Debauchery on a grand scale with everything from forbidden romance to shocking betrayals and drug abuse are not the hidden secrets most people would expect to unearth at Winston Churchill’s birthplace.
But Blenheim Palace – where the great wartime Prime Minister was born – has been the site of just about every kind of scandalous behaviour imaginable.
Now a compelling new exhibition, Lust and Laudanum, which opened this week, takes visitors on a romp through the extraordinary decadence of some of the palace’s most intriguing characters of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
The story begins with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, the sharp-elbowed court adviser, who climbed from Lady of the Bedchamber to most trusted confidante (and rumoured lover) of Queen Anne.
Played by Rachel Weisz in the award-winning 2018 film The Favourite, the duchess was born Sarah Jennings and played with the young Anne Stuart as ladies-in-waiting.
Their intense friendship became all-encompassing – they developed pet names for each other, Mrs Morley (Anne) and Mrs Freeman (Sarah), but when Sarah became a duchess through her marriage to John Churchill and Anne wed George, their relationship was labelled an “immoderate passion” by the Royal Family.
Anne was firmly told by Queen Mary to end their relationship, but she resisted, and wrote to Sarah assuring her of her “most sincere and tender passion”.
Always with one eye on her social standing, Sarah used her influence when Anne came to the throne in 1702, following the death of William III.
Sarah initially refused the offered dukedom for her husband John, concerned they wouldn’t have enough money to show off the title with the lavish entertainment expected from a ducal family. But with a pension of £5,000 a year for life, plus £2,000 a year from the Privy Purse to sweeten the deal, the duchess accepted, and was then made Mistress of the Robes – the highest office a woman could hold within the royal court – Groom of the Stool, Ranger of Windsor Great Park and Keeper of the Privy Purse.
And it wasn’t long before the newly titled Sarah started exerting pressure on the queen, slowly closing off access to the monarch and ensuring she was in charge of Anne’s business dealings.
She used Queen Anne’s favour to secure state funding for Blenheim Palace – named after the Duke’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim in the Spanish War of Succession.
As a dedicated campaigner for the Whig Party, Sarah’s fingerprints were all over policies being sent through parliament, but her bad temper and sharp tongue led to her dramatic fall from favour.
Infuriated to find out Anne was spending more time with Sarah’s own cousin, the Tory-supporting Abigail Masham (played by Emma Stone in The Favourite), the duchess spread rumours that Masham was providing the queen with “sweet service” and “dark deeds at night”.
The final straw came when Sarah snapped at Anne to “be quiet” during a church service after they had rowed over the jewels the queen was wearing. Hurt and offended by her former friend’s coldness, Anne stripped the Marlboroughs of their offices and they were exiled to Europe.
Sarah’s daughter Henrietta Churchill led a life just as scandalous as her mother’s. At 17 she married the Earl of Godolphin, but conducted a public affair with the playwright William Congreve, which resulted in the birth of her daughter, Mary.
Sarah, who grew estranged from three of her four daughters, dubbed Henrietta “Congreve’s moll”.
Meanwhile, after William’s death, the grieving Henrietta is said to have installed a wax figurine of her lover, dining with it and treating it as though he was still alive.
Sarah was still alive when Henrietta died, but the two evenl managed to quarrel in death. As stubborn as her mother, Henrietta had insisted on being buried at Westminster Abbey, over Blenheim – prompting Sarah to comment that “she finds new ways every day of surprising the world with her behaviour”.
The duchess also had a hand in raising her granddaughter Lady Di – namesake of the late Diana, Princess of Wales – taking her under her wing when little Di was orphaned at the age of six.
The scheming Sarah tried to arrange a secret marriage between Di and Prince Frederick, the heir apparent to the throne. When Prime Minister Robert Walpole discovered the plot, he married off the young Diana to Lord John Russell, the second Viscount Bolingbroke, instead.
Their loveless marriage ended in a sensational divorce by Act of Parliament, and Lady Di quickly married Topham Beauclerk, one of Nell Gwyn’s great-grandsons, with whom she’d been having a torrid affair.
Sadly, any chance of happiness was fleeting: Beauclark was a laudanum addict who would drink the potent opium and alcohol mixture to sink into drug-addled bliss.
They managed to have four children, but Di’s son George from her first marriage caused scandal when he seduced his own half-sister Mary, embarking on a long relationship with her, before dumping her to marry a Belgian baroness.
By the late 19th century, Blenheim was becoming a millstone around the Marlboroughs’ neck.
“The roof of the palace alone required nearly an acre of lead,” reveals historian and author Tessa Dunlop. “It was ruinously expensive to keep going.” The ninth Duke of Marlborough – cousin of Winston Churchill – had to look further afield to keep the family pile going. Consuelo Vanderbilt, ‘dollar princess’ and American heiress to the railroad fortune, agreed to wed the duke in 1895.
But despite the glittering facade of their marriage, the duke and his bride were miserable.
“There were cartoons in the American press at the time, of this tragic British aristocrat having to be bailed out by American dollars,” says Tessa. “It was a loveless marriage orchestrated by her very pushy mother, Alva. Consuelo, was in love with someone else and admitted that to the duke after their wedding.”
Their marriage was annulled by the Vatican in 1921.
“The Vanderbilts had to admit publicly that they had coerced their daughter into marrying the duke, in order for them to be released from the marriage,” explains Tessa. Conseulo happily remarried the handsome French aviator Jacques Balsan, while the duke set his sights on Conseulo’s American socialite friend Gladys Deacon.
Gladys had a tough childhood – her father had been imprisoned for shooting dead her mother’s lover – but her beauty and brains forged her reputation.
She eyed up the ninth duke at the age of 14, writing home in a letter that, “I am too young though mature in the arts of woman’s witchcraft and what is the use of the one without the other?”
When the duke’s first marriage ended, the pair quickly wed. But in her pursuit of perfection she disfigured herself: having injected her nose with paraffin wax to build the ideal Grecian profile, the fillers gradually slipped and left her with a heavy jaw. Her marriage to the duke was beset by painful miscarriages and, isolated from her intellectual peers,
Gladys took to breeding Blenheim spaniels, which eventually took over the palace. In disgust, the duke was driven away by the chaos and resorted to cutting the power to force his wife out.
“She moved to Bambury in Oxfordshire and acquired a host of cats, living in squalor,” explains Tessa. “British high society brands her an eccentric and in 1962 she’s forcibly removed and put under court protection in a hospital, although she remained mentally alert until her death in 1977.”
*The Lust & Laudanum trail is open at Blenheim Palace now. Tickets cost £38 per adult for admission to the palace, park and gardens. www.blenheimpalace.com
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