The Spencer Family

by Charles Spencer

  George John initially decided to concentrate on specific areas of literature: primarily on books from William Caxton’s printing press. By the time of his death, there were fifty-seven original Caxtons at Althorp, three of them unique. He then cast his net wider, professing a wish to possess an example of any and every book printed before 1500. Two generations later, it was said that Spencer had been so successful in this that ‘in this respect the library is rich beyond any other private collection that ever existed, or can now be expected to exist’. The jewels of the collection were the first Mainz Psalter, of 1457, and the Mazarin Bible by Gutenberg, of 1456 — the first printed Bible. In terms of the number of different editions of the Bible that it contained, the Spencer library was said to be without equal.

  Other works of extreme rarity included ten ‘block books’ — tomes produced before the introduction of movable type — as well as letters of indulgence sold by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, when the Holy Father was desperate for funds to pay for the defence of Cyprus from the Ottoman empire.

  George John’s classical studies meant that works relating to the ancient world and the Renaissance were eagerly sought by him. He had the first edition of the very first book to be printed in Greek characters, as well as similarly rare works by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. As the Second Earl’s tastes widened, so the earliest examples of the first presses of Germany, Holland, France and Naples were acquired. Of the latter, he secured a rich infusion when he bought the entire library of the Neapolitan aristocrat, the Duke of Cassano Serra, in 1819. Back in England, the same year, he managed to return to Althorp many books that had gone to Blenheim in the 1730s, when he was one of the major purchasers at the disposal of the Marlborough library.

  For advice and encouragement in his all-consuming hobby, George John had the services of his own personal librarian, the Reverend Thomas Dibdin. The knowledgeable cleric criss-crossed Europe looking for rarities to bring back to his master. Dibdin was also to write the definitive catalogue of the collection for posterity.

  While he was First Lord of the Admiralty, George John’s unquenchable thirst for books was acknowledged as a harmless eccentricity by his contemporaries. A Translation in Verse of the Mottos of the English Nobility, published in 1800 by Amicus, in London, poked gentle fun at Spencer:

  With active and incessant zeal,

  I labour for the public weal;

  And work at it both day and night:

  ‘Almighty God defend the right!’

  My countrymen I fane would save ye,

  By means of a tremendous navy,

  If the French came with hungry looks,

  In search of rare and matchless books,

  I then shall be at tenter-hooks!

  For France as well as Grande Bretagne,

  Is now become a ‘Bibliomane’!

  However, after his retirement from politics, it was clear that what had started out as a pastime had become an obsession with dire results for the Spencer family finances. It was this unique single-mindedness in his cause, though, that attracted the applause of fellow bibliophiles. The Frenchman Jules Janin, in an article on Paris’s great book collectors, mentioned the English earl as an example to them all:

  He spent only a year in Rome, where he visited neither St Peter’s, the Colosseum, nor the Vatican. He occupied himself only with dealers, and, having at last found the ‘Martial’, edited by Sweynheym and Paumarty in 1743, he returned instantly to England without giving the Eternal City another thought. In the course of time his library became the most famous in London. Don’t laugh, the love of books is a charming eccentricity: it is respectable, it is innocent, it proves that you have an honest soul, a contented mind. To love books is to renounce games, good eating, useless luxury, horseracing, political ambition, the pains of love. In his library the bibliophile is king.

  This particular bibliophile was more like an emperor, turning eight of the rooms at Althorp into libraries, where previously one had sufficed. He also transformed the original drawing room at Spencer House into a second library there, putting up a partition to divide the bulk of the room from the bow window, in order to accommodate a still greater number of volumes. In the process, he ruined the proportions of the space, but mere aesthetics were forced to take second place to the earl’s beloved books.

  It was reputed at the end of George John’s life that he had assembled a collection which contained a copy of every book published during the preceding thirty years. The only criterion for inclusion in the Spencer Library had become perfect condition, both in terms of text and outward appearance, rather than considerations of subject matter, author or provenance. Even the agricultural depression which followed the Napoleonic Wars did not stop his ceaseless buying. By the time of his death, Althorp contained more than 43,000 books, the fruits of an addiction every bit as potent, and certainly as expensive, as that of his gambling forebears.

