Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals

by John Pearson

  There can be no greater contrast to the Duke’s financial situation than that of Sarah’s favoured heir, his brother Jack. Where Charles was effectively disinherited by Sarah, Jack was that rich old woman’s unchallenged legatee. When the full extent of all she owned had been computed, it was revealed that Jack had inherited not so much a fortune as an empire - with no less than thirty-nine separate manors in a dozen counties. Some, like Crowhurst in Surrey and Hailweston in Northamptonshire, were relatively small. But other houses and estates were of considerable size and wealth. There was Sarah’s old home at St Albans, which effectively returned its own member of parliament. There was the shootingbox and fenland estate of North Creake in Norfolk. There were large tracts of land in Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire. Above all there was Wimbledon Manor with its potential urban goldmine at Putney and Mortlake. There was also half a million pounds in money and investments. When added to the 12,000 ancestral Spencer acres in Northamptonshire and Althorp this meant that, in terms of sheer resources, Sarah had made the Althorp Spencers into one of the wealthiest families in England. Since Charles Spencer remained fifth Earl of Sunderland on becoming Duke of Marlborough, Jack was still without a title, but with money this could soon be rectified, and the Althorp Spencers were vastly richer than the nearly bankrupt Dukes of Marlborough.

  For Jack Spencer it must suddenly have seemed that all those years of dancing attendance on Sarah had finally paid off, and he should have been the happiest of men as at last he entered into his great inheritance. But it was not that simple. With Sarah, things rarely were. Before she died she had made absolutely sure that there were several awkward catches to the enjoyment of his fortune.

  In the first place there was that all-important clause in his grandmother’s will which prohibited both him and his heir from taking any pension or position with the court. This meant that at the age of thirty-two Jack was politically castrated and totally excluded from political preferment, a career at court, or government largesse. More serious still was the discovery that his ‘old fury of a grandmother’ had effectively tied up all the lands that she had left in trust, and that the trustees themselves were utterly intent upon preserving every item of the great inheritance in the future interests of the family. This caused Jack serious problems. Sarah had lived so much longer than anyone expected that both he and Charles had been borrowing for years against their expectations, and now Jack’s debts were even larger than his brother’s. Whereas Charles was said to have been owing half a million pounds at Sarah’s death, one estimate put Jack’s indebtedness closer to a million.

  Jack, not unnaturally, had been assuming that he could use at least part of his inheritance to repay his debts, but this was shown to have been a most unwise assumption. He discovered that with all his property in trust he was banned from selling it to realise his assets. Nor could he even touch the income from the property and investments which, according to Horace Walpole, amounted to at least £30,000 a year. But Sarah’s death was the signal for creditors like Matthew Lamb and Sir Theodore Janssen’s son (who seems to have been lending Jack large amounts of money in the hope of recovering Wimbledon) to fall upon Jack, clamouring for payment. It must have been particularly disappointing for the easy-going hedonist to find himself having to convince these tough financiers that in spite of his inheritance he could genuinely not repay them, since his trustees were using all the income from his vast estate to pay off other debts and legacies.

  There is a certain amount of sympathy for him, but it is also hard not to feel impatient at his weakness and stupidity. Surely even he could have done something to make money out of this enormous legacy? He could have found himself sensible advisers. He could still have lived economically and happily at Althorp -which his brother had considerably enhanced in his years of tenure - or at Hollywell, or Wimbledon. And although forbidden to take any profit from the government or the court, there was nothing to stop him trading his electoral influence for money or a title. His situation, while difficult, was far from hopeless, and no property owner like him needed to despair. But despair he did. For, having just won the greatest inheritance of his age, Jack now seemed paralysed. His doctor summed the situation up as follows: ‘He didn’t have experience in the world sufficient to conduct himself and his affairs, was very negligent, and averse to business. Nor was he prudent in his dealings.’

  Sarah Marlborough had been making all the real decisions in Jack’s life for so long that she seemed to have destroyed his will. So it was that, instead of benefiting from her fortune, the greatest inheritor in England became its victim. Jack lacked the character and skill to cope with it, to the extent that it actually brought him far more misery than pleasure. In a sense he only had himself to blame, but Sarah should also bear some of the responsibility for Jack’s disaster. By spoiling and bullying him for so many years, she had effectively destroyed Jack Spencer before she died.

  A.L. Rowse believed that Jack’s decline was due to undiagnosed tuberculosis which he caught as a child from his mother Anne. Although there is no direct evidence that Anne Sunderland died of the disease, Jack’s sisters, Anne and Diana certainly did, and both his children were probably consumptive. For Jack himself the evidence is inconclusive. Certainly, shortly after Sarah’s death his doctor was assuring him that he found him ‘of strong and healthy constitution, and likely to live many years in good health’. But it is also clear that he was drinking more than was good for him. The ebullient Jack Spencer, who had once made Sarah laugh by re-entering her drawing room by the window when she had shown him the door, had turned into the notorious ‘Sack’ Spencer, best known for his addiction to the bottle.

