Home Farm, Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire

4 October 2017:- Today was simply set aside for a visit to Blenheim Palace, best in good weather, although not mandatory. We headed off about 9 am directly north for about ten miles, our choice of camp having been partly due to its proximity to this architectural treasure. Sadly, for us, this is neither under the care of National Trust or English Heritage, but is one of those included in the “two for one” Treasure Houses of England, hence it was the main target of our stay in or near Oxford.

Blenheim Palace is one of the most important grand houses in the United Kingdom, outside the royal residences which are in a class of their own, if only for the fact they are royal. 

Back in 1704, when John Churchill, 1^st Duke of Marlborough, returned victoriously from the battle against the French in Bavaria, he was awarded not a shiny medal, but the royal hunting property of Woodstock with enough money to be paid out for the building of a suitably appropriate mansion.  Just months on, the Duke engaged the architectural services of poet and writer, Sir John Vanbrugh, he who was also responsible for Castle Howard, but £260,000 into the project, the money ran out. Fortunately the Duke managed to supplement the crown grant with his own funds, and for a further £40,000, it was finished, twenty eight years later and after much acrimonious dealings with all parties involved. While the warring Duke was off fighting more battles, his clever but difficult wife, Sarah, managed to create many adversaries, all recorded in history rather than her more positive attributes. She had been a bosom buddy of Queen Anne who had made the generous grant to the Churchills, but even this relationship ended in bad blood, and the two women were seriously estranged by the time that Queen Anne died and the Hapsburgs moved onto British thrones.

Evidently the Churchills, or at least the Duke, were held in such high esteem that the law was changed in 1706 to allow the title to pass down to a women when there was no surviving male heir, however daughter Charlotte did not do any better in providing an heir, so the title and the property passed to her nephew, with the name Spencer, who begat and begat in a straight line all the way through to the current 12^th Duke still residing in a corner of Blenheim Palace. 

 Interestingly in 1817 the 5^th Duke managed to seek royal approval for a name change to the rather grand Spencer-Churchill and so it has remained, even by Sir Winston Churchill who was more correctly, Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill. It is also this family who spawned the equally famous Diana Princess of Wales, although on another line, but both she and Winston could claim John and Sarah as their antecedents.

Several generations of this family squandered the family wealth on projects of varying worth, while others spent money on improvements, including employing “Capability” Brown in the later 1700s, he who can take most of the credit for the wonderful landscape while the more formal aspects of the garden owe their existence to later designers. 

In 1895 the 9^th Duke caught himself an American heiress, Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was in turn keen to catch an English title. The match was mutually advantageous although on a more personal level less so; the marriage lasted little over ten years but long enough to produce an heir and a spare. And of course the dowry enabled significant upgrades of the property, much of it still visible today. 

Winston Churchill, while grandson of a Duke rather than being one himself, was born in Blenheim Palace, more by chance than good management, but did spend much of his childhood vacation time with his grandmother or nanny there, developing enduring ties to the palace. So much so that he proposed to his wife there and when he died, had his body interred at the nearby church rather than Westminster Abbey as protocol demanded.

The Palace was opened to the public in 1950 and granted World Heritage Site status in 1988, one of the criteria being the historic nature of the 2,000 acre Capability Brown landscape.

We spent more than six hours at the Palace and the surrounding grounds, firstly walking around the manmade lake, across the Vanbrugh’s beautiful Grand Bridge, through the rose gardens where we lunched, through the arboretum where we encountered hundreds of pheasants and many grey squirrels, down past the manmade cascade which doubles as a spillway, and finally up into the palace. There we spent time in “The Untold Story”, a series of scenes using film and holographs. This was quite brilliant, explaining the construction and subsequent history of the palace, although the attractive woman who greeted us as we entered the “experience” was Asian, English her second language and extremely difficult to understand, especially if you are slightly hard of hearing which all four of us visitors were.  

We joined a tour through the house led by a wonderful woman, who spoke clearly and offered a variety of gems to entertain and educate the variety of the members of the group, explaining the tapestries commissioned by the 1^st Duke and his wife to commemorate the Battle of Blenheim and drawing attention to the grand furniture rescued from the victims of the French Revolution. At the end of the tour, we were directed to the special exhibition about the life of Winston Churchill which we found most absorbing.

By the time we emerged from all this, there were still parts of the estate left unseen but I was tired and glad to head home. We were delighted to have made the effort to visit and would be glad to return at some time in the future, maybe again next year.