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 pleas
e 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.
The Spencer Family Page 5