by John Pearson
Dorothy’s father, Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester, came of a famous line of Tudor soldiers and administrators including his uncle, the legendary poet-hero Sir Philip Sidney, author of Arcadia, who died so gallantly at the battle of Zutphen in what were then the Spanish Netherlands. His death at the age of thirty-two, caught the imagination of Elizabethan England on something like the scale of the reaction to the death of his distant kinswoman, Princess Diana, four centuries later. Although Queen Elizabeth disliked Sidney, he was mourned across Europe. One nobleman of the day thought it sufficient to put on his tomb - ‘Friend of Sir Philip Sidney’. On hearing of his death, Philip II of Spain wrote in his diary: ‘He was my godson’, and the citizens of London are said to have ‘packed the windows and even the roofs of Fleet Street to watch his coffin trundle by’.
After marrying Sidney’s great niece, Henry Spencer took his bride to Paris. Lord Leicester was there as ambassador, and they spent the next two years with him, returning to Althorp at the end of 1641 with three young children, Robert, Henry and Dorothy. They were just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War a few months later.
Henry’s puritan sympathies and anti-court family traditions inclined him, like his friend Falkland and others among the aristocracy, to side with Parliament. He was wary of both Court and King, and as late as June 1642 Parliament appointed him Lord Lieutenant for Northamptonshire, charged with raising the militia on its behalf against the King. Accepting this duty, Henry put the Roundhead Militia Ordinance into effect with considerable vigour, ensuring that almost all the shire was held by Parliament when hostilities began in earnest.
Then suddenly he changed allegiance. According to Clarendon, ‘he was recovered to a right understanding, of which he was very capable, by his uncle, [the Earl of] Southampton’.
Lord Southampton, like Lord Falkland who had also reluctantly joined the King, remained one of the strongest supporters of a compromise peace throughout the Civil War. And Henry, in spite of his conversion to the Royal cause, was actually a most reluctant cavalier, as was his father-in-law, Lord Leicester, who unwillingly settled for the King. It was an indication of how split the country had become that two of Lord Leicester’s own sons - Philip, Lord Lisle, and his younger brother, Algernon Sidney - stayed firmly on the side of Parliament.
Early in September Henry rode away from Althorp to join King Charles at Shrewsbury, having sent his wife and children to Lady Leicester’s protection at Penshurst. He had done his work so well in organising Northamptonshire for Parliament that he was unable to raise a local regiment for the King. Refusing a commission, he decided to serve in the King’s bodyguard instead.
Someone said of Spencer that he shared Lord Falkland’s ‘belief in the crown, modified by distrust of its wearer’. This distrust increased the more he saw of Charles. But as an aristocrat he faced a problem which had not concerned the Spencers when they were raising sheep and making money - the idea of honour. And as he soon discovered, honour was expensive.
Honour made him lend the King £10,000 and join him when he raised his standard at Nottingham in September 1642. And at the battle of Edgehill, the first pitched battle of the Civil War, honour led him to the forefront of the cavalry charge against the Parliamentary forces.
After Edgehill, Henry spent the winter with his family, presumably at Oxford, but with spring the fighting and the threat to the city resumed, and they left him reluctantly for the safety of Penshurst. In June, guessing that he would never see the money he had lent the King again, he decided to accept the earldom that James had tried to sell his grandfather in its place. Later, when the King left Oxford to lay siege to Gloucester, it was no longer young Lord Spencer riding with him in the royal bodyguard, but the newly created Earl of Sunderland.
But Lord Sunderland hated soldiering as much as ever. In a letter to his wife from the siege of Gloucester he wrote about ‘the noise and tintamarre of guns and drums, the horid spectacles and the hideous cries of dead and hurt men’. He went on to assure her, ‘How infinitely more happy I should esteem myself quietly to enjoy your company at Althorp, than to be troubled with the noises and engaged in the factions of the Court, which I shall ever endeavour to avoid.’
But once again he was having to contend with honour. ‘Unless a man were resolved to fight on the parliament side, which for my part I had rather be hanged, it will be said without doubt that a man is afraid to fight. If there could be an expert to be found to solve the punctilio of honour, I would not continue here an hour.’
