Blenheim Palace

John Churchill won the Battle of Blenheim against the French and Bavarians in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession. In reward, the Crown granted him the tenancy of the royal manor of Woodstock as a site for a new house, and Parliament voted money toward its construction. Rent to the Crown was set at a peppercorn: one copy of the French royal flag, delivered to the monarch every year on the anniversary of the battle. Building began in 1705 with support from Queen Anne, but after a final quarrel between the Queen and Marlborough's wife, Sarah, in 1712, state funding stopped. By then £220,000 had been spent and £45,000 was owed to workmen. The Marlboroughs went into voluntary exile on the Continent and did not return until after the Queen's death on 1 August 1714.

The Duke commissioned the playwright-architect Sir John Vanbrugh, fresh from the Baroque Castle Howard, over Sarah's preferred choice, Christopher Wren. Sarah criticised Vanbrugh's designs as extravagant throughout the build, and after the Duke suffered a stroke in 1717 she took direct control, cutting workmen's pay and bringing in cheaper craftsmen. Following a final argument, Vanbrugh was banned from the site; in 1719 he viewed the house in secret while Sarah was away, and when his own wife visited as a member of the public in 1725, Sarah refused to let her through the gate.

After the Duke's death in 1722, Sarah drove the project to completion herself. Vanbrugh's assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor was recalled, designing the park's triumphal "Arch of Triumph" in 1723 and finishing the library ceilings and state rooms. No exact completion date survives; as late as 1735 Sarah was still haggling with the sculptor Rysbrack over the cost of a statue of Queen Anne for the library.

The 5th Duke, a spendthrift, sold the family's Boccaccio for £875 and his own library in more than 4,000 lots before his death in 1840 left the estate in financial difficulty. By the 1870s the family was in severe trouble: in 1875 the 7th Duke sold the Marlborough gems and a painting for £10,000, and in 1880 petitioned Parliament to break the legal entail protecting the palace's contents. The Sunderland Library, some 18,000 volumes, was sold in 1882 for almost £60,000. Raphael's Ansidei Madonna, Van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I and a Rubens family portrait given to the 1st Duke by the city of Brussels in 1704 were all sold off; the Rubens is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Inheriting a near-bankrupt dukedom in 1892, the 9th Duke married the American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt in November 1895 for $2,500,000 in railway stock, a match arranged by her mother against Consuelo's own wishes. The money funded a restoration: tapestries, paintings and furniture were bought to refill the palace, and staterooms were redecorated to imitate Versailles, while the French landscape architect Achille Duchêne laid out a new water garden. Consuelo left her husband in 1906 and they divorced in 1921; she later wrote of her unhappiness in the marriage in her memoir The Glitter and the Gold.

Winston Churchill, a descendant of the 1st Duke, was born at Blenheim, an event the palace still commemorates with a permanent exhibition in the room where his birth took place. A coming-out party for Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill on 7 July 1939 drew over 700 guests, including Churchill, Anthony Eden, Ian Fleming and a 22-year-old John F. Kennedy, and was later remembered as one of the last such parties before the war. From September 1940 the Security Service, MI5, used the palace as its wartime base, while the 10th Duke also took in evacuated schoolboys from Malvern College.

Blenheim has been Grade I listed since August 1957 and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987; its park and gardens are separately Grade I listed and the park is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. It remains the home of the Dukes of Marlborough, currently the 12th Duke, and is open to the public for an entry fee, alongside a working estate that includes formal gardens, a maze and contemporary art exhibitions staged by the Blenheim Art Foundation.