by John Pearson
It was now that Bobby realised the time had come to marry. Living the life he did, he might not have bothered but for a serious misfortune which for the second time within the century had struck the Spencers.
His brother and sister-in-law were childless and with the Countess now in her early forties it seemed they would undoubtedly remain so. Bobby was suddenly expected to provide the son and heir his brother could not.
He might have taken his distant Marlborough cousins as examples. Nine years earlier his near contemporary, Lord Randolph Churchill, had gone to America to find an heiress and returned with the ravishing Jennie Jerome, who provided an explosive boost to the bloodline of the Spencer Churchills by giving birth in Blenheim Palace in 1874 to his cousin Winston. A few years later another of Bobby’s distant cousins, the young duke ‘Sunny’ Marlborough, was to land the richest American heiress of them all - Commodore Vanderbilt’s daughter, Consuelo.
Bobby had no intention of going to America to find a bride, so he chose an heiress nearer home, settling for eighteen-year-old Margaret Baring, daughter of Edward Baring First Baron Revelstoke, head of the great banking house of Baring Brothers.
The Barings were no ordinary bankers. Having come to England from Germany in the 1770s, they established the great financial house by lending to the government of William Pitt. The Barings had subsequently married into the aristocracy, and on Margaret’s marriage Lord Revelstoke promised his daughter the adequate but not enormous allowance of £5,000 a year.
Homely Margaret was the perfect wife for Bobby, being the sort of gentle, motherly figure he needed, and he grew to love her, as he also came to love her family, whose cosmopolitan, highly civilised life-style, must have seemed particularly attractive after the political and hunting world of the Spencers. In contrast, the exotic Barings could have been a race apart, with their love of music and the arts, their private language, and their obsession with all things French. This included speaking French at meals - a habit which Bobby soon adopted. Indeed in many ways he seemed to be becoming more of a Baring than a Spencer, and although Margaret was twelve years younger he became totally dependent on his loving wife whose younger brother would become the celebrated writer, Maurice Baring, and who, having studied music in Paris with violinist Joachim, would play lullabies to their children on her Stradivarius.
They enjoyed a comfortable rather than a luxurious life together. His brother, the Red Earl, offered them the use of 28 St James’s Place, next door to Spencer House, along with Dallington House in Northampton, and the greatly-needed children started to arrive - in 1889 a daughter, Adelaide, known as Delia; in 1892 a son and heir, christened Albert Edward John, but always known as Jack; two further sons, Cecil and George, born in 1894 and 1902; and a daughter, Lavinia, born in 1899.
Although Margaret was a Baring, she and Bobby were not considered particularly rich by the standards of the society they inhabited - especially when Lord Revelstoke, through lunatic investments in the Argentine, all but bankrupted Baring Brothers in 1890. Bobby offered to forego Margaret’s annual income. As the Bank of England gallantly bailed out Barings Bank, the sacrifice was not required, but it so impressed one of Bobby’s rich banking friends, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, that he left him a legacy of £10,000.
Bobby had always been a snob, but one of that refined variety that can find true satisfaction only in the very highest reaches of Society. Baron Ferdinand had presumably belonged there, but the truly favoured recipients of Bobby’s admiration were the members of the Royal Family. He knew them personally, visited the Palace regularly, and took care to send them presents every Christmas. By now, he was steadily ascending the royal ladder. In 1895, when the Liberals were again returned to office, he was appointed Vice Chamberlain with the duty of standing in for the Lord Chamberlain during his absences from the court. Then, with the Liberal landslide of 1905, he was tipped for the post of Lord Chamberlain himself.
Although the main courtiers were appointed by the Prime Minister, the court had clung on grimly to the principle that those closest to the monarch had to be chosen from the upper aristocracy, but few Liberal peers were suitable or willing to accept the demanding post of Lord Chamberlain. King Edward was hoping that his bridge-playing friend, Lord Carrington, who as W.H. Smith had founded the famous firm of newsagents, would accept; but knowing what the work entailed, Lord Carrington wisely pleaded ill health and declined.
