THE SPENCER FAMILY
Charles Spencer

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

This edition first published by Endeavour Press Ltd. in 2017

First published in 1999 by Viking

Copyright © Charles Spencer 1999

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Charles Spencer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008373214

Version: 2020-07-28

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Despenser Debate

Chapter 2. The Early Spencers

Chapter 3. A Poet in the Family

Chapter 4. A Worthy Founder

Chapter 5. The Washington Connection

Chapter 6. Death for the King

Chapter 7. Products of their Age

Chapter 8. The Spencer-Churchill Match

Chapter 9. The Manipulative Matriarch

Chapter 10. A Secret Marriage, a Public Love Affair

Chapter 11. Duchess of Devonshire, Empress of Style

Chapter 12. From Nelson to Caxton

Chapter 13. Honest Jack Althorp

Chapter 14. Fourth Son, Fourth Earl

Chapter 15. Father Ignatius

Chapter 16. The Red Earl and the Fairy Queen

Chapter 17. More than a Mere Dandy

Chapter 18. The Curator Earl

Chapter 19. From My Father to My Children

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

An obscure publication, with the less than exhilarating name of Midland Halting Places, turned its attention on Althorp in 1886, and gave the line on the occupying Spencer family — my family — which had, by then, become commonly accepted:

It is very seldom that when a great man is born into a family, that family continues to produce great men to represent it for generation to generation. Sooner or later a scapegrace is sure to come to the front and do his best to mar the renown won by his ancestors. As an exception to this rule the House of Spencer stands almost unrivalled. From the commencement of the Sixteenth Century one continuous line of rich, noble, and high-minded men have heaped up glory and honour around the illustrious name of Spencer …

It was a myth reinforced not only through the Victorian desire to find moral probity to respect and aspire to, but through comparison with other aristocratic families, whose black sheep were enthusiastically excoriated, just as the humble shepherding origins of the Spencers were admired — an unthreatening and vaguely respectable start for a family that had more than done its bit for its country, without often producing figures that would remain household names beyond their own lifetime.

This touchingly English celebration of modest do-gooders was perpetuated down the generations. It is the line I was brought up on, as a boy.

When my grandfather died, in 1975, cold and lonely in a nursing home, with him went a vast bank of knowledge about the Spencers. Some of his research I have managed to find in his handwriting — as thin and puny as he was spherical and formidable. He knew his ancestors intimately. I get the impression that he could hear their voices, and that he wanted more than anything to continue the dynasty as he saw it: a powerhouse of liberal Whig politicians, backed by their dutiful, beautiful, clever wives. He failed in all his aims except two: he married a truly exceptional woman, and he did magnificently in holding his inheritance together.

His chief failure was not in being denied the Knighthood of the Garter that so many of his predecessors had gained, although that hurt him deeply; nor in being the first Spencer for at least nine generations to make no political mark whatsoever in England’s history. No, his chief failure was closer to home. It was in not carrying his only son, Johnnie, with him, so that my father never drank deep into the history of his ancestors, and came to see Grandfather’s obsession with things Spencerian as something threatening; for they were matters about which he knew almost nothing, and that lack of knowledge led to his allowing his second wife, Raine Dartmouth, to sell much that was of a core importance to my family’s heritage. Even after taking possession of Althorp, my father had little desire to get to grips with the minutiae of our family’s story.

When I look back on my childhood, this sad truth is evident. I can remember how, in an effort to ‘spring’ me from boarding school for an extra afternoon each summer, my father resurrected the old custom of inviting the headmaster of Maidwell Hall to bring his twelve prefects round to Althorp, to see the house and its contents, and to enjoy a huge tea.

As we all strained to glimpse the gigantic cut-glass bowls of fresh raspberries and strawberries in the Great Dining Room, my father would end the tour — the highlights of which were the terrifyingly gloomy cellars, and the cabinet with the secret drawer that concealed a blackened farthing — with the following short speech:

The reason Althorp contains so many beautiful and wonderful things is because, throughout its 500-year history, my family has always had steady, sensible people in charge of it: unlike other families with similar houses, we have not suffered from having gamblers and alcoholics, ploughing through the contents in an effort to fund their addictions.

Again, a continuation of the myth that we were, as the Victorians termed it, ‘the Good Spencers’.

Much to my relief as an author, let alone as someone with, I hope, a realistic view of human nature, it is clear that this is not a line that stands up to too much investigation. Certainly, there are many principled and decent people who were Spencers, but there are many more whose human foibles and weaknesses are at least as interesting as the successes of those who steered a firm course through life’s temptations.

Over the following pages you will find Spencers who are, by turn, ambitious, capricious, devious and pious. Simply because they are relatives, they will not receive any special treatment from me. First, because I, like my grandfather, want to hear their voices, pure and true but also because, on balance, I find the more flawed characters the more interesting.

We live in an age when merit, in theory, is seen to be the key to success. It is therefore amazing to many that in previous generations — right up to the end of the nineteenth century — simply being born an aristocrat guaranteed power and influence by right, almost regardless of character or ability. You could be a drunk or a gambler, have venereal disease and no obvious talents, but if your provenance was sufficiently exalted, you were going to be prominent. It must have put enormous pressure not only on family loyalty, but also on the individual, knowing what was expected of him, and how far he was from being able to fulfil the expectations. This was as true for members of my family as it was for their peers.

There is a strong Spencer tradition, one of which I am proud, of women more than holding their own; of being remarkable people in their own right, with strength of character, the power of beauty and wit, and a strong sense of their own significance, all underpinning the ways in which they blazed ahead, independent and deeply confident. Georgiana Devonshire was a Spencer; so, through Georgiana’s sister, was Byron’s mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb; and, before them, Sarah, the extraordinarily powerful and contrary Duchess of Marlborough. Yet there were many more, from Dorothy Spencer, Countess of Sunderland, who was immortalized by Waller as his muse, ‘Sacharissa’; through Georgiana Poyntz, First Countess Spencer, close friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick and a salon of the most able men of her day; to her daughter-in-law, Lavinia, confidante of Lord Nelson; and Charlotte, wife of the Fifth Earl Spencer, one of the most beautiful and glamorous figures of the Victorian age. There have been others, nearer to our own time.

I am conscious that it must look as if I have suffered from a raging case of wilful snobbery, writing about my own family in this way — especially as my only other book has been on my family’s principal home, Althorp. However, I am not a disciple of ancestor worship. This is a book I have wanted to write for many years. I spent my adolescence and early adulthood surrounded by portraits of every leading character in the ensuing chapters, and I would have had to be singularly uninquisitive not to have wanted to explore further, to learn what these people thought and believed in, what they contributed to the world and to the Spencer name.

One concept that all my ancestors understood was the relationship between privilege and responsibility. Some of them may have shirked their duties, but they knew what they were shirking. Similarly, I understand what an enormous privilege it is to know so much about the people whose genes I carry; I can go back at least 500 years, through correspondence, official papers and diaries. That is no boast. It is merely a way of underlining the responsibility I feel, for I realize this is my one chance to do justice to the myriad characters who have carried my name before me, and it is quite sobering to think that, as I turn the spotlight on them one by one, I know that they will have their chance for all eternity to correct and chide me, should I do them wrong, for I will one day join them in the family vault, in the village next to Althorp, where I will be the twentieth generation of the Spencer family to be laid to rest.

1. The Despenser Debate

Though this is a book that purports to deal in definites, it needs to begin with a ‘maybe’.

There has been much debate about where the history of my family can be seen to have begun. The version I was told, by Grandfather, was categorical: ‘The word “Spencer”,’ he told me when I was a boy, ‘derives from the Norman word for Steward, or Head of Household: “Despenser”. Our common ancestor was Steward to the household of William, Duke of Normandy, joining his master at the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, and subsequently settling in England, when the Duke became King of England.’

Grandfather’s forte was the Spencer family’s history, and it was unwise for anybody to challenge him when he expounded on his specialist subject with confidence. The result was ill-disguised contempt and the risk of permanent banishment from Althorp. The fact is, he was nearly always right; and, in the rare instances when his interpretation of events was open to question, it was best not to pursue the matter too closely.

If we look at supporting evidence for Grandfather’s Despenser claim, it is beyond doubt that one Robert Despenser was William’s steward, and that he did accompany his master on his successful invasion of England. We also know that Robert, although head of William’s household, was not a mere member of the domestic staff, but a powerful lord in his own right, holding his court position to augment his influence with his master. In England he was one of the most significant of the new class of magnate that the Crown was forced to rely on, in the late eleventh century, to ensure the ultimate success of the Norman conquest.

Thus we see Robert’s name alongside those of other barons who assembled in Council with William I, in London, in 1082. The following year, when the same members of the Council ‘set their Hands and Seals to the Charter of the King, for removing the secular Canons out of the Church of Durham, and placing Monks in their Stead’, Robert’s signature was on the document. The first recorded Despenser was also viewed as a powerful enough figure to act as witness to the King’s Act, which granted the city of Bath, with its coinage and toll, to John, Bishop of Bath, for the better support of his see. As for the monks of Worcester, they termed Robert Despenser ‘a very powerful man’. They should have known, since it was Robert who had seized the Lordship of Elmleigh from them, which they never regained.

Understandably, the Despensers jealously kept their senior court position in the family. Robert’s son, William Despenser, became steward to Henry I; as did William’s own son, Thurston, after him. On Thurston’s death, his son Walter, Lord of Stanley and Usher of the Chamber of Henry II, maintained the Despenser tradition of being mighty courtiers. Walter’s younger brother, Americus, settled in the tiny Midland county of Rutland, where he was sheriff in the 1180s, before following the family practice by becoming steward to Richard the Lionheart.

The close association between the Despensers and the monarchs of medieval England continued into the next generation, with Americus’s son, another Thurston, a baron in King John’s time, extending his influence into the reign of Henry III, when he was Sheriff of Gloucester, until his death in 1229.

It was at this stage, during Henry III’s fifty-six-year reign, that the Despensers were transformed from being important figures in the royal court, to numbering themselves among the most powerful handful of men in the land. Hugh Despenser, Thurston’s heir, was one of the twelve barons nominated by Henry III to amend and reform the laws of England. However, there were growing tensions between Henry and his barons, which were brought to a head when the monarch attempted to buy the kingdom of Sicily for his son, for a sum that the barons thought grossly inflated, and therefore contrary to the nation’s — and their — interests. In the ensuing civil war, Hugh Despenser was chosen by his peers to be Justiciar of England. This meant that he was entrusted with supreme control of the jurisdiction of the Law Courts of England.

Hugh fought against Henry III at the battles of Northampton and Lewes, at both of which he was noted for outstanding personal bravery. The military strength of the barons, under Simon de Montfort, resulted in Henry being taken prisoner at Lewes, giving the barons their greatest hold on power to date. To underline his humiliating loss of control, in 1265 King Henry was forced to send writs to all the cities, burghs and towns on the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk, stipulating that he was no longer their effective master; instead, Hugh Despenser was to be obeyed in everything he instructed them to do.

Hugh and his allies had little time to enjoy their new-found power for, in that same year, 1265, they were vanquished at the battle of Evesham in the most crushing defeat on English soil since Hastings two centuries earlier. Despenser met his death on the battlefield, after again fighting valiantly.

The Despenser mantle was next taken up by Hugh’s son and grandson, who shared the dead man’s lust for power, as well as his first name. Given the plethora of Hugh Despensers at this stage, these two Hughs are often referred to as Hugh Despenser Senior, and Junior. They were two of the most able and ambitious men of their age. As their destinies would show, however, this was not an age noted for its compassion.

Hugh Despenser Senior was a successful soldier and diplomat under Edward I, serving him militarily in the four spheres of operations that dominated English foreign policy at the time: France, Flanders, Wales and Scotland. While Hugh Senior was summoned to Parliament as a baron, his son, also noted as a loyal servant to the Crown, received a knighthood. It was under Edward II, however, that both Despensers were to reach the peak of their power and influence.

I have always felt sorry for Edward II: his record as king is one of the more pitiful in British history. Sandwiched between the military triumphs of his father, Edward I, known to posterity as ‘the Hammer of the Scots’, and the equally rugged and successful Edward III, the effete Edward II is only really remembered for two things: having his army trounced by Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, and being put to death by his homophobic enemies through the insertion of a red-hot poker into his rectum. From such mishaps it is hard to salvage a dignified reputation for posterity.

It was Edward’s close attachment to his royal favourites that was to be the chief focus of aggravation and destabilization throughout his adult life. Although those who would openly oppose Edward were to justify their rebellion as a just attack on ‘the evil counsellors’ who were perverting the King’s mind, to the detriment of his subjects, the real issue was one of power, and who should exercise it.

By the time that Edward II came to the throne in 1307, the barons of England were once again attempting to chip away at the might of the monarchy. They resented the power that still lay with members of the royal household, and the King’s prerogative that such a system of patronage reinforced. The barons believed that their might in the provinces should be recognized by the transfer of more executive authority into their hands. The result was friction, and revolt.

Edward II’s blatant reliance on his deeply unpopular Gascon lover, Piers Gaveston, gave the opposition barons a focus for their self-serving discontent. However, it was the Despensers who, for the latter years of the reign, were to galvanize the King’s enemies into open conflict with the Crown.

It has to be admitted that both Despensers were appallingly ill-advised choices as royal favourites. Early fourteenth-century Britain was not short of controversial figures, but they all had their apologists, who would write justifying the actions of the key personalities of the time. All, that is, except my supposed ancestors, the Despensers, who attracted not one page of defence from their contemporary chroniclers.

The universal contempt for the Despensers stemmed from their transparently rampant personal ambition, particularly after 1322, when they amassed an unseemly quantity of possessions and privileges for themselves, weakly handed to them by an increasingly dependent Edward. The two Hughs became, respectively, Earls of Winchester and of Gloucester, as well as owners of huge landed estates: at one stage, the Earl of Gloucester was calculated to own fifty-nine lordships in various English counties. There he kept his massive number of livestock, which amounted to 28,000 sheep, 1,000 oxen, 1,200 calving cattle, 40 mares with colts, 160 drawing horses, 2,000 hogs and 3,000 bullocks. In his various homes, there was estimated to be 40 tons of wine, 600 bacons, 80 carcasses of Martinmass beef, 600 muttons, 10 tons of cider; armour, plate, jewels and ready money, worth more than £10,000, as well as 36 sacks of wool and a great library of books.

