Proposals and Dowries |
In 1874 Lord Randolph Churchill, then aged twenty-four, met the fascinating American Jennie Jerome, and proposed to her at Cowes on the third night after their acquaintance. According to Sir Winston Churchill's biography, the two told their friends after their first night's meeting that they were going to marry each other. Lord Randolph's father protested that the uncontrolled state of his son's feelings was completely paralysing his judgment, and told him to wait a year. Letters were allowed to be exchanged, but meetings were restricted. Lord Randolph at one stage told Miss Jerome that he had two courses open: to refuse to stand for a constituency unless he was allowed to marry at once, or-'and this is still more Machiavellian'-to stand but at the last moment to threaten to withdraw, leaving the Radical a walkover. This ruthless course turned out to be unnecessary. In the 'nineties came a less exuberant betrothal between an American heiress and a Churchill. Consuelo Vanderbilt has told how her mother began negotiations to marry her to the ninth Duke of Marlborough when she was sixteen. She fell in love, however, with an American, and as a punishment was a 'prisoner', with her mother and governess as wardens, shortly before the Duke was due to call. Her mother, she says, announced that she would not hesitate to shoot any man who her opinion would be likely to ruin her daughter's life. Cbnsuelo gave in and married the Duke. She sobbed heavily on her wedding day, and doubtless reflected that there was one law for the rich and another for the poor.The flirtations of Margot Tennant (later Lady Asquith) caused her parents some alarm. She describes in her Auto-biography how she rashly promised to marry a man who threatened suicide if she refused him. Her mother, 'who had been a great flirt herself', forbade the man the house, and Margot was persuaded to break off the engagement. There-upon her admirer sold his hunters and went to Australia, where his hair turned grey in two years. Margot enjoys the unusual distinction of having twice received proposals of marriage by proxy. Sir William Miller, a family friend, said to her one night: 'Margy, will you marry my son Jim? She replied: 'My dear Sir William, your son Jim has never spoken to me in his life.' To which the reply was: ‘He is shy.' No one, says Margot, could have paid her less subsequent attention than did Jim. The other second-hand offer came from Baron Hirsch, an Austrian living in Paris. He invited her to a private room at the Cafe Anglais and urged her 'to marry his son Lucien. Lucien too was shy-but very rich. Margot finally found romance on the Terrace of the House of Commons. One night she and Herbert Asquith 'retired to the darkest part of the Terrace where, leaning over the parapet we gazed into the river, and talked far into the night ... when we finished our conversation the Terrace was deserted and the sky light'. There is some reason to believe that this is not the only romance to have burgeoned on the Terrace of the House of Commons. |