William Marvel: Our Winston Churchill

Sixteen years ago I completed a still-unpublished biography of Maxfield Parrish. One of Parrish’s closest friends and neighbors in the artists’ colony at Cornish and Plainfield was Winston Churchill, a transplant from St. Louis. Churchill had staked himself to the risky business of a literary career the old-fashioned way — by marrying a girl whose family was loaded — but in the late 1890s he started making his own money with a series of popular historical novels. In researching Parrish’s life I interviewed people who had been acquainted with both him and Churchill, but it was through Parrish’s prolific correspondence that I came to know Churchill best.

Like most well-heeled residents from “away,” Churchill brought a budget of political ideas that clashed with the traditional New Hampshire reverence for independence and self-reliance. He had been at least a part-time resident for about three years, fleeing to St. Louis every winter, but he seemed to consider that long enough to feel the pulse of the people and conclude that they wanted him to come to their rescue. The urban refugees of the artists’ colony probably brought him to that delusion by helping him into the Legislature, and with the impatience typical of the newcomer he waited only until his second term to run for governor.