  To George John and Lavinia, the concept of cutting back on their life of unremitting extravagance was something they increasingly discussed, but consistently failed to act upon. Indeed, pretty much the only economy that the couple effected was to let their Wimbledon home to the Duke of Somerset.

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  In 1996 I sold the lordship of the manor of Wimbledon at auction, for a sum that paid for the complete replumbing of Althorp. By so doing, I was bringing to an end 250 years of Spencer connections with one of London’s best-known suburbs, an area of land with a rich history of its own.

  The manor of Wimbledon belonged to the see of Canterbury from the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066 until the reign of Henry VIII, when Henry himself took possession of it. From the King, it went briefly to one of his closest advisers, Thomas Cromwell, and from him to one of Henry’s queens, Catherine Parr, for the remainder of her life.

  Wimbledon continued in the gift of royal favour during Queen Mary’s reign, being granted to her Catholic henchman, Cardinal Pole. In the following reign it was owned by Sir Christopher Hatton, the courtier who built Holdenby House, across the valley from Althorp Park. When Hatton went bankrupt, the next lord of the manor was Sir Thomas Cecil. On becoming Earl of Exeter, Cecil elected to have his eldest son receive the courtesy title of Viscount Wimbledon, indicating the special attachment he felt for his new home and its surrounding area.

  In 1638, the Earl of Holland bought the manor. Then followed a quick turnover of owners, including General Lambert, a florist and painter, who had been cashiered by Oliver Cromwell. After the Stuart Restoration of 1660, Queen Henrietta-Maria acquired Wimbledon, selling it on to the trustees of George Digby, Earl of Bristol — Anne Sunderland’s father. It was at this stage that John Evelyn, in his famous diaries, gave us a view of how the place appeared to contemporaries in 1662: ‘I went with my Lord of Bristol to see his house at Wimbledon, newly bought of the Queen Mother, to help contrive the garden after the modern [style]. It is a delicious place for prospect and the thickets but the soil cold and weeping clay.’

  Later Digby’s widow, Lady Bristol, agreed to sell Wimbledon to the Duke of Leeds. It was generally acknowledged to be one of the finest private residences in the London area — a fact attested to by Swift in his correspondence. When Leeds died, it was sold to Sir Theodore Jansson, who was forced to dispose of it after becoming a major casualty of the South Sea Bubble.

  Wimbledon was now added to the huge estate of Sarah Marlborough, at a cost of £15,000. As we have seen, the cantankerous duchess spent most of her middle and old age tampering with her children’s lives and fortunes. She also developed the expensive habit of remodelling her many houses, frequently falling out with the architects she employed to undertake such works on her behalf; her quarrels with Vanbrugh over the building of Blenheim Palace were notorious.

  The house at Wimbledon that Sarah Marlborough bought had been recently rebuilt, by Sir Theodore Jansson, on the site of Sir Thomas Cecil’s original residence. Sarah did not like it, and so employed Lord Burlington to design a new edifice. She was far from satisf
ied with the result, saying that the mansion looked as though ‘it was making a curtsey’, for it appeared to be dipping down into the ground, rather than standing tall and elegant. However, even when the design was changed, Sarah was not at all happy with what she saw, judging by her own comments on the place, in 1737: ‘Came yesterday from Wimbledon — though it stands high, it is upon clay, an ill sod, very damp, and I believe an unhealthy place, which I shall very seldom live in; and consequently I have thrown away a vast sum of money upon it to little purpose.’

  Although she did visit it more than this sulky entry in her journal might suggest, it was not a house where Sarah was to leave much of a mark. Indeed, perhaps the most striking reminder of her years of ownership lies in the name familiar to anyone who drives around that part of south London today, Tibbet’s Corner, after Mr Tibbet, her gatekeeper, whose lodge was at the top of Putney Hill.

