by John Pearson
But with Mr Gladstone’s Home Rule plans now splitting the Liberals, Lord Spencer’s sacrifice was made in vain, for the Gladstone government was defeated, Ireland failed to get its independence, and staunch Lord Spencer found himself in limbo, facing the twin realities of political failure and financial disaster.
Back from Ireland in 1885, the Earl took on a third term as Master of the Pytchley almost out of habit, but he was not as happy or carefree now as in the past. His thoughts were on finance, not foxes, for with £14,000 going out each year on the Hunt alone, it was clear that if nothing was done, Lord Spencer would go bankrupt.
At Althorp there was one obvious asset - the greatest private library in Europe. The Earl put on a good show of pretending that the very thought of selling it pained him deeply. But one feels that the man who according to Margot Asquith ‘had never opened a book for pleasure, and believed Jane Eyre was written by George Eliot’ cannot have been totally distraught to see the back of so many books that he would never read.
He wrote to the Librarian at the British Museum, ‘It would be a matter of concern for me to be obliged to deprive the house of the books which have such a great reputation, and are a monument of the book learning and collecting industry of my grandfather.’ But the agricultural depression was making it ‘extremely difficult for me to keep locked up the large amount of capital which the books here represent’.
He did not hesitate too long. By the end of July 1892 the deal was done and the greatest private library in Europe went to the John Rylands library at Manchester University for £250,000.
Writing to his half-brother, Bobby Spencer, the Earl admitted that the sale had left him feeling ‘rather depressed’, but he had convinced himself that it had been his duty to do it. ‘I could not have gone on as I have been doing for the last twelve or thirteen years, and believe me of what at times was intolerable, the feeling that I had no right to go on even in the very reduced way which we have adopted for the some years past, and I saw no way out of the difficulty.’
At less than £6 a volume the sale was less a deal than a steal, and today a single Caxton could fetch more than the Earl received for the whole collection. In the circumstances it is hard to criticise him for the sale - although it is hard to believe that by trying just a little harder he could not have got considerably better terms for such a totally unique collection.
Where he seems to have been genuinely irresponsible was in the way he used the money to continue living much as he had before. A few years later, when the Duke of Devonshire sold Devonshire House to make space for offices and car showrooms, much of the million pound profit was shrewdly invested in the Canadian Pacific Railway. But the nearest Lord Spencer came to investing his own little windfall was to install electric light at Spencer House. The money also permitted Lady Spencer to redecorate the house yet again to make it fit to receive Queen Victoria.
There was a further reason why Lord Spencer still refused to think of serious economies. True Spencer that he was, it was against his nature to be provident. In addition, the lure of power still tempted him and a hint of poverty might have hurt his prospects when Mr Gladstone formed his fourth administration after the election of 1892, and appointed Lord Spencer to the position of Lord President of the Council.
With Gladstone now in his eighties, someone would soon be called upon to succeed him as premier, and Spencer was aware of his chances. For the second time in his life, he reluctantly declined the Viceroyship of India and became instead First Lord of the Admiralty. Ironically it was as head of the Admiralty that Lord Spencer won his greatest political victory, when for the first time in his long political career he disagreed with Mr Gladstone.
This began in 1893 when the collision of two British men of war in the Mediterranean, with heavy loss of life, started a nationwide panic campaign to build more warships. As Roy Jenkins writes in his biography of Gladstone, this campaign was not entirely logical, since ‘it was not obvious that the answer to British ships running into each other was to have more of them’. But logic had never been Lord Spencer’s strongest point, and when the admirals and The Times began an emotional campaign to build more ships, Lord Spencer was converted. And once he had ‘swallowed the arguments of the admirals whole’, he became a formidable adversary against Mr Gladstone.
When Gladstone was defeated over Lord Spencer’s increased navy estimates he instantly resigned the premiership; and thanks to the man who had been among the most loyal of his supporters, the Grand Old Man’s long career in politics was over.
As Gladstone had feared, the sudden growth in British warship construction was answered by increased naval building programmes among other nations, particularly Germany, which are often claimed to be among the many causes of the First World War. But Lord Spencer’s navy estimates had another unexpected result, which would prove perhaps his most disastrous lasting legacy to the aristocracy, and especially the Spencers, to the present day.
In 1894 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, finding himself hard pushed to fund Lord Spencer’s naval building programme, decided on a novel tax - death duties on a sliding scale, so that on their death the largest landowners were to make the greatest contribution to the Exchequer. Among the hardest hit would be the Spencers.
From now until his death, the Red Earl was never free from money troubles. It was a galling situation, for just when his public role and reputation had never been higher, his private income and the state of his affairs had never sunk lower.
As a young man he had started out as the richest and most hopeful Spencer Earl for a century. Now with age he found himself afflicted by the constant scourge of the House of Spencer which he once believed he had evaded - chronic and persistent debt.
