CHAPTER XXII
A great deal has been written about Lord Randolph Churchill by those like Sir Henry Lucy, who met everyone and knew no one. And Randolph Churchill was not easy to know. The mere outward facts about him and his career have been set forth by his son in two stout volumes, an admirable official Victorian biography distinguished by the remarkable fairness used to explain every incident in his political career, a politician writing of a politician. But of the man himself, his powers, his failing and his quiddities, hardly a soul-revealing word; yet Winston might, nay, probably would have written a real life, had not Randolph been his father, and had he not had his own political career to consider. However, it must be confessed that the sympathy between father and son was very slight. Winston told me once that time and again when he tried to talk seriously on politics, or indeed on anything else, his father snubbed him pitilessly. 'He wouldn't listen to me or consider anything I said. There was no companionship with him possible to me and I tried so hard and so often. He was so self-centred no one else existed for him. My mother was everything to me.'
So remarkable a personality was Lord Randolph Churchill and such a whispering gallery and sounding board at the same time is London society that it would be almost possible to paint him in his habit as he lived by a series of true anecdotes. Winston enlivened his pages with a couple.
Everyone will remember how as a mere youth Randolph 'scored' off Tom Duffield, the Master of the Old Berkshire hounds. In the winter of 1868, when Randolph was not yet twenty years old, he had the ill luck one day to ride very close to the hounds and got himself violently scolded by the irascible old Master: he went off the field at once without replying. But at a hunt dinner shortly afterwards, when he was made chairman by his mother, who was always putting him forward, he was called on to propose the toast of fox hunting, and Mr. Duffield was to respond. Randolph began by declaring himself an enthusiast for all forms of sport. 'Fox hunting first, but I've often had good sport after hares. So keen am I that if I can't get fox hunting or hare hunting, I'll go with terriers after rats in a barn; and if I can't get that,' he added, pausing, 'why, rather than dawdle about indoors, I'd go out with Tom Duffield and the Old Berkshire.' A pause of consternation while everybody wondered what would happen; but it was Tom Duffield himself who burst into a peal of good-natured laughter and made of the story a classic.
For years and years, indeed from his entrance into the House till 1886, it was Randolph's courage chiefly that commended him to the House of Commons.
It may have been mainly aristocratic morgue, but Englishmen liked it none the less on that account.
It is usual for the extremists in a reform party to criticize their more conventional leaders, but this procedure is very unusual among Conservatives. From the beginning Lord Randolph showed this audacity, with a contempt, too, for titular authority that would have been marked, even in a Radical. In 1878 he attacked a Minister, ponderous Sclater-Booth, in a way that rejoiced the House.
'I don't object,' he said, 'to the Head of the Local Government Board dealing with such grave questions as the salaries of inspectors of nuisances. But I have the strongest possible objection to his coming down here with all the appearance of a great lawgiver to repair, according to his small ideas and in his little way, breaches in the British Constitution.' And then the witty sneer that set the House roaring: 'Strange,' he went on, as if speaking to himself,
'strange, how often we find mediocrity dowered with a double-barreled name!'
Sclater-Booth's harmless little bill introduced the elective principle timidly into County Government. Randolph attacked it as of 'brummagem-make,' a 'most Radical measure, a crowning desertion of Tory principles, a supreme violation of political honesty.' Everyone went out of the House comparing this with Disraeli's famous attacks on Peel.
A little later Randolph spoke on Irish education in the most liberal and pro- Irish spirit. Thanks to the years he had passed in Dublin when his father was Viceroy, he knew Ireland and Irish matters better than almost any English politician and so established his reputation for brains as well as audacity. The House always filled to hear him, even more than for any Minister. In spite of the fact that he was still a bad speaker, now too loud, now too low, always dependent on his notes and frequently at a standstill, confused by their volume, he was the greatest attraction in the Chamber; and in the beginning of the Parliament of 1880 the Bradlaugh incident gave him his first real opportunity. He changed his seat to the corner seat below the gangway and at once made himself the head of the new group composed of Drummond Wolff, Gorst and Arthur Balfour, which he himself christened the 'Fourth Party,' as Winston relates. For the next seven years Randolph Churchill was incontestably the most sensational figure in the House of Commons, and long before the defeat of Gladstone's government he was recognized as the ablest Conservative in the Chamber. The House of Commons has a very strong schoolboy element in it, and Gladstone's defeat was symbolized to everyone by the fact that hardly were the division figures given to the Opposition Whip, when Randolph jumped up on his corner seat and started all the cheering!
