15. Father Ignatius
Jack and Frederick Spencer had had little in common and they had not been especially close. Bob had been popular with both of them. But there was another unifying link which bound the three of them together: their strong Christianity, learned from the earliest moments of their life from George John and Lavinia. And yet, it was the youngest son, George, who was to have religion not only as a support to, but as the cornerstone of his life, dedicating his existence to God in the most uncompromising manner imaginable.
There was only a year in age between George and Frederick, and they were initially brought up very much together, leaving for Eton the same day in 1808, when George was only nine. Their sister Sarah marked the impending departure of her young brothers with a letter to Georgiana, First Countess Spencer, their mutual grandmother:
Next Wednesday our two dear little boys go to Eton. I won’t allow myself to think of it in as melancholy a way as I am inclined to do for I know my regret at it to be very selfish; they will be most satisfactorily situated in every way; and are I think too young to dread the event much. They have no conception of what it is to leave home, poor things, how little do they know the comfort of it!
A month later, Sarah reported that George John had gone to visit the boys, and had found them perfectly settled in at the school:
They are quite well, very much at their ease, and quite initiated already into the several mysteries of fagging, boxing, getting out of bounds, and buying trash at the pastry-cook’s, which make up the character of a school-boy. Mr Godley, their tutor, is delighted with their docility and extreme simplicity of mind; they have not a notion of not doing and saying before him exactly what they would away from him; and they seem to wish for no intimate friends besides each other as yet; and the Latin hobbles on very tolerably.
The Reverend Richard Godley had been chosen by George John and Lavinia to look after their two youngest boys because of his reputation for being an extremely conscientious Christian. George later recalled: ‘I must always account it one of the greatest blessings for which, under God, I am indebted to their wisdom and affection, that I was placed in such hands at so critical a time.’
Godley’s religious teachings fell on receptive ears: George would remember for the rest of his life the introduction to the Christian faith he received on his sixth birthday, courtesy of his sister’s Swiss governess. She took George aside, and told him about the joy of true faith, particularly of the qualities of the Church of England.
To what can I ascribe it, that I firmly believed from the first moment this truth, of which I was not capable of understanding a proof, that I never since have entertained a doubt of it, nor been led, like so many more, to universal scepticism; that my faith in the truth of God should have been preserved while for so long a time I lived, as I afterwards did, wholly without its influence.
This was the ‘extreme simplicity of mind’ that Godley had already detected, and to which he was to direct his own sincere beliefs.
Godley’s prime aim with his charges was to keep them away from the other boys at the school as much as was possible. This perceived reluctance to mix with them spurred the Eton boys into a frenzy of bullying against the cosseted Spencers. However, the more they indulged in this brutality, the more convinced Frederick and George became that Godley was correct in keeping them separate from such oafs.
In 1811, when Frederick went to sea, George was left with Godley, and they spent a year constantly in one another’s company. It was a seminal period of George’s life, as he acknowledged in middle age:
I can now hardly give an account of what were the religious ideas and impressions which began so greatly to engage my mind, except that I took my chief delight in hearing Mr Godley speak about religion, that I had great abhorrence and dread of wickedness, thought with pleasure of my being intended to be a clergyman, as I was always told I would be, and admired and loved all whom I was taught to look upon as religious people.
However, George’s parents became concerned that Godley was not sufficiently traditional in his Anglican beliefs, and they therefore moved the highly impressionable George into the main body of the school at Eton. He hated it, finding the conduct of his fellow pupils brutish and diametrically opposed to the principles that he had known at home, and had had reinforced by Godley. George could hardly believe that he had been placed in such a compromising position by his own flesh and blood:
But, alas! Little did my family suspect what a place was Eton; or, at least, if a suspicion came across parents’ minds of what their children are exposed to in public schools, they generally persuade themselves that this must be endured for a necessary good, which is, to make them learn to know the world.
For the two years that he remained at Eton after leaving the security of Mr Godley’s home, George did not pray once. He later bitterly contrasted this lapse with the much superior spiritual nurturing that he would have received, had he been brought up a Catholic child — an upbringing underpinned by religious principles that would have saved him from such oversights and omissions.
For the rest of his life, mainly because of his deeply unhappy experiences at Eton, George believed that parents had a duty to teach their own children, until the child had fully understood the overriding importance of virtue and piety. Only then could a public school be permitted to take a part in the education process.
At Christmas 1814, George left Eton with relief. He was then committed to the charge of Mr Blomfield, a priest on the Spencers’ Dunton estate in Buckinghamshire. Again, George John had placed his son in the care of a very able churchman. Blomfield was to rise to the position of Protestant Bishop of London.
Blomfield taught his pupil well, and George went up to Trinity College at Cambridge University in October 1817, his noble status more evident than his religious calling, since he arrived in the Spencer carriage, accompanied by his family’s liveried attendants, as his father had done a generation earlier.
