But even the aesthete in Robert was to be tainted by his lack of scruples. For he found that his expensive tastes could not be readily funded by his Spencer inheritance, and so he became susceptible to bribery and corruption of the worst kind, even resorting to treason in his quest to afford great art.
Robert’s early career did not allow him to fall prey to such temptations, for his influence was not at that stage worth buying. It did, however, increase his exposure to European culture: in 1671, he became ambassador extraordinary to the court of Madrid, followed, in the autumn of 1672, by a similar posting in Paris, in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather.
By this stage, he was already marked out as a man of potential, attracting this secret assessment from Louis XIV’s minister, Colbert:
The Earl of Sunderland will without fail depart tomorrow to wait on your Majesty. He is a young gentleman of high family; has a great deal of frankness, courage, parts, and learning; is also extremely well intentioned, and strongly disposed to become a Roman Catholic.
The following year, 1673, Robert was appointed one of the plenipotentiaries for the Treaty of Cologne, and, in 1674, he achieved his initial ambition of becoming a member of the Privy Council — the key royal advisory body — in London. This was a stepping-stone to his ultimate goals, the highest offices in the land. Robert realized that he must be patient; attaining them would require a careful strategy. Between 1674 and 1678, he enjoyed no official court or political role other than his Privy Councillorship, but he used those years to watch and to learn, to see who was allied with whom, and whose influence he should harness for his own ends. He saw that the Treasurer, Thomas Danby, was a man worth cultivating, and became one of his allies.
By the mid-1670s, Charles II was in a position that would have been quite familiar to his father and grandfather. The Stuart kings’ reluctance to be beholden to Parliament was contrary to the desire of the Members of Parliament to establish themselves as an integral part of the government of the nation. James I and Charles I had summoned Parliament only in order to use its tax-raising powers. This they had done with increasing reluctance, as Parliament’s reciprocal demands became increasingly bold.
Charles II was to suffer from the same dilemma: he needed money, and yet he could not abide what he believed to be the intrusions of mere Members of Parliament in his God-given privileges. While Charles had enjoyed the services of the Earl of Arlington as his secretary of state from 1662 to 1674, it had been possible for him to exercise some indirect royal control over many in Parliament. However, between 1674 and 1679, there was nobody to take a forceful role on the King’s behalf.
Determined to bypass the need for money, and therefore the necessity of asking Parliament to fund him, Charles II decided to enter into a secret arrangement with his country’s greatest enemy, Louis XIV of France. This was because Louis shared two things with his English counterpart and cousin: first, a belief in the complete autonomy of the monarch; and, secondly, the Roman Catholic faith. Both principles struck the majority of English Parliamentarians, and the wider landed and middle classes of England, as dangerous threats to the wellbeing of the nation. Well into the eighteenth century, until his death after the War of the Spanish Succession, Louis was therefore perceived to be the greatest threat to England’s safety and stability. He actively fought Protestants abroad, and forcefully exiled them from his own kingdom. Of even greater concern to the English, he was to provide a welcome home for the displaced Stuart claimants to the English crown, even funding various forays to try to place the exiled James II, and his son, born the Prince of Wales, back on the throne. For Charles to enter into a financial deal with the greatest enemy his people had was the most treacherous act he could have performed. To ensure that it remained secret, he needed to find somebody who not only would treat the matter with the utmost confidentiality, but who also would not be so smitten by his conscience that he simply could not go through with such a betrayal of his compatriots. On both counts Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, proved to be the perfect go-between.
In July 1678, Sunderland returned to Paris in an ambassadorial role, but with Charles II’s underhand scheme as his prime concern. He duly arranged the secret payments to Charles from Louis, giving himself the power over the King that was to lead to his becoming, in 1679, the main secretary of state to the monarch. At the same time, Robert established links with the French court that were to be highly lucrative for himself, when he, too, became available for sale to his country’s arch enemy. In Sunderland’s case, this was to be an annual bribe £5,500.
The influence that Louis was securing, through this payment, was that of Sunderland as the more powerful of the two secretaries of state. There was no prime minister of England during the Stuart age. Nor, in the modern understanding of the word, was there a cabinet: the ‘cabinet council’ that existed was not reflective of the majority opinion of the House of Commons, as it is designed to be today; neither was it of crucial importance in policy-making. Its lack of importance as a force and as a concept is shown by the fact that the king could ignore its advice when it met; and, with both Charles II and James II, this was what often happened. Indeed, the standing of the cabinet council could hardly have been lower in the three years of James II’s reign, when the King preferred to consult just Sunderland and a posse of Roman Catholic advisers: the Jesuit, Petre, and Lords Arundel and Powis.
Louis XIV was therefore not buying Sunderland in order to gain control of the cabinet, since that would have been money wasted. Secretaries of state could not deliver up a pliant cabinet through the power of their office. And, as we have seen, persuading the cabinet to unite was neither an easy objective nor a decisive conclusion. What Louis wanted was Sunderland’s direct access to the King of England’s ear — something he enjoyed completely from 1679 to 1680 and from 1683 to 1685 under Charles II, and from 1685 to 1688 under James II. There were other periods when he was a force in the kingdom, but these were his glory years — in terms of his power, that is, rather than of the ethics of his conduct.
