The enjoyment Lavinia had hoped to derive from her new Wimbledon residence lasted twenty-six years. It became a setting for the same lavish hospitality that she and George John provided for their guests at Spencer House and Althorp, adding to the seemingly endless strain on the family finances. We catch a glimpse of the scale of entertaining they indulged in, through the journal of the Hon. Mrs Calvert, written in July 1808: ‘We all went yesterday morning to a breakfast, or rather, cold dinner at Lord Spencer’s at Wimbledon ... It is really a beautiful place, and the day being very fine, and an immense concourse of people all walking about gaily dressed in groups was very pretty.’
However, such scenes of privileged pleasure at Wimbledon were not to last into the next generation. In 1827, when the Duke of Somerset took on a lease for the Wimbledon villa, it marked the end of the Spencer occupation of the property. Within twenty years, it was sold altogether.
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We have seen from her demanding relationship with her husband, and her fraught one with her mother-in-law and children, that Lavinia Spencer was not an easy person to live with or be related to. However, to be a guest in one of her homes was a joy.
In Tour of a German Artist in England, of 1836, M. Passavant recalled:
What, more than all contributed to render Althorp the favourite resort of all the rank and literati of England, was the all-enlivening genius of the late Lady Lavinia Spencer, who, by the urbanity of her manners, and the variety of her acquirements, inspired animation and cheerfulness to all around her.
The author may have had in mind the historian Gibbon, the sculptor Nollekens, or the political leaders Grenville and Grey. Gibbon is on record as having spent a memorable morning in the Library at Althorp, enjoying the seventy editions of Cicero collected by his host. George John was famous throughout Europe for his generosity in sharing his books with scholars of various disciplines.
At Spencer House, the salon consisted of all manner of learned men — Sir Humphry Davy, Sir Joseph Banks, William Wollaston and Thomas Young. The mixture reflected George John’s broad interests, which included science. He was the first president, as well as being one of the founders, of the Royal Institution.
Once in 1821, the family was in residence in Spencer House when Sir Walter Scott came round for dinner. Young George Spencer, George John and Lavinia’s youngest son, noted: ‘We all stayed the evening listening to him telling Scottish stories.’
By this stage of their lives, their sixties, George John and Lavinia were satisfied with maintaining a less frantic social life than had marked their prime. It was not that they had turned against entertainment as such, rather that they preferred to do as much of it as possible at their homes, rather than being permanently on the move from one house party to another, in the houses of fellow grandees. George recorded his parents’ dignified acceptance of their advancing years:
My father and mother were not like many aged veterans in dissipation ... who to the last of their strength keep up what they can of youth, in pursuing still the round of the gay parties of one rising generation after another. They hardly ever went into society away from home. They kept a grand establishment, when in London, at Spencer House, as well as Althorp in the winter, when the first society, whether of the political or the literary and scientific were constantly received. It would, therefore, have been unreasonable in me to be fond of going out for the sake of society, when, perhaps, none was to be met with so interesting as at home; besides this, my father and mother were fond of being surrounded by their family circle; and if I or my brothers, when staying with them in London, went out from home several times in succession, or many times a week, they would generally express some disappointment or displeasure …
George John and Lavinia’s last years were spent in increasingly intimate isolation, at their two primary residences. By now they had suffered the agony of outliving two of their adult children: Bob, a promising naval officer, who died at sea in 1830, and Georgiana, wife of Lord George Quin, whose life of unremitting illness ended in childbirth in 1827, aged just twenty-seven.
Lavinia’s last act of any note with regard to the family’s fortunes took place in 1830. She had set her heart on acquiring two portraits by Rubens, of Philip IV and Elizabeth of Bourbon, which were in the collection of Count Bentinck, in Flanders, where they had been since Rubens’s time. George John told his wife that there was no money available to buy the pair of paintings for her. However, Lavinia was determined to get her own way, and wrote to her husband with her usual blend of cunning and persuasiveness:
Last night it was very hot and I tumbled and tossed, and many idle visions past and repast my brain, and one of them was this: What is the use, said I to myself, of those foolish pearls which lie like dirt in my strong box, and never will be worn again by me or ever be of use to anyone else? Why should they not be valued and if of sufficient value, why not lay out the money they are worth in purchasing those two Rubens’s portraits? What think you of my waking dream?
‘Those foolish pearls’ were two of the most celebrated pieces of jewellery in England, having been owned by Elizabeth of Bohernia, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and Sarah Marlborough. However, George John surrendered to his wife’s demands, and they were sold. The proceeds secured Rubens’s portraits, which hang today in the Great Room at Althorp. This proved to be the last piece of scheming manipulation that Lavinia inflicted on her long-suffering husband for, in 1831, she died.
George John was by now very infirm, and, in 1832, there were erroneous reports that he, too, was dead. Learning that this was happily not the case, John Taylor wrote a celebratory sonnet which shows the affection in which the old earl was held by many, after a life of diversity and accomplishment:
Genius and Learning will delighted hear,
Rumour said falsely SPENCER was no more;
SPENCER distinguished for his classic love.
A lib’ral patron, talents must revere,
And, hence, to genius and to learning dear.
