DAY 1: The Ironies of History

Blenheim Palace

When Consuelo Vanderbilt arrived at Blenheim Palace in November, 1895, as a bride and the newest Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Randolph Churchill had been dead nearly a year. His mother, the Dowager Duchess Fanny, first met Consuelo when the twenty-year-old paid a bridal call on Fanny at her home in Grosvenor Square, where Randolph had died. The dowager still wore deepest mourning for her favorite son, and she lost no time in outlining Consuelo's chief value and purpose. As Consuelo recalls in her memoir, The Glitter and the Gold, Fanny declared:

"Your first duty is to have a child and it must be a son, because it would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke."

Cousins-by-marriage Consuelo and Winston at Blenheim

That little upstart--Fanny's twenty-one-year-old grandson and next in the Marlborough line of succession until Consuelo produced an heir--was somehow unworthy in the dowager's mind. This was primarily because of his mother. Fanny deplored Randolph's marriage to Jennie Jerome, and the passage of time only deepened her bitterness. The fact that Consuelo, too, was an American was apparently immaterial. Consuelo would never challenge Fanny's primacy in the history of Blenheim. She did, indeed, produce a firstborn son and then a second--coining the phrase "the heir and the spare" for all time--and the upstart was thwarted.

And yet...

When one visits Blenheim, or even pulls up its website online (which I recommend for the sweeping drone video footage that introduces the estate), it is impossible to escape the fact that a huge part of its attraction today is as the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill. Fanny, Randolph, his rakish brother George, and George's various wives and mistresses; Sunny the 9th Duke, Consuelo who eventually annulled her marriage and became Madame Jacques Balsan; their descendants in turn--all give way before the profound, unchallenged, singular and irreplaceable role that the upstart played in world history. Winston remains the most famous Churchill since the original John and his redoubtable duchess, Sarah.

That is due in major part to his mother.

As Winston wrote simply to Jennie upon first taking his seat in the House of Commons in 1899: "In a sense it belongs to you; for I could never have earned it had you not transmitted to me the wit and energy which are necessary."

Among its many events and offerings this winter, Blenheim is hosting an exhibition of family portraits from three centuries and some of Winston's landscape paintings. I imagine somewhere Jennie--and the upstart--are laughing.

Winston Churchill painting en plein air, Blenheim

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DAY 45: Steadfast Tin Soldiers

Visitors to Blenheim Palace are at times ambivalent about the place. But the one thing most unequivocally seem to love are the cases full of toy soldiers.

A caveat, however: The collection on display, manufactured by French firm Lucotte, is not Winston Churchill's, but those of his friend Paul Maze, meant to convey what Winston's collection might have looked like. Churchill's toy soldiers are lost to time. Perhaps they were manhandled by his son and grandson to the point where they had to be tossed. Perhaps an evil Jack-in-the-Box cursed them to fall down a drain or melt to only a lead heart in the nursery fire. In any case, just 44 cavalry and 53 foot soldiers thought to be Churchill's remain. They're on display at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms in London. 

Winston Churchill's German-made lead soldiers, Cabinet War Rooms

As Churchill students tend to know, he received his first set of soldiers when he was seven, and continued collecting and deploying them up to his departure for Sandhurst--Britain's Royal Military College--at the age of 19. The massive trestle table that filled the nursery attic at No. 2 Connaught Place was Churchill's drawing board and training ground for military strategy. His favorite historical battles to re-enact, and at times rewrite, were Waterloo and the Battle of Blenheim, won by his ancestor John Churchill, the First Duke of Marlborough. But over time his collection expanded to number some 1500 soldiers of every description. 

Churchill recalls in his memoir My Early Life that his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, paid a rare visit to the nursery when his son was 12, and stumbled on the trestle table full of embattled figures. From that point on, Randolph decided Winston was destined for the army. Winston noted wistfully that he assumed his father had detected some genius for strategy in his obsession with soldiers. But in fact, Winston later learned, Randolph simply thought he was too stupid for any other career. 

It was one of a long string of misjudgments Randolph Churchill made regarding his elder son. 

Paul Maze collection of toy soldiers displayed at Blenheim Palace

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DAY 93: A Palace for a Princess

Two thousand acres and 187 rooms, Blenheim Palace is the ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough, but it's not all that old by English standards--when Jennie first saw it in the spring of 1874, it had been standing in its Cotswold fields for a mere hundred and fifty years. The land and some funds to build the palace, along with a ducal title, were granted to John Churchill by Queen Anne to celebrate his victories against the French and Bavarians in the War of Spanish Succession. Huge cost overruns and the Churchills' fluctuating political fortunes prolonged the construction for decades; John died before the palace was completed. There was never enough money to maintain Blenheim in the style to which the Dukes of Marlborough managed to become accustomed. In Randolph Churchill's day, fifty indoor servants scurried up and down the hidden service passages to keep the family functioning. The outdoor servants--grooms, gardeners, coachmen, gameskeepers--were as numerous.

Everyone who visits Blenheim has an opinion about the place: it's hideous, cold, echoing, grand, awe-inspiring, monumental, tasteless, drafty, daunting, magnificent, depressing. 

Jennie viewed any stay with her in-laws as a penance; there was nothing to do and no one to amuse her. She spent the endless days practicing her piano, following the gentlemen's shooting parties, or writing letters to her sisters. Sometimes she concealed her face with a veil and joined groups of tourists wandering through the palace, suppressing laughter at their unflattering comments about the portraits of her husband's ancestors. 

The Long Library

Having been reared in American comfort, Jennie deplored the fact that there were only two baths in the entire "barracks," as she referred to the Blenheim. Family prayers were said each morning in the private chapel, dominated by John Churchill's tomb, and festivities were limited to the annual Hunt Ball. After dancing all night at this party in late November 1874, Jennie went into labor and gave birth to her first son, Winston, in a spare ground-floor bedroom.

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