Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals

by John Pearson

  His love of the country, and his attachment to the way of life it represented – beef, beer, farming and tradition – became fundamental to the young Althorp’s whole existence. But his enjoyment of the hunt was interrupted by the obligation to participate in politics. In 1804, probably to please his father, he had become a member of parliament for what was effectively a Spencer seat at Okehampton in Devon, and soon, through his father’s influence, he was given a very junior position at the Treasury in the Ministry of All the Talents. But at this stage he could never be called a dedicated politician. Hunting still came first and, after a late night sitting at Westminster, he would gallop through the night, using relays of horses on the way, to be back in time for the next day’s hunting with the Pytchley.

  Just as he had been obliged to enter politics, so Lord Althorp felt obliged to marry, but he was not enthusiastic at the prospect. His father suggested his cousin, his Aunt Harriet’s unbalanced and glamorous daughter, Caroline Ponsonby who, fortunately for Althorp, married Lord Melbourne instead and later fell in love with the man she called ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – Lord Byron.

  Lord Althorp decided he would please himself and, in the end, he predictably chose exactly the sort of bride his mother would have most disliked – portly, homely Esther Acklom, the daughter of an undistinguished but well-to-do Nottinghamshire squire. Lavinia was heard to say that her daughter-in-law’s ‘manner of address was so forthright and uninhibited that it rarely failed to cause unease amid well-bred people’. But just as Lavinia came to hate her, so stout Esther soon became the joy of Althorp’s life. Once married in 1814, they stayed away from London, settling into her old family house at Wiseton, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. It was here that John Charles’s lifelong interest in farming really started. He always said that these were the happiest years of his life. He farmed, he turned from breeding hounds to breeding cattle. He loved his wife, and went on hunting.

  But already the cares of the outside world were impinging on the rural peace of John Charles Spencer. Through parliament he had been meeting a group of rich young aristocrats from Whig families very like his own. There was Lord Tavistock, heir to the Duke of Bedford. There was also his cousin, the youthful Lord Duncannon and, above all, there was his closest and most influential friend, the immensely rich Lord Milton, heir to the great FitzWilliam estates and fortune.

  In the reaction to the war with France, the once pro-French Whig politicians of the second Earl Spencer’s generation had become increasingly impotent and disillusioned. But this group of young Whig noblemen was quite different from the older generation. All were devout evangelical Christians and, as such, were united by the bonds of serious belief. Devoted to good works, they were kindly landlords and puritan by inclination. They rigidly observed the Sabbath. John Charles himself began reading sermons to his guests on Sundays, and later had paintings removed from Spencer House ‘because they were in a state of nakedness without even fig leaves’. At Wiseton he insisted that ‘he had no wish to live the life of a grandee’ but preferred to ‘live like a squire and not a magnate’.

  However, while trying to live the life of a simple country squire with his plump wife and his herds of even plumper cattle, Lord Althorp was changing into something different. It was as if, in the person of this devout, country-loving nobleman, the eighteenth century was correcting itself of its excesses, with social conscience succeeding lordly unconcern, earnest belief taking the place of upper-class indifference, and sheer hard work making up for all the years of noble idleness. Simultaneously, in Parliament the same leaven of evangelical Christianity was working on young Whig noblemen like Althorp, in the cause of liberty, justice and the hatred of tyranny.

  Politically, what these earnest young men needed was a cause to unite them; and not for the first time in history it was provided by their opposition to the Royal Family. At the time, King George Ill’s son, Frederick, Duke of York, was Commander-in-Chief of the Army and it was revealed in parliament that his current mistress, Mrs Clarke, had been taking bribes from army officers anxious for promotion. Although it seemed as if the Duke himself had also been involved, the older members of parliament were inclined to deal leniently with the matter. Bribery was something of a way of life and a certain level of corruption made the world go round.

  But Althorp was genuinely shocked at such an attitude. So were his friends, for whom corruption, from whatever quarter, was a clear offence against the moral code they all believed in. Somewhat reluctantly, Lord Althorp now became their spokesman. Although he had already sat in the House of Commons for five years without speaking, he roused himself to deliver an impassioned attack upon the hapless Duke of York and, although his motion was defeated, his speech helped to make his name in Parliament. Older Whig politicians like his father had been growing tolerant of royalty, but Althorp would have none of this and from this point on would always be suspicious of the monarchy.

  One of the few clouds obscuring the sunshine of the Althorp marriage had been Esther’s failure to produce a child. Several times she suffered cruel miscarriages, which John Charles endured with her in agony. Finally, in the spring of 1818, Esther discovered she was pregnant once again, and this time she carried the child full term. Hoping for a Spencer heir at last, Althorp wrote happily to his friend, Lord Milton: ‘I never saw her better in my life and am therefore very sanguine as to the result.’ This time there seemed no cause for anxiety, but to be on the safe side he insisted on taking Esther to London for the birth. On 9 June, after a prolonged and agonising labour, Esther was delivered of the longed-for son and heir but the baby was stillborn. Two days later, John Charles also lost the wife that he had loved so dearly.

