt to delay the marriage by legal proceedings.

  Finally, however, Frances Anne, whose resolve had only been strengthened by this opposition, married her Charles quietly in London in April 1819, when she was given away by the Duke of Wellington, her aunt having been satisfied with a stringent marriage settlement which would protect her fortune from misuse. This meant, in effect, that Charles became tenant for life of his wife’s estate, but the trustees were empowered to suspend his authority if they considered he had acted imprudently in his management of the estates, especially the collieries; nor was he allowed to sell any portion of the landed property unless he made good the sale by the purchase of land or government stock of equivalent value. Charles in due course carefully honoured this agreement.

  Castlereagh, who provided his country house for the honeymoon, wrote at the time about Frances Anne:

  She is not a beauty but she is extremely well-looking, mild and intelligent and innocent … and for her time of life, she seems to have a great deal of decision and character. The situation in which she is placed will require a large share of both.1