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Sarah Marlborough was famous for her temper. It was a passion that she never learned to control. The ultimately unacceptable side of her beguiling exuberance and freshness, it proved to be her undoing, both at court and in her dealings with those she professed to love.
There are several portraits of Sarah at Althorp, one of which captures her just after one of her furious outbursts, her long hair cut from her head, limply held in her hand. The artist, Godfrey Kneller, has caught Sarah in the aftermath of one of her attacks of spiteful anger, this time directed at the husband she knew loved her dearly, and who would frequently compliment her on the beauty of her hair. This explains why she had chopped the hair off — the thoughtless act of a spoilt girl, now a woman rich enough to commission an artist to capture her momentary madness for posterity. The slightly bug eyes are red-rimmed from tears, and the attempted expression of haughty disdain falls flat, and merely looks very sad. Apparently the conclusion of the tale behind this painting was to take place after the duke’s death. Sorting through a chest of her husband’s most treasured items many years after this tantrum, Sarah was deeply moved to find that same swathe of her hair carefully stored away with loving care, by a man who adored her despite her temperamental failings.
As she got older, and as she felt more powerful, Sarah’s moods became more extreme and more frequent. They depressed and distracted Marlborough, as shown in a letter he wrote to her while in the campaign field in 1708: ‘I do not say this to flatter you,’ he wrote, ‘nor am I at an age of making fond expressions, but upon my word, when you are out of humour, and are dissatisfied with me, I had rather die than live.’
This claim was borne out the following year, 1709, when Sarah was becoming obsessed with the way Anne was apparently slighting her. Sarah urged her husband to rally to her assistance; this, while the captain-general was trying to deliver a final knockout blow to the French. Marlborough was reportedly deeply distracted by Sarah’s attention-seeking antics from across the Channel, and the expected victory, when it came at Malplaquet, was inconclusive and accompanied by an appalling loss of life on both sides. Marlborough himself was stunned by the bloodiness of the struggle, mourning ‘so many brave men killed with whom I have lived these eight years, when we thought ourselves sure of a peace’.
Marlborough, aware that the allied losses at Malplaquet gave the Tories great scope for calling for an end to the war, and conscious that Sarah’s less than respectful behaviour towards the Queen would only undermine the war effort further by driving Anne into the Tories’ arms, eventually did write to Anne on his wife’s behalf. The reply, written on 25 October 1709, shows how far matters had unravelled between the two women in three years:
I believe nobody was ever so used by a friend as I have been by her ever since my coming to the Crown. I desire nothing but that she will leave off teasing and tormenting me, and behave herself with the decency she ought both to her friend and Queen, and this I hope you will make her do.
The decisive break between Anne and Sarah came in 1710, with far-reaching consequences not only for the Marlboroughs, but also for their Spencer offshoots. Charles Sunderland saw the end might be coming, and urged Marlborough to see to it that Sarah prime Godolphin to stand fast, which, he hoped, would guarantee Anne would have to back down from any plans she might have to turn away from the Whigs. As Sunderland wrote to Marlborough at the end of March 1710:
Besides the danger to the whole, none of our heads are safe, if we can’t get the better of what I am convinced Mrs Morley [Anne] designs; and if [the] lord treasurer can be persuaded [by Sarah] to act like a man, I am sure our union and strength is too great to be hurt.
In this assessment, Charles Sunderland was woefully mistaken. Within two months, he himself had been dismissed from his secretaryship of state. It was one of a series of changes that signalled the ascendancy of Harley and his Tories, and the demise of the Whigs; for Anne’s new favourite was Abigail Hill, a cousin of Sarah’s whom the duchess herself had brought into Anne’s court, but who now enjoyed the Queen’s confidence. Abigail was a Tory, as well as a relative of Harley’s, and she helped encourage the transition of power that was to see the Marlborough-Godolphin-Sunderland triumvirate reduced to impotence.
