CHAPTER XXXIV

LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL--BEING MOSTLY PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS

I venture on an anecdote or two, which I have told elsewhere but imperfectly, those whom it concerns being now dead or retired. They were three; Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, and Mr. Archibald Forbes; all at that moment in the splendour, the blinding splendour, of their gifts and powers. It was after luncheon. The ladies had gone. Lord Randolph had been Secretary of State for India, and Forbes, like Lord Randolph, had lately been in India, and the talk turned upon India. All three were men who spoke their minds; not at all an uncommon practice in this country, where men dissent freely, and even bluntly, from the expressed opinion of others, and no offence taken. Lord Randolph and Forbes differed sharply. Neither stood in awe of the other, or of any man. Forbes would make a statement. Lord Randolph would answer:

"I know you have been in India but from what you say I shouldn't suppose you knew where it was."

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Lord Randolph would go on to point out what he thought Forbes's mistakes; then Forbes:

"Yes, you have ruled India but the real India is a sealed book to you."

And so on. Presently they discussed the Indian Civil Service and Mr. Chamberlain came to the front. In the new Civil Service lay, he thought, the hope of India. Appointments were no longer jobbed. A new class of men were brought into the service by examination, well taught, well trained, competent, and drawn from the whole people of England. Lord Randolph listened impatiently, interrupted now and then, but on the whole listened. When Mr. Chamberlain had finished Lord Randolph burst out:

"I have heard that before. No greater nonsense was ever talked. What is the Indian Civil Service; or rather, what was it? A boy of twenty went out as a clerk. From Calcutta he was sent up country, nominally in charge of a bureau, really to govern a district. He did govern it. He had passed no examination. Very likely he couldn't tell you the date of the battle of Plassey or the lineage of a native Prince. He had no mathematics, no Latin, and probably couldn't spell. But he had character. He knew how to govern because he came of a governing class. And he was a gentleman."

"Whereas now"--looking steadily at Chamberlain--"instead of gentlemen you get men from--Birmingham and God knows where."

Chamberlain, who seldom declined any {319} contest to which he was invited, sat cool and smiling while Lord Randolph launched his shafts. When he had emptied his quiver the member for Birmingham, still cool and smiling, observed that he thought it was time for us to join the ladies; and we did. Instantly the sky cleared. India was forgotten. The two combatants walked upstairs arm in arm, and the storm was as if it had never been.

The little scene in which Lord Randolph Churchill was the chief actor brings that vivid personality once again vividly to mind. Indeed, it is never long absent from the general memory. He has left a mark on the public life of this country which will last as long as anything lasts. And he has left a portrait of himself in the memory of all who really knew him. Besides which, he has left a son who does not allow us long to forget his existence or his relation to the affairs of the moment. A great authority was quoted quite lately as saying, "Winston is an abler man even than his father." I asked him whether he said it. "No, I said cleverer, not abler," which seemed a very just distinction.

I have not really much to add to the account of Lord Randolph which I wrote in January, 1895, upon his death. I adhere to all I then said. The estimate seems to me fair, if not complete. The years that have passed take nothing from Lord Randolph's fame. If anything, they add to it. And for this reason: his conception of the political future of his country was a true conception. {320} To him the year 1884, with its revolutionary enlargement of the suffrage, was the turning point of modern English history. The middle classes vacated the throne they had occupied since 1832. The working classes succeeded to their inheritance. Their power has steadily grown. They are two-thirds of the electorate to-day. They have, it is true, but 30 out of 670 Members of Parliament, but these figures are in no respect representative of their real authority. They and the Irish Nationalists hold the balance of power in the House of Commons. They returned fewer members to the House this year than in 1906, but that was because of an arrangement between them and the Liberals--for value received. And no man doubts that the power of the Labour Party will hereafter increase and not decrease. For the first time in the history of England they openly proclaim their purpose to legislate and to influence legislation in the interest of a single class and not in the interest of all classes and of the country as a whole. Their excuse is that they are a majority. But the day when a majority takes no account of the minority, or thinks a minority has no rights which the majority is bound to respect is a black day in the history of any country.

But this, in substance if not in detail is what Lord Randolph foresaw and announced; and he was the only man to foresee it. He did not disdain, as Mr. Gladstone did, to look ahead, to form to himself some conception of what the future of England was to be with this rising tide of Democracy. {321} His conception, as I said, was a true conception, and the political genius of the man was never more clearly visible than in this forecast, and in the means he proposed to himself and to his party for dealing with a situation absolutely new.