For an example of how dependent such a senior government figure was on the King’s favour, one has only to look at the ease with which the mighty Sunderland was dismissed in 1680. This was because he had voted in favour of the Exclusion of the future James II from the English throne for his Catholic beliefs. A political miscalculation of this magnitude on Sunderland’s behalf — Sir William Temple noted that the secretary of state was acting not only ‘against his master’s mind, but his express command’ — led to Charles II going so far as to order that Sunderland’s name be erased from the list of the Privy Council; this, even though probably no secretary had previously enjoyed such power before, having established an unprecedented control over the Privy Council. This had been achieved through starting to institutionalize his position at the head of a recognizable hierarchy, through the initiation of a recognizable structure of public government, which involved regular salaries being paid to political office holders, the concept of a proper business organization, and continuity of tenure of office.
Sunderland was aware that as much control as possible over the Privy Council was an effective way of consolidating his influence. This, combined with the control of intelligence information that came to the secretaries of state, was the cornerstone of Robert’s power, but his real gift was in making his ruler believe that he was indispensable. The proof of his success lay in the fact that he persuaded three such different monarchs — the outwardly Anglican but secretly Catholic Charles II, the fervently Catholic James II, and the Protestant champion, William III — all to turn to a man they knew to have no scruples, but whose political gifts they needed, just as surely as he craved the trappings and financial benefits of office they gave him in return.
There are several pivotal moments in Robert Sunderland’s career which demonstrate his extraordinary lack of principles and his ability to survive politically. The first came in the wake of the Duke of Monmouth’s unsuccessful rebellion
against James II. Monmouth had been one of the conspirators in the Rye House Plot of 1683, in which the prospect of murdering Charles II and James had been entertained. While two of the leaders of the plot, Russell and Sydney, were executed, Monmouth was sent into exile.
Monmouth was a royal bastard, the natural son of Charles II, which largely explains this leniency. He had joined with Sunderland and the Duchess of Portsmouth to bring down Danby after Sunderland had been appointed principal secretary of state in 1679. However, he had clearly learned little about his erstwhile political ally, if he expected their past unity of aims to count for anything when he truly needed Sunderland’s help.
On James II’s accession in 1685, Monmouth planned a rebellion to place himself on the throne. His forces arrived from the Netherlands in June of that same year. Sunderland, as administrative director of the army, passed James’s orders to his forces in the west. On 6 July, Monmouth was routed at the Battle of Sedgemoor, and he was captured and sent to the Tower of London, while his forces were brutally dispatched by the victorious Stuart army and judiciary.
Monmouth was not over-concerned by his incarceration, for he felt confident that he would once again be spared the ultimate sanction for treason. But this confidence was misplaced, because it relied on Sunderland standing by his word — for Sunderland had secretly promised Monmouth a pardon, should he confess nothing during his interrogation. Doubtless this was because, had Monmouth told the entire truth about his plans, he would have revealed that Sunderland had been secretly negotiating with him, in case he was successful in his insurrection.
By the time Monmouth had destroyed his own credibility by contradicting himself repeatedly during questioning, Sunderland realized that he needed to be rid of a man who could expose his own double-dealing, and quickly. Sunderland intercepted a letter written by Monmouth to the King, and had it destroyed, ensuring James never knew of its existence. There was to be no question of Monmouth’s being allowed to live any longer than was strictly necessary. His execution was not long in coming; this for a man who had had a personal guarantee from Sunderland, the King’s chief minister, that his life would never be in danger because of his sworn protection.
The second illustration of Robert’s true character took place in 1686, the second year of James II’s reign, when Sunderland was locked in a power struggle with Edward Hyde and his supporters, to become James’s chief adviser. Robert had lost favour under Charles II for voting publicly against the possibility of a Catholic heir succeeding to the English throne. However, with such a prize as supreme political power in the nation within his grasp, Sunderland was happy to convert to Catholicism — something the more principled Hyde just could not bring himself to do. Grateful that his minister had come over to what he sincerely believed to be the true faith, James duly invested Sunderland with the pre-eminence that he sought. However, James was well aware of the depths of treachery Sunderland was capable of, writing in the same year that he promoted him: ‘Sunderland, besides having a pension from the Prince of Orange, had one also from the King of France. He was the most mercenary man in all the world: veered with all the winds.’
James was not so fickle. However, his dogged promotion of Catholicism was bringing him into ever sharper conflict with the predominantly Anglican political class, as well as with the Church of England itself. The position became strained beyond breaking point when the two Protestant daughters of the King, Princess Mary and Princess Anne, were superseded in the succession by the birth of a little boy, the Prince of Wales, on 10 June 1688. It was believed that James would doubtlessly bring him up to be a Catholic king. As a result, an invitation was sent to Princess Mary’s Dutch husband, William of Orange, to come to England to usurp his own father-in-law.
