He could also be a sensitive and hospitable friend. Those who were fond of him included F. E. Smith (later first Earl of Birkenhead) and writer Sir Shane Leslie. His first cousin Winston Churchill remained one of his staunchest supporters. Mary Soames relates how her father, Winston Churchill, invited her mother, Clementine, to Blenheim for the weekend with a view to asking her to marry him. Before retiring to bed he made an assignation with her to walk in the rose garden the following morning after breakfast: ‘Clementine came downstairs with characteristic punctuality, and was much discomfited by Winston’s non-appearance. While she was eating breakfast, she seriously turned over in her mind the possibility of returning immediately to London. The Duke observed that Clementine was much put out, and took charge of the situation. He dispatched a sharp, cousinly note upstairs to Winston, and, deploying his utmost charm, suggested to Clementine that he should take her for a drive in his buggy. He whirled her round the estate for about half an hour, and upon their return there was the dilatory Winston anxiously scanning the horizon.’5 It was only thanks to this kindly intervention that Winston and Clementine were engaged by the end of the afternoon.
As Consuelo observed the unfamiliar figure of her new husband in the fog-bound confines of Idle Hour in November 1895, she was almost certainly aware that he had inherited Blenheim Palace – one of Europe’s great baroque buildings – at a low point in its fortunes. She was already acquainted with the early history of Blenheim, its dukes and its first duchess. (If she needed reminding she only had to read her fiancé’s article on Blenheim which was faithfully reprinted in the New York Herald when their engagement was announced.) The royal manor of Woodstock, and the dukedom of Marlborough had been given to the 1st Duke – the general John Churchill – by Queen Anne as a gift from a grateful nation for a series of military victories over the French. Of these, the Battle of Blenheim, named after a small village near the Danube where it was fought in 1704, was one of the most important and spectacular. The 1st Duke’s victories put paid to the French king’s expansionist ambitions in Europe, saved much of Continental Europe from his absolutist regime, and were instrumental in preserving the legacy of England’s Glorious Revolution. Queen Anne had awarded the 1st Duke of Marlborough title after title as one victory followed another, so that Consuelo found herself married not simply to a duke but a prince to boot: he was Duke of Marlborough, Marquess of Blandford, Earl of Marlborough, Lord Churchill of Eyemouth, Lord Churchill of Sandridge, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Prince of Mindelheim in Swabia. (This did not mean that the 1st Duke’s reputation remained unscathed, but Consuelo would have had to read Macaulay for herself to discover that there were those who persisted in regarding his pursuit of power and accumulation of wealth as disreputable and unscrupulous.)
Even the 9th Duke, whose view of his ancestry was understandably partial, was clear that Blenheim Palace itself was a source of conflict from the outset. The playwright and architect Sir John Vanbrugh was commissioned to design a palace intended not simply as a magnificently theatrical celebration of a great general and a great queen, but as a building that would rival the vanquished Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles. (It is little wonder that Alva admired Blenheim, for its design not only drew on the spirit of the Bourbons but competed with them.) Sarah, the formidable Duchess of the 1st Duke and the Queen’s favourite, hated Vanbrugh’s designs from the beginning saying: ‘I was always against the whole design of Blenheim, as too big and unwieldy, whether I considered the pleasure of living in it, or the good of my family who were to enjoy it hereafter.’6 Long before building was finished, however, the Duchess fell from royal favour when Queen Anne finally tired of her ‘teasing and tormenting’ and replaced her with the tactful and emollient Abigail Masham. This compounded the difficulty that the precise extent of the Queen’s gift had never been clear in the first place. The Duchess persevered with building and furnishing the palace after the Marlboroughs were restored to favour by George I. After the death of the Duke, she dedicated herself to completing the palace she believed her husband would have wanted, though she caused Vanbrugh to resign in fury and issued no fewer than 401 lawsuits against erring workmen in the process.
