A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [281]
Work began in the summer of 1705 and was trouble from the start. Many costly adjustments had to be made along the way. The principal entrance had to be changed when a cottage owner refused to move, so the main gate had to be located in an odd place at the back of the town, requiring visitors to pass along the high street, turn a corner, and enter the grounds through what even today feels oddly like a tradesman’s entrance (albeit rather a grand one).
Blenheim was budgeted to cost £40,000. Ultimately it cost about £300,000. This was unfortunate, as the Marlboroughs were notoriously parsimonious. The duke was so cheap that he refused to dot his i‘s when he wrote, to save on ink. It was never clear who was to pay for the work—Queen Anne, the treasury, or the Marlboroughs themselves. The duchess and Queen Anne had a close, rather strange, and just possibly intimate relationship. When alone they gave each other odd pet names—”Mrs. Morley” and “Mrs. Freeman”—to avoid any awkwardness arising from the fact that one of them was regal and the other was not. Unfortunately, the building of Blenheim coincided with a cooling of their affections, which added to the uncertainty of financial responsibility. Things grew more complicated still after the queen died in 1714 and was replaced by a king who felt no particular affection for, or debt to, the Marlboroughs. Many of the builders went unpaid for years as the disputes dragged on, and most eventually got only a fraction of what they were owed. Building work ceased altogether for four years, from 1712 to 1716, and many of the unpaid workers were understandably loath to return when work resumed. Vanbrugh himself didn’t get paid until 1725—almost exactly twenty years after work started.
Even when things were moving along, Vanbrugh and the duchess squabbled endlessly. She thought the palace “too big, too dark and too martial.” She accused Vanbrugh of extravagance and insubordination, and became implacably convinced that he was a bad thing. In 1716, she dismissed him altogether—though at the same time instructing the workmen to stay faithful to his plans. When Vanbrugh came with his wife in 1725 to see the finished building—a building on which he had lavished some two-thirds of his architectural career and one-third of his life—he was informed at the gate that the duchess had left standing instructions that he was not to be admitted to the grounds. So he never saw his finished masterwork except as a shimmer in the distance. Eight months later he was dead.
Like Castle Howard, Blenheim is in a baroque style, but even more so. Its roofline is a festive eruption of orbs and urns and other upright embellishments. Many people hated its monumental scale and ostentation. The Earl of Ailesbury dismissed it as “one mass of stone without taste or relish.” Alexander Pope, after exhaustively enumerating its failings, concluded: “In a word, it is a most expensive absurdity.” The Duke of Shrewsbury dismissed it as “a great quarry of stones above ground.” A wag named Abel Evans wrote a mock epitaph for Vanbrugh:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.
Blenheim is a gloriously overwrought piece of work without question, but transfixing nonetheless, and the scale is so off the chart that it can hardly fail to awe the first-time visitor. It is hard to believe that anyone would want to live in such