When the Duke of Marlborough died in 1722, aged seventy-two, there was no son to carry on the Churchill name into the next generation. John, Marquess of Blandford, fourth of the duke and duchess’s seven children and the eldest boy, had died of smallpox at the age of sixteen, in 1703. Charles, the youngest of the seven, lived only from 1690 to 1692.
Usually English hereditary titles can pass only through the male line. However, given Marlborough’s extraordinary military achievements, Parliament agreed that the dukedom could be perpetuated through the direct female line if no male alternative existed, in an effort to keep the new creation alive. This meant that the second Churchill daughter, Henrietta, was now effectively the Second Duke of Marlborough and her son, William, the Marquess of Blandford, her heir.
However, the real power in the Marlborough family still resided with Sarah, thanks to her husband’s will. She effectively controlled his £1 million estate, receiving a massive £20,000 per year pension and had the right to occupy Blenheim Palace, near Woodstock, and Marlborough House, in London, for life. On top of this, she had her own enormous wealth. She decided to use this power base to control her family; the twenty-two years of her widowhood were largely spent manipulating her children and grandchildren to her own ends. Given that her relations with her two surviving daughters, Henrietta, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Mary, the Duchess of Montagu, were frequently fraught, there seemed to be only one branch of her family on which she could focus particular attention with the prospect of minimal external interference: her orphaned Spencer grandchildren.
Sarah’s main hope lay with Lady Diana Spencer. In 1723, Sarah praised the thirteen-year-old girl by claiming that she already possessed ‘more sense than anybody that I know of my sex’. Certainly, Lady Diana appears to have been an exceptional girl. Blessed with looks and a fine temperament, she was even more attractive to prospective suitors because of her known closeness to the fantastically rich, and increasingly elderly and infirm, Duchess of Marlborough.
Sarah watched as the most eligible young men in the kingdom were pushed forward as potential husbands for Diana. The Duke of Somerset suggested his grandson, Master Wyndham. Lord Orkney’s great-nephew, Lord Weymouth, was another contender; as was Lord Shaftesbury. But Sarah wanted somebody who combined wealth, title and political clout. Holding out for the right suitor was a risky tactic, a point brought home when Diana developed scrofula, an unsightly disease which disfigured her neck. But Sarah paid a top surgeon to reduce the effect of the condition and, in 1730, it was decided that the twenty-year-old girl was ripe for a proper launch on to the marital market. A £50,000 dowry was known to go with Diana, and this on top of contemporary reports which described her as ‘amiable and graceful in her person, in her temper generous and affable, compassionate to the poor, by all beloved ...’ Sarah herself boasted that Diana Spencer was ‘a treasure in herself besides what I shall give her’.
Outside the peerage, there was one contender who met all of Sarah’s criteria for the perfect match with Diana: the Prince of Wales. Still deeply critical of the Hanoverian kings, Sarah was hardly any more enamoured of George II than she had been of his father. In 1737, John Percival, First Earl of Egremont, recorded a story in his diary which underlines the exasperating haughtiness Sarah reserved for her monarch:
Mr Capel Moore dined with me. He told me that the last time the old Duchess was at Court, which is long ago, the King spoke to her in English, but she replied she begged his pardon for not understanding him, because she knew nothing of French, giving him to understand he was too much of a German. Upon this he in a passion turned on his heel, and said so loud that all the room heard him, ‘Why, I have been speaking English to you all this while’.
Sarah was more accepting of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Importantly, the Prince was the enemy of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, the political figure most at odds with Sarah, and for whom she had reserved all her most bitter hatred. As William Eckhart Hartpole Lecky said of Frederick, ‘He made his Court the special centre of opposition to the government, and he exerted all his influence for the ruin of Walpole.’ This, allied with his social eminence, made the Prince an intriguing potential match for Diana.
Although exact details of this scheme are scanty, Horace Walpole recorded that marriage negotiations between Frederick and Sarah reached an advanced stage, a dowry of £100,000, and a date for the wedding apparently being agreed between the parties. However, Robert Walpole allegedly got to hear of the secret plans, and stymied them. The Prime Minister encouraged the King to find someone less politically threatening as a daughter-in-law, and so Frederick, aged twenty-eight, found himself tamely marrying the seventeen-year-old Princess Augusta of Saxe-Coburg.
