Less brilliant than either he has far more experience ... he has also decidedly more of the very important quality termed weight, and his cast of character I think affords more guarantees of the moderation he would combine with zeal, and more possibility of forecasting the course he would pursue.
However, the Queen broke with unwritten custom and talked about many subjects with Gladstone, including his eyesight and hearing, but not about his views as to the best future Prime Minister. She had already made her mind up and asked Rosebery to form an administration.
The Red Earl continued as First Lord under Rosebery, and his time in office was seen as a successful one. Queen Victoria wrote to Salisbury after the Liberal defeat in the general election of 1895: ‘Lord Spencer has been very successful not only as an Administrator but from his personal and social position which has lent prestige to what is our national service.’
Doubtless of more value to the Red Earl would have been the assessment of one of his Sea Lords, Fisher, who wrote to the departing First Lord: ‘I am confident you will live in the annals of the Navy as amongst the best and greatest of First Lords ... I sincerely hope I may yet be able to serve under you again.’
Freed from political office, the Red Earl was able to indulge his wife’s taste for travelling. The Spencers had visited Europe throughout their married life, primarily because of the Red Earl’s health, which resulted in frequent trips to spas, where his lungs and his eczema could be treated. The voyage they undertook in 1895 and 1896 was altogether more ambitious, taking them to India, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Canada and the United States.
The Red Earl was intrigued by India, and deeply impressed by the devotion and ability of the Indian Civil Service, in contrast to the revulsion he felt at the arrogance of his fellow countrymen working there, ‘who talk as if every Indian interest must bow to the Britisher, and the native only exists to minister to his wealth, pleasure and convenience ... It is very wrong, for we cannot forget that we have seized the natives’ country and are governing it for them.’
In Japan, the Spencers were received at a private audience by the Empress. The Red Earl’s impressions of the country were very positive, both with regard to its beauty and its people:
Japan is delightful, lovely scenery at palaces with wonderful Parks of trees such as we never see. Then the people are wonders of energy, and ability, swilling wholesale the newest of our ideas of Government and civilisation. They are ahead of us in many ways, some very odd ways.
A decade later, his enthusiasm for Japan undimmed, Spencer would be one of the more enthusiastic proponents of the new Anglo-Japanese agreement between the two nations’ governments.
The Red Earl was pleased to see North America again after nearly forty years. In May 1896, Spencer gave his first ever newspaper interview, to the Manitoba Evening Bulletin, while later, he and Theodore Roosevelt discussed their political theories with one another at a meeting in New York.
The Spencers were treated with great respect wherever they went, the Red Earl having earned an international reputation as a grand old man of British politics. He was still mooted as a possible Prime Minister, whenever a solid compromise candidate was thought desirable, and his views on matters at home and abroad always carried weight, even if they did not hold sway.
When the British decided to swallow up the Afrikaaner regions of South Africa, the Red Earl could see the injustice of the British cause and the dangers of antagonizing such a proud people. He knew the Boers, under Kruger, would fight if pushed. He wrote at the very start of the 1899 Boer War: ‘I have lately come to the conclusion that if the Government could show conclusively that Kruger never intended peace on reasonable terms, the Government would be greatly justified, but I cannot see that this contention is proved …’
He was appalled when the war that followed proved to be one that the British were incapable of winning quickly; or, as a consequence, of fighting cleanly. In an effort to bring the Boer guerrillas to their knees, the British had instigated a policy of burning their farms and resettling their families in centralized prisons — the first concentration camps. In October 1901 the Red Earl gave his opinion of these British inventions:
The Concentration Camps carry with them their terrible toll of death. I look on them as the dire consequence, it may be, of the farm burnings, but if they were a necessity, surely the authorities never provided what was essential for keeping them efficiently, by way of food, nurses, doctors, tents, etc. The mortality which still continues is appalling.
