The Spencer Family

by Charles Spencer

  Sarah could match Anne, spiteful sentiment for spiteful sentiment, calling her granddaughter ‘the vilest woman I ever knew in my life; and deserves to be burnt’.

  The result was that, at the end of her life, Sarah was effectively left with one Spencer grandchild on whom to pin her hopes: John. To be fair there was not much obvious potential in him. Like Charles, he had squandered his schooldays in Geneva by living well beyond his means and studying barely at all. Contemporaries recall the thirteen-year-old boy’s excitement at setting off for the foreign academy, longing to be free of his grandmother’s influence. The thought that this travel was based around a wish to improve his mind was a notion that seems never to have occurred to him.

  Sarah was deeply dissatisfied with her Geneva initiative, and she decided to entrust John to a tutor, Humphrey Fish. It is through a letter she wrote to Fish that we catch sight of how important John now was to her: ‘I am sure [I] wish him better, and love him more, than anybody that is now in the world.’

  In the summer of 1728, master and pupil moved to Dijon, where they both became dangerously ill. Fish eventually died from a fever.

  Sarah, although reassured that her ‘Johnny’ was not in the same danger, wrote to him: ‘No words can express how dear you are to me, and I shall be in torture till I see you, therefore pray let it be as soon as you can come with safety.’

  In the mid eighteenth century, political power was greatly influenced by the landowners in each locality. Woodstock, the constituency in which Blenheim Palace was built, was virtually a private fiefdom for Sarah, and in 1732 she effectively gave the parliamentary seat there to Johnny. But this was a Spencer with little interest in politics. Self-gratification was of more importance to him than public service; indeed, he was never actually to speak in the House of Commons, while a Member.

  His vices were the usual ones for rich young aristocrats of the time — women, gambling, drinking — and did not attract much comment. However, his penchant for taking baths was a subject of amused derision among his social peers, because it was thought a decidedly odd thing to want to do for pleasure. The First Earl of Egmont’s diary for 2 June 1732 records of Johnny:

  It seems this young gentleman is fond of frequent bathing and has a bath in his house. By mistake a gentleman who came to see him was admitted while he was in the tub, whereupon making a short visit, he took his leave that he might not keep Mr Spencer too long in the water; but Mr Spencer out of a sprightly and frolicsome humour, leaped out of the bath, naked as he was, and waited on him down to the very street door. The Queen at her levee talking of this action as a very extraordinary one, my Lord Peterborough replied that Mr Spencer was a man of extraordinary breeding to acknowledge the favour of a common visit in his birthday clothes.

  This perceived eccentricity aside, Johnny earned the respect of his contemporaries for standing by his brother, the Fifth Earl of Sunderland, when Sarah Marlborough fell out with Charles over his wedding to Elizabeth Trevor. Sarah offered Johnny the extraordinary sum of £400,000, if he would undertake never to see, or communicate with, his brother again. Johnny replied that he had always loved his brother, and that no sum existed which could make him desert him, ‘breaking this friendship and the ties of nature’.

  Before we assume that John was a man of the strongest moral fibre, he was to show considerably less resilience when Sarah insisted that he not see his sister Anne, Lady Bateman. He eventually yielded, because Sarah told him that refusal to do so would result in him being forced to quit his apartments in Marlborough House. This panicked Johnny, who said he could not possibly be expected to leave, since he was in the middle of long and painful treatment for venereal disease, and did not want to be seen in public. But Sarah was not bluffing, and Johnny agreed not to see his sister again, rather than be cast out of the comfort — and the privacy — of his lodgings.

  Sarah was determined to overlook Johnny’s shortcomings in her determination to create out of him the founder of a branch of the family in which she could invest her ambitions and riches. Her plan was to see Johnny raised to the peerage as Lord Churchill, with her fortune allowing him to live in a style appropriate to his new status. Johnny soon learned that such aspirations from his grandmother were not without reciprocal demands. The most pressing of these was Sarah’s insistence that he marry. Although this was not a step that he had ever considered before, after some thought Johnny judged it wiser to obey his grandmother, rather than risk forfeiting his inheritance. As for who the bride should be, that hardly seemed important to him.

  Charles Greville, writing a century later, tells us how Johnny Spencer chose his wife, with more than a little help from Sarah:

  He expressed his readiness to marry anybody she pleased and at last she sent him a list, alphabetically arranged, of suitable matches. He said he might as well take the first on the list, which happened to be letter C, a Carteret, daughter of Lord Granville’s, and her he accordingly married.

  The Carterets, a Bedfordshire family, were thought a suitable bloodline for Johnny to marry into. Sarah had immense regard for the head of the family, Granville, who had been a close political ally of John Spencer’s father, the Third Earl of Sunderland. For his troubles, Granville had been banished to Ireland by Sir Robert Walpole, as Lord Lieutenant. Walpole knew that Granville was a capable enough politician to be considered a potential future Prime Minister — a Whig one, of course. He did not want him on the British mainland.