This bountiful abuse of an ineffectual monarch was to spell the Despensers’ doom: breaking point came when the younger Hugh prevailed on Edward to give him a barony, which it was contentiously claimed had reverted to the Crown. There followed an insurrection in the kingdom, in 1326, whipped up by the discontented lords, but soon spreading throughout the land. As the Abbé Millot recorded in his History of England: ‘London revolted from Edward; the provinces followed the example of the capital; and the king, disappointed with regard to the loyalty of his subjects, took to flight.’

The beleaguered Edward II and the Despensers refused to break ranks with one another. Hugh Senior was cornered in Bristol, where he was handed over to the barons by his own men. The old man, being in his ninetieth year, might have expected a modicum of mercy; but it was not to be. Indeed, he failed even to be granted a trial, and was condemned to death, unheard. It was ordered that his execution should be that of a common criminal, and so he was hanged. The King and the younger Hugh were forced to watch his grisly end on the scaffold before them.

Despenser Junior had avoided the same fate by agreeing to surrender voluntarily, while holed up in the castle of Caerphilly. In return, his captors had solemnly guaranteed the safety of his life and limbs, hopeful that, after witnessing the demise of his father, Hugh would finally desert his king. However, this he would not do; so he was turned loose. He had overlooked the need, in such ruthless times, of extending his period of invulnerability, though, and he was almost immediately recaptured. This time the only guarantee he had was that he would be treated without mercy, and in that he was not to be disappointed: on 28 November 1326, he shared his father’s fate; the only consolation, for a descendant, lies in the fact that it was very much preferable to sharing that of his monarch.

Unsurprisingly, given the brutal deaths of the three preceding heads of the family, the Despensers chose to adopt a lower profile over the following generations. There was a royal marriage of sorts, when Hugh Junior’s grandson Thomas, Earl of Gloucester, wed Edward III ‘s granddaughter, Constance. The only son, Richard, died when just fourteen, and with him was extinguished the senior line of the Despenser family.

*

Grandfather’s contention was that our family sprang from a junior branch of the same family: from Geoffrey Despenser, in fact, the brother of the first of the three Hughs, the courageous figure slain at the battle of Evesham. We know little about Geoffrey, except that he was the first founder of Marlow Abbey in Buckinghamshire, and was a witness to Henry II’s Confirmation of Lands to Bungey Abbey in Suffolk. Later in Henry II’s reign, there is record of the donation by Geoffrey Despenser of the Church of Boynton to Bridlington Priory.

When he died, in 1251, Geoffrey left a son and heir, John, who was a minor. When he came of age, four years later, he was knighted by Henry III. This John was influential enough to obtain, in 1256, the Bull from Pope Alexander, which directed the Bishop of Salisbury to agree that ‘John Despenser be allowed to build a chapel, and have a chaplain in his manor of Swalefield, which John is prepared to endow, since the manor lies in a forest, making it unsafe for him and his family to go to the main church near-by, because of the amount of criminals lurking in the said forest.’

John was a man of war rather than a man of God. He joined the barons against Henry III, and was taken prisoner at the Battle of Northampton. His manors of Castle Carton and Cavenby, in Lincolnshire, were confiscated. But the barons prevailed and Sir John was released in 1264.

His son and heir, William, has left behind almost no trace of his existence. All we know about him is that he styled himself ‘William le Despencer of Belton’; and he lived at Defford, where he died during the reign of Edward III. His son, John, was a more remarkable figure, serving in the retinue of John, King of Castile, in his voyage to Spain, as a result of which he received the King’s Letters of Protection for one year, dated 6 March 1386. On his return to England, he became a Squire of the Body to King Henry V, as well as Keeper of his Great Wardrobe. John accompanied his monarch, one of the most heroic English personalities of the Middle Ages, on his expeditions to fight in France.

John and his wife Alice had a son, Nicholas, who was the father of Thomas and William Despencer. The elder of the two, Thomas, produced Henry Spencer (the first time the name was used in the family without its Norman prefix of ‘De-’), of Badby, Northamptonshire, the county which, beyond all others, has been associated ever since with the Spencer name.

Henry married Isabel, with whom he had four boys. When he died, in 1476, Henry’s last will was sealed with the coat of arms that the family still bears today.

There have been those who have disputed Spencer claims to spring from the same blood as the mighty Despensers. Certainly, on the page, the case appears proven. I hope I can be forgiven for going through the family tree in such detail, but I feel it is a helpful exercise in order to explain Grandfather’s thesis, while being aware that, at times, the preceding paragraphs must have all the appeal of one of those interminable chapters in Genesis, where so and so begets someone or other, seemingly ad infinitum.

It would not have been necessary to write down all the various links if the Despenser claim were undisputed; but that is not the case. At the time that the Tudor Spencers claimed such links with their presumed forefathers, they were accepted without question; indeed, as late as 1724, a contemporary chronicler was able to confirm that Althorp was ‘the manor and seat of the noted Family of the Spencers descended from the ancient Barons Spencer of whom Hugh Spencer the Father and Son, favourites of King Edward II were’.

But in 1859, Evelyn Philip Shirley, in The Noble and Gentle Men of England, was a little more sniffy about the Despenser connection, although he failed to specify where the problem lay: ‘The Spencers claim a collateral descent from the ancient baronial house of Le Despencer,’ he wrote, ‘a claim which, without being irreconcilable perhaps with the early pedigrees of that family, admits of very grave doubts and considerable difficulties.’ Shirley concluded his judgement with a concession, though: ‘It seems to be admitted that they descend from Henry Spencer [of Badby].’

The highly knowledgeable historian William Camden was convinced by the Despenser link, accepting the above family tree in full, and yet contemporary commentators still hold the claim as being open to question. In the course of compiling this book, I have studied the family papers in some depth, and fail to see where the problem lies. Perhaps, by the end of the eighteenth century, it just looked unnecessarily greedy and self-serving for the Spencers to claim prominence and position so very far back in the annals of the history of England?

Writing 200 years ago, Sir Egerton Brydges, the editor of Collins’s Peerage, struck on a compromise position over this matter, which hints that my theory may hold some water: ‘The present family of Spencer are sufficiently great,’ wrote Brydges, ‘and have too long enjoyed vast wealth and high honours, to require the decoration of feathers in their caps which are not their own. Sir John Spencer, their undisputed ancestor, and the immediate founder of their fortune, lived in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII; and three hundred years of riches and rank may surely satisfy a regulated pride.’

I am happy to settle for that. I doubt whether Grandfather would be too pleased about it, though.

2. The Early Spencers

My family was never very imaginative with Christian names. Perhaps having a surname as solid as ‘Spencer’ led them to think that it had to be counterbalanced by something similarly uncompromising in its simplicity? At least this would explain the vast preponderance of ‘Johns’ in the family tree: my brother, who died soon after birth in 1960, was the thirteenth eldest son to be given the name in a little over 500 years.

As a result, prior to my family being created peers, and after they were established as rich landowners in the Midlands, we encounter a succession of Sir John Spencers. The first of these was the eldest great-grandson of Henry Spencer of Badby, who had first borne the modern Spencer name and coat of arms. By the time this Spencer — let us call him ‘Sir John’ — was a man, his branch of the Spencer family had begun to concentrate its land and talents in the heart of the English Midlands — specifically in Warwickshire, which was the centre of the burgeoning English wool trade.

By early Tudor times, at the end of the fifteenth century, sheep farming had become a significant industry. The weaving of wool, together with the manufacture of flax and hemp, was greatly improved by the arrival of cloth-dressers who had fled to England after persecution on mainland Europe.

To some, the trend of turning ploughed land over to grazing was deeply unsettling. Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, written at the start of the sixteenth century, decried ‘the increase of pasture, by which sheep may be now said to devour men and unpeople not only villages but towns’. Apart from the social upheaval implicit in this change of land usage, there was also resentment, again vocalized by More, that the sheep ‘are in so few hands, and these are so rich …’, allowing unscrupulous and greedy men to raise ‘the price as high as possible’.

Sir Thomas may well have had John Spencer in mind when launching this attack, as his herds were famous throughout England for their size and strength. However, there is no record of Sir John I having been either unscrupulous or heartless. A shrewd marriage to Isabell Graunt had secured for the Spencers the addition of an excellent inheritance at Snitterfield, also in Warwickshire; but, otherwise, it was through skilful husbandry that he managed to build up his landholdings so consistently. Five centuries on, the two key estates — Wormleighton and Althorp — remain in my family’s hands, both still demonstrating the fertility and quality that attracted Sir John’s interest all those generations ago.

The family’s association with Wormleighton dates back 530 years. It is a village close to the Three-Shire Stone which marks the junction of Warwickshire with Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. On a clear day the Malvern Hills can be seen to the west, while from the roof of the tower in the village, Coplow in Leicestershire and the city of Coventry are both visible in the distance. My father told me that this beautiful hamlet marks the furthest point from the sea in all of England.

The earliest deed relating to Wormleighton in my family documents dates from the reign of King John, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and is a record of a grant of services from seven acres of land by Cecilia, widow of Simon Dispensator. By coincidence, ‘Dispensator’ is the Latin word for ‘Despenser’, or steward.

It was not until John Spencer, father of Sir John I, that my family had direct dealings with the village of Wormleighton, and it was only with the agricultural expansion of Sir John I that the Spencers bought the land that was to become the centre of their sheep-farming empire. He paid William Cope, a financial officer of the royal household, £1,900 for the estate in 1508. In November of that year, all evidences, charters and other documentation relating to the estate were delivered to John Spencer. They remained at Althorp until they were sold in the 1980s.

The success of Sir John I can be gauged by his soon receiving a copy of a statute from London, condemning ‘divers covetous persons, [who], espying the great profit of sheep, have gotten into their hands great portions of the ground of this realm, converting the pasture from tillage and keep some 12,000, some 20,000, some 24,000 sheep, whereby churches and towns be pulled down, rents of land enhanced, and prices of cattle and victuals greatly raised’. For Sir John, the figure was reputedly just under 20,000 sheep. Family legend has it that he was never able actually to reach the 20,000 mark because, every time his flocks approached that total, they were blighted by disease or accident.

Having failed to cut back on his sheep farming after receiving the statute, Sir John now received a direct order from the court, to grub up his fences and plough up the land. Unwilling to cut himself off from such a profitable form of farming without a fight, Sir John appealed to Henry VIII himself, to be allowed to continue his business, underlining several points that he insisted should be taken into consideration before a final decision about him and his sheep was made. First, that there had been no timber within fourteen miles of the manor of Wormleighton, whereas he had ‘set all manner of wood and sowed acorns both in the hedgerows and also betwixt the hedges adjoining the old hedges’; secondly, that he had personally been responsible for ‘building and maintaining of the Church and bought all ornaments as crosses, books, copes, vestments, chalices and censers … And where they never had but one priest, I have had and intend to have 2 or 3’; and, thirdly, that despite the danger and difficulty of the transport operation, he sold his fat cattle annually in London and in other towns and cities that required entrepreneurs like his good self to supply their urban needs.

Sir John’s submissions were accepted. He continued with his accumulation of wealth undisturbed by central authority, and built Wormleighton Manor for himself and sixty relatives. It was a huge structure — old ground plans suggest it was perhaps three or four times larger than Althorp — and as such it remained the chief seat of the Spencers till the 1640s, when much of it was destroyed by the Royalists in the English Civil War.

What is left today shows that it was a classic piece of architecture of the time following the period of continued civil unrest that Sir Walter Scott romantically termed ‘the Wars of the Roses’. It was a defensible structure, with castellations and narrow windows, and yet it had no moat, indicating an increased expectation of peace. The whole building was based around three courtyards, accessed by an imposing gatehouse.

The two biggest rooms that remain in the sole surviving wing are large — thirty-one foot long by twenty-two foot wide. The brewhouse lies on the ground floor, with bay windows, and, above, you can still see the Star Chamber, an early Tudor courtroom, its oak lintels and panels originally painted with stars (it was the fashion in Tudor times to paint oak). The dimensions of the rooms justify the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s conclusion that ‘The Manor house of the Spencers must once have been a grand affair, perhaps as grand as Compton Wynyates.’

Like Compton Wynyates, one of the great treasures of early English architecture, Wormleighton was to have its Northamptonshire counterpart. Whereas the Comptons had Castle Ashby, the Spencers acquired Althorp.

*

When Sir John Spencer I looked for further land to satisfy his desire for agricultural expansion, his eye fell on the land of his cousins, the Catesbys. Like the Spencers, they were an ancient family, with roots in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire. John de Catesby had been sheriff of the latter county in 1425, and by this stage he had bought Althorp from the Lumley family; in a deed of 1421, he styled himself ‘lord of Olthorp’. But it was an estate that was to remain in the Catesby family for only two generations, for John’s grandson allowed Sir John Spencer to lease Althorp for the grazing of his sheep, from 1486. Twenty-two years later, convinced of the supreme quality of the land, Spencer bought it from Catesby for £800.

The rest of the Catesby family history at this stage was even less happy than this unfortunate sale might indicate. The John Catesby who last owned Althorp had a brother, Sir William, Sheriff of Northampton during Edward IV’s time, and subsequently Chancellor of the Exchequer to Richard III. Sir William, with Sir Richard Ratcliffe and Viscount Lovell, effectively formed a triumvirate that governed King Richard’s lands for him, giving rise to the following ditty:

The Rat, the Cat, and Lovell our dog,

Rule all England under the hog.

The hog being the hunchbacked Richard III, retribution for the neat but deeply libellous couplet was harsh: its author, Collingbourn, was ‘hanged, headed, and quartered’ on London’s Tower Hill.

Richard III was subsequently slain in 1485, at the climax of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Bosworth, and the loyal Catesby was captured there, too. In the three days between the battle and his own execution, Sir William had time to sort out his affairs; and, in his will, he directed ‘that John Spencer have his L.xli [£41] with the old money that I owe’.

Thanks to their active Catholicism, there was to be no peaceful retiring into the ranks of the growing gentry class for the Catesbys. We hear of another Sir William Catesby who, in 1581, was brought before the Court of the Star Chamber, a judicial innovation of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, for harbouring Jesuits, and for being present at the celebration of mass. Thanks to statutes recently brought in by Queen Elizabeth, both were serious offences, and Sir William was punished accordingly.

It was doubtless partly out of a feeling that his father had been harshly treated that Sir William’s only surviving son embarked on a life of rebellion. Certainly, Robert Catesby was a man destined to make his mark somewhere, and it appears to have been a waste of his great potential that his religious convictions forced him into a life of sedition. As the historian Baker wrote: ‘He was a man of considerable talents, insinuating manners, and inflexible resolution; daring and fertile in expedients, but subtle and circumspect in the development of his purposes; and ready to sacrifice his life, his fortune, and every feeling of humanity, in defence of the Roman Catholic cause.’