So honour kept him reluctantly in the flooded trenches round the city, but with few illusions now about the royal cause. As a keen Protestant, the more he saw of Charles I and his courtiers, the less he wished to be involved with them. As C.V. Wedgwood writes, ‘the growing influence of the Papists on the king deeply disturbed him. The King, he thought, would be in London before the year was out; and this would bring the triumph of extreme and violent men, and there would be no alternative for those, like himself, of moderate and Protestant views, but to go into voluntary exile.’
He continued seeing Falkland, one of the few to whom he could now talk freely. During the siege they often dined together in Lord Falkland’s cottage, together with the Protestant theologian John Chillingworth (currently enlisted in the royal forces as an engineer). The three sat long into the night, talking not of honour, nor of tactics, but of the more serious business of theology.
The battle camp, however, was no place for moderate-minded intellectuals. When Lord Essex, the Parliamentary leader, took the risk of leading his army out of London to relieve the siege of Gloucester, the King saw his chance to lift the siege, march swiftly back to London and retake the undefended capital. But before this happened, Charles, egged on by his courtiers spoiling for a fight, decided to engage the Parliamentary army outside Newbury.
Henry Spencer had as little faith in the royal strategy as in the royal person or his followers. But yet again honour made him set aside his doubts and placed him in the forefront of the royal army as the autumn sun was rising and the cavalry prepared to charge the enemy below them.
Clarendon describes what happened next. ‘Having no Command in the Army [Sunderland] attended upon the King’s Person, under the obligation of Honour; and putting himself that day in the King’s troop as a Voluntier before they came to Charge, was taken away by a cannon bullet.’
Henry Spencer, first Earl of Sunderland, was twenty-three when the cannon bullet took him off. His friend Lord Falkland died in the ensuing battle, but before they buried Henry in a common grave, someone cut his heart out and carried it back to Althorp. Here his widow, Countess of Sunderland for just four months, had it placed in the vault in Great Brington church beside those ‘costly and self-confident’ tombs of her husband’s ancestors.
They had had a happy marriage. ‘I know you lived happily, and so as nobody but yourself could measure the contentment of it,’ her father wrote. ‘I rejoiced at it and did thank God for making me one of the means to procure it for you.’ She was five months pregnant with a second daughter at the time; her eldest son, two-year-old Robert Spencer, was now the second Earl of Sunderland.
Chapter 2
Shameless Sunderland
Robert, second Earl of Sunderland (1641-1702)
Henry Spencer died honourably, but he had done his family no favours by getting himself killed in battle for a cause he barely believed in and leaving behind a pregnant wife with three small children to be taken care of. So it was predictable that his son Robert would not be too preoccupied with honour when he became a man. Honour would prove a luxury that he could ill afford, but through dishonour Robert, second Earl of Sunderland, did more to advance the Spencers than any other member of the family, apart from its founder, Sir John Spencer, who was probably not terribly concerned with honour either.
Sunderland’s contemporaries loathed him, almost to a man. ‘Shameless Sunderland’, they called him, and ‘the great apostate of Althorp’. But this was ge
nerally said behind his back, for people also feared him. At the height of his power, the future Queen Anne called him ‘the most subtil working villain on the face of the earth’ as he had led her father to ruin; long after his death Macaulay’s damning verdict was: ‘Nature had given him a keen understanding, a restless and mischievous temper, a cold heart and an abject spirit.’
Much of this was true. Even today Robert Sunderland appears splendidly despicable - a turncoat and a cynic, a false friend and great betrayer. Unlike the later Spencers, who became so loaded down with wealth and honours that they had little alternative to being honourable and virtuous, Sunderland is slippery as a snake, darting whichever way he feels his fortunes might direct him, changing religion when it suits him, wildly extravagant, an accomplished liar, mercenary and utterly corrupt. If he had a conscience, no one has found evidence of its existence.
All of which makes him absolutely fascinating, and has earned him a unique position in the human chain that links the Spencers with the present day. Balzac remarked that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Behind the Spencer family lies Shameless Sunderland.
