by John Pearson
By now the contrast between the two clerical converts, George Spencer and John Henry Newman, could hardly be more marked. Newman, the Catholic intellectual and successful churchman, had become a famous author, a great Victorian, and founder of the Catholic ‘oratories’ at Birmingham and London; whereas George Spencer was to face a life of increasing hardship and abasement as he served the poor and continued his missions through the land.
Now in his late forties, he was far from strong and became seriously unwell from the hardships he inflicted on himself during his noviciate. There could hardly have been a greater contrast than between the world he had forsworn as the son of an Earl and that of the novice monk he had become. Ignatius slept on a straw mattress, rose in the middle of the night to pray, and ate the roughest food. He suffered terribly from chilblains. After tending Irish immigrants from the Great Potato Famine in 1845 he contracted fever and nearly died himself. This was the one occasion when his family came to his assistance. His brother Fritz, now the fourth Earl Spencer, while disapproving as strongly as ever of the Pope and Rome, agreed to pay his doctor’s bills. George himself was penniless, having made over his own small income to the Passionists, after swearing himself to poverty as well as chastity.
In spite of sickness, George persisted in his cause and in 1848 took his final vows as a Passionist brother. He was beginning to be regarded as something of a Holy Man and made many converts, less by argument than by personal example.
Once he had taken his final vows as a Passionist monk his life became increasingly occupied with his ‘missions’, travelling throughout the British Isles. But when he was on foreign journeys on behalf of the Passionists, the self-confidence which had never left him as the son of an Earl, made it seem quite natural for him to call upon Napoleon III in Paris, or the Emperor Maximilian in Vienna, asking them, too, to pray for England’s reconversion.
The steadfastness of his belief is staggering, sustaining him through these endless journeys, enabling him to endure the rebuffs, the ridicule and the physical hardship of his self-imposed existence.
‘Why do you travel third class?’ someone asked him.
‘Because there isn’t a fourth,’ he answered simply.
There was no glory for him, no fame and no applause, and he still suffered periodical attacks of ‘the dumps’. And while he went on forcing his presence on as many of the great and famous as would see him, he still travelled like a holy tramp, dressed in a long black cassock, his few possessions carried in a sack and wearing an enormous cape embroidered with the emblems of the Passion.
One member of his family that he saw occasionally was his sister, Sarah Lyttleton, while she was acting as governess to the royal children. But whenever he called on her, she made very sure it was at her private house, rather than at the Palace, since, as she said, she did not want a ‘paragraph’ in the papers.
In 1857 the death of his brother Fritz ended his long exile from Althorp. He had always missed his old home and the new Earl Spencer, Fritz’s son, John Poyntz Spencer, was a more tolerant and kind man than his father. He became genuinely fond of his eccentric uncle, and late in life George would sometimes stay at Althorp. On one occasion he attended a dinner for the local Volunteers, at which he made a patriotic speech referring to his Passionist habit as his uniform.
By now several of the Catholics he had known in his youth had become great figures in the Church. In 1850 Nicholas Wiseman was appointed the first Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. Later, he and John Henry Newman became cardinals and princes of the church. Whereas George, now in his mid-sixties, continued with his solitary ‘crusade of payer’ for Christian unity. He was feeling tired and unwell, but nothing could daunt him in this self-appointed task.
In September 1864, on a journey to Scotland, he had to wait for a train at the town of Carstairs, and decided to call on a friend who lived nearby. But before he could reach the house, he collapsed with a heart attack and died by the roadside, much as he had lived, ‘on a journey and alone’.
At the time, and in contrast with Newman and Wiseman, it must have seemed as if his life had been a failure. But now, thanks to the unpredictable way in which his distant niece, Diana, would one day become the mother of the future King of England, justice could be done and George Spencer, also known as St Ignatius of St Paul, may yet receive the sainthood for which he would never have believed that he was worthy.
