At dawn on the 30th of November 1874, a child was born in a small room off the great hall of Blenheim Palace, and the counting began almost at once. He was named Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, and the official account was that he had arrived early, brought on by a fall and a jolting carriage ride. But seven and a half months was close enough to a full term that every calculating mind in society did its arithmetic and reached a scandalous total: the baby, the whispers ran, had been conceived before the wedding. It was the first of many times the world would count against his mother, Jeanette Jerome, known all her life as Jenny.
She had arrived in London only a few years earlier, an American girl no one quite knew what to do with. Born in Brooklyn on the 9th of January 1854, the second of three daughters of Leonard Jerome, a Wall Street speculator the newspapers called the King of Wall Street, she had grown up inside the swing of his fortunes. He made and lost millions on railway shares and gold and the wild markets of the Civil War, spending as fast as he earned on private theaters and racehorses and the opera singers he liked to keep near him. Her mother, Clara, ambitious for her girls and impatient with the snobberies of New York, took the daughters to Europe in the late 1860s.
They lived first in Paris in the last glittering years of the Second Empire, where Jenny absorbed the French, the manners, and the music that marked her for life. She was a serious pianist, trained to a level that astonished the professionals who later heard her play. When the empire fell in 1870 and the Prussians closed on Paris, the family crossed to London, and it was there, on the edges of a society that prized blood above money, that Jenny came of age. What people remembered first was the way she looked.
The diplomat Lord D’Abernon left the most famous account after watching her enter a room: “There was more of the panther than of the woman in her look,” he wrote. “More of the cat than of the lady in the way she moved. ” And there was the detail the drawing rooms whispered about. On her right wrist, just where a bracelet might sit, she wore a tattoo of a coiled snake, covered with a band of diamonds and left to the world’s wonder.
In an age when respectable women did not mark their bodies at all, it was an extraordinary thing. They met at a summer ball by the sea at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in the first week of August 1873, during the regatta week that drew all of fashionable England to the water. Across the room was a slight, intense young man with prominent eyes and an enormous mustache, the second son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough. His name was Lord Randolph Churchill, and he was twenty-four years old.
Within three days of meeting, he had proposed and she had accepted. It was not a courtship in any sense the age recognized. It was a collision. Both families were appalled, for mirror image reasons.
The Duke of Marlborough saw loud American money with no pedigree behind it. Leonard Jerome was no more pleased to be condescended to by a Duke who needed his money more than he admitted. The result was nearly a year of hard negotiation conducted by lawyers over how much an American father would pay to place his daughter inside a British aristocratic family that did not want her. Leonard eventually agreed to settle fifty thousand pounds, but he attached a condition that scandalized the Marlborough lawyers: one thousand of the yearly income must be settled on Jenny herself, as her own money, to do with as she pleased.
In England in 1874, that simply was not done. A wife with independent income was a near revolutionary idea. By sheer stubbornness, he pressed the principle into the contract, reaching across the Atlantic to press a sliver of freedom into his daughter’s hand before the door of the marriage closed behind her. The wedding was fixed for the 15th of April 1874, at the chapel of the British Embassy in Paris.
The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough pointedly did not attend. She was twenty years old. She had got what she wanted in three days and held it through a year of opposition. She was Lady Randolph Churchill now.
The young couple was taken up almost at once by the fastest and most glamorous circle in England, the set that gathered around Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, the heir to Queen Victoria’s throne. The Marlborough House set, named for the Prince’s London residence, was a few hundred people who had quietly agreed to live by rules different from the ones the rest of Victorian England preached. Below the surface of respectability, the set conducted its affairs, its gambling, its enormous debts, and its discreet adulteries, protected by a code of silence and by the simple fact that the future king was at its center. A married woman might take a lover, provided she was discreet, had first given her husband an heir, and never caused a public scene.
The Prince liked beautiful women, clever talk, and people who could amuse him. Jenny was all three at a level few could match. To be noticed by the Prince was to be made. Then, in the spring of 1876, Randolph did something so reckless it slammed every door shut at once.
His elder brother, the Marquess of Blandford, had embarked on an open affair with a married woman, Lady Aylesford, while her husband was away in India with the Prince of Wales. When Lord Aylesford threatened divorce, the scandal threatened to drag the Prince himself into a public courtroom. Randolph, fiercely loyal to his brother, got hold of indiscreet letters the Prince had written to Lady Aylesford and took them to the Princess of Wales, making the threat plain: if the divorce went ahead and his brother was named, the letters would be made public. It was, in effect, an attempt to blackmail the future king of England.
