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Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
One of The Wall Street Journal 's Ten Best Books of 2018
One of The Economist 's Best Books of 2018
One of The New York Times 's Notable Books of 2018
"Unarguably the best single-volume biography of Churchill . . . A brilliant feat of storytelling, monumental in scope, yet put together with tenderness for a man who had always believed that he would be Britain's savior." -- Wall Street Journal
In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman and leader can finally be fully seen and understood--by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Last King of America.
When we seek an example of great leaders with unalloyed courage, the person who comes to mind is Winston Churchill: the iconic, visionary war leader immune from the consensus of the day, who stood firmly for his beliefs when everyone doubted him. But how did young Winston become Churchill? What gave him the strength to take on the superior force of Nazi Germany when bombs rained on London and so many others had caved? In Churchill, Andrew Roberts gives readers the full and definitive Winston Churchill, from birth to lasting legacy, as personally revealing as it is compulsively readable.
Roberts gained exclusive access to extensive new material: transcripts of War Cabinet meetings, diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs from Churchill's contemporaries. The Royal Family permitted Roberts--in a first for a Churchill biographer--to read the detailed notes taken by King George VI in his diary after his weekly meetings with Churchill during World War II. This treasure trove of access allows Roberts to understand the man in revelatory new ways, and to identify the hidden forces fueling Churchill's legendary drive.
We think of Churchill as a hero who saved civilization from the evils of Nazism and warned of the grave crimes of Soviet communism, but Roberts's masterwork reveals that he has as much to teach us about the challenges leaders face today--and the fundamental values of courage, tenacity, leadership and moral conviction.
Author Notes
Andrew Roberts was born on January 13, 1963 in Hammersmith, England. He studied at Gonville and Caius College and earned his B.A. degree in Modern History in 1985. He began his post-graduate career in corporate finance as an investment banker and private company director with the London merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. He published his first historical book in 1991.
He went on to become a public commentator appearing in several periodicals such as The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. Roberts himself is best known for his 2009 non-fiction work The Storm of War A look at the Second World War covering historical factors such as Hitler's rise to power and the organisation of Nazi Germany, the book received the British Army Military Book of the Year Award for 2010. In 2018 his work, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, made the Bestseller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Roberts (Napoleon: A Life) serves up an extraordinary biography of Winston Churchill. A resolutely pro-British empire "child of the Victorian era" who was emotionally neglected by his aristocratic father and frivolous American-raised mother, Churchill by his 20s had already reported from, fought in, and sometimes written books about imperial struggles in such places as Cuba, Sudan, India, and South Africa. He leveraged fame due to an escape from Boer captivity to win an election to British parliament in 1900 at age 25. As first lord of the admiralty during WWI, he was scapegoated for the military fiasco of Gallipoli in 1915 and cast into the political wilderness, which strengthened his nonconformist, independent nature, Roberts writes, helping him when he became prime minister in 1940. Roberts captures Churchill's close working relationship with FDR ("the greatest American friend we have ever known"), his distrust of his chiefs of staff, and his excessive faith in Stalin's promises in 1945. He also captures the man, dispelling the myth that Churchill was prone to depression and revealing his deep love for his wife, Clementine; his egotism, his wit, his loyalty to friends, his penchant sometimes for "selfishness, insensitivity, and ruthlessness"; and his "sybaritic" love of good drink and cigars. This biography is exhaustively researched, beautifully written and paced, deeply admiring but not hagiographic, and empathic and balanced in its judgments-a magnificent achievement. Agent: Georgina Capel, Georgina Capel Assoc. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* For the historian Arthur Bryant, the death of Winston Churchill meant the day of giants is gone forever. But that day dawns again as Roberts retraces the improbable life course that a modern Atlas traverses before fulfilling his boyhood dream of leading Britain through a great national crisis. As Churchill dodges swords and bullets while fighting dervishes in Sudan, Boers in South Africa, and Germans in France, readers see him manifest the physical valor necessary to later lead England through her darkest hour. But Roberts reveals that Churchill's labors as a writer do more than his military adversity to inculcate his unyielding courage. As Churchill pens the histories and biographies that would lead to to a Nobel Prize for literature in 1953, readers see him develop a passionate awareness of history. Roberts identifies one book as a particularly potent influence in priming Churchill for his epoch-making historical role in leading Britain to victory over Hitler: the biography he wrote about his valiant ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough, who, like his descendant, endured political disgrace only to rise again as Britain's wartime hero. Though Roberts frankly acknowledges Churchill's blunders, political and military, this riveting narrative ultimately burnishes the iconic statesman's reputation. A masterful biography, rich in detail and insight.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
