Gladys had been used to the stimulating, intellectual life of Paris – the world of Proust, Anatole France, Walter Berry and the Abbé Mugnier mixing with artists such as Rodin and Monet.

Visitors do not always look up into portico of the Grand Entrance but the blue eyes of Gladys and the brown eyes of the 9th Duke stare down at them, painted by the decorative artist, Colin Gill. Her long stays in Italy, notably at her mother’s Farnese villa at Caprarola, influenced the creation of the water terraces leading to the lake, the placing there of the Bernini fountain, of Venus statues and of the two dramatic sphinxes, which bear her features (sculpted by W.Ward Willis). Gladys may not have brought a fortune to Blenheim but she did bring style: once declaring she had married a house, not a man. You have few responsibilities and my own are tremendous,” he wrote, thanking her for the times he had spent with her: “some happy days with a fond heart – in a life which has otherwise been one of exceptional chagrin.” But by the time she finally became his wife, after 15 years as his mistress, it was arguably too late for happiness. “I realise you cannot appreciate my position. There exist touching letters between Gladys and the Duke during the Great War. However, as often happens, once he fell for her, Consuelo blamed Gladys for stealing her husband and denied the Duke a divorce for 14 years, only granting it when she wanted to marry, Colonel Jacques Balsan, an aviator and balloonist kept active and amorous on monkey gland injections. It is impossible not to believe that Consuelo steered Gladys towards the Duke – she did not want him and had observed their growing attraction. He declared he did not want her back and they separated in 1906. They were soon holidaying together.īy then the Marlboroughs’ marriage was in grave decline – the Duke had discovered that Consuelo had reignited her love for Winthrop Rutherfurd (the man she had forsaken to marry him), questioned the paternity of her second son Ivor, was upset by her affair with his cousin, Frederick Guest, and finally exasperated by her elopement to Paris with another cousin, Lord Castlereagh. The unhappy Duke was already writing to her secretly by August 1901, and in 1902 Consuelo was promising to send her a lock of her hair. It was in 1900, when Gladys’s social-climbing mother launcher her upon London, that she finally met the Marlboroughs for the first time – and both became entranced by her.

She found her in-laws difficult, and dreaded the house parties: the Kaiser came to lunch in 1899 with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Connaught, with “but a few days’ notice.” She pleased the Dowager Duchess by producing an heir in 1897, but in her duplicitous memoirs, she wrote of silent meals, frosty atmospheres, and tiring social activities. The Marlboroughs’ marriage was a loveless one: Consuelo’s mother had been determined her daughter should marry a duke, but besides bringing $2.5 million of railway stocks to the union – Blenheim needed a new roof – she contributed very little to life there. “O dear me,” Gladys, then 14, wrote to her mother from school in America, “if I was only a little older I might catch him yet! Hélas! I am too young though mature in the ways of women’s witchcraft and what is the use of the one without the other?” Having been sent to New York to find himself a ‘dollar princess’ to keep his expensive Palace going, Sunny’s 1895 wedding to Consuelo Vanderbilt, the immensely rich heiress, and grand-daughter of the famous Commodore, was international news. The first child of rich but scandalous American parents living in Paris, her father shot her mother’s lover dead in a Cannes hotel room in 1892, the same year that Charles ‘Sunny’ (by name, if not by nature) Churchill inherited his title – just before his 21st birthday. Though the fiercely intelligent Belle Époque beauty didn’t become chatelaine until she was 40, she had been obsessed with the 9th Duke of Marlborough since she was a teenager. They promise costumed characters, sculptures, portraits, themed teas – and I am talking twice more about Gladys Deacon, that most elusive and mysterious of all Blenheim’s duchesses, whose brief but glamorous reign (1921-1933) coincided with that decade. The National Portrait Gallery is celebrating Cecil Beaton and the Bright Young Things, and Blenheim Palace is staging an exhibition called Let’s Misbehave, inviting us to explore the Roaring Twenties – a heady insight into the world of great changes socially, artistically and politically. In this health-conscious age, we may have to eschew lethal Black Ladies in favour of non-alcoholic spritzers but, just as after the Great War, a whole generation needs to relax a bit – any excuse to enjoy life is welcome. There seems to be a most welcome post-Brexit clarion call to get everyone partying in 2020.

Duchess of marlborough gladys deacon