Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals

by John Pearson

  Just before she died, Georgiana wrote a letter to her son, Lord Hartington. In it she admitted her faults, and said that she was putting all her hopes in the son she left behind. At whatever cost, and after whatever disappointments, she had at least produced the heir.

  ‘I shall live on in you,’ she told him.

  Chapter 8

  The Great Library

  George John, second Earl Spencer (1758-1834)

  As an example of the perfect late-eighteenth-century aristocrat, it would be hard to better the First Earl’s son and heir, George Spencer, who in 1783, at the age of twenty-five, succeeded him as second Earl Spencer. Unlike so many of his recent male predecessors, he had grown up strong and healthy. Fanny Burney thought him ‘very handsome with fine blue eyes’, and his grandmother Lady Cowper said that he was ‘most agreeable’. Most of those who met him thought the same, from George III to the aged Dr Johnson, from Charles James Fox to William Pitt the Younger. He had an air of effortless distinction and was generous and kind. As a scholar he was equally at home in Greek and Latin and spoke excellent French and Italian. He was a faithful husband, a loving father and a man of reasonable but not excessive piety. He gambled moderately and rarely drank too much. A Whig by birth, he was suspicious of the growing power of the Crown, supported American independence and thought the slave trade something that ‘no Christian and indeed no man of the least feeling for his fellow creatures can tolerate’. But when war came with revolutionary France, he patriotically joined the government of William Pitt, was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, ran the navy with extreme efficiency and will always be remembered as the man who picked and promoted Horatio Nelson.

  In almost every way the second Earl seemed the embodiment of that good sense which was considered the hallmark of an eighteenth-century English gentleman, which makes it all the stranger that for the Spencer family, his fifty-one year tenure of the earldom proved a period of such decline. While he maintained the splendour and the style of the great nobleman he was, income dwindled, debt increased as the disaster grew from which the Spencers never entirely recovered.

  The second Earl had grown up in a family ruled by women and, in the nursery at Spencer House, he had been largely overshadowed by his two dominating sisters, Georgiana and Harriet. With his father often absent or unwell, his closest bond was with his mother, and when he came to marry, as he did in 1784, he chose another strong-willed female in the person of the vivacious and outspoken Lavinia Bingham, daughter of the eccentric newly-created Irish peer Lord Lucan.

  It was very much a love match from the start. Early in the courtship he had written to his mother describing an evening with his sociable friend Vesey. ‘Best party I have seen there yet; Dr Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr Wraxall, Ly Lucan and Miss Bingham. Over the top. Oh! I am quite distracted. I stayed there till 11 o’clock (talking to the divine Lavinia). Decided to quit gambling and to think of nothing but her, for I can think of nothing else. I am quite out of my senses about her. I got up very late this morning. (I dreamt of her all night.)’

  The divine Lavinia responded to the attentions of this handsome heir to one of the great inheritances in England. She was, she said ‘mad with pride and happiness, but also with humility whenever I think of his love’. Within two months they were happily engaged and their marriage, at St George’s, Hanover Square, was the smartest and grandest of the season.

  As a newly married couple they gave every appearance of enjoying a truly enviable situation. Along with Spencer House and Althorp, they also had that great mixed bag of rich estates left to the family by Sarah Marlborough; and George’s potentially interfering mother, now the dowager Lady Spencer, was tactfully installed at Holywell, Sarah’s old house at St Albans, which was made her dower house. George’s own favourite residence remained ‘verdant Wimbledon’. He had been born there and always claimed it was ‘the nicest spot on earth’.

  The one serious fly in the ointment was financial, despite the £30-£40,000 a year income which the Earl theoretically received. The immense debts which his father had left behind him caused an immediate crisis; George could not even afford to pay his sister Harriet’s, marriage portion, and most of the available estates were burdened with mortgages. Normally the Earl would have paid some of these off by marrying an heiress. But Lavinia, with her marriage portion of only £5,000, was by Spencer standards barely an heiress at all. In order to pay off the pressing debts, George began selling some outlying estates, and replaced his father’s old agents by Thomas Harrison, a professional administrator, who was assisted by his sons.

