I never will forget the feeling of perplexity I experienced when I saw, on the floor of the House of Commons crowded with members waiting to take the oath, a strange figure that stood out in almost ostentatious and astounding contrast to the rest of the people around him. He looked so ridiculously young — so absolutely babyish, that I thought for a while he was a son of one of the members — still probably at Eton — who had been brought in by mistake or by some exceptional privilege given to the swells of the new House. But the boy was a member right enough; Northants had chosen him.
To begin with, Bobby’s youth meant that he was not taken seriously by the rest of the Commons; even less so when it was assumed, from his dandyism, that he was more interested in his sartorial splendour than in politics. A parliamentary sketch writer wrote of Bobby at this stage: ‘It was said of him in those days that he always had his blue books bound by Zahnsdorffin blue morocco; it was said of him that he always carried a laced pocket handkerchief to his nose after the manner of a modish French “abbé” of a last century salon.’
And then there was the matter of his collars ... Although highcollars were in fashion in the 1880s among the gilded youth, nobody had ever seen collars as high, or as immaculate, as Bobby’s. As O’Connor noted: ‘Bobby’s collar was to the ordinary collar of the dandy as the Matterhorn to Mount Snowdon.’ And it was not simply the collars that provoked incredulous comment:
The spats were of spotless white that might make snow blush in rivalry, and, of course, the boots were blinding in their brightness. Nobody among the middle-aged and elderly men who then usually formed the majority of the House of Commons could take such a palpable boy seriously; and for years Bobby did not overcome the under-estimate provoked by the Alpine-heighted collars.
Indeed, one evening in the Commons an irate Irish member promised to keep the debate going for as long as it was necessary, to push through his point; and that could be ‘until Bobby Spencer’s collar gave way’.
But there was more to Bobby than an outlandish dress sense. As he became more established as a Member of Parliament, so his qualities grew more obvious. He was noted as a highly accomplished speaker, occasionally quite brilliant, with a dry wit. Once, when taking part in a debate on a Small Holdings Bill, Bobby stood up, his collar tall, his coat and waistcoat immaculate, his hair combed back and slicked down to reveal his smooth, aristocratic hauteur, and started his intervention in the proceedings with the phrase: ‘I am not an agricultural labourer ...’ The House dissolved into an uproar of laughter, some Members apparently so convulsed by mirth that they were ‘nearly sick’, before the imperturbable Bobby put forward his case on behalf of his predominantly agrarian constituency.
His quickness of wit was well known; as, indeed, was his measured courtesy. Once, when he was addressing his constituents, a heckler shouted out at Bobby: ‘Mr Spencer, do tell us how you get into them collars?’ Without missing a beat, Bobby calmly replied: ‘My friend, you are much mistaken if you think I shall lose a single vote by your being rude.’ The acclamation that greeted this retort was strong enough to force the heckler to slope off into the darkness, his barb deflected.
Once the meeting was over, Bobby returned to his carriage. As he stepped into it, he saw a hand held out to him, and realized it belonged to the heckler. ‘Mr Spencer,’ the man said, ‘I’m sorry I was rude. I’ve always voted blue before, but you shall have my vote this time.’
Bobby was greatly respected for the way in which he supported his half-brother during the Red Earl’s second term as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, one newspaper remarking, ‘Mr Spencer is not a mere dandy, however, and the pluck with which he rode and walked about Dublin with his half-brother, Earl Spencer, as if it were St James’s Street, was quite a public service.’ Indeed, such loyalty nearly cost him his life — not from any subversive elements, but because the drains at Dublin Castle gave him a serious bout of typhoid fever. His condition was critical for several weeks, and only the nursing of his half-sister Sarah, his full sister Victoria and his sister-in-law Charlotte carried him through.
Gradually he obtained the respect that was to lead to his becoming a government whip and parliamentary Groom in Waiting in 1886. Whips have traditionally been people of firm views, prepared to make their Members perform the party’s bidding, by whatever means; the line between persuasion and bullying has often been blurred. This was not Bobby’s style at all. A contemporary newspaper observed that: ‘Members find it more difficult to excuse themselves for indiscipline or absence under the soft application of Mr Spencer’s gentle and caressing whip than when bidden by the harshest and most blustering of the officers of the party ...’ He was still not thirty years old.
