Blenheim Palace

We went to Blenheim Palace from Oxford this afternoon with our friend Alice. Highpoint was a guided tour of the myriad portraits of nobility with an excellent guide; she helped us sort them out with great clarity.   The enormous palace, built 1705-1722,  "is unique in its combined usage as a family home, mausoleum and national  monument ... and also notable as the birthplace and ancestral home of Winston Churchill."  It was intended as a tribute to the 1st Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, rewarding him for his military leadership during the War of the Spanish Succession, culminating in the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.