The Spencer Family

by Charles Spencer

  This is a most comfortable and magnificent mansion, the library and picture gallery and staircase are very splendid indeed; the books and pictures are well worth coming to see, and I am perfectly enchanted with the house. My bed room and dressing room are very nice, and full of very fine pictures. My looking glass is set in richly worked silver, and I am quite grand. The Deer come close to the windows — there seem to be a vast number — the Park appears grand and extremely well-wooded, but not pretty, though I am not a good judge as I have only been to the stables as it pours with rain. There is a very nice chapel in the house —the old china jars and old cabinets here are very handsome.

  She was equally enchanted by her husband, her postscript delighting in his simple rural pleasures: ‘Notwithstanding the rain, Althorp is just going to see his “children” in the Kennel.’

  Esther was taken on a tour of the villages by Mr Bailey, the Spencers’ steward. As the future mistress of the estate, she was expected to take on a charitable role to alleviate the suffering of the less fortunate members of the community. Although this had not been a priority for Lavinia, the local people looked to the new Viscountess Althorp to fill the void left by the recent death of Georgiana, the First Earl’s widow, whose good works were greatly appreciated by all locally.

  Esther was flattered by her welcome, but shocked by the deprivation she witnessed:

  I gave fifteen pounds amongst the poor, and there is one poor girl, who is subject to fits to whom I intend allowing eighteen pence a week. As I paid fifty-two visits, you may suppose I was completely tired, having been out and on my legs from eleven o’clock till five ... I went to see one old woman, who has been bedridden for some years ... I also saw a woman who is confined to her bed being paralytic and having a cancer on her nose; I saw a child in the agonies of death, which was quite frightful, but every person else was comfortable enough though scarce one woman in the village did not complain of bad health. My popularity here is very great indeed, and I am called the charming Lady Althorp and the dear Dowager over again.

  These were the happy days that Jack Althorp remembered till the end of his life: his new wife, loving and loved, happy with him and with his estate. They were a popular couple, and they looked after their staff and dependents with a care that was considered admirably enlightened by their contemporaries. A newspaper cutting of 1816 chronicles how,

  On Saturday, Lord Viscount Althorp and family left their house in Pall Mall, on a four months’ absence. His Lordship’s conduct is truly noble, and we hope will be imitated at least by all who can afford it. He has not discharged a single servant, and has allowed them all board wages. He sent them to his estates in Yorkshire and Northamptonshire, where they were to be allowed milk, potatoes, etc. The stable boys and other menial servants, who cannot read or write, are to be sent to school to learn at his Lordship’s expense, during his absence from England.

  Happier than he had ever been, Jack also found in Esther’s mother a figure far more loving and maternal towards him than Lavinia had ever been. In fact, to their embarrassment, other members of the Spencer family noticed that Jack addressed Mrs Acklom in a more affectionate way than he chose to treat either of his parents.

  The perceived eccentricities of young Lord Althorp were of less interest to the Spencers than the need for him to produce an heir, something Esther was well aware was a priority for dynastic reasons, but also something she was eager to achieve, out of the genuine contentment she felt in the marriage. As Mrs Calvert noted in May 1816: ‘I saw Lady Althorp yesterday. She is grown immensely fat. She says she is the happiest creature in the world — nothing wanting but a child.’

  But childbirth was a very dangerous procedure in the early nineteenth century. Even the royal family was not immune from the high mortality associated with the process of giving life, the extremely popular Princess Charlotte dying in such a way at this time, to the public’s dismay.

  Conscious of the attendant risks, Esther fell pregnant at the end of 1817. By February 1818, she was openly talking about her fear of something going wrong with the birth. Tragically, that fear was to be fully justified.

  On 8 June after a protracted labour, the child — a son — was born dead. There were deep concerns about the mother, but she recovered her senses, and the specialist doctors thought her better. They left her, and her family physician came in to find Esther eating a little bread and sipping some milk. However, when he felt her pulse, he realized that something was drastically wrong: it was far too weak.

