by John Pearson
He certainly had no intention of becoming like Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, who finally became prime minister in 1754 and ended up £300,000 the poorer after spending forty years, and almost all his fortune, on the unrewarding game of politics. Not only did Sarah’s ban save Spencer from such a fate, he was even able to turn the ban to his own advantage. At twenty-six he wrote to Newcastle pointing out that he had always supported the government and that since he was unable to accept office, he was unable to receive any favour from the King except a title.
‘Only a title? My dear fellow, we must see to that!’ said Newcastle, or words to that effect. Since Newcastle’s government was in desperate need of fresh supporters in the House of Lords, John duly found himself created first Viscount Spencer in 1761, and was effortlessly earled some four years later. Henceforth as first Earl Spencer, he was free to follow the blessings of a very grand and very private life at the apex of polite eighteenth-century aristocratic society.
And what a life it was, with all those houses crammed with art and books and hordes of servants. There was Althorp, somewhat neglected but enjoying the fine new stables generously built by Uncle Charles, fifth Earl of Sunderland before he left for Blenheim to become the Duke of Marlborough. There was Holywell, Sarah Marlborough’s family house at St Albans, which she had had largely rebuilt by the architect William Talman before he turned to greater things at Chatsworth. They leased Pytchley for the hunting, and owned North Creake in Norfolk for the shooting. And last, but emphatically not least, there was Sarah’s proudest purchase, Wimbledon Park, which now included the picturesque villages of Mortlake and Roehampton, a forty-acre lake, abundant woodlands, several farms, unrivalled views across to the Surrey hills, and a costly new menagerie of exotic birds and beasts, together with Sarah’s very grand Palladian mansion - all within five miles of Hyde Park Corner.
The Spencers seemed a happy and devoted pair, if somewhat selfindulgent, and wildly extravagant. Even the cynical old Lord Queensberry grudgingly conceded that they offered the best argument for the married state he had ever seen. Nothing appeared to mar their happiness until suddenly the Earl’s health once again betrayed him.
It must have been tuberculosis, for in 1763, at the age of twenty-eight, he was suffering from what was described as ‘a weakness of the lungs’, which necessitated wintering abroad. Even this was undertaken on the grandest scale. Two separate packet boats were needed to transport the Spencers from Gravesend to Harwich - one for the Earl, family and personal servants, the other for the baggage, lesser servants and his Lordship’s furniture and carriages.
Even so, it took this caravanserai more than a month to rattle down to Rome, much of it spent bumping over unmade roads. When the Spencers reached the Eternal City, they were welcomed by the Pope, the palazzi of the city swung open their great doors in their honour and, between outings into the campagna, Georgiana sat for her portrait to the most fashionable Roman painter of the English nobility, Pompeo Battoni. The Earl, meanwhile, bought paintings by Andrea Sacchi and Salvator Rosa for the empty walls of Spencer House in far-off London.
In warmer climes the Earl’s health had steadily improved, making him happy to return to England in early summer. Once back, the Spencers’ lives seemed governed by perpetual motion as they moved from one great mansion to the next. At Althorp the Earl was obsessed with hunting, and as master of the Pytchley Hunt would go out regardless of the weather and his state of health. Back in London, he and Lady Spencer were privileged spectators of the great Augustan age in art and literature, enjoying the company of such men as Samuel Johnson, David Garrick and their close friend, the great painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. Lawrence Sterne, a particular protegé, dedicated part of Tristram Shandy to them.
If one could choose a time in which to be alive and young and very rich, it must have been around the time when the first Earl Spencer was living in newly-built Spencer House with his wife Georgiana. And yet the Earl grew increasingly irritable, and was sometimes overcome by black bad temper. It was now that Lord Hervey wrote about how deeply involved Georgiana was with the poor of Althorp. She was a dedicated Christian and was the first member of the family to show any real concern for them and set up Sunday schools for the children. With her love of the country and her commitment to the local poor, ‘nothing’, Lord Hervey wrote, ‘could tempt Lady Spencer to London but the restlessness of her poor husband’.
