Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals

by John Pearson

  So it was back to London, from where his last letter to Gosse mentioned that ‘the bronchitis affected my heart so I am what old fashioned doctors call “much reduced”.’ On 26 September 1922 came a final heart attack, and the saddest of the Spencer Earls found peace at last.

  Chapter 13

  ‘Jolly Jack’

  Albert Edward John, seventh Earl Spencer (1892-1975)

  One will never know how deeply Bobby’s eldest son, Jack Spencer, was affected by his mother’s sudden death, for he never talked about it. But what seems clear is that after Margaret’s death, Jack’s life was ruled by a conscious effort not to succumb to the weaknesses which had made his father’s life a misery.

  This made him very much his father’s opposite. He lacked his father’s good looks and his father’s vanity. Distrusting charm in others, he was virtually devoid of charm himself. He despised uncertainty, and throughout his life infuriated others by his conviction that he was always right. He also despised weakness, which could make him something of a bully.

  He was the first of the Spencers to break with the Whig family tradition and openly declare himself a Tory. He was also at heart an intellectual, although this was something else that he kept hidden - possibly because his father had rather prided himself upon his intellect. Jack Spencer would probably have been the last man in London to have made a friend of Edmund Gosse - and vice versa.

  He was still a serving officer in the First Life Guards in the summer of 1922 when he took over Althorp as seventh Earl Spencer, and it was through military eyes that he surveyed the wreckage. In certain ways the situation was not quite as bad as his sick and lonely father had convinced himself it was. Bobby may have been defeated, but Jack had no intention of surrendering.

  * * *

  As an undergraduate at Cambridge Jack had been a droll, rather prickly character, and it was there that he earned his nickname ‘Jolly Jack’. Like a true Spencer - and again unlike his father - he was a passionate horseman. According to his friend, Sir Alan Lascelles, he ‘rode well and was genuinely philotheros [fond of hunting]’ - so fond that during term time he insisted on taking the train from Cambridge to Northampton twice a week to hunt with the Pytchley.

  Towards the end of the war, as a captain in the Life Guards, he came into fairly frequent contact with the monarch and the court in the course of duty. He had absolutely no wish to become a courtier, but as an accomplished ballroom dancer and heir to an earldom, he was in considerable demand at royal balls and parties. At one point it was being hinted that he might marry George V’s daughter, the Princess Royal. Instead he married the Duke of Abercorn’s considerably prettier daughter, Lady Cynthia Hamilton – who in turn had once been rumoured as a possible bride for the Prince of Wales. Their first child, Lady Anne, was born in 1920, shortly before her grandfather died. Two years later the family moved to Althorp.

  It took some time to get to know the house and assess the situation, but it was clear from the outset that Jack’s first priority was financial. Along with the outstanding debts and mortgages, many of them dating back to the Red Earl’s day, tax was owing and death duties needed to be paid. But during these early months when the Spencers were living at Althorp and at Spencer House in London, Jack came to a decision he would adhere to for the rest of his life. Whatever happened, he was staying put. He would do whatever was required to pay off the debt, but, as far as possible, he would ‘maintain the acreage’ of Spencer land, and avoid the sale of property. This left him no alternative but to turn, like many a hard-pushed aristocrat in the 1920s, to the intolerable but invaluable Joe Duveen.

  Joseph Duveen, who ended life in 1939 as Lord Duveen of Millbank, was the merchant prince of European art dealers. As his biographer S.M. Behrman put it, his ‘entire astonishing career’ was the product of ‘the simple observation … that Europe had plenty of art, and America had plenty of money’. Accordingly he gained his fortune and his title by the wholesale marketing of old master paintings from impecunious European aristocrats like Jack Spencer to very rich Americans. He visited Althorp in person and, while there, helped Jack select six of his most saleable masterpieces for America - a pair of full length portraits of Georgiana Devonshire, one by Reynolds, the other by Gainsborough, two further Reynoldses, one of Lavinia, second Countess Spencer, the other of Lady Camden, a Franz Hals portrait of an unknown man, and Van Dyck’s ravishing Daedalus and Icarus.