  The doctor went to Jack Althorp and told him that they were facing an emergency: if they could not get some brandy down his wife’s throat, she would be dead within the hour. The two men mixed the brandy in arrowroot, so that it would not burn Esther’s throat. However, she managed to take only a few drops, for she was having great difficulty in swallowing. Suddenly she passed out. Very soon afterwards, she was dead.

  Jack Althorp, who had taken so long to find true love, was bereft. On 18 June 1818, he buried the caskets containing the bodies of his wife and tiny stillborn son in the family vault at Great Brington. He wore black for the rest of his life, and never remarried.

  Sarah Spencer, Jack’s sister, had never liked Esther. However, on seeing the grief afflicting her brother, she was honest enough to admit that ‘never was there a happier marriage — never more sincere and deep affection on both sides, and never deeper grief in any widowed heart’.

  From the time of Esther’s and his son’s death, Jack Althorp devoted his life to God and to fulfilling that sense of duty that his Christianity underscored in him.

  *

  Jack Althorp’s interests in life were farming, foxhunting and family. However, it is as a politician that his name is most readily remembered.

  His early political life seemed to be little more than an intrusion on his other pleasures, his sister Sarah writing in 1809 to their brother, Bob: ‘Althorp [is] chiefly on the high road between London and Northampton, flying from hunting to voting, and from voting to hunting again in his usual way ...’ However, politics dominated the next quarter century of his life. He remained a Member of Parliament for Northamptonshire from 1806 until his elevation to the House of Lords, on the death of George John in 1834.

  For much of this period he was in opposition, Lord Liverpool’s administration keeping the Whigs out of power for fifteen consecutive years. Throughout, Althorp consistently lent his name to the struggle against every measure which he believed to be a threat to the liberty of the subject. He was a champion of the move to allow Roman Catholics to have the same basic rights as their Protestant compatriots; similarly, he was an ardent supporter of the abolition of slavery; he backed the right of people accused of crimes to have legal advice before and during their trials; and, despite it impacting directly on his own agricultural income and interests, he never deviated from his belief in free trade, when others from his background advocated protective tariffs, during the debate over the Corn Laws.

  If most of his beliefs were typically Whig, there was a sincerity and a decency about their proponent that was recognized as being admirable, respectable and unique. His sobriquet was ‘Honest Jack’ Althorp and, although he was short of charisma, a quite appalling public speaker, and the very antithesis of smooth charm, he proved to be precisely the right man to foster one of the most important reforms in Britain’s political history.

  However, before that, Althorp’s first major political act was unintentionally and indirectly to bring down an administration. In 1827, George Canning had stated in his budget address the need for the whole financial condition of the nation to be subjected to a thorough investigation. The country was in an economic depression following a poor harvest the previous year, and Canning needed to show that something was being done to meet the people’s concerns. He therefore announced his intention of forming a finance committee to head up the enquiry.

  Canning’s death soon afterwards led to one of the briefer, and certainly most insignificant, premier
ships of the nineteenth century; that of Lord Goderich, a highly emotional man ill-suited to the exercise of power.

  On taking office, Goderich tamely reiterated Canning’s pledge, and started to think about the composition of the proposed committee. George Tierney, Master of the Mint, suggested that Lord Althorp should be one of its members — an idea Goderich agreed to, provided George John, Second Earl Spencer, approved the move. This consent was readily given; at which point Jack was invited by Tierney to chair the committee.

  Meanwhile Mr Herries, Chancellor of the Exchequer, knew nothing of Tierney’s proposal, nor of Althorp’s acceptance of the committee’s chairmanship. When he did indirectly find out, he made it clear that Althorp was not somebody who could be accepted in such a sensitive position. He was seen by the Chancellor as too much of a party man, and — although Herries made it clear he had nothing but the highest regard for Jack’s character and ability — this would inevitably lead to conflict between the chairman and the Chancellor, which would in turn undermine the entire process that the committee was meant to oversee.