  After Sarah died in 1744, Wimbledon passed to her grandson, Johnny Spencer. His premature death left the house and 1,200-acre park in the hands of John, later First Earl Spencer. He proved more interested in remodelling Wimbledon and creating Spencer House than he initially was in preserving Althorp. ‘Capability’ Brown was brought in to improve the landscape, creating a large lake by draining the wet fields round about, and laying out the entrance drive that is now known as Victoria Drive. The house itself was extensively rebuilt in 1749 using Roger Morris’s designs, twenty years after he had built his beautiful stables at Althorp. So attached was John to Wimbledon that he very nearly chose to celebrate his twenty-first birthday there in 1755, rather than going to Althorp on the journey that was to see him return a married man — this despite the fact that the Northamptonshire mansion was steeped in his family’s history, whereas Wimbledon had been a Spencer property for only eleven years.

  Inside Wimbledon, John and Georgiana Spencer perpetuated the theme of extravagant self-indulgence that marked their life together. The envy this extreme display of wealth provoked can be divined in the following letters, between a Miss Talbot and a Mrs Carter, dating from 1760. Miss Talbot reported:

  On Tuesday I rode to Wimbledon ... we visited Mrs Poyntz [Georgiana’s mother], admired the very charming park, walked to the menagerie, and all over the ground floor of the house, saw many curious and pretty birds, some very good pictures, and Mrs Spencer’s closet, which I fancy you have heard her describe. It is not near finished; though small is very elegant and pretty, and will be immensely costly. And yet a plain green paper, white curtains, two or three Dutch chairs, and a deal table would be quite as elegant and commodious as all that ornament, and more suitable to the size; and as my mother well observed to me, much more suitable for a grave good woman to say her prayers in, than amidst all those Cupids and Hymens and Metamorphoses.

  Mrs Carter’s reply demonstrates how eager she was to join in her friend’s proffered disapproval:

  … I have a strange savage taste and a most unconquerable aversion to finery though in so gay and glittering an age it may not be always prudent or polite to declare it. Persons of large fortune may, I suppose, very allowably employ some part of it on things by no means strictly useful, yet is a pity they should lavish it upon toys of which they must so soon grow weary.

  A more generous appraisal of Wimbledon in the First Earl and Countess’s time comes from Hannah More, who was a guest there in 1780. She noted with something approaching awe:

  I did not think there could have been so beautiful a place within seven miles of London. The park has as much variety of ground, and is un-Londonish as if it were an hundred miles out; and I enjoyed the violets and the birds more than all the marechal powder and the music of this foolish town.

  Two years before Hannah More wrote this panegyric passage, the Spencer household at Wimbledon had been dragged into a scandal, through the public’s interest in a salacious attempted murder that belied the estate’s rural charms.

  Jane Bannister was one of Georgiana Spencer’s maids. She had been courted by Thomas Empson, a footman to Dr Bell, who was chaplain to the neighbouring Princess Amelia. When the relationship ended at the maid’s request, Empson refused to accept his rebuttal, and arranged for wedding banns in both their names to be read at St George’s Church, Hanover Square, without telling Jane. When she was informed, she was both embarrassed and furious, and forbade them being read again.

  Empson had been obsessive in his love, but now he felt humiliated at this public rejection of his suit. He decided to make Jane pay for the hurt he felt, arranging for another servant in his household to write the following to her:

  Dear Madam,

  Pardon me for taking the liberty of writing these few lines to you, it being the desire of my friend. I should be very glad if you would meet me between the Porter’s Lodge and the laundry, where I am desired to tell you something which may be to your satisfaction, as likewise the same to my friend. I am bound of point of word not to enter the house. If you will favour me with your company at the place appointed, you will greatly oblige.

  Your sincere friend and wellwisher,

  Thomas Jenkinson.

  This is requested as a most great favour from you.

  It is not known if Jane realized that Jenkinson’s ‘friend’ was Empson. Probably not; for she set off for the agreed rendezvous, only to be ambushed by her former love, who grabbed her tight.

