“Strange Glittering Beings”

It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Winston Churchill could have become the tenth Duke of Marlborough, and thus custodian for life of Blenheim Palace. He was heir presumptive to the title between 1895 and 1897, since at that time his first cousin the ninth Duke had no children, and Winston’s father Lord Randolph Churchill had died in January 1895.

This prospect was evidently of some concern to Frances, Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, a daughter of the third Marquess of Londonderry, though this may have been exaggerated by Consuelo Vanderbilt in her somewhat misleading and self-serving memoirs . That was the book from which she emerges as the poor, unloved American bride, forced by her mother to marry Sunny, the ninth Duke, in 1895—his only motive to obtain Vanderbilt money to keep Blenheim going. In her book, Consuelo described her husband’s grandmother as “a formidable old lady of the Queen Anne type… [with] large prominent eyes, an aquiline nose, and a God-and-my-right conception of life.” But according to her biographer, Margaret Elizabeth Forster, the old Duchess was fond of her other grandson, Winston. Yet Consuelo wrote that, no sooner had she married Sunny, the Dowager Duchess admonished the young bride: “Your first duty is to have a child and it must be a son, because it would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke. Are you in the family way?” Whatever the truth of that, Consuelo obliged by producing “Bert,” the Marquess of Blandford, on 18 September 1897. A younger brother, Ivor, followed in 1898, and Winston was duly side-lined, enabling him to stand as an MP and remain in the House