  Stunned with grief, he longed to join her. Retreating alone to Wiseton in a state of deep depression, he spoke of death as ‘the most inestimable blessing a created being can receive’. When finally he felt that he could face the world again, he tried to convince himself that Esther’s death had had a meaning, telling himself that it had been God’s way to make him stick more strictly to the path of duty. Only thus would he ‘fulfil His plans in order to secure eventual reunion with his wife in heaven’. Until that happened, he felt he was on leave of absence from the great hereafter, with his life at best an interlude before the awesome drama of Judgement Day. From now on Althorp craved no frivolous delights. He gave up hunting and wore black at all times, claiming that his only use of this world was ‘as a stepping stone to the next’.

  His mother naturally had hopes that he would overcome his grief, and finally remarry, if only to provide the all-important heir for the family. But for such a man, the idea of remarriage after Esther’s death was quite repugnant. This was the time when his mother could have helped him, but as she had never disguised her hatred for his dead wife, he found it hard to endure his mother’s company. Instead of going back to live with her, he chose to make his home with the person who was now his only link with Esther – his mother-in-law, the widowed Mrs Acklom – feeling it his duty to look after her.

  Lady Spencer bitterly complained that her son rarely dined at Spencer House because ‘he dare not leave that old drunkard of a mother-in-law who rules him with a rod of iron and who having once got him into her town residence will never let him quit it’.

  By setting up home with his mother-in-law, John Charles had effectively cut himself off from his mother. More important for the future of the Spencers, he had protected himself against any urge he might have felt at this stage to remarry. Since Esther had been unable to present him with an heir no other woman was to have that privilege, and the succession would inevitably pass to one of his brothers, Robert, Frederick or George. There were enough of them, and he was not worried. He had other matters on his mind.

  Still grieving for Esther, he sought consolation in his farms and with his cattle. As he told his father, ‘I hope by such quiet pursuits as these to bear the affliction I am suffering under with tolerable patience.’ He also b
egan to educate himself by the serious study of divinity and economics. But work was only soporific, life at best a grim alternative to death, which often tempted him.

  The outside world could not be so easily evaded, and it was now that, together with a small group of friends in Parliament, Lord Althorp first became involved in the cause of parliamentary reform. Still fearful of a French-style revolution breaking out in England, the Tory government was firmly wedded to repression. On 16 August 1819, a huge crowd that had peaceably assembled at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to hear the Radical ‘Orator’ Hunt on the subject of parliamentary reform, was fired on by the Yeomanry. The eleven who were killed became the ‘martyrs’ of what was known as the ‘Peterloo Massacre’.

  Amid great concern throughout the country, everyone took sides and Lord Althorp found the cause he needed. Following Esther’s death he felt he had to do ‘that which is pleasing unto God’ and, after the horror of Peterloo, was convinced that what was pleasing unto God was to sweep away parliamentary corruption and extend the vote to the rising middle classes and the unrepresented industrial cities of the North. Only serious electoral reform would prevent further Peterloos and the revolution everybody dreaded.

  In Parliament he began to make his reputation as one of the most effective leaders of the Opposition. Lacking the distraction of a wife or children, he could devote himself almost exclusively to his duties. But while he was totally sincere in his dedication both to Christianity and Reform, his character remained the same as ever. The least arrogant of aristocrats, this John Bull figure could not have been more unlike the fashionable and elegant Whig noblemen of his father’s generation, particularly now that he lacked a wife to keep him clean and tidy. The diarist Creevey describes him in parliament with his ‘stout, honest face, and farmer-like figure, habited in ill-made black clothes, his trousers rucked up in a heap around his legs, one coat flap turned round and exposing his posterior …’ And, according to R.H. Gronow, ‘even in the hottest days he was buttoned up to his chin, and no one has ever been able to discover whether his lordship wore a shirt or not’.

  Far from arousing disapproval, all of this endeared him to members on both sides of the House. He genuinely did not want to change his manner or his clothes. And, just as he was proud of looking like a farmer, so he remained completely serious in his belief that as a Christian his true purpose in this vale of tears was to fight corruption and ‘place the civil liberties of my country in an impregnable position’.

  It was this unusual combination of opposites which gave Althorp such influence in Parliament and, thanks to this, in 1830 the Whig Opposition elected him their leader. Another source of Althorp’s strength was the fact that he was probably the only man in Parliament who personally wanted nothing out of politics. He was so clearly what he said he was, that no one could question his integrity. And since, as an aristocrat himself, Reform was clearly not in his own interests, none could question the sincerity with which he urged it on his fellow politicians.

  Even his lack of polish as a speaker could work in his favour. When he was in government, a particularly persuasive speaker made a strong speech supporting an amendment against Reform. Althorp, rising to his feet, replied that ‘he had made some calculations which he considered as entirely conclusive as a refutation of the honourable gentleman’s arguments, but unfortunately he had mislaid them, so that he could only say that if the House would be guided by his advice, they would reject the amendment’. And they did.

  For as Peel said, ‘Althorp only had to get up, take off his hat and shake his head to convince the House that the Opposition’s arguments, however plausible, were founded on a fallacy.’

