CHRIS KOENIG tells the less well known story of the grandsons of the first Churchill, a West Country squire

The first Sir Winston Churchill, a West Country squire, was the father of the great Duke of Marlborough of Blenheim Palace. Less widely known is the fact that he was also grandfather of two other dukes - of sorts.

These were the illegitimate sons of his daughter, Arabella, Marlborough's elder sister. She took a fall from her horse when riding to a greyhound meet one day in the mid-1660s, and it so chanced that the Duke of York, later James II, came riding by and found her unconscious and dishevelled. Romance ensued.

Their first son, James FitzJames, was born in 1670 and became Duke of Berwick in 1687. Like his uncle he was an able soldier, but the paradox here is that Berwick fought on the French side, against Marlborough, at the Battle of Blenheim - and indeed at many other battles during the Wars of the Spanish Succession. He even became a Marshall of France.

Unlike his half-sisters, Queens Mary and Anne, he supported his father in his bid to reclaim the English crown after William III ousted him in 1688. In short, he was a Jacobite to the core.

Alongside Marlborough, then still Lord Churchill, Berwick was at James II's court when William landed at Torbay in his successful bid to seize the British crown. But, unlike Marlborough, he remained loyal.

Poor James II. An eyewitness reported of his distress: at the very moment in which he was about to lose his kingdom he called on that great benefactor of Oxford, Dr Radcliffe, for help with an affliction that was wont to affect the Stuarts in times of stress - a nose bleed.

The report reads: "Everybody in this hurly-burly was thinking of himself and nobody minded the king, who came up to Dr Radcliffe and asked him what he thought was good for the bleeding of the nose."

Strangely, Marlborough remained friendly with Berwick until the end of his life, maintaining an ambivalent attitude towards Jacobites - and stashing away money abroad in case he was ever exiled himself. Many historians, including Lord Macaulay and G.K. Chesterton, have condemned him for biting the hand that fed him, namely that of James II.

However, his descendent, Winston Churchill, in his Life and Times of the Duke of Marlborough, showed that Macaulay got some of his facts wrong. But certainly Marlborough, at least in his early career, "owed his rise to his sister's shame," as Macaulay stated.

G.K. Chesterton wrote: "Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed over the country to the invader."

Berwick's dukedom was later attainted. As for the third ducal grandson of the first Winston Churchill, he was the other son of Arabella and James, Henry FitzJames, who became Duke of Albemarle after the king was exiled and who, therefore, is not accepted as a proper Duke - except by Jacobites.

And as for loyalty, Queen Anne showed little of that to Sarah Duchess of Marlborough after the two quarelled. Sarah asked to store her furniture at St James Palace. The Queen demanded ten shillings a week. Sarah removed everything from her apartments including the fireplaces - and the Queen duly ceased paying for the building of Blenheim which had been promised to the Duke as a "gift from a grateful nation".