  Althorp, which he and Lavinia had visited on their honeymoon, needed particular attention. Ever since the tenure of his horse-mad great uncle - Charles, fifth Earl of Sunderland, before he left to become the Duke of Marlborough - most of the money spent at Althorp had been on horses rather than humans and the neglect was all too evident. As George wrote to his mother, it would need a fortune ‘simply making the apartment we live in weatherproof, which it really hardly is at present, and saving the house from tumbling down’.

  Saving Althorp was an expense that could not be avoided. The great gardener, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown had already cleared away whatever remained of Le Notre’s parterres and formal gardens, and the effect, however bare in comparison, was entirely in the eighteenth-century fashion. Being a Whig, the Earl called in the most fashionable Whig architect, Henry Holland, to transform the appearance of the house to match. As a result, at great expense, the wonderful but now decrepit and unfashionable Italianate palace left by Shameless Sunderland was effectively rebuilt by Holland, and given the politest of Georgian façades in greyish so-called ‘mathematical’ tiles made by a manufacturer near Norwich. When completed, the new Althorp was extremely tasteful and polite and, like the Earl himself, was universally admired.

  Back in London, Countess Lavinia, as chatelaine of Spencer House, had taken up her social duties with determination - holding levees, luncheon parties and receptions twice a week, interspersed in summertime with ‘breakfasts’ for six hundred guests at Wimbledon, starting at around eleven and continuing till dusk. With so much effort, she rapidly acquired a reputation as a social figure, hostess, and something of a wit, but she never could compete with the overwhelming presence of her sister-in-law on the other side of the Park, and increasingly disapproved of Georgiana and the scandalous world of Devonshire House.

  The Earl was a tolerant man, who loved his sister and wasn’t overly concerned about her morals - or anybody else’s. He even got on well with his brother-in-law, the wintry Duke of Devonshire, who positively thawed in his company. Early that year the Duke had called at Wimbledon bearing a live turtle ‘which formed the basis for a feast’. But Georgiana did not join them, nor did Lavinia visit Devonshire House in return. ‘Your sister,’ Lavinia told her husband, ‘is quite incorrigible.’

  As the first Spencer benefiting from Sarah’s great inheritance to be free from her ban upon accepting office, the Earl allowed himself to be politically ambitious. ‘I believe that whenever it comes in my way to concern myself in public affairs, I shall be a great politician,’ he had written to his father with rather touching immodesty on the eve of leaving Harrow, and nothing since had made him change his mind. As a follower of Fox there seemed little chance of getting into government, but one cannot believe this seriously worried him.

  He was the least doctrinaire of men, as his wife was the most vehement of women. ‘Do you like Mr Pitt?’ she asked him. ‘Pray don’t, for I cannot. He is so affected, so conceited that he makes me sick.’

  In fact the Earl got on very well with Mr Pitt but, as he liked a peaceful life, chose not argue with Lavinia on the subject.

  A more serious problem between them was the fact that she was not maternal and deeply resented the sheer waste of time, not to speak of the discomfort, caused by procreation. With time she adjusted to the facts of life, but by then she had formed a life-long antipathy towards her first-born child, Jack. To
compensate, George always tried to show his son affection, particularly after his narrow escape when Wimbledon House caught fire in the spring of 1785. While on a trip to Althorp, the Spencers had left baby Jack with his wet-nurse in the nursery at Wimbledon. George was out hunting when news reached him of the fire. Rushing back to Wimbledon, they found that the nursery was the only part of Sarah’s house left standing, but that little Jack was safe.

  Apart from the nursery, little of Sarah’s ‘curtseying villa’ had survived. ‘I had no conception of so complete a demolition of everything combustible,’ wrote the Earl. For everything had gone, including Marlborough’s state carriage, his marble bust and twenty dozen bottles from his cellar, consumed by the villagers while putting out the fire - this presumably explaining why so little had survived the conflagration.