  It was in 1830 after the collapse of the Duke of Wellington’s Tory government that Georgiana Devonshire’s former lover, Lord Grey, became Whig prime minister and invited Althorp to become his Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Before accepting, Althorp had written to his brother, Robert, ‘I will not take office unless some great good is to be effected by it. I know it will make me miserable … but I have no right to refuse, though I accept at the expense of my own happiness.’

  He was not exaggerating. He remained Leader of the House as well as Chancellor, and the next two years his life were dominated by the unremitting labour of dragging the first Great Reform Bill through a reluctant Parliament. His fellow Whig, the future prime minister Lord John Russell, was the Bill’s effective architect, but throughout the gruelling committee stages Althorp had the task of controlling the House and dealing, step by step, with the most minute details of the government’s proposals.

  He never faltered. After a general election in the spring of 1831 had returned a Whig government with an even larger majority, his work went on. With the opposition fighting every detail, Russell virtually collapsed, leaving Althorp to soldier on ‘night after night in the crowded, steaming chamber, which stank in warm weather because of its proximity to the Thames eight or nine hours every evening’. Between December 1830 and March 1832, Russell spoke 329 times in parliament to Althorp’s 1014.

  For although the Bill was passed by the House of Commons it was twice rejected by the House of Lords, leaving the government no alternative but to start its work afresh.

  The strain on ministers became intense and particularly on Althorp. ‘Damn Reform,’ Lord Grey remarked to him in February 1832. ‘I wish I had never touched it.’

  Wearily Althorp said he felt the same, adding that he had removed his pistols from his bedroom, just in case the temptation to kill himself became irresistible. Around the same time he was telling Byron’s old friend Hobhouse: ‘I don’t know whether I ought not to make matters easier by shooting myself.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Hobhouse answered loyally, ‘shoot anyone else.’

  It needed yet another General Election, and the threat by the new King William IV to create as many new Whig peers as were necessary to get the Reform Bill through the House of Lords, but in June 1832, the First Reform Bill became law. And Lord Althorp, who had done the donkeywork to make this possible, had almost had enough. In 1834, his father’s death removed him from the House of Commons to what he called that ‘hospital of incurables’, the House of Lords. Freedom beckoned. ‘At all rates, I am the House of Commons Minister who will be handed down to posterity as being the man who only accepted office for the purpose of carrying Reform, and who first has applied the axe to the root of all our evils,’ he wrote. He had ‘done what was pleasuring unto God and, without regret, he now returned to the country

  Now that his father was dead, he could keep the promise he had made to him to deal once and for all with the apparently insoluble problem of the Spencer family debt. As he had told his father, he had ‘no desire to keep up the state of a great nobleman’, and was perfectly prepared to live economically. As a former Chancellor of the Exchequer he was also used to dealing with large amounts of money, but even he was shocked to discover that the debt was standing at nearly half a million pounds.

  It was a strange situation. For Sarah’s great inheritance, far from having proved a financial blessing, had ended up all but ruining the Spencers. The existence of such wealth had encouraged the first Earl in cripplingly expensive self-indulgence, way beyond the income the inheritance produced, and with so many great houses, and increasingly mortgaged resources, the Spencers had been living in an aristocratic cloud cuckoo land for the last two generations. If this continued, John Charles could see that the family would soon be ruined. It was a nightmare task for anyone to deal with, and few could have managed it. But thanks to his frugal way of life, and the fact that he had no immediate family, John Charles uncomplainingly set himself to cope with a situation for which he was in no way responsible.

  He began by implementing as many personal economies as possible, spending little on himself, closing up Althorp, selling furniture and shares, and disposing of his apartment in the Albany. But none of this made much impression on the debt. Reluctantly he tried to sell Spencer Ho
use, which he loved, by offering it, together with some paintings, several adjacent houses and the Marlborough diamonds, in a package for the knock-down price of £60,000. But even a potential buyer as rich as the Duke of Richmond jibbed at the thought of maintaining such a palace, and incredibly there were no takers.

  This left him no alternative to what he called ‘the Great Operation’, which would occupy much of his attention for several years. His principal ambition was to preserve Althorp and the original Spencer lands in Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. These were sacred, and to keep them it was clear that there was only one sacrifice the family could make. The great Spencer estates on the south bank of the Thames in Wandsworth and Battersea would have to go.

  He must have guessed that as far as the future was concerned, this would be a serious loss for the family, for much of the land was undeveloped, and soon this whole area beside the Thames would be thick with wharves and factories, and the dense housing developments of Victorian London. Had the Spencers been able to hold onto them, they might not necessarily have made them the ‘leviathans of wealth’ that Althorp’s biographer suggests they might have been, but they would certainly have been spared the worst of the financial troubles that plagued them later in the century.

  But this was not possible. The splendid life indulged in by the last two generations of Spencers still had to be paid for. The debts of the dead had to be met by the living, and John Charles, third Earl Spencer, paid them. The £324,000 which the sales of Wandsworth and Battersea produced, brought down the debt to more manageable proportions and, when further land was sold at Wimbledon Park, the Spencers were nearly solvent for the first time in more than half a century.