  The match found favour with the Granvilles because of its political expediency, rather than because they had any enthusiasm for Johnny himself. Struggling to find an aspect of her new son-in-law to admire, Lady Granville wrote to a friend, ‘My daughter tells me Mrs Spencer will improve her music with learning, for Mr Spencer loves it extremely, and plays himself very well on the German flute …’

  Despite the absence of romance in the selection of his bride, Johnny Spencer chose St Valentine’s Day 1734 for the marriage. His wedding present from Sarah Marlborough was a large house she had just had built in Wimbledon. Three weeks before the wedding, the division of Spencer and Churchill assets was finally agreed, as the Daily Courant reported:

  On Tuesday last the estates of his Grace Charles Duke of Marlborough in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire, together with Sunderland House in Piccadilly, were in due form conveyed to the Honble John Spencer, his Grace’s only brother, pursuant to the last will and testament of the late Duke of Marlborough to settle such estates he was before in possession of on his younger brothers or brother, or give him an equivalent in lieu thereof, within three months after the acquisition of those honours. We hear the Duchess Dowager of Marlborough hath settled £5,000 per annum on the Honble John Spencer, her grandson, and his heirs forever.

  The financial affairs of the Carterets were slightly less ordered, and considerably less substantial, than those of the dynasty into which they had married. Lord Granville himself was ‘more careless than extravagant’, according to his contemporary, the Earl of Shelburne. As the father of the bride, he was expected to provide a large monetary settlement; this, despite all the wealth that had already been directed towards the couple via the groom’s family. However, his family knew he could not possibly meet the obligation. They repeatedly asked Granville to address the problem, but he showed no inclination to face up to the potential embarrassment of the situation, and became a master of benign procrastination.

  Eventually, the day before the settlement was to be formalized, Granville’s father-in-law, Sir Robert Worsley, asked for a private word with him. Worsley managed to turn the conversation round to the matter of the wedding, and said that he hoped that everything was in order with regard to the finances, because otherwise Sarah Marlborough might prove to be more than a little peeved. Worsley went on to say that, of course, he did not assume Granville was unprepared, ‘But if you are, I have £5,000 at my bankers, with which I can accommodate you.’ At this news, Granville brightened considerably, saying, ‘Can you really! If so, I shall be mu
ch obliged to you, for, to say the truth, I have not a hundred pounds towards it.’

  At the wedding service at St George’s, Hanover Square, Georgina Carteret wore white satin embroidered with silver, set off with very fine lace. Her jewels were given to her by Sarah Marlborough. After the wedding ceremony, the couple joined their guests at the gaming tables, dined at ten in the evening, and went to bed between twelve and one, before heading to Sarah Marlborough’s house at Windsor.

  It was customary, soon after the marriage of an aristocrat, for the couple to be presented to the monarch at St James’s Palace, in what was termed the drawing room. The convention was for this to be a formal but happy occasion, one which the newlyweds would have looked forward to as a blessing on their union from the highest in the land. But this was to be a meeting that would hold no happy memories for the Spencer-Carteret party, who had turned out in force for the prestigious event. The First Earl of Egmont captured the drama of it all in his diary:

  The Lord Carteret and his Lady, the Earl of Sunderland and his Countess and several others attended on the occasion and as is usual expected the honour to kiss hands, but the King turned his back to them all, nor did the Queen (who usually makes amends for the King’s reservedness) say anything to them, only after a considerable neglect of them all, at last came up to Mr Spencer and only said to him, ‘I think, Mr Spencer, I have not seen you since you was a child’; to which he answered as coldly, ‘No, Madam, I believe not’, and so they all came away displeased. It were to be wished the King had more affability ... there are conjunctions of time when Kings should take some pains to please. These Lords Carteret and Sunderland have affections for his Majesty’s family, but are no friends to Sir Robert Walpole, but it appears whoever are not friends to him are not to be countenanced at Court.

  The result of this graceless snub was Johnny’s decision to join his brother and brother-in-law, the Dukes of Marlborough and Bedford, in ‘the Rumpsteak Club’. This was made up of aristocrats who had suffered from George II’s unfortunate rudeness, the name having been suggested by one of the members after he complained that George had ‘turned his rump to him’.

  The marriage of John and Georgina was a happy one. She adored her husband, who carried on as though nothing had really changed in his life — the perpetual bachelor. Georgina was known for her charm and ease of manner, having inspired an admirer to write of her when she was a mere child in Ireland:

  Little charm of placid mien,

  Miniature of beauty’s queen,

  Numbering years a scanty nine,

  Stealing hearts without design,

  Young inveigler, fond of wiles,

  Prone to mirth, profuse in smiles,

  Yet a novice in disdain,

  Pleasure giving, without pain;

  Still caressing, still carest,

  Thou and all thy lovers blest;

  Never teaz’d, and never teazing,

  O, for ever pleas’d, and pleasing ...

  Georgina needed limitless patience to put up with John’s behaviour. True, their union got off to a successful start, with a son — also called John — being born in December 1734. Sarah Marlborough was delighted that there was an heir in the Spencer line, although disappointed that the baby resembled his mother more than his father: ‘If he makes a good man and is healthy,’ Sarah conceded, ‘I do not much care whom he is like.’ A second pregnancy followed towards the end of 1735. However, a month before its culmination, Lord Egmont reported that John was back to his old ways:

  Snowball, our beadle, told us at the Vestry that five o’clock in the morning one day this week the Duke of Bedford, Mr Spencer ... and Lord Beaumont, the Duke of Roxburgh’s son, together with two others he knew not, came from a tavern in Pall Mall with three ladies (as he called them) to the watch house and stayed there till seven, drinking wine they brought with them, after which the gentlemen went away, leaving the ladies.