After the Great Duke’s death, family history became more complicated. He had no surviving sons so the dukedom passed by a series of manoeuvres to Sarah’s grandson, Charles Spencer, 5th Earl of Sunderland, who became the 3rd Duke of Marlborough in 1731 – thereby linking the Marlboroughs to the Spencers of Althorp. (The family name now became Spencer rather than Churchill until it was changed by act of Parliament to Spencer-Churchill in the patriotic atmosphere that followed the Battle of Waterloo.) The 3rd Duke of Marlborough began a long history of extravagance. His son, George, the 4th Duke, continued it to great effect over a period lasting nearly sixty years, for he employed Sir William Chambers and Capability Brown to enhance Vanbrugh’s original designs, building the little temples of Diana, Flora and Health and transforming High Lodge into a small Gothic castle. Capability Brown’s great contribution to Blenheim was the creation of the lake in the park – two lakes in fact – which greatly enhanced Vanbrugh’s beautiful bridge. On the other hand, the 4th Duke also tampered with Vanbrugh’s original design for the gardens, grassing over the Great Court, and the parterre to the south of the palace.
At this point, Sunny’s account of family history for the benefit of his new bride may have become a little vague. The improvements to Blenheim and the cost of the upkeep of the palace were already proving a drain on expenditure by the time of the 4th Duke’s death (he lived out the end of his life as an embittered recluse). Both the 5th and 6th Dukes made matters considerably worse. The 5th Duke, though a man of taste, a connoisseur and a bibliophile, was a spendthrift who was later forced to sell many of the treasures he had bought and retreat to live in one corner of the palace. The 6th Duke made no contribution to Blenheim at all, other than a much publicised row about the admission price for visitors which he was forced to reduce to a shilling shortly before he died in 1857. His chief claim to fame was a libel case involving allegations of bigamy.
The accession of the 7th Duke marked a change in pace for he stopped the family’s growing reputation for degenerate behaviour in its tracks. His formidable widow Frances, known as Fanny, was still alive in 1895, and the high-mindedness of this couple was forcefully impressed upon Consuelo. The 7th Duke may have been a ‘complete, full-blown Victorian prig’,7 but he led a worthwhile existence as a Privy Councillor, Lord Steward of the Household and was the author of the Blandford Act which resulted in an essential but stupefyingly dull sub-division of extended parishes. He too was forced to make stringent economies and started selling family treasures to make ends meet, including a precious collection of antique cameos and intaglios known as the Marlborough Gems and the priceless Sunderland Library.
Duchess Fanny, wife of the 7th Duke, and dowager duchess when Consuelo arrived in England, was the redoubtable daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry. She undertook important fundraising for famine relief when her husband became Viceroy of Ireland. Indeed, she had a keen sense of the duties of a duchess which she impressed on her descendants to the point of ennui. Her American daughter-in-law, Lady Randolph Churchill, (and Consuelo) cordially disliked her, but Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd comes to her defence: ‘In fairness to Duchess Fanny it could be said that she was obliged to run the palace on a tight rein for reasons of economy. The Marlboroughs’ income of £40,000 a year was by no means great by contemporary standards, certainly not with Blenheim to maintain. Rather than retreat to a corner like the spent-out 5th Duke, they managed to keep up appearances, dutifully entertaining the Prince of Wales and other notables of the day, even if the fare was somewhat sparse. Sir Alexander Cockburn, the Lord Chief Justice, complained in the Visitor’s Book that while he was prepared to share almost everything in life, he drew the line at half a snipe for dinner.’8
The serious-minded and industrious atmosphere that surrounded the 7th Duke and his duchess wo
uld not endure for they produced two of the most erratic and wayward sons in the family’s history. Their younger son was Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston Churchill. The elder, the heir, was Sunny’s father, the ‘wicked’ 8th Duke. It would take Consuelo a good deal longer than the first week of her honeymoon to appreciate the havoc wrought by this man, who caused his parents great grief while he was still Marquess of Blandford. He continued the process of asset-stripping begun by his much worthier father so that by 1886, he had sold eighteen paintings by Rubens, two by Rembrandt, one Breughel, eight Van Dycks, not to mention works by Watteau, Stubbs, Reynolds, Poussin and a couple of Titians, the rest of the library and much of the porcelain. This caused a bitter quarrel between the 8th Duke and his brother, Lord Randolph Churchill, who kept finding family paintings as far afield as St Petersburg. In 1888, discovering that he had little of value left to sell, the 8th Duke went to America where he found a rich widow, Lilian Hammersley, and married her, a move not lost on the American press as they reported on Consuelo’s engagement to his son. More interested in science and agriculture than in art, the 8th Duke spent money on equipping the estate farms, building hot houses and a scientific laboratory for himself, in which he died of heart failure ‘with a terrible expression on his face’ at the age of forty-eight.