While the Red Earl increasingly assumed the role of elder statesman, at home Charlotte Spencer’s health was beginning to wane. She had enjoyed all the benefits of a robust constitution — apart from contracting malaria while on honeymoon in Italy — which had led to an active life, primarily as hostess at Althorp, Spencer House, Dublin Castle and the Admiralty, but also as a perpetrator of good works.
Her most important charitable efforts were in league with eleven other concerned ladies, each of them adopting an area of London’s East End and helping to fight the fall-out of dire poverty. This campaign, fought through ‘The Women’s Association’, had its successes, and is noted for having been one of the earliest schemes for dealing with the East End’s problems in such a concerted and applied manner.
As for her primary role — that of châtelaine and hostess — despite constant reminders, from the 1870s onwards, that she and her husband had not the money to entertain as lavishly and often as they had been accustomed to in the first part of their marriage, when the opportunity did present itself for a proper party, Charlotte refused to stint.
The largest party Charlotte gave in her latter years was a ball supper in 1899, in the Picture Gallery at Althorp, when all the Marlborough silver was displayed. The newspapers that covered the event focused on the novelty of the use of electric lighting, contrasting the 2,000 lbs of candles used with the 120 lights which, it was calculated, gave off the same illumination as a further 1,620 candles.
Three hundred and fifty guests were welcomed to Althorp, the house thick with plants, flowers and evergreens from the gardens overseen by Silas Coles, who, two years later, amazed the horticultural world with his invention, ‘the Spencer Sweet Pea’, whose first examples were termed ‘the Countess Spencer’ after Charlotte. Coles was famed for his ability to use his flowers to transform a room, and his blooms were apparently more striking than the jewellery of the female guests, or the silver of the Red Earl.
Charlotte, though in late middle age by this point, was still remarkably fine looking, and she danced to the music of the band, called ‘Mr Kinkee’s’ after the conductor. The guests feasted on tortoise soup, pheasant, foie gras, lobsters, prawns and marrons glacés, all prepared by a famous London-based chef, Monsieur Emile Beguinot. It was a lavish reminder of the days of high entertaining she had regularly dispensed in the Queen’s name in Ireland.
Three years later, in 1902, Charlotte, who had been feeling unwell for some time, was diagnosed as having cancer, and was made to have an operation without delay in Spencer House. Her surgeon was, unusually for the era, a woman, Dr Mary Scharlieb, who had been one of the first students at the London School of Medicine for Women. The Red Earl knew of Scharlieb, and had a high regard for her skills. Certainly it seemed as though the operation had been a success, Charlotte being allowed to return to Althorp in January 1903.
Over the next few months her convalescence took place, her usual retinue of dogs — predominantly dachshunds — padding round after their mistress, as she made an almost daily walk from the mansion down to the side of the Round Oval lake that she had created in the gardens, before sitting quietly under the arch of the temple at the far end of the water, enjoying fresh air after her many weeks of being confined to bed.
On Charlotte’s return, a service of thanksgiving was held in the Chapel at Althorp for her apparent recovery, attended by relatives and close friends. However, the period of tolerable health granted to her was brief. In June
1903, returning from Northampton railway station in an open carriage, Charlotte was caught in a rainstorm and contracted pneumonia. Four days later she had what appears to have been a stroke, leaving her paralysed down her right side and incapable of speech. Charlotte’s last few months were spent in silent confusion, each day faithfully chronicled by the Red Earl. His entry for 31 October 1903 read: ‘At 12.50, “sorrow of sorrows”. She left us in a sleep of perfect peace and beauty.’
The widowed Red Earl was a pathetically lonely figure. He and Charlotte had been unable to have children, and so he was left alone at Althorp, the presence of his half-brother and his young family, several miles away in Dallington, only partially able to compensate for his own solitude. There was also a maiden sister, Lady Sarah Spencer, named after Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. An active Liberal herself, she was a great friend of Sir William Gladstone’s, often reading to him after his eyesight had dimmed. Gladstone noted: ‘Many kind friends have read to me; I must place Lady Sarah Spencer at the head of the proficients in that difficult art; in distinctiveness of articulation, with low, clear voice, she is supreme.’