Lord Randolph's Dartford speech in 1886 will therefore remain a monument to his sagacity. It was a speech which may be read to-day with profit and admiration. So may that at Birmingham, of which "Trust the People" is the motto. I will go farther. If I wanted a body of political doctrine to put into the hands of an American student of English politics I would as soon offer him Lord Randolph's speeches as any other. There is no complete collection but there are the two volumes edited by Mr. Louis Jennings and published by Messrs. Longmans in 1889. They cover a period of only nine years, 1880-8, but they are a handbook to the political life of England for a generation. Lord Randolph had this rare merit--rare in this country--he dealt habitually with principles, and his treatment of political questions was not empirical but scientific. And he was absolutely fearless.

He was fearless alike in public and private, and he looked his own fortunes in the face whether they presented themselves to him with the promise of good or of ill. He knew he was a doomed man. He cast his own horoscope shortly before he flung that fatal card upon the table which lost him the game in his long contest with Lord Salisbury. He said:

"I shall be five years in office or in opposition. {322} Then I shall be five years Prime Minister. Then I shall die."

And he was right as to the length of his life though a perverse fate and his one fatal miscalculation, "I forgot Goschen," falsified the rest of his prediction. Mr. Winston Churchill queries this saying but I am inclined to think it authentic.

Many of these matters I used to hear Lord Randolph discuss in private, and even now I suppose they must remain private though the impression his talks left may fairly be described. I listened to his views on finance--long before he was Finance Minister--through nearly the whole of a long summer afternoon. We were at Cliveden. That beautiful possession had not then passed into Mr. Astor's hands. It still belonged to the Duke of Westminster, and had been lent by him to the Duchess of Marlborough--widow of that seventh Duke of Marlborough who was Viceroy of Ireland--and Lord Randolph's mother. The Duchess was a woman who may always be adduced in support of the theory that qualities of mind and character descend from mother to son. She was a woman of great natural shrewdness and force, with an insight into the true nature of such things as interested her; and the one thing that interested her above all others was her second son, Lord Randolph.

"Come for a drive after lunch," said Lord Randolph, and we went in a dog-cart to Burnham Beeches and Taplow and elsewhere for many miles and hours through the woods which are one {323} of the glories of that delightful country. It was a perfect afternoon. You were not the least disposed to ask with Lowell, "What is so rare as a day in June?" Rather:

In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon.

And always June. That is one of the enchantments of this versatile climate. When in a good mood you think it will be always good. And the enchantments in and about Cliveden were many and to-day are many more.

To all of them Lord Randolph seemed for the moment insensible. His mind was upon Finance, and upon Finance he discoursed during the better part of three hours. To the sunlight and the flower-strewn hedges and the far-stretching forests he paid no more attention than he did to his driving. The horse took his own pace, and being a well-trained animal showed a sensible preference for his own side of the road.

Lord Randolph's talk was not much more than thinking aloud. His financial opinions which became afterward, like those of all Chancellors of the Exchequer, rigid, were in process of formation. Now and then he asked a question about the Treasury in America but for the most part his monologue was a soliloquy. I know few things more instructive than to see a mind like his at work. He thought as he talked on, but the sentences fell from his lips clean-cut and finished. He {324} was not announcing conclusions nor laying down laws. Finance was then comparatively new to him. He would take up any idea or view as it occurred to him, hold it before him, look at it from all sides, and either drop it or put it on a shelf till he could see how it fitted with the next. I said as he pressed a proposal--I have forgotten what:

"You break with all tradition."

"What do you suppose I am here for? Have you ever known me to adopt an opinion because somebody else had adopted it?"

And in truth I had not, nor had any one. Part of his charm lay in his independence; and a large part. He was fettered by no restrictions nor overborne by any authority. Once only, as he told me at another time, did he find himself "in the presence of a superior being," Mr. Gladstone, to wit. "I could argue, but before the man himself I bent." But I have related that story in the paper referred to above. Yet we find Lord Randolph telling Prince Bismarck, who asked him whether the English people would exchange Mr. Gladstone for General Caprivi:

"The English people would cheerfully give you Mr. Gladstone for nothing but you would find him an expensive present."

Of Prince Bismarck, however, Lord Randolph seems not to have received the same impression he did of Mr. Gladstone, high as is the tribute he pays him. There had been a little friction. In 1888, in Berlin, Prince Bismarck had refused to see {325} Lord Randolph, or to meet him at lunch at Count Herbert's, and he calls the great Chancellor a _grincheux_ old creature who kept away because Lord Randolph had used all his influence "to prevent Lord Salisbury from being towed in his wake." But at Kissingen, in 1893--Lord Randolph, alas, being no longer in a position to influence, nor Prince Bismarck, alas, any longer Chancellor of the Empire he had created--there was a meeting. Lord Randolph wrote an account of it to his mother, and the letter, a most picturesque letter, is given in the _Life_. Lord Randolph felt the fascination the Prince could exercise when he chose, and pays due tribute to him. But it is admiration, not awe, he feels in the great German's presence. In truth, Lord Randolph had said savage things of Prince Bismarck in days past, as well as of Mr. Gladstone. "If you want to sup with him you must have a long spoon."

