It is ironic that although Winston Churchill revered the concept of monarchy – his wife Clementine joked that he was the last believer in the Divine Right of Kings – half of the six monarchs under whom he served had anything but reverence for him.
He never met Queen Victoria, who signed his officer’s commission but died when Churchill was 26. He had a complicated relationship with Edward VII. As Prince of Wales, in 1876 Edward had been blackmailed by Winston’s father Lord Randolph Churchill, and had later slept with Winston’s mother, Jennie Jerome, after Lord Randolph’s death. Edward was impressed when Churchill escaped from the Boer prisoner of war camp in Pretoria in December 1899, but he disapproved of him leaving the Conservative party to join the Liberals five years later.
It was said that Jennie had one of the earliest lifts in London installed in her house off Marble Arch to accommodate ‘King Tum-Tum’, so that he didn’t have to climb the stairs to her bedroom; but Ted Powell sensibly ignores such gossip in this well-researched and well-written book. Considering how many works there are on every minute aspect of Churchill’s life, Powell is to be congratulated on having found an interesting subject that has not been written about before, and to have summed it up admirably in only 211 pages.