  Drinking heavily, he grew morose. There was no sign of affection to or from his wife and family - nor did women or gambling seem to interest him any longer. Instead he withdrew from life, and the more he drank the more his health deteriorated. But even now when he consulted an apothecary in Chelsea, Jack was assured that ‘provided he could refrain from chewing tobacco and drinking of drams, he might still live a great while’. But did he want to?

  ‘From time to time’, as his doctor suggested, Jack would take a cure at Bath, hoping that the waters would ‘remove the disorders of his stomach’. For a while, it seems, they did, for soon his doctor was prescribing Jack what he called ‘a strict regime’ which he insisted could still save him. But Jack was too weak willed to follow it. And in 1745, barely twenty months after inheriting one of the greatest fortunes in the country, Jack Spencer died. In recording his death, Horace Walpole wrote his epitaph: ‘With an income of £30,000 a year, Jack Spencer had died, because he would not be abridg’d of those invaluable blessings of an English subject, brandy, small beer and tobacco.’

  Even now Sarah’s influence continued to affect the Spencers, and Walpole it was who also described the strange postscript to Jack’s death.

  ‘The great business of the town,’ he wrote, ‘is Jack Spencer’s will, who has left Althorp and the Sunderland estates in reversion to Pitt, after more obligations and more pretended friendships for his brother than is conceivable.’

  It seems that this alarming clause in Jack Spencer’s will was due to Sarah’s influence, and it left a most worrying situation for the family. Not long before Sarah died she had been delighted by Pitt the Elder’s angry attacks on the Hanoverian influence on George II and the foreign policy of Walpole. She had made Jack agree to the reversion of all the Spencer property being left to Pitt - anything to stop it going back to Charles and the Marlborough side of the family. This meant that everything depended on the heir Jack Spencer left behind him. Small wonder that his brother Charles was so unhappy when he heard the news. For far from strengthening the house of Spencer, as she had once intended, Sarah had left its future hanging by a slender thread of a single life - Jack’s only son, John Spencer. At the tender age of twelve, John found himself the ‘richest schoolboy in England’.

  Chapter 6

  The First Earl

  John, fi
rst Earl Spencer (1734-1783)

  Young John Spencer was not only the richest schoolboy in England, but also the most precious as far as the Spencers were concerned, since he was all that now prevented Althorp and Sarah Marlborough’s fortune passing to William Pitt the Elder. This must have made his adolescence a time of some anxiety, and as a consequence his mother seems to have lavished more care and attention on him than was good for his character. Even as a grown man he would never quite get over all the spoiling he received in childhood.

  His mother’s behaviour was understandable, however, for as well as being so important he was also beautiful, having inherited his father’s looks, with the same fine eyes and clear complexion. But he was always delicate, and after his sister, Diana, died in late childhood, his mother became doubly anxious for him.

  Sarah Marlborough’s death, followed so rapidly by Jack Spencer’s, had provided a breathing space for the family trustees to address the problems of the estate, settle Jack’s debts, invest in yet more land, including Wandsworth and Battersea, and amass a surplus of £25,000 in cash for John Spencer to receive on his majority. And although his mother had married for the second time kindly Lord Cowper, she continued to dedicate her life to looking after her delicate son, and thereby saving Sarah Marlborough’s vast inheritance for the Spencers.

  After his sister’s death, John’s health improved sufficiently for his mother to send him off to be educated at Harrow, where she made sure he was looked after by a private tutor. However, towards the end of his schooldays John’s health was causing fresh anxiety, and instead of being sent to university or on the Grand Tour, he returned to Althorp and his doting mother, having grown from a pretty child into an unusually handsome young man. Although there is no evidence of the exact nature of his illness it was almost certainly tuberculosis, which affected him intermittently for the rest of his life and would ultimately kill him.

  Whether or not Lady Cowper knew what was wrong with her son, she was obviously extremely worried, but at the same time she must have realised that this was not the moment to be over-sentimental. If her son’s life was threatened, when so much depended on it, the sooner he was married and producing little Spencers the better. Just as she took care of most things in his life, Lady Cowper seems to have taken care of this as well.

  In December 1755 she gave a party at Althorp on the eve of her son’s twenty first birthday, in the course of which it had been arranged that he should slip upstairs to his mother’s dressing room with seventeen-year-old Georgiana Poyntz. Lady Cowper and Georgiana’s mother were waiting for them with a local vicar, who proceeded to marry the young couple there and then in the simplest of ceremonies. Shortly afterwards, when they returned to the party as man and wife, none of their guests was any the wiser.

  It was most mysterious, and when the marriage was made public, Horace Walpole expressed surprise that somebody as rich and grand as Spencer should be marrying ‘a mere Miss Poyntz’, when he seemed to be ideally placed for another of those splendid marriages so beloved by his family.

  Miss Poyntz was neither rich nor famous. Her father, Stephen Poyntz, the son of a London upholsterer, was a self-made businessman who had risen to become a courtier, a diplomat and tutor to the Duke of Cumberland. He was also a trusted friend of the Duke of Devonshire, and his social connections explain how his lively daughter came to meet the young John Spencer, and fall in love with him, and he with her. But a romance between them would have gone no further without positive encouragement from both

  their families. While the Poyntzes must have seen marriage with rich John Spencer, however ill he was, as a splendid opportunity for their daughter, Lady Cowper must also have detected in Georgiana Poyntz the sort of wife her son so badly needed.