How, one asks, could one so blest be ‘restless’ - and why was one so rich described as ‘poor’?
There were several reasons. The first was that all the spoiling in his childhood seems to have left the Earl permanently discontented. Apart from travelling and spending vast amounts of money, there was not a great deal for his restless nature to accomplish after “Spencer House was built. Although he happened to buy pictures, and his friendships with Reynolds and Gainsborough produced some magnificent portraits, particularly of his wife and daughters, he was in no sense a patron and connoisseur like his great grandfather, the second Earl of Sunderland. And, although he rather casually purchased 5,000 Elizabethan volumes from Dr George, the Master of Eton, to fill some of the empty shelves at Althorp after his uncle Charles took so much of the famous Sunderland Library to Blenheim, he was in no sense a bibliophile and scholar like his formidable grandfather, the third Earl of Sunderland.
There was another reason for Spencer’s discontent. Remarkably for one so rich, he was often worried about money - or the lack of it. Throughout his adult life, his income stood at around £40,000 a year, which - at a time when a servant was rich on £50 a year, and Sarah had bought the Wimbledon estate for £25,000 - should have seemed like boundless riches. But even in the 1760s a determined man could get through £40,000 a year - and the Earl was such a man. Admittedly, he seldom received his full theoretical income, particularly during periods of agricultural depression, and his stewards and rent collectors were not well supervised by the ageing agents inherited from Sarah or the Trustees. But nothing was likely to check John Spencer from overspending in an age when even the greatest nobles were usually in debt. He might reasonably feel that, in establishing the new dynasty socially and politically, he had done his duty by his successors even if he had failed to realise the moment when indebtedness passed from being a normal burden on a great estate to a threat to its survival.
Servants might be cheap, but when you staffed as many establishments as he did, wages - and the cost of clothing and feeding an army of retainers - mounted up. So did the maintenance on so many houses, particularly the roofs. Roofs were the bane of the eighteenth-century aristocracy.
There were also the Earl’s random extravagances. Hunting was always a great expense, particularly with the hounds and horses he was expected to maintain as Master of the Pytchley. He was also spending lavishly on the gardens at Althorp, and currently employing the aristocracy’s favourite landscape gardener, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, to sweep away what was left of the ancient formal gardens, replacing them with the now fashionable ‘natural’ landscape. Brown was also employed widely at Wimbledon. But all of this still left the Earl two areas where he could spread himself financially - politics and building.
Although Spencer’s St Alban’s estate enabled him to control one of the town’s two MPs, at neighbouring Northampton, electoral influence was split between the Comptons, Earls of Northampton, and the Montagus, Earls of Halifax. Soon after he came of age, John Spencer became determined to break this control, but the showdown finally came with what became known as ‘the contest of the three earls’ at the 1768 general election.
From the start he fought with the determination of his greatgrandfather, Marlborough, beating back the French. It was a battle of attrition - more Malplaquet than Blenheim - and proved disastrously expensive, with all three families upping the bribes offered to the thousand or so highly-favoured local electors.
It was the most corrupt election of the century. Sarah would have turned in her grave, and the story goes that as potenti
al voters were welcomed into Althorp House, each was offered a sandwich by a footman at the door, only to discover that the sandwich filling was a golden guinea. They were then coralled in the park by Spencer agents to prevent their opponents’ agents carrying them off before they voted. Even so, the opposing families’ candidates were elected, but thanks to fact that the Comptons had committed even more illegalities than the Spencers, the Spencer candidate was finally elected on petition.
It had been cripplingly expensive for all concerned. Lord Halifax was ruined and sold his estates, the Northamptons had to live abroad for a generation, and Spencer was henceforth never free from financial problems. One estimate put the cost to him at a staggering £120,000.
