Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard Read Free Book Online Page A

of Cambridge to the prime minister to the Prince of Wales in a blatant attempt to help her son win military appointments. Now he needed her more than ever. “This is a pushing age,” he had written to her. “We must push with the best.”
    Despite Jennie’s rebellious nature and shocking social life, or perhaps because of them, Winston knew that she would be an irresistible draw to any public event, even the campaign of a young politician in a cotton mill town. As Election Day drew near, he wanted nothing more than to have his mother by his side.

    Jennie arrived in Oldham as she did any place she deigned to appear, with high style and supreme confidence. Dressed all in blue, the Conservative Party color, and carrying a parasol of the same hue, she galloped into town riding in a highly decorated horse-drawn carriage, a postilion sitting stiffly up front, his uniform covered in blue ribbons and rosettes. Turning heads wherever she went, Jennie seemed less like the mother of a political candidate than an American stage star, shipped over for the day to scatter fairy dust on a dreary campaign. “Lady Randolph Churchill was, naturally enough, the observed of all observers,” a local reporter panted. “Indeed she created quite a sensation in these grimy old streets.”
    Neither his mother’s bright glamour, however, nor his own magnetism at the podium could change Churchill’s fate on Election Day. On July 6, the men of Oldham, who filled the city’s polling centers by the tens of thousands—a voter turnout that was “as big as wasknown in England”—gave the Liberal candidates nearly 53 percent of the vote, leaving Churchill thirteen hundred votes short of victory and Mawdsley even more. Churchill left Oldham feeling, he would later write, like “a bottle of champagne…left uncorked for the night.”
    The high-ranking members of his party were not inclined to offer words of comfort and encouragement to a young man who had failed, even if he was Randolph Churchill’s son. On the contrary, Churchill arrived in London in time to learn that Arthur Balfour, Lord Salisbury’s nephew who would himself become prime minister just three years later, had been talking about him in the lobby of the House of Commons. “I thought he was a young man of promise,” Balfour had sneered, “but it appears he is a young man of promises.”
    Balfour’s searing assessment only hardened Churchill’s resolve. He had no money, no occupation and, it appeared, no one who believed in him quite as much as he believed in himself. The only thing he knew with any certainty was that in the end, whatever it took, he would succeed or, quite literally, die trying. “What an awful thing it will be if I don’t come off,” he had written to his mother just months before. “It will break my heart for I have nothing else but ambition to cling to.”

CHAPTER 4
BLOWING THE TRUMPET
    I f Churchill was looking for a refuge where he might, for a time, forget his failure, even escape the relentless demands of his own ambition, he should not have returned to the place of his birth: Blenheim Palace. Soon after the election, with no home of his own and no real plan, he traveled to the small town of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, where his family’s estate sprawled in ornate splendor across seven acres of a vast, two-thousand-acre park. As his carriage passed the massive stone pillars flanking the entrance to the grounds and rattled down the Grand Avenue, he could see from his window the house itself as it came into view: a massive, stunningly beautiful Baroque palace built of a local cream-colored limestone that over the span of time had turned a radiant golden hue.
    It was a sight that had astonished nearly two centuries of visitors, from Alexander Pope, who had written an arch letter about the extreme lavishness of Blenheim after touring it in the early eighteenth century, to Churchill’s own Brooklyn-born mother, who saw it for the first time after her