The domestic and personal side of Lord Randolph had a fascination quite other than that of his political life. Simplicity was one note of it; that and the absolute freedom from affectation which is natural to a man whose courage is equal to every demand. I began meaning to be domestic and personal but I shrink from saying most of the things I should like to. Two summers in succession he had an old Elizabethan house near Egham, known as Great Forsters; the house still encompassed by a moat, mostly dry. I had always thought him at his best in his own home, where, whoever might be his guest, he recognized {326} his obligations as host, and his manner softened and the lawlessness of his tongue was restrained.

This impression grew stronger with these visits. It happened that two of their guests, his and Lady Randolph's, were attractive to both of them as well as to the rest of the world. The two were the beautiful Duchess of Leinster and Sir Henry Drummond Wolff. The Duchess of Leinster was at that time in the full splendour of her loveliness. I had never seen her except at a ball or dinner or on some other social occasion, in the glory of a toilet and of her shoulders and diamonds, when she was perhaps the most resplendent object to be seen in London. At Great Forsters she went about during the day in the simplest of gowns. She was less dazzling but not less charming. As for Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, he and Lord Randolph set each other off. Their intimacy was both political and personal. If I may use such a word of two men, I should say they were on affectionate terms. Both of them were capable of cynicism but that only made their affection the more striking. There were no ties of blood but as you looked on this little group and listened to their talk, which was both easy and brilliant, you felt as if you were present at a family gathering.

II

Lord Randolph Churchill despised two things which (I am told) are much respected in the {327} United States; public opinion and money. Of course, in public life he had to take account of public opinion and he was a very good judge of it, and in 1886 he taught his party to take account of it. But what I mean is that, while he admitted and asserted the necessity of calculating forces as the first business of a statesman, he was never subservient to that majority which he sought to make his own. He was not frightened by names and he did not shrink from unpopularity. He told Prince Bismarck at Kissingen that nobody in England cared a rap what the papers said, which meant that he (Lord Randolph) did not care a rap. Yet at opportune moments he used the Press with skill. Or, if I ought not to say used, he availed himself adroitly of the Press to serve his own purpose. His midnight journey to _The Times_ office in Printing House Square in order to tell Mr. Buckle that he had resigned from Lord Salisbury's Ministry and that his resignation had been accepted is a case in point. It is just conceivable that Mr. Buckle took, or might have taken, a more lenient view of Lord Randolph's _coup de tête_ from having the exclusive news of it. It is, at any rate, conceivable that the resigning Minister imagined, or hoped, a friendly opinion would be expressed.

I will give a very different instance which came to my knowledge directly. At the time of the great dock strike which disordered and threatened to destroy all the waterside industries of the port of London, Cardinal Manning sided with the {328} strikers. He was a prelate who often mixed politics with his religion or, to put it more charitably, with his ecclesiastical polity. He went to the East End and made a speech at the strikers' meeting, undeterred by the fact that they were threatening violence, and he wound up by giving £25 to the cause of these enemies of public order.

All this came out in next morning's papers. Toward noon I went to see Lord Randolph. He was full of the subject and his sympathies with the men were evident. He had read Cardinal Manning's speech and, with certain reservations, approved of it.

"Do you think he ought to have given money to encourage disorder?"

"What do you mean by encouraging disorder? The men are out of work. They and their wives are starving. I would gladly give £25 myself if I had it."

Nevertheless, I suppose no act of Cardinal Manning, nothing he did in his extremely variegated career, brought upon him more or better deserved censure in the Press than the countenance he gave to this very dangerous industrial rebellion. The censure upon Lord Randolph would surely have been not less severe. But what cared he? Lord Randolph, I ought to add, had been during a great part of his too short political life the friend and champion of the working men. He believed them to be the necessary support of the Conservative Party without which, as the event proved, that party could win no great {329} victory at the polls. He believed them to be, as a body, like the majority of the English people, irrespective of party, essentially Conservative. He was ready to do what he could to lighten and brighten their sometimes dreary lot. It was not only as a politician that he interested himself in their fortunes. He had a man's sympathy with other men less fortunate than himself.

Less fortunate, but perhaps not always much less. For what I said above about Lord Randolph's indifference to money was true during nearly all his life, and was shown in many ways to his own hurt. He had the usual younger son's portion, and in this country of magnificent estates the younger son's portion is of the most modest description. Not otherwise than by reserving the great bulk of the family wealth to eldest sons, one after the other, can these magnificent estates be kept together and kept magnificent. But Lord Randolph's tastes and ambitions were nowise in proportion to the slenderness of his income. The present Mr. Winston Churchill in his most admirable _Life_ of his father has made some reference to two occasions in which questions of money became critical. He has said so much that I think I may say a little more.

