Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals

by John Pearson

  Never before or since had there been such bargains for a rich book collector. Throughout France and Italy, war and revolution had destroyed palaces and displaced great libraries, throwing treasures of bibliography onto a depressed market. It was one of his buying trips to Italy that produced another of the Earl’s most prestigious purchases, the entire library of the Duke of Cassano-Serra, with unrivalled works of all the great Italian and Sicilian printers. By now the Earl was employing the most distinguished bibliophile of his day, Thomas Dibdin, as his permanent librarian, and was constantly buying from dealers and at auction. He was also spending a small fortune on bookbinders.

  In London there was great competition between rich collectors, for this was also the great period for aristocratic libraries, the time when, according to the historian of the English country house, Mark Girouard, ‘the country house library- was at its apogee’. Nowhere more so than at Althorp.

  Now that Henry Holland had finished it, the Earl could turn the interior into one enormous library with the entire ground floor to be given over almost totally to books. It was a truly fabulous collection, which finally contained four Shakespeare folios, fifty-eight Caxtons, all the earliest editions of Chaucer, bibles by Gutenberg and Wynkyn de Worde, and unrivalled examples of early Italian printing at its most splendid. It was, according to a modern authority, among ‘the most important single collections illustrating the history and development of Western printing ever formed’. Room by room, as the shelves invaded all the available wall-space, the pictures were banished to the higher storeys and books took their place.

  But the postwar years, which were kind to the aristocracy as book collectors, suddenly turned against them as land-owners. During the war the price of grain and foodstuffs grew, and new agricultural methods brought increased yields and profits. Peace, however, led to a sharp and unprecedentedly long agricultural depression which would last, with only temporary remissions, for the rest of the second earl’s life. The Spencer estates, inherited from Sarah, remained scattered across a dozen counties and were hard to administer, even when the agents were honest. Thomas Harrison, the Earl’s overall manager, and his elder son and successor, were both suspicious of innovations. They were honest but, owing to indifferent health, found it hard to control lazy and dishonest subordinates. Even at Wimbledon and Althorp, the Earl had perpetual problems with farmers, agents and park stewards.

  He was reluctant to sell land to pay off debt, feeling that estates were undervalued according to what he felt to be ‘normal’ standards. Trying to sell Holywell after his mother’s death, he dropped the price by a third and still found no buyers.

  Yet selling, and, for that matter, buying land for an aristocrat like him was never dictated purely by economics. When the spendthrift squire of the large Harlestone estate adjoining Althorp was forced to sell up in 1829, the thought of the trouble an unfriendly neighbour might cause the Spencers forced the Earl to give £135,000 for it, far more than he felt to be the market rate, and at a time when he could clearly not afford it.

  In 1826, he actually undertook a drastic reorganisation of all his estates, replacing the Harrisons with a new self-confident young general manager, John George, Shaw-Lefebre. But the Earl was always hoping for an end to the agricultural depression and went on spending. This continued almost to the day he died, and included wage bills, property repairs, endless entertaining, hunting, political organisation and lavish foreign travel. The Earl was by nature and nurture extravagant. Spending money was part of the role of the aristocracy. There were also, of course, the ever-mounting costs of the library which were not to be denied.

  Perhaps there is a book-collecting gene, for his ancestor the third Earl of Sunderland had been another great collector; as was his Blenheim cousin, Lord Blandford, who in 1817 became fifth Duke of Marlborough. With the passage of time, the differences between the Marlborough dukes and the Spencers earls had, if anything, increased. It was probably the effect of Blenheim, but a strong vein of melancholy had started to afflict the Marlboroughs.

  The fifth Duke’s father, George Spencer, fourth Duke of Marlborough, was a true depressive, who, towards the end of his long life, turned hermit. He refused to meet Nelson when he called at Blenheim and when the celebrated Mme. de Stael arrived, all he could say to her was ‘Go away! Go away!’