in April 1955, on the final weekend before he left office for the last time, Winston Churchill had the vast canvas of Peter Paul Rubens's "The Lion and the Mouse" taken down from the Great Hall at the prime ministerial retreat of Chequers. He had always found the depiction of the mouse too indistinct, so he retrieved his paintbrushes and set about "improving" on the work of Rubens by making the hazy rodent clearer. "If that is not courage," Lord Mountbatten, the First Sea Lord, said later, "I do not know what is." Lack of courage was never Churchill's problem. As a young man he was mentioned in dispatches for his bravery fighting alongside the Malakand Field Force on the North-West Frontier, and subsequently he took part in the last significant cavalry charge in British history at the Battle of Omdurman in central Sudan. In middle age he served in the trenches of World War I, during which time a German high-explosive shell came in through the roof of his dugout and blew his mess orderly's head clean off. Later, as prime minister during World War II, and by now in his mid-60s, he thought nothing of visiting bomb sites during the Blitz or crossing the treacherous waters of the Atlantic to see President Roosevelt despite the very real chance of being torpedoed by German U-boats. Churchill had political courage too, not least as one of the few to oppose the appeasement of Hitler. Many had thought him a warmonger and even a traitor. "I have always felt," said that scion of the Establishment, Lord Ponsonby, at the time of the Munich debate in 1938, "that in a crisis he is one of the first people who ought to be interned." Instead, when the moment of supreme crisis came in 1940, the British people turned to him for leadership. Here was his ultimate projection of courage: that Britain would "never surrender." If courage was not the issue, lack of judgment often was. Famous military disasters attached to his name, including Antwerp in 1914, the Dardanelles (Gallipoli) in 1915 and Narvik in 1940. So too did political controversies, like turning up in person to instruct the police during a violent street battle with anarchists, defying John Maynard Keynes in returning Britain to the gold standard or rashly supporting Edward VIII during the abdication crisis. His views on race and empire were anachronistic even for those times. The carpet bombing of German cities during World War II; the "naughty document" that handed over Romania and Bulgaria to Stalin; comparing the Labour Party to the Gestapo - the list of Churchillian controversies goes on. Each raised questions about his temperament and character. His drinking habits also attracted comment. Such is the challenge facing any biographer of Churchill: how to weigh in the balance a life filled with so much triumph and disaster, adulation and contempt. The historian Andrew Roberts's insight about Churchill's relation to fate in "Churchill: Walking With Destiny" comes directly from the subject himself. "I felt as if I were walking with destiny," Churchill wrote of that moment in May 1940 when he achieved the highest office. But the story Roberts tells is more sophisticated and in the end more satisfying. "For although he was indeed walking with destiny in May 1940, it was a destiny that he had consciously spent a lifetime shaping," Roberts writes, adding that Churchill learned from his mistakes, and "put those lessons to use during civilization's most testing hour." Experience and reflection on painful failures, while less glamorous than a fate written in the stars, turn out to be the key ingredients in Churchill's ultimate success. He did not get off to a particularly happy start. His erratic and narcissistic father, Lord Randolph Churchill, saw the boy as "among the second rate and third rate," predicting that his life would "degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence." His American mother, Jennie, was often not much kinder, sending letters to him at Harrow that must have arrived like a Howler in a Harry Potter novel. Parental judgments became an obvious spur to fame and attention. "Few," Roberts writes, "have set out with more coldblooded deliberation to become first a hero and then a Great Man." After stints in Cuba, India and Sudan, Churchill achieved instant fame during the Boer War after a daring escape from a South African P.O. W camp in 1899. That renown propelled him into Parliament, where he soon added notoriety to his reputation by crossing the floor of the House of Commons, abandoning the Conservative Party for the Liberals. Thereafter, wrote his friend Violet, daughter of the future prime minister H. H. Asquith, he was viewed