The Churchills Read online

  King William III created John the Earl of Marlborough, made him a Privy Councillor, and later appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the armies in Flanders. But the new King never entirely trusted Churchill, and this is not surprising, for it was soon discovered that John was still in secret communication with the exiled King James. Churchill was disgraced and stripped of his court offices, and was lucky not to have fared worse. For some years he was out of the public eye and during this time he served as Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, lending his name to the town of Churchill in Manitoba (which is still thriving).

  In 1701 the Spanish King died without an heir. Louis XIV of France immediately put forward his grandson, the Duke of Anjou, as Spanish successor and made it clear that France would go to war to advance this claim. A coalition of European states and governments, concerned about French plans to encompass Spain, backed a rival claimant, the Austrian Archduke Charles.

  Despite his misgivings about Churchill’s loyalty, before King William’s sudden and unexpected death (which occurred when his horse stumbled on a mole hill at Hampton Court), * the King had confided to his sister-in-law and heir to the throne, the Princess Anne, that there was only one man capable of stopping the French from taking over the whole of Europe, and that man was Marlborough. This advice was heeded, and when the War of Spanish Succession began Churchill was appointed to command the English and Dutch armies for an annual stipend of £10,000. He was a brilliant tactician, and in the first of ten successive campaigns he captured Kaiserworth and all the territory between the Rhine and Meuse Rivers. In recognition of this Queen Anne gratefully conferred a dukedom upon him and, as he was heading into his mid-fifties (then considered to be old), it seemed he had reached the summit of his career. Yet John Churchill’s finest hour still lay ahead of him, and though he was an avaricious man and an undoubted time-server, his record as a commander has never been equalled – not even by the great Wellington.

  Even without that direct commendation from the late King William, and had he not been the greatest military strategist in England, John Churchill – by then Duke of Marlborough –might well have been selected to lead the armies, for Queen Anne was completely in thrall to the dictatorial Duchess, Sarah Churchill. The two women had known each other since childhood, and Anne had always been fascinated by the older girl, who had advised her on how to act, how to dress and how to deal with court officials. By the time she ascended the throne, Queen Anne would never make a decision before consulting her best friend Sarah. There was only one way, besides conquest, that anyone could hope for social and financial advancement at court, and that was through royal patronage. The entire court schemed endlessly and shamelessly for positions, pensions, sinecures and titles, but no one rivalled Sarah in the art of machination and self-promotion.

  While they were still teenagers, Sarah had groomed Princess Anne to look to her for guidance in all things. And after Anne came to the throne Sarah collected a number of titles and honours for herself, to each of which was attached an annual stipend: Groom of the Stole, Mistress of the Robes, Keeper of the Privy Purse and Ranger of Windsor Park. More importantly, she was able to manipulate the Queen as she wished. It was Sarah, for example, who ensured that Churchill’s good friend Earl Godolphin was made First Minister, the equivalent of today’s Prime Minister. And it was rumoured that Sarah received a gift of £10,000 from the Duke of Kent when he was appointed to the position of Lord Chamberlain in 1704, through her influence.

  So while her able husband led his armies and worked towards glory (he never lost a battle and he took every fortress he besieged), Sarah, from her start as a lowly handmaiden, had by her own efforts made herself a woman of immense power, able to influence state policy, and perhaps to change the course of history. To all intents and purposes, through Sarah, the Churchill ‘set’ ran the country for a while – one pamphleteer wrote that although Anne wore the crown, it was Sarah who reigned. It was said of her that ‘No woman not of royal rank has ever held before, or is likely to hold again, such a position as was hers during the critical years of the eighteenth century, when the map of Europe and the constitution of England were in the making.’8

  Churchill’s sensational victory at Blenheim in 1704, where his cavalry broke the French line on the left bank of the Danube and made Europe safe again from French ambitions (until the rise of Napoleon almost a century later), was a cause for massive nationwide celebration.* Sarah made the most of it. Churchill became a national hero and in his absence honours were showered upon him. He was made a Knight of the Garter, a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Master General of the Ordnance, and he received other sinecures as well as a lifetime grant of £5000 a year from the Civil List. But the biggest reward of all was the gift of the 2700-acre royal estate at Woodstock in Oxfordshire†which generated £6000 a year. Furthermore, the Queen asked Parliament, on behalf of a grateful nation, to grant funds to build ‘a castle’ for the Duke at Woodstock, to commemorate his glorious victory. Parliament voted the huge sum of £250,000.

