Blenheim Revisited

Yesterday I made my first visit this year to Blenheim Palace when I took a group of students from a CBL International course at Oriel to visit it. This is an excursion I have led for different groups over several years.

I knew that the permanent exhibition about Sir Winston Churchill had been renovated and when I walked through that thought it a great improvement on the previous version, and it uses video and other modern methods to tell the story of his life as well as an improved display of photographs and memorabilia.

Being early in the season the Palace was quiet so one could see it in more comfort than in high summer. The trees in the park still lack their spring green but one sensed it was not far away with the daffodils blooming on the grass verges by the Palace gates.

Blenheim Revisited

As today is the 308th anniversary of the battle of Blenheim in 1704 and as I led three groups from an Oxford summer school out to Blenheim Palace on Saturday and Sunday and gave them introductory talks about the history of the building and the Churchill family and a tour it seems appropriate to write something about it today.

Blenheim Palace

Image: Blenheim7k.co.uk

When I give these tours, and I have done several this summer, I stress the fact that in building the palace as a thank offering to the first Duke of Marlborough the political nation was very much aware of the significance of his victory at Blenheim and of his later victories at Ramilles, Oudenarde and Malplaquet, over the armies of King Louis XIV.

 

Firstly these were the first major defeats of the formidable French military machine in many decades.

 

Secondly this was the first time an English land army had secured a major victory over the old enemy on the continent since the battle of  Verneuil in 1424, 280 years earlier.

 

Thirdly we can see with hindsight that Marlborough's military victories do mark - or recognise - the emergence of Britain as a major military and diplomatic power in the Europe of the eighteenth century - something we had not really been as a country, and despite what we might like to think, since the fifteenth century - we had been too pre-occupied with our own succession disputes and the disasters of reformation and civil war.

In recent years the presentation of Blenheim Palace has been greatly improved - in the 1980s it was not getting very good reviews in the heritage press - and there is a lot to see and do with exhibitions about both the Marlborough family and about Winston Churchill who was, of course, born at the Palace in 1874.

The way in which the Palace celebrates the French opponent is rather surprising - not only does King Louis XIV preside in a state portrait over on e of the great reception rooms, and the fleur de lys is prominent on captured standards from Marlborough's victories and the standards presented annually to the Sovereign as rent for the Woodstock estate, but most strikingly in the great bust of Le Roi Soleil which sits on top of the centre of the south facade of Vanburgh's building - captured in the Low Countries by the first Duke he brought it back and incorporated it in his new building. It may be grandiloquent as a gesture, but it also suggest repect and magnanimity towards an opponent

Blenheim Palace

This morning I led a small group from a summer school here in Oxford on a tour of Blenheim Palace. As it turned out today is the anniversary of the battle in 1704, so it was a very suitable day on which to make a visit.

It is a while since I had visited Blenheim, and the whole business of welcoming visitors has expanded, but what was on offer was very well done, and the Palace is impressive, if very much a self conscious national monument - indeed that fact lay at the root of many of the disputes over its construction. It is grand, but impersonal. When the ninth Duke commented about the way the monument of the first Duke dominates the chapel "Here we worship Churchills" he was not far wrong. Of course such a complex building has to be understood in terms of the social norms which dictated its plan, and how these have changes - the rooms were designed for rather different functions than those they present today. I enjoyed this visit more than my previous one - but I would still say there are many more appealing grand houses of families of similar prominence. Nonetheless worth saying you have seen it.

One thing I regret is that there is nothing left of Woodstock manor. Apparently Vanburgh wanted to preserve the remains, but the formidable Duchess Sarah insisted upon their removal. From what I have gleaned from the Victoria County History volume for Woodstock it was a substantial complex, and presumably with features from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. A great loss. I am surprised the site has never, so far as I know, been excavated.

Looking round houses such as Blenheim it is often the not so obvious things which stay in the mind. Yesterday these included family photographs of Winston Churchill and other members of the family sitting and talking on the steps of the great entrance circa 1901 - a reminder that this was (and is, I suppose) a family home. There were also the three sheets of the Letters Patent of Queen Victoria appointing the seventh Duke as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1876, all three bordered with the floral badges of the Monarch, and at the top the Royal Arms flanked by the English and Irish Royal Crests - the latter comprising the castle tower with the white hart emerging. Not as good heraldic art as you would get in the twentieth century, but a reminder of the ancient linkage of an undivided Ireland to the Crown.

Amongst the portraits two struck me - one of the first Duke's sister Arabella, mistress of the future King James II and VII and mother of, amongst others, the Jacobite Marshal Duke of Berwick, and the other, perhaps booty from the war which brought Marlborough to such prominence, a state portrait of King Louis XIV, seated in his robes of state and holding the royal sceptre and the Main de Justice. This is not the only portrait of the King at Blenheim - there seems to have been a pleasure in displaying images of the great adversary.