There was not a great deal to be done about it now, but had he been cleverer or less profligate, things might been different. Instead there were more economies, which filled his later years with a sort of nagging sorrow. An Earl Spencer should simply not be short of money, but since he was, he dismissed staff, closed up Althorp for six months every summer, let Spencer House and took Charlotte off to Egypt for the winter. This was something that a childless couple could do - and without the responsibility for children their money worries must have been easier to bear. But it must have been particularly lonely for the childless Earl when in 1903 his wife, Charlotte, died quite suddenly after a cancer operation. This had been performed a few months earlier in Spencer House by one of the earliest female surgeons, Dr Mary Scharlieb.
‘Charlotte left us in a sleep of perfect peace and beauty,’ wrote her husband, and there is something touching in the last impression of this lonely nobleman keeping up appearances in old age at the end of so long a line. Just as the pre-eminence of the early Spencers had been built on economy and money, so the absence of both was undermining them.
Mounting costs would all but overwhelm the Earl and he had always lacked the foresight - and brutality - that might have eased the situation. Instead, with unerring misjudgement, John Poyntz almost always made the wrong decisions.
The contrast with more successful aristocrats was cruel but telling. With the Red Earl, there had been no heiresses, no mineral rights, no children and finally no premiership. Just as the early Spencers had always been lucky, so he was hit by terribly bad luck. Had he not had the two fatal strokes just before the Liberal victory in December 1905, he might still have been prime minister, making his whole career appear worthwhile. The winner of that particular battle, Campbell Bannerman, was only two years younger and had only two more years to live himself.
As it was, the Earl never entirely recovered from the two strokes and his health began to worsen. When he resigned his Lord Lieutenantship of Northamptonshire in 1908, he received the coolest of replies from his former friend, the King, who had a long memory and had never forgiven him for backing Home Rule for Ireland.
Towards the end, Lord Spencer’s mind began to wander. Bobby Spencer, who for many years had been his heir,
remained loyally with him at Althorp and was with him when he died. He described what happened: ‘He did not suffer at all, I think, though there was a fearful restlessness always to get home … Then the idea of hunting, actually insisting on getting up fairly early to be in time to start, and our helplessness to convince him that there was no hunting and that he was in his own house - all this was a strain … At last he took to his bed, but his strength was such that even then he tried to dress on purpose to get home. I was with him when the blessed peace came to him and he gently sighed his life away.
‘I had the ribbon of the Garter put on him, and later when he lay in the big hall, I covered him with the mantle of the Garter.’
Chapter 12
‘Dearest Boy’
Charles Robert, sixth Earl Spencer (1857-1922)
Once he had placed the mantle of the Garter over the large recumbent body of his brother, Charles Robert, who found himself now sixth Earl Spencer, had to take stock of his situation.
He was fifty-three, in poor health and without a wife. He did not hunt, he did not particularly enjoy the country, and he did not wish to live permanently at Althorp. In his latter years his brother had let Althorp go, and Bobby had no idea how, if ever, he would sort the problems out, what with the death duties, the condition of the estates and the whole chaotic muddle.
For that matter, how could he possibly live up to that larger-than-life character? His half-brother had been ‘King’ of Northamptonshire, but Bobby Spencer knew that he could never be a king. He was a courtier, and for several years his life had been totally taken up with his work at court and the lives and activities of Their Majesties. To leave them, and retreat to Althorp, would be like going into exile.
While the Red Earl was alive, he and Bobby had made a most unlikely double act; the Earl so tall and bearded, and Bobby so cleanly shaved and barbered. There was always something birdlike about Bobby with his winged moustaches, high pitched voice and what his friend Eddie Marsh once called his ‘deliriously petulant way of speaking’. As a young man he was very vain and something of a dandy. He dressed immaculately and was proud of the sartorial trademark which he had long ago adopted - the four-inch high stiff white collars which were specially made for him by one of London’s most fashionable shirt-makers in Jermyn Street.
But the truth was that Bobby’s succession to the earldom meant more than just a change of personalities. The gusto and extravagance which the Red Earl had spread so heedlessly around him had departed. With his death an air of sadness seemed to fall upon the family. For behind the four-inch collars and the winged moustaches was a deeply melancholy man. Even the circumstances of Bobby Spencer’s birth had been part of a Victorian tragedy.
In 1855 Lady Stanley of Alderley who was staying at Althorp had written to her husband about Fritz’s young wife, Yaddy: ‘Lady Spencer is delicate. She never comes down in the morning and lies in the evening with her feet up. I suppose she is trying to make a little Spencer.’
She was indeed. Yaddy already had a daughter, Lady Victoria, known to one and all as Va, but Fritz was anxious for a second son and in October 1857 she gave him what he wanted in the shape of Charles Robert.
Bobby’s arrival was greeted joyfully. Fritz doted on his young wife, and she on him. He was apparently in perfect health, and the mysterious illness which hit the Earl in the midst of all their happiness on the very eve of Christmas, seemed particularly cruel. Within a few days thirty-two-year-old Yaddy found herself a widow.
In its abruptness, Fritz’s death foreshadowed that of Prince Albert four years later, and Yaddy herself now acted much as the widowed Queen Victoria would do. Mourning became her way of life, and the bereft and deeply pious widow saw her delicate son as a gift sent specially from God to console her for the husband He had taken. She treasured him, and for the rest of her life was almost totally obsessed with him. The result was predictable, with Bobby growing up a spoiled and solitary mother’s darling. Apart from his sister, he had few companions.