On 5 February 1731 Sarah renewed the impetus behind the marriage campaign by giving a ball at Marlborough House for Diana. At last Sarah was successful for, later in the same year, Diana made a worthy if not spectacular match, when she married the Duke of Bedford’s younger brother, Lord John Russell. Their married life together got off to a tragic start when, in 1732, Diana was thrown from a carriage when pregnant, the shock of the fall inducing the premature birth of a son, who did not live long.
Soon after this dreadful mishap, the Duke of Bedford died, without an heir, making Lord John the Fourth Duke and Diana his duchess. The new duke now focused obsessively on the need for an heir to his name and to Woburn, and he became deeply agitated when Diana had another miscarriage — this time through not looking after herself properly during the pregnancy.
In the spring of 1735 Diana felt changes in her body which she optimistically assumed to be her third conception. In fact the stirrings within her proved to be the harbingers of death, not life. What she had thought to be morning sickness was a malady of a more menacing kind, and she started to fade away. When Sarah visited Diana at Woburn, she looked at her favourite granddaughter and found ‘Death in her Face’. On 27 September Diana died of consumption.
The obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine recorded Diana’s qualities, and made particular reference to the fact that she was loved ‘most tenderly by her Grandmother the Duchess of Marlborough’, before even mentioning that she was also loved by her husband. Unbalanced by grief, Sarah acted with her customary aggression by accusing Bedford of being party to Diana’s death — at which accusation the duke fainted — and then retired to her house at Wimbledon, where she had spent so many happy days with her favourite grandchild, rereading all the girl’s letters to her, then tearfully burning them one after the other on a fire.
The septuagenarian Sarah was to become accustomed to seeing her grandchildren predecease her, in an age of poor medicine and sudden death. Diana’s eldest brother, Robert Spencer, Fourth Earl of Sunderland, had died six years earlier, in Paris. The Northampton Mercury recorded mournfully on 6 October 1729:
Yesterday at two o’clock in the afternoon the corpse of the late Earl of Sunderland was landed at the Tower-Wharf from on board Capt. Taylor’s sloop; the body was in a leaden coffin, the heart in a leaden case, and the bowels in a leaden urn. In the evening it was brought in a hearse, followed by a mourning coach, to his late dwelling house in Piccadilly.
From there, he was later removed to the family vault in Brington, near Althorp, his coffin ‘faced with velvet’.
Sarah had adored Robert, once telling him, ‘I hope I shall find in you all the comforts I have lost in your dear mother, whose picture you were once, and as I believe from what you write that you will act like a son, I shall have all the pleasure in the world in making you mine.’ Indeed, as a boy, his likeness to his mother had been so great that Sarah had found it difficult to look at him after Anne Sunderland’s death.
Sarah was fiercely protective of her grandson, when he succeeded to the Spencer titles on Charles Sunderland’s death. The young man had an intriguing heritage. His father and paternal grandfather had been dominant figures in England for half a century, so much was expected of him in the political sphere, while his Marlborou
gh blood and money marked him down for further attention from those who would use him for their own ends. Sarah warned him, as he returned to take up his inheritance from abroad, to treat with scepticism the ministers who would move to welcome him back in the country, ‘who I know will court you very much in order to deceive you, and make you as they have done many noble men a tool of theirs to carry on their dirty work for mean pensions, and the hopes of preferment, as they call it in some places …’
Robert, the third successive head of the Spencer family to be addicted to gambling, was a willing pawn in his wealthy grandmother’s scheming, relying on her munificence in return for accepting her directions as to how he should conduct his life. The old lady’s wish that Robert should steer clear of a court position was yielded to when Sarah offered him a generous annual allowance instead of becoming a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. She had earlier arranged for Robert to be free of his father, and the Spencer purse strings, by ensuring that he had been included in Marlborough’s will.