The obvious candidate was Bobby, but according to King Edward’s friend, Sir Lionel Cust, when the new premier, Campbell-Bannerman, suggested him, the King was not enthusiastic. He still suspected him of radical tendencies, like his brother’s, particularly over the issue of Ireland. But Cust added that Bobby’s obsession with etiquette and protocol weighed in his favour and in the absence of other candidates, he was chosen. There was still one minor problem. Although heir-apparent to the Spencer earldom, he lacked the necessary title, and it had to be arranged for him to be made Lord Althorp in his own right.
With a peerage, a stipend of £2,000 a year and an important court appointment, Bobby was in his element at last, at the very apex of Society. As Lord Chamberlain his finest hour had come, and he was happy.
Such good fortune could not last. Margaret, who had always had a calming influence on her husband’s obsession with the monarchy, managed to remain devoted to her family and the children, and when at Christmas she discovered she was once more pregnant, she was perfectly content. By now, her homely sister, Susan, had married Sir James Reid, the royal doctor, and Sir James himself assured Bobby that at thirty-eight his wife was strong and healthy and that there was no cause for worry.
But on 4 July 1906, when Margaret went into labour in the middle of the night, she lost consciousness nearly at once. A healthy baby girl was delivered at 3 a.m., but by then the doctor was so worried about Margaret’s health that he called Sir James. When Sir James arrived, however, there was nothing to be done.
‘On going into the room I found poor Margaret looking as if she were dying - we did all we could with strong remedies, oxygen, etc., but she never revived and died quietly at 6. It was heart failure, and I think an attack of influenza she had a month ago, which lasted three weeks, had left her heart in a weakened condition. Susan came in just before she died, and Margaret recognised her and said “my boys”, meaning that Susan should look after them.’
The unexpected death brought widespread sympathy - ranging from letters of condolence from the King and Queen, to an estimated crowd of 5,000 at Margaret’s funeral at Great Brington. In the words of a local reporter, ‘It was a strangely pathetic procession from Althorp House to the church on the hill a mile away. Behind the coffin walked the solitary figure of Lord Althorp, who bore up bravely under his unspeakable grief, but how deeply his sorrow was shared became touchingly manifest as the procession passed through respectful crowds that lined the route, for many were unable to control their emotion.’
Somehow Bobby controlled his grief and, just as when his mother died, he refused to speak about his feelings. It was somehow typical of him that the one occasion when he did was in a letter to his future King. Thanking Prince George for his letter of condolence he replied: ‘I cannot realise it all at present, though I know that my life’s object for nineteen happy years has been taken from me, and I have to live on for our children’s sake, though the longing to rejoin my beloved Margaret almost overpowers me. Life’s burden seems so heavy, but it must be born and such warm sympathy as You Royal Highnesses are showing to me helps me.’
Just as Yaddy mourned Bobby’s father for the rest of her life, so Bobby went on mourning Margaret. But however deep his sorrow and however much he may have blamed himself for her death, he always managed to suppress his feelings. He kept his sorrow to himself, and could not bring himself to speak about her. As the children followed his example, none of them really came to terms with their grief at their mother’s passing. According to the youngest daughter, who was named Margaret in her memory, ‘None of her six
children ever recovered from her death or ceased to miss her.’
Bobby was forty-nine when Margaret died and, curiously, her death appeared to set the seal on Bobby’s absolute obsession with his life at court, as he tried to fill the gap she left behind her. Helped by the Reids, he brought the six children up as best he could, with his eldest daughter, sixteen-year-old Delia in her mother’s role. Delia was kind and caring to the children, but even she could never quite forgive the baby Margaret for having caused her mother’s death.
As for Bobby the minutiae of court life now occupied his life completely and helped to fill the place of Margaret. Within two months of her death he was in Berlin, where King Edward was busy visiting the Kaiser and he seemed to have totally recovered from his loss. Writing home Sir James Reid said, ‘Bobby is all right, very fussy, but quite in his element and delights us all.’
