Hollow Crown

The strange things you find out when your car needs a service. Oxford was wet! We spent the day looking at minor exhibitions. Intriguingly, despite huge differences between them, there was a common thread around migration, exploitation, trafficking, slavery, imperalism. This is an exhibit from one of them, created by Filipino artist and his wife (or principally by his wife, Frances Wadsworth Jones, I think)

In the dying years of the 19th century, Charles Spencer-Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, cousin of Winston, was flat broke, and his palace - Blenheim, which we passed twice today - was crumbling around him. Luckily for him, he found an American railroad heiress whose family wanted her to be a duchess. A dowry of almost $80M was negotiated, along with an annual income of $3M (current values)

The marriage was loveless. Consuella (nee Vanderbilt) had several lovers - three of them her husband's cousins. Charles, meanwhile, invited another heiress to Blenheim - a French-American socialite called Gladys Deacon, whose beauty was the talk of Europe's high society. She became Consuella's friend and Charles' lover. Eventually, the couple divorced; he kept the money and married Gladys

So far, so normal-for-aristos, but here things get very weird. There are two sphinxes in the water-garden at Blenheim, facing one another: the faces on both are a likeness if Gladys - I'm not sure whose idea this was, but I don't think MrsM would go for it. At about the same time, Gladys bought in a Christie's auction a silver, diamond and pearl diadem that was sold by the Stalin government, after it had been 'nationalised' by the Bolsheviks, following the execution of the Romanovs. Not long after that, Gladys and Charles relationship fell apart, she took to keeping a gun in her room and he eventually had her evicted from Blenheim. She lived out her days first as a recluse in an Oxfordshire farmhouse and then in a mental health hospital. She lived until 1977, when she was 96 years old

On her death, the jewellery and paintings she had kept with her at the farmhouse were sold, raising £784,000 - the sale included, I think, the Russian diadem. This did not surface again until 2016, when it was once more part of a hoarde confiscated by a revolutionary government - in this case the one that the Philippines government reclaimed from the notorious kleptocrat Imelda Marcos

The artists have created two loose impressions of the diadem and mounted them facing one another, as echoes of the two sphinxes. As they put it, "their outrageous provenance and recurrence in history [turns] them into intimate testimonies to endless cycles of violence, upheaval and impunity" 

The car is fine