Unlike those of certain of the later Spencers, Robert’s face is unforgettable. Someone called him ‘the thin great man in Whitehall’, and one gets a hint of this in his later portraits - the absurdly haughty mien, the hooded, faintly slanting eyes, the unquestionably aristocratic nose.
As far as the Spencers were concerned, he increased the splendour and importance of the family immeasurably. Thanks to him Althorp was transformed from a Jacobean mansion into a palace worthy of a Prince. Thanks again to him, the family taboo against the court was finally forgotten, which helped promote the Spencers from titled plutocrats into serious members of the aristocracy. He himself became a statesman of the first rank, playing a crucial role in politics and the development of the constitution and the monarchy. And finally, besides all this, he placed his descendants in his everlasting debt by putting them in line for one of the very great inheritances of the eighteenth century. Such were the fruits of Sunderland’s dishonour.
One can but speculate on how a family as sensible and solid as the Spencers suddenly produced this quite outlandish character. Perhaps it was those turbulent Sidney genes which became laced with the rustic nature of the Spencers when Lord Leicester’s daughter married Henry Spencer.
Four months after Henry’s death, Dorothy Sunderland gave birth to a daughter, Penelope, but as the fighting was already spreading through Northamptonshire she was forced to stay on at Penshurst with her parents and the children.
As the Civil War progressed, both sides inflicted damage on the Spencer properties. First the Roundheads sacked Althorp, then the Royalists razed the original Spencer house at Wormleighton to the ground (apart from a gatehouse which survives, a tantalising relic, to the present day). Finally, to crown the disaster, the Spencer estates were sequestered as royalist property after Cromwell’s final victory.
Because of this, Dorothy Sunderland and the children had to go on living at Penshurst for seven years as guests of Lord and Lady Leicester, and the infant Earl of Sunderland grew up with the Leicester’s youngest son, Henry Sidney. Although he was his uncle, Henry was almost his exact contemporary and became his closest - and at times his only - friend.
It was not in Dorothy’s nature to accept the disaster that war had inflicted on the Spencers, and she placed the family firmly in her debt by the way she helped restore their fortunes. First she took advantage of the fact that Sidneys had fought on both sides in the Civil War, and somehow persuaded both her Roundhead brothers, Lord de Lisle and Algernon Sidney, to use their influence to get the Spencer lands released from sequestration. Then, once Althorp was recovered, she set about repairing the extensive damage and making the old house habitable. It was thanks entirely to her that the ten-year-old Robert, Earl of Sunderland, was finally able to return to his ancestral home in 1651.
In the absence of records, how she managed this with the Republic still in power remains a mystery, particularly as her activities did not stop there. Considerable sums of money must have been forthcoming, for during the 1650s the courtyard was roofed over and a few years later work began on the great staircase that is one of the glories of the house. Just as remarkable in its way, Dorothy was able to ensure that, at seventeen, her eldest son embarked on what she felt to be the proper education of a nobleman - a lengthy period travelling through France and Italy
Bear-led by an Oxford don, pious Dr Pierce of Magdalen, Robert Sunderland and Henry Sidney departed for the Continent together, with introductions from Lord Leicester to some of the most noble houses in France and Spain. They travelled indefatigably and, thanks to the reputation of the Sidneys, seem to have been welcome guests wherever they alighted.
After the England of the Commonwealth it must have been a revelation for these two young noblemen to find themselves in Europe with the entrèe to some of the grandest and most elegant society in France. How Dr Pierce coped with them is not recorded. It seems that in Paris he could not prevent them running into debt; but what they spent their money on is matter for conjecture. For Robert Sunderland was already starting a lifelong love-affair with France, and in particular with the glittering society he witnessed at its court, dancing attendance on the most impressive king in Christendom.
It was in France that his passion for painting and architecture started, and having a considerable flair for language, he was also able to perfect his Spanish in addition to his French, when he and his youthful uncle left Paris for Madrid and visited the Spanish court together. Then, on the eve of the restoration of King Charles II, Sunderland returned to England as what he would remain for the rest of his life - more of a European than an Englishman.
