Before he ever thought of designing a building, Sir John Vanbrugh was a successful playwright – a man of the theatre through and through. He personifies Restoration drama. His plays are racy, subversive, witty, fast and furious. Much of that energy spilled over into his buildings along with his finely honed mastery of deception and illusion and his love of bringing off the impossible – or, as Wilde might have said, the improbable. 

We’ll grant him improbable. Think of Blenheim, begun in 1705. It looks like nothing on earth – at least, on English earth. It has little to do with the country house tradition; even Chatsworth, which is just a couple of decades earlier, is comfortable, if on a large scale. Not Blenheim, that vast and most unlikely palace dumped in the depths of the English countryside: in Pope’s phrase, ‘the whole, a labour’d quarry above ground’. Everything about it was done for effect. Outside, it’s a dramatic set, as cool as any classical monument; inside it’s colder still, a hard-hearted essay in echoing halls. 

Blenheim is a kind of reverse-Versailles and represents solemnity defeating frivolity. The comparison is invited by the way the endless north front advances to wrap itself around a giant courtyard, prompting thoughts of Marlborough’s army crushing the French in the embrace of battle. Vanbrugh was conscious of these effects and