The Dukes (50 page)

The fruit of this alliance was the 3rd Duke of Marlborough (1706- 1758), a sad and lonely character, of generous impulses, but no talent. Lord Landsdowne said he had "no force of character whatever"; it was more likely to have been smothered by his grandmother, old Sarah, who detested him. He seems to have embraced a military life simply because he was bored with staying at home and did not know what else to do with himself. When he became Duke, he took over Blenheim Palace and all the Churchill property, but surrendered (quite willingly) the Spencer property to his brother John. There were two causes for the explosive rupture between the new Duke and old Sarah. She wanted to lay claim to a portion of the 1st Duke's personal estate, a matter which could quite easily be settled amicably, as the new Duke was an obliging man. "But as a suit with her to go on
amicably
was a thing about as likely as for an oil-shop, set on fire, to be slow in burning",
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the whole business ballooned into a full-scale family row. Then the Duke announced his intention of marrying a daughter of Lord Trevor (who had been a great enemy of his grand­father Marlborough), and Aetna erupted in a cloud of invective. She stormed and raged; the lady's father was a madman, she said, her mother a fool, her grandfather a rogue, and her grandmother a whore. Sarah wrote: "The woman herself (as they say, for I have never seen her) has been bred in a very low way and don't know how to behave herself upon any occasion; not at all pretty, and has a mean, ordinary look. As to the behaviour, if she has any sense, that may mend. But they say she has very bad teeth, which I think is an objection alone in a wife, and they will be sure to grow worse with time." The true objection did not edge its way into view until much more spite and spleen had been vented, and then, it was the familiar old obsession with money - "a contemptible family, the chief of which cheated his grandfather by a false mortgage of £10,000".
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So that was it. She had not given him Marlborough's sword "lest he should pick out the diamonds and pawn them". It was at this point that, poisoned with acrimony, Sarah took a brush and disfigured her grand-daughter's portrait. The poor Duke put up with it all patiently, the whole world knowing that his grandmother loathed him, and George II had little time for him either. His wife did turn out to be coarse in time. After his death, she fell in love with her son's tutor, Dr Moore, and proposed marriage; he discreetly declined, but the connection served him well, for he was eventually Archbishop of Canterbury.

The 4th Duke of Marlborough (1739-1817), born in the midst of squabbles, was a nervous, highly strung man. Self-consciousness made him shy, an embarrassment which he covered by a sullen over­bearing manner. He was ill-at-ease, and made others feel so in his company, though they knew him to be a decent, hospitable man. His marriage to a daughter of the Duke of Bedford was extremely happy. Like his contemporary, the Duke of Queensberry (Old Q), Marlborough indulged the fashionable habit of employing a running footman. These men could run comfortably at about seven miles an hour, sometimes more, sustained by white wine and eggs. An amusing pastime was to stage a race between horse and carriage, and a running footman - it was something else to bet on in the eighteenth century. The last such race on record was between the Duke of Marlborough and his footman. The Duke was in a carriage and four, and started from Windsor at the same time as the footman, with London as their goal. The Duke won, but only just, and the footman died from the effects of overstrain."

By one account, this duke did not pronounce a single word for three years, and was about to enter the fourth year of silence when it was announced that Madame de Stael, the French intellectual, was about to pay him a visit. "Take me away! Take me away!" he roared.
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His son the 5th Duke (1766-1840), who changed the family name from Spencer to Spencer-Churchill by royal licence, dated 26th May 1817, and who was the first man in England to abandon the foreign spelling of Marquess
(Marquis),
spent a fortune on books. He it was who bought the 1471 edition of Boccaccio from the Duke of Roxburghe's library in 1812, and founded the Roxburghe Club the same day. "He lived in utter retirement at one corner of his magnificent palace, a melancholy instance of the results of extra­vagance."
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The 6th Duke of Marlborough (1793-1857) was an entirely different proposition. In him seem to have fused the tough indepen­dent spirit of the Churchills and the intolerable amoral egoism of the Spencers. He had some of the qualities of a leader, and used them to base ends. Even as a boy he was first brought to notice for trouble- making. At Eton there was a headmaster called Keate, who took an inordinate pleasure in flogging boys. He boasted having flogged 200 in one day, and regretted not having flogged more. At last the boys rose in rebellion against the authoritarian rule, and ran amok in the "Keate riots"; one of the ringleaders was young Spencer-Churchill.

