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Elizabeth Forster has found new, original material and unpublished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.
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