Contemporaries commented on his great height — ‘above two yards high’ — and his exceptional good looks, being ‘one of the chief gallants of the time’, as well as on his character, ‘so liberal and apt to help of all sorts, as it got him much love’.

Robert had supported the Earl of Essex in his doomed rebellion, his subsequent pardon costing £3,000. In 1605, he garnered everlasting infamy through his involvement in the equally unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up King James I and his Parliament which failed when Guy Fawkes was arrested before he could ignite his explosives.

Hearing that the plot had been compromised Catesby, with Rockwood, Percy and other fellow conspirators, fled from London, covering the first eighty miles in seven hours, heading for Holbeach, a house in Staffordshire owned by a sympathizer. From here there proved to be no escape: a sheriff and his posse kept them holed up in the house for two days, before it was accidentally torched. Catesby and Percy had to choose between burning to death and making a hopeless bolt for freedom. Percy was shot, and died two days later of his wounds; Robert Catesby was shot dead. He left behind a widow, Catherine, herself the daughter of a Spencer girl.

The pious first Sir John Spencer would have been appalled to think that a descendant of his — albeit remote — would try to murder God’s anointed servant on earth. His loyalty and riches were the reason his monarch, Henry VIII, had honoured him with a knighthood, and everything about his recorded conduct justified his receiving such recognition. Not only Wormleighton, but also two Northamptonshire churches — those of Brington and of Stanton — were greatly improved by him, and supplied with vestments and chalices, and he made many bequests to other religious institutions.

So God-fearing was he that he stipulated in his will, read after his death in April 1522,

That he requires his Executors to recompense every one that can lawfully prove, or will make Oath, that he has hurt him in any wise, so that they make their Claim within two Years, tho’ (as is recited) he has none in his Remembrance, but he had rather charge their Souls than his own should be in Danger: And requires his Executors to cause Proclamation thereof to be made, once a Month, during the first Year after his Decease, at Warwick, Southampton, Coventry, Banbury, Daventry, and Northampton.

Sir John I had, surprisingly, chosen to be buried in Brington, near to Althorp, rather than at Wormleighton. He had had a family vault built on the north side of the chancel of Brington church, designed by the priest he appointed to that parish in 1513, Thomas Heritage, a chaplain to Henry VIII, and Surveyor of the King’s Works at Westminster. The first Sir John Spencer therefore established not only the wealth whereby his family was to prosper, but also the place where they would rest, once such worldly considerations were no longer relevant.

*

For ten years my family had at its head Sir John I’s son, Sir William Spencer, who had been knighted by Henry VIII at York Place (now Whitehall) in 1529. Sheriff of Northamptonshire from 1531 to 1532, Sir William is chiefly remembered by my family for having had to endure particularly troublesome dealings with his in-laws.

Sir William had married into the Knightley family, from Fawsley, Northamptonshire, a village half-way between Althorp and Wormleighton. With Susan, his wife, he did not have a problem; but as for Sir Richard Knightley, his father-in-law, and Edmund Knight-ley, Sir Richard’s brother — well, the records of the Court of the Star Chamber attest to strained, indeed violent, relations, while failing to tell us the original cause of such deep animosity.

The documents to be found in the Star Chamber’s annals centre around Edmund Knightley’s complaint to the King, concerning ‘certain criminal offences committed and done in the county of Northampton … by one Sir William Spenser [sic] knight contrary to the laws of almighty God’. It was Sir William’s contention that these offences had been reported by the Knightleys to the Bishop of Lincoln. This was totally unacceptable to Sir William, who had never liked Edmund, so he resolved to take a direct approach.

Coming out of a tavern one winter’s day, Edmund and Sir Richard Knightley were confronted by the menacing form of a highly agitated Sir William, who told Edmund he had something to talk to him about, but it could wait till they were alone together. Edmund acknowledged the implied threat, and moved on. However, he was mistaken if he thought this was to be a temporary end to the matter.

Not far from the tavern, the Knightley party

came to a place called the Stokkes, beneath Chepe, [where] the said Sir William Spenser, in riotous manner, with six or seven persons with him, having their swords and bucklers in their hands ready to fight, overtook your said beseecher and his said brother, the said Sir William laying his hand upon his dagger, and saying these words: ‘Edmund Knightley, what communication hast thou had with the Bishop of Lincoln concerning my vicious living?’ To the which your said orator answered, ‘My lord of Lincoln can report the truth; let him be the judge.’ And therewith the said Sir William said to your said suppliant these words: ‘Thou art a knave, a precious knave and a wretch!’ And your said orator answered, and said: ‘I am a gentleman and no knave’. And therewith the said Sir William said, ‘Doest thou me nay? Then thou shalt have a blow!’; and therewith cast off his gown and his servants were drawing their swords. And one of the said servants, called Cartwright, being behind your said orator, violently and furiously with his sword drawn struck at your said orator. And if he had not been shoved back by the servant of your said orator’s brother, in striking the said stroke he had utterly slain your said beseecher …

The outcome of this affray was a tactical retreat from the scene by both parties. But William had still to work off his anger. Soon afterwards, setting off from Wormleighton with a retinue of servants, he rode over to the Knightley home, and killed a buck in Fawsley Park. When a gamekeeper tried to apprehend the intruders, Sir William cut the man’s bowstring with his sword, and would probably have run the gamekeeper through, had his own men not forcibly held him back. Riding away cursing angrily, Sir William told the gamekeeper that he would kill another twenty of the Knightleys’ deer within a month, whenever and however he wished. At a time when the poaching of a single deer was a capital offence, this was provocation at its most extreme.

Sir William Spencer died in 1532, aged only thirty-four. He, too, bequeathed his body to be buried at Brington, and also ordered that his father’s will should be complied with in every article, but his chief concern was that his young son, John, be well taken care of by the executors of his own will. Sir William was right to worry, for Edmund Knightley was not letting his feud die along with his adversary.

By the time of Sir William’s death, Edmund had become a powerful man: a knight, a sergeant-at-law, and one of the commissioners for inspecting the religious houses, prior to their planned dissolution. However, he was to deprive himself of the opportunity to fulfil that last set of obligations, and it was his attempted undermining of Sir William’s clear and simple will that was to lead to his ultimate disgrace. He made the mistake of trying to limit the monarch’s claim to a share of the inheritance — something the Crown was entitled to because the heir to the estate was a minor.

As Thomas Cromwell, one of Henry VIII’s chief advisers, reported to the King in September 1532, Knightley had ‘done his utmost to set the executors at variance and defect the King’s title to the heir, to effect which he has presumptuously caused proclamations to be made in various towns in Co. Warwick, Leicester, Northants, in contempt of the King and his laws. My Lord Keeper has therefore committed him to the Fleet until the King’s pleasure be known.’

In the end, it was Knightley, not Spencer, who was the victim of royal retribution, although the battle was not resolved until after Sir William’s death. His premature demise meant he could be the victor only from beyond the grave.

*

The little boy Sir William had been so desperate to protect became the second Sir John Spencer. In an act of political juggling of considerable skill, he straddled the reigns of the Protestant Edward VI, the devoutly Roman Catholic Mary and the Protestant Elizabeth I, holding office as Sheriff of Northampton at some stage during each of the three monarchs’ times. Sir John II was also MP for Northamptonshire in 1553-4 and 1557-8.

An ardent Protestant himself, Sir John II was considered sufficiently sound to be appointed a commissioner by Elizabeth I, ‘to enquire about such persons as acted contrary to “An Act for the Uniformity of Common Prayer, Service in the Church, and Administration of the Sacraments”.’

He fitted into the ideal of the age, being a man of substance noted for his care over his general expenditure, while never stinting on entertaining in the grand manner, as is shown by his last will and testament, of 4 January 1585. In this he ordered hospitality to be kept to the same high standard at Althorp and Wormleighton by his heir, as it had always been his own custom to do.

He was always busy: contemporaries commented on how active he was, even after he could have adopted a more leisurely lifestyle as owner of a great estate. His chief recreation was as a breeder of cattle. However, professionally, he was an earnest fosterer of the family’s sheep-based wealth.

After his death in 1586, the instructions contained in his will were obeyed: he was buried ‘in a decent manner’, in Brington church, ‘without pomp after the worldly fashion’, next to his wife, Dame Katherine. Sixty pounds was given to the poor, and money was provided for the tomb that is still visible today, between the South and North Chancels, under an arch of exquisite workmanship, embellished with roses and lozenges of various hues, a knight in armour next to his lady, facing up to heaven, cut in marble.

3. A Poet in the Family

The second Sir John and Dame Katherine produced eleven children: five sons — of whom the youngest died soon after his baptism — and six daughters. Of the sons, four headed their own dynasties — their father’s great business acumen resulting in three lesser landed estates, Claverdon, Yarnton and Offley, which were given to the younger sons. The Althorp and Wormleighton patrimony went to their eldest son, inevitably called John.

For the first time in the family annals, our attention now passes to Spencer daughters. Not the eldest, Margaret, who married Giles Allington, from whom the Barons Allington were descended; nor Katherine, the wife of Sir Thomas Leigh, of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire; and not Mary, whose marriage to Sir Edward Aston, of Tixhall, Staffordshire, was the only event of note recorded about her life. It is the other three — Elizabeth, Anne and Alice — who are of greater significance, bringing unwittingly to light the Spencer link to Edmund Spenser, the Elizabethan poet.

It is not possible to establish at this distance exactly how Edmund Spenser was connected to the Spencers of Wormleighton and Althorp. Certainly, the fact that the surname was spelt differently is of no real significance: spelling had yet to be standardized, and the use of ‘c’ or ‘s’ in the middle of the name was an understandable variable. Indeed, the sixteenth-century stained glass windows from Wormleighton, now in the chapel at Althorp, spell the family name as ‘Spenser’.

Interestingly, the claim of kinship came not from the Spencers, but from Edmund Spenser himself. As Evelyn Philip Shirley concluded, in The Noble and Gentle Men of England: ‘The poet Spenser boasted that he belonged to this house; though … the precise link of genealogical connexion cannot now perhaps be ascertained.’

Edmund Spenser will be for ever remembered as the author of the poem The Faerie Queene. Born in London in 1552, he described the city in his ‘Prothalamion’ as:

My most kindly nurse

That to me gave this life’s first native source.

Educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, he matriculated in 1569, leaving the university as a Master of Arts in 1576. Two years later he became a member of the Earl of Leicester’s household, working from Leicester House in the Strand. For a man who has since become such a celebrated man of letters — the Prince of Poets in his Time — there is a measure of absurdity in the humble task he performed as deliverer of dispatches to Leicester’s overseas correspondents.

In 1580 Spenser became secretary to Arthur, fourteenth Lord Grey de Wilton, who was then going to Ireland as Lord Deputy. Spenser stayed in Ireland — apart from a couple of visits to England — until the close of 1598. At various stages he was Clerk of the Munster Council — where he made, and enjoyed, the acquaintance of Sir Walter Raleigh — and Sheriff of Cork, an appointment that resulted in Spenser’s house, Kilcolman Castle, being plundered by a discontented Irish mob. He fled with his family to London, died a month later in January 1599, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

An interesting footnote to his time in Ireland lies in the identity of the man who shared his rooms in Chancery in 1593: Maurice, Lord Roche of Fermoy. Three hundred and sixty-one years later, Maurice Roche, Lord Fermoy, witnessed the union of his daughter Frances to Johnnie Spencer, Viscount Althorp — my parents’ marriage — in the same abbey where Edmund Spenser was buried.

The question of kinship to the Spencer family was one that preoccupied Spenser throughout his working life. In one of his greatest works, ‘Colin Clouts come Home againe’, Spenser referred to Elizabeth, Alice and Anne as the ‘sisters three’:

The honour of the noble family

Of which I meanest boast myself to be.

Certainly, the kinship cannot have been over-close: in ‘Muiotpotmos’, a poem dedicated to Elizabeth Spencer — by then Lady Carey — Spenser expresses his gratitude that his claim is recognized by her, in the line ‘… for name or kindred’s sake by you vouchsafed’.

Similarly, Spenser writes to Alice Spencer, in his dedication to her of ‘The Teares of the Muses’:

Most brave and beautiful ladie; the things, that make ye so much honored of the world as ye bee, are such, as (without my simple lines testimonie) are thoroughlie knowen to all men; namely, your excellent beautie, your vertuous behaviour, and your noble match with that most honourable Lord, the very Paterne of right Nobilitie: but the causes, for which ye have thus deserved of me to be honored, (if honor it be at all,) are both your particular bounties, and also some private bands of affinitie, which it hath pleased your Ladyship to acknowledge.

If the kinship had been intimate, then there would have been no need for the vouchsafing by Elizabeth, nor the acknowledging by Alice; indeed, if the blood link had been close, it would have appeared odd for Spenser to have harped on about it. However, similarly, the claim must have been logically sustainable, or else it would not have been presented by the poet, nor accepted by the Spencer ladies.

The reason behind dedicating poetry to influential ladies of breeding was flattery. Not content with fawning to their human charms, Spenser transformed the three Spencer girls into mythical muses — Phyllis (Elizabeth), Charillis (Anne) and sweet Amaryllis (Alice):

Phyllis the faire is the eldest of the three:

The next to her is bountifull Charillis;

But th’youngest is the highest in degree,

Phyllis, the floure of rare perfection,

Faire spreading forth her leaves with fresh delight,

That, with their beauties amorous reflexion,

Bereave of sence each rash beholders sight.

But sweet Charillis is the paragone

Of peerless price, and ornament of praise,

Admir’d of all, yet envied of none,

Through the myld temperance of her goodly raies.

The Spencer daughters were the recipients of other dedications from contemporary writers and Alice’s home was frequented by artists of all kinds. Her husband, Lord Strange, the grandson of Mary, Dowager Queen of France, a sister of England’s Henry VIII, was a friend of poets, and even wrote some verse himself. He also was the patron of the company of actors who had previously been attached to the Earl of Leicester, ‘Lord Strange’s Company’. Spenser, keen to stay on the right side of such a benefactor of the arts, called Strange ‘the very Paterne of right Nobilitie’, and even praised the lord’s amateur artistic efforts posthumously:

He, whilst he lived, was the noblest swain

That ever piped upon an oaten quill,

Both did he other, which could pipe maintain,

And eke could pipe himself with passing skill.

