April 7, 2015

Finest Hour 133, Winter 2006-07

Page 39

By Richard M. Langworth

Death at Blenheim Palace, by Robin Paige. New York: Berkley Crime Books, 312 pages hardbound, $23.95, $6.99 from Amazon.com.

Robin Paige is a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing team who produce a series of cookie-cutter whodunnits: Death in Hyde Park…Glamis Castle… Dartmoor… Whitechapel, etc. As the titles suggest, their novels occur in Britain, and they have a fair if exaggerated and somewhat shopworn view of British life in the early 20th century. They also know very little about Winston Churchill.

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The possibly eponymous protagonists are Charles and Kate Sheridan, invited by the Marlboroughs to Blenheim because Kate is working on a book about an old scandal. The ancient palace of Marlborough Hall, said to have stood here in 1154, was the scene of a tryst between the King Henry II and his teen-age flame Rosamund, carried out under the very nose of Henry’s Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. The story is loosely based on folklore: “Fair Rosamund” was the legendary mistress of Henry, who hid in a mysterious hunting lodge the King built for her, accessible only by a labyrinth (“Rosamund’s Bower”). Alas, goes the story, Henry’s scheme was defeated: he found his lover poisoned.

But Death at Blenheim Palace is not based on fact. Most of what’s known about Rosamund is pure legend. Most sources deny she was poisoned by a jealous Eleanor, or that Henry constructed a “bower” at Woodstock which was pulled down when Blenheim was built. John Churchill was given the property and a grant to build Blenheim in 1705, so exactly why an 1154 structure was called Marlborough Hall is obscure.

The novel occurs in 1903; the Sheridans meet a frequent Blenheim visitor, Winston Churchill. With Churchill’s help, or rather in spite of it, they solve a more current and compelling mystery, which turns into a kind of reenactment of the old legend. The action is set off by the sudden disappearance of another house guest, Gladys Deacon, with whom the Duke is already involved, to the distaste of Duchess Consuelo, and Churchill. (In real life, Gladys—pronounced “Gladeiss”— did eventually replace Consuelo as Duchess, though not for long.)

Churchill is here to write Lord Randolph Churchill (mistitled in this book), which Sheridan describes as “rather a white-wash job.” WSC’s task is “to redeem Lord Randolph from the portrayals of his malicious peers as a conniving, capricious politician who had thrown up a promising career on a crazy whim. While others might suggest that Lord Randolph had been an angry, spendthrift, syphilitic husband and a cold and uncaring father, Winston saw him as a great statesman who was too busy about the affairs of the Empire to squander his energies on his family, and especially his undeserving eldest son.”

Clearly, if you’re here for an accurate picture of the Churchills, you should look elsewhere. Authors who haven’t bothered to check current historical conclusions about Lord Randolph’s career, let alone his health or the title of his biography, are merely superficial. Winston never regarded his father’s career as the reason his father ignored him. And Winston himself gets the same short shrift, described as a boorish, red-faced, impatient “toff,” unlikely to get to the bottom of any problem involving large amounts of grey matter. Charles Sheridan’s main use for WSC is to send him off on simple errands to the village.