The first was in anticipation of his marriage. Mr. Jerome had the ideas of the average American father about settlements. Lord Randolph's ideas on that subject were English. There was a collision between the two. The wooer had already announced to his father, the seventh Duke of {330} Marlborough, his attachment to Miss Jerome and the Duke had agreed provisionally to the engagement. Mr. Jerome had agreed, but his views about money threatened to break off the negotiations. At the end--they had lasted seven months--Lord Randolph "refused utterly to agree to any settlement which contained even technical provisions to which he objected." He delivered to Mr. Jerome what his biographer rightly calls an ultimatum. He was "ready to earn a living in England or out of it" without Mr. Jerome's help, and in this the girl agreed with him. Mr. Jerome capitulated. Perhaps the difference between them was more a matter of form than anything. The terms of the final agreement are not stated in the _Life_. They have often been stated in London where everything on every subject of human interest is known, and where it was always understood that Mr. Jerome agreed to settle £2000 a year on his daughter and son-in-law, with remainder to the children, duly secured by a mortage on the University Club house in Madison Square. But what I ask you to notice is the readiness of Lord Randolph to fling away an income far larger than he had ever had unless it came to him on such terms as he thought right and unless his English views were accepted by this American father.

The other instance relates to South Africa. When he went to Mashonaland, in 1891, he borrowed £5000 from a good and staunch friend whom I should like to name--well, why should I not? I mean Lord Rothschild, whose kindnesses {331} to men of every degree and of all religions and races have been innumerable. If ever a great fortune paid, in the long-ago phrase of Mr. Chamberlain, a ransom, his has paid it; not compulsory but from true good-will to men. Lord Randolph invested the £5000 in Rand gold mining shares on the advice of that American engineer of genius, Mr. Perkins, who inferred from the dip of the gold-bearing reefs the direction and depth at which they could be overtaken by shafts sunk far south of the actual gold area. The world knows the result and is the richer by hundreds of millions for the vision which pierced the outer crest of the earth and saw the treasures hidden below. Mr. Perkins was, in fact, the engineer whom Lord Rothschild had sent to South Africa with Lord Randolph. They had gone through Mashonaland together vainly, and the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer now invested his £5000 in Rand shares. But values of that nature require time and being in want of money he sold two-fifths of his investment. The remainder he held till his death when it was disposed of for something over £70,000. A comfortable fortune to leave? Yes, comfortable enough to pay the debts of the estate. That was one form which his contempt for money took. He lived on the principal. It is no matter of censure. He was born and built that way. The strain of frugality in the first Duke of Marlborough had worn itself out.

My last meeting with Lord Randolph was at Tring, Lord Rothschild's place in Buckinghamshire. {332} He was already in the grip of the illness which was to destroy him; nervous, irritable, restless in manner, haggard to look at, and his speech uncertain. I don't like to think of it and I mention it only for the sake of the contrast. For now and again the old brilliancy reappeared, and the old charm. He had both in a measure given to few men. Wilful as he was, with a freedom of speech which overpassed the usual social limits, he had also when he chose the graces and gifts which made him beloved of men and of women. No man made more enemies; but in this world--by which I mean this world of England and other worlds where the English people have built new civilizations--it is not enmities which count but friendships.

Whether you saw him in the House of Commons, leading it as no man had ever led it, or at a dinner, or on the platform, or, if you like, on the Turf or in other places which the Puritan thinks of the devil, he had the same ascendancy. He said once to Lord Rosebery that to both of them their titles had been helpful in public life. No doubt, but something besides a title descends or may descend, to him who bears it. Not every son of a duke has upon him the stamp of the patrician. That is what Lord Randolph had. An imperious temper, an intellectual disdain of natures from which intellects had been omitted, moods of black despair late in life, but all through life the set resolve to win his battles without much thought of the cost--all these he had, and no one {333} of them nor all of them broke or impaired the spell he laid upon those about him.

Narrow means never stinted his generosity. Uncertain health never stilled his passion for work. I never went into his library that I did not find him busy. I have seen him at dinner turn away from the distinguished woman who passed for the most amusing of talkers to devote himself to a neglected stranger. When he quarrelled with the Prince of Wales (King Edward) and went into a kind of social exile for seven years, while he was quite aware of the price he was paying, he never dreamed of surrender. When Lord Salisbury, not choosing to remember or perhaps not able to remember his services and his capacities, passed him over in 1891 for the last time, and gave the leadership of the House of Commons to his nephew, Mr. Balfour, he writes to his wife: "All confirms me in my decision to have done with politics and try to make a little money for the boys and for ourselves." On his release from party obligations he sought others, and his sister, Lady Tweedmouth, between whom and himself there was on both sides a devoted attachment, persuaded him to see something of men from whom he had held aloof. Mr. Gladstone was among these, and I end with Mr. Gladstone's remark about Lord Randolph:

"He was the courtliest man I ever met."

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