To some extent, William and Mary were to owe their throne to Sunderland’s treachery. James found out only after William was on his way to England that his most senior and most highly rewarded adviser had been playing his usual double game, and dismissed him on 27 October 1688. James later discovered that Sunderland had been communicating regularly with William via Sunderland’s uncle, Henry Sidney, who was James’s representative at The Hague, in the Netherlands. In order to cover his tracks, Sunderland had persuaded James to command that all foreign ministers, including Sidney, correspond solely and directly with Sunderland.
In what became known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, James II and his supporters slipped off to France, and the reign of William and Mary began, with remarkably little English blood having been spilt.
This could have marked the end of Sunderland’s life, let alone his career. He was widely hated, and was known to be a man of the lowest possible moral calibre. However, he was merely disgraced, and exiled. Almost unbelievably, within five years he had inveigled himself back into royal favour, not only as William III’s confidant, but also as a key figure in the control of the liberal Whig politicians, with whom the Spencers were to identify strongly over the next 230 years.
There were no official parties in English politics at this time, but the definable difference between Whigs and Tories was becoming apparent: the Whigs, keen to check abuses of royal power and champions of the rights of the people at large; the Tories, ardent royalists and stolid supporters of the Anglican Church as a cement for the Establishment as a whole.
Before Robert, the Spencers had long shown sympathies that would later be termed Whig — hence the ghastly irony of the death of Robert’s own father, fighting beside people whose cause he decried, while being slain by his ideological compatriots — but it was the Machiavellian Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, who established his family as one of the key Whig aristocratic dynasties over the succeeding quarter of a millennium.
His Whig sympathies alone would have been enough to have made Princess — later Queen — Anne uneasy about Robert Sunderland. Although, during her own reign, Anne did support a Whig ministry while Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, was her favourite, Anne felt more at ease with the Tories. Yet her dislike of Sunderland went way beyond the political; it was deeply personal. Her letters on the man are as damning as it is possible to be. During her father James’s reign she wrote to her sister Mary:
You may remember I have once before ventured to tell you that I thought Lord Sunderland a very ill man, and I am more confirmed every day in that opinion. Everybody knows how often this man turned backwards and forwards in the late King’s [Charles II’s] time, and now, to complete all his virtues, he is working with all his might to bring in Popery. He is perpetually with the priests, and stirs up the King to do things faster than I believe he would of himself.
Princess Anne’s opinion of Robert’s wife was equally low. Anne was the daughter of George Digby, Second Earl of Bristol, who had been a Royalist general in the English Civil War, and of Lady Anne Russell. According to Louis XIV’s envoys in England, Barillon and Bonrepaux, Anne Sunderland was the lover, during her marriage, of Henry Sidney, reputedly the handsomest man of his time, but also her own husband’s uncle. Sidney was a renowned ladies’ man, and was, according to Burnet, ‘a man of sweet and caressing temper, and had no malice in his heart, but too great a love of pleasure’. Extramarital affairs were certainly not uncommon at court at this time, though Sidney’s and Anne’s lack of discretion over the matter was considered shoddy. But it was not Lady Sunderland’s questionable sexual morality that attracted the Princess’s condemnation, but rather her general character; reservations she was prepared to communicate to her sister, Princess Mary, with the utmost candour:
His lady [Anne] too is as extraordinary in her kind, for she is a flattering, dissembling, false woman; but she has so fawning and endearing a way that she will deceive anybody at first, and it is not possible to find out all her ways in a little time. She cares not at what rate she lives, but never pays anybody. She will cheat, though it be for a little. Then she has had her gallants, though may be not as many as some ladies here; and with all these good qualities she is a constant Church-woman, s
o that to outward appearance one would take her for a saint, and to hear her talk you would think she was a very good Protestant; but she is as much one as the other, for it is certain that her lord does nothing without her.
This led to Princess Anne’s withering conclusion that, ‘Sure there never was a couple so well matched as she and her husband, for as she is throughout all her actions the greatest jade that ever was, so is he the subtellest workingest villain that is on the face of the earth.’
It was not to be long, though, before even she would be drawn into Robert Sunderland’s web of influence. First, he managed to secure for one of his daughters, Lady Anne Spencer, a court position with the Princess. This was a less than successful appointment: not only did Lady Anne spend months unable to perform her duties, being constantly ill, but, even when in healthy attendance, she was treated with open distrust by her employer, ‘knowing from whence she comes’.
Secondly, during the reign of William and Mary, which began in 1688, there were strong tensions between the rival royal courts of the two sisters. To Robert, a divided royal house was something to be avoided. He meant to straddle the current and future reigns with the minimum of fuss, so he made it his mission to smooth over the differences. Unsurprisingly, when one takes into account his previous record of being able to ingratiate himself even with those who knew he was totally untrustworthy, Robert managed to bring about a measure of reconciliation in the mid-1690s. According to Anne’s favourite, Sarah Churchill, Sunderland ‘showed himself a man of sense and breeding’ in his dealings with her mistress at that time.
The Spencer Family Page 7