as "a rat, a turncoat, an arriviste and, worst crime of all, one who had certainly arrived." "We are all worms," Churchill told her. "But I do believe that I am a glowworm." And glow he did, becoming in 1908, at 33, the youngest cabinet member in 40 years and subsequently the youngest home secretary since Peel in 1822. As First Lord of the Admiralty he was credited with making the navy ready for war - his single most important achievement in government before 1940. Even when disaster befell him, Churchill always managed to bounce back. A new prime minister, David Lloyd George, returned him to the wartime cabinet despite the catastrophe of the Dardanelles. When the Liberal Party disintegrated after the rise of Labour, Churchill conveniently "re-ratted" back to the Conservatives, where Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin put him unhappily in charge of the nation's finances. By the late 1930s, out of office and despised for his opposition to appeasement, Churchill seemed finished once and for all. But he was ready. "The Dardanelles catastrophe taught him not to overrule the Chiefs of Staff," Roberts writes, "the General Strike and Tonypandy taught him to leave industrial relations during the Second World War to Labour's Ernest Bevin; the Gold Standard disaster taught him to reflate and keep as much liquidity in the financial system as the exigencies of wartime would allow." Less well known is that Churchill also learned from his successes. Cryptographical breakthroughs at the Admiralty during World War I led him to back Alan Ttiring and the Ultra decrypters in the second war; the anti-U-boat campaign of 1917 instructed him about the convoy system; his earlier advocacy of the tank encouraged him to support the development of new weaponry. Research for a life of Marlborough (a book that Leo Strauss called the greatest historical work of the 20th century) taught Churchill the value of international alliances in wartime. If Churchill's entire life was a preparation for 1940, "the man and the moment only just coincided." He was 65 years old when he became prime minister and had only just re-entered front-line politics after a decade out of office. It would be like Tony Blair returning to 10 Downing Street today, ready to put lessons learned during the Iraq war to work. Had Hitler delayed by a few years, Roberts suggests, Churchill would surely have been away from frontrank politics too long to "make himself the one indispensable figure." Experience certainly did not make success inevitable. In France, Marshal Pétain, revered as the "Lion of Verdun" for his glorious career in World War I, made all the wrong decisions as prime minister from June 1940 onward, equating peace with occupation and collaboration. Churchill was the anti-Pétain, but what was it that made him "indispensable"? Hope, certainly, and an ability to communicate resolve with both clarity and force. Recordings of wartime speeches can still provoke goose bumps. In the end, Roberts sums up Churchill's overriding achievement in a single sentence: It was "not that he stopped a German invasion... but that he stopped the British government from making a peace." That turned out to be the whole ballgame. After the Battle of Britain was won and, first, the Russians and, then, the Americans came into the war, Churchill knew that "time and patience will give certain victory." But it also meant a gradual relegation to second if not third place. Britain had entered the war as the most prestigious of the world's great powers. By its conclusion, having lost about a quarter of its national wealth in fighting the war, Britain had become the fraction in the Big Two and a Half, and was effectively bust. Sic transit gloria mundi. Roberts tells this story with great authority and not a little panache. He writes elegantly, with enjoyable flashes of tartness, and is in complete command both of his sources and the vast historiography. For a book of a thousand pages, there are surprisingly no longueurs. Roberts is admiring of Churchill, but not uncritically so. Often he lays out the various debates before the reader so that we can draw different conclusions to his own. Essentially a conservative realist, he sees political and military controversies through the lens of the art of the possible. Only once does he really bristle, when Churchill says of Stalin in 1945, "I like that man." "Where was the Churchill of 1931," he laments, "who had denounced Stalin's 'morning's budget of death warrants'?" Some may find Roberts's emphasis on politics and war old-fashioned, indistinguishable, say, from the approach taken almost half a century ago by Henry Pelling. He is out of step with much of the best British history being written today, where the likes of Dominic Sandbrook, Or Rosenboim and John Bew have successfully blended cultural and intellectual history with the study of high politics. But it would be foolish to say Roberts made the wrong choice. He is Thucydidean in viewing decisions about war and politics, politics and war as the crux of the matter. A life defined by politics here rightly gets a political life. All told, it must surely be the best singlevolume biography of Churchill yet written. Churchill may have walked with destiny, but it was a destiny he had spent a lifetime shaping. Richard aldous, the author of "Reagan and Thatcher" and "Schlesinger," teaches at Bard.
