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After she arrived, he wasted little time before proposing, and she said yes. ‘I behaved badly to Violet,’ he later admitted to his friend and future Secretary of State for Scotland Lord Dalmeny, ‘because I was practically engaged to her.’Ī week before his promised visit to Slains Castle, he suggested to Clementine that she come to Blenheim Palace - the home of his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough - on August 10. Which is how he came to lead one woman on while secretly hoping to win another. At some point that summer, he decided to make her his fall-back choice in case Clementine turned him down. Although his strongest emotions were aroused by Clementine, he wasn’t sure whether she would marry him - whereas he knew that he could count on Violet to say yes. One admirer called her a ‘sweet almond-eyed gazelle’.Ĭhurchill began weighing the merits of the two women, who were almost exact opposites. Whereas Violet’s mind was transparent and analytical, Clementine had an air of mystery and sensual complexity about her. Indeed, Clementine Hozier, the 22-year-old granddaughter of Scottish peer the Earl of Airlie, had an allure that Churchill found irresistible. ‘He will be well looked after and provided for.’Īlluring: Clementine, pictured with her husband Winston Churchill in 1914, was described by an admirer as a 'sweet almond-eyed gazelle'īut what she hadn’t realised was that another woman had recently captured his heart. ‘You need have no fear on W’s account,’ he hastened to assure her.

In early April 1908, when Asquith became Prime Minister, she bluntly told her father: ‘Make the most of Winston.’ Churchill was determined to be one of those men and he knew that Violet would eagerly plead his case. At the time they started growing close, her father was still several months away from becoming Prime Minister, but few doubted that he would get the job - and bring new men into the Cabinet with him. But I do believe that I am a glowworm.’įor Churchill, there was an obvious career advantage to having this remarkable young woman’s unqualified support. She didn’t even laugh when he told her one day, without the slightest trace of modesty: ‘We are all worms. Her stepdaughter certainly believed that she and Churchill breathed the same rarified air of intellectual intensity. Her stepmother, Margot Asquith once said that Violet, ‘though intensely feminine, could have made a remarkable man’. At times, it seemed to Violet that she had found in Winston’s mind a mirror image of her own. In many ways, she and young Churchill were rather alike - both were highly opinionated, strong-willed, idealistic and romantic. ‘Was he, as people said, inebriated by his own words?’ she asked herself. At the dances, as soon as he arrived, she would throw ‘all engagements to the winds’ and steer him to a corner where they would talk for hours while others danced.

Over the next few months, they continued to meet at balls and dinner parties. Getting to know young Winston Churchill, who was 12 years her senior and still unmarried, filled her with a sense of ‘new excitement’, as she later put it. Only 20 when she came under Churchill’s spell, Violet Asquith had met him one April weekend in 1907 at Taplow Court, a red-brick mansion on the Thames, near Windsor Castle, owned by society hostess Lady Desborough. The Rt Hon Sir Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister between April 1908 to December 1916, kept his daughter's ordeal a secret What happened that night has long remained a mystery - but buried in the Asquith family papers, now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I have discovered an astonishing revelation: the story of Violet Asquith’s brush with death is inextricably linked with her doomed love for a rising young star in her father’s Liberal cabinet - Winston Churchill. It took several days of determined stonewalling before the Press stopped asking questions. But no one could explain why Violet had remained missing for so many hours. The Prime Minister moved swiftly to quiet any speculation by offering an innocent tale about his daughter stumbling in the dark. But rumours continued to swirl: had she fallen by accident or had there been foul play? Some even whispered that she might have been intentionally trying to harm herself.

A love triangle: Violet Asquith, the daughter of former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, pictured left, was left heartbroken when Winston Churchill, then just an MP, married Clementine in 1930, pictured right in 1930Ī doctor was summoned and she quickly revived.