  Not only could this serious and affectionate young girl bear her sickly son’s all-important children; she could also look after him and give him all the love he needed. His health was so uncertain at this time that someone later said, ‘It was a question of which came first, the marriage or the funeral’, which almost certainly explains why the wedding was performed so hurriedly and with such discretion. The ailing groom was thought unlikely to have coped with a grander ceremony, and he was really marrying his nurse. But they loved each other, and Georgiana would devotedly look after him in sickness and in health for the rest of his life.

  It was thanks to her that the marriage swiftly proved a much greater success than anyone - apart presumably from Pitt the Elder - can have hoped for. (Pitt, in fact, had more serious matters on his mind, having just effectively taken charge of the war against the French, and he made no mention of the matter.)

  But no sooner was John Spencer married than his health dramatically improved. He and his wife seemed more in love than ever and, before long, everyone concerned about the future of the Spencers and their great inheritance could breathe again. Young Mrs Spencer was pregnant and, provided all went well, the family would have an heir for Althorp and for Sarah Marlborough’s inheritance. The relief was enormous and, to celebrate, John Spencer decided to use part of his great legacy to build one of the most beautiful houses in London.

  Although he owned more grand houses than he knew what to do with, the one place where he lacked a residence was London. His Sunderland grandfather’s house in Piccadilly had been sold, following his death, and Marlborough House in Pall Mall had gone to his uncle, Charles Duke of Marlborough, leaving the newly married Spencers with nothing more than what Horace Walpole would probably have called ‘a mere abode’ in Grosvenor Street. It was in fact extremely comfortable, but it was not in keeping with the Spencers’ wealth and their suddenly expanding social aspirations. But like most things in John Spencer’s now enviable existence, this was something else that money could provide.

  As luck would have it, shortly before the Spencers married, Henry Bromley, first Baron Montfort, an overweight and none too scrupulous City businessman, was involved in a financial scandal that ruined him. After dining at Whites, he called on his lawyer to countersign his will and, while the man was in another room, put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. His suicide placed the most desirable building site in London on the market. He had recently bought some land between St James’s Palace and Green Park, and had already dug the foundations for what was intended to be Monfort House. John Spencer purchased the site from the dead businessman’s estate and proceeded to build Spencer House instead.

  Thanks to Sarah Marlborough, with so much money at the couple’s disposal the result was no ordinary house. They could have exactly what they wanted, and they were fortunate to be building at a time when it seemed impossible to create anything ugly -whether a book, a tombstone, a carriage or a house - particularly a house overlooking Green Park, with the pick of London’s architects to call on.

  They chose John Vardy, a follower of the architect William Kent, a choice revealing something of the way their minds were working. For Kent’s accepted masterpiece was the rebuilt Devonshire House, the grandest of all the great Whig palaces and home of the Cavendish Dukes of Devonshire, which faced them just across Green Park from Piccadilly. And although the mansion Vardy planned was very much in Kent’s Palladian manner, it was based on the smaller and more elegant Palazzo Chiericato in Verona.

  There was great joy when, in January 1757, Mrs Spencer gave birth to a healthy baby girl. To express his gratitude to his wife, John Spencer insisted on naming her Georgiana, and the following year the arrival of a son and heir, George John, guaranteed the future of the Spencer dynasty. Their third and last child, Henrietta (always known as Harriet), arrived two years later.

  The Spencers were a particularly devoted family, due partly to John Spencer’s still delicate state of health and also to his wife’s profoundly earnest dedication to their children’s needs. Coming from a close-knit middle-class family herself, she would always be involved in her children’s lives, taking an unusual interest in their education and religion.

  After four years, Spencer House was
still not finished, and Spencer and his wife had become disenchanted with their architect. Kent and Vardy were going out of fashion. Stylistically, ancient Greece was superseding ancient Rome, and there was now a new genius for everyone to turn to, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, who was freshly back from Athens where he had been studying the art and architecture of Ancient Greece. He was considered the architectural arbiter elegantiarum of his day, and the Spencers appointed him to take over from Vardy and impart additional refinements to the house, assisted by many of the most gifted craftsmen from England, France and Italy.

  The result was the most beautiful neo-classical house in London, which alone of the great Whig London mansions miraculously survives today. It has been as miraculously restored thanks to Lord (Jacob) Rothschild, who fell in love with it and whose investment company bought a 124-year lease on the house in 1987. Walking through its rooms today one glimpses something of the style and splendour in which John and Georgiana Spencer lived their married life in London.

  Now that John Spencer had a son it was time to think about a title. At twenty-one he had been offered - and had rather languidly accepted - a seat in parliament, but he does not seem to have enjoyed it. His distant cousin, Lady Mary Coke, heard him speak in a debate and commented, ‘as much as could be heard was very pretty, but he was extremely frightened and spoke very low’. If he was so uncomfortable in parliament, the clause in Sarah Marlborough’s will banning him from any ministerial appointment, cannot have seriously worried him, particularly not with so much else in a life as rich as his to relish and enjoy.