In truth, Robert Spencer, Fourth Earl of Sunderland, showed little promise or talent during his brief life. Even Sarah, in her more candid moments, knew that he was only good to her out of an overweening interest in her will, writing that, despite that, I must be contented and make the best of those comforts I have left, and I do believe that whole branch [the Spencers] and Lady Anne Egerton [daughter of Sarah’s fifth child, Elizabeth, the Duchess of Bridgwater] will be good to me, not only because I hope they are so in their natures, but most of them will want me, and my fortune is in my own power.
So Robert, as the head of the Spencers, ‘the only branch that I can ever hope to receive any comfort from, in my own family’, was the heir apparent to Sarah Marlborough’s estate. His premature death, brought about by Parisian doctors bleeding him excessively when he was suffering from a fever, forced her to reconsider her options. The picture was further complicated two years later, in 1731, when she lost another titled grandson, William, Marquess of Blandford, heir to the dukedom of Marlborough. His death meant that the importance of the remaining Spencer family in Sarah’s dynastic plans increased, as Charles Spencer, the Fifth Earl of Sunderland, Robert’s younger brother, was now in line to be the Third Duke of Marlborough.
When the Third Earl of Sunderland had married Lady Anne Churchill, it had been settled that, if their eldest son ever became Duke of Marlborough, the second son would inherit the traditional Spencer estates in Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. While Blandford had lived, this had not been an issue. Now he was dead, and Henrietta, the Duchess of Marlborough, was fifty, it was time to sort out the division of Spencer and Churchill riches and titles that would follow Henrietta’s death.
However, before that death occurred, an unforeseen set of circumstances took place. Charles, Fifth Earl of Sunderland, inherited the Spencer estate, living at Althorp, secure in the knowledge that this was a mere stepping stone to the even more impressive inheritance of Blenheim Palace. He also took possession of the Spencer home in London, Sunderland House, described in A Journey Through England, an anonymous gentleman-traveller’s reminiscences, written in 1732, as ‘the Palace of Charles, Earl of Sunderland ... separated from the street of Piccadilly by a wall, with large grown trees before the gate ... The greatest beauty of this palace is the library, running from the house into the garden; and, I must say, is the finest in Europe, both for the disposition of the apartments, and of the books ... No nobleman of any nation hath taken greater care to make his collection complete, nor does he spare any cost for the most valuable and rare books.’
This gives an idea of the extravagance and style that were part of the Fifth Earl of Sunderland’s make-up. Further evidence of the same can be seen at Althorp where, during his four years in charge, many great and lasting alterations were made, most obviously to the Stables, which were pulled down, and replaced by a Tuscan-style Palladian building to accommodate the many hunters and grooms that the Fifth Earl needed for his favourite pastime, foxhunting.
Sarah Marlborough had an uneasy relationship with Charles Spencer, Fifth Earl of Sunderland. He reminded her of his father, the Third Earl, both in looks and stubborn temperament; she preferred her grandchildren good-looking and malleable. Sarah had tried to bring him under her control, hoping to divert him from the Spencer penchant for gambling, and she had attempted to instil in him a sense of the value of money, stressing the need as a student to study accounts and mathematics, rather than theology and the Classics. Sarah wrote to Charles’s tutor in 1727: ‘If a young man would make his fortune in this country he must make himself useful, and consequently some time or other, such a one as may be fear’d by ministers. Otherwise, there is nothing to be got here, but by such vile means as I would not receive life upon.’
However, Charles was too much of a wastrel to have time for his grandmother’s advice on how to better himself. When Sarah packed him off to finish his education in an academy in Geneva, he concentrated on high living, rather than on academia. The bills that he amassed were substantially in excess of the £500 per year allowance given him in his father’s will. Sarah wrote disapprovingly that Charles was ‘much too expensive for a younger brother’. By the time Charles left Althorp in 1733, he had accumulated debts of £30,000, and was spending more annually than the First Duke of Marlborough had managed to at the height of his pomp.
But, until that climax of extravagance was reached, the problem for Sarah lay in the fact that after Blandford’s death the Fifth Earl had sufficient income to become the first Spencer grandchild not to be dependent financially on the controlling old lady’s diktats; or, as the Fifth Earl himself put it, he was fortunate to ‘be no longer obliged to manage that unloving, capricious, extravagant old Fury of a Grandmother’. During a not infrequent drunken episode, he claimed he wanted ‘to kick her arse and bid her kiss his own’.