In a similar way Nash, the satirist, acknowledged the patronage of Elizabeth Spencer, Lady Carey, while also taking the opportunity to doff his hat with respect to a far greater literary talent than his own, when he recorded in his dedication to ‘Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem’: ‘Divers well-deserving Poets have consecrated their endeavours to your praise. Fame’s eldest favorite, Maister Spencer, in all his writings he prizeth you.’

Later generations of the Spencer family were to honour their blood link with Edmund Spenser. When George John, Second Earl Spencer, found his vast collection of books was spilling out from the library at Althorp in the early nineteenth century, his wife, Lavinia, named one of the sitting rooms ‘The Spenser Library’, filled it with volumes of poetry, and had a portrait of Edmund placed above the fireplace there. The earl and his wife — both highly educated — seem to have agreed with the opinion of their friend, the historian Edward Gibbon, when he wrote: ‘The nobility of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough, but I exhort them to consider The Faery Queene as the most precious jewel in their coronet.’

4. A Worthy Founder

Sir John Spencer II, father of these muse-like daughters, died in 1586. His eldest son, Sir John III, knighted on his father’s death by Queen Elizabeth, followed him in January 1599. This ancestor of mine can have had little idea that evidence of his life at Althorp would still be visible in the Park 400 years on. However, that is the case, for Sir John III planted a large wood at the rear of Althorp, which is only now reaching the end of its natural life. The oldest oaks still growing there today were planted at his instruction in 1589. My father told me that, the Spanish Armada having been defeated the year before the wood was seeded, it was Sir John III’s intention to boost the timber stocks, in order to be able to help the English Navy to build more ships, should such an invasion be attempted again in the future.

Other than that, he is remembered by my family for increasing the Althorp estate by buying Little Brington, a village a couple of miles from Althorp, in 1592. The vendor was Francis Bernard, and the price £2,150. Some property in that village, like the mighty oaks in the Park, remains in my family’s possession today.

In stark contrast to his father’s fertility, the third Sir John had but one son, by his wife Mary, sole daughter and heir of Sir Robert Catlyn, the Lord Chief Justice. Named after his illustrious maternal grandfather, Robert Spencer was a truly remarkable man, a lynchpin in the family’s history, but also the object of great respect during his own lifetime.

Much of this esteem flowed from qualities that have been seen in generations of Spencers, both before and after Robert’s tenure of Althorp: a keen and able participation in the family’s farming enterprises, a lack of personal political ambition, and a relentless defence of the rights of the English citizen against the abuses of the Crown, as well as the ability to stand aloof from the self-serving infighting of the court. Soon after his death, it was said of Robert:

He made the country a virtuous court, where his fields and flocks brought him more calm and happy contentment than the various and unstable dispensations a Court can contribute, and when he was called to the Senate he was more vigilant to keep the people’s liberties from being a prey to the encroaching power of monarchy than his harmless and tender lambs from foxes and ravenous creatures.

The Spencer family is perhaps unique, of the old English aristocracy, in tracing the roots of its noble title back to the relatively prosaic world of agriculture. The more usual paths to the House of Lords were via military distinction, or through royal blood links — legitimate or illegitimate. The humble farming ancestry of the Spencers was highly unusual, but so was the wealth that inspired husbandry had amassed for the family.

Robert, the fifth Spencer knight in succession, was able to cement his family’s rise from gentry to nobility by building on his forefathers’ endeavours. His personal involvement in the farming operation is shown by references to his attending markets in the West Country in 1597, accompanied by his bailiff, in a quest to improve the bloodline of his cattle, beasts of particular importance to the late sixteenth-century household: the Althorp domestic accounts of the time record that 200 lbs of butter were consumed every week the family was in residence.

We also know that Robert insisted on overseeing the entire agricultural operation on his home farm, at Muscot, five miles from Althorp, where he grew not only rye and barley, but also hops. He was a familiar sight, atop his horse, a small cob palfrey, constantly looking for ideas on how to improve the way tasks were handled, and with a reputation for being unusually approachable to his workers.

Writing in the 1860s, the vicar of Brington, the Reverend J. N. Simpkinson, working from the accounts and records in the Althorp Muniment Room, recreated the scene that would have been witnessed, if one could have been transported back to Robert’s tenure of the Estate:

Lord Spencer never allowed himself to drop behind the agricultural improvements of the day: and the system he had adopted gave employment to many of the women of the villages around as well as to their husbands and fathers. He had introduced the cultivation of hops, both at Muscot farm and in Althorp park; and troops of women were wanted in the hop-grounds, in the spring and early summer, for weeding and tying. Then the meadows had to be ‘clotted’: and, in the parts of the park which were laid for hay, care must be taken to gather the sticks, and rake up the ‘orts’ — the litter, that is, that lay on the ground where the cattle had been foddered in the winter. And in the early part of June, the women were busy in weeding the young quickset hedges; fresh portions of which Lord Spencer added, year by year, to the enclosures on his estate … Lord Spencer treated his labourers liberally. Besides the regular pay (sixpence a day for men, and three-pence for women) he would kill two or three sheep to regale them on such occasions; besides supplying them amply with beer, and plenty of bread to eat with it — excellent bread, such as was not often to be had by labourers in those days, half of barley and half of rye; and at the conclusion would hire a ‘minstrel’, to make merry for them: often coming himself with a party from Althorp, to take part in the final rejoicings.

This enjoyment of a simple, rural life was maintained, despite his increasing importance as a man of influence in the country at large.

When Elizabeth I died, the new King James I was eager to cement his position, so he made it his business to identify the key men in the kingdom, to secure their loyalty. Robert Spencer, reputedly with more ready money than any other man in the kingdom, was clearly somebody whose support was desirable. This explains the honour that was paid to him and to his family when James’s queen, Anne of Denmark, and his heir, Henry, Prince of Wales, stayed at Althorp during their progress to their new palaces in June 1603. It was repaid in full by Robert, who commissioned Ben Jonson to write a masque to be performed as a welcome for the royal guests, in the Park at Althorp. Queen Anne was intrigued by this novel art form — a marked improvement on the Danish court’s idea of entertainment, which centred around the men present drinking enormous quantities of alcohol until they could consume no more — and it was thanks to this performance at Althorp that masques became a part of fashionable royal entertainment in the early seventeenth century.

Partly because of his wealth, partly because of the appreciation of the royal party for their gracious reception at Althorp, and partly because new men of note were needed to buoy up the Stuart hold on the throne of England, Robert was made Baron Spencer of Wormleighton later in 1603. His first task was to act as ambassador for the King, and to invest England’s ally, Frederic, Duke of Wurttemberg, with the highest order of chivalry, a knighthood of the Garter. The baron and the duke vied with each other in the fabulousness of their retinues, and in their gifts to each other, dazzling those who witnessed their meeting with their displays of wealth and munificence.

Robert did not involve himself in court life back in England; it was of no interest to him. However, he took his duties as a member of the Upper House of Parliament seriously, trying to remain loyal to his monarch, while becoming increasingly perturbed by the royal inclination to be overbearing in its attitude to the people’s representatives. James’s belief in the Divine Right of Kings to rule — and raise money — as they saw fit, flew in the face of Spencer’s belief in the need for respect for the people’s elected representatives.

Diligent though Robert was, his agricultural provenance was not forgotten by some of his fellow peers. Once, while he was speaking in the House of Lords on the bravery displayed by former generations in guarding the liberties of England, the Earl of Arundel — conscious of four centuries of aristocratic blood in his own veins — interrupted contemptuously, ‘My Lord, when these things were doing, your ancestors were keeping sheep!’ Robert, apparently without missing a beat, retorted: ‘When my ancestors were keeping sheep, as you say, your ancestors were plotting treason.’ Arundel exploded with rage, to such an extent that he was sent to the Tower of London for his unseemly conduct, until he had calmed down and was ready to apologize to Robert for the rudeness of his insult.

Despite his misgivings about James’s conduct as king, it is clear that James himself had only the greatest respect for Robert. Indeed, when it came to finding a suitable Midland home for his second son, Prince Charles, James was persuaded to choose Holdenby, across the valley from Althorp, in the hope that some of Robert’s virtues would rub off on his boy. As the Reverend Simpkinson neatly phrased it, Robert was ‘a nobleman who had attained a very great reputation and influence, not only in the midland counties, but also in the House of Lords, and in whom the king rightly believed that he should secure a most valuable neighbour and counsellor for his son’. The bond between the King and the baron was strengthened, when both lost their eldest sons in 1612 — the Spencer heir at Blois, in France, and Henry, Prince of Wales, after catching a chill playing tennis.

It was not Robert’s first taste of family tragedy. His wife, Margaret Willoughby, was a lady of interesting pedigree. Her father was Sir Francis Willoughby, himself the son of Henry Willoughby and Anne, daughter of the Second Marquess of Dorset. Dorset was a landowner in the vicinity of Althorp, who had conveyed the manor of Newbottle (now Nobottle) to the first John Spencer in 1511. Dorset’s son, the Third Marquess, has gone down in history as the man who pushed forward his daughter, Lady Jane Grey, on the death of Edward VII In 1553. The hapless Jane was queen for all of nine days, before being deposed by Mary Tudor. She was subsequently beheaded.

The first Baroness Spencer was, therefore, the first cousin once removed of Lady Jane Grey. This may explain why the only known portrait painted of Lady Jane during her brief life is at Althorp. She is shown as a devoted Christian, reading her Psalter, very much an innocent. There is nothing threatening about her, nothing ambitious or devious; just a naïve young girl, overtaken by other people’s scheming, and unfairly paying for their manipulations with her life.

This link to royalty — albeit relatively obscure, and certainly extremely short-lived — did not spare Robert’s wife from one of the common scourges of women at this time: death in childbirth; although the child, Margaret, survived. As the heartbroken widower recorded in his own hand in the first pages of his Account Book, after the details of the seven children that he had successfully fathered:

Anno Domi: 1597. At Allthrop. The xvii of August it plesed the Allmighty God to take to his mercy Margarite my most loving wife having borne to me all these children afore named they all now living and being married ix yeare and a halfe … her vertues surpassed all.

By coincidence, in 1906 my great-grandfather, another Robert Spencer, lost his wife, also a Margaret, in childbirth. Both children of the ill-fated births were daughters, and both were named after their deceased mothers. Although both Roberts lived for a considerable time after bereavement, neither remarried.

Robert, First Baron Spencer, died in 1627, choosing to have his bowels buried at Wormleighton — from where his baronial title gained its name — and his body at Brington, beside the beloved Margaret, who had died thirty years beforehand. In the sermon preached at his funeral, the congregation was reminded that it had been Robert’s custom to feed fifteen poor persons every Monday, as well as giving alms at all other times, and relieving the distress of all who came to the gates of his mansions; that he had been a lenient landlord and a kind master, providing amply for his servants in their old age; that he had been held in such high estimation by his friends, that many of them entrusted their whole estates — and the education of their children — to his care; that his ‘singular skill in antiquities, arms, and alliances’ was not less noted than his constant integrity and uprightness of life and conversation; and also that, in the management of his great estates, he had made a ‘careful frugality the fuel of his continual hospitality’.

5. The Washington Connection

William, Second Baron Spencer, was reputed to have inherited the qualities of his father just as suredly as he had inherited his estates. A monument to his memory was to record that he was a tender husband, loving father, faithful friend, a sincere worshipper of God, devoted to his king, and a patriot of his country. During his lifetime, with the tensions between Crown and Parliament increasing all the time, balancing the latter two demands became an ever more difficult task.

In the general celebrations at Charles Stuart’s becoming Prince of Wales in 1616, William had been created a Knight of the Bath. Keenly involved in the political life of the nation, he was elected one of the Knights of the Shire for Northamptonshire in three different parliaments in James I’s reign, and in two of Charles I’s.

William’s wife would have a marked effect on his political stance. She was Lady Penelope Wriothesley, daughter of the Earl of Southampton — the patron of William Shakespeare, and a figure known for his antipathy to the court faction.

By the second decade of his reign, James I was resorting to highly dubious means to raise money without suffering the intrusions and counter-demands of Parliament. The King was seen to be undermining the House of Lords, by selling peerages to fill his coffers. A letter of June 1618 from a Thomas Lorkin to an unnamed friend gives an indication of where Penelope stood on such questionable use of royal power, since her politics were known to have reflected those of her father and brother closely:

Ere long you are likely to hear of a new creation of my Lord Rich, my Lord Compton, Lord Peter, and Candish or Chandos, I remember not whether, are to be made Earles and to pay ten thousand pounds a piece, which is allotted for the expense of the progresse; my Lord Spencer likewise was nominated, but diverted as they say by my Lord of Southampton (whose daughter his eldest sonne marryed) from accepting it.

Penelope was a considerable force for good at Althorp. Her father-in-law, lonely after his Margaret’s death, invited her and William to live in the mansion with him, handing over day-to-day administration of the housekeeping to Penelope, while increasing the privacy that the young couple could enjoy through the provision of a drawing room for the new lady of the house and a closet for William. If the old First Baron had hoped the young couple would bring a bit of life to proceedings at Althorp, they did not disappoint, producing thirteen children, the old iron cradle, looked after by Nurse Detheridge, frequently coming out of storage, with its ‘canopy and a covering of silver velvet, laced with open spangle lace of gold and silver, and curtains of the same stuff suitable, fringed with crimson silk and silver’.

Running Althorp efficiently was a task Penelope took to with aplomb. Before her involvement, the accounts for the household had been kept by the bailiff, and by the steward of the household. These books showed the various items of expenditure pertaining to the kitchen, the stables, the park and the farms. Lord Spencer and William would inspect such accounts weekly. However, they were not precise enough for Penelope’s liking. She introduced a more comprehensive and accessible system, whereby the rate, as well as the extent, of all household expenditure could be exactly monitored. Through a cursory glance, Penelope could discover what was in store, and what needed to be ordered. As Simpkinson admiringly wrote,

The estimated value of every bullock and sheep that was killed, and of every other article of farm produce which was brought into the house, appeared to her as important to know and to record, as the money which had gone to defray the purchases of the cater: while the last column of the book informed her practised eye every Saturday which of the stores was running low, and how soon it would need replenishing.

The Spencers were not short of money; far from it. Yet this skilful control of the accounts allowed the family to entertain in style, without worrying about wastefulness. The number and the calibre of domestic staff increased — there were soon over fifty, some from France, and others gentlemen in their own right — and they were sumptuously clothed. Penelope’s readiness to pay for quality is demonstrated in the rate of pay of senior household figures — £6 per year, three times the conventional rate of the time.

