by John Pearson
By now Lord Bristol had returned to royal favour, and while still in Italy Sunderland had asked his mother to apologise on his behalf to Lady Anne and tactfully renew his marriage offer. As ever with her son, the Countess did as she was told, and Anne Digby, surprisingly, accepted. But even now Sunderland took his time and stayed on in Venice during carnevale, only getting back to England in time for his marriage at St Giles in the Fields in the early summer of 1665.
It is inevitable that the reputation of Anne, Countess of Sunderland, has suffered from association with her husband. Queen Anne, who never had a good word for the Spencers, called her ‘the greatest jade that ever lived’, and the anonymous historian in The Dictionary of National Biography, repeats as gospel the innuendoes of Barillon, Louis XIV’s ambassador at St James’s, who of all people had the gall to call her ‘a born intriguante’, and recounted the gossip of the day about a long affair she may have had with Henry Sidney. As with much in Anne’s life, the evidence of this ‘affaire’ is highly circumstantial.
But if Henry Sidney did become her lover, few could blame her. Sidney was an attractive man and Sunderland at times a quite appalling husband. Henry Sidney did the Sunderlands many favours, and if Anne fell in love with him Sunderland was in no position to complain. More to the point, if Anne was unfaithful to her husband she was more than faithful to the House of Spencer.
Once married, the Sunderlands returned in style to Althorp and set about producing children. They finally had seven, four of whom, Robert, Charles, Elizabeth and Anne, survived into adulthood. But from the start one gets the feeling that Sunderland was more concerned about the Van Dycks and Titians on his walls than about the children in his nursery.
At first he seemed content to play the nobleman of taste and leisure. Thanks to Anne’s marriage settlement there were funds to lavish on the house, and just as he had worn a foreign garb when painted by Maratta, so he now decided to clothe homely Althorp in the guise of the princely palaces he had seen in Tuscany.
Again he was well ahead of fashion. Fifty years on and rich Whig aristocrats would be vying with each other to build country houses like Italian palaces, but Sunderland was already transforming Althorp into his own idea of a country house ‘disposed after the Italian manner’. There is some mystery over how the work was done. Workmen’s accounts have long since disappeared, and even the architect remains unknown. He is sometimes said to have been an anonymous Italian, but J.C. Kenyon, Sunderland’s biographer, believes the earl was his own architect. Given his taste and dominating character, this seems more than likely.
Sunderland retained parts of the old house, including the famous staircase, which was now complete, and the Long Gallery, which made a perfect background for his paintings. But externally he changed the house completely, giving it a classical façade, with Tuscan pillars and a balustrade along the roof. Internally, according to the diarist John Evelyn, who was a friend of Sunderland’s wife, he also added ‘rooms of state, galleries, offices and furniture such as may become a great prince’.
By creating the setting for a small Italian court in the middle of Northamptonshire, Sunderland was following the example of the independent princes and ‘overmighty subjects’ he had met in France and Italy. John Evelyn was not the only visitor struck by Althorp’s semi-regal status. The indefatigable Celia Fiennes, who visited in 1702 remembered it as being ‘like a Prince’s Court’.
Sunderland spared no expense in adding to its splendour. Louis XIV’s favourite architect, Le Notre, was probably brought over from Versailles to advise on the formal gardens round the house. French deer were specially imported for the park and an ornamental canal created, on which a Venetian gondola floated.
This was all very different from the days when Althorp was the centre of the Spencers’ highly profitable farming operation. Now the house existed to reflect the splendour of its owner, and he was soon playing host at Althorp to some of the most influential figures of the day, including the King’s current mistress, Lady Castlemaine, his bastard son the Duke of Monmouth, and the heir to the throne, the King’s brother, James, Duke of York. Given his situation, it was wise of Sunderland to cultivate such people, but his proudest moment must have come in 1669, when his one-time host from Italy, Grand Duke Cosimo III of Tuscany, visited Althorp on a tour of England. Cosimo was highly complimentary, calling Althorp ‘the best planned and best arranged country seat in the kingdom’.
