by John Pearson
‘Don’t say, “Johnnie, please get well”,’ her mother told her. ‘Say, “Johnnie, you will get well.”’
And Johnnie, obedient to Raine as ever, did get well.
Within two months, though wobbly, he was on his feet and back at Althorp. He was now in debt to Raine for ever.
In most families this sort of miracle recovery would have brought them all together, but not the Spencers. Feeling excluded during the long weeks Johnnie spent in hospital, the children were resenting Raine as much as ever. For it seemed that she had taken over everything. They all felt that the illness had changed their father. As Diana said: ‘he was one person before and was certainly a different person after.’ She described him as being ‘estranged but adoring’. The illness left him very weak and more grateful and dependent on his wife than ever.
Since he was unable to cope with the daily running of Althorp and the estates, Raine took over. A trust was formed with her, the family lawyer Hugo Southern, and the estate manager Richard Stanley to make the decisions Johnnie could not.
Raine was not the one to waste a chance like this, and it was now that she made two important decisions. The first was to plan for her own future. Being nothing if not realistic, she knew that Johnnie could have a second stroke at any time, and his recent brush with death had taught her that she could expect absolutely nothing from the children if he died. From now on it was up to her to look after her own interests. Secondly, she realised that she finally had the chance she had always wanted to leave her mark upon a stately home. For the now convalescent Johnnie was only too happy to let her have her way - believing that everything she did was perfect and that, whatever happened, Raine knew best.
To achieve these two ambitions Raine needed money, and there was one obvious way for her to get it. Two years before, Johnnie had already sold two van Dycks to help pay death duties and the cost of running Althorp. While Johnnie lacked ready money, as lord of Althorp he was actually the owner of a treasure chest crammed with potential capital in the form of masterpieces, paintings and antiquities for which the London dealers would pay fortunes. Legally they all belonged to him, to do with as he wanted.
Despite the earlier sales of paintings by Bobby and Jack the core of the great collections was intact: there were the pictures that had come from Spencer House; the Duke of Marlborough’s unrivalled gold and silver collection; statuary, priceless porcelain; and endless objects of value accumulated over four centuries. One might have thought that Johnnie would hope to preserve as much as possible of this Spencer patrimony for his son and future generations of Spencers. But if he wished to dispose of any of his possessions, however historic or important to the family, it was his decision and his alone to do so.
Shortly after his illness, when Johnnie and Raine began a selling spree together, Johnnie appeared, if anything, more enthusiastic to be selling the family heritage than Raine. His son Charles believes that ‘my grandfather’s compulsive devotion to the house caused great resentment in my father. By selling off the art, my father may have derived pleasure in the knowledge that the seventh Earl would be spinning in his grave. It was his revenge for not feeling loved as a child.’
This seems possible, and, if true, Johnnie must have particularly enjoyed selling Jack Spencer’s pride and joy at Althorp, his famous muniment room which he had carefully created and helped to catalogue and which contained the great Spencer collection of documents and letters relating to the family. Without a qualm, Johnnie sold the entire collection for a million pounds, leaving the archive to be split between the British Library in London and the County Records Office in Northampton.
This was only a small part of what was now disposed of. One of the family’s proudest possessions, the two solid gold wine coolers reputedly given to the Duke of Marlborough by Queen Anne after the Battle of Blenheim, went to the British Museum for around one million pounds, and barely was a convalescent Johnnie back at Althorp than a pair of great paintings which the first Earl Spencer bought in Rome in 1761 for Spencer House were sold privately to the London dealers Wildenstein, for a fraction of their value. These were Appollo Crowning the Musician Marcantonio Pasqualini by Andrea Sacchi, and Liberality and Modesty by Guido Reni, both in elaborate frames which Athenian Stuart originally designed for them at Spencer House. (Wildensteins paid £40,000 for the Sacchi, which later went to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art for £270,000.)
The departure of the paintings from Althorp was the signal for a selling frenzy, as treasures great and small were eagerly disposed of, generally in secret, to the Bond Street dealers. Throughout the eighties a stream of silver, furniture and paintings flowed from Althorp to the London market. The sales were haphazard and on such a scale that to the present day no one is absolutely sure what went. According to Charles Spencer’s own calculations, possibly a fifth of the contents of the house vanished for ever, usually in private sales to individual dealers.
This was curious behaviour from Raine, given her previous commitment to English Heritage, and her normally acute business instincts. Part of the trouble came from her belief that, as always, she knew best, not realising quite how sharp the dealers were.
One of the saddest losses was John Wootton’s painting of Sarah Marlborough’s dogs, along with six unique chairs designed by Athenian Stuart for the Great Room at Spencer House, which Johnnie presented to a London dealer in part payment for restoration work at Althorp. And sometimes objects would be sold to finance a particular extravagance, or to meet a particular need for money, as in 1983 when Johnnie bought Raine a Rolls Royce Silver Spur for £64,000.