In terms of sheer extravagance, however, not even the Northamptonshire election could match the final cost of Spencer House, which severely dented even the Spencers’ ironclad resources. For Spencer House, as an exercise in luxury, style and high fashion, proved inordinately costly. (Some idea of its cost in present-day terms can be gathered from the fact that, after leasing Spencer House from the family, Rothschilds spent something like £16 million restoring it and its decorations to their former glory.)
Intended to impress a world already very rich, Spencer House appears a supreme example of what the economist Thorstein Veblen called ‘Conspicuous Consumption’, or the showing off of wealth on the grandest scale to impress the neighbours. What the house did - and did superbly - was to place the Spencers firmly in the centre of the smartest Whig society of the time, by making the point that not only was the family very rich, but that it was among the unsurpassed leaders of style and fashion. Certainly in social terms Spencer House would prove a wonderful investment, and owning this gem, so strategically placed between St James’s
Palace and Devonshire House, made them pre-eminent as social figures.
This endorsement of their social position went with the shift in the Spencers’ situation following the exclusion clause in Sarah Marlborough’s will. For now that they were banned from office, they were picking up a different role as leaders, not of politics, but of a London Society which was swiftly overtaking Paris as the most fashionable in Europe. This move from the male world of politics to the female one of fashion and society, meant that the most memorable Spencers were suddenly women, and Spencer House became quite different from the male world of Althorp.
Althorp had always been the centre of the Spencers’ political and territorial influence, which together with the hunting, made it very much a world of men. Whereas Spencer House was dominated by two essentially feminine activities from the start. The first was love and child-rearing, and just as it was built by a young, newly-married couple who were very much in love, so the result is still an unmistakably romantic house. Even the gilded plaster mouldings are concupiscent - from the egg and dart motif in the friezes and the cupids with their scattered garlands, to Georgiana Spencer’s bedroom with its golden palm trees, symbols of fertility, copied from Inigo Jones’s plans for the Queen’s bedroom in her house at Greenwich. In such surroundings, one has left the rustic male domain of Althorp for the seductive, eighteenth-century world of the boudoir, the ballroom and the glancing world of female fashion.
There was also the social side of Spencer House, with its whole tenor set by the progress (known as the ‘rout’) made by the Spencers’ guests through an enfilade of rooms towards Athenian Stuart’s magnificent Painted Room in green and gold, where the Countess (not the Earl) received her guests, gossiped, dispensed politesse and - the acme of sophistication - offered them the latest novelty, ice-cream-an ice-house for its manufacture having been built beside the house in 1762.
While the Countess was growing in importance in this social world, so, as the years passed and ill health took over, the Earl increasingly relied upon her for affection and support. She had changed from the earnest teenage girl of the time of her marriage into a strong-willed, quietly dominating character. She was intelligent, loved travel and had inherited her entrepreneurial father’s firm belief in self-improvement. But although something of a bluestocking, Georgiana, like all the Poyntzes, had a very different side to her character, and enjoyed life with a gusto foreign to her increasingly sick, reclusive husband. She was a great dancer and party lover, as well as an accomplished billiards player, but, above all, like most of her family, she was a compulsive gambler.
‘I have known the Poyntzes in the nursery,’ said Lord Lansdowne, ‘the Bible on the table, the cards in the drawer’; and both Althorp and Spencer House became notorious for what were often all-night gambling parties. The guests were rich and often serious gamblers, and the stakes could be enormous. With a tradition of gambling in the family, the Earl needed little encouragement from his wife but he was rarely lucky, and the Spencers increasingly drew upon their income to cover their continual losses.
Lady Spencer was a devoted mother, supervising her children’s studies and making sure that George the son and heir received tuition from the Oriental scholar learned Dr Jones. Like a very modern parent, above all she craved her children’s friendship - an idea which would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, and which she certainly retained for the rest of her life as far as her son, George, was concerned.
As for the Earl, by his early forties he was appearing increasingly redundant in this overwhelming world of women. At Althorp he still hunted with the consumptive’s hectic desperation, but he had clearly started to decline, and he who was once so handsome and decisive was increasingly described as shy and shadowy. His lungs were again affected but in addition he was now afflicted by a series of unrelated illnesses, which eighteenth-century doctors invariably diagnose as gout.