Choice Review
Acclaimed author and historian Andrew Roberts has produced a striking cradle-to-grave biography of Churchill. Churchill biography is a crowded field but, drawing on previously untapped sources, Roberts's contribution is well worth the read. Roberts is the first Churchill biographer to examine King George VI's extensive notes from his weekly meetings with Churchill throughout the Second World War. He also had exclusive access to transcripts of War Cabinet meetings, unpublished diaries, letters, and memoirs from Churchill's contemporaries, as well as Chequers visitors' books during Churchill's premierships and his wartime monthly engagement cards. The familiar elements are all here--the dramatic background of great events, the dominating figure of the famous statesman glowering his invincible determination--but we also see his vulnerability as a child, his humor, and his generosity toward political foes. Criticisms and mistakes are also dealt with. No doubt the percentages of this blend will not satisfy everyone, but one must appreciate how enormously difficult it must be to encapsulate in a single volume a life that was by no means uneventful and intersected some of the most momentous events in human history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates and above; general readers. --Justin D. Lyons, Cedarville University
Guardian Review
At a time when every fraud and charlatan is taking refuge in spurious fantasies of Churchilliana, it is salutary to read this brilliant, bracing mega-biography of Winston Churchill and be reminded what Britain's most famous prime minister was actually like. It is no whitewash - Andrew Roberts is incisive about Churchill's arrogance, failures in judgment and casually xenophobic assumption of British superiority to all other nations and races - and over its great but never boring length, manages to dispense with every cigar-waving, V-sign-bestowing cliche of its protagonist. Instead, Roberts convincingly depicts Churchill as that rarest of things: a man of conviction who, at his country's greatest moment of danger, rose admirably to an unparalleled challenge.
Kirkus Review
Sprawling life of the great British leader, drawing on previously unavailable documents, including notes of wartime counsels kept by King George VI.No stranger to big biographies or larger-than-life subjects, historian and commentator Roberts (Napoleon: A Life, 2014, etc.) faces a special challenge with Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who closely documented himself and still has managed to inspire a roomful of books. Roberts adds materially to the library by consulting troves of documents unknown or not open to other researchers. He also has a sense of both drama and character as well as the context of Churchill's time. As the author writes early on, Churchill "was born into a caste that held immense political and economic power in the largest empire in world history, and that had not yet become plagued by insecurity and self-doubt." Sometimes Churchill's overconfidence led to disaster, as at Gallipoli; other times it helped his nation steel itself for war, as with his "fight them on the beaches" speech at the dawn of World War II. Roberts turns up fascinating fragments, including solid evidence that Churchill was not always the pro-American some biographers have claimed him to be: "You have to try and understand and master America and make her like you," counseled his wife, Clementine. Better still, the narrative underscores Churchill's attention to the smallest details while seeing the big picture of global strategy in matters such as handling an always-fraught alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler and laying the groundwork for a postwar world with plenty of tensions of its own, including the question of a Jewish state in Palestine. Roberts' portrait comes warts and all, allowing, for instance, that the leader who decried Nazi air attacks on London would order the leveling by bombing of whole German cities. The author delivers a clear, well-limned view of a complex figure who, in no danger of being forgotten, continues to inspire.The most comprehensive single-volume biography of Churchill that we have in print and a boon for any student of the statesman and his times. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