Yaddy was less concerned about her daughter, Victoria, who eventually married Lord Sandhurst. But living her life for and through her son, the moment Yaddy dreaded most was the day he left for Harrow, and his long absences at boarding school became a source of misery for them both. She wrote to him every day, and the correspondence from this lonely widow to her ‘Dearest, Dearest Boy’, laboriously penned on black-edged paper, is extraordinary. For here in these innocently pre-Freudian times is a classic case of a mother besottedly in love with her beautiful male child who inevitably becomes what, subconsciously at least, she longs for him to be - dependent, delicate and over-sensitive.
Inevitably he learned the art of using illness to get what he wanted out of life and those around him. One sees him doing this already when, at seventeen, he decided he had had enough of Harrow. Towards the end of January 1875, Yaddy was writing anxiously to him at school - ‘My Own Own Boy, I hope the changes of tonic may do your poor head real good my precious … God Almighty bless you and prosper you my own.’
The change of tonic must have worked, for all was well, and it was not until the end of the summer holidays that the threat of school brought a recurrence of Bobby’s headaches - and his mother’s unhappiness at losing him again.
‘My Dearest Boy, I can never tell you, never, what it cost me to send you back last Wednesday - and it was all I could do to do it - and as it happened I had better not as I have only given you more suffering, my poor, poor darling.’
By now Bobby’s headaches must have been enough to persuade the school authorities to send him home for good, and soon his mother was writing with the news that they would soon be reunited. ‘And so end my letters to you as a school boy my own dearest child … Most precious boy. How I do miss you. I’m sure no one has a Boy like mine. Such a good dear contented helpful Boy. God will bless you, my own, for all your goodness to me, my old Darling.’
Robert Charles was just twenty when his mother died without warning and he seems to have bottled up his grief as he always would throughout his life. Freed from the suffocating love of Yaddy, he appeared transformed and positively light-hearted among his friends.
Having loved his stepmother dearly, the Red Earl dedicated the new panelling in St Mary’s Great Brington to her memory. He also looked after his younger brother, and it was through his patronage that Bobby, at the age of twenty-two, became the youngest member of the House of Commons, representing what was still effectively the Spencer family seat of Northamptonshire as a Liberal.
Although not a dedicated politician like his brother, Bobby Spencer held the seat for over twenty years and was widely admired in the House for what his mother would have wanted him to be -elegant, witty, and the best dressed man in Parliament.
With his stylish dress and perfect manners he was also a popular social figure, and as such had little difficulty impressing the grandest London hostesses, including middle-aged Lady Holland who liked to have devoted young admirers around her. She was the last of the great Whig hostesses, and when Bobby told her how much he wished he had had a chance to meet Charles James Fox, she replied, ‘Believe me, my dear, so do I, but then we should not be alive today, my dear, and the alternative is rather depressing.’
She was a perfect mother substitute for the handsome Bobby. His delicate health attracted her devotion and soon a distinctly arch flirtation had begun between them. Before long she too was writing to him as ‘My dearest love’, and ‘My Dear, Dear Bobby’.
It is intriguing that Lady Holland ended her letters to Bobby using the private language which his distant Aunt Georgiana Devonshire had invented when she wrote to Dearest Bess, and which was still sometimes used in Whig society: Take care of yourself, dearest Don Roberto, and I’se ’appy’.
Bobby Spencer seemed so completely in his element as a social figure, that his friends were puzzled when, at twenty-eight, he was struck with a mysterious depressive illness. A note has been preserved from Sir William Gill, the fashionable physician: ‘I w
as unhappy to find you so depressed yesterday. I have analysed the contents of the bottle and find it quite satisfactory.’
His urine sample may have been satisfactory, but something was obviously amiss and Bobby’s doctors recommended a period of total rest in the winter sunshine of Madeira. Here he started to recover, but one feels that more therapeutic than the sunshine was the letter he received just after Christmas Day on heavily embossed paper from Marlborough House.
My Dear Bobby,
How kind of you to send me such a charming Christmas present.
I envy you spending this season of the year in so charming a climate and trust that you are feeling all the better for it.
I send you a Tiffany cigarette case as my Xmas offering and trust that you will sometimes use it.
From yours very sincerely,
Albert Edward.
This letter from the Prince of Wales and the Tiffany cigarette case that accompanied it mark an important moment in the life of the Honourable Robert Spencer, showing that he had made it to the topmost reaches of society. Early in the New Year he returned to London and five weeks later he received a second letter from Marlborough House in the same unmistakable handwriting.
My Dear Bobby,
Many thanks for writing to tell me that Mr Gladstone has submitted your name to the Queen as Parliamentary Groom in Waiting. I congratulate you sincerely on this appointment which I was very anxious for you to obtain. My only regret is that you form part of a Home Rule group.
Obviously the Irish Home Rule problem was still worrying the Prince, but although the office of Parliamentary Groom in Waiting was a political appointment, which made Bobby one of the Liberal whips in Parliament, it also gave him a ceremonial position in the court.
