Blenheim Palace

The Great Hall

The Great Hall is chiefly remarkable for its proportions (it is 67 feet, or 20 metres, high), for its Thornhill ceiling, and for its stone enrichments Cutt Extrording ry rich and sunk very deep. Gibbons and his assistants also carved the arms of Queen Anne on the keystone of the main arch, which spans a minstrels' gallery, originally open to the Saloon beyond.

The bust of Marlborough, over the Saloon door, has an inscription in Latin and in English. Sarah particularly liked the last line: "Nor cou'd Augustus better calm mankind" which she knew "to bee an exact description of the Dear Duke of Marlboroughs temper".

The hall, ceiling, painted in 1716 by Sir James Thornhill, shows Marlborough victorious, with the battle order at Blenheim spread for view. Thornhill was also to have painted the Saloon and the Long Library, but the Duchess s uspected him of sharp practice in charging (for the hall) twenty-five shillings (£1.25) a yard for the murals in grisaille - 'not', she considered, 'worth half-a-crown [12.5p] a yard' - as well as for the 'historical part' (ceiling) in colour; and so, in spite of his spirited and carefully finished drafts for the Saloon, she changed her mind and commissioned a French artist, Louis Laguerre: a reversal of what had happened at St Paul's, where Laguerre had lost the dome decoration to Thornhill. The ceiling panels of the Long Library remained undecorated.

The long, vaulted corridors running to the wings from the north and south sides of the Great Hall are typical of Vanbrugh, as is the staircase, concealed by the arcaded eastern wall. (There was originally inten ded to be another staircase behind the western wall.) Good simple ironwork supports the handrail and screens the balcony. None, directed the Duchess, was to be bespoke till she had seen the pattern.

One exciting idea, sketched by Thornhill but never adopted, was to treat the hall as a vast guard-room, its walls glinting with suits of armour and with great wheels of silver suns made of pistols and cutlasses, as in the guard- rooms at Windsor and Hampton Court.

The complicated lock for the hall doors was copied from a lock found on the gates of Warsaw. With it goes a huge coroneted key.

The bronze bust of the 9th Duke of Marlborough is by Epstein. In the corridor leading from the Great Hall to the Long Library two white marble busts by the American sculptor Waldo Story are of the 9th Duke and his Duchess Consuelo.