Timothy Clifford, director of the National Galleries of Scotland, called the rape of Althorp ‘one of the great tragedies of the eighties’, while Robert Simon, editor of the connoisseurs’ Apollo Magazine, thought it ‘the worst scandal that has happened to a country house in the last century. No one has put their hands on a collection and dealt with it so ruthlessly.’
It was now that Raine moved into action, and began using part of the proceeds of the sales to transform the house in accordance with her own decided views of what she felt a stately home should be.
Admirers of Jack Spencer insist that, thanks to his taste and the hefty restoration grants paid for by the tax-payers, Althorp had been left to Johnnie Spencer in near perfect condition. But Raine had recently reached a very different conclusion. ‘She is’, in the words of Roy Strong, ‘a monument to the creature comforts’, and since Jack Spencer’s Althorp was too spartan for her sybaritic nature, she began to change it into a place fit for herself to live in and her friends to visit.
Few could seriously object to en suite bathrooms and better central heating. But, as one of Raine’s admirers says, ‘at times Raine overdid it, such was her nature’. Once more she was doing what she wanted, and there was something quite extraordinary in the assurance with which she imposed on Althorp what one purist called ‘her own profoundly suburban view of what a great aristocratic house should be’. This included double glazing to cut out the draughts from the eighteenth-century windows, oatmeal coloured close carpeting laid over ancient floorboards in the Gallery, and orange coloured dralon to replace Jack Spencer’s own petit point chair seats. Someone calculated that Raine had over two thousand separate items of furniture at Althorp restored or re-gilded.
Depending on one’s taste, the result of all these changes was excessive or spectacular. One neighbour called Raine’s Althorp ‘fairyland’, and it reminded Alan Clark of the Schloss in Pontresina - ‘a beautifully furnished hotel reserved for grand German tourists’.
Unsurprisingly, the children hated it without exception, and particularly resented having the portrait of Robert, first Lord Spencer, which had always been at the top of the grand staircase, replaced by a full-length portrait of a very youthful Raine by Carlo Sanchez.
Johnnie’s illness had a curious aftermath which would also play a fateful part in Diana’s future. Early in 1980, to celebrate his recovery, he took Raine off
for a very special weekend, staying at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. During their stay the hotel’s public relations person approached them and said, ‘Lord and Lady Spencer, our new proprietor would like you to join him for a drink. He loves members of the British aristocracy and is anxious to meet you. His name is Mr al Fayed.’
The Spencers accepted the invitation, and thus began a most unusual friendship, partly based on the fact that, as Lady Spencer must have realised, friendship with the owner of the Ritz Hotel could bring tangible benefits, like upgrading, and all those extras hotel managements can offer their favoured guests.
The friendship between the Spencers and the al Fayeds flowered when Mr al Fayed purchased Harrods two years later. One of Johnnie’s greatest pleasures was to shop there, pottering through the famous Food Halls and the toy department with his shopping basket. Whenever he entered Harrods, Mr al Fayed was invariably around to greet him. In due course, Mr al Fayed invited Johnnie and Raine to lunch with him at his sumptuous residence at Oxted so that they could meet his family. In return he visited them at Althorp.
Along with the changes Raine imposed on Althorp went the sense that, as one neighbour put it, she had somehow ‘stolen Althorp from the county’. She is a profoundly urban creature, and the local gentry increasingly resented - or pretended to despise on grounds of taste or snobbery - what was happening as Raine organised weekend house parties for her friends from London.
But the greatest damage caused by what was happening was not to the house or the collections, but to the family. For while it seemed that Raine had now secured total victory, neither Diana nor her brother, Charles, surrendered. Their fight went on, and it would be many years before Diana would forgive her stepmother for having taken over Althorp and her father. Within the family, Diana had learned to fight a very bitter battle, and all the anger and resentment which she felt against this older woman stayed bottled up within her. At the same time, Johnnie was perfectly aware of how much his father would have hated what he had done at Althorp, and the old Earl’s angry ghost was said to have been seen haunting desecrated Althorp. (Efficient as ever, Raine asked the Vicar of Northampton to exorcise it.)
In the past there had always been two solutions when the Spencers were in trouble - an influential marriage, or involvement with the court. Whether subconsciously or not, Johnnie now began to pin his hopes on both these sources of salvation.
Although the family was in such disarray, the younger generation had been re-establishing close connections with the court. In 1978 Johnnie’s second daughter, Jane, had married Robert Fellowes, assistant private secretary to the Queen. They had been friends since childhood - Robert’s father, Sir William Fellowes, having been the land agent at Sandringham. And while this marriage helped to re-establish contact between the Spencers and the court, Sarah too had become a friend of the Prince of Wales, who had been kind to her after the break-up of her romance with the future Duke of Westminster had left her unhappy and suffering from anorexia.
This fresh involvement with the court seems to have caused Johnnie, as a former courtier himself, to become obsessed with the idea of at least one of his daughters marrying royalty. Marriage with the royal House of Windsor would reverse the downward spiral of the Spencer family and simultaneously enhance its prestige. He seems to have hoped that Sarah might have married Prince Charles, leaving Diana as the perfect bride for Prince Andrew. But Diana had her own ideas. She had been closely following her sister Sarah’s friendship with Prince Charles, and had formed a girlish crush on him herself.