But the fussiness increased and with it the desperate involvement in all things royal. Along with his other court responsibilities, Bobby was kept busy in his role as theatrical censor, which was part of the duties of Lord Chamberlain. He was soon banning a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado for fear of offending the Japanese Crown Prince Fushimi during a state visit. In fact there was something almost Japanese in the profundity of Bobby’s reverence for the monarchy, which began to show in his letters to the royal personages. When King Edward finally expired in 1910, he wrote as follows to King George V: ‘The Lord Chamberlain ventures most respectfully to hope that the heart-stirring though silent sympathy of the vast crowds of Your Majesty’s subjects may have somehow helped Your Majesty in his crushing sorrow.’
But the grand climacteric of Bobby’s life as a courtier was still to come. In the Windsor archives is a large red ledger marked ‘Preparations for the Coronation’. In its neatly-written pages, one sees something of the sheer extent of the Lord Chamberlain’s duties and involvement:
Queen’s robes - Are they safeguarded from moth in the Tower?
The stole - H.M. to approve of the design.
Queen’s crown - H.M. asks for sketch of.
His Late Majesty’s robes - request for permission to sketch. (Declined.)
Breeches - Submitting General Greely’s application to wear trousers instead of. (Refused.)
Duchess of Coburg to rank as Princess of Great Britain? (Yes.)
By the time a very weary Bobby entered the Abbey in his robes and coronet, bearing his white wand of office at the new King’s Coronation his life at court was all but over. He was genuinely ailing now with a heart condition which had already kept this most faithful of courtiers from attending two investitures. When the King and Queen departed for fresh triumphs at the Delhi Durbar, Bobby was not included in the party due to ill health. And on his return from India, the King received another deeply deferential letter from his ever faithful chamberlain.
The Lord Chamberlain presents his humble duty to Your Majesty and ventures respectfully to congratulate Your Majesty and the Queen on the triumphant success of the whole of Your Majesty’s Indian journey.
‘Earl Spencer regrets bitterly to have to inform Your Majesty that owing to the state of his health he has been forced by his doctor and his surgeon to consider the necessity of a somewhat prolonged rest abroad. Lord Spencer would not have considered this, only it appears from the doctor’s report that his health, for the remainder of his life, depends on his taking this long rest. Under the circumstances Lord Spencer reluctantly has come to the inevitable conclusion that he must respectfully ask Your Majesty to be graciously pleased to allow him to hand in the resignation of his office of Lord Chamberlain.’
With this most courtly of letters, Lord Spencer’s career as a courtier, which had been the glory of his life, was over. True, the King had given him the Garter, and Althorp was awaiting his attention, but neither took the place of the splendour and excitement he had known in the service of his royal masters. His health was doubtful, his children were growing up, and he was bored and ill and lonely.
Just occasionally he still had contact with the Royal Family. In 1913 when the King and Queen attended military manoeuvres in Northamptonshire they stayed two nights at Althorp, and for those two brief days Bobby was a courtier again. Between rain showers, a group photograph was taken of them all sitting in the garden, and that night His Majesty was by royal standards positively effusive when writing up his diary: ‘Back to Althorp. Dined at 8.30. Looked at Bobby’s lovely rooms full of beautiful pictures. Bed at 11.00.’
In 1914, shortly before war broke out, there was just time for a twenty-first birthday party for his son Jack before he joined the First Life Guards and went to fight in France, where he was seriously wounded in the leg, and rescued from no-man’s-land by a fellow officer. He was invalided back to England and was home by Christmas.
Bobby had never liked the House of Lords which, in contrast with the House of Commons, he found boring and unpleasant. But in the library he discovered a congenial spirit in the person of the man of letters, Edmund Gosse, who had recently published his masterpiece Father and Son. Gosse was clearly flattered by Lord Spencer’s friendship, just as Lord Spencer, as a proudly intellectual man, liked discussing literature with a congenial writer such as Gosse. Soon they were writing regularly to one another and every week, from now until his death, Bobby would start his letter to Gosse with the two words, ‘Cher Ami’, and end it simply, ‘Spencer’.