Chapter 11
The Red Earl
John Poyntz, fifth Earl Spencer (1835-1910)
In the spring of 1905 John Poyntz, fifth Earl Spencer, was showing signs of great excitement, which was not an emotion normally encountered in that venerable figure. Standing six foot four, with much of his face obscured behind what was once a bright red beard, Lord Spencer was so dignified, and commanded such immense respect that to credit him with something as vulgar as excitement seemed almost Iésé majesté
What could have possibly aroused him so? He was too respectable – and, at sixty–nine, probably too old – to be tempted by the flesh. Besides, he had everything that in theory a great aristocrat could possibly desire – 37,000 fertile acres, Althorp Park and Spencer House, and more than his share of worldly honours. He had twice been the Queen’s Viceroy in Ireland, President of the Council and First Lord of the Admiralty under Gladstone, and had twice declined the Viceroyalty of India. Nearer home, he was Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire, Chairman of the County Council, three times Master of the Pytchley Hunt and Chancellor of Manchester’s Victoria University. He was sometimes referred to as ‘King of Northamptonshire’, and the Order of the Garter which Queen Victoria bestowed on him in 1863 seemed almost incidental.
One thing alone had eluded him – the premiership. At last it seemed within his grasp. He had nearly made it in to office back in 1894, when the eighty-four-year-old Mr Gladstone, as Liberal prime minister, had told him that should Her Majesty ask his advice about his successor he would be recommending Spencer. In fact, Her Majesty, to nobody’s surprise, was so pleased to be freed from Mr Gladstone’s advice that she asked him nothing of the sort. Acting on her own initiative, she had summoned instead Archibald Primrose, better known as Lord Rosebery, to be Prime Minister. But although Lord Rosebery won the Derby twice, he won no prizes at Number 10 as Prime Minister. Lord Salisbury led the Conservatives to victory in 1895 and was succeeded as Conservative premier by A.J. Balfour in 1902. Throughout this ten-year period of opposition for the Liberals, Lord Spencer had stayed on manfully in place at the head of the Liberal opposition in the House of Lords.
With fresh elections looming in 1905, there seemed a real possibility that the Liberals would win and Lord Spencer gain what seemed to be his just reward after thirty selfless years in politics. He had considerable support within the party and the famous journalist, W.T. Stead, was promoting his prospects in the Morning Chronicle on the electrifying proposition that ‘Lord Spencer is by heredity, by character and by achievement marked out for high position’.
But, on the edge of seventy, age was catching up with Lord Spencer. His health had never been robust and, that autumn, when out shooting over the Spencer properties at North Creak, Norfolk, he had a stroke. Another followed, leaving him so weak that he could play little part in the November election which produced the Liberal landslide of 1905.
Even so, his thoughts were still on the greatest prize in British politics and, for some reason, he had formed the notion that King Edward was about to summon him at last. It was a pathetic moment as the stricken statesman waited for the invitation from the Palace which never came. But when Spencer’s friend Lord Haldane saw the King at the Palace on the morrow of the election, he found His Majesty in a state of agitation: ‘Who told Spencer that I’m about to call on him to form a government?’ he demanded. ‘I’m sure I didn’t.’
It would have been unlikely if he had, for John Poyntz Spencer was in no fit state to form anything very much by now, and to his bitter disappointment his friend and rival, Campbell-Ba
nnerman, became Liberal Prime Minister instead.
With Lord Spencer’s illness and this angry reaction from the King, the door slammed shut on the last aristocrat in Britain to have had the chance to lead a government from the House of Lords. After three hundred years it also marked the end of the Spencers as a major force in British politics.
Balfour, ennobled after his electoral defeat, was interesting on the subject of Lord Spencer when later discussing him with the Librarian of the House of Lords, the rising man of letters, Edmund Gosse. ‘Gosse,’ he said, ‘what an amazing example Spencer is of what can be done in this country by a noble presence, a great hereditary position, and a fine personal record, assisted by no intellectual parts of any kind. Such a sweet character, and even such a beautiful character and no ability at all.’