  His son, George, Lord Blandford, was as much of a spendthrift as any of his Althorp cousins, but with far slimmer resources, so that when he outbid the second Earl with the exaggerated figure of £2,600 for an edition of the Decameron, the Earl may have suspected that Blandford would not keep it long. Sure enough, a few years later the fifth Duke, as George had now become, went bankrupt. The Decameron went up for auction, and the Earl purchased it for £750.

  Like all the Spencers, the second Earl loved his hunting and shooting; or, as Lavinia called it, ‘the irrepressible spirit derived from sheer pulling the trigger’. But what increasingly occupied his time were the insatiable demands of his ever-growing library.

  ‘While in London, Father spends more and more of his time in book shops and browsing through catalogues,’ wrote his daughter, Sarah. While up at Althorp, in his great library, with its eight separate book-rooms, the Earl had built himself the perfect pleasuredome where, for days on end, he could happily escape from care and worry.

  By now he was borrowing heavily to finance his purchases. Buying books on such a scale had become a sort of vice, not unlike his sister Georgiana’s compulsive gambling. But with the Earl it was strange to find this obsession in a man who was otherwise a monument of sanity. Increasingly omnivorous in his collecting, all he now demanded of a printed book was antiquity, rarity and, as far as possible, absolute perfection.

  At Althorp the result was overwhelming, with what amounted to a series of separate libraries filling the ground floor of the house, culminating in his so-called ‘gothic library’, built in 1819. Thomas Dibdin described it thus: ‘It had a first floor gallery six feet wide, with ample room for chairs and tables; and the studious may steal away from the animated discussions carried out below to the more perfect enjoyment of their favourite authors.’

  For the Earl his library was also a place to ‘steal away’ from the mounting irritations of his life - and particularly from his wife, Lavinia who, energetic and increasingly abrasive, still tried to rule the lives of her husband and their seven children. After the eldest, Jack, Lord Althorp, came Sarah, Robert, Frederick, known as Fritz, Georgiana and the afterthought, George, who was known to everyone as Hodgekin. It was unfortunate that as a clever woman, Lavinia felt obliged to make continual fun at their expense, particularly Jack’s. His two brothers, Robert and Frederick, escaped to the Navy as midshipmen, but for Jack it seemed that there was no release from his difficult relationship with his mother.

  According to Georgiana’s daughter, Harriet, Lavinia’s conversation was ‘so improving and so very entertaining that I could listen to her forever. She laughs at poor Lord Althorp without mercy and has no compassion on him when he gets bewildered. I love my aunt but would rather be anything but her daughter.’

  Another of Lavinia’s targets was the royal family. Genial as ever, her husband had come to admire King George III, when he met him during his brief spell as Home Secretary in the Whig ‘Ministry of all the Talents’. ‘Just returned from the King’s drawing room,’ he wrote. ‘Never saw him looking better, tho’ the Queen looks old and ill. They were both, as usual, extremely gracious to me.’

  Lavinia would not hear such sentiments and, at King George’s golden jubilee in 1810, became incensed when the vicar of Wimbledon called, requesting a contribution to the celebrations, ‘just to prove my joy’, she wrote with heavy sarcasm, ‘at having lived to see the fiftieth year of our victorious, glorious, wise, good and fortunate monarch’. Having contributed five guineas for the poor on condition that it did not go towards the celebrations, she informed the priest that she would not be visiting his church that Sunday ‘as pray for the King I cannot
and will not’.

  But although Lavinia could be intolerable, she adored her husband with a love that grew as they got older. The Earl does not seem to have reciprocated. Instead, behaving like the well-bred gentleman he was, he was kind to her, avoided arguments and disappeared to Althorp and his precious library with increasing frequency.

  In middle age, his closest friend was his son Jack who, by now, thoroughly disliked his mother. As a so-called ‘Young Whig’, Jack was becoming more extreme than his father in his deep distrust of the monarchy, as well as in his belief in fundamental Christianity. The Earl did not agree with him, on either count, nor could he agree with his attitude towards the aristocracy. As a Whig grandee, George Spencer still believed it was his duty to maintain the dignity and splendour of his great position, but Jack was not particularly concerned with either.