Penelope wanted Althorp to be a byword for great hospitality and, despite the fact that it is almost as far from the coast as it is possible to be in England, she employed staff whose sole job it was to furnish the dining table with half a dozen barrels of oysters fresh from the east coast, on a weekly basis. Other fish came direct from London, brought by the wonderfully named carriers, Legg and Short-legs, who also supplied groceries from the backs of their pack-horses. The journey took two to three days, Legg and Shortlegs ‘freshening’ their perishable goods on the way by hosing them with water.

Penelope’s influence was to be seen in a more lasting manner through improvements to the gardens, and to Althorp itself. She had read Lord Bacon’s Essays, and these persuaded her to redesign some of the avenues in the gardens, and to build a folly on a mound towards the rear of the main house. A new fruit and vegetable garden was initiated; and a pheasantry, too.

Inside the mansion, Penelope introduced forks, to be used with table knives, at meal times. Another practical change was the installation of a bell pulley in Penelope’s bedroom, so she could summon her waiting-woman when she was required, without frequent breaches of her privacy.

Structurally, she helped William plan the enlargement of Althorp. A best drawing room was added in time for a royal visit by Charles I and his queen, Henrietta-Maria, in 1636, the windows constructed in the modish ‘balconia’ fashion.

The Spencers did not limit themselves to royalty and aristocracy when inviting house guests to Althorp. William’s friends were an interesting mix: from his horseracing and hunting friends (William, although he kept only a single racehorse himself, had an entire racecourse established in the park at Althorp), and those who attended the hawking parties, to learned and famous physicians of the day, especially one Dr Cotta, a Cambridge graduate practising in Northampton, and Doctors Ashworth and Clayton, from Oxford. Most noblemen of the time chose to socialize with people from their own background.

One group conspicuously absent from the guest list at Althorp, to judge from Penelope’s household accounts, is that of the Puritans; William had no time for them. Indeed, one of his own friends was Charles I’s controversial High Church Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. So, when it was time to appoint a new preacher for the parish of Brington, the man who William presented for the post had the full four surplices — something no Low Churchman would have contemplated.

William was so rigid in his Anglican beliefs that he rarely allowed his brother, Sir Edward Spencer, to visit Althorp. He considered Edward a traitor to his faith and upbringing for embracing Puritanism. Indeed, William refused to send his eldest son, Henry, to Sir Edward’s alma mater, Balliol College, Oxford, in case his heir was similarly contaminated. Instead, William chose Magdalen, secure in the knowledge that it was under the presidency of Dr Accepted Frewen, later Archbishop of York, who, despite his name, was strongly anti-Puritan.

More welcome at Althorp in William’s time was a family from the other side of Northamptonshire, who had fallen on hard times: the Washingtons. The last English forebear of George Washington lies buried less than two miles from Althorp’s front door, in the same churchyard — Brington — as the Spencer tombs.

In the early sixteenth century Lawrence Washington, of Warton in Lancashire, had decided to move south. A lawyer, Lawrence had become a member of the society of Gray’s Inn. However, an uncle who was a successful London merchant told him to forget law for the time being, and to take advantage of the boom in the wool trade. As had been the case with the Spencers, the wish to profit from sheep had brought him to the Northampton area, where he settled, becoming mayor of the town in 1532.

When Henry VIII severed contacts with the Pope at the time of his first divorce, he decided to take control of the vast wealth of the religious houses across his kingdom. This decision was formalized in 1539 and, among those enthusiastic to benefit from the situation, was this same Lawrence Washington, who received a grant of the manor and lands of Sulgrave, which had previously been the property of a wealthy monastery, St Andrew’s, in Northampton.

Later, people talked of a curse being attached to those who had profited from the monasteries’ dissolution. Certainly, the speedy change in fortune of the Washingtons of Sulgrave Manor would give some credibility to such a theory, since the estate was effectively ruined by 1606; and Lawrence’s grandson, another Lawrence Washington, was forced to sell Sulgrave soon afterwards, in 1610.

According to Reverend Simpkinson, the distressed Washingtons found a saviour in Robert, First Lord Spencer, who provided them with a small house in Brington. Not long after the move was made, Lawrence and his wife produced a son, Gregory, who died an infant, and was buried in Brington churchyard.

Why Lord Spencer should help the Washingtons is not clear. Perhaps it was because of a distant kinship: Spencer’s grandmother, the wife to the third Sir John, was a daughter of Sir Thomas Kitson, the London merchant who was the Washington uncle who had advised the family to move to Northamptonshire so they could enrich themselves from the wool trade.

After Sulgrave’s sale, the younger Lawrence Washington took his young family to London, while his brother, Robert, took on the house in Brington, with his older wife, Elizabeth. Apparently they were unable to have children of their own — Elizabeth was perhaps past her childbearing years — so they adopted Amy, one of their nieces. From the household records at Althorp, it is apparent that Amy was a frequent companion — and, quite possibly, a friend — of young Margaret Spencer, the sickly girl who had survived her mother’s death in childbirth. As a result, her name appears frequently in Penelope Spencer’s household accounts.

There are also other Washington references there: in mid-January 1622, we learn that there was, ‘Given by Mr Robert Washington. Chickines 5, Casuall chickine 1, Chickine to the falkenor 1; given also by Mr Washington. Henns, cupp: 2, Flitch of bacon.’ These may well have been by way of New Year’s presents. They could never be repeated, since Robert died a month and a half later. His widow, Elizabeth, died nine days afterwards. Over the grave there is a ledger-stone marked with their names, telling all who see it that they sleep below, ‘after they lived lovingly together many years in this village’ of Brington.

By this stage the wider Washington family had risen considerably in importance, doubtless through James I’s deep affection for George Villiers, whose sister had married Amy Washington’s elder brother, William. James, always receptive to handsome young men, had met Villiers while on a progress through Northamptonshire in 1614. A younger son of a Leicestershire knight, George was lured to the royal court, where he was soon acknowledged to be the King’s favourite.

As was his custom, James swamped his new love with gifts — including titular ones, advancing George to the rank of Viscount Villiers, and then, in rapid succession, to earl, then marquis, then finally Duke of Buckingham. The spin-offs for a favourite’s family — while he remained in favour — were considerable and Villiers saw that his kin did not feel neglected in this regard. They became titled, or received sources of wealth in various forms, or were helped with promotion in their professions. By the time of simple Robert Washington’s funeral in Brington, Amy’s two eldest brothers found themselves styled Sir William and Sir John, and the latter was the owner of a landed estate in Yorkshire.

Although the Washingtons left Brington after Robert and Elizabeth’s deaths, this was not the end of the links between the rest of the family and the Spencers. Sir John was a frequent visitor to Althorp, often staying for several weeks at a time. So close were the Spencers to him that, when he was widowed, it was to Althorp that he immediately retired for consolation, taking his three young children with him.

It was a friendship that crossed the generations. After Robert, First Lord Spencer’s death in 1627, Sir John remained a welcome guest of William and Penelope Spencer’s. Indeed, when their daughters were too old to need regular nannies, Lucy Washington, Sir John and Amy’s little sister, assumed the role of their governess.

When the Spencer heir, Henry, required military instruction — particularly on how to master his charger (‘the great horse’) — Sir John and his son, Mordaunt, appear to have been sent for to help him learn. Henry, together with Sir John, and the latter’s Washington nephew — another Henry — were all to fight on the Royalist side in the coming English Civil War. After the Parliamentary victory, Sir John, Mordaunt and Lawrence Washington decided to quit England, and set off for Virginia. There is speculation that they were forced to do so to save their lives, after being implicated in a Royalist conspiracy in 1656. Virginia, at this stage in its history, was known as a bolthole for disaffected Englishmen, eager to escape the government of the Commonwealth, which succeeded the reign of Charles I.

Sir John’s great-grandson was George Washington.

6. Death for the King

The last time William, Second Lord Spencer’s signature is to be found approving his wife’s household accounts was on 9 December 1636. Nine days later he was dead, aged forty-four. Penelope was distraught. She refused several proposals in her widowhood, which lasted thirty-one years. In honour of the man she truly loved, Penelope erected ‘a noble and stately monument of black and white marble’ in Brington church.

On his father’s death, the sixteen-year-old heir, Henry, was immediately brought to Althorp from his studies at Oxford. An extremely popular and able young man, Henry had already received a Master of Arts degree by this early age, his studies having initially been under the direct care of his father at Althorp. A contemporary wrote of Henry, during his Oxford days:

He had a tutor, crooked with age, who straitened the manners of his youth, arming him against those customs that are not knocked, but screwed, into the soul; inuring him to good discourse and company; habituating him to temperance and good order, whence he had the advantage of others, not only in health, but in time and business; and diverting him with safe, cheap, but manly and generous recreations; the result of which education was a knowing and a staid nature, that made him a lamb when pleased, a lion when angry.

He was then brought up under the charge of his mother, and the guardianship of his uncle, Thomas, Earl of Southampton, the son of Shakespeare’s patron. The end product of this upbringing was a man of great renown and promise. He was only to have his potential increased through marriage to a woman in every way his equal. Dorothy Sidney was the eldest of the eight daughters of Robert Sidney, Second Earl of Leicester, and Dorothy Percy, herself daughter of the Ninth Earl of Northumberland. She was, like Henry, born in 1620. Unlike her eventual husband, she was brought up at the centre of court politics, where her parents were pivotal figures. Dorothy — her parents called her ‘Doll’ — was their favourite child.

Given her personal charms, as well as her parents’ prominence, Dorothy was pursued by suitors as soon as she was old enough to become their prey. In the seventeenth century, this meant that her parents were having to fend off unwelcome attentions from the time she was fifteen. Her mother’s concerns about two well-born but undesirable suitors are clearly shown in a letter to Dorothy’s father:

Now considering Doll … I find my Lord Lovelace so uncertain, and so idle; so much addicted to mean company, and so easily drawn to debauchery; as it is now my study how to break off with him in such a manner as it may be said that we refused him … Many particulars I could tell you of his wildness; but the knowledge of them would be of no use to you, since he is likely to be a stranger to us; for, though his estate is good, his person pretty enough, and his wit much more than ordinary, yet dare I not venture to give Doll to him. And concerning my Lord of Devonshire I can say as little to please you; for, though his mother and sister made fair shows of good intentions to us, yet in the end we find them, just as I expected, full of deceit and juggling … My dear heart, let not these cross accidents trouble you; for we do not know what God has provided for her.

Of equally little interest to the Leicesters was the suit of the poet, Edmund Waller. A widower at the age of twenty-five, he directed his romantic yearning towards Dorothy. In his poems she was his ‘Sacharissa’, his sweet and perfect muse.

When it became evident that Dorothy was never going to be his, the distraught Waller threatened to quit England for ever. And yet Dorothy was still uppermost in the creative part of his mind when he wrote to a later love, Lady Sophia Murray, whom he termed his ‘Amoret’. Lady Sophia was to be in no doubt that the best position she could attain in Waller’s affections was a secondary one, as the poet explained in his ‘To Amoret’:

… I will tell you how I do

Sacharissa love, and you.

If sweet Amoret complains,

I have sense of all her pains;

But for Sacharissa I

Do not only grieve but die …

Sacharissa’s beauty’s wine,

Which to madness doth incline:

Such a liquor has no brain

That is mortal can sustain.

Scarce can I to heav’n excuse

The devotion which I use

Unto that adored dame …

Hearing the news that Dorothy had married the nineteen-year-old Henry, Third Baron Spencer, at the Sidney family home of Penshurst in 1639, Waller was generous in accepting she had gone from him for ever, and wrote to one of Dorothy’s sisters:

May my Lady Dorothy (if we may yet call her so) suffer as much, and have the like passion for this young Lord, whom she has preferred to the rest of mankind, as others have had for her; and may this love before the year go about make her taste of the first curse imposed on womankind, the pains of becoming a mother. May her first born be none of her own sex, nor so like her but that he may resemble her Lord as much as herself. May she that always affected silence, and retiredness, have the house filled with the noise and number of her children, and hereafter of her grand children; and then may she arrive at that great curse, so much declined by fair ladies, old age. May she live to be very old, and yet seem young; be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her of the truth: and when she shall appear to be mortal, may her Lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place where we are told there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage; that, being there divorced, we may all have an equal interest in her again. My revenge being immortal, I wish all this may also befall their prosperity to the world’s end, and afterwards.

When the Spencers were married, they went to live with Dorothy’s parents in France, where her father was ambassador. Only on the conclusion of Lord Leicester’s mission in October 1641, did the family group return to England — an England that was in seething turmoil, since tensions between Charles I’s court and the Parliamentarians were reaching their peak.

Within days of arriving back in the country, Henry had taken his seat in the House of Lords. He soon found himself being courted by both political factions with as much ardour as his wife had inspired among her many suitors. Henry’s position was complex: his wealth, influence and human qualities were such that he could be assured of prominence whichever party he fell in with. His problem lay in deciding which should have his support. By inclination, he was liberal, against the Crown’s increasingly frequent abuses of the burgeoning democratic system in England, and a believer in the inviolable rights of the people. However, taking a belligerent stand against his monarch was anathema to him.

In 1642 the Parliamentary party offered him the Lord Lieutenancy of Northamptonshire, in the hope that Henry would consolidate the sympathy that that Midland county was demonstrating for its cause. The turmoil of the times is shown by the fact that the Northamptonshire Lord Lieutenancy, a post that usually rested with an individual for several years, in 1642 was occupied by four different men.

Henry accepted the position, but not for the reason that the Parliamentarians had offered it. He abhorred the divisiveness that the extremists in the two opposing factions were trying to exacerbate, and hoped that the power he would enjoy as Lord Lieutenant would help him to bring about appeasement and understanding in his native county, while allowing him to push for the same in the nation’s Parliament.

Those in the Parliamentary faction who wanted outright conflict with the court latched on to the fact that Charles I seemed to have become inaccessible to them and their grievances, and complained that this showed his inability to be a wise and considerate monarch. Henry, while wishing that the King would become more directly involved in addressing the Parliamentarians’ grievances, was also appalled by the excessively aggressive stance that he thought Charles’s opponents were taking. In the Lords, Henry was among the first to advise that a more conciliatory approach might harvest more positive and mutually satisfactory results.

From the snippets of his speeches that survive from this time, we hear Henry counselling that those who were worried by the King’s apparent withdrawal from the centre of political life should ‘lure him home by their loving behaviour, and not to do so as those troublesome women who by their hideous outcries drive their wandering husbands further off’. Later, angrier at the predicament that he believed some in Parliament were unnecessarily bringing about, Henry said that he did not pity ‘them that bemoaned his Majesty’s distance’, even though they seemed to expect to be commended for their patience ‘under so great a punishment’. In Henry’s eyes, they deserved to be condemned for having sought the King’s approbation.