It was after meeting him with Sarah that she asked the mother of a friend how she could get Prince Charles to notice her.
‘Become a blonde,’ she was told.
And so Diana did.
Chapter 16
A Royal Fairy Story
When Prince Charles proposed to Diana Spencer in Windsor Castle in February 1981, he did not know her very well. She did not ride or hunt, she did not sparkle socially and, in contrast with other young women he knew, she was virginal and unsophisticated. She seemed very young and inexperienced and, while she was undoubtedly in love with him, we now know he was not in love with her. So why did he propose?
The unromantic answer is that at thirty-two Charles knew he had to marry someone. For the last ten years his surprisingly tolerant parents had permitted him his sexual freedom, which as a freelance prince he had made the most of. But now the time had come for the most important act the heir to the throne is called upon to perform for the monarchy - select himself a wife to bear the royal children and one day to become queen herself.
This was overdue, and his family was getting nervous that he might follow the example of his great-uncle David, (later Edward VIII, then Duke of Windsor) who also had his mistresses and waited far too long to marry, ending up at forty abdicating his throne in order to wed the love of his life, the American divorcee, Mrs Ernest Simpson.
The precedent particularly worried the Queen Mother, who deeply disapproved of everything to do with the Duke of Windsor, and who was particularly close to her eldest grandson. He discussed almost everything with her, and she sometimes talked about young Diana Spencer. Although the royal matriarch was rising eighty, she was still as well informed as anyone at court, and thought she knew all there was to know about the girl.
After all, Diana was granddaughter of two of her own ladies in waiting, the late Lady Cynthia Spencer, and her special friend, Lady Fermoy, who had mentioned that her granddaughter seemed to be in love with the Prince. Perhaps he should think seriously about Diana. She was eminently suitable. Breeding counted in such matters, and as an aristocrat coming from a family of courtiers, Diana would know by instinct what was expected of her. The Queen Mother remembered seeing her as a child at Sandringham, and from all she had heard about her since, she was absolutely charming – as one would expect of a grandchild of Cynthia Spencer.
At around this time there were strong vibrations in Diana’s favour coming from other members of the Royal Family. Ever since King George V had, from necessity, made it permissible for royalty to marry commoners - rather than the by now virtually non-existent European royal spouses once insisted on by Queen Victoria - they had chosen them from aristocratic families with courtier connections, like the Lascelleses, the Strathmores and the Airlies.
The Spencers were similar, but had closer past connections with the court than any of them, and, since the family was popular with both the Queen and the Queen Mother, Charles knew that if he married Diana Spencer he would be doing so with full parental approval, which was something he had always wanted. He was already acquainted with Diana as the shy teenage sister of his friend, her sister, Sarah. Compared with his other girl friends, Diana cannot have seemed particularly exciting, but the more he thought about her, the more it seemed that she would make an admirable queen. She would also have some less obvious advantages which for the Prince weighed strongly in her favour.
During the previous four years he had become deeply and, as it is now known, irrevocably involved with Camilla, wife of his polo-playing friend, Colonel (now Brigadier) Andrew Parker-Bowles. The affair had actually started ten years earlier when Camilla, proud of her descent from King Edward VII’s mistress, Alice Keppel, is said to have made him the irresistible invitation – ‘My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great grandfather. How’s about it, sir?’ The resultant affair had ended when the Prince went off to command his frigate, HMS Minerva, and Camilla married the womanising Parker-Bowles. It began again some six years and two children later.
Since then the affair had grown in intensity, until it was fairly common knowledge at the Palace, which must have made the Prince’s parents more anxious still to see him safely married. None of them knew, as we do now, that Mrs Parker-Bowles would be the one enduring love of the Prince’s life, whose presence, as he put it later, would never be ‘negotiable’. But already she was appearing in the guise of that most perilous of figures in the lives of princes from the House o
f Windsor, a quietly determined older married woman; and the Prince’s dependence on her was arousing understandable concern.
By strict royal standards theirs had to be a hopeless love. Since he was future King and Head of the Church of England and she was someone else’s wife, the Prince could never think of marrying Camilla. But he had to marry someone, even if it broke his heart, and he genuinely believed that it would break his heart if his marriage meant giving up this woman that he loved, for ever.
He and Camilla had undoubtedly discussed the situation, and whilst both accepted the fact that it was Charles’s duty to marry, Camilla felt it was equally her duty to be there for him when he needed her, just as her great-grandmother had always been there for King Edward. If Charles could make his sacrifice for the monarchy, so could she, and with love and patience everything could work out in the end.
Clearly much was going to depend on the character of the girl he chose to be his wife. Ideally she should be another Alexandra to Camilla’s Mrs Keppel, someone who, with time and understanding, could be led to tolerate and finally accept the situation, which after all, was something kings and princes had been indulging in since the world began.