Churchill's Grandmama

by Margaret E. Forster

  This grand occasion, a vivid memory in any young woman’s impressionable mind, contributed to Frances’ and John’s commitment to the Irish people in the 1870s, when they took their turn as Viceroy and Vicereine of Ireland and Frances became so unexpectedly active on behalf of the Irish. Garron Tower also became a significant factor in the life of their grandson, Winston Churchill, over 70 years later.

  Chapter Seven

  FRANCES AND BLENHEIM

  * * *

  Frances and John Winston (as Marquess of Blandford) began married life at Hensington House, which, although relatively tiny, was an important Blenheim property. It was conveniently located on the land now occupied by Cadogan Park, a short distance from the Palace, the seat of the Marlborough family and home of Frances’ father-in-law, the 6th Duke. It was a substantial house of three storeys, with a central clock and wings to each side, and occupied attractive spacious grounds. It had been built in 1768 by the 4th Duke and only used for the most senior staff. In location, size and status it was ideal for the young couple as their first home.

  In these early years of the marriage an important role for Frances was to support her 22-year-old husband in his political career. He was elected MP for Woodstock, the local town, almost immediately in 1844, and held the seat with only a short break until 1857 when, on succeeding to the Marlborough title, he continued his career in the House of Lords. To give her husband a full measure of support would not have been easy for Frances since she was busy producing and bringing up a large family.

  In the 14 years, from 1843 to 1857, they lived at Hensington, Frances gave birth to eight of their 11 children. All accounts agree she provided a loving, happy, well-adjusted and well-guided childhood for them here, as she later did at the Palace itself. One of her great personal qualities was her maternal instinct, the ability to reach out and care for all children, not just her own. From the moment of her arrival, Frances’ home became Blenheim. Although she revisited Wynyard, and no doubt remembered it with affection, her love and attention were focused on this lovely palace and its environs. Much has been said elsewhere about Blenheim, more graciously and at greater length, but the purpose here is to emphasise the significance of her arrival, her substantial contribution to its life and community, and her well-deserved place in its history.

  Blenheim Palace, the family seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, is situated a few miles north-west of the city of Oxford; the park on which it stands has a clear perspective of 12 centuries of history. It had been a royal hunting forest from Saxon times. In the Middle Ages Henry II built the royal manor of Woodstock where Elizabeth I was later imprisoned by her half-sister Mary. When John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, as leader of the allied forces against Louis XIV, was victorious in the critical battle of Blenheim in 1704, he was rewarded by a grateful Queen Anne and nation with the gift of two and a half thousand acres of land and the means to build the palace, which was to be huge and imposingly baroque. It would be built on a scale to symbolise for posterity the glory of the Duke’s achievement and, perhaps more importantly, serve as a reminder of Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts. Sir John Vanbrugh, the chosen architect, built for them this dramatic palace, overwhelming to many. For Frances, however, brought up in a world of power, status and magnificent houses, her new married world was one she not only adjusted to but also warmly welcomed. She was aware and appreciative of the palace’s fascinating history. The park at Wynyard had been comparable to that at Blenheim, and in later years Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister, was to describe Wynyard as ‘a palace in a vast park’, with a feudal air of forest rides and antlered deer.

  It was thanks to the 1st Duchess Sarah’s close friendship with Queen Anne that the Churchills’ Blenheim inheritance survived in the early days. When John and Sarah’s remaining son died, and the dukedom was threatened with extinction, Queen Anne made it possible for the title to pass through the female line, so that at her father’s death his eldest daughter, Henrietta, became Duchess in her own right. Her son in turn predeceased her, and so on her death Charles, the oldest surviving son of Anne, the second daughter, came from Althorp to become the 3rd Duke of Marlborough. Since he was a Spencer, the family name ultimately became Spencer-Churchill. Anne’s second son, John, remained at Althorp to continue the family line which is now that of the present Earl Spencer and his famous sister, the late Diana Princess of Wales.

  It was the 4th Duke of Marlborough, George, succeeding to the title in 1758 and living until 1817, who made a most substantial contribution to Blenheim. In his 59 years at the palace he improved the park, firstly bringing in ‘Capability’ Brown, the famous landscape gardener, to create the lake in particular and provide the lovely views on all sides. His celebrated style of tree planting in belt and clump; his skill with water, that we see in the lake and the glorious cascade; his topographical talent with rise and fall of land created the remarkable and impressive sight we enjoy today, a vista which is man-made but convinces us it is totally natural. Secondly, the three Greek temples in the gardens and the elegant Bladon bridge were built by the Duke’s architects, Sir William Chambers and John Yenn. The cost of it all exceeded £100,000. He was thorough in his stewardship of the palace also, investing in furniture, antique gems and pictures. The portrait of this Duke and his family by Sir Joshua Reynolds is one of the present treasures in the collection at Blenheim.

