While she was legally the daughter of Sir Henry Hozier , her mother Lady Blanche's known infidelity and his suspected infertility makes her paternity uncertain. Clementine met Churchill in and they began their marriage of 56 years in They had five children together, one of whom named Marigold died aged two from sepsis.
Throughout her life she was granted many titles, the final being a life peerage following the death of her husband in In her later years, she sold several of her husband's portraits to help support herself financially. She died in her London home aged After Sir Henry found Lady Blanche with a lover in , she managed to avert her husband's suit for divorce because of his own infidelities, and thereafter the couple separated.
Clementine's biographer, Joan Hardwick, has surmised due in part to Sir Henry Hozier's reputed sterility that all Lady Blanche's "Hozier" children were actually fathered by her sister's husband, Bertram Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale β , who is also known as the grandfather of the famous Mitford sisters.
While Mitford is considered the most probable candidate, it has also been asserted that Bay Middleton was her father. Whatever her true paternity, Clementine is recorded as being the daughter of Lady Blanche and Sir Henry.
In the summer of , when Clementine was 14, her mother moved the family to Dieppe , a coastal community in the north of France. There the family spent an idyllic summer, bathing, canoeing, picnicking, and blackberrying. This group consisted of military men, writers and painters, such as Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Sickert. The latter came to be a great friend of the family. According to Clementine's daughter, Mary Soames, Clementine was deeply struck by Sickert and thought he was the most handsome and compelling man she had ever seen.