  George took the loss of his villa philosophically, as he took most things in life. However, the house was seriously underinsured, proof of the old regime’s incompetence, and the £8,000 insurance money he received was not enough to rebuild it. So it was that, although Wimbledon was the Earl’s favourite residence, the family had to camp out in the servants’ quarters when they visited until 1801, when he felt he could afford to have Henry Holland reconstruct the large but uninspired new villa called Wimbledon Park House. In the meantime, since Jack was safe he was entrusted to a more reliable nurse when his parents went off on a European tour a few months later.

  Like his parents before him, George Spencer did the Continental Tour in style, with a positive convoy of carriages and horses and numerous servants, including two cooks. They slowly bumped their way through Belgium and Germany to Italy, Christmassed in Rome, then travelled on to Naples to meet the spring. George was particularly anxious to see the famous diplomat and collector, Sir William Hamilton. When they met, Lavinia was not impressed by his young wife Emma, having heard distressing stories of her earlier existence, including a rumour that she had once been a prostitute. But the Earl liked her as he liked all pretty women.

  What really impressed George Spencer was Sir William’s passion for collecting. Sir William collected almost everything, and the Earl was particularly interested in his library. With Sir William as guide the Earl visited all the Neapolitan booksellers, and was most taken by the splendid books on offer, many of them by the greatest Italian and Sicilian printers. He purchased numerous editions of the classics and it was now that he first contracted the disease that would bring such pain and pleasure to his life. It was now that he became a serious book collector.

  The Spencers returned to Spencer House to find Jack looking ‘vastly well’, despite the fact that, since Lavinia more or less ignored him, he was unresponsive in her presence. The Earl, however, was discovering, as he wrote to his mother, that ‘Jack conversed in his manner a great deal with me. I did not understand much of what he said, but more I think than when I went away. He has got one of those swinging hobby horses which he rides extremely well, and is highly delighted with it.’

  Apart from playing with his son, the Earl had much to occupy his time. Henry Holland was now hard at work at Althorp, and in London there were the constant demands of politics and high society. But what also occupied the Earl’s attention were the books that he had bought in Italy. ‘Much occupied by matters bibliographical,’ he wrote to his mother, for already he had started adding to what was left of the third Earl of Sunderland’s great library at Althorp. As more than half of the books had been removed to Blenheim by great-uncle Charles when he departed to become the Duke of Marlborough, there were more than enough spaces on the shelves that needed filling.

  Soon he was writing to his mother of finding ‘a jewel of the first water - an early edition of Virgil at a reasonable price’. Then there was even more exciting news: Edward Gibbon was at Althorp visiting his library. The author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was particularly impressed by the Earl’s editions of Cicero ‘and is very entertaining indeed, tho’ nothing was ever as shocking as his figure. He is much pleased with the library.’

  This was only the beginning. In 1790, George Spencer heard that the great bibliophile, the Hungarian diplomat Count Karolyi Reviczky, worried by the state of Europe, was anxious for a settled income for his later years and might be persuaded to dispose of his famous library. It contained treasures acquired over many years, including early editions of the Greek and Latin classics, most of them in mint condition. Normally the Count would not have dreamt of selling, but with revolution threatening Europe there were few buyers in the offing and, after some negotiation, Count Reviczky accepted from the Earl a down payment of £1,000 and an annuity of £250 a quarter.

  This was probably the one sharp business deal George Spencer ever made. For Count Reviczky died eighteen months later, which meant that for £2,500 the Earl had got one of the great bargains in the history of book collecting. Encouraged by his coup, he determined to persevere with his obsession.

  He was interrupted by events in France. As a Whig who still believed in liberty, the Earl welcomed the fall of the Bastille in 1789 but, as the French Revolution gathered strength, it began to worry him just as it had worried the unfortunate Count Reviczky.

  Early in 1793, finding Jack ‘such good company, and cleverer than many people twice his age’, George took him to Dieppe for what was intended as a short holiday; but on reading reports there of ‘convulsions at Paris which stopped us going to Rouen’, the two hurriedly returned, much shaken, two days later.

