Blenheim Palace

John Churchill

Winston Churchill

John Churchill, together with his ambitious wife, Sarah, created Blenheim Palace to found a dynasty. Today it's a destination.

The first time I saw Blenheim Palace was by accident. My hotel in Woodstock, a small town a few miles north of Oxford, England, was just a handy stop on a business trip, and I set out on a walk before sunset, past old stone town houses with cobbled roofs and brightly painted doorways. The street swung left into a cul-de-sac enclosed by a high stone wall. I hesitated a moment, then walked through an archway and stopped, breathless. Off to the right, in the middle of a vast private park, a lake perfectly mirrored the triple arches of a monumental bridge. Beyond, in the distance, stood Blenheim, a mass of columns, arches and towers, the stone glowing like honey in the evening sun, golden spheres on the rooftops glinting against a bruised April sky.

It was arguably the "finest view in England," as a 19th-century Churchill, whose family still owns the place, once boasted: three acres of house (seven if you count the courtyards), 187 rooms (plus 33 in the bridge), a 2,100-acre park landscaped by Lancelot "Capability" Brown, enclosed by a stone wall nine miles long, altogether so grand that King George III once remarked, "We have nothing to equal this."

Unless your name appears in Burke’s Peerage & Baronetage, then one of your best chances to sample the decadent splendor of royalty is to spend an afternoon at Blenheim Palace and its gardens, not far from the university town of Oxford.

Grandeur and envy being near of kin, Blenheim was also one of the most reviled buildings in all of England, and by some of the most scathing critics, among them Alexander Pope ("the most inhospitable thing imaginable, and the most selfish..."), Horace Walpole ("execrable within, without & almost all around"), François Voltaire ("une grosse masse de pierre, sans agrément et sans goût"—"a great pile of stone without harmony or taste"), Noël Coward ("Woke frozen. Shaving sheer agony...loo like an icebox").

"That Wild, Unmercifull House"

The Churchills themselves (or at least their wives) have at times denounced Blenheim Palace as the "dump" and "that wild, unmercifull house," and with good reason. No house anywhere has ever put its mark so thoroughly on a family’s collective soul. Built between 1705 and 1722 to glorify John Churchill, one of England’s greatest military heroes, Blenheim instead helped ruin his reputation with its sheer egotistic excess. Built to found a dynasty, Blenheim instead turned succeeding generations into madmen, scoundrels, snobs and gold diggers (the better to keep the roof overhead, and to gild the plasterwork lilies). And yet the arrogant mythology of the place worked. If the owners were, at best, ordinary men and women, it was often hard to notice, given the ostentatious way every stone declared their majesty. At least once in 300 years, Blenheim also redeemed itself by producing someone worthy of the place. Winston Churchill, one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century, was born at Blenheim, the grandson of a duke, and he got his sense of destiny there. "We shape our dwellings," he once wrote, "and afterwards our dwellings shape us."

So when I returned recently to learn more about Blenheim, where salespeople now dine at corporate banquets and Sly Stallone held his wedding reception (the public rooms have rented for as much as $22,000 an evening), it was with mixed feelings—awe, envy, regret for faded grandeur, and a dollop of democratic delight in tales of aristocratic folly. It turned out that the Churchills’ own staff now tell these tales as gleefully as anyone, if only to give the 250,000 or so tourists who troop through each year good value for the $14 price of admission. "To read the history books," the guide was saying as we entered a room lined to its 20-foot ceiling with old family portraits, "you would never want to meet such an avaricious couple. Anything and everything was for sale." He was talking about John and particularly Sarah Churchill, the first Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, who built Blenheim.