  In his later years the Earl became increasingly concerned that he was living far above his means, but when he discussed this with his son and heir, Jack was always more than understanding. ‘Continue to live as you have been accustomed,’ he told him. ‘Let the task of retrenchment fall on me; I have no desire to keep up the state of a great nobleman and shall be prepared to live very economically.’

  Lavinia, however, was less tolerant of the Earl’s extravagance, and sometimes chided him about his library.

  ‘When I consider the heavy charges on your landed estate, and the just and lawful claims your children have to better allowances than they already have, and the frequent opportunities which arrive when an 100 pounds might do them inexpressible good, I have no scruple to say that you have no right to throw away such sums upon an useless fancy, and that as you grow older I earnestly hope you will curtail some of your library expenses.’

  He, of course, did nothing of the kind. For if there is such a thing as a libroholic, the Earl was in the final stages of addiction. His wife, as usual, failed to understand and, having lived his life encircled by dominating women, he knew better than to argue with her. But far from being a mere ‘useless fancy’, his great library had become the centre of his world and he was spending more than ever on his books as the time available to him to buy them lessened. For Lavinia to talk in terms of the occasional hundred pounds showed how little she suspected of the true amounts that he was spending. But her warnings were given point when their straitened circumstances forced them to leave for good the Earl’s favourite residence, Wimbledon Park House, in 1826.

  The Earl was grateful that, after he was gone, everything would be sorted out by Jack. At least there was the land, including Sarah’s vast estates and although some of them would have to go, Jack was not extravagant like his father. The Earl had done his best, but it was now beyond his capacity to change the situation - or himself.

  Early in 1814, his mother died. He had written to her every day since he was a boy. Years before she had told him: ‘did not the stronger tie of parent and child subsist between us, you are in character, in understanding and in disposition, the person of all others I have ever known (except your father) whom I would choose for a friend.’

  Just before she died on New Year’s Eve, she had written him a letter of farewell, telling him how much she loved him, and ending ‘many many happy years to you my dearest G. and to Lavinia and all your litter’.

  During the last years of her life, Lavinia must have haunted her husband. In her letters she increasingly complained about her situation, as he was absent more than ever. She was particularly lonely in the autumn, when the shooting season provided a fresh excuse for him to leave her.

  ‘Plunged, immersed, buried in autumn and all its dreary solitude, I do hate and detest the dreary season … I wish partridges, pheasants, woodcocks, snipes and hares all at the bottom of the sea.’

  At other times, she would simply say how much she missed him: ‘Your Letters are my breath of life,’ she told him.

  They had a great sadness when their sailor son Robert died suddenly aboard ship off Alexandria. ‘He was the best of all of us,’ said his brother Jack, who particularly loved him.

  Then in June 1831, it was the turn of Lavinia herself. For some time she had been unwell, probably with hepatitis, and throughout her lengthy illness she remained in London, writing the Earl pathetic letters of devotion. While refusing to curtail his hunting and lengthy visits to his library, he was as kind to her as his nature permitted.

  Although the Earl was not devout like Jack, he was a believer, and he composed a prayer for the new year following her death. In it he referred to ‘God’s perfect mercy, unerring wisdom, and strict justice both to her, whom thou hast released from the sufferings and miseries of this world, embittered alas, and too justly, by my own misconduct, and to me by forcing me to a more due attention … to all my failings and transgressions.’

  What he meant by his ‘misconduct’ is a mystery. If he kept a mistress, all trace of her has long since vanished. And even if he had, his real mistress was his library, just as his true ‘misconduct’ was the obsessional love he gave it - at the expense of Lavinia and the children, and indeed the future of the Spencer family through the ever growing debt he created.

  He himself died three years later, leaving behind what at the time was the greatest private library in existence. Yet in the process of creating it, he had all but bankrupted the family. On his death in 1834, he left 43,000 priceless volumes and a debt of over half a million pounds.