  The Duke’s ideas for this building were always more grandiose than were his wife’s, especially when her power over the Queen began to wane. But Churchill – who spent all his summers campaigning in Europe – was happy to leave most things, including his advancement, to Sarah. For a while, she seems to have believed she was the Queen, and was witnessed not only correcting the Queen in public but shouting her down and dictating to her which jewels should be worn on state occasions. In time Sarah was supplanted by her young relative, Abigail Hill, whom Sarah had placed in a lowly position in the Queen’s household. Abigail knew how to comfort the Queen and to listen to her; where Sarah stormed and threw tantrums, Abigail soothed. To Sarah’s astonishment and impotent fury she saw her influence ebb away in favour of her inconspicuous relative. She was not so upset emotionally, for she had begun to find the dumpy Queen vapid, boring and lacking in taste, but the loss of her power base was a major shock to her.

  Much to everyone’s surprise – since it had been assumed that Sir Christopher Wren (whom Sarah chose to design their London home, Marlborough House, on the Mall) would oversee the prestigious project of what was then referred to as Blenheim Castle – the Duke chose the architect John Vanbrugh. Sarah always preferred Marlborough House, where her husband’s successes were celebrated in the marbled fabric of the house but where it was her own taste that prevailed – ‘my taste always having been to have things plain and clean from a piece of wainscot to a lady’s face,’ she wrote.9 The Duke dreamed of ‘an English Versailles’, not so much as a family home but as a national monument to the glory of the victory at Blenheim, and he had been deeply impressed by Castle Howard, designed by Vanbrugh. So, in 1705, it was Vanbrugh he chose to build his dream house.

  In fact the generous amount provided by Parliament proved inadequate for the grandiose building plans and the equally lavish interior. Sarah ‘managed’ the project herself, at constant loggerheads with Vanbrugh, so that everything took longer than necessary. When the money ran out, the fifteen hundred workmen went unpaid. Had it not been for Vanbrugh’s efforts to protect the building over the winter (he moved in and lived there), it would have inevitably fallen into ruin. Meanwhile, Sarah had quarrelled irrevocably with the Queen and was stripped of all her court offices. Given that Sarah was unable to watch over the Duke’s interests, his enemies at court had the best of it, and despite having led the British armies victoriously for a decade he was now accused of having prolonged the wars in Europe for his own interests. Realising that there was no longer a future for them under Queen Anne and a Parliament resolutely opposed to the Duke, the Marlboroughs decided to move to Europe, where they became close to the Electress of Hanover and her son George, who were next in line to the English throne after the childless Anne.* It was clearly a symbiotic relationship.

  When, on 1 August 1714, Queen Anne died, the Marlboroughs returned immediately to England as part of the retinue of King George I, and were cheered heartily by crowds who reca
lled the Duke’s great victories. The enemies of the Churchills were duly routed and everything went smoothly for the couple until, in the following year, their daughter Anne (her father’s favourite child) died at the age of thirty-two from smallpox, and within days the Duke suffered a major stroke. He had scarcely recovered when he suffered a second stroke, which robbed him of speech. During these years the great building site at Woodstock was slowly evolving into a palace, while Sarah fought daily battles with the designer, builders and craftsmen, shaving a penny off here and sixpence off there, a hundred guineas anywhere she could, while always demanding the highest quality and being slow to pay the bills.

  In the summer of 1719 the Marlboroughs finally moved into Blenheim, which had been furnished without regard to cost – the Duke, renowned for being parsimonious since he was a youth, never begrudged money spent on his pet project. Sarah hated the building, finding it unwieldy as a home: ‘That wild unmerciful house,’ she once wrote of it, ‘which not even a vast number of feather beds and quilts, all good and sweet feathers, even for the servants, could tame.’ She had penny-pinched, scolded and raged at everyone as she drove the project to completion. Her friend Alexander Pope, when he visited Blenheim, agreed with her assessment of it:

  The chimneys are so well designed

  They never smoke in any wind.