Anne was aware that she risked losing her captain-general and her Treasurer, through the Sunderland dismissal, in a domino effect. The two men who had brought so much honour to her reign and her country had told her it would be an ‘insupportable’ move, in their view, to dispense with Sunderland’s services. But Anne’s fears of appearing weak made her stubbornly resolute. Dismissing a man as powerful as Sunderland had many attractions, one of which was being able to flatter herself that she had, four years on, stamped her royal authority on her overbearing politicians in a decisive and responsible manner. Informing Lord Somers, another member of the Whig junto, of his colleague’s demise, Anne told him ‘that she was entirely for moderation, yet she did not intend to make any other alterations, but this was a resolution [that] she had taken for a long time, and that nothing could divert her from it’.
The Tories rejoiced at Sunderland’s dismissal. Abel Boyer reported at the time: ‘The High Church party were wonderfully pleased, and elated, upon this alteration, which they looked upon as a sure earnest, and forerunner of greater changes.’ The Whigs retreated to Althorp in September 1710 to discuss their future tactics, knowing that they would be out of power after the inevitable dissolution of Parliament. As it transpired, this was the end of Marlborough and Sunderland’s influence for the remaining four years of Stuart rule.
It is worth mentioning that, on his dismissal, Queen Anne offered Sunderland the sop of a £3,000 pension for life. In a gesture of noble self-denial that would have been anathema to his father, Charles proudly retorted that he was glad Her Majesty was satisfied he had done his duty, but if he could not have the honour of serving his country, then neither would he plunder it. This was a rare flash of selfless decency from an early eighteenth-century Spencer.
Meanwhile Sarah was utterly furious at what she perceived to be the cruel and ungrateful treatment of herself, her husband, their greatest friend and her son-in-law. In truth Sarah’s own erratic behaviour was largely responsible for the mass fall from royal favour, yet Sarah refused to accept that she was to blame, preferring to believe that Anne had acted dishonourably and unjustly. The breakdown between the weak Queen and the arrogant courtier was formally recognized by both sides when, on 18 January 1711, Marlborough surrendered Sarah’s key of office to Anne.
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Sarah Marlborough has been seen as an early feminist, and it is indisputable that she did forge an independent course by the standards of the time. Her mother, Frances — a hatchet-faced crone, if her portrait at Althorp is a fair likeness — had insisted that her daughters be brought up with a sense of self-sufficiency as one of their central beliefs. In Sarah, this lesson manifested itself in her insistence on mastering her own business affairs; she always kept her burgeoning wealth separate from the considerable fortune of her husband.
Similarly, Sarah saw no reason why she could not be fully involved in politics, once declaring, in 1714: ‘I am confident I should have been the greatest hero that ever was known in the Parliament House, if I had been so happy as to have been a man.’ On another occasion she was to assert with bitter resignation: ‘The things that are worth naming will ever be done from the influence of men.’
In her middle age, deprived of her influence at court, Sarah was more determined than ever to make her own independent mark as a woman by other means, acquiring property on a huge scale, and forcing herself, as a meddling matriarch, on the lives of those relatives around her who hoped to benefit from her wealth when she was gone. She was to become reputedly the richest woman in England, outside the royal family she so despised. This money gave her plenty of scope for her favourite pastime: dynastic scheming and manipulation.
The Marlboroughs’ favourite child was Anne Spencer, Countess o
f Sunderland. As a couple, they had always been less than enamoured of their son-in-law, Charles Sunderland; increasingly so, as he treated their daughter more and more shoddily. There were political differences, too, which came to the surface particularly after the 1710 dismissal. Yet it was Sunderland’s taste for prostitutes, his fathering of an illegitimate daughter, and the growing rumours of his bisexuality, which were the greatest causes of his alienation from the Marlboroughs.
Both Marlborough and his son-in-law headed families who had suffered greatly after their dismissals by Anne. The Marlboroughs had even felt obliged to spend an increasing amount of time overseas, knowing they were more appreciated there than they were in the homeland which they believed they had served so well. The enemies the couple had made in their years in favour now mercilessly attacked yesteryear’s golden couple, particularly in print. In a sentiment that would not have been unfamiliar to one of her ill-fated descendants nearly 300 years later, Sarah, exhausted by the unremitting nastiness of the English press, left London in January 1713, saying: ‘I really long as much to be out of this horrid country as I used to do to come into it.’