Lord Monson said that the boy was "one of the handsomest lads I ever saw". In later years he was to turn his good looks to full advantage in a disreputable escapade. In 1817, while he was still styled Lord Blandford, he began a liaison with a seventeen-year-old girl, Susan Adelaide Law, who lived with her parents in Seymour Place, Bryanston Square. She quite obviously was infatuated with him. Before long, he had made her pregnant, and she bore him a daughter. She must have begged to be made a respectable woman (and a Marchioness), for though they were living together as Captain and Mrs Lawson and she received an allowance from Marl­borough funds, she was still only Miss Law. Blandford then staged a bogus marriage to satisfy her. The marriage took place in her father's house, with Blandford's brother as witness, and an officer in the army dressed up as a clergyman. Little Miss Law was completely deceived. She travelled with her "husband" to Scotland, where she said she was presented as the Marchioness of Blandford (though, predictably, neither of the lords she met on this occasion would corroborate her). She must have been the only person to be taken in by the farce, since it seems hardly likely her parents did not know the truth. However, the matter became public knowledge when, years later, the
Satirist
newspaper stated that Lord Blandford's subsequent marriage to Lord Galloway's daughter was bigamous, and that their children were bastards. The Blandfords had to take the matter to court, where the mock marriage was revealed, and it was also discovered the Duchess of Marlborough had been paying £400 a year to Miss Law (later reduced to £200), which went some way to redeem the Marl­borough name. For Blandford, the judge had some harsh words to say.
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With his son, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, we come close to the present day. The 7th Duke (1822-1883) married Fanny, daughter of Lord Londonderry, and their youngest son was Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Sir Winston. In fact, Winston Churchill was heir presumptive to the dukedom of Marlborough until he was eighteen; if his uncle had not had a son, Winston could have been a duke.

In the lifetime of the 7th Duke there erupted another family scandal, in which all the Spencer-Churchill foibles of arrogance, quarrelsomeness, pig-headedness, and tempestuous obstinacy were brought into play. It revolved around the Marquess of Blandford, the eldest son, Randolph's brother and Winston's uncle. He had mar­ried Bertha Hamilton, daughter of the Duke of Abercorn, a good- hearted but rather silly girl, known to her family as "Goosie". In an age which delighted in practical jokes, Goosie was the worst offender; she amused herself putting inkpots over the door when her husband walked in, placing a celluloid baby on his breakfast tray instead of a poached egg, as well as the full gamut of apple-pie beds and tied pyjamas. Aristocratic ladies were bored to death in the nineteenth century not knowing what to do with themselves between meals and decorous gossip. The mania for practical jokes sprang from that boredom (and persists to this day in some aristocratic descendants). Bertha Blandford drove her husband mad with her insufferable tricks and it is no wonder that he looked elsewhere for affection.

So started the Aylesford scandal, the details of which have often been related in print. Essentially, Blandford and Lady Aylesford decided to elope. That alone in mid-Victorian society was an incon­ceivable scandal, sinning against the law of do-as-you-will-so-long-as- you-do-not-admit-it. It was made worse by the involvement of the Prince of Wales. The Marlborough family and Lord and Lady Ayles­ford were in the Prince's "set", and Aylesford himself was with the Prince in India when the scandal broke. H.R.H. called Blandford a blackguard, whereupon Blandford's brother, irascible Lord Randolph, called upon the Princess of Wales and told her that the Prince him­self had known Lady Aylesford well, and had addressed compromis­ing letters to her, which he, Randolph, would publish so that the Prince would never sit on the throne of England. It was bald black­mail. In the turmoil which followed, the Prince escaped unscathed, the Aylesfords were ruined, and the Marlborough family was tem­porarily banished from the best circles. The old Duke was made bitterly unhappy, although it must be said he showed precious little understanding of his son's dilemma. Tempers were raw, no one stopped to reason calmly (except Blandford, who wrote his father some cogent literate letters which did no good at all but which revealed some of the Churchill power for expression in prose).