  This gallery’s contrived for walking,

  The windows to retire and talk in;

  The Council Chamber for debate,

  And all the rest are rooms of state.

  ‘Thanks, sir,’ cried I, ‘’Tis very fine,

  But where d’ye sleep, or where d’ye dine?

  I find by all you have been telling

  That ’tis a house, but not a dwelling.’

  So unpleasant and dictatorial had Sarah become by now that even her two surviving daughters refused to visit Blenheim while their mother was in residence. When informed that the Duke was dying in June 1722 and they had little choice if they wished to see their father alive, they called to see him. But they paid their mother ‘no more attention’, Sarah wrote, ‘than if I had been the nurse to snuff out the candles’. Incensed, she demanded that they leave, and they did so. The Duke died the following morning at dawn. Sarah said she knew the exact moment of his death, for she felt her soul ‘tearing’ from her body.

  John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was buried in Westminster Abbey at his wife’s expense, though she subsequently went carefully through the invoices, totalling £5000, and had the cost significantly reduced. Later, the Duke’s body would be moved to Blenheim to lie with Sarah’s; but meanwhile, given her personal fortune, she was regarded as a great catch and was courted by several dukes. To one, the Duke of Somerset, who had proposed marriage, Horace Walpole maliciously wrote that Sarah replied: ‘If I were young and handsome as I was, instead of old and faded as I am, and [if] you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should [still] never share the heart and hand that once belonged to John, Duke of Marlborough.’ In fact her reply was far more diplomatic. Having thanked him for the great compliment, she advised: ‘I am resolved never to change my condition and…I would not marry the Emperor of the world though I were but thirty years old.’10

  By special royal assent, because there was no living son the title was, unusually, allowed to pass through the female line to John and Sarah’s eldest surviving daughter, forty-two-year-old Henrietta.* The new Duchess of Marlborough and her mother, now the Dowager Duchess, were estranged for many years, although Sarah was very upset when Henrietta predeceased her. In fact Sarah outlived all but one of her children, as well as a number of grandchildren including her favourite granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer, for whom Sarah plotted a secret marriage to the Prince of Wales.† Henrietta’s son William, Marquess of Blandford, had died before his mother, which was, Sarah decided, no bad thing, for he was a spendthrift.

  The title then passed to Charles Spencer, the eldest son of Sarah’s second daughter Anne.‡ Thus in 1733, when Charles Spencer became the 3rd Duke, the family surname became Spencer and remained so until the 5th Duke added the name Churchill, and the family became the Spencer Churchills. Some years earlier on the death of his elder brother, Charles had succeeded to Althorp, the family seat of the Spencers in Northamptonshire, but when he became Duke of Marlborough, in fulfilment of a family pact he handed Althorp to his younger brother John. It is John who is the ancestor of the present Spencer family.

  Once Blenheim was finished (mostly from public money), Sarah carefully garnered her income and, like many self-made people, she hated the thought of her descendants squandering the fortune she and the Duke had made.§ Although she had spent lavishly on Blenheim to glorify her dead husband, she always made sure that she got twenty shillings’ value for every pound spent, whereas her grandsons were so profligate that they would pay a sedan chair-man with a golden guinea (the fare was usually less than a shilling) and refused to take change because they were too grand to be seen handling silver coins. Sarah was worth considerably more than a million pounds (£120 million today) in her final years, which made her one of the richest women in the country, and unusually her money was within her own control. She spent much of her long old age writing innumerable revisions to her complicated will, and in the last year of her life alone she rewrote it twenty-five times. As a result she left enough to sustain her descendants through several generations. She died at the age of eighty-five, having been a widow for over two decades. Of her two spendthrift noble grandsons, John (‘Jack’) at Althorp and Charles at Blenheim, she preferred Jack. So it was to Jack Spencer that she left most of the family property and treasures that were within her own control (not entailed). Consequently, Althorp was always the more richly endowed of the two properties.

