Joshua Reynolds - The Marlborough Family

Duke of Marlborough (local Listeni/ˈmɔːlbrə/ MAWL-brə) is a title in the Peerage of England. It was created by Queen Anne in 1702 for John Churchill, 1st Earl of Marlborough (1650–1722), the noted military leader. The name of the dukedom refers to Marlborough in Wiltshire. It is the only current dukedom in the Peerages of England, Great Britain or the United Kingdom that can pass to a woman and through a woman.

Churchill had been made Lord Churchill of Eyemouth (1682) in the Scottish peerage, Baron Churchill of Sandridge (1685), and Earl of Marlborough (1689) in the Peerage of England, all conferred by King William III. Shortly after her accession to the throne in 1702, Queen Anne made Churchill the first Duke of Marlborough and granted him the subsidiary title Marquess of Blandford.

In 1678, Churchill married Sarah Jennings (1660–1744), a courtier and influential favourite of the queen. They had seven children, of whom four daughters married into some of the most important families in Great Britain;one daughter and two sons died in infancy. Because they had no surviving sons, the dukedom was allowed by a special Act of Parliament to pass to a woman and through a woman. When the 1st Duke of Marlborough, died in 1722, his title as Lord Churchill of Eyemouth in the Scottish peerage became extinct, and the Marlborough titles passed to his eldest daughter Henrietta (1681-1733), the 2nd Duchess of Marlborough. She was married to the 2nd Earl of Godolphin and had a son who predeceased her.

When Henrietta died in 1733, the Marlborough titles passed to her nephew Charles Spencer (1706–1758), the third son of her late sister Anne (1683-1716), who had married the 3rd Earl of Sunderland in 1699. After his older brother's death in 1729, Charles Spencer had already inherited the Spencer family estates and the titles of Earl of Sunderland (1643) and Baron Spencer of Wormleighton (1603), all in the Peerage of England. Upon his maternal aunt Henrietta's death in 1733, Charles Spencer succeeded to the Marlborough family estates and titles and became the 3rd Duke. When he died in 1758, his titles passed to his eldest son George (1739–1817), who was succeeded by his eldest son George, the 5th Duke (1766–1840). In 1815, Francis Spencer (the younger son of the 4th Duke) was created Baron Churchill in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. In 1902, his grandson, the 3rd Baron Churchill, was created Viscount Churchill.

In 1817, the 5th Duke obtained permission to assume and bear the surname of Churchill in addition to his surname of Spencer, to perpetuate the name of his illustrious great-great-grandfather. At the same time he received Royal Licence to quarter the coat of arms of Churchill with his paternal arms of Spencer. The modern Dukes thus originally bore the surname "Spencer": the double-barrelled surname of "Spencer-Churchill" as used since 1817 remains in the family, though some members have preferred to style themselves "Churchill".

The 7th Duke was the paternal grandfather of the British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, born at Blenheim Palace on 30 November 1874.

The present (11th) Duke is John George Vanderbilt Henry Spencer-Churchill.

After his leadership in the victory against the French in the Battle of Blenheim on 13 August 1704, the 1st Duke was honoured by Queen Anne granting him the royal manor of Woodstock, and building him a house at her expense to be called Blenheim. Construction started in 1705 and the house was completed in 1722, the year of the 1st Duke's death. Blenheim Palace has since remained in the Churchill and Spencer-Churchill family.

Dukes and Duchesses are buried in Blenheim Palace's chapel. Most other members of the Spencer-Churchill family are interred in St. Martin's parish churchyard at Bladon, a short distance from the palace.

“Moon Rising at the Staffelalp”, Ernst Kirchner.

Waterloo Bridge, Misty Weather ~ Claude Monet

Waterloo Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge crossing the River Thames in London, between Blackfriars Bridge and Hungerford Bridge. The name of the bridge is in memory of the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Thanks to its location at a strategic bend in the river, the views of London (Westminster, the South Bank and London Eye to the west, the City of London and Canary Wharf to the east) from the bridge are widely held to be the finest from any spot at ground level.

 

"The Bridge of Sighs" is a famous poem of 1844 by Thomas Hood concerning the suicide of a homeless young woman who threw herself from Waterloo Bridge in London.

 

Although Thomas Hood (1799–1845) is usually regarded as a humorous poet, towards the end of his life, when he was on his sick bed, he wrote a number of poems commenting on contemporary poverty. These included "The Song of the Shirt", "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Labourer". "The Bridge of Sighs" is particularly well-known because of its novel meter, complex three syllable rhymes, varied rhyming scheme and pathetic subject matter.

 

The poem describes the woman as having been immersed in the grimy water, but having been washed so that whatever sins she may have committed are obliterated by the pathos of her death.

 

Make no deep scrutiny

 Into her mutiny

   Rash and undutiful:

 Past all dishonour,

 Death has left on her

   Only the beautiful.

 

Several clues in the poem, which harps upon beauty, sins and scorn, hint that the woman was pregnant and had been thrown out of her home.

 

Sisterly, brotherly,

 Fatherly, motherly

   Feelings had changed:

 Love, by harsh evidence,

 Thrown from its eminence;

 Even God's providence

   Seeming estranged.

Art

Evelyn de Morgan’s paintings

 (Wikimedia)

Evelyn de Morgan’s paintings usually indicate their blatant symbolism by their (subtly or unsubtly) implausible settings.

In The Crown of Glory, though—which de Morgan painted in 1896—the scene, though obviously invented, doesn’t have the same immediate feeling of impossibility.

Certainly it isn’t a precise depiction of the classical world: de Morgan has no interest in the careful historicity of Alma-Tadema. The fish at the edge of the tapestry or fresco behind her evoke both her husband’s ceramic tiles and the ancient Roman motifs that inspired him. The little telamon and caryatid that support the bookshelf again suggest the classical world, while the raised-cord-bound books on them are clearly of more modern origin. The three-legged table with its climbing snakes, and the subject’s own draped and gathered garments, both straddle that same line between a modern and a classical aesthetic. For the most part, though, the work looks at least internally consistent.

But perhaps the most important element—the large image towards which the subject looks as she casts off her ornaments—is a total break from even the fairly modernized Greco-Roman style of the rest of the scene.

After all, it is practically a copy of one of Giotto’s 14th-century frescoes for the Lower Basilica in Assisi, which (as Christie’s points out), de Morgan “may well have seen…on one of her numerous visits to Italy, or she may have known the design in reproduction, possibly the engraving in William Young Ottley’s Florentine School (1826) which her mentor Burne-Jones had copied in an early sketchbook (Victoria and Albert Museum).”

The result is to produce a sort of dissonance between the ornate, finely wrought Greco-Roman objects in the rest of the scene, and the incredibly simplified—even flattened—Medieval depiction of Saint Francis’ allegorical marriage to Lady Poverty.

Which is, of course, the visual equivalent of the spiritual dissonance which is suddenly brought to the attention of the painting’s subject.