From this date, too, appears an unbreachable gulf between fathers and sons in the Marlborough sequence, reminiscent of the Russells, and most vividly' shown in Winston's relations with his father. Bertha Blandford was herself the daughter of a Russell, the Duchess of Abercorn.

Bertha divorced her husband shortly before he became Duke, on the grounds of proven adultery with the Countess of Aylesford. The new Duke of Marlborough (1844-1892) married again, this time an American; the ceremony was performed by the Mayor of New York at the Tabernacle Baptists Church on 2 nd Avenue.

We know something of the 9th Duke (1871-1934) through the memoirs of his wife, Consuelo Vanderbilt. Her story is particularly interesting because it represents one of the last instances of a purely arranged marriage, in which love played no part. English ducal families had taken such marriages in their stride as a necessary con­tribution towards maintaining rank, in itself far more important than happiness, and few women sacrificed in this way ever saw fit to com­plain. Consuelo was different. From sturdy independent American stock, she had no worship for the idea of family.

Consuelo Vanderbilt was the daughter of one of the handful of truly wealthy Americans. The Vanderbilt millions were legendary when the Duke of Marlborough began looking around. Consuelo's mother had everything that money could buy, ten times over, but one thing eluded her - status. Mrs Vanderbilt determined that her daughter would marry into the English aristocracy. Consuelo was a victim of material ambition, and of dwindling funds in ducal pockets. She lived at a time when it was more and more common for British dukes to protect their assets by marrying American heiresses - May Goelet married the Duke of Roxburghe in 1903 and Helena Zimmerman became Duchess of Manchester in 1900. Both women were friends of the Vanderbilts; indeed, Consuelo was named after a previous American Duchess of Manchester, her godmother - Consuelo Iznaga del Valle.

Mrs Vanderbilt was quite merciless in the pursuit of her aims. Once she had the Duke of Marlborough in her sights, no amount of tears or protests from her daughter would shift her. Consuelo was already in love with someone else, so she had to be imprisoned in her own house to make sure she would never meet him. She was not allowed out, her letters were intercepted and read, and her outgoing mail was censored. Cunningly, Mrs Vanderbilt let it be known that her daughter would consider an approach from the Duke. A meeting was arranged. They did not like each other at all, but that was not the point. He, too, was in love with someone else, who was not suit­able. He was not slow to see the advantage, financially speaking, of such a union. For the sake of the continued wealth of the Marl- boroughs, he was prepared to sacrifice himself. We do not know if he considered the sacrifice
she
was making; perhaps there was none, in his eyes. He was giving her the rank of a duchess and the privilege of belonging to the Churchill family. "When I broke the news of our engagement to my brothers," wrote Consuelo, "Harold observed, 'He is only marrying you for your money', and with this last slap to my pride I burst into tears.'"
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And so they were wed, in 1896. There was not the merest surge of love between the two from the beginning. They remained strangers to each other. They had children, including the 10th Duke, but their characters were irreconcilable. The Duchess tells how their meals together at Blenheim would be painfully silent, the Duke staring into space and she bored to desperation; mealtimes with Herbrand, nth Duke of Bedford, and his wife were exactly the same.

Consuelo's first meeting with the Dowager Duchess, Fanny, was frightening. She was told she must keep up the prestige of the family at all costs, and she uttered a command which must serve as one of the highest ironies in British history. "Your first duty is to have a child," she said, "and it must be a son, because it would be intoler­able to have that little upstart Winston become Duke. Are you in the family way?"
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The marriage settlement gave the Duke £20,000 a year out of the Vanderbilt wealth, and income from a £500,000 fund. In the present generation this has been augmented by the millions she in herited from her father, and some of which she passed to her Marl­borough heirs. From that point of view, the marriage was a success. From the human view, however, it was disaster. From 1907, they lived apart, finally divorcing in 1921. She then married Jacques Balsan, and died in 1964. His second marriage was to another Ameri­can, Gladys Deacon, who knew Marcel Proust for years. She used to tell how Proust was fascinated by the sound of aristocratic names. He was most excited by the name Duchess of Northumberland.
"Je vais l'annoncer,"
he said, got out of bed, opened wide the door, and yelled, "
Madame la Duchesse de Northumberland,"
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