On the eve on the wedding, John Colville, a long-time private secretary of Winston Churchill, who in his younger days had been part of the same social "set" as Churchill's niece, recorded in his diary that Clarissa, who was staying at Churchill's home at Chartwell, Kent, was "very beautiful, but … still strange and bewildering". He added that Churchill "feels avuncular to his orphaned niece, gave her a cheque for £500 and told me that he thought she had a most unusual personality". According to Lady Avon herself, Churchill's wife Clementine thought her "too independent and totally unsuitable", while the marriage is said to have exacerbated the antagonism towards Eden of the Churchills' often wayward son Randolph, who, having initially defended his cousin to Evelyn Waugh, gave her "two years to knock him into shape". His subsequent attacks on Eden in the press culminated in a scathing biography, "The Rise and Fall of Sir Anthony Eden" (1959).