More Spencer than Churchill
A. L. Rowse
THE PROFLIGATE DUKE, FIFTH DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH AND HIS DUCHESS by Mary Soames
Collins, £17.50
Lady Soames had a resounding and deserved success with her biography of her mother, Clementine Churchill. She has now tackled a contrasting and more diffi- cult subject with equal success: the fantas- tic story of the rackety Regency fifth Duke of Marlborough — a remarkable ancestor a liability to possess, since he got rid of so much of the family property. It all adds up to a vivid portrait of Regency society: aristocratic gifts and eccentricities, talents (in both senses) dispersed and wasted; much getting into bed with other people's wives; illegitimacies and actions crim. con.; a passion for collection and folie de gran- deur; above all, dominated by debt. It is all like the life of the Regent himself — a good subject for this admirable author, who has inherited the family talent for writing.
In 1817 when this Duke succeeded to the title and to Blenheim, he took back the Churchill name. After the death of Hen- rietta Godolphin, who was second Duke in her own right (and Congreve's mistress), they were all Spencers, with marked Spencer characteristics. Where the Chur- chills had been saving and mean, piling up a great fortune, the Spencers were extrava- gant, building up wonderful collections of art objects.
The fifth Duke, for all his taking back the Churchill name, probably in rivalry with the victor of Waterloo a couple of years after it, was a complete Spencer. His father, though respectable and dominated by his duchess, was already pretty eccen- tric. Pathologically shy and hypochondriac, he was given to silence and astronomy. When the appalling Madame de Stael clamoured at the gate for entrance to the Palace, 'Oh, take me away,' he said (I don't blame him), and hardly spoke for the next three years.
His son hardly had a chance, though with such prospects. Early on he was the target of designing mothers: Mrs Gunning, who had already caught one duke for one daughter, was after him for another. To escape the trap he rushed into matrimony with a nice woman, though in love with somebody else's wife. Hence the action for crim. con., when the not much injured husband, who expected thousands from the Marquis, was awarded a derisory £100. Blandford, as he then was, had more than his fair share of Regency sentimentality, and — again like the Regent — more than his fair share of sex.
Though he behaved so foolishly, and earned everybody's disrespect, he was really a talented man and not unlikeable, as Lady Soames notes. One wonders what the influence of Blenheim was — she does not say — but I should have thought enough to turn anybody's head. (To her father, Sir Winston, it provided inspiration and also grandiosity.) At Whiteknights near Reading Bland- ford created a house and gardens which were one of the show-places of England. The library had a collection of rare books, on which he spent a fortune (all borrowed, of course); a gallery of pictures of varied merit (like himself). He thought nothing of spending thousands on importing rare American trees, shrubs, plants; and on aquariums with warm water so that flora from the Ganges should not feel not at home. A patron of music, he had his own orchestra; when royalty came to visit he regaled them with his own sentimental compositions. Like the Regent, he was a man of sentiment.
By the time he succeeded to Blenheim he was virtually bankrupt. A diner-out from Oxford was surprised at the number of footmen: they were bailiffs in disguise. Thus he kept up an appearance of state, and thus the erosion of those splendid treasures began — first, with the great Duke's service of gold plate. Everything at Whiteknights was sold or dispersed. Today it can display the uncoordinated and dull collection of buildings of Reading universi- ty: a pretty contrast between the creative- ness of the Regency and that of our own demotic society.
Perhaps there is an immoral moral to the tale; for it was after all not this poor Duke who was responsible for the major disper- sals of treasures from Blenheim. It was Sir Winston's highly respectable grandfather, the seventh Duke, who sold the world- famous collection of gems, the porcelain which filled a specially built gallery, and the magnificent Sunderland Library which is now the glory of the John Rylands Library at Manchester. Then the eighth Duke sold upwards of 200 of the pictures, many of them noteworthy, along with furniture. Much of it went to Berlin, where Lord Randolph, Winston's father, recog- nised it to his disgust.
More pleasantly, a whole folio of the fifth Duchess's water-colours and flower pieces have recently come to light at Blenheim, which show her to have been a talented artist as she was an exemplary (and much tried) wife. Reproductions of these help to make this a beautiful book, as well as rattling good reading.
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