  His son, the 5th Duke, was an outstanding horticulturist, bibliophile, talented musician and spendthrift; he caused severe financial problems for the family for generations to come. Lady Mary Soames has outlined his lamentable career in her book The Profligate Duke; suffice it to say here that his extravagance was a cruel legacy for his descendants, and his shortcomings forced the subsequent sale of important Blenheim art treasures in the years that were to come.

  Of Frances’ five sons three had died very young: Frederick at four, Charles before he was two and Augustus at only ten months. Fortitude was one of Frances’ strengths throughout her life and it was a quality she needed in the face of the bereavements she had to endure. There were great moments of pathos in her life.

  For now, though, she was free to concentrate mainly on her family although time would be given to duties assigned her by the 6th Duke and her husband John Winston. She would come to know the people in the surrounding villages of Bladon, Combe, Long Hanborough, Church Hanborough and Hensington, which is now part of Woodstock. Often she would walk by the lovely lake created by Capability Brown in 1764, when Blenheim underwent a transition from formality to naturalism. She would take pleasure in the wildfowl, probably feeding them, in particular the wild geese that reminded her of the sea birds that flocked around Seaham Hall: cormorant, seagull, guillemot and tern. Rosamund’s Well would be a favourite place, sheltered and peaceful, where one might imagine the thoughts and feelings of lonely Rosamund as she marked the passing of the years. Frances would study the developing shape of Brown’s beeches, growing in clumps in the distance and turning in autumn to those familiar and glorious shades of bronze and gold. It is very easy to come to love Blenheim Park in every season, but perhaps the most splendid is the late summer and autumn when the leaves linger in glowing colours and the eye is drawn to the warmth and beauty of the trees in the dying moments of the year.

  The location of Hensington House was fortunate because it brought John Winston and Frances into easy contact with John’s father, the 6th Duke, at the palace a short distance away. There seems to have been a good relationship between them, although in some ways the Duke was not an easy man. The proximity had another consequence for Frances in that it placed her at the heart of the Blenheim community in which, as Duchess, she was later to have responsibilities. Over the 14 years at Hensington House she came to know the ordinary people and the reality of their lives in Woodstock and the surrounding villages. Concern for the needy and deprived was to characterise all her years in the Marlborough family as it had characterised her ancestors’ lives.

  On one occasion her
husband was addressing a gathering of prosperous farmers. He thanked his wife for her presence and support but said they should know that her real care and concern was not for them but for their workers and families, the more vulnerable, where she found there was often more need and more hardship.

  As the family grew older and her sons went to preparatory school and Eton, it was the mother’s responsibility to educate her daughters; in this respect Frances was fortunate, being both intelligent and well educated. Education was one of her passions and, of course, she started with her own family. She was fortunate also to have at Blenheim what was described as one of the finest private libraries in Europe, and this storehouse of Victorian thought and literature echoed and reinforced Frances’ own ideals and sympathies.

  From the 1850s onwards the prosperity and power of the Victorians showed an astonishing increase; they looked back on a poverty-stricken agricultural past and flocked to the new industrial regions to enjoy new prosperity and security. They became confident, dynamic, ambitious, wealthy and internationally respected. The military glory of the eighteenth century was followed by the growth of the British Empire, which came to rule almost half the world. Founded on natural resources – mainly coal, iron and wool – British exports increased ten-fold. The year 1825 had seen the first public railway, from Stockton to Darlington, and now science and technology made great strides. Brunel and the Stephensons erected magnificent bridges over rivers and valleys; Faraday in 1837 introduced electricity. Britain hummed with activity and pride. As an educated, aristocratic woman, wife and mother, Frances took great interest in this exciting social and cultural change.

  In the arts the output was prolific. At the centre of intellectual life were Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Scottish by birth but established from 1834 in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. Here Thomas wrote his defence of the industrial poor, Past and Present, published in 1843 and destined to become a beacon for the new social consciousness; he became a passionate reformer, both spiritual and prophetic. In 1849 John Ruskin published Seven Lamps of Architecture; he became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1870 and his struggle for Christian social ideals against competition and self-interest was his greatest characteristic. Also in Oxford were the Tractarians, a movement generating profound reform in the Church of England. Led by John Keble, John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey, it used sermons and published pamphlets to provoke concern and discussion throughout the Christian Church. The impact of the Oxford Movement, as it came to be called, was immense upon both religious and cultural life and it directed thought and research back to the times before the Reformation. Alongside it, the Pre-Raphaelite movement was a brotherhood of artists dedicated to the reflection of nature and moral seriousness, represented most often in medieval subjects and imagery. Associated with it are the names of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, J.E. Millais, W. Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones and, of course, William Morris, the multi-talented craftsman who married the lovely Jane Burden in St Michael’s Church in Oxford in 1859 and in 1871 brought her and their two daughters to live at Kelmscott Manor on the banks of the Thames. It was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who painted the murals in the Oxford Union in 1857. Throughout society a fresh wind of enterprise and initiative, of creativity and precision, of energy and enthusiasm was blowing, which was to have a profound effect on those generations following.