The irrepressible Bobby — ‘so young, so lighthearted, so glad he is alive’ — met his life’s love in 1887. Margaret Baring was only a teenager, and he was eleven years her senior, but he was sure this was the woman he would wed. They married after a one-month engagement, on 25 July of the same year.
Margaret was the second daughter of Edward Charles Baring, Baron Revelstoke. The Barings controlled one of the great banking dynasties of late nineteenth-century Britain. The founder of the firm had been Francis Baring, the son of an immigrant from Bremen. Francis had originally been a cloth dealer, but he appreciated the growing importance of banking — a trade that took off during the Continental and Napoleonic Wars. It was a wise career move. The Prime Minister, Lord Shelburne, referred to Francis Baring as ‘the Prince of Merchants’, while, at the time of Francis’s death in 1810, Lord Erskine dubbed him ‘the first merchant in Europe’.
Francis left £2 million in his will. He had five sons and five daughters, of whom the most successful proved to be Alexander, who banked on an unprecedented scale. Once he secured a loan for France which ‘freed France from the incubus of the Russian, Prussian and Austrian occupation’. This transaction led the French Premier to claim: ‘There are six great Powers in Europe — England, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Baring Bros.’ This was borne out by the head of the family becoming known as ‘Alexander the Great’. When he died, in 1848, he had been raised to the peerage as Baron Ashburton.
The next head of the firm was Alexander’s nephew, Thomas Baring. In official circles the respect for the Barings, and for their financial nous, was underlined through Lord Melbourne’s decision to appoint Thomas Baring as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
It was Thomas’s nephew, Edward, who was Bobby’s father-in-law. In 1885, he had been given the title of Baron Revelstoke, joining his brother, Baron Northbrook, in the House of Lords. Margaret was, through her mother, a great-great-granddaughter of the same Lord Grey who had fathered Georgiana Devonshire’s love child. Among her brothers, Margaret numbered: one Director of the Bank of England; a war hero from Sudan — who was subsequently military secretary to the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon; a diplomat; and an army officer, severely wounded in the Boer Wars, who lived in New York. Francis Baring’s progeny were so conspicuous in the success and diversity of their careers, that it seemed that Lady Ashburton was justified when she said of the Barings: ‘They are everywhere.’
The Daily Reporter was effusive in its praise of the couple on their wedding day. About Bobby, it reported: ‘In Parliament he is known as the most popular member of the House of Commons; and in London society is an especial favourite.’ Then, approvingly, it noted: ‘The bride arrived at the church very punctually. She looked sweetly pretty, her personal charms enhanced by the exquisite dress she was wearing. It was of white satin, with a long train, completely covered with rich “Point d’Argentan” lace, trimmed with lovely orange blossoms.’
Bobby festooned his bride with wedding gifts, the jewellery dominated by diamonds: a tiara, a brooch for her hair, two bracelets; also an emerald and diamond ring, a moonstone and diamond necklace, a pearl necklace; as well as an old Berlin tea service, a ‘Venus Martin’ box and two Dresden snuffboxes.
The honeymoon was spent at Althorp, by invitation of the Red Earl a
nd Charlotte. Given that the couple had known one another for such a short while, this was the first time that Margaret had seen her husband’s family home. One hundred estate and park staff pulled the carriage from Althorp station to the mansion, under an arch with ‘Long Life and Happiness’ written on it. Children from the park lodges threw flowers on the lady they assumed would one day be the mistress of Althorp.
Married life for the Spencers centred on Dallington House, which was then a mile from Northampton. It was a separate estate from the other Spencer land in the county, and had been bought by Jack Althorp. The house itself was of a suitably large and grand design to be home to a couple who were heir presumptives to the Spencer title since it was evident the Red Earl and Charlotte were not to have children. However, it was considerably less forbidding than Althorp.
