Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard Read Free Book Online Page B

wedding more than 150 years later. “Looking at the lake, the bridge, the miles of magnificent park studded with old oaks, I found no adequate words to express my admiration,” she would later recall, “and when we reached the huge and statelypalace…I confess that I felt awed. But my American pride forbade the admission.”
    Churchill had been born in a relatively modest room on the first floor. Although he had never lived at Blenheim, he had spent much of his childhood there, hunting in the open countryside, fishing in the lake, racing through the grand corridors, and alternately charming and exhausting his famously stern grandmother, the duchess. “Winston is going back to school today,” she had written to Randolph after one particularly taxing visit from her spirited grandson. “ Entre nous I do not feel very sorry for he certainly is a handful.”
    Churchill had always believed that Blenheim—its history, its grandeur, its power to awe—had molded him, creating the foundation for the great man he was destined to become. “We shape our buildings,” he would later write, “and then our buildings shape us.”Now, however, as he wandered around the palace in the wake of his defeat, trying to finish the manuscript for his second book and playing endless rounds of chess with his cousin Sunny, the current Duke of Marlborough, the magnificence of Blenheim seemed less a proud symbol of his exalted lineage than a painful reminder of his inability thus far to live up to it.

    Everything Churchill saw as he walked the broad, seemingly endless corridors of Blenheim, everything he admired, everything he was determined to become, was inescapably linked to his illustrious ancestor John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. John Churchill, whose own father had been a man of much more modest means, had won his grand estate through his own courage and hard-edged intelligence. Although he had fallen into and out of favor with every ruler of England from King James II, whom he had at first supported and then helped to depose, to William of Orange to Queen Anne, and had even been imprisoned in the Tower of London, he had one skill that had made him indispensable: He never lost on the battlefield. “Amid all the chances and baffling accidents of war heproduced victory with almost mechanical certainty,” Winston would write in his biography of John Churchill more than thirty years later. “He never rode off any field except as a victor. He quitted war invincible; and no sooner was his guiding hand withdrawn than disaster overtook the armies he had left.”
    It had been during the War of the Spanish Succession, in fact, following Churchill’s extraordinary defeat of the French in the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, that Queen Anne had given him, as a token of gratitude, the royal manor of Woodstock, on which he had built Blenheim Palace. He had also been made a sovereign prince of the Holy Roman Empire by the emperor Leopold and given a gift of land—the principality of Mindelheim in Bavaria, Germany—for his accomplishments as commander in chief of the Grand Alliance’s armies. Even those who hated and envied him believed him to be the greatest general in England and perhaps, before Napoleon, even the world.
    Nearly two hundred years later, the weight of John Churchill’s legacy followed his ambitious young descendant wherever he went. If Winston entered the Great Hall, his shoes echoing on the marble floors, an elaborate mural depicting the 1st Duke kneeling before Britannia, unfurling his grand plan for the Battle of Blenheim, loomed above him from the room’s breathtaking sixty-seven-foot-high ceiling. If he wandered into the Green Writing Room, whose walls were covered in a rich green silk damask, he was confronted by an enormous, incredibly detailed tapestry depicting John Churchill’s triumph at Blenheim. If he escaped the palace to stroll across the enormous park with its arboretum, vast lake and elaborate, themed