The Prince’s response was total. He let it be known that he would not enter any house that received Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill. In a society organized entirely around who dined with whom, this was annihilation. Invitations stopped.
Doors swung shut. The family’s solution was a kind of honorable banishment. The seventh Duke of Marlborough accepted the post of Viceroy of Ireland, and he took Randolph with him as his private secretary. In the winter of 1876, the young Churchills left London under a cloud and remained in Ireland for the better part of three years.
For Jenny, it was exile in the fullest sense. But cut off from the glittering distractions, she threw herself into the life around her, hunting hard across the Irish countryside, an audacious rider who took fences that frightened the men, and she began for the first time to take a serious interest in politics and the machinery of power. In 1880, she gave birth to a second son, John, always called Jack, but by then the marriage had cooled from its three-day fever into something more like a partnership of convenience, and tongues murmured that Jack’s father might not be Randolph at all. Not a shred of it was ever proved.
It belonged to gossip, not to record. By the end of the 1870s, the Prince’s anger had cooled enough for a negotiated reconciliation, and the Churchills were allowed back into the world that had cast them out. Jenny returned older, harder, cleverer, and more determined. The Prince sought her out, invited her to the intimate dinners, the country house parties, the inner gatherings of his set.
Whatever exactly passed between them across thirty years cannot be proved in the way a date can be proved; the closeness is fact, and the mistress is the strong claim of those who knew the set best. What can be said without hesitation is what the relationship gave her. The favor of the prince was the single most valuable asset a woman in that society could hold. It meant protection, position, the assurance that no hostess would dare to slight her.
While the 1880s advanced, a central love entered her life. Count Carl Kinsky was an Austrian aristocrat of ancient family, a diplomat posted to the London embassy, and one of the great horsemen of his generation. In 1883 he rode his own horse, Zoedone, to victory in the Grand National, the first amateur and the first foreign gentleman ever to win it. He was charming, daring, beautiful to look at, and some years younger than Jenny.
With Kinsky, Jenny wanted what her marriage could no longer give her. The accounts of those who knew her speak of a depth of feeling she showed for no one else, a hope that one day she might be free to be with him. The love and the marriage made their claims on her in different rooms, and she answered both and told the truth of neither. Through the early 1880s, Randolph underwent a transformation as sudden as his courtship.
He reinvented himself as the most exciting politician in England, gathering a small band of allies the press christened the Fourth Party, coining the slogan “Tory democracy,” and selling it from platforms across the country. Jenny was a full partner in this. Her drawing room became one of the most important political salons in London, the place where alliances were made and her husband’s career advanced through the ceaseless work of a brilliant hostess. She campaigned for him at a time when wives did not do such things.
The marriage that had cooled as a romance had become formidable as a machine. In the summer of 1886, at the age of thirty-seven, Randolph became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons at once. He was, in effect, the second most powerful man in the country, and the obvious next step was the office of Prime Minister itself. Then, at the end of 1886, he gambled his whole career on a single threat.
As Chancellor, he wanted deep cuts in spending, including cuts to the army and navy estimates that the service ministers refused to accept. Rather than negotiate, Randolph threatened to resign, certain that the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, could not afford to lose him. Salisbury accepted the resignation without a fight. In a single exchange of letters over the Christmas of 1886, Randolph resigned the second most powerful position in the British government, and he never held office again.
He was thirty-seven, and his career was over the moment it should have been beginning. What followed was worse. Through the late 1880s and into the 1890s, his decline became impossible to ignore and impossible to discuss. His speech began to slur.
His moods swung from black depression to wild grandiose excitement. He grew paranoid. His hands trembled. In the House of Commons, where he had once held the chamber spellbound, he rose to deliver speeches that rambled and faltered.
The diagnosis his doctors recorded was general paralysis of the insane, the medical name for the final stage of syphilis attacking the brain after lying dormant for years. The family knew, the doctors knew, and the word was never said aloud. A strand of modern medical opinion has challenged the diagnosis, suggesting a brain tumor instead, but the mainstream of historical opinion still holds to the original. What is not in doubt is that Randolph was dying by inches of something that destroyed his mind before it took his body, and that his wife watched every stage of it.
