Frances’ involvement with schools in the years still to come, as Vicereine of Ireland, was based on long experience.
Notes
1. The Later Churchills, by A.L. Rowse, pp.215, 223.
2. Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill, pp.61-2.
3. Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 1.5.1858, cited in History of Bladon School by Wendy Heppell and Carol Browning, 2008, p.8.
4. Log book of Woodstock School, cited in History of the Woodstock Schools by Norman Roast, pp.24, 25, 31.
Chapter Nine
THE TRIUMPHANT REVIVAL
* * *
The more domestic face of Blenheim Palace was to take on a new appearance at this point in its history. The 6th Duke had already begun on the restoration after his father’s sad reign, but only by obtaining an Act of Parliament could he finance repairs by mortgages and timber sales. The fact that this Duke had all his papers destroyed at his death has made it difficult to assess the extent of his contribution, but we do know that in his relatively short time as Duke (1840-57) the Palace was renovated ‘at immense expense’, reputedly £80,000. It is not possible to define exactly what he did, but there is one known detail which was to benefit Frances when she arrived at Blenheim after her marriage. The 4th Duke had developed the former Orangery into a theatre, but this was now redundant and so the 6th Duke converted it into offices and moved the Palace administration there from Hensington House. This resulted in the large and attractive house, so conveniently located, becoming available to Frances and John Winston when they were married.
The period 1857-83, when John Winston and Frances inhabited Blenheim as 7th Duke and Duchess, brought significant changes and improvements. The 7th Duke continued his father’s work of developing and restoring the Palace and Park after years of neglect by the 5th Duke. This was a world foreign to Frances. There was no question of any need for remedial or restoration work on the houses and farms where she had grown up. Nothing was allowed to deteriorate there: everything was in good order. The financial basis of the Londonderry estate and houses was different, the family not depending on their land and agricultural income. The income from industry was huge, particularly the collieries of her mother’s family, the Vanes, which her father, the Marquess, had developed so successfully. When her father-in-law and then her husband were struggling to find necessary finance, the Londonderry collieries were employing over 4,000 miners at the height of the nineteenth-century boom. As usual, there was only support from Frances for the measures her husband had to take.
In their years at Blenheim there were great changes for the staff who had always lived in the Palace. In the early nineteenth century there were said to be 187 furnished rooms in the Palace and a staff, not all resident, of about 80; the 1871 census return records at least 30 servants living in the Palace itself. Now the Duke was building lodges and estate cottages on the Park and in nearby villages. Springlock Lodge, or Cottage, was built near High Lodge in the 1840s; Middle and Eagle Lodges before 1863; Hensington Lodge from 1876-7. Ditchley Lodge, at the northern boundary to the park, was rebuilt closer to the gate before 1863; Woodstock Lodge, at the Town Gate, so called by 1863, was rebuilt in the 1880s; Bladon Lodge was much restored in 1888; the Bothy, north-west of the kitchen garden, was built in the late nineteenth century. Staff, household and otherwise, could now move out of the Palace and enjoy a new degree of freedom, no longer under the same roof as the Duke; in many cases there was easier access to local amenities such as schools and shops. Among the houses were the Duke’s ‘Model Cottages’, of which he built 20 or more, not only in Woodstock but in villages on the outlying estate. These were built for families, and provided a much greater opportunity for staff to marry and have children.