He came back to find his mother remarried - to a handsome, ineffectual Kentishman called Smythe - but she was still calling herself the Countess of Sunderland, and making it clear that Mr Smythe had no authority whatever over his noble stepson. Sunderland would have undoubtedly agreed, since he already possessed the arrogance of a Restoration rake and was hardly likely to take criticism lightly - particularly from somebody called Smythe. At Oxford he survived a term at Christ Church, then left in a hurry for what appears a most unlikely reason - supporting another Christ Church man, William Penn, the Quaker and future founder of Pennsylvania, in a demonstration against the reintroduction of the Anglican liturgy in the college chapel. Not that it mattered very much what Robert Sunderland got up to now. For with his majority approaching, he would soon take his seat in the House of Lords, and with it full control of Althorp and his enviable inheritance.
He was fortunate to come of age in the freer atmosphere following the Restoration, and more fortunate still when King Charles decided to repay the £10,000 which Henry Spencer had lent his father. On the strength of this Sunderland promptly ordered the seventeenth-century equivalent of a Lamborghini - a brand new coach from Paris - and sat for his portrait to Sir Peter Lely. The painting, which is still at Althorp, shows exactly what one would expect - the epicene features and haughty glance of a terribly spoiled young man of fashion.
As such he could not wait to leave England again, spending two more years in his beloved France before returning in 1663 to get married - to seventeen-year-old Anne Digby, the heiress daughter of the Earl of Bristol. But, he being Sunderland, even this could not go smoothly. One the eve of the wedding he bolted, warning his friends ‘not to enquire into the reason’ … but saying that he was ‘resolved never to have her’. With this the Europhile Lord Sunderland was off once more across the Channel, this time to Italy, accompanied by Henry Sidney and his brother-in-law, Sir George Savile (later to become the politician Lord Halifax), who was married to Robert’s sister Dorothy.
Sunderland’s treatment of the buxom Anne is generally seen as typical of his deeply selfish nature, but for once there may just have been a reason for his bad behaviour. At the time of his proposal his prospective father-in-law, the intemperate Lord Bristol, had aro
used King Charles’s wrath by attacking his First Minister, Clarendon, in the House of Lords; and Sunderland, with a weather eye upon some future court appointment, may well have felt it inadvisable to become linked through marriage with an enemy of the monarch. Equally, he may simply have felt the urge to see Italy before he married.
Long before the ‘Grand Tour’ became so fashionable in the eighteenth century there was already a conviction that the true home of literature, art and architecture lay in Italy. The Elizabethan paragon, Sir Philip Sidney, spent more than a year studying in Rome and Venice in the 1560s. Now his great-great-nephew was treading in his famous footsteps.
Inevitably the three young noblemen saw Rome and Venice, but what seems to have produced the most lasting impression on Sunderland was a lengthy visit to the youthful ruler of Tuscany, Grand Duke Cosimo III. Although wretchedly married to Louis XIV’s cousin, Marguerite Louise d’Orleans, Cosimo’s existence was made bearable by his court’s apparently unending progress between one or another of the fifteen sumptuous renaissance villas which the Medici still owned in the hills round Florence. These included several great houses like Poggio a Caiano, Buontalenti’s Villa Artemisa, and Lorenzo Medici’s favourite villa at Careggi, in which the Tuscan court continued to pursue its strangely restless life of pleasure. For Sunderland, Paris had been an overwhelming show of the power of the king of France, but these Tuscan villas of the Medici must have seemed attainable examples of a sort of paradise on earth.
Before leaving Italy for good, one task remained for him - to have his portrait painted. Sir Philip Sidney had been painted in Venice by Veronese. (The portrait has long since disappeared.) Sunderland chose the young and still virtually unknown Roman painter, Carlo Maratta. Unlike subsequent Grand Tourists, who had themselves depicted in the height of fashion in their English finery, Sunderland wore sandals and a Roman toga, and appears against the stormy background of a classical landscape. With his high cheekbones and intense, faintly slanting eyes it is a disturbing portrait. Since Lely painted him he has put on weight, and the languid look has gone entirely, so that the portrait of himself that Sunderland brought back to Althorp was not of an English nobleman at all, but of a young and dangerous-looking Roman senator.