For Sunderland there was one slight problem. Through his personal extravagance and wild spending on his house, he was running deeply into debt. Unlike his Spencer forebears, he could never manage money. Where they had built their careful fortunes from the land, he showed no interest in farming or in business, and he was doing what the Spencers lying in Great Brington Church would never have forgiven - selling off land to pay his debts. He had become something else money-conscious Spencers would have disapproved of - an obsessional gambler and a most unlucky one, who had reputedly lost £5,000 on one night’s play. By 1670 he had been forced to mortgage Althorp for the then enormous sum of £17,000.
Debt could still destroy the greatest families and suddenly the Spencers themselves seemed threatened. It was in a serious attempt to rescue Althorp, that Sunderland embarked on his political career, driven by an overwhelming need for money. At first he relied for support on one of the King’s most influential ministers, Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, a key member of the governing faction known as the Cabal. Arlington recognised Sunderland’s ability and appointed him to several diplomatic posts abroad, including a spell as ambassador in Paris. Further foreign missions followed, but although he was gaining diplomatic expertise Sunderland was still desperately pursued by debt. Nobody knows exactly how he managed. At one point he was borrowing £200 from his chaplain, and his wife had a larger loan from John Evelyn. As a last resort Sunderland tried marrying his fourteen-year-old son and heir, Robert, to the heiress daughter of the city magnate, Sir Stephen Fox, but Robert was so spoiled and uncontrollable that not even Sunderland’s famous powers of persuasion could make Sir Stephen force him onto his reluctant daughter.
But help was at hand. Among the fashionable society he and his wife had cultivated so assiduously was Louise de Keroualle, the young French courtesan brought to England by the Duke of Buckingham who had recently become King Charles’s favourite mistress. In 1673 Charles made her Duchess of Portsmouth, and two years later he personally requested Sunderland to conduct the delicate negotiations to confer the title of Duke of Richmond on their child.
For Sunderland this was the start of the most important friendship of his life. Unlike the perilous liaison which his younger friend John Churchill was conducting with another royal mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland, this was emphatically non-sexual. Sunderland was not a womaniser, but unquestionably had a way with women, especially women of influence and power like the Duchess of Portsmouth. Speaking fluent French, and acquainted with the French king and his leading courtiers, the Francophile Sunderland could gain her trust and do her further services. It was thanks to him that the infant Duke of Richmond was legitimised in France by Louis XIV, and so enabled to inherit from his mother’s family. According to Louise de Keroualle’s descendant, Charles James Fox, Sunderland was even suspected of ‘offering to obtain the succession of the crown for her son the Duke of Richmond’.
Whether he did or not, the fact is that Sunderland now had an ally at court of immense importance. Charles genuinely loved his ‘dearest Fubbs’, as he called her, and there was little that he could refuse her. In 1678, when his leading minister, Lord Danby, was bitterly attacked in the panic following the so-called ‘Popish Plot’, it was the Duchess’s influence that helped persuade the King to appoint the relatively unknown Earl of Sunderland to the ministerial post of Secretary of State. From now on Sunderland would not look back.
Within a year, Danby had resigned and Sunderland joined the ‘Triumvirate’ - the other members being Lord Essex and his brother-in-law, Halifax - who were g
overning the country. It is hard to know how much Sunderland gained financially from his position, but his appointment undoubtedly redeemed the Spencers from their desperate situation. It was accepted that court appointments were a legitimate source of personal enrichment, and Professor Habakuk once calculated that Secretary Finch gained £50,000 legitimately from his five year period in office some years earlier. It is hard to imagine Sunderland faring worse. But even now his gambler’s instinct all but destroyed him when a movement started with the aim of excluding Charles IPs Roman Catholic younger brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession on the grounds of his religion.