With his latest work, best-selling author Roberts (Napoleon: A Life) presents a well-researched and exceptionally well-written biography of former British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965). As in the author's equally fine biography of Napoleon, the goal here is neither to glorify nor condemn, but rather to distinguish what led Churchill to greatness. Roberts relays how Churchill believed heritage and character predestined him for his role, and how even Churchill's failures contributed to later successes. Access to previously unavailable archives allows Roberts to paint a detailed portrait of a man he clearly, and deservedly, reveres. The author shows how Churchill found a way to appeal to Englishmen of all classes and mobilize their latent patriotism. This lively story retells the politician's time in captivity during the Second Boer War, an experience that impacted his life and career, especially his later diplomatic relations with Italy and Germany as prime minister. It's easy to agree with Roberts that history would be vastly different if Churchill had not led England during this pivotal time in history. VERDICT This compelling book is likely to become a standard text on Churchill and will be difficult to keep on the shelves.-David Keymer, Cleveland © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Introduction On Thursday, 20 December 1945, the editor of the Sunday Dispatch , Charles Eade, lunched with Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine at their new home in Knightsbridge in London. Eade was editing the former Prime Minister's wartime speeches for publication, and they were due to discuss the latest volume. Before lunch, Eade had waited in what he later described as 'a beautiful room with bookshelves let into the wall and carrying superbly bound volumes of French and English books', which Churchill called his 'snob library'. The walls were adorned with pictures of Churchill's great ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, and a portrait of Churchill painted by Sir John Lavery during the First World War. The lunch reflected post-war British rationing: an egg dish, cold turkey and salad, plum pudding and coffee. They drank a bottle of claret that the Mayor of Bordeaux had just sent over. Churchill told the trusted journalist, who had lunched with him several times during the war, that he 'had got very drunk' at a dinner at the French Embassy the previous night, adding with a chuckle, 'drunker than usual'. Over several glasses of brandy and a cigar - whose band Eade took away as a souvenir - Churchill got down to discussing the best way to publish the wartime speeches he had delivered when the House of Commons had been in secret session during the war. In the course of their hour-long talk, he showed Eade the sixty-eight volumes of minutes, messages and memoranda that he had sent to various Cabinet ministers and the Chiefs of Staff between 1940 and 1945, allowing him to open them at random. When Eade naturally expressed surprise at the sheer volume of work that Churchill had managed to get through as prime minister, 'He explained to me that he was able to handle all these affairs at the centre, because his whole life had been a training for the high office he had filled during the war.' It was a sentiment that Churchill had expressed two years earlier to the Canadian Prime Minister, William Mackenzie King, during the Quebec Conference in August 1943. When King told Churchill that no one else could have saved the British Empire in 1940, he replied that 'he had had very exceptional training, having been through a previous war, and having had large experience in government.' King rejoined, 'Yes, it almost confirmed the old Presbyterian idea of pre-destination or pre-ordination; of his having been the man selected for this task.' This idea was reiterated by the Conservative politician Lord Hailsham, who had been a junior minister in Churchill's wartime government, when he said, 'The one case in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history is Churchill's arrival at the premiership at that precise moment in 1940.' Churchill put his remarks to King and Eade far more poetically three years later in the final lines of his book The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his war memoirs. Recalling the evening of Friday, 10 May 1940, when he had become prime minister only hours after Adolf Hitler had unleashed his Blitzkrieg on the West, Churchill wrote, 'I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial ... I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it. I thought I knew a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail.' He had believed in his own destiny since at least the age of sixteen, when he told a friend that he would save Britain from a foreign invasion. His lifelong admiration of Napoleon and his own ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, coloured his belief that he too was a man of destiny. His aristocratic birth, as the holder of the two famous names of Spencer and Churchill, gave him a tremendous self-confidence that meant that he was not personally hurt by criticism. In the courageous and often lonely stands he was to take against the twin totalitarian threats of Fascism and Communism, he cared far more for what he imagined would have been the good opinion of his fallen comrades of the Great War than for what was said by his living colleagues on the benches of the House of Commons. The memory of his friends killed in war or by accidents (such as Lawrence of Arabia) or alcoholism (such as F. E. Smith) very often moved Churchill to tears, but so did many other things, as this book will relate. Churchill's passions and emotions often mastered