This period also saw a great deal of restoration and alteration within the Palace. Frances and John used it as the home for a family (a family with eight children), and also made comfortable provision for guests, both family and formal, of whom there were many. They enjoyed a reputation for their welcoming hospitality at the Palace as well as for the grand society occasions they hosted. To this end, the circuit for visitors of public rooms was curtailed and the whole east front reserved as private apartments. The large drawing-room west of the Grand Cabinet Room, and the present Green Drawing Room, became a billiard room. The Saloon, known as the State Dining Room, was refurnished as a drawing-room. The former billiard room became a library, designed in Gothic style by S.S. Teulon, who also made substantial alterations in the Chapel. The principal staircases were altered around this time, the one in the north-west of the main block being entirely reconstructed. It is also possible the Duke installed a system of underfloor heating of the main corridors. By the 1880s the present China Ante-room linked the hall to the rooms beyond. Before 1860 an Italian garden was laid out on the east front and a circular rose garden with radiating paths and a central fountain constructed.1
The local town of Woodstock seemed to emulate the Duke’s energy and began to improve considerably. Several Nonconformist churches were built, a police station appeared, and in 1853 there was a gas works on Brook Hill. Houses in the main streets were demolished and rebuilt, and there was gradual residential development along Hensington Road. A large union workhouse appeared on what is now the site of the fire station. Later, in 1890, a single track railway was opened from the Great Western Railway at Woodstock Road (renamed Kidlington) station to Blenheim and Woodstock station, built on the Duke’s land on the east side of Oxford Street.
In 2001 a letter arrived at Blenheim from a correspondent in Warwickshire, containing photocopies of a prayer book presented to the sender’s great grandmother in 1880, ‘With best wishes from the Duchess of Marlborough at her leaving the Duchess’s School of Industry’. Previous generations of her family said the great grandmother had been provided for by the 7th Duchess of Marlborough, at a boarding school she had established in the 1860s at 22 Park Street in Woodstock, just outside the Park gates. The school trained girls, aged 13 and usually local, at Frances’ expense for posts in domestic service which required high levels of skill or responsibility. In 1873, on one of his frequent visits to Blenheim, Benjamin Disraeli visited the school, which continued for at least 20 years. Clearly Frances was providing sought after and valued opportunities. One of her frequently demonstrated qualities was common sense; her altruism was often based on practicality. This was to stand her in good stead in her greatest challenge, soon to come.
The period between 1850 and 1886 was the high point of Victorian energy and achievement. It was characterised by exciting and powerful initiatives and achievements nationally and overseas: the Great Exhibition (1851), the opening of the Suez Canal (1875), Queen Victoria’s reign as Empress of India, and the growth of Britain’s exports throughout the world. Between 1844 and 1880 Britain’s coal production was half as great again as that of France, Germany, Belgium and Russia combined. Huge London docks were built to facilitate export: Royal Victoria (1855), Millwall (1868), Royal Albert (1880). All this activity was typical of the Victorians: they built with confidence and foresight; they invested in the future and, in Blenheim’s case, they put right the neglect of the past. Both John Winston and Frances took their responsibilities seriously, their attitudes and decisions reflecting the ambition and achievement of the times. So the Palace and Park were an urgent priority; a considerable number of staff were housed comfortably and safely in their own homes and the district was revived.
John Winston and Frances made Blenheim a place of hospitality and welcome. The Visitors’ Book reveals a stream of guests – family, friends and establishment figures, local and national. The dates of visits are significant and reflect the longer visits of groups of formal visitors as well as the less formal, shorter visits of friends at ease with their hosts. For over 20 years, the book is a roll call of the important and the influential: royal, aristocratic and political. It also includes regular family visiting by Frances’ and her husband’s families. Among the royal names are Prince Albert a
nd Princess Alexandra (regularly), Princess of Schleswig-Holstein (Queen Victoria’s daughter), Frederick William, Prince of Germany, Duc d’Orleans. The list of aristocratic names includes Dufferin, Northumberland, Caernarvon, Chelsea, Bute, Bath, Ranfurly, Grosvenor, Mitford, Walsingham, Buccleugh, Cavendish and many more. Among the politicians are Disraeli, Rosebery, Lansdowne, Curzon, Cecil, Balfour. Family names are frequent: Churchill, Portarlington, Vane, Stewart, Camden, Garlies, Roxburghe occur time and again, as well as Rothschild, a business acquaintance.
This was Frances’ world. Although the names reflect the Duke’s status, his political career and perhaps the interest and importance of Blenheim, they suggest Frances’ superb skill as a social hostess. She had learnt well from her background.