This was not, however, a talent that was to secure her a husband, and Lady Sarah devoted much of her energy to helping the Red Earl in his public life, never overcoming her disappointment at her elder brother’s failure to replace Gladstone as Prime Minister, thinking him perfectly suited for that task.
Lady Sarah was intrigued by the Spencer family and its history, spending an enormous amount of time chronicling the history and provenance of the heirlooms to be found at Althorp and in Spencer House. She lived next door to the latter, but was not averse to leaving her spinster’s home to enjoy her single life.
A keen rider with a reputation for daring, she went to Algeciras in Spain, at the age of seventy-one, and encountered trouble while riding a donkey too fast. Thrown by her mount, she broke a leg. A member of a nearby picnic party, Rear-Admiral Foley, gallantly escorted Lady Sarah back to her hotel. Unfortunately for the admiral, he too chose a donkey as his mode of transport to return to the picnic he had so suddenly left. He was thrown as well, and broke his leg too.
Lady Sarah lived until 1919, when she was eighty-one. In the congregation at her funeral in Great Brington was Mrs Emma Garderton, who had been a pall-bearer at the funeral of her and the Red Earl’s sister, Lady Georgiana, who had died of measles in 1852.
*
In the early 1900s, there were final calls upon Spencer from political allies, again looking to him as a potential caretaker leader of the Whigs and Prime Minister. Edward VII had recorded his happiness at the possibility of his former Groom of the Stole becoming Premier in 1902. In 1904, it appeared probable that Spencer’s moment had come. In January several publications were contemplating the real prospect of a Spencer administration, and later the same year the Red Earl’s young cousin, Winston Spencer-Churchill, came to consult him about how to effect a desertion from the Conservatives to the Liberals, with the assumption that the Red Earl might very well then be his party — and national — leader.
The Red Earl was still an imposing presence, even with his seventieth birthday approaching. Edmund Gosse, librarian of the House of Lords, met Spencer at this late stage of the earl’s active life in that chamber:
I found him very intimidating; one looks up in despair for his face at the top of the white cliff of his great beard. He was possibly shy, he certainly made me feel so, but he gives the great impression of great dignity, and the temper of a very fine gentleman. I admire him intensely, but he is certainly the most alarming figure I have yet encountered here.
The same year as this observation, 1904, saw Spencer laid low by a heart attack. Although the Red Earl did rally briefly from its effects, Edward VII decided then that Spencer was not physically strong enough to be considered for the position of Prime Minister. However, the rest of the political classes were unaware of the King’s private decision, and only ruled the earl out in October 1905, when he suffered a serious stroke while out shooting on his Norfolk estate. The local doctor reported on a scrap of paper: ‘Block of a small vessel in the brain producing loss of speech but no loss of power in limbs, perfectly conscious.’ Winston Churchill, thinking that Spencer had been within an ace of achieving the highest office in the land, wrote to Lord Rosebery: ‘Poor Lord Spencer, it was rather like a ship sinking in sight of land.’
A man who had been a byword for quiet dignity was now reduced to an unpredictable invalid, sometimes speaking in barely distinguishable tones, at other times showing the greatest confusion as to his whereabouts and his identity. There was relief among those who knew him in those final years when the end came, a further stroke delivering him from his pain and discomfort. On 13 August 1910 he died, his half-brother Bobby kissing his head before recording:
He is now at rest, my dear S. [Spencer.] And I must face the horrid domestic difficulties as I best can. Looking back, I can see the thing that he lacked was children — yet he took mine to himself. His delight and pride in them was really great: and so was Charlotte’s ... My dear S. looked most ‘digne’ and fine lying on his bed, a weary warrior at rest. R.I.P. — My dear old Brother.