  Duveen was excited by the pictures, which as he predicted duly produced £300,000 when sold in New York. And while Jack was sad to see them go, there are worse things in life than selling paintings and war had taught him to regard casualties philosophically. As he explained to a reporter from The Times, ‘The fact of the deaths of the two previous earls occurring within a comparatively short period has compelled the sacrifice.’ When asked if he was satisfied with the £300,000 he received for them he felt obliged to add, ‘I do not touch a penny of whatever I receive for the pictures’. This was true as far as it went, but rather missed the point about the sales. The fact was that, for the moment at least, the paintings had saved Althorp for the Spencers and that their ‘sacrifice’ permitted them to go on living in the house of their ancestors.

  With Althorp safe for now, Jack began to organise a way of life as far as possible within his means. This was very different from the lavish life-style of his predecessors. National politics were out, and he rarely bothered to attend the House of Lords. He continued to hunt throughout his twenties and thirties, but could not possibly afford the Spencer earls’ traditional mastership of the Pytchley. The sale of the paintings had saved Spencer House as well as Althorp for the family, but as they could not afford to live in both he sold a long lease on Spencer House to a ladies’ club, and rented a flat in Grosvenor Square instead.

  At Althorp he was probably the most economical of the Spencers since the Tudors. He was extraordinarily careful over money, and permitted neither himself nor his wife anything that he considered self indulgent. Staff were reduced to a minimum, the only exception being in the kitchens where he always spent above the odds on a first rate cook. He had inherited the famous Spencer appetite and since he loved his food he and Lady Cynthia employed a local girl and trained her to cook the classic English food they both enjoyed. They had one foreign holiday each year which cost them very little, as they spent it aboard their friend Lord Fairhaven’s luxury yacht in the South of France. Jack’s great indulgence was to own two second-hand Rolls Royces. They cost him £750 and he had the Spencer crest painted on the doors.

  Having sold the paintings, Jack allowed himself one more extravagance. He commissioned Augustus John to paint his portrait, wearing his Life Guard’s uniform. Here he was taking a considerable risk, for John was drinking heavily by now and, according to his biographer Michael Holroyd, had a tendency to caricature his male sitters. Jack’s portrait is in fact something of a caricature of a pantomime guardee, and was criticised as such when exhibited in London. Even John himself admitted that ‘he should have probably been hung [sic] rather than his picture’.

  But Jack seemed entirely happy with his portrait, apart from complaining about a crease that John had painted in his guardsman’s tunic, and the minor matter of being charged for a full size canvas rather than the smaller one which he insisted was all he could afford - and all that he ultimately paid for.

  Edward John, the son and heir and future eighth Earl Spencer, was born in 1924. A pretty and affectionate small boy who was always known as Johnnie, he had clearly inherited all his mother’s charm. It was through his mother’s close friendship with the Duchess of York that the future eighth Earl made his own first royal appearance, as page to his great uncle, the Earl of Lucan, at the 1937 coronation of King George VI. Shortly afterwards Lady Spencer was herself appointed lady-in-waiting to her friend, now Queen Elizabeth.

  But although the Spencers were keeping up distinctly grand appearances throughout the 1930s, it was becoming doubtful how much longer this could be maintained. The
y lacked serious capital investments, agricultural land had slumped in value and, despite all Jack’s economies, with agriculture in the state it was, they were still living way above their income. This meant that, in the same year as the coronation, yet another major painting had to go – Holbein’s magnificent portrait of Henry VIII, which had been hanging in the small dining room at Althorp for as long as anybody could remember. The fine art market was depressed and King Henry was purchased by Herr von Thyssen, the German steel magnate, for the ridiculously small - but very welcome - sum of £10,000.

  It was now that Jack’s distant Spencer Churchill cousin, Winston, spent some days at Althorp researching his full-scale biography of their joint if far-off ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Discredited by now, and out of office, Winston was in his ‘Wilderness Years’, and dreading the approaching European war which he was powerless to avert. He found writing his life of Marlborough a diversion and an inspiration, for alone of all the Duke’s descendants, Winston would always look to Marlborough as a hero, and indeed as a model when, like Marlborough, he was called on four years later to command the nation’s forces in a full-scale European conflict.