By the summer of 1642, it was evident that Parliament and King were headed for almost certain armed conflict. In his final speech before leaving the Lords, Henry fired a parting salvo at those who had helped to foster an atmosphere that would bring the monarch and the people’s representatives to such a state, through demands so unreasonable that they could never have been met: ‘We had been satisfied long ‘ere this, if we did not ask things that deny themselves; and if some men had not shuffled demands into our propositions on purpose that we may have no satisfaction.’

Henry left London accompanied by his kinsman, Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton, to join the King at Nottingham, on 22 August 1642. Charles had raised his standard there, calling for his supporters to rally to him. Soon afterwards, Parliamentary forces from Northampton occupied Althorp, much to Henry’s concern. But the unreasonable stance of the Parliamentary leaders, combined with his belief in the obligation he had to protect his monarch, had persuaded Henry that his was the only right course, even though he had no personal sympathy with Charles or his advisers. Those who had been his closest colleagues ideologically in the House of Lords — Northumberland and Essex — went to take their places at the head of the Parliamentary cause.

If Henry Spencer had expected to find less selfish intent in the King’s camp, he was quickly disappointed. A letter of 21 September 1642 to Dorothy displays his disgust at his new-found comrades-in-arms:

My dearest Hart,

The King’s condition is much improved of late. His force increaseth daily, which increaseth the insolencie of the papists. How much I am unsatisfied with the proceedings here I have at large expressed in several letters; neither is there wanting daily handsome occasion to retire, were it not for gaining honour: for, let occasion be never so handsome, unless a man resolve to fight on the Parliament side, which, for my part, I had rather be hanged, it will be said a man is afraid to fight. If there could be an expedient found to salve the punctilio of honour, I would not continue here an hour. The discontent that I, and many other honest men, receive daily is beyond expression.

By this stage the royal army was comprised of 6,000 infantry, 1,500 dragoons and over 2,000 cavalry. Both sides were busy increasing their strength for the coming conflict. Henry hoped it would not come to actual bloodshed, but he despaired as he witnessed the determination of the Roman Catholics among Charles’s close advisers not to have any conciliation with Parliament, with its significant Protestant sympathies. In desperation, Henry managed to see the King alone outside Birmingham in October 1642, and spent over an hour pleading with him to reach a settlement with the enemy. Charles was not strong enough to ignore the self-serving persuasions of his less honest advisers, and politely thanked Henry for his counsel, while putting it firmly to one side.

Later that same month, the first major battle of the English Civil War took place near Wormleighton, at Edgehill. An inconclusive affair, the encounter was marked by the success of the Royalist horse in sweeping through its Parliamentarian counterpart. Henry, serving in the King’s Life Guards, was conspicuous in his bravery that day, taking a prominent role in the dramatic cavalry charge.

Henry Spencer’s loyalty, combined with a gift of 10,000 to the royal coffers to help fund the war, led to his being raised to the earldom of Sunderland, on 8 June 1643. It was a title that had briefly belonged to the Scrope family, which had first achieved prominence in the reign of Edward II, when William, Lord Scrope, of Bolton, had been Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. His descendant, Emmanuel, Lord Scrope, was made President of the King’s Council in the North in 1618, under James I. Charles I had promoted him to become Earl of Sunderland in 1627, but Emmanuel died without a legitimate heir in 1640, leaving the title extinct. Charles decided to revive it by conferring it on his Spencer supporter. However, Henry did not enjoy his elevation for long.

The new Earl of Sunderland attached himself to the forces of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles’s flamboyant nephew and commander, and was present when the Prince’s forces captured the important city of Bristol in the summer of 1643. From there, Henry rode to join Charles at the siege of Gloucester — even though he thought the King wrong to be side-tracked by the attempted reduction of a county town, when the Royalists should have been trying to bring the Parliamentarians to a conclusive set battle. Henry reported his reservations to Dorothy: ‘The King’s going to Gloucester is, in the opinion of most, very unadvised: the Queen unsatisfied with it; so is all the people of quality.’ The siege had not been properly planned, and the King’s lack of judgement and leadership convinced Henry that the war was an increasingly regrettable, unnecessary affair.

Above all, Henry missed his Dorothy. On 25 August 1643, from his quarters outside the besieged Gloucester, he transmitted his utter loneliness to his wife:

Writing to you, and hearing from you, being the most pleasant entertainment I am capable of receiving in any place, but especially here, where, but when I am in the trenches (which place is seldom without my company) I am more solitary than ever I was in my life …

Many of the soldiers are confident that we shall have the towne within this four days, which I extremely long for; not that I am weary of this siege, for really, though we suffer many inconveniences, yet I am not ill pleased with this variety, so directly opposite as the being in the trenches, with so much good company, together with the noise and tintamarre of guns and drums, with the horrid spectacles, and hideous cries, of dead and hurt men, is to the solitariness of my quarter, together with all the marks of peace, which often brings into my thoughts, notwithstanding your mother’s opinion of me, how infinitely more happy I should esteem myself quietly to enjoy your company at Althorp than to be troubled with the noises, and engaged in the factions of the Court, which I shall ever endeavour to avoid.

Henry’s colleagues were wrong about the vulnerability of Gloucester. It successfully survived the Royalist siege, and Charles ordered his army to strike camp in the first week of September. Henry was in no doubt as to the significance of the setback, and its accompanying waste of valuable campaigning time:

I am afraid our setting down before Gloucester has hindered us from making an end of the war this year, which nothing could keep us from doing if we had a month’s more time which we lost there, for we never were in a more prosperous condition …

Increasingly disillusioned, Henry had by this stage made two resolutions to himself: the first was never to be parted from his King during the war, so he could help protect the monarch whenever Charles was commanding his forces in person; the second was never to accept a commission in the Royalist army. His conscience told him he, personally, must serve his monarch, but he had no wish to take a commanding role in an army whose aims and ethics ran counter to his own and led him into direct conflict with people whose values were closer to those of his own conscience.

The Royalists regrouped in their stronghold of Oxford, the scene of Henry’s student days a few years earlier. From here, on 16 September 1643, Henry wrote to Dorothy:

I cannot, by walking about my chamber, call any thing more to mind to set down here; and really I have made you no small compliment in writing this much, for I have so great a cold that I do nothing but sneeze, and my eyes do nothing but water, all the while I am in the posture of holding down my head. I beseech you present his service to my lady, who is most passionately and perfectly yours, Sunderland.

Four days later, Henry was dead.

The Battle of Newbury was fought on 20 September 1643. It was not one of the more significant encounters of the Civil War, but it did see the deaths of several young noblemen. Henry Spencer, First Earl of Sunderland, was struck by a cannon ball in the groin, dying in slow agony. His body was taken to The Chequers coaching-house at nearby Speenhamland, where it was laid out with those of Lords Carnarvon and Falkland, prior to being taken away to be buried, his bowels interred on the battlefield itself, his heart preserved for posterity in a lead casket packed with mortar.

Lord Clarendon, the great contemporary historian of the war, recorded that the King’s cavalry at Newbury ‘charged with a kind of contempt of the enemy, and with wonderful boldness, upon all grounds of inequality; and were so far too hard for the troops of the other side, that they routed them in most places’. With sadness, he also recorded Henry’s demise:

The Earl of Sunderland, a Lord of great fortune; tender years, being not above three and twenty years of age; and an early judgement; who, having no command in the army, attended upon the King’s person, under the obligation of honour; and, putting himself that day in the King’s troop, a volunteer, was taken away by a cannon bullet.

It was agreed among commentators that this was a great loss to the country, as well as to the King. In his Memoirs of the Loyalists, Lloyd wrote of the qualities that had died with Henry, calling the fallen young nobleman ‘a good patriot upon all other occasions as one of them at Westminster observed; promoting the trade, manufactures, and privileges of this country; and now standing by his Majesty as he evidently saw him stand for his kingdom’.

The all-round virtues of this ‘true nobleman’ were trumpeted, as his death was mourned:

A good neighbour; the country about him, when he had occasion to make use of it, being his friends that loved him, rather than slaves that feared him; A discreet landlord, finding ways to improve his land, rather than rack his tenants: A noble housekeeper, to whom that ingenuity that he was master of himself was welcome in others: An honest patron, seldom furnishing a church with an incumbent till he had consulted the college he had been of, and the Bishop he lived under: An exemplary master of a family; observing exactly the excellent rules he so strictly enjoined; consecrating his house as a temple, where he ordered his followers to wrestle with God in prayer, while he wrestled with the enemy in fight.

Dorothy’s devastation was total; on learning of Henry’s fate, she lost the baby girl she had been carrying. Her physical and mental health plummeted, and her family feared for her wellbeing. Dorothy refused to leave Althorp, or to see anyone. Lord Leicester, her father, wrote to her in an attempt to bring her out of her misery:

Your reason will assure you that, besides the vanity of bemoaning that which hath no remedy, you offend him whom you loved if you hurt that person whom he loved. Remember how apprehensive he was of your dangers, and how sorry for any thing that troubled you. Imagine how he sees that you afflict and hurt yourself. You will then believe that, though he look upon it without any perturbation, for that cannot be admitted by that blessed condition wherein he is, yet he may censure you, and think you forgetful of the friendship that was between you, if you pursue not his desires in being careful of yourself, who was so dear unto him.

Her father’s advice seems to have had an impact on Dorothy: she took over the running of Althorp herself, and ensured that it remained a bastion of Royalist support in a county that was predominantly Parliamentarian. Lloyd wrote of Dorothy: ‘She is not to be mentioned without the highest honour in this catalogue of sufferers, to so many of whom her house was a sanctuary, her interest a protection, her estate a maintenance, and the livings in her gift a preferment.’

State papers of the latter 1640s bear this out, regularly referring to problems encountered by Parliamentary troops with the Althorp Estate:

October 27, 1646. Deposition of Capt. John Warren — That about St James’ tide, 1643 Capt. Otway with his troop was marching from his quarters from Northampton to Coventry by Althorpe House, in Co. Northampton when a horse being tired he sent to Lord Spencer’s house, who was an active enemy to the parliament and slain in the King’s army at Newbury fight, for another horse, but being refused, the Captain marched thither, who also being refused he conjectured that some eminent cavalier might be in the house, and resolved to force an entrance, which was with some danger effected …

By 1649 the Royalists had lost the English Civil War, and Charles was imprisoned across the valley from Althorp, at Holdenby, the Midland palace his father had given to him in order to bring his royal son under the influence of Robert, First Baron Spencer. Holdenby was a huge mansion then, but it did not have a bowling green. Bowling — along with chess and praying — being one of Charles’s favourite pastimes, the King was a frequent guest at the green at Althorp. Indeed, it was during such a visit as guest of Dorothy Sunderland, that Charles learned that a force of Parliamentarian troops had arrived to take him away to London. Charles was subsequently tried, and then beheaded at Whitehall — where, thirty-odd years earlier, he and William, Second Baron Spencer, had innocently celebrated Charles becoming Prince of Wales.

We get a glimpse of Dorothy’s defiant attitude to the Puritan masters of England, who dominated the country in the 1650s, in her appointment in 1654 of Thomas Pierce as rector of Brington. At a time when the military and religious forces of Cromwell’s Commonwealth were happy to resort to violence in an effort to eradicate dissension from the state-approved practices of religion, Dorothy patronized one of the most able and eminent controversialist writers of the time. Pierce was known to be unashamed in his outspokenness, and to be possessed of a fiery temper. Championed by Dorothy Sunderland, he never shirked from attacking other, more compliant preachers in the locality, with considerable effect.

By the time the Stuarts were restored to the throne in 1660, Pierce’s reputation was so well established that Charles II subsequently made him King’s Chaplain. He went on to become Canon of Canterbury, and then President of Magdalen College, Oxford — Henry Spencer’s alma mater. When he died in 1691, it was as Dean of Salisbury. He could trace his rise in the Church back to the bold endorsement of Dorothy Sunderland, who gave him a living when a more timid patron would have plumped for a less controversial candidate.

Dorothy’s self-assuredness was also evident in the way in which she looked after Althorp, while her son Robert was in his minority. The lack of respect that both warring parties had for great houses was shown to her in 1646, when Royalist troops from the Banbury garrison burnt down the Hall at Wormleighton. By that stage the Warwickshire family home was a massive affair — occupying several times the square footage of Althorp — and the Royalists feared that it might be taken by the Parliamentarians and used as a fortress by them. With nobody from the family there to protest, the original home to the Spencer family was all but annihilated. Today, one wing survives, and that has had to be made whole again with stone, leaving only one side in the original Tudor red brick.

Althorp’s neighbouring mansion, Holdenby, also suffered appallingly during the war. After its sale by order of Parliament in 1650, the bulk of it was destroyed in an attempt to eradicate such a dramatic symbol of royal power. A small section of the house and two gateways where the principal court had been, together with a range of lesser buildings, were all that remained, along with various obelisks and arcades in the grounds. The parkland around Holdenby was stripped of its timber, to complete the desecration of what had been one of the great houses of the English Midlands.

Dorothy managed to see that no such devastation overtook Althorp. In this she was aided by her husband’s uncle, Sir Edward Spencer, whose conversion to Puritanism had so appalled his brother William, but whose influence was now used for the preservation of the family home and its contents. Edward did not fight in the Civil War, but he was still of sufficient influence on the Parliamentarian side to be able to protect his nephew’s widow and children. When he learned of Henry’s death, he had immediately gone to Dorothy to console her in her bereavement. Further compassion and practical support from the Parliamentarian side was provided by Dorothy’s brothers, Lord Lisle and Algernon Sidney.

Dorothy was close to her family and deeply respectful of her parents. When her father, Lord Leicester, decided that the best thing for his grieving daughter would be remarriage, she yielded to his request to end her widowhood with a second husband. Dorothy married Robert Smythe, of Roundes, in the parish of Bidborough, Kent. Smythe was from the family of the Viscounts Strangford, of Ireland, and was considered a safe second husband for the countess, although his social standing was not as exalted as her own. There was a child: Robert, who became Governor of Dover Castle during the reign of Charles II. However, this was not the love match that she had enjoyed with Henry.

There was to be no distracting Dorothy from looking after her first husband’s bequest. She was responsible for the dramatic transformation in Althorp, from Tudor to Stuart style, covering over the old open courtyard in the centre of the house with a roof, and ordering the construction of the broad and handsome wooden staircase that has been the main feature of the Saloon over the last three centuries.