The relationship reached a trough after Sarah had encouraged him to marry in order to produce an heir. Monogamy was not something that appealed to him, for he claimed to be bored by any woman after only a few months. However, he eventually succumbed to Sarah’s wishes, marrying in May 1732. The difficulty was, his wife was a daughter of Lord Trevor, who was an old enemy of the Marlboroughs from the days of the War of the Spanish Succession. Sarah had not been consulted about the match and in retaliation she rewrote her will; removing Charles’s name from the list of beneficiaries, and taking pleasure in telling him of her actions.
Charles, feeling free for the first time in his adult life to tell his grandmother what he truly thought of her, sent Sarah a sizzling reply:
I received Your Grace’s extraordinary letter last night, and I own my discerning won’t let me see any reason in what Your Grace is pleased to say against my marrying; unless invectives are to be looked on as arguments ... In the passion Your Grace must be, when you wrote such a letter, all arguments would be of very little use. As for putting me out of your Will, it is some time since I neither expected or desired to be in it. I have nothing more to add but to assure Your Grace, that this is the last time I shall ever trouble you by letter or conversation.
I am Your Grace’s grandson,
Sunderland.
Sarah was determined to have the final word. ‘You end that you are my grandson,’ she retorted, ‘which is indeed a very melancholy truth; but very lucky for you. For all the world except yourself is sensible, that had you not been my grandson you would have been in as bad a condition as you deserve to be.’
In the last decade of her life, Sarah would have the satisfaction of seeing Charles Marlborough (as Sunderland now was) struggle, without her financial might to keep him afloat. He became increasingly dependent on moneylenders, and it looked to contemporaries as though he would end up penniless.
Sarah might have forgiven her prodigal grandson, if the difference between them had been caused merely by his indolence, and his wish to be independent of her influence; however, the Duchess never forgave treachery. Thus when, out of a wish for increased income, rather t
han because of any military or court ambitions, Charles Marlborough agreed to become the colonel of a West India regiment and a lord of the bedchamber, Sarah recognized that her own flesh and blood had been bought off by her arch enemy, Sir Robert Walpole, in whose gift both positions effectively were.
Through this great betrayal Charles Spencer, Duke of Marlborough, ensured that his grandmother’s and his grandfather’s great wealth would remain parted for ever. From that point onwards there was to be no hope of reconciliation with Sarah.
*
With Robert and Diana no more, and Charles as good as dead in her eyes, Sarah was left with two Spencer grandchildren. The elder one was Anne, born in 1702, who had married the banking heir that George I had so enjoyed creating Viscount Bateman. Anne was as strong in character and as clever in manipulation as her grandmother, the result being a toxic relationship between the two which caused both women tremendous hurt and damage.
Sarah suspected Anne of being prepared to stop at almost nothing in her efforts to control her brothers and sister — including, allegedly, procuring women for Charles and Robert. Anne also meddled dangerously in the sphere which Sarah believed to be very much her own preserve — the Spencer men’s choice of brides. Sarah decided the only way to end this sort of interference was to ostracize Anne from her siblings. However, this tactic had markedly different results: whereas Diana was compliant with Sarah’s wishes, Charles and John took a more independent line. Sarah received an anonymous letter on the subject, most probably written at Anne’s behest; certainly it smacks of her characteristic forthrightness:
I know your Grace is mad, but if you ever have an interval do but consider what you are doing now in a family that you pretend to espouse, instead of making them considerable by being united which is of more consequence than all your ill gotten money, you are endeavouring to bring them in to as many quarrels as you have your self, brothers and sisters and all you would have quarrel, I think there is now of those that are in your power, but the Duke of Bedford and the Duchess of Manchester that you have not made infamous by quitting Lady Bateman’s friendship only because you have taken a fancy against her. Is it not enough for you to exercise your pretty temper your self and for some atonement to your family, entail our money without your wickedness, and die as soon as you can.
The Spencer Family Page 11