  Unlike his sister, Georgiana, who was still regarding what was happening in France as a re-run of the great Whig revolution, the Earl feared anarchy spreading from France to England, and when war broke out the following year, his reaction was straightforward: ‘God grant we may be successful with it, for I verily believe that our existence as a free and independent country is in the scale.’

  Feeling as he did, he was strongly tempted to accept when Lavinia’s bête noire, William Pitt, with the backing of the King, invited him to join his government. After serious consideration he finally accepted, and at thirty-one found himself appointed First Lord of the Admiralty with overall responsibility for the Royal Navy.

  As Pitt had warned, it was a daunting task. Boxing Day found him writing to his mother that ‘Yesterday tho’ Christmas Day I was ten hours unremittingly at work in this office. I fear I fall far short of what the immense load of business here requires.’ He was running the Royal Navy almost single-handed and, along with Pitt and Dundas, was at the centre of the high command directing the conduct of the war.

  He proved an exceptional administrator. He was intelligent and hard working, and his planning helped secure the naval victories of Camperdown and Cape St Vincent - just as his sense of justice and good sense helped him settle the naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. Had the mutinies continued, the fleet could have been out of action and Britain left defenceless, but, as his wife wrote proudly, ‘the sailors have been satisfied thro’ Lord Spencer’s zeal, activity, judgement and firmness.’ Most of their grievances were met and, thanks to the Earl, the threat to the fleet was ended.

  But his greatest claim to glory came in 1798 when he selected and supported young Vice Admiral Nelson over the heads of more senior commanders to command the Mediterranean Fleet, and Nelson won his first great naval victory of the Nile in that July.

  The Earl regarded Nelson as his personal protégé, but, to start with, his wife was even more enthusiastic about the young Admiral. ‘How perfectly he fulfils my notion of a Christian hero!’ she exclaimed, and was most concerned about the hero’s health. ‘His wound is perfectly well, but he complains of a hectic cough, and a state of weakness that goes to my heart. However I trust in the air of Naples doing him good, dear dear creature. Every letter I see of his increases my respect for his character.’

  But not for long.

  Back in London, Lavinia learned of Nelson’s love for Emma Hamilton. Remembering Emma from her trip to Naples she became incensed against Nelson and, when the Spencers
entertained the hero and his wife to dinner at Spencer House, she later referred to him as ‘that little man between that old fool, Sir William, and his lady wife’. Prig that she was, she could never bring herself to say a good word thereafter for the greatest hero of the age and, although the home that Nelson shared with the Hamiltons at Merton was not that far from Wimbledon Park House, he was never invited to visit. On the very eve of Trafalgar she would write that ‘Nelson’s disgusting bragging and vanity dyes every friend’s cheek scarlet. He makes me vomit.’

  The Earl, as usual, made no comment, but by then he had left the Admiralty resigning with Pitt in 1801 over the King’s refusal to grant Catholic emancipation. G. M. Trevelyan rated George Spencer as ‘the greatest civil administrator of the Navy that ever sat in Whitehall’, and according to The Dictionary of National Biography his six years in office were ‘the most stirring, the most glorious in our naval history, so that for him, more distinctly perhaps than for any other administrator, may be claimed the title organiser of victory’. He remained devoted to the Navy and in 1807 built a family villa at Ryde on the Isle of Wight from which the Spencers used to watch the fleet at anchor at Spithead and sailing through the Solent.

  The Earl had accepted the Garter, but seems to have declined a dukedom. Then, when peace returned in 1815 there were more appetising things than politics demanding his attention.

  The upheavals caused by the Napoleonic wars had created extraordinary possibilities for rich collectors, and the Spencers were soon off to Italy in search of an ever greater literary treasure-trove. ‘When Spencer travelled on the Continent to make purchases for his library, he was accompanied by five coaches, thirteen horses and eleven people in his retinue.’