In the middle of 1894, with Randolph visibly failing, his doctors settled on a desperate plan: a long voyage around the world, through Asia and the Americas, in the hope that travel and rest might slow the disease. Jenny agreed and went with him. It was months of travel by ship and train with a patient whose brain was failing and whose conduct grew more unpredictable by the week. She nursed him, managed him, covered for him, thousands of miles from home, with the burden falling almost entirely on her.
And it was during this voyage, while she was locked into the long duty of her husband’s dying, that the other blow fell. Word reached her that Count Kinsky, the man she truly loved, had become engaged to another woman, a young Austrian countess many years her junior. The timing was almost too cruel to credit. At the exact moment Jenny was chained by duty to a dying husband and unable to act, the one door she had quietly kept open in her heart was closed for good.
She could do nothing but read the news and go on nursing Randolph through the next bad night. The voyage could not save him. They returned to England at the end of 1894, his mind almost gone. Randolph Churchill died on the 24th of January 1895 at his mother’s house in London with Jenny near him.
He was forty-five years old. He was buried at the little church at Bladon, near Blenheim. Jenny was a widow at forty-one, still beautiful, still magnetic, and for the first time in her adult life she belonged to no one. But the freedom came stripped of the things that had made her position.
She had a tangle of debts, expensive habits, and a reputation fixed beyond changing. The lovers, real and imagined, had been totted up, and the legend of the two hundred lovers, set down by her great niece Anita Leslie in a biography published in 1969, had hardened into a settled story. It was an estimate of a long and amorous life, not a counted list, and there is no ledger anywhere that could confirm it. Yet what she did with the wreckage is remarkable.
She threw herself into advancing the career of her elder son, pulling strings and opening doors, pressing her contacts in politics and the press to give the brilliant, impatient young man his chance. Winston later wrote that in those years she was less like a mother to him than like an ally, working in the closest concert with him, more like a sister than a parent. At the moment he most needed a dangerous posting to win his reputation, it was Jenny who worked her contacts to get him there. She used the whole accumulated capital of thirty years in society and spent it without hesitation on her son.
She refused to settle into dignified widowhood. In 1900, at the age of forty-five, she married George Cornwallis West, a handsome young officer of the Scots Guards twenty years her junior, born in the same year as Winston himself. The marriage was a strain almost from the start and ended in divorce in 1914. She founded and edited a lavish literary magazine, a quarterly bound like a rare antique book, so expensive to produce it could never pay its way.
She wrote her memoirs, tried her hand at plays. During the South African War she organized an American-funded hospital ship, the Maine, raising the money and fitting it out to carry the wounded. When the First World War engulfed Europe, she turned her energies to war work again. In 1918, at the age of sixty-four, she married for the third time.
Her new husband was Montagu Porch, a member of the British Colonial Service in Nigeria, twenty-three years younger than she was, younger even than her sons. The world reacted with the mixture of horror and helpless admiration she had been provoking for half a century. A man of sixty-four who married a woman of forty would have drawn no comment at all; reverse the ages, and the same world recoiled. Jenny ignored it entirely and married the man she wanted.
In June 1921, Jenny was staying with a friend at Mells in Somerset. Coming down a staircase in new high-heeled shoes she had bought to look well for Montagu Porch, she slipped and fell and broke her leg. The injury did not heal as it should. Gangrene set in, and within a fortnight her doctors faced the only choice left: to save her life, the leg would have to come off.
As the surgeons prepared to amputate above the knee, she gave an instruction. “Make sure,” she told him, “that you cut high enough. ” Conscious, composed, facing the loss of her own leg, she was thinking clearly about the spread of the infection and the margin of safety. The amputation was done.
For a few days she seemed to be recovering. Then, on the morning of the 29th of June 1921, the great artery in the stump suddenly burst. She bled and fell into a coma, and before her sons could reach her, she died. She was sixty-seven years old.
They buried her at Bladon, in the Oxfordshire churchyard where Randolph already lay, and one day a third grave would join them, for Winston Churchill himself was buried there in 1965. The neglected boy from the nursery came home at last to lie near the mother who had been more like a sister to him. Under the diamonds on her wrist, she had worn all her life the small coiled snake, the private mark beneath the public jewel. The world saw the diamonds and called her a scandal.
It never quite troubled to look at the woman underneath. That was always the real story.