The photograph albums from Bobby and Margaret’s Dallington days show a deeply contented late Victorian/early Edwardian household, the living rooms filled with luxuriant potted plants and crammed with paintings of the burgeoning family the parents so adored. In accordance with the tastes of the time, furniture was crowded into every available space, with pride of place going to the piano: this was a highly musical family, with Bobby a keen pianist, and Margaret a highly accomplished violinist — a gift she passed down to the eldest child, Adelaide, known as Delia. The children often accompanied their mother, giving concerts for the benefit of local causes, while Bobby would lead the entire family in enthusiastic performances given at Spencer House. There were five children after Delia: Jack — my grandfather, Cecil, Lavinia, George and Margaret.
Margaret was much respected in Northamptonshire. A local newspaper commented that ‘She was the good angel of Dallington, and of her small and numerous family.’ Another claimed that she possessed ‘the gentle loving kindness of a lady who would have been noble if the first breath of her life had been drawn in a miner’s hut’.
She was a loyal wife, helping Bobby in his electioneering and becoming President of the Northamptonshire Women’s Liberal Association. Above all Margaret was a warm and loving mother, more than usually involved in the minutiae of her children’s upbringing, and not prepared merely to hand them over to nannies.
Her particular charitable interests were the Northampton Crippled Children’s Fund and the Northamptonshire Nursing Association, both local concerns with which she was fully involved. She was also a keen supporter of the RSPCA and patron of the Band of Mercy Section, the latter being an organization established to appeal to the young, and to teach them how to act with kindness in all they did.
The Reverend W. N. Martin later recalled of Margaret that she ‘used all her ability — and that was great — all her influence — and that was not slight — to do the very best that she could for everyone that she knew was suffering or had a claim on her’.
With the responsibilities of a large family, and of the post of government whip, the ebullience that had marked Bobby’s youth slowly ebbed away, being replaced by a growing maturity. As a parliamentary sketch writer noted in 1892: ‘To be Whip to a political party is to be a serious statesman, and to be a serious statesman one must be serious, “quel diable”. And so Mr Spencer has become serious, dimming the bright gloss of his dandyism thereby, and gaining, in return, fame.’ He also became, in that same year, a Privy Councillor and Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household — the latter position giving him a prominent role in the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George V and Queen Mary.
Bobby’s public life now started to follow two quite different courses, one of which would eventually have to surrender to the other: those of politician and of courtier. He sat as an MP from 1880 until 1895; for North Northamptonshire from 1880 to 1885, and then, when the county was divided into three constituencies, for Mid-Northamptonshire for the following decade. In 1895, he was one of many Liberal casualties in the general election, despite the Red Earl’s continued assistance for his cause.
There followed five years away from the Commons. Bobby missed his political life enormously, and even stood in East Hertfordshire in 1898. His chances were known to be almost non-existent: the seat had only become vacant through the death of the Conservative MP; it was a solidly Conservative area; and his opponent was Evelyn Cecil, a grandson of Lord Salisbury. Bobby was apologetic about even thinking of standing in such a vain cause, writing to the Red Earl: ‘I hope I have not done too foolishly to consider it, but when the offer came for the party’s sake I confess I panted to fight, knowing the hopelessness of it all the time.’
However, revelling in the role of underdog, Bobby excelled in the campaign, and was delighted to reduce the Conservative majority from 1,236 to a mere 268. On the day the results were made public, he again wrote to his half-brother:
You will have received a telegramme announcing the poll in East Herts. It surpassed my wildest dreams. Our people were mad with excitement, and I really am enchanted. Never did I expect to win but I hoped to run them close, and the Tories’ faces when the numbers were declared were very low and depressed.
In 1900 Bobby recaptured the Mid-Northamptonshire constituency, but his hopes of achieving high office were impeded by his being the Red Earl’s heir. T. P. O’Connor wrote of Bobby, in 1920: ‘A good, sometimes even a brilliant, speaker, with strong convictions tenaciously held, Bobby might have been a big Parliamentary figure: but the doom of an inevitable earldom ... hung over him, and he subsided into a great courtier.’