The 8th Duke was guilty of much more than selling the family silver however. David Cannadine describes him as ‘one of the more disreputable men ever to have debased the highest rank in the British peerage … rude, erratic, profligate, irresponsible and lacking in self-control.’9 Even A. L. Rowse, who takes a more favourable view of Marlboroughs in general, remarked that he was a ‘clever man whose cleverness ran all to seed’.10 He was expelled from Eton as a youth. Immediately after Sunny’s birth in Simla in India in 1871, he told his wife to make her own way back to England with a tiny baby and an ayah while he explored Kashmir. He was persistently unfaithful, miring the family in deep disgrace as a result of his affair with Lady Aylesford. In a wholly misjudged move to keep his proposed elopement with Lady Aylesford quiet, he and his brother, Lord Randolph Churchill, attempted a crude blackmail of the Prince of Wales, threatening to make public admiring letters the latter had written Lady Aylesford unless the Prince persuaded his crony, Lord Aylesford, to abandon plans for divorce. An acceptable apology from Lord Randolph to the furious Prince of Wales had to be drafted by the Lord Chancellor. The Queen became involved. The Prime Minister, Disraeli, finally dispatched the unhappy 7th Duke of Marlborough and his duchess to Ireland where he made the Duke Viceroy and told him to take Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife, Jennie, out of England. The Prince of Wales refused to enter any house that entertained the Spencer-Churchills and denounced Blandford as ‘the greatest blaggard alive’. None of it had any effect. His first wife Albertha finally divorced him after he fathered a son by Lady Aylesford in 1881. He went on to figure in the sensational divorce case of Lady Colin Campbell. It did nothing to help the family’s reputation that when the 8th Duke died at the age of forty-eight, he left a substantial bequest to Lady Colin Campbell, and nothing to Lady Aylesford.
It would also take Consuelo time to understand just how dysfunctional her new husband’s upbringing had been at the hands of such a father. The idea that dukes can suffer from unhappy childhoods may induce snorts of derision in a more democratic age, but there is little doubt that the damaging impact of the childhood on Sunny was recognised long before such explanations were fashionable. A letter from his aunt, Lady Lansdowne, to Sunny’s second wife, Gladys Deacon, in 1921 remarked: ‘Up to ten-years old he was one of the most charming boys I ever met & most joyous; after that his spirits seemed to have vanished & he quite changed,’11 though she may not have mentioned this to Alva when proposing him as a potential suitor for Consuelo. As his marital affairs lurched from bad to worse, the 8th Duke seems to have taken it out on his eldest legitimate son. Sunny told Consuelo that his father had bullied him so badly as a child that he found it quite impossible to exert parental discipline himself, and humiliating ill-treatment of a different kind continued. The 8th Duke kept his family so short of funds that in 1891, when Sunny was still at Cambridge, his father ceased to pay him any form of allowance, and his mother was forced to apply to the courts, unsuccessfully, for it to be reinstated.
Consuelo’s mother-in-law was born Albertha Hamilton, a daughter of the Duke of Abercorn. She was known as ‘Goosey’ because though she was beautiful she was generally felt to be dim. She was also kind and affectionate but this was not enough to compensate for her husband’s cruel and damaging behaviour. She had a marked penchant for heavy-handed practical jokes which drove those around her to distraction, but which were probably a sign of deeply repressed and seething anger, for, according to Consuelo, ‘Goosey’ too had been forced to stand down the man she loved and had been made to marry her duke. Ink pots were placed on top of doors; guests fell ill after eating soap at dinner; one of her best japes was placing a pink toy baby under a silver dish for her husband’s breakfast just after his mistress, Lady Aylesford, had given birth to his son.12
Consuelo later maintained that her husband ended up greatly preferring his aunt, Lady Lansdowne, to his mother. All this came on top of one dynastic trait for which even the 8th Duke cannot be blamed – a family tendency to depression observable from the 4th Duke onwards and which famously afflicted Sunny’s cousin Winston. When Consuelo first arrived at Blenheim she found the 8th Duke’s depressive tendencies still manifest in enigmatic but gloomy inscriptions. The mantelpiece of her bedroom read: ‘Dust. Ashes. Nothing.’ In another room he had inscribed: ‘They say. What say they? Let them say.’
