The Spencer Family

by Charles Spencer

  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.

&
nbsp; 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 frie
nd, 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: