Until this point in his life, the Red Earl had been a solid supporter of the Establishment line on almost every issue, but he could not advocate a policy which he sincerely thought both unsustainable and likely to lead only to ever greater discord. His conclusion was simple: ‘I believe that if we had to wait until we convinced the Irish people that they would not get Home Rule we should have to wait until the crack of doom.’
This was an opinion shared by his most trusted and knowledgeable officers. In September 1884 he received a letter from Edward Jenkinson, who was in charge of fighting secret organizations in Ireland, which ventured that Home Rule was the true solution of the difficulty. Jenkinson, like Spencer, believed that English distrust of Home Rule was the result of pitiful ignorance; it was up to those who understood the situation to promote the Irishman’s right to self-governance. Jenkinson pleaded with his Lord Lieutenant ‘to consider earnestly whether it might be possible to take a new departure, and so to initiate a Policy which in the end may rid us of this troublesome Irish question’.
Spencer looked at alternatives. He returned to his earlier suggestion that a royal residence be established in Ireland, but Queen Victoria thought it a ludicrous idea. Hearing of the Queen’s rejection of his proposal, the Red Earl despaired, telling a friend: ‘I feel inclined to throw up the sponge and retire to my plough in Northamptonshire.’
In the summer of 1885, the Red Earl’s direct involvement in Irish affairs came to an end when he returned to England at the conclusion of his second and final spell as Lord Lieutenant. The Times reported on 28 June: ‘Lord Spencer yesterday formally resigned the office of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, which he had held during three of the most eventful years in the history of the country.’
His perceived success in exceptionally testing circumstances was marked by a dinner given in his honour by 200 Whig members of both Houses of Parliament. In his speech that night, he gave a candid view of what he felt to be his political raison d’etre: ‘I am but a poor soldier in your army. I was enlisted for a special service. I was enlisted for the service of Ireland.’
After returning to Althorp, he went to Northampton to make his first public address in the county for several years. ‘I need not tell you,’ he said to his cheering audience, ‘how rejoiced I am to find myself once more among old friends in Northamptonshire, to see well-known faces again, and to be able to take part in the county business and country pursuits which are so familiar and agreeable to me.’
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The two periods spent in Ireland by the Fifth Earl and Countess Spencer were interludes of genuine power and responsibility in an existence that was otherwise similar to that of many aristocratic families in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
They had almost no understanding of money, finding finance an embarrassing subject to raise even with their professional advisers. It was also a confusingly scarce commodity, as agriculture failed to provide the income they had previously taken for granted. This was particularly the case after 1878. One major problem was the increased influx of grain from the North American prairies. Another was the fact that families such as the Spencers rarely had other commercial enterprises on which to fall back, whenever agriculture failed to perform.
When newly impoverished aristocrats did face up to their change in circumstances, it was often with the bemused realism that Spencer betrayed in a letter of August 1886 to Lord Rosebery: ‘We have given up all travels and mean to live in a hut without servants. We have given notice to nearly all our servants. It is a great bore but inevitable and it is better to face it at once than return to narrow means in 6 months.’ However, the Spencers were typical of their class in being unable to maintain for long such a thrifty resolve.
The Red Earl’s obsession with foxhunting was a very costly pastime. For much of his time at Althorp, he was Master of the Pytchley, a pack jointly kennelled at Althorp and at the nearby village after which the hounds were named. It was considered correct form for a man of the Red Earl’s apparent wealth to bankroll the sport for his fellow foxhunters, and so we find Spencer, whose keenness to fulfil social obligations frequently exceeded his bank balance, in April 1879 seeking a loan for £15,000, ‘on account of the excess expenditure for the Hounds, 1874/8’.
In return, the Red Earl expected total respect on the hunting field. It was customary for the other riders to have the courtesy to allow the Master to lead the field. However, approaching an awkward jump one day he was amazed to see a stranger cut in in front of him, and clear the obstacle first. Initially speechless, his face redder than ever his beard had been, he then shouted to the offending rider, ‘I’m much obliged to you, sir. Upon my word I am. Did you come far to do this?’
Spencer’s enjoyment of foxhunting was famous throughout the aristocracy and royalty of Europe. His reputation brought Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, as a guest in 1876 and 1878. The Empress was noted, not just for extraordinary good looks, but also for her eccentricities: she stuck to a rigorous diet, but enjoyed beer or port, and transported a gym around with her on her frequent travels. At Althorp she provoked astonishment from her fellow guests by lighting herself a cigar after dinner one night.
There is a large and handsome portrait of Elisabeth in the Billiard Room at Althorp, flying over a fence on her mount, riding side-saddle, beautiful and fearless. The Red Earl was concerned about how to protect his imperial guest in the field, as much from herself as from any other dangers. As he told his cousin, Lord Granville, ‘The responsibility of piloting her is awful.’
The Red Earl relied on certain assumptions as host to the Empress, and one of these was that she viewed the pursuit of the fox, as he himself did, as a pastime that should not be interrupted by everyday matters — or even by matters of state. One day the Pytchley met at Stanford Hall, not far from Althorp. Stanford’s owner, Lord Braye, had just been informed that Pope Pius IX had died, and he told Spencer that he was going to pass the news on to Elisabeth. The Red Earl thought this a poor idea, and told Braye: ‘You need not tell her just yet; she would have to go home and not finish her day.’ Perhaps this attitude helps explain why Elisabeth wrote to her husband, the Emperor Franz Josef, about the Red Earl: ‘I like him very much. He is so nice and natural and I think that if he ever pays us a visit you will like him too.’
It was not until he was close to sixty that the Red Earl could bring himself to retire as Master of the Pytchley. He told Charlotte of his decision in January 1894: ‘I wrote yesterday to give up Hounds. It is a bitter thing to do as it is what I care most for as amusement in the world. But I dare not face the cost ...’ In 1890 he had spent over £5,000 on his horses; the following year, in excess of £4,000.
Financial worries had come back to haunt the Spencer family again. Just as Jack Althorp, on succeeding his father, had been forced to concentrate on settling debts, so the Red Earl realized that he must address the accumulated shortfall on his income occasioned by the expense of his Irish Lord Lieutenancy and of funding the Pytchley. There were also the expenses of living at Althorp, Spencer House and the shooting lodge they maintained on the Norfolk estate, North Creake.
In 1886, the first drastic cutback was made when the Red Earl decided to find a tenant for Spencer House. Being in office then, he was able to occupy an official residence when in London, so this was a logical and relatively painless economy. One of his early tenants was Barney Barnato, born in the East End in 1852 who, by the 1890s, had become perhaps the wealthiest and most influential financier in South Africa. In the summer of 1895, he was calculated to have earned £5 for every minute of his working day.
‘Flamboyant’ is the adjective usually trundled out to describe Barnato; but it seems too simplistic. He was unique, particularly in his confidence. When the Red Earl told him with trepidation that the rent for Spencer House was £2,000 per year, Barnato made an immediate payment of the first two years. He was soon heard to comment of his new residence — one of the great private palaces of London, bordering Green Park,
and a symbol of classical elegance — ‘It’s not a bad position: exactly half-way between the Prince of Wales in Marlborough House and the PM in Arlington Street.’
The atmosphere of the house changed dramatically. No more was it a bastion of Whig politics, but rather the rented accommodation of a multi-millionaire freed from the social obligations the Spencers had always felt so keenly. Barnato held open house for his coterie of actors, horse trainers, boxers and impresarios. He objected to paying the butler and the footmen, whose purpose he could not fathom — to him, they stood around far too much. What was more, they seemed unable to enjoy themselves. When Barnato wanted to practise his boxing with them, he was astonished to discover that the beautifully mannered Spencer staff simply would not fight back. As Barnato said, disappointedly, ‘It’s no fun punching a bloke who bows and thanks you as if he’s afraid of losing his ruddy job.’
Being freed of the cost of Spencer House was a help, but it was not enough to solve the crisis. The Red Earl decided to do something that his uncle Jack had so assiduously avoided, half a century before: he sought a buyer for the Spencer Library, so expensively assembled by George John, the Second Earl.
He wrote to his half-brother, Bobby, who was also his heir:
I feel it much, now that it has come, but I do not alter my view that it was my duty to do it. I could not have gone on as I have been for the last 12 or 13 years ... It will make a vast difference to my financial position, and relieve me of what at times was intolerable, the feeling that I had no right to go on even in the very reduced way which we have adopted for some years past: and I saw no way out of the difficulty.
His hope was to preserve the books in one collection, and in Great Britain; the hope being that they would be readily accessible to British scholars. Only a few books were to be kept back from the sale: the Bible of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and Ben Jonson’s masque, performed at Althorp for Anne of Denmark in 1603, among them. Everything else — the Caxton bibles, the early psalters, the foreign classics — went.
It was an unfortunate business transaction. The Red Earl’s preference for a British buyer made him settle for the offer of Enriqueta Rylands, the widow of a businessman from Manchester, who wanted to establish a memorial to her husband, John. If the Red Earl had followed up the expressed interest of the New York Public Library, he would have learned that the Americans were prepared to pay £300,000 for the Library. As it was, when he signed the contract in 1892, Spencer had settled for £220,000.
There was to be good news for Spencer, in the same year of 1892. Gladstone won the general election, and he considered making his trusted supporter of a quarter of a century the Home Secretary. However, the Red Earl received a post that he had hoped would one day be his: that of First Lord of the Admiralty. As Queen Victoria noted in her diary for 18 August 1892: ‘I saw Lord Spencer who seemed pleased to go to the Admiralty, though all was new to him, as his father and uncle had both been in the Navy, and his grandfather First Lord of the Admiralty in Nelson’s time and even had recommended him for employment.’
The Prince of Wales followed up the appointment with a letter of congratulations: ‘Nothing has given me greater pleasure than to know that you have been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, and I know it is a popular one in the Navy. That it is pleasing to yourself I can easily imagine ...’ This marked the Red Earl’s re-emergency into royal favour after several years which must have been deeply hurtful to a man whose constant aim in public life was merely to obey his conscience and his considered judgement.
In the late 1880s the question of Home Rule for Ireland had become one of the bitterest in the political arena. Charlotte’s brother maintained that the debate ‘developed into a social war. It invaded the hearth and home with unprecedented acrimony. Even in the preliminary fencing in the Houses of Parliament the buttons had been removed from the foils. The controversy assumed almost a religious tinge.’
Feeling was strong enough to split the Liberal Party, with the Unionists deserting Gladstone. Gladstone and Spencer were united in their belief that this was an issue that needed to be dealt with honestly and conclusively. Gladstone knew little about Ireland, having visited it only briefly in 1877. Indeed, his ignorance had astonished the Red Earl’s half-brother, Bobby, who reported: ‘I had luncheon with Mr Gladstone ... I was much struck by the evident way he thought Ireland was as quiet really as here with only a row or an outrage every now and then.’
The Red Earl, by standing by his old friend in the face of so much withering aggression — some of it from former allies of theirs — gave Gladstone and his cause credibility. At the same time, he became a social pariah to many of his class, who failed to see the drive for Home Rule as anything other than an underhand, treacherous way of depriving the British sovereign of control over his or her dominions. The Duchess of Teck was typical in her unquestioning contempt for the Red Earl’s stand on the issue, writing to a friend: ‘We have heard that Lord Spencer, of all people is a convert (pervert I think I ought to say!) to Home Rule.’
Sir Dighton Probyn, of the Prince of Wales’s household, joined in the chorus of disgust:
I am worried over Lord Spencer. I have always looked upon him as being an honest Englishman, and a Gentleman ... But he has fallen into the traitor’s clutches, and is lending a helping hand to a fearful Civil War ... A man of that sort advocating Communism shakes my belief in anything mortal.