Bobby did not want to leave the Commons. He believed he had much still to do there, and he had little enthusiasm for the life of a courtier. However, he felt a sense of duty to obey his monarch’s wishes and, after the Red Earl’s debilitating stroke in 1905, Edward VII decided it was time to promote Bobby in the royal household, and to recognize his position as heir to the Spencer title. Thus Bobby was created Viscount Althorp in his own right, and became Lord Chamberlain in December 1905. Although Bobby put a brave public face on these developments, his diary reveals his utter disappointment at being removed irrevocably from the Commons:
I said that I would accept the position if the King wished it. And there is the end of my political life in the House of Commons. I cannot say how I regret it, and I am by no means sure that we shall not lose the seat; but there it is — Heaven help me ... I feel very depressed about it.
It was clear from the start that Edward VII was looking to Bobby to provide some relief from his more stuffy courtiers. Bobby’s diary entry for 12 December 1905 reveals:
At 11.4.0 I was sent for by the King, who greeted me most cordially. Said as an old friend he wanted to talk to me about the Ld Chamberlain’s department ... Then he talked about S. [Spencer — the Red Earl] and heard all I had to say. Was most sympathetic and kind ... Said that I was to come and see him often, my duty was to do so. I tried to go away but he kept me and talked. At last he ended the audience saying that next week I should probably kiss hands. I had asked him about his cough. He said it was only the fog, and one ought to have oxygen to breathe. He hoped to find less fog at Welbeck.
Apart from the responsibilities appertaining to the Royal Household, the Lord Chamberlain was also the censor of plays destined for public performance in Britain. As a contemporary noted with disapproval, ‘A tick of his pencil was law; despite the Liberalism that is supposed to be in him, he loved that autocratic weapon.’ However, by the time that Bobby was wielding this power, the public mood had started to turn against blithe acceptance of the Lord Chamberlain’s moral judgements on its behalf. Petitions were signed against his authority and, by the time of Bobby’s resignation, it was clear that the petitioners had won: he was to be the last of the old-style censors.
The period 1900-1910 was perhaps the decade most redolent with family grief in the entire Spencer history. In 1903, Charlotte had died; 1905 saw the end of the Red Earl’s effective life, as he settled into five years of dotage before his own death in 1910. But there were two other deaths in the intervening period which rocked the remaining S
pencers more than either of the above, for they were of two ladies who had seemed still too young and healthy to be considered candidates for an early grave.
Bobby’s sister Va had always been particularly close to her brother. They had survived a childhood together without knowing their father, and living very much as a secondary Spencer family at Guilsborough, with the Red Earl residing at Althorp and Spencer House.
The siblings shared the same politics in adult life, Va becoming an active member of the Women’s Liberal Foundation. In 1881, she had married William, Lord Sandhurst, and accompanied him during his term as Governor of Bombay from 1895 to 1900. Va and Bobby had missed one another enormously during the five years of absence, and had made a point of meeting regularly on the Sandhursts’ return from their posting. However, towards the end of 1905, Va started to feel unwell.
To begin with, nobody was overly concerned by Va’s condition. The first note of alarm comes in Bobby’s diary, on 1 January 1906: ‘Got up to find a letter from Sandhurst saying that Va was still unwell, and that Barlow was to be consulted. Flurried me a good deal. I pray that there is nothing really wrong ...’ There was: the consultant discovered that Va had cancer of the liver, and that it was so far advanced as to be terminal.
Va, a devout Christian, showed enormous courage over the next two months, as she slid rapidly towards death. The last time she was able to talk to her brother was on 3 March, and he was distraught at the ravaged form that greeted him that day: ‘I went in. Va smiled at me. I kissed her twice, blessed her, and came out, saying I hoped she would sleep. She said, “I think so”. She looked very very thin, her neck shrunk to nothing, her right hand perfectly bloodless lying on a cushion.’ Va never regained consciousness.
On 12 March, it was decided to try to prolong her life by up to three months, by operating on her, with a mixture of ether, laughing gas and chloroform as anaesthetic. When she was cut open it was discovered that her stomach was half the expected size. Her physical reserves were similarly reduced. Bobby was by her bedside at 8.55 p.m. the following evening, when Va shivered, took two or three deep breaths, before sighing her life away: ‘We used my watch to see if there was any breath, then a looking glass, but there was none.’ She was fifty years old.
The Spencer Family Page 33