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.
The Spencer Family Page 6