They returned on 1 August 1714 to find that Queen Anne had just died. Marlborough’s military talents were acknowledged by the new King soon enough, and he was once again made captain-general of land forces, as well as colonel of the first regiment of foot-guards and master of the ordnance — the threat of a Jacobite invasion overcoming George I’s initial fears as to how best to control Marlborough’s famously rampant ambition.
The position was not made easier when both Marlborough and Sunderland were unexpectedly excluded from the core of George I’s court. To their astonishment, neither was even on the list of Lord Justices, who were to oversee the wellbeing of the nation in the month and a half between the death of Queen Anne and the arrival of the first Hanoverian king of England.
Suspicion hung over Charles Sunderland, and it took rare diligence as a Privy Councillor, followed by a spell as Viceroy of Ireland, to reinstate him as a trusted royal adviser. Remarkably, Sunderland oversaw the obligations of his Irish position from England. He claimed he could not go to Ireland itself, because of problems with his wife’s health — doubtless true, but also a convenient excuse for not being kept away from the hub of political life in London.
It was said that it was Sunderland who, at this pivotal stage in the Hanoverian attempt to establish themselves in Britain, was personally responsible for making it impossible for the Jacobites to mount a rebellion in Ireland in 1715, to coincide with the unsuccessful one that broke out then in England. As a reward, in February 1716, Sunderland was appointed a joint Vice-Treasurer of Ireland — a post he received for life, in a sole capacity, four months later.
At this juncture Sunderland was invited by George I to go to Holland and Hanover in the royal party. He clearly took the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the King for, in April 1717, Lord Townshend was ousted, and Sunderland was asked to form a new administration, along with Stanhope and Cadogan.
It was either side of this reinstatement in the political elite that Sunderland’s problems with the Marlboroughs reached a climax. In 1716 his wife died. Anne Sunderland, her health always frail, had developed pleurisy. The ineptness of her physicians had led to a botched blood-letting, which left her suffering from a fatal exposure to septicaemia. Marlborough was devastated by the death of his daughter, and his sorrow may well have contributed to the debilitating stroke he suffered later in the same year, the effects of which he was never to overcome.
As for Sarah Marlborough, her grief was compounded by furious outrage when Charles Sunderland seemed altogether too hasty in remarrying, after her Anne’s death. Only eighteen months into his second widowhood, he wed Judith Tichborne, a fifteen-year-old — the same age as his second oldest child — who was ‘without a shilling and without a name’. With her customary fertility of imagination when angry, Sarah somehow convinced herself that Charles was partly responsible for Anne’s death. She decided it was now her responsibility to take an active interest in the children of her dead daughter on her behalf, to see that their irresponsible father could not compromise the plans she had for them.
There were five children in this generation of the Spencer family: Robert, Lord Spencer, the heir to the earldom of Sunderland, born in 1701; Lady Anne Spencer, a year his junior; the Honourable Charles Spencer, four years younger than Anne; the Honourable John Spencer, born in 1708; and the baby of the family, destined to be the favourite of Sarah’s twelve grandchildren, Lady Diana Spencer, two years John’s junior.
In 1716, in a eulogy written on Anne Sunderland’s death, J. C. Gent wrote of the Spencer quintet:
Loving may they Live, mature in ev’ry charm,
Strike ev’ry Eye, and ev’ry Fancy warm;
Let Art and Nature join their forms to grace,
And call the Mother forth in ev’ry Face;
To them may Heav’n impart thy Virtues too,
And teach them thy Example to pursue,
Thy bright Perfections into each transfuse,
And make thy Race the Theme of ev’ry Muse.
In only one of the five could it be said that Gent’s hopes were successfully met.