  By the time of Winston’s visit Jack was gaining a reputation for irascibility, and a story went the rounds that he had been so incensed at finding Winston smoking in his library that he snatched the offending large cigar from the statesman’s lips and stamped it underfoot.

  Jack was disappointed when war broke out in 1939 and he was officially informed that at forty-seven he was too old to rejoin his regiment. Soon enough, however, he had another battle on his hands - defending Spencer House against the German Blitz in the spring of 1941. The ladies’ club had closed, Spencer House stood empty, and Jack was there one night on fire-watching duty when the house next door was hit by incendiary bombs and almost totally destroyed. On this occasion Spencer House lost only its windows, but with the raids continuing, it seemed likely to follow the fate of its next-door neighbour.

  Worried about the priceless eighteenth-century fittings in the house, Jack made a snap decision. He would evacuate all the remaining fixtures and fittings from the house, before bombs destroyed them or someone stole them. He brought workmen up from Althorp and supervised the work in person.

  It must have been like pillaging a palace in the face of an advancing army, as everything was hurriedly removed - exquisite eighteenth-century chimney pieces specially designed for the first Earl by John Vardy and Athenian Stuart, mahogany doors and elaborate door frames, marble busts, and the great bronze-gilt lantern in the hall. Once he had begun, Jack became determined to leave behind as little as possible and was soon having chair rails and skirting boards prised from the walls, together with the decorated inset panels in the Painted Room. He even rescued the enormous Spencer House doormat inscribed with the one word ‘salve’ (welcome) in black capitals, which must have wiped the feet of many of the greatest figures in over a century of English history.

  By 12 May 1941 all was finished. Spencer House stood gutted and, after driving through the night, Jack supervised the stacking of its treasures in Roger Morris’s great stables back at Althorp. Here they would remain for what was known as ‘the duration’. At this stage, having preserved this remarkable collection of antiquities, Jack was planning to return them to Spencer House when the war was over, should it still be standing, which in 1941 seemed most unlikely.

  War was a gloomy time for the owners of great houses. Repairs were impossible, staff unavailable, and by 1942 Jack Spencer came to the decision over Althorp which he had been trying to avoid for nearly two decades - concede defeat. Rather than let the house destroy him as it had his father, he would pass on responsibility for it to the National Trust.

  Early that year, he reluctantly allowed the Trust’s local agent to make a full inspection of the house, and when the agent had finished his report, the Trust’s Historic Buildings Secretary, James Lees Milne, came up to Althorp to discuss the terms of the surrender.

  Lees Milne warmed instantly to Lady Spencer, like everyone who met her, describing her as ‘like a goddess, distilling charm and gentleness around her’. Not so her husband, who was barely civil. Lees Milne soon discovered why. The local agent for the Trust had had the impertinence to ‘depreciate’ Althorp. Like a doctor telling a patient the worst, he had explained that Althorp House was suffering from almost every ailment known to ancient buildings. The roof leaked, the foundations were unsatisfactory, the centuries-old timbers were suffering from wet rot, dry rot and the death watch beetle. This was bad enough but, in addition, the National Trust required a large endowment to keep a house like Althorp going before they would accept it. Not only would the Spencers have to leave the house they had inhabited for nearly four centuries, but yet more land and works of art would have to go to pay for their departure.

  As they discussed this, it was not surprising that Jack became increasingly ‘huffy’, and that Lees Milne left for London feeling deeply pessimistic. As he wrote in his diary that evening, ‘Certainly I appreciated Althorp. But the difficulties will be infinite before we get it.’

  In fact it was the sheer ‘infinity’ of the difficulties that finally saved Althorp for the Spencers. Seeing no way round them Jack refused to give the Trust his house, just as the Trust decided it could not accept it. Thus was Althorp saved - and in the process ‘the Curator Earl’ came into being.