Smythe predeceased Dorothy. In her second widowhood, she met the poet Edmund Waller again and teasingly asked her erstwhile admirer when he would write more fine verses to her, his ‘Sacharissa’. Waller looked at the elderly figure before him, and replied, perhaps jokingly, but also perhaps with the satisfaction of the avenged: ‘Oh madam! When your ladyship is as young again.’

After her death in 1684, Dorothy was laid beside the remains of her beloved Henry, in Brington church — final recognition of the fact that her true loyalty had remained with him throughout the four decades that they had been forcibly separated.

Of all my ancestors’ tales, the doomed love story of Henry and Dorothy has always been the one that has moved me the most. When I was young, I would look at his portrait at the head of the Saloon staircase, his long dark hair flopping down round his handsome pale face, his torso encased in the armour that proved inadequate against the fateful cannonball that ended his life so prematurely. In his death, the futility and horror of civil war is encapsulated, for this was a man fighting to the end for a cause that he abhorred, but prevented by his concept of chivalric honour from drawing his sword for his political ideals.

As for Dorothy, left without her soulmate for two-thirds of her life, and persuaded to enter a marriage that in every sense was a secondary one, pity merges with sympathy for her truly tragic plight, while respect and admiration are due to her for the pride, confidence and aplomb with which she marked her remaining years.

7. Products of their Age

Henry and Dorothy Spencer, First Earl and Countess of Sunderland, were people of the highest possible character, prized by contemporaries for their ability to conform to the ideals of nobility and graciousness expected of the aristocracy at that time. It is therefore puzzling that their combined genes produced an heir as far removed from all that they individually stood for as can be imagined, a man so shameful in his conduct that, nearly 300 years on, my father would talk about him with an ashamed, resigned chuckle. I was brought up to be proud of my ancestors, but here was an exception that brought shame and dishonour cascading down the bloodline.

Two living children came from Henry and Dorothy Sunderland’s four-year marriage. The daughter, also called Dorothy, married Sir George Savile, afterwards the Marquis of Halifax. The son, Robert, who inherited his mother’s great beauty, was to become perhaps the most politically powerful Spencer of them all — while simultaneously ensuring his name would be a byword for deviousness and self-interest. Macaulay captured the spirit of the man with three words, ‘cunning, supple, shameless’, adding that Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, was endowed with ‘a restless and mischievous temper, a cold heart, and an abject spirit’. In this, he was the product of his age.

The latter half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth was a time of great insecurity in England. The concept of the republic as demonstrated by the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, which dominated the 1650s, was discredited, and there was widespread joy at the coronation of Charles II in 1660. Parliament and King co-existed with tolerance until the mid-1670s, when well-founded doubts arose about Charles’s trustworthiness and intentions. These tensions were increased by Charles’s financial difficulties, and by the prospect of his brother and successor, James, Duke of York, being increasingly flagrant in his attachment to Roman Catholicism. In time, this was to lead to revolution, the second Stuart king in three generations being removed from the throne, this time not through execution, but by replacement by a foreign prince. The consequent presence of an entirely plausible rival court, across the Channel in France, made generations of politicians in England decide that the only way they could pursue power while not risking their lives, should the Stuarts return, was by openly displaying loyalty to their monarch, while secretly pandering to his greatest enemy.

Robert Sunderland’s character was perfectly suited to this unethical code of self-preservation and self-advancement. Some excuse for his character defects may perhaps be found in his fatherless upbringing. Certainly his tutor would have been surprised at how his charge turned out, if we judge by his glowing assessment of the young Robert:

His choice endowments of nature, having been happily seasoned and crowned with grace, gave him at once such a willingness and aptness to be taught, that reconciled his greatest ease and pleasure; and made the education of his dear lord, not so much his employment, as his recreation and reward.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when Robert’s personality took its decisive turn for the worse. As a young nobleman, he had shown himself greatly appreciative of the treasures of European civilization, during his ‘Grand Tour’. This was a traditional finishing off of the young aristocrat’s education, giving him a chance to learn artistic sensibilities which would, it was hoped, stand him in good stead in later life, encouraging the patronage and acquisition of fine objects for the family collection.

Some privileged young men saw the opportunity of travelling on the Continent with a tutor and servants, and without direct family supervision, as an opportunity to enjoy the brothels and bars of Europe, and the conduct of such ‘milords’ was infamous throughout France, Italy and Germany. Robert, however, was genuinely intrigued by the art he saw, extending his time abroad repeatedly, and he was imbued with a taste for collecting, the results of which are still to be seen on the walls of Althorp today. Apart from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, he was the main contributor to the collection there. Indeed he designed the dominant style of frame to be seen at Althorp — the ‘Sunderland frame’, with its swirling swathes of gold.

But even the aesthete in Robert was to be tainted by his lack of scruples. For he found that his expensive tastes could not be readily funded by his Spencer inheritance, and so he became susceptible to bribery and corruption of the worst kind, even resorting to treason in his quest to afford great art.

Robert’s early career did not allow him to fall prey to such temptations, for his influence was not at that stage worth buying. It did, however, increase his exposure to European culture: in 1671, he became ambassador extraordinary to the court of Madrid, followed, in the autumn of 1672, by a similar posting in Paris, in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather.

By this stage, he was already marked out as a man of potential, attracting this secret assessment from Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert:

The Earl of Sunderland will without fail depart tomorrow to wait on your Majesty. He is a young gentleman of high family; has a great deal of frankness, courage, parts, and learning; is also extremely well intentioned, and strongly disposed to become a Roman Catholic.

The following year, 1673, Robert was appointed one of the plenipotentiaries for the Treaty of Cologne, and, in 1674, he achieved his initial ambition of becoming a member of the Privy Council — the key royal advisory body — in London. This was a stepping-stone to his ultimate goals, the highest offices in the land. Robert realized that he must be patient; attaining them would require a careful strategy. Between 1674 and 1678, he enjoyed no official court or political role other than his Privy Councillorship, but he used those years to watch and to learn, to see who was allied with whom, and whose influence he should harness for his own ends. He saw that the Treasurer, Thomas Danby, was a man worth cultivating, and became one of his allies.

By the mid-1670s, Charles II was in a position that would have been quite familiar to his father and grandfather. The Stuart kings’ reluctance to be beholden to Parliament was contrary to the desire of the Members of Parliament to establish themselves as an integral part of the government of the nation. James I and Charles I had summoned Parliament only in order to use its tax-raising powers. This they had done with increasing reluctance, as Parliament’s reciprocal demands became increasingly bold.

Charles II was to suffer from the same dilemma: he needed money, and yet he could not abide what he believed to be the intrusions of mere Members of Parliament in his God-given privileges. While Charles had enjoyed the services of the Earl of Arlington as his secretary of state from 1662 to 1674, it had been possible for him to exercise some indirect royal control over many in Parliament. However, between 1674 and 1679, there was nobody to take a forceful role on the King’s behalf.

Determined to bypass the need for money, and therefore the necessity of asking Parliament to fund him, Charles II decided to enter into a secret arrangement with his country’s greatest enemy, Louis XIV of France. This was because Louis shared two things with his English counterpart and cousin: first, a belief in the complete autonomy of the monarch; and, secondly, the Roman Catholic faith. Both principles struck the majority of English Parliamentarians, and the wider landed and middle classes of England, as dangerous threats to the wellbeing of the nation. Well into the eighteenth century, until his death after the War of the Spanish Succession, Louis was therefore perceived to be the greatest threat to England’s safety and stability. He actively fought Protestants abroad, and forcefully exiled them from his own kingdom. Of even greater concern to the English, he was to provide a welcome home for the displaced Stuart claimants to the English crown, even funding various forays to try to place the exiled James II, and his son, born the Prince of Wales, back on the throne. For Charles to enter into a financial deal with the greatest enemy his people had was the most treacherous act he could have performed. To ensure that it remained secret, he needed to find somebody who not only would treat the matter with the utmost confidentiality, but who also would not be so smitten by his conscience that he simply could not go through with such a betrayal of his compatriots. On both counts Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, proved to be the perfect go-between.

In July 1678, Sunderland returned to Paris in an ambassadorial role, but with Charles II’s underhand scheme as his prime concern. He duly arranged the secret payments to Charles from Louis, giving himself the power over the King that was to lead to his becoming, in 1679, the main secretary of state to the monarch. At the same time, Robert established links with the French court that were to be highly lucrative for himself, when he, too, became available for sale to his country’s arch enemy. In Sunderland’s case, this was to be an annual bribe £5,500.

The influence that Louis was securing, through this payment, was that of Sunderland as the more powerful of the two secretaries of state. There was no prime minister of England during the Stuart age. Nor, in the modern understanding of the word, was there a cabinet: the ‘cabinet council’ that existed was not reflective of the majority opinion of the House of Commons, as it is designed to be today; neither was it of crucial importance in policy-making. Its lack of importance as a force and as a concept is shown by the fact that the king could ignore its advice when it met; and, with both Charles II and James II, this was what often happened. Indeed, the standing of the cabinet council could hardly have been lower in the three years of James II’s reign, when the King preferred to consult just Sunderland and a posse of Roman Catholic advisers: the Jesuit, Petre, and Lords Arundel and Powis.

Louis XIV was therefore not buying Sunderland in order to gain control of the cabinet, since that would have been money wasted. Secretaries of state could not deliver up a pliant cabinet through the power of their office. And, as we have seen, persuading the cabinet to unite was neither an easy objective nor a decisive conclusion. What Louis wanted was Sunderland’s direct access to the King of England’s ear — something he enjoyed completely from 1679 to 1680 and from 1683 to 1685 under Charles II, and from 1685 to 1688 under James II. There were other periods when he was a force in the kingdom, but these were his glory years — in terms of his power, that is, rather than of the ethics of his conduct.

For an example of how dependent such a senior government figure was on the King’s favour, one has only to look at the ease with which the mighty Sunderland was dismissed in 1680. This was because he had voted in favour of the Exclusion of the future James II from the English throne for his Catholic beliefs. A political miscalculation of this magnitude on Sunderland’s behalf — Sir William Temple noted that the secretary of state was acting not only ‘against his master’s mind, but his express command’ — led to Charles II going so far as to order that Sunderland’s name be erased from the list of the Privy Council; this, even though probably no secretary had previously enjoyed such power before, having established an unprecedented control over the Privy Council. This had been achieved through starting to institutionalize his position at the head of a recognizable hierarchy, through the initiation of a recognizable structure of public government, which involved regular salaries being paid to political office holders, the concept of a proper business organization, and continuity of tenure of office.

Sunderland was aware that as much control as possible over the Privy Council was an effective way of consolidating his influence. This, combined with the control of intelligence information that came to the secretaries of state, was the cornerstone of Robert’s power, but his real gift was in making his ruler believe that he was indispensable. The proof of his success lay in the fact that he persuaded three such different monarchs — the outwardly Anglican but secretly Catholic Charles II, the fervently Catholic James II, and the Protestant champion, William III — all to turn to a man they knew to have no scruples, but whose political gifts they needed, just as surely as he craved the trappings and financial benefits of office they gave him in return.

There are several pivotal moments in Robert Sunderland’s career which demonstrate his extraordinary lack of principles and his ability to survive politically. The first came in the wake of the Duke of Monmouth’s unsuccessful rebellion against James II. Monmouth had been one of the conspirators in the Rye House Plot of 1683, in which the prospect of murdering Charles II and James had been entertained. While two of the leaders of the plot, Russell and Sydney, were executed, Monmouth was sent into exile.

Monmouth was a royal bastard, the natural son of Charles II, which largely explains this leniency. He had joined with Sunderland and the Duchess of Portsmouth to bring down Danby after Sunderland had been appointed principal secretary of state in 1679. However, he had clearly learned little about his erstwhile political ally, if he expected their past unity of aims to count for anything when he truly needed Sunderland’s help.

On James II’s accession in 1685, Monmouth planned a rebellion to place himself on the throne. His forces arrived from the Netherlands in June of that same year. Sunderland, as administrative director of the army, passed James’s orders to his forces in the west. On 6 July, Monmouth was routed at the Battle of Sedgemoor, and he was captured and sent to the Tower of London, while his forces were brutally dispatched by the victorious Stuart army and judiciary.

Monmouth was not over-concerned by his incarceration, for he felt confident that he would once again be spared the ultimate sanction for treason. But this confidence was misplaced, because it relied on Sunderland standing by his word — for Sunderland had secretly promised Monmouth a pardon, should he confess nothing during his interrogation. Doubtless this was because, had Monmouth told the entire truth about his plans, he would have revealed that Sunderland had been secretly negotiating with him, in case he was successful in his insurrection.

By the time Monmouth had destroyed his own credibility by contradicting himself repeatedly during questioning, Sunderland realized that he needed to be rid of a man who could expose his own double-dealing, and quickly. Sunderland intercepted a letter written by Monmouth to the King, and had it destroyed, ensuring James never knew of its existence. There was to be no question of Monmouth’s being allowed to live any longer than was strictly necessary. His execution was not long in coming; this for a man who had had a personal guarantee from Sunderland, the King’s chief minister, that his life would never be in danger because of his sworn protection.

The second illustration of Robert’s true character took place in 1686, the second year of James II’s reign, when Sunderland was locked in a power struggle with Edward Hyde and his supporters, to become James’s chief adviser. Robert had lost favour under Charles II for voting publicly against the possibility of a Catholic heir succeeding to the English throne. However, with such a prize as supreme political power in the nation within his grasp, Sunderland was happy to convert to Catholicism — something the more principled Hyde just could not bring himself to do. Grateful that his minister had come over to what he sincerely believed to be the true faith, James duly invested Sunderland with the pre-eminence that he sought. However, James was well aware of the depths of treachery Sunderland was capable of, writing in the same year that he promoted him: ‘Sunderland, besides having a pension from the Prince of Orange, had one also from the King of France. He was the most mercenary man in all the world: veered with all the winds.’

James was not so fickle. However, his dogged promotion of Catholicism was bringing him into ever sharper conflict with the predominantly Anglican political class, as well as with the Church of England itself. The position became strained beyond breaking point when the two Protestant daughters of the King, Princess Mary and Princess Anne, were superseded in the succession by the birth of a little boy, the Prince of Wales, on 10 June 1688. It was believed that James would doubtlessly bring him up to be a Catholic king. As a result, an invitation was sent to Princess Mary’s Dutch husband, William of Orange, to come to England to usurp his own father-in-law.