One of the chroniclers of George’s life, Father Pius, took stock of his subject at this point in his youth: ‘He was a young man, just turned eighteen; he had been brought up in splendour at home, and in a poisonous atmosphere at school. That he was not the vilest of the vile is to be wondered at more than that he preserved as much goodness as he did.’
Lavinia Spencer was all for her son becoming a priest, but she wanted him also to hone the attributes that she still believed to be important for his secondary role as a highly born young gentleman. She encouraged him to take up fencing. There was also, she said, something wonderful about the guitar; he ought to learn how to play it. Both of these recommendations he turned down. The only advice he took from his mother at this stage was to play cricket, a sport he had always adored, and which was to remain a ‘mania’ — his own word for it — throughout the rest of his life.
His elder brother Bob was to be of more value as adviser. When George, aged sixteen or so, confided in him that he found it very difficult to talk to girls at parties, Bob exclaimed, ‘What a wretched false shame is that!’, before berating him for thinking flirtation with women was an important pastime. After that, George later recalled, he was more appalled at the shame he had felt, than at his inadequacies with the opposite sex.
Of even more use to George was the advice Bob gave him just before he set off for Cambridge for his first term. Bob himself was about to leave for a tour of duty at sea, and, keen to protect his impressionable brother from falling in with the wrong sort of person when an undergraduate, he exhorted George never to laugh when those around him indulged in ‘immoral conversation’. George set enormous importance by this brotherly guidance, marvelling in the honourable strength it revealed in Bob:
What rare advice was this from the mouth of a gay, gallant young officer; and if there were more of his character who were not ashamed to give it to their young brothers and friends, how many might be saved, who are now lost, because they do not see one example to show how a manly, fashionable character
can be maintained with strict morality and modesty.
Without being diverted by the hedonistic pleasures that many of his fellow students pursued, George was able to forge ahead with his studies. Being the son of an aristocrat, he was excused the rigours of the normal seven-year degree that he would have been expected to sit, and was allowed to study for the two-year nobleman’s degree. He came first out of all in his year sitting for the exam, achieving a first-class degree in mathematics and classics. Academic study was always something he excelled at. Later in his life his speaking and understanding of Italian and French were said to be ‘perfect’, and he had more than passable German.
His treatment as a young nobleman rather than as a potential priest continued after Cambridge, when he embarked on his own Grand Tour, in 1819, for a year. He was always to love travel, and the seeds of this passion were sown during this time. George John, Second Earl Spencer, was aware of the moral strengths of his youngest son, but he was also careful to warn him of the temptations that time away from home would present to him:
As to your conduct, George, I need not tell you how important it is for your future happiness and character that you should keep yourself from all evil; especially considering the sacred profession for which you are intended. But, on this subject, I have no wish concerning you but to hear that you continue to be what you have hitherto been.
At that time George began to become convinced that his life had been marked out for some special course — a theory reinforced when he and his companion narrowly escaped death while venturing too close to an active volcano in January 1820:
I went up Mount Vesuvius with Dr Wilson, when, as we were looking into the crater of the volcano, a discharge of red-hot stones took place. I heard them whistle by me as they ascended, and though it was of no use to attempt to get out of the way, I hurried back a few steps by a natural impulse, and immediately saw a lump of red-hot stuff twice the size of one’s head fall on the spot where I had been standing just before. We immediately ran down the side of the mountain, and reached a place about a quarter of a mile distant from the mouth of the crater ... Just then a grand explosion took place, which shook the whole mountain, and a vast quantity of these masses of fiery red stuff was spouted out from the crater, which in its return appeared entirely to cover the whole space over which we had been running five minutes before.
George’s conclusion was straightforward: ‘Here was an evident escape which, in a mind possessed with any religion at all, could not fail of awakening some serious reflections.’
Two years later a similar escape occurred. He was partridge shooting with his cousin, George Bingham, later Third Earl of Lucan, when the latter’s gunpowder flask caught fire and exploded in Bingham’s hand, severely burning him, and convincing George Spencer, who caught some of the blast himself, that only God had spared him from death.
It was at this stage of his youth that George Spencer started to put the trials of life into perspective, as being the will of God. He was prone to fits of depression. However, by giving these a religious provenance, he came to welcome them, for he believed God was giving him feelings of melancholy in order to teach him how there could be no happiness while he remained preoccupied with the superficial elements of life. He was later to chastise himself for his early inclination to follow the shallow and materialistic course expected of a young man of his privileged background:
Whatever I thought desirable in the world, — abundance of money, high titles, amusements of all sorts, fine dress, and the like, — as soon and as far as I understood anything about them, I loved and longed for; nor do I see how it could have been otherwise, as the holy, severe maxims of the Gospel truth on these matters were not impressed upon me.
Rejoicing in the trials sent down by God became a central tenet of George’s belief. Accepting — indeed, almost wallowing in — feeling dejected in his early twenties was the first step down this road for the increasingly introspective young aristocrat. ‘For if I have within me one bright, heavenly desire,’ he acknowledged in later life, ‘I owe it to these feelings, which first poisoned my pleasure in the world, and drew me at length to seek for it elsewhere, and now I wish never to have peace within my breast while one desire lives there for anything but God.’