Never was a man more vulnerable to that excruciating malady than poor John Spencer. When gout attacked his feet Georgiana took him off to Bath, from where she wrote about him in his ‘wheeling chair’, unable to stand because his feet and ankles were so red and swollen. His sad decline had now begun in earnest. So had his anger and frustration, and soon he was coughing blood in what sounds like the final stages of consumption.
But his doctors still insisted it was gout, which they diagnosed in both his head and stomach. Early in 1783, he and Georgiana were staying quietly at Wimbledon, and he seemed slightly better. She had taken charge of him completely, and later in the year took him to Buxton Spa in Derbyshire, hoping the waters would cure him.
‘I get up at 6,’ she wrote to her son. ‘Walk. Breakfast in pumproom on excellent muffins, brown toast and tea. Home to see how father is. Home for father’s b’fast. In evening play whist while father retires to read till near 10. Your father and I then sup and converse on our own till 12.’
It is a touching demonstration of the closeness of their marriage but by July they were, back at Spencer House, and Georgiana was once more writing to their son. ‘Father very ill indeed, with gout in head and stomach. Takes nothing but a little veal broth … God grant, my dearest George, you may go thro’ life w’out the feeling and anguish which I have suffered these last three days. He is coming out of his room, so I hasten to seal up this letter.’
Ever hopeful, in August Georgiana took her husband off to Margate, trusting this time that the sea air would help him. It seems it did not, for in October they returned to Bath, from where Georgiana had to tell her son that ‘father is no better for taking the waters’.
By 23 October she writes: ‘He is so oppressed with sleep that he dozes incessantly. Now wanders when he wakes. Not sure where he is. Am more miserable than I have been in my life … You must come to me, my dearest George, if he grows worse. I do not believe I could support myself without you.’
Lord Althorp was a good son and went to Bath to join his mother at her vigil. Eight days later he was present when his father died, aged forty-eight, leaving his widow broken-hearted.
For in spite of his chronic ailments and uncertain temper, she had always loved the Earl, and on the day following his death she described herself in her diary ‘stunned with a
ffliction and stupefied with laudanum’. She could still not bear to leave him. ‘There is something inexpressibly painful to me in the thoughts of abandoning him to servants and of so soon avoiding what I have so long and ardently loved.’
Next day she wrote, ‘I can never describe or forget what I felt when they came to fetch me. My reason almost forsook me. I was half frantic, and wanted to get into his room. I had no power to pass by his door, and my brother and George were forced to drag me downstairs and lift me into the coach.’
A week later, when he was buried at St Mary’s, Great Brington, she found consolation in the sorrow of the local people. For all his weaknesses, John Spencer had made himself popular with the people of Northamptonshire. As his wife wrote: ‘the unsolicited attendance and the uncommon degree of gratitude, affection and respect shown to my Lord’s memory has soothed and gratified my aching heart.’
But as his family would discover, the man who was once ‘the richest schoolboy in England’ had left them something else to remember him by - his debts. For whilst enriching them, Sarah Marlborough’s fortune had encouraged the Spencers to be more profligate than ever and, before his death, Lord Spencer’s extravagance was coming close to ruining the family.
Chapter 7
‘A Wild and Scrambling Life’
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806)
Although the first Earl Spencer died a sad and disillusioned man, he had lived long enough to see all his three children settled. The future of the family was safe now that his heir, George Spencer, had married Lavinia Bingham, daughter of the Irish peer Lord Lucan and Lavinia had recently given birth to a son called Jack. The Earl’s youngest daughter, Harriet, had finally resisted the dishonourable advances of the young Prince Regent and had settled instead for marriage with Frederick Ponsonby, who received the courtesy title Lord Duncannon, and who would later inherit the title of third Earl of Bessborough. As for his favourite child, Georgiana, the Earl had often had to hide his worries, but he could at least die happy in the knowledge that with her he had fathered one of the most extraordinary women of her age.
