ABSTRACT
In the middle of the seventeenth century the first Sir Winston Churchill, an impoverished country gentleman of Wootton Glanville in the County of Dorset, had achieved an astonishing tour de force of procreation, fathering four children of great distinction. Two hundred years later Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill filled a remarkable ‘flush’. Thus Marlborough’s great qualities of patience and sweetness, tolerance and compromise, which made of him a master of all the arts of the possible and brought to his country the lasting fruits of his statesmanship, had been nurtured in the seventeenth century equivalent of the nursery. The prince and princess of Wales, afterwards Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, had smiled with favour upon the Jeromes, and especially upon the dazzling young woman, flushed with the excitement of her first ‘official’ dance. But in England the Reformers had been long on the march, and for many years there had been grave unease in the best minds.