Within the tangled web of Caroline politics, the so-called ‘Exclusion Crisis’ marks the beginning of a genuine divide in English history. Many of the so-called ‘Exclusionists’ backed the claims of Charles’s bastard, the Duke of Monmouth, as well as of the Dutch Prince William of Orange, who besides being Protestant was also grandson to King Charles I and married to another claimant to the throne, the Duke of York’s Protestant daughter, Princess Mary. What made this crisis so important for the future was the fact that the Exclusionists were putting forward fundamental claims which the Civil War had left unsettled - such as the right to depose an unjust or unlawful king, Parliament’s control of money and taxation and the supremacy of the Protestant religion. For Charles II, claims like these were close to treason, and while at times he compromised with Parliament, he himself would die a Catholic, still believing in the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings that had helped to destroy his father. It was during the Parliamentary battles of the early 1680s that the ‘Exclusionists’ first became known as ‘Whigs’ and supporters of the King and the royal prerogative as ‘Tories’.
To start with, Sunderland naturally sided with the King and his friend the Duke of York. But as the Exclusion movement gathered pace, he wavered. Guided as ever by self-interest, he suddenly switched sides and plumped for the claims of Dutch Prince William. During this period he led the Prince’s supporters, and it was now that William first appreciated Sunderland’s abilities.
But, not for the first or last time in his life, Sunderland had seriously miscalculated. His brother-in-law, Halifax, spoke out against Exclusion in the House of Lords, and when the King told Parliament that he would tolerate no change in the succession, the Exclusionists collapsed. So did Sunderland. King Charles called him ‘Judas’ to his face, and dismissed him from the court with ignominy.
Again it was ‘dearest Fubbs’ who saved Sunderland by finally persuading Charles to forgive him, and in 1683 he was reappointed Secretary of State. Wishing to hear no more about Exclusion, Charles had dispensed with Parliament and needed all the political talent he could find - particularly Sunderland’s expertise in foreign policy. It was Sunderland who helped negotiate the secret financial subsidies from King Louis which enabled Charles to dispense with Parliament. In the process, through Ambassador Barillon, Sunderland also secured a French subsidy of his own. Having demanded £10,000, he finally settled for a pension of £7,000 a year from Louis.
This must have helped with his financial worries and saved his much loved Althorp in the process, but it would be wrong to imagine that success and solvency had made Sunderland any nicer. Seventeenth-century Europe was a cruel place. It was Sunderland who appointed Judge Jeffreys, whose Bloody Assize pursued the West Countrymen after Monmouth’s rebellion with such terrible ferocity, and it was always said that the only person Jeffreys feared was Sunderland. On a lesser level, Sunderland drove the young Whig philosopher John Locke out of his fellowship at Oxford. And when the old republican, Algernon Sidney, became implicated on flimsy evidence in the Rye House plot to assassinate the King, Sunderland did nothing to save his uncle from the axe - despite the fact that Sidney had helped him to recover Althorp during the Protectorate and that grief at her brother’s execution would hasten the death of his mother two months later.
In 1685, when Charles died and James peaceably succeeded him, it seemed inconceivable that Sunderland could remain in office. King James, unlike his pliant brother, had not forgiven his betrayal in the Exclusion crisis. But among the skills of the professional politician, Sunderland had learned the art of managing elections and was able to ensure that James was greeted by a relatively docile Parliament. Seeing his worth, the King forgot the past and offered him the additional post of Lord President of the Council. Sunderland accepted. The Garter followed, and the most dangerous episode in Sunderland’s perilous career had started.
As a devout Roman Catholic, King James had one consuming ambition - the return of England to the faith of Rome. It was an impossible ambition without another civil war, but James had the faith of a believer, and started by using the royal prerogative to place Catholic nominees in positions of influence in the armed forces, the government and the universities, all of which were legally confined to members of the Church of England. He also tried using his prerogative to undermine the rights of the boroughs in the Catholic interest.