Allied in blood to that great Bard of yore
Ordain’d the heights of poesy to soar,
And Fiction make with moral grace appear.
Descended from a line of noblest breed,
For martial and for patriot fame renown’d,
Still to new honours may that line succeed,
The prop and lustre of their natal ground,
A nation’s gratitude their rightful meed,
A nation’s praise to latest times resound.
In 1834, he was still to be seen making a weekly trek to the church at Brington, but he was so feeble by then that two of the Althorp footmen had to carry him to the altar for Communion, his head slumped on his chest, before returning him to his pew, his feet shuffling feebly as dotage took hold of his mind.
George John kept a journal of key events relating to his family and his country, written in his increasingly erratic hand: a small fire at Althorp, the sale of West Hill estate to the Duke of Sutherland, and the burning of the House of Commons and Lords being his three last entries. Beneath these was the following anonymous conclusion to the diary, and to George John’s life: ‘1834. On 10TH November, Lord Spencer died at Althorp loved and lamented by all who knew him.’
13. Honest Jack Althorp
George John’s will was left in the hands of a sole executor, his eldest son, John Charles, now Third Earl Spencer, but best-known to history as Lord Althorp, which was the courtesy title he held for over fifty of his sixty-three years.
It was fortunate for the succeeding generations of Spencers that such an able and decent man came to be head of the family at such a difficult time, for George John left behind him an estate valued for probate purposes at under £160,000, with mortgages of over £300,000. Out of this, £20,000 each had to be found for three of the younger children, and the Second Earl’s house at Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, together with all its contents, was left to a younger son, Frederick.
A lesser man than Lord Althorp would have balk
ed at the hopelessness of it all, but he had shown himself throughout his life to be a man of the strongest moral character for whom the concept of duty was the overriding consideration, whatever the consequences. Whether as a son, a politician or as a pillar of the community, Althorp was rock solid.
George John had been an attentive father, compared to many of his contemporary grandees. Throughout ‘Jack’ Althorp’s childhood, he recorded the boy’s small triumphs and progresses, keeping the ageing Georgiana Spencer up to date on the development of her eldest Spencer grandson. Althorp showed a fine practical intellect at an early age, and George John proudly reported in October 1788: ‘Jack really improves in his reading and has got a very accurate notion of the general Geography of Europe — all the countries of which he can point out and call by their names on the great Globe in the Library.’
By then, Jack had already sat, dressed in a page boy’s outfit, for the family friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds — he was, in old age, to claim that he was the only person to have been painted by Reynolds, and also to have been photographed — in one of the artist’s most successful depictions of a child. Looking at the portrait today, dominating the Library at Althorp, the sky-blue sash cutting through the surrounding mellow tones of the book spines, it is possible to see that this is not a soul at ease with the finery into which it had been born; the sensitive face looks trapped between the dramatic sweep of an ostentatious hat and the fussy luxuriance of the silky clothes.
Jack Althorp was born and largely brought up at Spencer House, but was always at his happiest in the countryside. He came to hate the sophisticated urban living that his parents indulged in at their private London palace, but he understood that his father’s political obligations necessitated long spells in the capital. Jack’s education was started at Spencer House. He was taught to read there by a Swiss footman, and it was there that his tutor, Samuel Herrick, prepared him for boarding school.
At the age of eight, he was sent to Harrow. It was not a happy time for him, although he formed a lifelong friendship with his first cousin, Lord Duncannon, son of Jack’s aunt Harriet. They were to remain allies during their respective distinguished public lives. Two of the great Whig politicians of the early to mid nineteenth century dominated Harrow’s Public Speeches on 5 July 1798; Althorp declaiming ‘The Earl of Arundel’ by Lord Littleton, and Duncannon reciting Livy’s ‘Hanno ad Carthag.’.
Growing up as Lavinia Spencer’s eldest son had not been easy. He did not conform to her ideal of a young nobleman. He was plain, lacked eloquence, and early showed a greater interest in country sports than in the refinements of her salons. And yet it was this very lack of flair, this absence of pretence, that was to mark him down as exceptional, in an age when trust and respect were words rarely attached to leading political figures. One of Lavinia’s house guests commented on both sides of his character, the superficial and the internal, in 1805, before Jack entered the public life for which he was to prove so strangely suited: ‘Lord Althorp, the eldest son, is just grown up. He is not handsome, and don’t look like a man of fashion, but he seems very good-humoured and pleasing.’ This affability would be an enduring attribute.
The Grand Tour which Jack Althorp was sent on was not a success. He returned in 1803, with no appreciable interest in the arts, missing his horses and his foxhounds back at Althorp.
Although his father was temporarily sidelined from mainstream political life, it was expected of Jack, as the Spencer heir, that he would follow in his father’s footsteps by entering the fray himself. After being accepted as Member of Parliament for the Okehampton seat in 1804 — Okehampton was one of the estates acquired by Sarah Marlborough and passed down to the Spencers — two years later he stood for Northamptonshire, against Sir William Langham. The latter’s supporters made it clear, in an electioneering ditty, that the twenty-four-year-old should think again, if he thought his father’s eminence and political record would smooth his own path into public life:
A Peer’s eldest son from Althorp has run,
To contend for a seat for the County;
The youth perhaps thought that our votes might be bought,
By the strength of the Treasury Bounty:
At the poll let him give his attendance;
We’ll show him we like independence …
However, Althorp was elected; and was re-elected the following year. It was the start of a political career that was to go much further in terms of success and acclaim than the modest Jack ever sought, expected or wanted.