him, and he never minded crying in public, even as prime minister, in an age that admired the stiff upper lip. This was just one phenomenon of many that made him a profoundly unusual person. This book explores the extraordinary degree to which in 1940 Churchill's past life had indeed been but a preparation for his leadership in the Second World War. It investigates the myriad lessons that he learned in the sixty-five years before he became prime minister - years of error and tragedy as well as of hard work and inspiring leadership - then it looks at the ways that he put those lessons to use during civilization's most testing hour and trial. For although he was indeed walking with destiny in May 1940, it was a destiny that he had consciously spent a lifetime shaping. Part One The Preparation 1 A Famous Name, November 1874-January 1895 It is said that famous men are usually the product of unhappy childhood. The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished. Churchill, Marlborough Half English aristocrat and half American gambler. Harold Macmillan on Churchill Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born in a small ground-floor room, the nearest bedroom to the main entrance of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, at 1.30 a.m. on Monday, 30 November 1874. It was a worrying birth as the baby was at least six weeks premature, and his mother, the beautiful American socialite Jennie Jerome, had suffered a fall a few days earlier. She had also been shaken by a pony-cart the day before the birth, following which her labour-pains started. In the event there were no abnormalities, and the baby's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, was soon describing him as 'wonderfully pretty' with 'dark eyes and hair and very healthy'. (The hair soon went strawberry blond, and great tresses of it from when he was five can be seen in the birth room at the Palace today; thereafter Churchill was red-headed.) The name 'Winston' recalled both Sir Winston Churchill, the child's ancestor who had fought for King Charles I in the English Civil War, and Lord Randolph's elder brother, who had died aged four. 'Leonard' honoured the baby's maternal grandfather, a risk-taking American financier and railway-owner who had already made and lost two great fortunes on Wall Street. 'Spencer' had been hyphenated with 'Churchill' since 1817, the result of a marital alliance with the rich Spencer family of Althorp, Northamptonshire, who at that time held the earldom of Sunderland and were later to become the Earls Spencer. Proud of his Spencer forebears, he signed himself Winston S. Churchill, and in 1942 told an American trade unionist that 'of course his real name was Spencer-Churchill and it is in this way that he is described, for example, in Court Circulars when he goes to see the King.' The child's paternal grandfather was John Winston Spencer-Churchill, owner of Blenheim Palace, which has been described both as the English Versailles and as 'the greatest war memorial ever built'. Named after the most glorious of the battles won by John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, in the War of Spanish Succession in 1704, its magnificent structure, tapestries, busts, paintings and furnishings commemorated a victory in a conflict that had saved Britain from domination by a European superpower - in this case, the France of Louis XIV - a message that the young Winston did not fail to imbibe. 'We have nothing to equal this,' King George III admitted when he visited Blenheim Palace in 1786. 'We shape our buildings,' Winston Churchill was later to say, 'and afterwards our buildings shape us.' Although he never lived at Blenheim, he was profoundly influenced by the splendour of the Palace's 500-foot frontage, its 7 acres of rooms and its 2,700-acre estate. He absorbed its magnificence during the many holidays and weekends he stayed there with his cousins. The Palace was - still is - pervaded with the spirit of the 1st Duke, the greatest soldier-statesman in British history, who, as Churchill was to describe him in his biography of his ancestor, was a duke 'in days when dukes were dukes'. For his late Victorian contemporaries, the young Winston Churchill's name conjured up two images: the splendour of the 1st Duke's military reputation and Palace of course, but also the adventurous career of Lord Randolph Churchill, the child's father. Lord Randolph had been elected a Member of Parliament nine months before Churchill was born, and was one of the leaders of the Conservative Party from the child's sixth birthday onwards. He was controversial, mercurial, opportunistic, politically ruthless, a brilliant speaker both on public platforms and in the House of Commons, and was marked out as a future prime minister - as long as his inherent tendency to recklessness did not get the better of him. In politics, he followed the precepts of the Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, which combined imperialism abroad with a progressive programme of social reform at