  The cabinet now found itself in an apparently irreconcilable position: Tierney and Huskisson, the Colonial Secretary, felt themselves honour-bound to see through the commitment they had made to Spencer and Althorp, whereas Herries remained unshakeable in his belief that Althorp was simply unacceptable in such a sensitive posting.

  All of this might have been resolved, had a strong Prime Minister taken a firm grip of the situation, but there was only Goderich, and he had none of the qualities needed to appease the two sides. Furthermore, he found himself genuinely undecided as to what the best way forward was. In the end, unable to demonstrate any leadership qualities when they were needed, he decided to resign his premiership. Althorp, known to subsequent generations of historians as the man who helped hold administrations together under the most difficult of circumstances, made his first mark on the political landscape by inadvertently bringing one down.

  In November 1830, the Whigs returned to power under Lord Grey, the man who had fathered Georgiana Devonshire’s illegitimate daughter, a generation earlier. Althorp was entrusted with two key positions: Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. For the former he showed little talent, but he was to show extraordinary suitability for the latter.

  It is testament to the man’s unerring lack of ambition that, even with two of the greatest offices of state entrusted to him, Althorp found his appointment as cabinet minister an unwelcome obligation, rather than a recognition of any abilities he might possess. Lord Broughton recalled, the month that Althorp assumed his new positions: ‘I walked about some time with Lord Althorp, an excellent person, too good for a party man. He told me that he should retire from public life the moment he got into the “Hospital for Incurables”.’ And yet Jack knew that, while his father still lived, there was to be no escape to the House of Lords.

  Althorp found the Chancellorship of the Exchequer an onerous office. His first budget, of 1831, was a fiddly affair, in which he tinkered with taxation on timber, newspapers and tobacco. Later, to general approval, he repealed taxes on sea-borne coal, as well as on tiles, candles and soap. However, such measures failed to convince his contemporaries that Althorp was anything other than a mediocre Chancellor, with little instinct for, or interest in, the economy and its efficient management. This explains the derision directed at him when he relieved some of the fiscal burden on the farmer by also repealing taxes on farm servants and farm dogs. A Tory cartoon of the time showed Jack, who was famed for his agrarian interests, dressed as an agricultural labourer, standing by a cow’s rear end, with the caption: ‘What a pleasure it is to get at something one does understand!’

  Jack knew that his critics were correct, and that several others could have run the Exchequer with greater flair and success. However, the insistence of his cabinet colleagues that he carry on persuaded him that it was his duty to continue in a position he loathed. In 1833, he summed up his extreme distaste for the Chancellorship when he confessed to the Prime Minister, Lord Grey: ‘I should certainly prefer anything, death not excepted, to sitting upon the Treasury bench in the House of Commons.’

  There was a streak of melancholy in Jack verging on the suicidal, which grew in strength as his tenure of high office continued. In 1832, he dined with his trusted colleague Lord Broughton, who recalled:

  Althorp talked very confidentially of his own repugnance to office, and said it destroyed all his happiness, adding that he ‘removed his pistols from his bedroom for fear of shooting himself’. Such are the secrets of the human heart! Who would have imagined that such a notion ever entered into the head of the pure, the imperturbable, the virtuous Althorp? ... I took leave of this excellent man with greater admiration of him than ever.

  This conversation took place at a time when Jack Althorp was helping to steer through Parliament one of the most forward-thinking pieces of legislation of its time. The great Reform Bill of 1832, which gave the vote to previously disenfranchised swathes of the British middle classes, was nicknamed in some places ‘Althorp’s Act’, so crucial was the Leader of the House of Commons’ support for it seen to be.

  The Reform Bill was extraordinarily contentious, throwing the opposing creeds of Whig and Tory into sharp relief Given the intensity of feeling on both sides, its chances of success remained in doubt all the way through its parliamentary passage. Many were convinced that to extend the vote so dramatically was to invite revolution. Lord Broughton wrote in his diary:

  Whatever may have been the cause of the alarm, there can be no doubt but that it was very general. Lady Shrewsbury told my wife that the Duchesse de Berri said to her, a day or two ago, that the people of England were mad; and that, if our Ministers did not resist all Reform, England would soon fall into the same wretched condition as France!

