The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [280]
John Churchill had been a genial fellow, with only a poor squire’s fortune at the court of the merry monarch, with whom he had shared a mistress. But he was also a formidable soldier. Having won a string of brilliant victories for Queen Anne, he was made Duke of Marlborough and rewarded, as successful generals were, with a great estate. As their carriage rolled along the drive this sunny morning, Fanny looked out eagerly to see the mansion. And soon enough, looking across a great sweep, she did.
It came as a shock. She felt a little intake of breath, a sense of cold fear. She was familiar with the mansions of the New Forest; she had visited the great house of Wilton up at Sarum; but she had never seen anything like this before.
The vast classical palace of Blenheim, named after the duke’s most famous victory over King Louis XIV of France, did not sit in the landscape: it spread across it like a cavalry charge in stone. Its baroque magnificence utterly dwarfed even the largest of England’s manor-mansions. It was not an English country house. It was a European palace, of a kind with the Louvre, or Versailles, or one of the great Austrian palaces that stretch across the horizon at Vienna – behind whose classical façades one may sense a spirit of almost oriental power, like that of the Russian tsars, or the Turkic khans of the endless steppe.
For even in England, in that age – when portraits of aristocrats depicted them in the poses of classical gods – the founder of the Churchill family was not to be housed like a mortal. It was a quarter of a mile from the kitchens to the dining room.
They toured the house first. The Duke of Marlborough’s marbled halls and galleries had a haughty grandeur she had never encountered before. This, she realized, was an aristocratic world quite outside and beyond her own. She felt a little overawed. She noticed that Mr Martell looked quite at home, though.
‘There is a connection between Blenheim and the New Forest,’ Mr Gilpin reminded them. ‘The last Duke of Montagu, whose family owns Beaulieu, married Marlborough’s daughter. So the lords of Beaulieu now are partly Churchills too.’
They admired the Rubens paintings. ‘The first family picture in England,’ announced Gilpin of one. Although of the picture of the Holy Family he roundly declared: ‘It is flat. It possesses little of the master’s fire. Except, Fanny, you may agree, in the old woman’s head.’ But despite all the wonders of the palace, Fanny was not sorry when Mr Gilpin finally led them out to survey the park.
The park at Blenheim was very large, one of the greatest that Capability Brown had ever undertaken. There were no small comforts like those favoured by Repton: no modest walks or flower beds, but great sweeps across which all Marlborough’s armies might have marched. God, it seemed to say, in framing nature, had only presumed to make a rough preparation, to be ordered and given meaning by the authority of an English duke. So it was that the park at Blenheim, with its broad arrangement of stream and lake, belts of woodland and endless open vistas, rolled away towards a conquered horizon.
‘Every advantage has been taken, which could add variety to grandeur,’ declared Gilpin as they began their promenade.
They all chatted together quite easily by now. As she walked with Mr Gilpin behind the other three, she saw that even Louisa was saying a few words to Mr Martell, about the scenery or the weather no doubt; and if Mr Martell did not say much, he seemed to be replying, at least. One could not deny, whatever one’s opinion of him, that Mr Martell looked very handsome in this setting.
At one point, when a particularly fine vista, cunningly contrived