17. More than a Mere Dandy
I found Bobby Spencer’s diaries in a bank vault five years ago. They had been there since his death, placed in privacy and safety by the executors of his will in accordance with his final instructions: nobody was to open their pages for at least twenty-five years after his demise. Indeed, because they were forgotten when that period of time had elapsed, it is probable that I am the only person apart from him ever to have laid eyes on their contents. They constitute a sharp and intriguing insight into the mind of a man who felt keenly that he was presiding over the death throes of his family as people of influence and property, particularly after the First World War.
Bobby had been born two months before the death of his father, Frederick, Fourth Earl Spencer, in 1857. He had one full sister, Victoria Alexandrina, known as ‘Va’, who was a goddaughter of Queen Victoria. They shared three half-siblings, almost a generation their senior. Bobby and Va’s mother, Yaddy, was given a house at Guilsborough, in Northamptonshire, for her widowhood. It was a period of their lives that her two children were always to remember with fondness, revolving around riding their ponies, gardening and piano-playing. Their favourite game as children was playing at Ivanhoe in the laurels.
Bobby was always of delicate health. He was sent to a boarding school in Sevenoaks, Kent, followed by several years at Harrow. Because of his fragility, he was not pushed either academically or on the sports field. Nevertheless, he seems to have enjoyed his time at school, and at Harrow made friends for life with the Earl of Crowe and Lord Desborough. His studies were interrupted once after a bad concussion sustained when out hunting, which led to his being sent with his uncle, Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour —later Lord Alcester — on a long recuperative voyage.
After his return, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1877, and showed little flair for his studies, although he revealed what was to be a lasting interest in music, the fine arts and drama. He took a nobleman’s degree, less, apparently, because he wanted to, but more because they were in danger of being discontinued, and he believed that it was therefore his duty to help to perpetuate them if he could.
The Red Earl was a hugely important influence in Bobby’s life, becoming a blend of brother and benign uncle. He was the guiding force in his public life, seeing in Bobby a way of extending Whig influence in Northamptonshire, after a gap that went back to his own elevation to the House of Lords in 1857. Since then the Southern Division of Northamptonshire had become a safe seat for the Tories. As the Red Earl’s election agent, John Becke, reported to his political master in January 1874: ‘It is my firm conviction, which is shared by all the sober minded men of the party, that there is no hope of considering with success the Southern Division unless we have a “Spencer” to bring forward.’
In 1880 the Red Earl’s lungs were causin
g him much distress, and he was sent to Algiers to benefit from its dry heat. However, his absence did not stop him from pushing forward his young half-brother, fresh out of Cambridge, in the general election of that year. Although the Red Earl had hoped to train his brother longer before the youth embarked on a political career — he had advised Bobby to train as a barrister in order to help his public speaking —the opportunity of having a Spencer once again in the House of Commons was one that galvanized the Red Earl into action, as energetic and focused as if he had been fighting the campaign for himself.
Having decided that it was still futile to try to wrest the Southern Division of Northamptonshire from the Tories, the Red Earl told Bobby to stand for the Northern Division — not traditional Spencer territory, but still within the family’s sphere of influence. The Red Earl wrote to all the landowners in the area, asking them to support his young half-brother. The reply from Henry Nethercote, one of the Red Earl’s hunting friends but an avowed Tory, was typical of the response that was given by many to the request: ‘Had any other Candidate stood I should have opposed him with all my might. As it is, my attachment to, and my respect for, the House to which Bobby Spencer belongs keeps me quiet, and I shall not vote at all.’
The result was that Bobby was elected, ahead even of Lord Burghley, whose family was the largest landowner in the Division, and who had widely been expected to head the poll. Bobby wrote to the Red Earl to thank him for the virtual gift of the seat: ‘I am so pleased and happy and feel now more than all is due to you and your being so respected and cared for in the county.’
Bobby Spencer, at twenty-two, was the youngest Member of the House of Commons. T. P. O’Connor, MP, writing in the Sunday Times forty years later, remembered his first sighting of Bobby in his new official capacity:
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