"Anglomania" was sweeping America, as everything and anything which was decreed to be English became the rage. The snobbery, the rank, the idea of meeting royalty: it was all so alluring to young American girls who saw themselves as so very close to being Aristocrats themselves, if only they had been born in a different country.
One of the most famous heiresses was also one of these "Buccaneers" (MacColl uses this term, after Edith Wharton's novel of the same name, to identify the earlier marriages).
|
|
Prince Albert, with his particular taste for wealthy American beauties, took up the young couple's case, and their was nothing the Marlboroughs could do about it. They did, however, say that the match could not be made until Randolph had won a seat in the House of Commons. Finally, all the kinks were worked out, and the couple were married in April of 1874. As Randolph's fame grew, it was rumored that she even wrote some of his famous orations, and she certainly helped him at least prepare them (MacColl, pg. 202). She developed a political career of her own in the early 1880's with her "Primrose League," and traveled around England giving speeches to promote Conservative views among the lower classes. When Randolph was appointed secretary of state for India, it was she who took over all his campaigning. She received the Insignia of the Crown of India (and went directly to Paris for a new Worth dress to match the blue of the medal's ribbon) from Queen Victoria herself, and was mobbed by an adoring populace every time she went out.
Lady Churchill's life shattered, however, when her husband, without any warning whatsoever, resigned from public life. When she found out the next day in the newspaper, she was furious. Eulogized one popular news magazine, "we are sorry Randy is in the muck, less for his own
|
|
A true renaissance woman, Jennie edited a literary magazine, "The Anglo-Saxon Review," which was forced to stop publishing after only a year, was Winston's literary agent, and was a playwright. During World War I, she worked as a nurse on the ship, The Maine, in South Africa.
As was common among upper-class women who had already done their duty in the nursery, she took a succession of lovers, among which were definitely the Austrian Count Charles Andreas Kinsky, and probably the Prince of Wales himself. Lord Randolph died in 1895 of syphilis, and she married first George Cornwallis-West in 1900, a man who was only two weeks older than Winston, divorcing him eleven years later to marry Montagu Porch, who was even younger, in 1918.