  No one knows who first called Jack the ‘Curator Earl’, but with the ending of the war, the care and preservation of Althorp started to become his true obsession. Since the National Trust was not an option, he had to rescue the house on his own and find alternative means of paying for the extensive restoration. The wartime need for food had boosted agriculture, and government support for farming continued into the post-war period. For Jack this alleviated the disastrous pre-war fall in income, and as far as Althorp was concerned, he was now helped by the advice of his friend, the architect Lord ‘Gerry’ Wellington. At his suggestion he employed Stephen Dykes-Bower, the surveyor of Westminster Abbey, to inspect the house and it was he who told him how he should obtain official grants for Althorp’s preservation.

  By now, central government was beginning to accept an obligation to preserve what was known as ‘the national heritage’. Jack would have deeply resented the suggestion that Althorp was the heritage of anybody but the Spencers, but, as curator, and in order to save its fabric, he was perfectly prepared to accept money from the government and therefore had to accept the penance of opening the house for sixty days a year to the general public. Starting in 1957, he received six separate government grants to finance the restoration of Althorp.

  At times it seemed an endless labour of rebuilding walls, repairing roofs and replacing rotten timbers with immense steel girders, but by the end of it Althorp House was probably in better condition than ever in its history. He also re-created the seventeenth-century state room on the first floor, which had been divided into bedrooms by the second earl in the later eighteenth century, and lovingly restored one of the minor gems of Althorp, the elegant Palladian gardener’s cottage in the park.

  By now Jack had renegotiated the lease on Spencer House to be used as offices, and since no one seemed to care about the absence of John Vardy’s doors or Athenian Stuart’s chimney pieces, he decided he was perfectly entitled to use them at Althorp instead.

  Jack had a well trained eye for architecture and furniture and could see behind the Red Earl’s Victorian restorations to the house which Henry Holland had created for the fifth Earl Spencer. Having so many treasures from Spencer House at his disposal, he was at liberty to do things that not even the second Earl had been able accomplish. Starting with the Sunderland Room, he installed two magnificent chimney pieces in carara marble which had been ‘stolen’ from Spencer House, one by Athenian Stuart, the other by John Vardy. Impressed by the result, he moved on to the Marlborough Room where he replaced two Victorian chimney pieces with another pair from Spencer House, one by the celebrated D
utch sculptor, Scheemakers. Next he improved the appearance of the South Drawing Room by giving it a mahogany door case, circa 1740, by Athenian Stuart. The big ‘salve’ doormat went perfectly in the entrance hall with Vardy’s bronze-gilt lantern from Spencer House above it. As he went on finding places for the treasures hoarded in the stables, Jack was acting like some immensely rich curator, drawing on his private source of authentic masterpieces to enhance his treasure house still further.

  Jack was now in his mid-fifties, and over the years had become a considerable historian. He started taking on trusteeships and advisory positions on the boards of museums like London’s Wallace Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He grew ever more fascinated by his ancestors and took vast trouble establishing a proper muniment room at Althorp to house his great collection of Spencer papers.

  With Spencer House still leased for offices, he treated Brooks’s Club in St James’s as his fiefdom, relishing the part his ancestors had played in its early history. It pleased him that the dining room at Brooks’s was called the Spencer Room, and when lunching there he always tried to sit beneath the portrait of the man he familiarly referred to as ‘my great-grandfather’ - George John, the second Earl and friend of Nelson.

  Jack had never been an easy man. As the years passed and he became ever more obsessed with Althorp, people wondered how his charming wife, Cynthia, put up with the situation. The truth was that they were living very separate lives. Apart from his work at Althorp, he was also deeply involved in the county, as Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire, and one of the longest serving members of the county council. He was also an active member of the Northampton Hospital Committee.

  Lady Cynthia’s world was different. She was a loving mother who would later be adored by all her grandchildren. She was extremely kind, and spent much of her time helping the sick and needy. But she also had another escape route from the strain of her life at Althorp. In 1936 Queen Elizabeth had offered her a place at court, as a Woman of the Bedchamber, and she was later to become a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II.