  Jane saw that Empson was holding a pistol, and sank to her knees begging for mercy. As Empson dithered, she picked herself up and ran away, only to be hit by a bullet that ricocheted from a wall. The lovelorn footman thought he had killed Jane, and fled from Wimbledon to Ireland. There, he learned that he had merely wounded his erstwhile lover, who was now recovering from her injury. He sent a series of letters to her, saying he would ‘compleat the work he began’, leading to excited speculation in the newspapers that the would-be murderer was set to return and see through his crime of passion. However, the Spencers made sure that ships from Ireland were monitored, and when Empson set foot in Liverpool, he was arrested and imprisoned.

  Within a decade, the human failings of the staff at Wimbledon were to have much more far-reaching consequences than this tale of a lover scorned.

  George John, Second Earl Spencer, had been in possession of his estates and titles for only a little over a year when he decided to spend some time at Wimbledon after Easter 1785. The staff got the family’s sheets out to be aired and then warmed — it being only March — in front of the fire, but the maid overseeing this everyday domestic task failed to carry out her responsibilities with proper attention, going downstairs for a cup of tea.

  The result was the subject of George John’s letter to his mother, sent the day of his arrival at Wimbledon: ‘I take the opportunity of Mr Graham’s going over to you to let you know that the house is entirely demolished, there not being (in Townsend’s [the steward at Wimbledon] own words) a single bit of wood remaining in any part of it.’

  Initial impressions were mixed. The house itself, as George John had remarked, was gutted. However, because the place was fully staffed in anticipation of George John’s arrival, and the local inhabitants had rushed to help, a surprising proportion of the contents was saved: all of the Second Earl’s books; the house and table linen; the bulk of the furniture, including the hefty billiard table; and nearly all the best pictures — among them a very valuable Hondecoeter farmyard scene, now at Althorp, torn from its frame by the staff, before being rolled up and thrown out of a window to safety. The one picture of note to be lost was of the first Marquis of Blandford.

  Over the next few days, the full extent of the fire damage started to emerge. On 4 April George John wrote to his mother again:

  Nobody was hurt much — one man had a little melted lead fall upon him and a few men were a little bruised but there was nothing to signify. The mob towards the latter end of the time broke into the wine cellar and many of them got excessively drunk; Soullavie [the butler] examined it today and misses about twenty dozen of different sorts of wine.
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  Evidence of the fierceness of the fire fascinated the amateur scientist in George John:

  There was very little silver found and, what was, was almost burnt to a coal. The violence of the fire must have been wonderful as they found a great misshapen lump of bell-metal which was one of the bells melted — an operation that would require a very strong furnace to perform.

  Georgiana’s initial reaction was one of typically Christian charity towards the girl who was being blamed for the fire, since the insurers — who had to pay £4,500 for the destroyed contents, let alone the full cost of the rebuilding of the structure itself — were believed to be eager to have her imprisoned. ‘If, as I suppose by Lord Lucan’s letter,’ Georgiana wrote, ‘this horrid business was owing to the carelessness of the Nursery Maid, I shall wish to know what becomes of the poor girl, who, however blameable, is much to be pitied, for I cannot conceive a more terrible sensation than a consciousness of neglect in such a case …’

  The maid in question had apparently shown tremendous courage during the dangerous salvage operation, having to be pulled out by her legs from under a collapsed beam, which ‘near demolished’ her.

  Over the next sixteen years, the Spencers used the outbuildings at Wimbledon as their retreat from the heat and dirt of the London summer. In the meantime, Henry Holland was commissioned to design a smaller house of simple beauty. In 1801, Lavinia Spencer took occupation of the new family home, a villa, built slightly to the north of the mansion that had burnt down. She wrote to her husband: ‘Here we are, my best beloved, so delighted and so comfortable; indeed I do think our establishment here will produce us as much satisfaction as we ought reasonably to expect from anything of the kind ...’ She was proud to relate that Holland had been to visit her at Wimbledon, and ‘extremely pleased was he to see me already settled and happy in the villa which I see he thinks the best thing he has done in the building way …’