home. Lord Randolph was to call his version Tory Democracy, and it was to be imbibed in full by Winston. His slogan, 'Trust the People', was to be used many times in his son's career. Although Lord Randolph was the son of a duke, he was not rich, at least relative to most of the rest of his class. As an aristocratic younger son in the era of primogeniture, he could not expect to inherit much from his father; and although the father of his American wife Jennie Jerome had been enormously rich in the recent past - he was once nicknamed 'the King of New York' - he had seen massive reverses in the American stock-market crash of 1873. Nevertheless, Leonard Jerome still lived in a house that covered an entire block on Madison Avenue and 26th Street, and which boasted extensive stabling and a full-size theatre. He had owned the land where the Jerome Park Reservoir is today, founded the American Jockey Club and co-owned the New York Times. By the time of Jennie's wedding the year after the crash, however, Jerome could settle only £2,000 per annum on his beautiful daughter, the Duke of Marlborough contributing £1,200 per annum for his son. Along with the leasehold on a house at 48 Charles Street in Mayfair, courtesy of Jerome, that ought to have been enough for the couple to live upon comfortably, had they not both been notorious spendthrifts. 'We were not rich,' their son recalled during the Second World War. 'I suppose we had about three thousand pounds a year and spent six thousand.' Lord Randolph had met Jennie at Cowes Regatta on the Isle of Wight in August 1873. After only three days he had proposed and been accepted. They married in the British Embassy in Paris after a seven-month engagement, on 15 April 1874. Although the Marlboroughs gave their formal blessing to the union, they were absent from the wedding, because the Duke - who had sent agents to New York and Washington to try to ascertain Jerome's genuine net worth - thought it a mZsalliance and Jerome 'a vulgar kind of man', 'a bad character' from 'the class of speculators'. Churchill was proud that his parents had married for love. Writing in 1937 about a libel action he was launching against a book which had described him as 'the first-fruit of the first famous snob-dollar marriage', he told a friend: The reference to my mother and father's marriage is not only very painful to me, but as you know is utterly devoid of foundation. This was a love-match if ever there was one, with very little money on either side. In fact they could only live in the very smallest way possible to people in London Society. If the marriage became famous afterwards it was because my father, an unknown sprig of the aristocracy, became famous, and also because my mother, as all her photographs attest, was by general consent one of the beauties of her time. (He eventually won £500 in damages from the publisher for the libel, plus £250 in costs, but not the apology for which he had been hoping.) Winston Churchill was born into a caste that held immense political and economic power in the largest empire in world history, and that had not yet become plagued by insecurity and self-doubt. Churchill's sublime self-confidence and self-reliance stemmed directly from the assurance he instinctively felt in who he was and where he came from. In his obituary of his cousin 'Sunny', the 9th Duke of Marlborough, he wrote that he had been born into one of 'the three or four hundred families which had for three or four hundred years guided the fortunes of the nation'. He knew he came from the apex of the social pyramid, and one of the key attributes of that class at that time was not to care overmuch what people further down it thought of them. As his greatest friend, the Tory MP and barrister F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, was to write of him, 'He was shielded in his own mind from self-distrust.' This was to prove invaluable to Churchill at the periods - of which there were many - when no one else seemed to trust him. The social life of the Victorian and Edwardian upper classes was partly based upon staying in the country houses of friends and acquaintances for the 'Friday-to-Monday' extended weekend. Over the coming years, Churchill was to stay with the Lyttons at Knebworth, his cousins the Londonderrys at Mount Stewart, the Rothschilds at Tring, the Grenfells at Taplow and Panshanger, the Roseberys at Dalmeny, the Cecils at Hatfield, the Duke of Westminster at Eaton Hall and on his yacht Flying Cloud, his cousins Lord and Lady Wimborne at Canford Manor, the John Astors at Hever and the Waldorf Astors at Cliveden, as well as paying frequent visits to Blenheim and very many other such houses. Although he occasionally experienced social ostracism as a result of his politics in later life, he always had an extensive and immensely grand social network upon which he could fall back. This largely aristocratic cocoon of friendship and kinship was to sustain him in the bad times to come. Excerpted from Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