Naturally, he became Leader of the House and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative Ministry of Lord Salisbury, and here another trait showed itself, his gratitude. Randolph took care that all supporters should be rewarded: Wolff was made a privy counsellor and Gorst an un-der-secretary of state: honor to the Jew and a salary to the needy.
I remember, after I had got to know and like Lord Randolph, lunching on Sunday at Mrs. Jeune's when he was at the same table. Almost before lunch was finished, Lord Randolph got up and excused himself with 'urgent business' and left the room, followed closely by the Conservative Whip. In a few moments, to our astonishment, this gentleman, Winn, if my memory serves me truly, returned, pale as a ghost and evidently too angry to choose his words. When Mrs. Jeune pleasantly asked him, 'Has anything happened,' he replied, 'A piece of brutal rudeness entirely unprovoked. Yesterday Randolph came to me and said he wanted half an hour's talk. I had to tell him I was too busy then. He asked me to meet him here today, said he'd leave early, begged me to follow his example and we might have half an hour's quiet talk. A little against my habit, I consented; you saw how I followed him; in the hall I asked him, 'Where shall we go for our talk?' He cried, 'Can one never get rid of you and your talks!' and flung out of the house. I was never so insulted in my life!' The poor gentleman seemed almost unable to get over the shock to his dignity; we all commiserated with him while secretly diverted by Randolph's rudeness.
But no one who wishes to win in English political life, not even a Duke's son, can afford to be habitually rude, and especially not to a Whip of his own party. When a day or two later I mentioned the fact to Lord Randolph, he merely grinned. 'I had forgotten,' he said, 'that I asked him to follow me, but he's rather a fool.' Still, men intent on gaining and keeping power should learn 'to suffer fools gladly,' as St. Paul knew.
Another story here that should have found a place before his triumph. He dined with me one night-if I remember rightly, at the short-lived Amphitryon Club-and afterwards he took me with him to a meeting at Paddington, where he was 'billed' to speak. The dinner had been excellent and the Perrier-Jouet of 1875 was, I think, about the best champagne I ever drank. We had a magnum, and for the first and last time in my knowledge of him, Randolph showed himself a little excited, or perhaps I should say, reckless. At any rate, I had never heard him speak so well: in his own constituency, with none but friends and admirers about him, he spoke without notes. Usually he wrote out his speeches and learned them by heart and even then depended on notes for the sequence of subjects and special phrases. This night he talked extemporaneously, and to my astonishment adapted without knowing it a thought in the second part of Goethe's Faust to the condition of English politics at that moment. He began by predicting that a general election was at hand, and 'which party will win in it, is the question of questions. The Liberals and Mr. Gladstone are very confident; they know that the working classes hold the balance of power; and the Liberal bourgeoisie think they are nearer the workmen than the aristocratic Conservatives can possibly be. But my feeling is that this earl or that marquis is much more in sympathy with the working man than the greedy nonconformist butcher or baker or candlestick maker. I want you to seize my point because it explains what I have always meant when I spoke of myself as a Tory-democrat. The best class and the lowest class in England come together naturally: they like and esteem each other; they are not greasy hypocrites talking of morality and frequenting the Sunday school while sanding the sugar; they are united in England in the bonds of a frank immorality.'
Naturally I led the cheering, which, however, was curiously feeble and soon died away into half-hearted laughter and much shamefaced grinning. In the pause that followed I looked over the side of the platform to the reporters' table: everyone had dropped his pen or pencil and was waiting for the rest of the speech. Randolph spoke for some time longer and, I thought, with effort, as if to efface the impression of his great and true word.