Tactful as ever, Gosse replied, ‘Lord Spencer’s mind works very slowly.’
‘It does not work at all,’ said Balfour. ‘Lord Spencer has no mind. He has character, but no mind.’
‘Character but no mind’ - even now the verdict seems distinctly harsh on a man who in his day was immensely popular and in his way entirely admirable. But every upward step in the long distinguished life of John Poyntz Spencer bears out the truth of Balfour’s words and demonstrates the remarkable advantages a member of the upper aristocracy could still extract from ‘a noble presence and a great hereditary position’ throughout the reign of Queen Victoria.
But his long career proves something else which has a particular bearing on our story. There was one area in the Earl’s life where brains and foresight were required - over the fate and future of his family. Here, in contrast with the world of politics, a fine presence and a great hereditary position were not enough, and the Earl’s incumbency at Althorp saw what seemed like the beginning of the irreversible decline of the House of Spencer.
The key to the fifth Earl’s career lies in a strange phenomenon that lasted almost throughout the long reign of Queen Victoria. At a time when electoral reform was busily eroding the political power of the aristocracy, people began to feel a deep nostalgia for the image and the ethos of the old nobility. Even as they clipped their wings, the Victorians seemed to fall in love with them and the aristocracy responded by appearing even grander than they ever were before. Never had noblemen looked more authentically noble than Victorian grandees like Lord Salisbury, Lord Hartington and the fifth Earl Spencer. For although he survived until 1910, in almost everything he did, John Poyntz Spencer unashamedly played the part of an eighteenth-century Whig grandee until the day he died.
It was, of course, a role in life that he was born to. Starting life amid the neo-classical splendours of Spencer House in 1835 there was an effortless quality about him from the start. Thanks to ‘inherited position’, he became Lord Althorp at the age of ten, when his father, Frederick, succeeded his brother Charles, third Earl Spencer, and the family moved to Althorp.
Like all the Spencers except the great bibliophile, George John the second Earl, John Poyntz made little mark at Harrow. But thanks again to ‘inherited position’ he entered Trinity College Cambridge, wore the gold tasselled gown of a nobleman undergraduate, and as such emerged two years later honoured with a degree without the vulgar necessity of an examination. Inherited position also gained him a seat in the supposedly reformed House of Commons as member for Northamptonshire, which the Spencers still effectively controlled. Within a year he effortlessly ascended to the House of Lords when his father, the fourth Earl, died in 1857. Father and son had never been particularly close, so John Poyntz Spencer did not have to suffer too much grief when at the age of twenty-two he found himself an Earl and heir to two great houses and one of the greatest inheritances in the country. It was now that he started doing almost all the things - and many more - that a great Whig magnate would have done a century earlier.
First he had to find himself a wife. Shortly after leaving Cambridge he had toured America, but instead of using the opportunity to find himself an American heiress who might have proved the ultimate salvation of the Spencers, he took the line of least resistance and soon after his return to England married his distant kinswoman, his step-mother’s cousin, the beautiful but not overbright Lady Charlotte Seymour, who brought no money to the union and, possibly because of consanguinity, would bring no children either. Apart from this, Charlotte played the part of Countess Spencer to perfection. She was good and kind, just as the Earl was serious and rather shy, and the couple settled very grandly into the role awaiting them at Spencer House and Althorp.
In terms of income, the new Earl was better off than any of his immediate predecessors. Thanks almost entirely to the third Earl’s self-denying economies and his sales to rid the Spencers of chronic indebtedness, he was not only free from nagging worries over debt, but enjoyed an unencumbered income, chiefly in the form of agricultural rent, which at his accession was estimated at £47,000 a year.
It seemed a lot, and in fact it was a lot. But common sense suggested that since this income came almost entirely from land it might not continue so abundantly for ever. The brighter members of the aristocracy were already busily diversifying their resources. The Duke of Devonshire would soon be developing seaside Eastbourne, and the Cadogans were hard at work improving their London property in Chelsea; likewise the Grosvenors in Belgravia and the Bedfords in Covent Garden. Thanks to the third Earl’s sales, John Poyntz no longer had the priceless assets of Wandsworth and Battersea to exploit and, in 1871, he would reluctantly relinquish the Spencer’s last practical connection with Sarah Marlborough’s Wimbledon - the unprofitable manorial rights over the Common.