The local gentry and notables seem to have benefited from regular invitations to the Palace. There are revealing, sometimes amusing, insights into the occasions hosted by Frances and the Duke. A Mrs Jeune, wife of an Oxford don, dined at Blenheim in November 1858, and observed rather resentfully in her diary that she was kept warm with furs and hot-water bottles. The following year Max Muller, of All Souls College, Oxford, did rather better: he describes the excellent meal he had in the Rubens room in a party of 24, and was allowed to wander through the rooms while music played. In particular he enjoyed a privilege which only private guests received:
The next day I saw the pictures in the private rooms, which one cannot see otherwise, the gems, the sketches, then more music.2
Mrs Jeune was back in November 1859 at a ball given for the Prince of Wales. The Palace looked very grand, well lighted and with a dozen footmen in the showy Marlborough livery drawn up at the entrance, and this time she provides a glimpse of one of the grand occasions. She followed the Prince into the Grand Cabinet Room where a large party had gathered, including the Earl of Portarlington and his wife (Frances’ sister), Earl Vane (Frances’ brother) and ‘who not’ in the county of Oxford. Despite her seriousness of character, Frances was vastly experienced in creating the grand occasion; she knew how to make the most of her fashionable guests and of the magnificent rooms of the Palace:
Dinner was in the Grand Saloon, brilliantly lit by candles and gas below, dark suggestive shadows in the vault above … dazzled by the display of jewels round the table.
Such occasions needed a hostess who could organise and direct, and we are given a glimpse of Frances here on her own ground:
At ten the evening company began to arrive and they all proceeded to the ballroom. There was dancing in two of the tapestry rooms, too.3
It is true to say the Duke and Duchess were characterised by steadiness, responsibility and seriousness, but this does not tell the whole story. Frances in particular, had polished social skills of a very high order. Of all visitors, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, was the most frequent; he was at Blenheim in 1859, 1870, 1873 and 1896. An undated newspaper in the Bodleian Library gives an account of an even grander party given for the Prince:
After the shoot there was a banquet ‘a la russe’ in the Grand Saloon, with a vast bill of French fare. There was an evening party for three hundred; the display of diamonds and jewellery was dazzling in the extreme. All the apartments along the whole south front of the Palace were illuminated and thrown open to the autumn night and the gaze of hundreds of spectators gathered on the site of Henry Wise’s vanished parterres. The first and second state drawing-rooms had been furnished anew for the occasion, the Prince’s apartments fitted up in enamelled white and gold furniture … Altogether it was the most brilliant spectacle in the county for a century.4
And thus Blenheim Palace began to emerge from its long sleep of over 50 years, from two generations of neglect both domestic and social. In 1861, however, there was a disastrous fire at Blenheim. For centuries the nature, size and location of the great country houses had made the threat of fire a nightmare for their owners. The corner of the north-east quadrangle, known as the Kitchen Courtyard, was completely destroyed, and the Titian Gallery with all its paintings was lost, including the series of paintings attributed to Titian and presented to the 1st Duke by Victor Amadeus II and an extremely valuable Rubens, ‘The Rape of Proserpine’. These pictures had been removed from the main part of the Palace by the 4th Duke in 1796. John Winston had to make good the fire damage, which he did with exceptional good taste. In 1862 he rebuilt almost the whole south side of the Kitchen Courtyard with a conservatory of such quality that in recent years it has been converted into a gracious venue for corporate entertaining. Anyone who is a guest in the Orangery today has only to glance up at the glass roof, with its elegant tracery of wrought iron, to be impressed by the good taste of the 7th Duke, and probably his Duchess.