  Sarah’s death on 18 October 1744 at Marlborough House in London was recorded by her contemporary, the writer Tobias Smollett: ‘In October the old Duchess of Marlborough resigned her breath in the 85th year of her age, immensely rich and very little regretted either by her own family, or by the world in general.’

  2

  1850–74

  Randolph and Jennie

  It was almost inevitable that any dynastic line stemming from two such powerful personalities as John and Sarah Churchill would carry a strain of strong individualism. And so it proved, down through more than two centuries in the Spencer Churchill family, while six generations successfully established themselves in Britain’s ruling elite. The marriages of all Churchill children, whether in the direct ducal line or not, were more often than not ‘arranged’ with the progeny of other leading aristocrats, for both dynastic and financial reasons.

  By the mid-nineteenth century this family was, without question, among the top five arbiters of national policy, law, fashion and society. But beneath the splendour of this success lay the fact that instead of following the prudent example of the first Duke and Duchess, most of those who succeeded to the dukedom were profligate.

  Henrietta, daughter of John and Sarah, succeeded as Duchess of Marlborough on the death of her father, but she died before her mother and had little time to make her mark. When Henrietta’s nephew Charles Spencer succeeded her as 3rd Duke, to his grandmother’s horror he had already managed to squander over half a million pounds in gambling and high living. He inherited from his father the Earl of Sunderland a wonderful collection of books, which by 1703 numbered twenty-four thousand volumes and was already described by some as the finest library in Europe.1 So the 3rd Duke’s contribution to posterity, and to Blenheim, was to create the Sunderland Library. He died, aged fifty-two, of dysentery while campaigning in Germany.

  His son George became the 4th Duke at the age of eighteen. When he married the daughter of the Duke of Bedford, the new Duchess – who had been raised at Woburn Abbey and so was undaunted by the size of Blenheim – was the first member of the family to see Blenheim as a potential family home. Not only did she furnish it, regardless of expense, with the finest Chippendale pieces, but the Duke c
ommissioned Capability Brown to re-landscape the park, a project that took ten years and included the creation of the great lake which forms what the family still regard as ‘the finest view in Europe’. He also purchased the collection known as the Marlborough Gems, carved gemstones and other precious items, for the palace. By 1766 the Duke, who all his life had spent money without a thought for the morrow, was struggling to pay his bills. He was forced to reduce the household staff from eighty-seven to seventy-five, and to sell one of the grand Spencer houses, Langley Park. As he aged he became a recluse, and when he died in his sleep aged seventy-seven the estate passed to his eldest son, George.

  It is true that George Spencer Churchill, the 5th Duke, who adopted Spencer Churchill as the family name, inherited mainly debts when he succeeded in 1817; but he had been a wild and spoilt young man, a Regency buck who had borrowed money recklessly upon his expectations and lived a riotous life in London, estranged from his parents. Rather than retrenching when he inherited, he thought up the novel solution of spending his way out of his debt problems.

  In order to raise money for his favourite pastimes – which included enhancing the gardens and his beloved library – the 5th Duke began selling off family assets that were in fact entailed in perpetuity, and not his to sell. At one point this included the melting-down of valuable items of gold; the gold was then sold and the original objects replaced with cheap ormolu look-alikes in an attempt to fool the estate’s trustees. But the trustees were not fooled, and took the Duke to Chancery Court where they obtained an injunction to prevent him ‘selling, pawning or disposing’ of any further items. The Duchess moved out to a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court, while the Duke holed up in a few rooms in a remote corner of the palace and lived off game and fish from the estate while drinking his way through the vast cellars. He then scandalised society by selling fishing and shooting rights at Blenheim ‘by the hour’ to anyone who could afford the fees. By the time he died in 1840, the 5th Duke was penniless. Bailiffs moved into Sarah’s wonderful state rooms and Blenheim survived him, but only just, in a desperate state of repair. Nine years later, when the Duke of Wellington visited Blenheim with his mistress Harriet Arbuthnot, she observed that the family had ‘sadly gone to decay and are but a disgrace to the illustrious name of Churchill…the present Duke is overloaded with debt’.2