What really interested the Earl was spending money, rather than making it - and thereby asserting the position of the Spencers in politics, in London Society and in the county of Northamptonshire. In all three areas Spencer influence had been declining during his father’s tenure, but the fifth Earl was quietly determined to reassert the traditional position of the House of Spencer.
Because of this there was much on which the Earl could spend his fortune. Althorp had been considerably neglected since the second Earl’s death in 1834 and the gardens had all but disappeared as part of the third Earl’s economies. But with the new Earl, money was no object, and he was happy when his wife engaged the fashionable French landscape architect, Teulon, to re-create a full-scale formal garden at Althorp.
At the same time the Earl himself was keen to reassert the position of the Spencers in the county. Traditionally, one way of doing this had always been through the mastership of the Pytchley Hunt. His father had not hunted, nor had his uncle, the third Earl, from the day his wife Esther died. When John Poyntz took on the mastership of the Pytchley for the first time in 1861, he was determined to be totally in charge. A forceful rider, as Master he rapidly established his authority over the ill-disciplined ‘wild boys’, whose behaviour in the hunting field had been bringing the Pytchley into disrepute.
He felt obliged to do this for the simple reason that whoever ran the Pytchley also controlled most of the rural society of Northamptonshire and much of the Earl’s authority within the county came directly from his mastership of the hunt. But such authority did not come cheap. According to the social historian Lawrence Stone, at this time ‘a good hunter, which would keep its owner at the head of the field, cost anything between £400-£700’. As Master of the Hunt, the Earl kept a stable of over fifty horses at Althorp, and by his own estimation the mastership of the Pytchley never cost him less that £14,000 a year.
Another expense he shouldered was supporting the local Liberal Party organisation, which formed the basis of the political influence of the Spencers in the county. Meanwhile, in London, the young Earl thought it even more important to reassert the position of the Spencers as leaders of society. This meant almost completely redecorating Spencer House which, like Althorp, had also been much neglected. All this activity was soon consuming almost all the young Earl’s income, but since he had £47,000 rolling in each year from re
nts and farming and the world believed that he was very rich, there seemed no reason for the Earl and his sociable young wife to think otherwise.
Once the Spencers were enjoying the splendours of the freshly carpeted, curtained and redecorated Spencer House, the Earl owed the next important step in his career to ‘heredity and great position’. Despite attempts to wipe out so-called ‘old corruption’ in Victorian society, at Court the position of the aristocracy continued much as ever. Senior courtiers still came exclusively from the aristocracy, and since the Earl’s father, the fourth Earl Spencer, had been Lord Chamberlain, his son was soon given a position in the court as Groom of the Stole to the Royal Consort, Prince Albert.
With his great height and absolutely perfect manners, the young Lord Spencer might have been bred to be a courtier. Along with the mastership of the Pytchley and attendance at the House of Lords, his role at court was a source of interest and prestige, and he was upset when it seemed that it would have to end, less than two years later, on the sudden death of Prince Albert. In fact the Earl’s connection with the court was far from over, thanks to what was tactfully referred to in court circles at the time as ‘that dreadful business at the Curragh’.
Twenty miles or so from Dublin was the Curragh Camp, the main British garrison in Ireland. It was here that the nineteen-year-old Prince of Wales was sent on six weeks holiday attachment to the Grenadier Guards. Until now the Prince had led a cosseted and sheltered life, and this was the first time he had been free from his parents and the royal minders. The Prince got on well with the officers at the Curragh and several of them, feeling sorry for a sexually frustrated fellow Grenadier, smuggled a present into the royal quarters in the form of Nellie Clifden, a pretty twenty-two-year-old actress.