It is strange how alone he always seemed to be and how in need of friendship. Apart from his youngest daughter, Margaret, his family all had their own lives to lead, and had little time for the sick old man he was rapidly becoming. Money worries plagued him. He described himself as ‘living in a small way and somewhat paralysed by financial difficulties, not of my own making.’ He was right, of course. None of the debts was self-inflicted. He had inherited them from his brother, and before that from generations of the family who had so often overspent and failed to recoup or change their habits.
In 1915, to his infinite regret, he was forced to sell one of the gems of the Althorp collection, Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Boy, for £35,000 in settlement of the most pressing of his debts. But the financial worries continued and, four years later, his collection of etchings followed the Rembrandt to the sale room.
One can appreciate the fearful emptiness of Bobby Spencer’s whole existence as the years passed. It seemed part of an overall decline within the family. After almost four centuries of extraordinary wealth and power the pre-eminence of the Spencers seemed to be drawing to a close in the person of this ageing aristocrat marooned among his pictures, with only his youngest daughter and her governess, Miss Wells, for company.
In 1921 he was sixty-three, and in the letters that he wrote to Gosse from Althorp he was lonely, sick and short of money. May had come, but he was physically cold, for, as he told his friend, there was insufficient fuel to keep the house warm, and ‘the east wind seems to penetrate every cranny’.
Troubles were mounting up around him. ‘There is an overdraft at the bank of “thousands and thousands”. I sold another piece of property the other day, but the mortgagers at once took £9,000 of the purchase money. Of course quite right, but it was a blow.’
At the same time, his heart had weakened and he was having trouble with his teeth. ‘A big tooth dragged out on Tuesday. So it goes on … How long I shall be “toothless Bob” I know not.’ He was relying on laudanum to dull the pain. But his financial worries were a pain that would not go away.
Bobby could see no solution. As he saw it, the Spencers were finished, just as the landed aristocracy in general seemed finished. All he could think of doing was to close up Althorp but, as he told Gosse, ‘preparations for shutting this house up more or less fill me with despair’.
He relied increasingly on his friendship with Gosse for company and support. In a moment of despair he begged Gosse, his ‘cher ami’, to come and see him. When Gosse said that he would come, Bobby’s first reaction was delight, and the following week he wro
te, ‘What talks we will have. We will retremper [soak] ourselves in the gorgeous past.’
But a few days later came a note of caution as he warned his friend about the dullness of Althorp. Besides, he wrote, ‘I am rather a feeble companion, as I do not walk much, and am rather a senile bore.’
Gosse arrived, stayed for a few days, and seemed to cheer him up. But soon after his departure, Bobby suffered two serious heart attacks within four days ‘which shattered me’. He had been planning to go to the unveiling of King Edward VII’s memorial, ‘but there it was. I could not travel.’
He was cheered by news from his youngest son, George, now a midshipman on HMS Hood at Invergordon, who promised to spend a weekend at Althorp. But by October 1921 Bobby could no longer cope with the discomfort of another Althorp winter. He closed the house up and went to London. ‘I left my dear home last Friday and am relieved at having got over the terrible wrench.’
He was annoyed when a newspaper reported him ‘pleading poverty’. He retorted: ‘I plead nothing except that owing to financial difficulties, I cannot go on at Althorp.’ Others asked him if Althorp was for sale - ‘A question of such impertinence that it deserves no answer.’
He remained the social snob he always had been to the end, telling Gosse that he had been reading Byron’s letters, but ‘the sadness is that Lord Byron was not quite gentilhomme, which comes out so dreadfuly in his letters.’
Later, he planned a three-day trip back to shuttered and deserted Althorp. ‘I can do little there,’ he wrote, ‘but I shall have the pictures as companions, so I shall be quite happy.’ In fact, he was not happy at all. Back at Althorp he was once more overwhelmed by money worries and the omnipresence of the debt. ‘No reduction in the income tax, I fear. Soon I shall have to take to Nebuchadnezzar’s very cheap nourishment.’ (Nebuchadnezzar had eaten grass like a beast of the field.)