This seems to have left more of a lasting impression on him than did his first brushes with the Roman Catholic Church. He travelled through several Catholic countries on his Grand Tour but, by his own admission, he was primarily concerned with his own pleasure, and, secondly, with absorbing what he saw and experienced as a tourist. In a distant third place, he made superficial observations about religion; an example being his view of Easter Day celebrations in Sicily, the fireworks, bells, fancy dress, flags and drums leading him to a dismissive view of Roman Catholicism: ‘This religion is most extraordinary. It strikes me as impious; but I suppose it takes possession of the common people sooner than a sensible one.’
However, one of the most profound influences on the future direction of George’s life was to take place during his foreign travels, and, although the setting was one of luxury and sophisticated enjoyment, it impacted directly on his religious consciousness in a manner that his direct exposure to Catholicism had failed to do.
While in Paris, in 1820, he twice attended the Italian Opera. On both occasions the opera performed was Don Giovanni, which tells the story of a legendary seducer and blasphemer, who attracts the wrath of men and God through his arrogant disregard for their conventions. George had felt weak even agreeing to attend the opera, since he believed he should have been living a modest life in preparation for taking holy orders. Going to the ‘dangerous and fascinating’ Don Giovanni was, he promised himself, the last occasion on which he would indulge himself in such a way.
It was the climax of the opera which was to have an unforeseen impact on his life — the irony of the venue for such a revelation not being lost on him:
The last scene ... represents Don Giovanni, the hero of the piece, seized in the midst of his licentious career by a troop of devils, and hurried down to hell. As I saw this scene, I was terrified at my own state. I knew that God, who knew what was within me, must look on me as one in the same class with such as Don Giovanni, and for once this holy fear of God’s judgement saved me: and this holy warning I was to find in an opera-house at Paris.
Such serious-minded reflection was typical of George Spencer, who seems never to have allowed himself truly to enjoy his youth, being too weighed down by his religious destiny. Reflecting on the occasion of his twenty-second birthday, he convinced himself that ‘the best and happiest years of life are already past’. He made this the point at which a rededication of his energies was to be made, a focusing of his mind and body on matters which he felt he had wrongly neglected in the first part of his life:
God grant that I make those that remain more profitable to others, and consequently to myself. As to happiness, I think my temper and dispositions have prevented my having my share to the full of youthful pleasures; so I may look forward to the future for better circumstances: if I can but tutor my mind into contentment at my situation, and an engrossing wish to make my duty the leading guide of my actions. Indolence and irresolution are my stumbling blocks.
The early 1820s were a period of slow transition for George, in which his single-minded determination to serve God gradually gained strength. In December 1822, he took deacon’s orders from the Protestant Bishop of Peterborough, thus taking the first step towards what everybody assumed would, given his family background, be a bishopric of his own, before too long. On 12 January 1825, he was appointed priest for Brington, the parish next to Althorp, by his father, in whose possession the living lay.
Although he was expected to lead a good life and be an example to others, strict religious devotion was not demanded of a gentleman-preacher like the Honourable and Reverend George Spencer; indeed, if he had chosen not even to live in the parish, that would not have been a matter for undue comment. A life of leisur
e could have been his, with the priesthood a mere career choice, not necessarily a vocation.
But George was becoming increasingly determined to dedicate himself to a sincere and rigorous life, where the appreciation of God was of core importance. He found, more and more, that he turned his back on his former pleasures. First, he decided not to visit the theatre again. This followed an embarrassing incident when he was at a play where the parson was depicted as a bumbling fool. George’s fellow theatre-goers looked to see whether he had a sense of humour about this lampooning. He disliked the sensation of being put in an invidious position by people whose pleasure and concerns seemed so utterly shallow.
He also decided not to shoot again. This was not out of concern for the pain he was causing his prey, but because he despised the showing-off that was such an integral part of the sport, whereby an accurate or difficult shot evinced the acclaim of others.
Dancing was also a casualty of this period of reappraisal. When old, George had trouble with an ulcer on his leg. A religious colleague told him that he deserved to be lame, because: ‘You made such use of your feet in the days of your dancing and sporting, that Almighty God is punishing you now, and the instruments of your pleasure are aptly turned into instruments of pain.’ This was a judgement that George accepted fully, being in keeping with his entire philosophy as to how God rewarded self-indulgence.
However, despite such sacrifices, George had become convinced that his time as priest in Brington was lacking something. In 1826 and 1827, according to his biographer, Father Pius, ‘He distributed Bibles and blankets, prayer-books and porridge, and three of his best and most hopeful proselytes went mad, and were sent to the county lunatic asylum.’ George himself noted, in one of his periodic bouts of critical self-analysis, at the start of 1827: ‘I have found my mind so far from settled that I never saw myself more in need of God’s grace. But I shall find it.’
The Spencer Family Page 26