By Jane Ridley

Jennie Churchill was the wife of the most celebrated political enfant terrible of his day, Lord Randolph Churchill, and the mother of Winston, the most famous Englishman of all. Little wonder that, squashed between these two alpha males, Lady Randolph Churchill has usually been seen as a walk-on part. Raven-haired and fiery-eyed, “Black Jane” is alleged to have slept with 200 men. She is chiefly remembered for being a bad mother to the infant Winston, leaving him to the tender mercies of Nannie Everest. Anne Sebba’s gripping new biography is a sharp and intelligent reassessment of Jennie’s life, and it nails a number of myths.

Jennie was one of the three daughters of Leonard Jerome, an extrovert New York financier whose roller-coaster fortunes so upset his bourgeois wife Clara that she left her husband in New York and fled with her daughters to Paris . Brought up on the fringes of the disreputable court of Napoleon III, Jennie learned early about bad behaviour. She also learned how to dress, buying her clothes at Worth, the outrageously expensive Paris designer. Jennie was a compulsive shopper, and throughout her life she spent money like water, always expecting Daddy to pick up the tab.

At the age of nineteen, Jennie fell in love with the dashing Lord Randolph Churchill. There’s no doubt, as Sebba shows, that this was a coup de foudre, but right from the start there were tensions. The Marlboroughs were downwardly mobile dukes, badly in need of a cash-rich heiress, and they were disappointed to discover that Leonard Jerome had just lost a fortune. Pre-nup bickering between the families figured badly for the marriage. Jennie’s first child, Winston, was born at Blenheim after six months of marriage. The Churchill story is that he was premature, but Sebba shows convincingly that he was a healthy, normal baby, and probably conceived – rather shockingly – before marriage, though there’s no doubt he was Randolph’s son.

Randolph Churchill was brilliant in a manic sort of way and he could be charming, but he was also the rudest man in Britain , with a vile temper, and right from the start the marriage was rocky. He quarrelled with his friend and patron, the Prince of Wales, over the Aylesford scandal, when Randolph , desperate to prevent his brother Blandford from eloping with Lady Aylesford, tried to blackmail the Prince, and he and Jennie were forced into social exile in Ireland . Randolph spent most of his time away from Jennie – Sebba even speculates (no more than that) that he was gay, as his companions were always men. Whatever the truth about that, Randolph was undeniably ill from very early on in the marriage. Whether in fact he had syphilis is still controversial, and denied by some members of the Churchill family. But as Sebba sensibly points out, the fact is that he thought he had it, and his doctors treated him for it and (later) told Jennie that he had it, so whatever was actually the matter, ‘He might as well have had syphilis’. It’s probable too that Randolph was not the father of Jennie’s second son, Jack. The likely father was a handsome but stupid peer named Lord Falmouth.

In spite of his illness, Randolph managed to achieve extraordinary political success. Salisbury made him Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1886, but by then he was a sick man, unable to carry the workload. In a fit of pique he resigned – he didn’t even tell Jennie beforehand – and after that the marriage unravelled. Randolph was verbally abusive, though probably not violent, and there were constant worries about money as Jennie continued to spend and Randolph seemed incapable of earning anything. No one blamed her for being unfaithful to Randolph . The love of her life was Charles Kinsky, a glamorous Austrian diplomat who dumped her cruelly. There were many others, and the men grew younger as she grew older, but as Sebba shows, many of Jennie’s alleged “lovers” were in fact just friends. Perhaps her most important friend was the Prince of Wales. Sebba, probably rightly, discounts the possibility of a sexual relationship, though in the absence of Jennie’s letters to the Prince, it’s impossible to be certain. To her credit, Jennie was always loyal and tender to Randolph . The end was terrible. Lurching like a drunk, unable to speak or swallow and prone to violent rages, Randolph was a pathetic wreck. Bravely, Jennie accompanied him on a last, gut-wrenching world cruise. She survived partly because of her close relationship with her sisters, Leonie and Clara – all three of the Jerome girls married bounders who had hoped, in vain, to attach themselves to dollar transfusions from American cash cows.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is Sebba’s account of Jennie’s relationship with Winston. When he was a small child there’s no doubt that Jennie neglected him, parcelling him off to Nannie Everest. He wrote pathetic letters from his first prep school, where he was beaten, and Jennie ignored him. So much, so bad. But, as Sebba perceptively shows, in later life Winston spun a myth about his childhood, claiming that famous men are the product of unhappy childhoods. Randolph, whom Winston hero-worshipped, treated him far worse than Jennie ever did, writing savagely cruel letters. As a teenager Winston wrote letters to Jennie from school, which, by the stiff-upper-lipped standards of the day, were both cheeky and demanding. Jennie never froze him out or cut him down, and Sebba rightly sees Winston’s whinging as a sign of the strength of the relationship. Like many mothers with terminally sick husbands, Jennie was extraordinarily close to her son. After Randolph ‘s death, she poured all her disappointed and frustrated ambition into Winston, and she pulled every string she had to secure his promotion as a soldier, or to publish his first books. Contemporaries thought the young Winston disgustingly pushy and spoiled, but Jennie’s unconditional love gave him the confidence to reach the top. He always came first.

Sebba suggests that Jennie felt drawn to younger men partly because they could never threaten Winston’s dominant position in her life. At the age of forty-six she made herself ridiculous by marrying the beautiful but dim George Cornwallis-West, who at twenty-six was the same age as Winston. This ended, predictably, in tears – George left her for another older woman, the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, earning the nickname ‘the old wives’ tale’. Jennie who never gave up, married at the age of sixty-four her third husband, Montagu Porch, another beauty, twenty-three years her junior.

Anne Sebba has written an immensely enjoyable book. Her prose is as smooth and elegant as expensive cashmere, and the book reads like a novel, which is as it should be, for Lady Randolph Churchill was a character larger than life.