  The family at Blenheim grew up surrounded by books and newspapers. The work of writers and poets in this literary golden age rank among the familiar classics of today: Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), the products of that dramatic but tragic vicarage in Haworth; William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) and later Henry Esmond (1852); Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poems of lyrical beauty, Ulysses, The Lotus-Eaters and his grief-stricken In Memoriam, published in 1850; Robert Browning’s highly original poems, mostly written after he had eloped with Elizabeth Barrett in 1846, a romantic marriage which ended with her death in 1861; Elizabeth’s own Sonnets from the Portuguese (1860); the fiercely intellectual Mary Ann Evans, forced into the nom-de-plume of George Eliot, for Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861); Matthew Arnold, reformer in education and poet, and his Forsaken Merman (1849), Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar-Gipsy (both 1853); Elizabeth Gaskell, pre-occupied with social problems in Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855); and, most prolific of all, Charles Dickens with his monthly magazine instalments, beginning in 1836 with Sketches by Boz and continuing through to 1865 and Our Mutual Friend.

  All these volumes would have been read by Frances and her daughters, who lacked a formal education and remained at home; the richness of the literature would have made an important contribution to their thinking and conversation, and books would be eagerly read and discussed at the dinner table. Serial publication in magazines was common, and the whole family would look forward to the arrival of the weekly or monthly instalment, delivered by that great Victorian invention the Royal Mail. Reputed to have had brains rather than beauty, Frances would have relished the opportunity to follow the progress of contemporary arts in particular. She passed on her love of the theatre, whose heartland was London, and adored Gilbert and Sullivan, which says something about her sense of humour. It seems likely the London houses in Mayfair were used by Frances and John Winston from the beginning of their marriage; after all, the children were born in London and she had spent a great deal of her own childhood there. It was doubtless a family treat to attend the theatre regularly; she enjoyed taking her grandson Winston and his cousins years later.

  Sadness was not far away from the Londonderrys. In 1849, when Queen Victoria visited Ireland, Frances’ father Charles rode with her in the royal carriage through Belfast. Relations with the Queen, a contemporary of Frances, had always been cordial and at this point Charles enjoyed affection and respect from that quarter. But, in November 1852, the Duke of Wellington died and Charles, in his seventies, served as pallbearer to his old friend and ally in the magnificent public funeral which followed.

  The Whig government had fallen and Lord Derby became Prime Minister, with Disraeli as Leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The question of who should succeed Wellington as a Knight of the Order of the Garter arose, and, remembering Londonderry’s courteous withdrawal from the post of Ambassador to Russia in 1836, Queen Victoria agreed immediately that he should be appointed. Derby wrote to him that he could not more appropriately dispose of Wellington’s Garter than to one of the ‘most distinguished of his old companions-at-arms’. Life had come full circle, and Londonderry was reminded of his beloved brother Castlereagh and the glories of military and diplomatic Europe. He replied with great pleasure to Derby that although he had been fortunate to receive the highest decorations from the sovereigns of all the countries of Europe he would value Wellington’s ribbon as worth them all put together. The idealism and integrity which Frances inherited from her father are evident in this reply.

  The shadows were closing in on Charles Stewart, however. In February 1853, his last public appearance, he stood in a biting north-east wind to cut the first turf of the railway which was to link Seaham with the port of Sunderland. In his speech, delivered with his usual charismatic commitment, he was cheered and carried along by his audience almost sentence by sentence. He concluded:

  I beg pardon for having troubled you at such length; but the moment is one of great importance to myself. It may be the last time I shall have the opportunity of addressing you. I have told you without reserve every feeling that has directed me, and also the history of my latest undertaking. If I live to see this last project successfully accomplished, I shall cheerfully lay my head on my pillow and resign life, conscious that, so far as concerns those whose interests Providence has committed to my care, I have to the fullest extent of my means discharged the duty which has devolved upon me.1

  He had spoken for over half an hour, bare-headed in a cruel wind from the North Sea, and then he came do
wn from the platform, cut a piece of turf with his spade and threw it, with appropriate style, into a handsome mahogany wheelbarrow. The loud cheering followed him as he wheeled it across the field to his carriage, on top of which he flung it with a heroic flourish, together with the spade. For him it was the triumphant moment for which he had waited so long.

  Christmas and New Year were spent as usual at Wynyard and, although Charles was unwell, he struggled up to Londonderry House in February 1854 to attend Parliament. A bad attack of influenza unfortunately turned to pneumonia and he died on 6 March 1854 in the presence of his wife and children, deeply mourned. The Crimean War was beginning, and the Indian Mutiny a year away. The same black horses that had drawn the coffin of the Duke of Wellington through the streets of London now conveyed the Marquess of Londonderry to his final resting-place.

  Notes