To some extent, William and Mary were to owe their throne to Sunderland’s treachery. James found out only after William was on his way to England that his most senior and most highly rewarded adviser had been playing his usual double game, and dismissed him on 27 October 1688. James later discovered that Sunderland had been communicating regularly with William via Sunderland’s uncle, Henry Sidney, who was James’s representative at The Hague, in the Netherlands. In order to cover his tracks, Sunderland had persuaded James to command that all foreign ministers, including Sidney, correspond solely and directly with Sunderland.

In what became known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, James II and his supporters slipped off to France, and the reign of William and Mary began, with remarkably little English blood having been spilt.

This could have marked the end of Sunderland’s life, let alone his career. He was widely hated, and was known to be a man of the lowest possible moral calibre. However, he was merely disgraced, and exiled. Almost unbelievably, within five years he had inveigled himself back into royal favour, not only as William III’s confidant, but also as a key figure in the control of the liberal Whig politicians, with whom the Spencers were to identify strongly over the next 230 years.

There were no official parties in English politics at this time, but the definable difference between Whigs and Tories was becoming apparent: the Whigs, keen to check abuses of royal power and champions of the rights of the people at large; the Tories, ardent royalists and stolid supporters of the Anglican Church as a cement for the Establishment as a whole.

Before Robert, the Spencers had long shown sympathies that would later be termed Whig — hence the ghastly irony of the death of Robert’s own father, fighting beside people whose cause he decried, while being slain by his ideological compatriots — but it was the Machiavellian Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, who established his family as one of the key Whig aristocratic dynasties over the succeeding quarter of a millennium.

His Whig sympathies alone would have been enough to have made Princess — later Queen — Anne uneasy about Robert Sunderland. Although, during her own reign, Anne did support a Whig ministry while Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, was her favourite, Anne felt more at ease with the Tories. Yet her dislike of Sunderland went way beyond the political; it was deeply personal. Her letters on the man are as damning as it is possible to be. During her father James’s reign she wrote to her sister Mary:

You may remember I have once before ventured to tell you that I thought Lord Sunderland a very ill man, and I am more confirmed every day in that opinion. Everybody knows how often this man turned backwards and forwards in the late King’s [Charles II’s] time, and now, to complete all his virtues, he is working with all his might to bring in Popery. He is perpetually with the priests, and stirs up the King to do things faster than I believe he would of himself.

Princess Anne’s opinion of Robert’s wife was equally low. Anne was the daughter of George Digby, Second Earl of Bristol, who had been a Royalist general in the English Civil War, and of Lady Anne Russell. According to Louis XIV’s envoys in England, Barillon and Bonrepaux, Anne Sunderland was the lover, during her marriage, of Henry Sidney, reputedly the handsomest man of his time, but also her own husband’s uncle. Sidney was a renowned ladies’ man, and was, according to Burnet, ‘a man of sweet and caressing temper, and had no malice in his heart, but too great a love of pleasure’. Extramarital affairs were certainly not uncommon at court at this time, though Sidney’s and Anne’s lack of discretion over the matter was considered shoddy. But it was not Lady Sunderland’s questionable sexual morality that attracted the Princess’s condemnation, but rather her general character; reservations she was prepared to communicate to her sister, Princess Mary, with the utmost candour:

His lady [Anne] too is as extraordinary in her kind, for she is a flattering, dissembling, false woman; but she has so fawning and endearing a way that she will deceive anybody at first, and it is not possible to find out all her ways in a little time. She cares not at what rate she lives, but never pays anybody. She will cheat, though it be for a little. Then she has had her gallants, though may be not as many as some ladies here; and with all these good qualities she is a constant Church-woman, so that to outward appearance one would take her for a saint, and to hear her talk you would think she was a very good Protestant; but she is as much one as the other, for it is certain that her lord does nothing without her.

This led to Princess Anne’s withering conclusion that, ‘Sure there never was a couple so well matched as she and her husband, for as she is throughout all her actions the greatest jade that ever was, so is he the subtellest workingest villain that is on the face of the earth.’

It was not to be long, though, before even she would be drawn into Robert Sunderland’s web of influence. First, he managed to secure for one of his daughters, Lady Anne Spencer, a court position with the Princess. This was a less than successful appointment: not only did Lady Anne spend months unable to perform her duties, being constantly ill, but, even when in healthy attendance, she was treated with open distrust by her employer, ‘knowing from whence she comes’.

Secondly, during the reign of William and Mary, which began in 1688, there were strong tensions between the rival royal courts of the two sisters. To Robert, a divided royal house was something to be avoided. He meant to straddle the current and future reigns with the minimum of fuss, so he made it his mission to smooth over the differences. Unsurprisingly, when one takes into account his previous record of being able to ingratiate himself even with those who knew he was totally untrustworthy, Robert managed to bring about a measure of reconciliation in the mid-1690s. According to Anne’s favourite, Sarah Churchill, Sunderland ‘showed himself a man of sense and breeding’ in his dealings with her mistress at that time.

The death from smallpox of Queen Mary in December 1694 was seen by Sunderland as the perfect opportunity to bring a full rapprochement between King William III and his sister-in-law Princess Anne. With Sunderland’s encouragement, Anne wrote her brother-in-law a letter of condolence. Soon after, again at Sunderland’s behest, William offered Anne the use of St James’s Palace, as fitting accommodation for the monarch-in-waiting.

Given Anne’s hatred of Sunderland, clearly stated in her correspondence of a few years earlier, it is testimony to his diplomatic skills that, on her own accession to the throne in 1702, Queen Anne settled a £2,000 per annum pension on Sunderland, out of gratitude for his help during the previous years.

As a family man, Robert was less successful than in his professional life. He and Anne suffered the loss, as was common at the time, of children in infancy: their third son, Henry, and fourth daughter, Mary, dying soon after their respective births. And Isabella, the third of the four daughters, died before marriage. Of the four children who survived into adulthood, the eldest son — and heir — Robert, Lord Spencer, was to be one of the most dissolute young men of his generation. The eldest of seven children, he was born in 1666 and went up to be educated at Oxford in 1680.

We learn something of his character at that stage from his grandmother, Dorothy, First Countess of Sunderland, in a letter to Lord Halifax:

He has no good nature, nor good humour: he is scornful and too pretending … He comes to me seldom, seems weary in a minute, talks of my company as if I picked them up off the streets. My Lord Sunderland [her son, Robert, Second Earl of Sunderland] at his age did nothing like it. He will be spoiled, I can see it.

In 1688, the diarist John Evelyn reported good things of the second Spencer son, Charles — ‘a youth of extraordinary hopes, very learned for his age and ingenious, and under a Governor of extraordinary worth’ — but he qualified that praise with a less sanguine look at the heir to the Sunderland title:

Happy were it could as much be said of the elder brother, the Lord Spencer, who, rambling about the world, dishonours both his name and family, adding sorrow to sorrow, to a mother who had taken all imaginable care of his education: but vice, more and more predominantly, gives slender hopes of his reformation …

Evelyn was put in an invidious position when he had to judge between his allegiance to Anne, Second Countess of Sunderland, and his justifiable disregard for her first-born. Robert and Anne’s high living had left the Spencer family finances in some disarray, Robert’s taste for gambling compounding the problems brought about by their extravagant lifestyle and constant pursuit of artistic acquisitions.

Anne decided that the simplest solution would be to marry her eldest son to an heiress. She therefore asked Evelyn to effect an introduction, with a view to a match being made, between Robert Spencer and Jane Fox, the daughter of Sir Stephen Fox, a millionaire financier. Evelyn, though always keen to stay in favour with prestigious society hostesses, judged that Robert was such a liability that he simply could not get involved, even if it meant incurring her ladyship’s displeasure. As he himself recorded:

Come my Lady Sunderland to desire that I would [make] a match to Sir Stephen Fox for her son, Lord Spencer, to marry Miss Jane, Sir Stephen’s daughter. I excus’d myself all I was able for the truth is I was afraid he would prove an extravagant man: for though a youth of extraordinary parts, and had an excellent education to render him a worthy man, yet his early inclinations to extravagance made me apprehensive that I should not serve Sir Stephen by proposing it like a friend: this now being his only daughter, well bred, and likely to receive a large share of her father’s opulence.

Robert Spencer’s remaining years were to show that Evelyn deserved the undying gratitude of Sir Stephen Fox, as Robert degenerated into a life of boorish — indeed, drunken and violent — behaviour. In August 1685, with his father one of the most important people in the kingdom, Robert and two friends went round to the home of the Earl of Carnarvon — whose forefather had perished with Robert’s own grandfather at Newbury — and whipped him. According to Sir Edmund Verney, the aristocratic trio also indulged in ‘some other peccadillos in his [Carnarvon’s] castle besides’.

This escapade resulted in Robert being sent abroad by his family, in temporary banishment. But if the Spencers had hoped he would return a changed man, it was to prove a forlorn hope. Within a year, we find Sir John Reresby noting, ‘My Lord Spencer is not well by the ill usage he and the rest of his company received from the constables and watch three nights ago, being upon a high ramble.’ Far from bridling at the thrashing his son had received from these officers, Robert Sunderland only grumbled, ‘It was pity it was not worse.’

Robert Spencer’s life was now unravelling fast. His father tried to channel his aggressive instincts, and put some structure into his son’s life, by buying him an officer’s commission in the army. It was not enough. In March 1687, young Robert exceeded even his usual ability to disgrace himself, interrupting a church service in Suffolk with his sword drawn, uttering profanities, and attempting to pull the preacher out of the pulpit. The congregation rushed to the priest’s defence, pummelling the errant young aristocrat, stripping his clothes off his back, and subjecting him to further humiliations.

Robert had inherited a modicum of the persuasive charms of his father, and he knew how to ingratiate himself to his monarch. He showed great contrition for his appalling behaviour, and simultaneously claimed that he had been converted to Roman Catholicism. This was — as Robert well knew — bound to be a popular development with James II. Sure enough, the King now asked Spencer to represent him on a diplomatic mission to the Duke of Modena, brother to the Queen, Mary. But this was trust unwisely placed. Robert headed straight for the whoring and drinking places of Paris, and indulged himself to such an extent that, by the time he reached Turin, tales of his excesses were widely known.

Living at such a pace took its inevitable toll. Spencer was unable even to reach Modena, being too ill to complete his mission. He stayed for several months in Turin, before retracing his steps to Paris. It was to be his final trip; and it was suitable that he should end his days in this city, which had witnessed the most excessive behaviour of a truly spoilt and irresponsible youth. He died on 16 September 1688, the Marquis de Dagneau recording in his diary:

‘Milord Spencer, fils aine du Comte de Sunderland, est mort cette nuit a Paris pour avoir trop bu d’eau de vie.’

Anne, Second Countess of Sunderland’s match-making skills may have been stymied by John Evelyn’s good judgement, with regard to her eldest son, but she got her way with her daughter Elizabeth, whom she forced into a child marriage with Lord Clancarty, an Irish nobleman of enormous landed wealth. The lack of love in the relationship is underlined by the fact that, after several years, the union remained unconsummated.

Clancarty was a Jacobite sympathizer, supporting the deposed James II against William III and Mary in Ireland. With the failure of the Jacobite campaign, Clancarty was declared an outlaw, and so he fled to the exiled Stuart court at St Germain. The Clancarty estates in Ireland were confiscated, and handed to William III ‘s favourite, Portland.

Anne Sunderland was appalled that her daughter’s marital wealth had been taken from her, and planned ways of having it restored to her through the pardoning of Clancarty. It was decided to encourage Clancarty to come to consummate his marriage, the assumption being that his father-in-law, Sunderland, could then persuade William III to grant him a pardon, which, in turn, would lead to the restitution of the Clancarty estates.

At the end of 1698, Clancarty sneaked into England to fulfil the marital obligations that had previously been beyond him. However, his brother-in-law, Charles Spencer, reported the whereabouts of the outlawed Clancarty to the authorities, and the latter was arrested while in the unaccustomed position of being in bed with his wife.

With his usual inclination for self-preservation over integrity, Robert Sunderland publicly distanced himself from the ensuing scandal by disowning the innocent in this sorry tale, his daughter Elizabeth. However, Sarah Marlborough joined Anne Sunderland in seeking clemency for Clancarty, and she being the right-hand woman of Princess Anne, William yielded, pardoning Clancarty, while allowing him a pension on the condition that Irish peer remain abroad for the rest of his life, and that he no longer base himself in the enemy Jacobite camp.

Elizabeth Clancarty decided that the scandal had made her continued life in England too grim to contemplate, so she accompanied Clancarty into exile in Hamburg. She was never happy there, but it was where she spent the remainder of her very sad life. At least her marriage was consummated and she did become a mother, although she died before her eldest reached the age of six.

The Clancarty affair had occurred after Robert Sunderland’s retirement from active political life. He had resigned his positions in 1697, the year in which he had been made Lord Chamberlain and a Lord of Regency, much to the disappointment of William III, who still believed him an indispensable adviser and ally, despite the cries of the Tories, who never left their monarch in any doubt as to their horror that such a man should have the King’s ear.

Robert Sunderland lived out the remaining five years of his life at Althorp, surrounded by the spoils of his treacherous, self-seeking career. On his death, in September 1702, even a supporter such as Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, had to concede that Robert ‘had really a great many good qualities, with some bad ones’.

Bishop Burnet was similarly generously disposed to the wily statesman in death, summing up his gifts and shortcomings thus:

Lord Sunderland was a man of a clear and ready apprehension, and a quick decision in business. He had too much heat, both of imagination and passion, and was apt to speak very freely both of persons and things. His own notions were always good, but he was a man of great expense and … he went into the prevailing counsels at Court, and he changed sides often, with little regard either to religion or to the interests of his country. He raised many enemies to himself by the contempt with which he treated those who differed from him. He had indeed the superior genius to all the men of business that I have yet known; and he had the dexterity of insinuating himself so entirely into the greatest degree of confidence with three succeeding Princes, who set up on very different interests, that he came by this to lose himself so much that even those who esteemed his parts depended little on his firmness.

Within a few years of Robert Sunderland’s death, Queen Anne’s Whig ministry decided to commission the writer Edmund Smith to chronicle the history of the 1688 Revolution, showing the Whig influence in the event to its best possible effect. When being told his task by Addison, Smith retorted, ‘What shall I do with the character of Lord Sunderland?’ The implication was clear. Smith would have to address the deviousness and treachery of this most eminent of Whigs, if he were to give the full and true version of events; and yet that would show the Whigs in such a poor light, that the point of the propaganda exercise would clearly be severely compromised. Rather than deal with Sunderland and his disgraceful conduct, it was agreed that the history should not be written.

Perhaps that is, in itself, the most fitting and eloquent testimony to a man about whom ‘too much cannot be said of his talents, nor too little of his principles’.

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