  Althorp’s contribution to the Bill’s success lay in his ability to defuse such suspicions, and to reassure the nervous: charges of extremism and folly levelled against the Whigs foundered when answered by somebody as transparently cautious, wise and solid as Althorp. Once, in the midst of an extremely agitated debate about Reform, Althorp ended the chaotic scenes around him by getting to his feet and asking the Commons en masse: ‘Has the House confidence in me?’ Tensions immediately subsided, for there could be only one answer to the question — and nobody needed to voice it.

  Jack Althorp’s quiet calm, his undoubted patience and good humour all aided the radical Bill through to its successful adoption by Parliament. Far from plunging Britain into revolution, it is arguable that its timely acknowledgement of the need to extend democracy actually saved the country from the violent civil strife that overtook much of Continental Europe in the 1840s.

  Yet universal respect for his integrity was not to spare Althorp from some extremely rough treatment from the Opposition Tories, and those sections of the press controlled by them or sympathetic to their cause. The Morning Post made much of his absent-mindedness when, in the general election following the passing of the Reform Bill, the Conservatives objected to Lord Althorp’s vote, and sought for it to be struck off. He had entered himself as ‘Viscount Althorp; residence, Althorp; qualification, renter of above £50 a year’.

  Lord Althorp’s steward assumed the objection was over the question of the rent, but the Tory queries were directed elsewhere, and they were valid. He might have had unquestionable ties to Althorp, but according to his tax returns, his residence was at Brampton, a nearby village where his Northamptonshire farming operations were based. And, in the Reform Bill that he had championed so effectively, it had been clearly stipulated that the Christian name and surname of the party claiming a vote had to be entered in full. His real name, for this purpose, was therefore not ‘Viscount Althorp’ — that was his courtesy title, borne as the eldest son of Earl Spencer — but ‘John Charles Spencer’. One of the chief architects of Reform was thus left ineligible to vote — and entirely through his own lack of attention to detail. />
  The Tories found endless amusement in Althorp’s unsophisticated nature, never sparing him from ridicule that was to hurt him deeply. The poem ‘Rusticus, abnormis sapiens crassaque Minerva’, which appeared anonymously in 1834, was typical of the genre, cruelly lampooning Jack’s love for the rural life:

  Most rustic A L T H O R P, honest, stupid, dull,

  Blunderer in thoughts, thy ev’ry act a bull;

  Poor erring man! Kind Nature’s will forgot,

  For she had formed thee a happier lot;

  The grazier’s oracle, the farmer’s theme.

  Judge of the plough and well-directed team—

  Alas! That aught should mar designs so great,

  And make thee now a Farmer of the State.

  However, the Whigs treasured their deeply unglamorous champion, fêting him and his cabinet colleagues for delivering the great prize that they had sought for years in the shape of Reform. Public collections were taken to buy suitable tributes for those who were perceived to be the defenders of democracy, and banquets were arranged to venerate their achievements.

  In the George Hotel in Northampton, in 1832, 500 gentlemen met to dine in honour of Lord Althorp. The health of the King was drunk, followed by that of the Queen, then of the rest of the royal family. The fourth health was for ‘the glorious triumph of Parliamentary Reform’, and this was barely out of the proposer’s mouth than the place erupted, the cheers lasting several minutes.

  The chairman of the banquet got to his feet, and explained to those present:

  For the achievement of that measure, to no person is the country more indebted than to my noble friend, Lord Althorp ... the success of that measure was greatly accelerated by the ability, firmness, and integrity of Lord Althorp who, by his urbanity and good temper, had surmounted many difficulties in its way. Even his political enemies did not deny that no man but Lord Althorp could have so speedily and successfully brought that measure to a triumphant conclusion.