This produced alarm among the Protestant majority, many of whom were worried by the news from France, where Louis XIV had just revoked the freedom French Protestants had enjoyed under the Edict of Nantes and followed this with widespread persecution. Disquiet was also growing in other sections of society, particularly the aristocracy and the urban middle classes, at the way their rights and independence seemed threatened by James’s assertion of the old doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
It will always be a mystery how a politician as experienced and shrewd as Sunderland could have thought that James’s reign would end in anything but absolute disaster. But once he had started, any sign of moderation on his part - or ‘cowardice’, as James and his more extreme advisers would have called it - would have led to his dismissal and he could simply not afford to be dismissed. His debts drove him on to advise disastrous policies, but he wasted the huge sums he obtained on gambling and luxuries.
But there was more to it than that. Something in King James’s curiously despotic nature seems to have matched his own, as he urged the King to ever more extremist measures. It was as if, having turned Althorp into a palace for an Italianate prince, he was acting like a post-renaissance European prince himself, trying to create an unassailable position as principal minister of an absolutist royal master. Machiavelli, whose book The Prince he must have read, presupposes politicians such as Sunderland - subtle bureaucrats, pragmatists who operate behind the scenes, ruthless advisers using all the arts of politics in the faithful services of an autocratic ruler.
By the early months of 1688 it was clear that England would rather change its king than its religion. But the signs which might have prompted Sunderland to cut his losses made him up the stakes and cling to power - even if this meant proving his loyalty to James by publicly converting to Catholicism. Apart from the King, few believed in his change of faith, and the cynical nature of his ‘conversion’ turned almost everyone against him - his wife included. It was now that he was first called ‘Shameless Sunderland’ and ‘the Apostate of Althorp’. Urchins in the streets yelled insults at his passing.
It was shortly after this that his wife’s old friend (and one-time creditor) John Evelyn visited Althorp. Sunderland was still away at court, struggling to contain a situation that was getting out of all control. Since early June, when James’s wife, Queen Mary of Modena, had apparently guaranteed the Catholic succession by giving birth to a son, rumours had started that Dutch William, at the urgent invitation of seven influential Whig leaders, was about to sail for England. Since Henry Sidney was among this ‘immortal seven’ who signed the famous invitation, Sunderland must certainly have known of the situation and he was suddenly making unsuccessful efforts to persuade the King to moderate his policy.
All these problems must have seemed a continent away as John Evelyn and the Countess strolled through Althorp’s summer-scented gardens, pausing to admire Le Notre’s elegant parterres, so ‘exquisitely planted and kept’, and the park beyond, ‘set with rows or
walks of trees, canals and fishponds and stored with game’.
But despite the appearance of tranquillity Anne was deeply troubled by her husband’s actions. Like Evelyn she was a devout Anglican, and news of Sunderland’s conversion had caused her ‘as much affliction as a lady of great soul and much prudence is capable of.
Evelyn was concerned for her. ‘I wish from my soul,’ he wrote, ‘that the Lord her husband (whose parts and abilities are otherwise conspicuous) was as worthy of her, as by a fatal apostasy and court ambition, he has made himself unworthy.’
But Sunderland was trapped. By October came the news that William had sailed for England. Barring accidents, King James’s days were numbered and, once he fell, few would give much for his chief minister’s chances of survival.
At court a sharp pair of eyes was watching what was happening. They belonged to Monsignor D’Adda, the papal nuncio, who reported back to Rome that ‘my Lord Sunderland shows the utmost fear at the perilous position he is in’. He added that ‘his best friends could scarcely excuse the startling transformation in three weeks -from boldness to timidity, from blind courage to wide-eyed terror’.
Sunderland might have kept his nerve - and his dignity - had he realised that this would be a most unusual revolution. Come November, when Dutch William and his troops landed at Torbay, and great men like Cavendish and Marlborough decided to support him, James would decline to fight. And having come to the conclusion that it was in their deepest interests to dismiss the King, the Whigs would conduct the change of monarch with the smoothness of a modern boardroom takeover.