When his father died in 1892, the 9th Duke inherited several intractable problems. The family name was tainted by scandal. Blenheim had been stripped of many of its treasures. An agricultural depression had reduced rents, and in any case, the Marlborough wealth from land was modest compared with other British dukedoms. They were not great London landlords like the Dukes of Westminster and Bedford. Nor were they great landowners like the Duke of Buccleuch or the Duke of Devonshire. The Duke of Buccleuch derived an income from annual rent rolls of £217,000 from 460,000 acres. The Duke of Devonshire received £181,000 from 200,000 acres. The Duke of Marlborough, on the other hand, derived a mere £37,000 from 24,000 acres.13
At the same time, Sunny believed passionately that aristocracy was the cornerstone of the polity. Like most English patricians in the 1890s, he believed that society was unequal by God-given design, that his position was his birthright, and that his responsibility was to maintain an unbroken link with England’s ancient and traditional structures. Though his friends teased him that he had a feudal mind, it is perhaps unsurprising since the Marlboroughs were ranked ninth in an aristocracy that was the most exclusive and prestigious in Europe – an elite of wealth and hereditary political power that had seemed to serve Britain well for centuries. But this was more than a conventionally aristocratic self-serving view. On account of his very difficult background, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his feudal mind and passionate crusade to restore the Marlboroughs and Blenheim to their former glory was closely bound up, at a deeper level, with a crusade to restore himself.
Unlike his father, and several of his forbears apart from the 7th Duke, the 9th Duke believed that rank had its obligations. Disraeli, Salisbury and even his uncle, Lord Lansdowne, had all turned down dukedoms because they felt they ‘lacked the resources to support the dignity’.14 It was Sunny’s misfortune that he felt this sense of obligation so acutely when the first real challenges to the aristocratic status quo were beginning to appear, and when the rules of what constituted ducal ‘dignity’ were being changed by royalty itself. The problem for those at the pinnacle of aristocratic society in England in 1895 was that the tone was now being set by the Prince of Wales who presided over an alternative court to that of his mother, Queen Victoria – a virtual recluse since the death of Prince Albert. It was not simply that the Prince was easi
ly bored, that he enjoyed gambling for high stakes, racing, elaborate meals and colossal sport – though several of his friends claimed to have beggared themselves by keeping him amused. More pernicious was the manner in which the cosmopolitan and metropolitan Prince was embracing opulent style and equating it with rank.
In the short term, the Vanderbilt dowry would do much to relieve these tensions. Many reports of the Duke’s more disagreeable behaviour stemmed from later in his life, and include Consuelo’s own memoir written from the perspective of a far happier second marriage. In 1895, the problems caused by his difficult legacy were much less obvious. Alva would have noted and approved of his emerging connoisseurship. She may have taken the sympathetic view that he was an artist whose canvas was Blenheim as hers had been 660 Fifth Avenue and Marble House. She later wrote that he was ‘a young man of promise’15 with political ambitions – which would have pleased her as she thought of the grandeur of the life enjoyed by the Viceroys of India.
Beneath the surface, however, there was a legacy of bad-temper, bullying, erratic behaviour, humiliation and scandal, a mother he had learnt to despise, and a family tendency to depression. Behind a polite veneer, the Duke was a hyper-sensitive, anxious and self-involved young man determined to restore Blenheim and the tarnished family name regardless of personal cost. None of this would make him an easy companion. In 1895 he also had the disadvantage of youth and inexperience. The 9th Duke of Marlborough came into the title in 1892 and found himself shouldering responsibility for Blenheim Palace before he turned twenty-one. When he married his eighteen-year-old Duchess, he was only twenty-three.
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Page 19