In spite of his elevation from the Commons to the House of Lords, compulsory for any MP who became a peer, the 7th Duke’s career in politics continued to flourish. By 1866 he had become Lord Steward of the Royal Household and the following year he was Lord President of the Council. Given the commitment to education he shared with Frances, this was a welcome appointment. In the nineteenth century there was no Department of Education. It was part of the responsibility of the Lord President, an opportunity which John Winston exploited to the full, undoubtedly with Frances’ support and influence. The initiatives he took are revealing. He introduced an Education Bill which proposed extending state aid to non-denominational schools and making state support for schools, based on results, dependent on results achieved solely in secular teaching. He advocated a complete survey of education provision in Britain which, three years later, a Royal Commission was set up to perform. He proposed a conscience clause, allowing withdrawal from lessons on religious grounds in single school parishes. For his time he was an enlightened man and he was in a position to provoke national debate and action on the issues and ambitions Frances shared with him. In February 1868 Disraeli became Prime Minister. He invited John Winston to lead the House of Lords but the Duke scrupulously told him that that honour belonged to Lord Malmesbury, who had often deputised for Lord Derby during his frequent absences.
In April 1868 the Conservatives fell from power and remained in opposition for six years. By now John Winston’s mind and interests were considerably enlarged, church and education matters becoming the focus of his attention. In 1874, when the Conservatives returned to power, Disraeli proposed the Duke to Queen Victoria as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He thought the Duke had ‘initiative, intellectual grasp and moral energy’, and regarded him as one of the most competent Tories in the Lords. John Winston has been described as ‘a serious, honourable and industrious man’. The impression created by these words is of a man that a woman such as Frances would be totally comfortable with. His qualities reflect and complement hers; they were happy together and in understanding and appreciating him we understand and appreciate her more readily. The public and official appreciation and regard he had achieved by this stage are impressive. He had fought several elections successfully, he was a Knight of the Garter (1868), a Cabinet Minister and a Privy Counsellor, and he was now deemed suitable to be the Queen’s representative as Lord Lieutenant, Viceroy of Ireland. The post carried considerable status and significance but it was an expensive one to maintain: official receptions, regular courts at Dublin Castle, weekend parties and endless hospitality, not to mention the host of staff needed to support it all. Official financial support for the post covered only about fifty per cent of the cost, the holder of the office being expected to bear the remainder, which would amount to about £20,000, over £1,000,000 in today’s values. John Winston was a prudent man and, knowing it would strain his resources, declined the offer.
As Blenheim began to revive, restored by the energy of the Duke and Duchess, the Duchess’s mother Frances Anne picked up the threads of her own life of widowhood in the north. Firstly she erected an impressive mausoleum at Wynyard for her husband Charles, designed by Lord Ravensworth. All his orders, insignia, uniforms and trophies were displayed, and inscribed on the walls were the nam
es and dates of the 25 battles he had fought from 1796 to 1814. She built a church in Seaham in County Durham and placed a dramatic equestrian statue of Charles in his Hussar uniform in the market-place in Durham City, and these stand as evidence of her love and deep grief. It had been a very successful marriage, begun in disapproval but continued lovingly in spite of the 20 year gap in their ages; 30 years later Frances Anne had to come to terms with being alone.
Like her daughter she believed in action. Her husband’s will returned to her the collieries, originally her own property, and Garron Tower, which she had built on her mother’s Antrim estate. She had the use for life of Wynyard Hall, Londonderry House and Seaham Hall, in the last of which she chose to live in spite of the fact that each of her married children, and the Disraelis, warmly offered her a home. Mount Stewart and Londonderry’s Irish properties passed to her stepson Viscount Castlereagh, who now became the 4th Marquess of Londonderry. At the same time, her own eldest son, Harry, Viscount Seaham, succeeded to his father’s earldom of Vane and other English titles in accordance with the terms of the special creation. Charles, ever the devoted and caring husband and father, had provided well for his loved ones.
The Londonderry sense of commitment meant Frances Anne saw her duty in the continuation of his work. She wrote to the people of Seaham:
Be assured that, whether it may please God to lengthen or shorten my days, whatever remains of life will be devoted to the accomplishment of all his plans and objects. Deeply do I feel the responsibility in succeeding to the management of these great concerns, and bitterly do I deplore my inferiority to the master mind that preceded me, but with God’s help I will do my best, and I promise the inhabitants of Seaham that my humble efforts shall never be wanting to advance and promote the prosperity of the town and harbour.5
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