9. The Manipulative Matriarch
When Charles Sunderland became Lord Commissioner of the Treasury in March 1718, the Spencer family that he headed was in financial turmoil. This was largely thanks to his own expenditure. Charles’s particular weakness was not paintings, like his father, but books; he was the first Spencer bibliophile, and his excessive spending at book sales was famed throughout the literary world. He was also, like his father, a compulsive gambler. Sarah Marlborough was aware of both extravagances, and was most concerned that, with Charles clearly set on a third marriage, and with the prospect of yet more children, her daughter’s offspring would not be sufficiently well provided for to fund the ambitions she had for her Spencer grandchildren.
Charles Sunderland had expected the Marlboroughs’ vast wealth to provide for the children from his marriage to their daughter. He was to be disabused of this idea when the time came for a £10,000 marriage portion to be found for his elder daughter, Anne, to William Bateman, the son of a director of the very prosperous, but ultimately ill-fated, South Sea Company.
Although Bateman was not a choice that appealed to Sunderland, Sarah insisted that the father of the bride provide £5,000 of the marriage settlement himself. Sarah felt she had done more than enough by persuading George I to make Bateman a viscount, a concept that the King found very amusing, saying, after meeting the newly ennobled young man, that he could make Bateman a peer, but not even he could turn him into a gentleman.
Given the source of his new son-in-law’s wealth, it was, ironically, the South Sea Company’s disastrous collapse that was to be the dominant event in the remainder of Sunderland’s ministry. Established in 1711 in a Tory attempt to bypass the Whig-dominated Bank of England, the South Sea Company, by the time of its demise, purported to be an attractive long-term investment for those prepared to stake their money against England’s National Debt. The early investors made huge gains. Sarah Marlborough was one of the larger beneficiaries of the scheme, selling her and her husband’s stock for £100,000 profit, just before many investors were totally ruined by the dramatic collapse in the company’s value. She had recognized that it was not a process of investment based on any sound principles, rather on novelty value and greed.
That greed extended to those government ministers who were prepared to accept bribes to help keep share prices unrealistically high. Sunderland himself had allegedly received £50,000 worth of new stock, before the South Sea Bubble spectacularly burst, in 1720. Harried by his political enemies, who insisted on a full enquiry into the allegations against him, Sunderland reawakened his contacts with the Jacobites, so he could be sure of a bolthole somewhere, should a prison sentence be looming. By dint of a private understanding with his successor, Robert Walpole, Sunderland left his m
inistry the following winter, without facing justice.
There was to be no further resurrection of Sunderland’s career. He fell ill in April 1722 and died within a few days, only in his mid-forties. His death had a different significance for different interest groups. William Bowyer, a contemporary printer, recorded in his memoirs:
19 April 1722. This day, about three in the afternoon, died Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, which I note here, because I believe that by reason of his decease some benefit may accrue to this Library, even in case his Relations will part with none of his books, I mean, by his raising the price of books the higher now; so that, in probability, this commodity may fall in the market, and any gentleman be permitted to buy an uncommon old book for less than forty or fifty pounds.
The effect of Charles Sunderland’s death on the political world of early Hanoverian England was somewhat more dramatic than these scholarly and mercenary musings. Lord Cardigan wrote to Lord Gower:
The death of my Lord Sunderland has very much disconcerted the measures of the court, and puts their affairs into some confusion. As soon as he was dead, the Executors and the Duchess of Marlborough sealed up his scrutore till his son returned from his Travels. But the Lord President of the Council [Lord Carleton], the Lord Privy Seal [the Duke of Kingston], and the two secretaries of State [Lord Carteret and Lord Townshend] came and tore off the seals, seiz’d what papers related to Publick Affairs, and carried them away, which all the world says, has put the Duchess into a very great passion, and she threatens them with a law suit. He has died in much better [financial] circumstances than his friends expected.
Now that her favourite daughter’s family was no longer under the control of the man whom she and her husband had come to dislike increasingly, Sarah Marlborough decided to become the de facto head of the Spencer family, formally adopting Lady Diana, and taking firm control of the school careers of Charles and John, moving them from Eton to her lodgings in Windsor Great Park, with a tutor of her choosing.
The Spencer Family Page 10
