Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill Read Online Free PDF

was the House of Commons, more than half its members came from the British aristocracy. To most young men, the room alone, with its soaring ceilings, paneled walls, casually scattered chess tables and curved wooden chairs upholstered in rich leather and tarnished brass tacks, would be imposing, even awe inspiring. For Churchill, it was, in reputation at least, as familiar as his own childhood. Although this was not yet his world, it had long been his father’s.

    Lord Randolph Churchill, the brilliant, talented and arrogant third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, had had an extraordinary political career, made even more remarkable by the fact that he had lived to be only forty-five years old. He had won his first seat in Parliament in 1874, the same year in which he had married an American beauty named Jennie Jerome and his first child, Winston, had been born. By the time he was thirty-six, he was secretary of state for India. A year later, the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, appointed him leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, just one position below Salisbury himself.
    Although Churchill had never had the close relationship with his father that he longed for, he had been fiercely proud of Lord Randolph’s public position and had dreamed of one day becoming, if not a trusted adviser, at least a help to him in his meteoric career. “To me,” Churchill would write years later, “he seemed to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having.” He would never forget walking down the street as a child and watching as men doffed their hats in respect as his father passed by. He scanned the papers, hungrily reading every mention of Lord Randolph’s name, every quotation from his speeches, every word of criticism or admiration. “Everything he said even at the tiniest bazaar was reported verbatim in all the newspapers,” Churchill would proudly recall, “every phrasebeing scrutinized and weighed.”When at Harrow, the public school he attended as a boy, Churchill had repeatedly begged his mother to send him not just his father’s autographs but even her own so that he could give, or perhaps sell, them to his classmates.
    Lord Randolph’s career, however, had been as brief as it was blazing. “The darling of democracy,” one contemporary writer called him, “a wayward genius who flashed across the political firmament like a dazzling meteor burning himself out too soon.” Famously outspoken and sharp-tongued, he had, from the beginning of his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer, publicly and unapologetically disagreed with many of the other members of Lord Salisbury’s administration. When his first budget was rejected, Randolph, in a cold rage, had written Salisbury a letter of resignation, confident that it would not be accepted. It was.
    Years later, Churchill’s mother could still vividly recall her own horror and that of Randolph’s private secretary, A. W. Moore, when they realized what he had done. “Mr. Moore, who was devoted to Randolph, rushed in, pale and anxious,” she wrote, “and with a faltering voice said to me, ‘He has thrown himself from the top of the ladder.’ ” Not only would Randolph never rise again, he would die eight years later following a long, frightening and excruciatingly public mental decline.
    Although the memory of Lord Randolph still haunted the House of Commons, lingering in every spiral of smoke, scribbled note and murmured comment, it was his son who now had Ascroft’s full attention. He had invited Churchill there to ask him a question that could greatly affect both of their political careers. The city of Oldham would be holding a by-election that summer, and Ascroft’s counterpart, James Oswald, who was sixty years old and had long been chronically ill and conspicuously absent, had made it clear that he would not be seeking reelection. Ascroft was, he told Churchill, “on the look-out for someone to run in double harness with