Although relieved that Jack was now launched on an acceptable career, Lavinia was concerned that her eldest son showed no interest in any of the things that she viewed as being important. She despaired that the next occupant of Spencer House and Althorp was happiest in the kennels or with the gamekeepers, rather than indulging in social niceties.
Turning Jack into a polished young nobleman was an ambition she knew to be doomed to failure from an early stage; a point she seems to acknowledge in a letter to her husband of June 1807, concerning the possibility of a party at Spencer House, which she hoped might at least force Jack into being seen at a high society event:
I have hitherto thought that it would not be necessary, but I find it is expected from us and so with your permission a little dance below stairs and an ambigu supper in the Great Room upstairs may be well contrived and we shall wipe off all scores and answer our acquaintances’ expectation and Jack will once more appear in good company.
Jack was to show as little interest in settling down with a wife as he had done in socializing. However, his perceived wealth and undoubted status ensured that he ended up marrying one of the most desirable women in London.
Esther Acklom started attracting attention from the ladies who controlled high society in London in 1807. The Hon. Mrs Calvert recalled meeting the only child of Richard Acklom, a Nottingham-shire man, in that year, noting her wealth and beauty. Her own brother-in-law, Charles Calvert, was totally infatuated with the coquettish Miss Acklom at the time, and this was a potential match of which she thoroughly approved. However, it was not to be. Charles Calvert was told by young Esther that she would never contemplate marrying a man over thirty — which he was — leaving him both broken-hearted and angry, for he felt Esther had definitely egged him on with her flirtatiousness.
Within three months, two other potential suitors — Lord Lindsay and a Mr Wynne — had been similarly abruptly cast aside. Four years on, and it seemed that the flighty Esther had finally met the man she would wed — one Thomas Knox. Both of them were keen to marry, but the two fathers could not agree on the financial arrangements to be reached, and the couple broke off the engagement.
The last day of 1812 found Richard Acklom dead in his bed, leaving his daughter Esther independence in the form of a £10,000 annuity. Beyond that, her mother was given an annual pension of £16,000 which, it was assumed, would also be Esther’s before too long. It was now believed that Esther would marry her latest admirer, a Mr Madocks. However, with her financial position secure, Esther decided against Madocks, paid him back all the money he had spent while courting her — which apparently amounted to thousands of pounds — and resolved to find a more eligible match.
When her eye alighted on Jack Althorp, there was no pretence of love on either side: Esther wanted a title, and Althorp was after money. Here, it seemed, was a match to answer both parties’ material desires. However, the Spencer family did not like what they saw in their potential in-law. Indeed, Lavinia never warmed to Esther, and Jack’s sister, Sarah, thought her ‘a vulgar person and a spoilt child’.
Jack was no more enamoured than his relatives had revealed themselves to be. Faced with the prospect of marrying someone he barely knew, and certainly did not like, Jack decided to take a long walk in the Park at Althorp, to decide if he could go through with the match for the good of his finances. Two hours later he returned, his mind made up. He would wed the heiress.
From such unpromising beginnings sprang a ma
rriage of unusual tenderness and sincerity. It would appear that, from the time that the engagement was announced, the betrothed began genuinely to appreciate one another’s human qualities. The Spencer parents, disappointed though they were, put on a united front over their son’s decision, the Hon. Mrs Calvert writing in her journal for 19 March 1814:
Miss Acklom is going to be married to Lord Althorp, Lord Spencer’s eldest son, and they are delighted at the match, and Lady Spencer says she has been ‘so well-educated — on the Continent’. Heaven preserve me from so well educated a daughter-in-law.
The marriage took place on 13 April 1814. Esther wrote to her mother of the beauty of the day, of the 2,000 people who were at the service in their honour, and of ‘the feeling of real affection to dear Althorp which seemed to pervade through the heart of every person present ...’ The guests presented the bride with a nosegay, and shouted, ‘Lady Althorp for ever’, and, ‘May she live long to enjoy it’, followed by hurrahs. The bride was seen to smile, while shedding tears of gratitude at the warmth of her acclamation.
In June the newlyweds returned to Althorp after their honeymoon. A huge crowd welcomed them at the gates, on horseback, in carriages and on foot. There were wagons, garlanded with flowers and filled with women dressed in white. The Spencer flag was carried in front of the Althorps’ carriage, while three huntsmen and four grooms rode on one side of them, and four of the Park and gamekeeping staff, dressed in their green and gold livery, on the other.
The following morning, after ‘a very hearty breakfast’, Esther gave her mother her initial impressions of the house at Althorp, which she supposed would one day be her and Jack’s home. It was everything to which she had aspired:
The Spencer Family Page 21