Sir Rainald and Lady Knightley of Fawsley, distant Spencer kinsmen in Northamptonshire, made their condemnation of the Red Earl and Charlotte clear at a dinner party in 1886, Lady Knightley recording: ‘Saw Lady Spencer, both R. and I greeted her with MARKED coldness — publicly and privately I do feel so angry with them.’
Queen Victoria also felt let down. She confronted a slightly flustered Red Earl about his apparently sudden conversion to a cause that he had fought against for so long, noting that, ‘He continued that he certainly had changed his opinion very much tho’ he must confess he had for some time had a sneaking feeling that “something of this kind would have to be resorted to” ... Altogether I thought his explanations very unsatisfactory and weak.’ She stopped asking the Spencers to Windsor. Even more crushing was the decision of Lord Frederick Cavendish’s family not to invite the Spencers to Chatsworth — a ban that stood for twelve years.
After such a bleak period in the social and political wilderness, the appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty was doubly welcome. The Red Earl brought the same qualities to the post as his grandfather had done, in particular through his insistence on a hands-on style of management. Moreover, he took the helm at a time when the Navy was facing something of a crisis: not warfare and mutiny, but a definite feeling of grave doubt as to whether it had the capability to fight a war on anything like the superior footing it had been used to for ninety years.
The French and Russians had been improving their fleets in the 1890s, and the British were nervous about either or both matching or surpassing their seapower. The Russians were causing concern through their aggression in Afghanistan, and the French were proving to be problematic in Egypt. There was also a perceived problem with the standard of senior officer in the Royal Navy, many of whom had failed to understand how much warfare had moved on since they last fired their cannon in anger: the advent of the submarine, the seamine and the torpedo had all to be digested and mastered.
The Red Earl decided his best chance of making the necessary improvements in the Navy was to deal directly with his admirals. (As was the case throughout his public life, he wrote nearly all his correspondence himself, in fairly diabolical handwriting, eschewing the services of a secretary.) During his period at the Admiralty, from 1892 to 1895, Spencer saw to it that: naval personnel was increased by 6,000; the problem of there being too few stokers was solved; the number of quick-firing guns was added to; the elite blue-jackets and marines were armed with magazine rifles; and extensive harbour works at Gibraltar, Portland and Dover were begun.
His mai
n responsibility was to prepare the estimates relating to naval expenditure in the following year, to be submitted to his cabinet colleagues for their approval. Given the worries expressed by his Sea Lords, which reflected the mood throughout the country, at the end of 1893 the Red Earl submitted that the Navy should be reinforced by ten first-class battleships. Gladstone was almost alone in opposing the recommendation, fearing the cost was unsustainable, and that the continued escalation of firepower would result in war. The Prime Minister asked Spencer to revise his department’s estimates, but the Red Earl was assured by Admiral Fisher, one of his most able Sea Lords, that any fewer than seven new battleships would severely compromise national safety. The impasse between Gladstone and Spencer was one that the two friends could not resolve, and was one of the main reasons why Gladstone resigned in March 1894.
The Red Earl felt remorse that his inability to back down on a point of political principle had resulted in the end of Gladstone’s premiership, writing to him:
I cannot conceal from myself that the policy which I proposed for the Navy has had a marked influence in bringing you to the decision of resigning at this moment. I most earnestly wish that I could have modified my proposals, or given place to someone else whose views would have agreed with your own ... This position has been most painful to me for I owe my political career entirely to you, and I have always and still do admire your political principles and action and if I may be allowed to say so have a real affection and veneration for you personally.
It was testament to the two old colleagues’ regard for each other that, despite their cabinet quarrel, Gladstone had resolved to champion the Red Earl as Prime Minister, during his resignation meeting with Queen Victoria. Harcourt and Rosebery were the two front-runners, as successors, but Gladstone thought Spencer would be better than them, recording in a memorandum:
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