  Johnny also kept a mistress, Fanny Murray. She was treated honourably by the family after his death, being given a pension of £160 per year, provided she stop being a courtesan, and marry an actor called David Ross. Georgina knew about her during the marriage, and put up with her erring husband’s ways without public comment.

  Apart from his sexual peccadilloes and his heavy drinking, Johnny’s other physical vice was chewing tobacco, to which he became addicted. The combined effect of John’s excesses on his health was such that his doctors, whom he shared with Sarah Marlborough — forty-eight years his senior — were convinced that grandson would predecease grandmother. However, the old matriarch finally died, aged eighty-three, in 1744. Her estranged daughter, the Duchess of Montagu, betrayed her lack of emotion at her mother’s passing, merely remarking that dying was not in her mother’s style.

  Writing on the life of Pitt in 1910, Lord Rosebery referred to Sarah as a ‘vigorous old termagant’, and went on to justify this character judgement:

  All through her life she had been more bellicose, though with less success, than her illustrious husband, and of late years had devoted her peculiar powers of hatred to Walpole. This bitterness extended even beyond the grave, for by a codicil dated two months before her death she bequeathed legacies to the two men who had most distinguished themselves by their attacks on that Minister. One was Chesterfield, to whom she left £20,000; the other was Pitt, to whom she left £10,000 ‘for the noble defence he made for the support of the laws of England, and to prevent the ruin of his country’.

  Pitt, although no doubt delighted by this unexpected windfall, made it clear that he had some reservations about its source, when he wrote to Sarah’s executor, Marchmont, ‘Give me leave to return your Lordship my thanks for the obliging manner in which you do me the honour to inform me of the Duchess of Marlborough’s great goodness to me. The sort of regard I feel for her memory I leave to your Lordship’s heart to suggest to you.’

  Pitt and Chesterfield were also to share Wimbledon, if Johnny Spencer and his sickly young son failed to produce a surviving heir between them; and Pitt, thanks to Sarah Marlborough’s influence, was to succeed to the Spencer estates, too, in the same circumstances. As Rosebery recorded, though:

  Fortunately the splendid contingency did not take effect. For Chesterfield died without legitimate issue, and the Pitts have long been extinct; but the descendants of John Spencer’s only son have been men of a purity of character and honour which have sweetened and exalted the traditions of English public life.

  There was one overriding condition, though, if Sarah’s wealth was to pass in its entirety to Johnny and his son. In her will, she wrote: ‘I have settled all the estates in this Paper upon John Spencer and his son; but if either of them take any employment or Pension from the Crown they are to forfeit the whole and they are to go to others as if they were dead.’ The only honours they were allowed to receive were a peerage and the Rangership of Windsor Park. Control of her family, and hatred of the royal family, were not to be diminished by the small matter of mortality.

  There was no question of Johnny Spencer risking his huge inheritance by going against his benefactor’s instructions. He now became the possessor of twenty-seven landed estates in twelve counties, the majority in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, but as far afield as Kent and Staffordshire. Dr Frances Harris of the British Library has estimated that the capital value of this land was £400,000, with an annual rent roll of £17,000 per year after outgoings. A gentleman at this time could live on £300 per year. There was also in excess of £250,000 not tied up in land, together with paintings by Stubbs, Rubens and Hondecoeter, and the fabulous Marlborough silver. All this on top of his paternal inheritance of Althorp and Wormleighton. He was fantastically wealthy — way beyond his expectations as a young man, when he was resigned to being only a relatively well-off third son of an aristocratic family.

  However, Johnny did not have long to enjoy his Marlborough possessions. His drinking, tobacco-chewing and other indulgences finally proved his doctors right
, and he died in June 1746, only twenty months after Sarah. Charles Marlborough now expected to be reconnected with his Spencer possessions, and was amazed to discover that this was not to be the case. Horace Walpole wrote to George Montagu:

  The great business of the town is Jack Spencer’s will, who has left Althrop [sic] and the Sunderland estates in reversion to Pitt; after more obligations and more pretended friendship for his brother, the Duke, than is conceivable. The Duke is in the utmost uneasiness about it, having left the drawing of the writings for the estate to his brother and his grandmother, and without having any idea that himself was cut out of the entail.

  10. A Secret Marriage, a Public Love Affair

  The eleven-year-old boy who was now possessor of such fabulous wealth was Master John Spencer. He had not been expected to survive his first few years, and poor health was to be the theme of his life, ultimately shortening it substantially. He was shy and awkward throughout his life, and Viscount Palmerston evaluated him thus:

  He seems to be a man whose value few people know. The bright side of his character appears in private and the dark side in public ... it is only those who live in intimacy with him who know that he has an understanding heart that might do credit to any man.

  Certainly, he was a man of contradictions.