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Describes the life of the first Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, who was responsible for shattering the 300-year French domination of Europe and paving the way for the establishment of a British Empire.
Sir Winston Churchill's paternal grandmother and the mother of Randolph Churchill, the 7th Duchess of Marlborough, has been a slight figure in many other people's biographies yet her own story as a member of a remarkable family has never been fully told, until now. Frances Anne Emily Vane-Tempest-Stewart's family background, as well as her own life, is steeped in great historical names and occasions. She was the eldest daughter of the 3rd Marquess and Marchioness of Londonderry, two well-known, glamorous individuals: her father was a military hero, second in command to Wellington in the Napoleonic wars, and her mother one of the wealthiest women in England. Her godfather was the Duke of Wellington, her uncle Lord Castlereagh, British Foreign Secretary, Queen Victoria was a lifelong personal friend and contemporary and her political circle included both Disraeli and Gladstone. Tsar Alexander I of Russia was a mysterious, romantic figure among the shadows of her childhood. Frances' arrival at Blenheim Palace in 1843 as the bride of John Winston, 7th Marquess of Blandford resulted in the great ancestral seat's regeneration as a family home, as a social and political focus for the life of the nation and for the neighbourhood of Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Frances the Duchess gave loyal support not only to her husband but also her younger son, Randolph, in his political career, and became a stable and abiding influence on her famous grandson, Winston Churchill, shaping his character, ambitions and later achievements. Her own crowning achievement, fully and dramatically told in this book, is her humanity, leadership and skill, through her Famine Relief Committtee, in averting the effects of the Irish potato famine of 1879, which threatened to repeat the wholesale loss of life of the famine of the 1840s, when she was Vicereine of Ireland. Margaret Elizabeth Forster has found new, original material and unpublished family photographs from the Marlborough personal archives to recount this absorbing, remarkable biography and to restore a most gracious woman to her proper place at Blenheim.
Excerpt from John and Sarah, Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, 1660-1744 A preface to a book ought to prove, to some extent at least, an aid to its interpretation. I sometimes think that an author when called upon to make such a deliverance may be likened to an architect who, in the presence of his completed work, is asked to explain the methods of its construction. Author and architect might very well claim to be excused, for books, like buildings, are, after all, accomplished facts which speak for themselves, and if their appeal is not self-evident, it is negligible. People who do not care for a preface - they are in a minority I am told - are quite at liberty to exercise the right of private judgment, and pass over these pages in their haste to read the Introduction with which the Duke of Marlborough has equipped this work. But since the majority of readers appreciate an author's confidences and prefer him to talk to them before the curtain is drawn up, I make a virtue of necessity and take up my parable. This is an age when the will of the majority, for better or worse, prevails, and therefore I propose to make a statement - inevitably personal in part - which is intended to be an aid to the interpretation of the book. There is a certain advantage, moreover, about a preface, since it gives the author an opportunity of telling the reader certain facts which could not be introduced into the actual text without doing violence to a narrative which is at once biographical and historical. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