  Chapter 9

  Reform and After

  John Charles, third Earl Spencer (1782-1845) and Frederick, fourth Earl Spencer (1798-1857)

  Apart from his mother, almost everyone who came in contact with John Charles, Lord Althorp, ended up loving him. For John Charles was that rare and irresistible phenomenon – an honest, genuinely good man. In his way he was also a great man. Gladstone called him ‘the very best leader of the House of Commons that any party ever had’. And Sarah Marlborough’s biographer, Frances Harris, believes that in him, ‘Sarah’s desire to found a great and politically responsible family, endowed with her own fortune, was finally realised’.

  He was born at Spencer House on 30 May 1782, and his fate -and with it the fate of several future generations of Spencers – seems to have been dictated by his early reaction to that sharp-tongued, deeply unmaternal woman, his mother Lavinia, second Countess Spencer. Disliking the whole process of human reproduction, she was unable to forgive her first-born child for the discomfort and pain he caused her at his birth. She neglected him during her long trips abroad and when he showed genuine affection for his father she could not forgive him for that either.

  Children have a way of turning into what their parents want them not to be and, as he grew, John Charles became what he may have thought would give his mother most displeasure – he was graceless, incoherent, slow of speech and distinctly dull. With his father, he became a different child, but for much of his childhood his father was working fourteen hours a day at the Admiralty, directing the long sea war which culminated in Nelson’s victories, and John Charles was more or less neglected. According to family tradition it was a Swiss footman at Spencer House who taught him to read. And at Harrow, where the future lords Byron, Palmerston and Melbourne were already sparkling among his contemporaries, John Charles, Lord Althorp, dull as ever, did the opposite.

  Aged twenty-three he showed how much he had rejected the values of his parents’ generation when his father, as a former First Lord of the Admiralty, was able to arrange for a Royal Navy sloop to drop him off at Naples for what had traditionally been the culmination of a young Whig nobleman’s education – the Grand Tour of Italy. From the days of Shameless Sunderland, a love of Italy and things Italian had almost been an article of faith among the Spencers, but after spending several days in Naples, something must have told John Charles that Italy was not for him. Like many an indignant Englishman before and since, he was soon complaining: ‘It appears that there is not a single honest man in this country.’ In Rome he thoroughly disliked the Vatican galleries, and in Flor
ence felt much the same in the Uffizi. In him, his family had produced that rarity, a Spencer who positively hated art, so much so that he carefully avoided Paris on his journey back to England, just in case anyone tried to make him visit one more picture gallery.

  While abroad he missed his steak and missed his hunting, and could not wait to be reunited with the rainswept shores of England. All he brought back from the Grand Tour was an Aldine edition of Homer for his father, and a Parmesan cheese the size of a cartwheel for his mother.

  Back in England he seems to have genuinely wanted to avoid his mother and tried his best to escape from her as soon as possible. Since he was his heir, his father would not to let him join the Navy like his younger brothers, Robert and Frederick, so John Charles did the next best thing, and opted for a life deep in the country. Meeting him at Althorp, his cousin Harriet was shocked to see to what depths he had sunk. ‘He has contrived to make himself so compleat a zero in society,’ she said. He had become a man ‘whose soul is engrossed with one most uninteresting pursuit, and who cares for neither father, mother, brothers, sisters or for anything else on earth but that noble animal, a horse.’ In reaction to her own cleverness, his mother seemed to have produced a simple eighteenth-century philistine whose greatest happiness was to spend the whole day hunting.

  But John Charles was not quite the ‘absolute zero’ that he seemed. At his father’s suggestion he took over the mastership of the Pytchley at a time when it was dominated by its older members who liked hunting with heavy horses and slow hounds. This did not suit John Charles and, to bring back some excitement to the hunt, he undertook the complicated business of breeding hounds ‘for speed and spirit’. He also used his influence to change the hunt membership, and it was always claimed that under his mastership the Pytchley finally attained ‘the zenith of it glory’.