The Spencer Family

For the first time in the family annals, our attention now passes to Spencer daughters. Not the eldest, Margaret, who married Giles Allington, from whom the Barons Allington were descended; nor Katherine, the wife of Sir Thomas Leigh, of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire; and not Mary, whose marriage to Sir Edward Aston, of Tixhall, Staffordshire, was the only event of note recorded about her life. It is the other three — Elizabeth, Anne and Alice — who are of greater significance, bringing unwittingly to light the Spencer link to Edmund Spenser, the Elizabethan poet.

It is not possible to establish at this distance exactly how Edmund Spenser was connected to the Spencers of Wormleighton and Althorp. Certainly, the fact that the surname was spelt differently is of no real significance: spelling had yet to be standardized, and the use of ‘c’ or ‘s’ in the middle of the name was an understandable variable. Indeed, the sixteenth-century stained glass windows from Wormleighton, now in the chapel at Althorp, spell the family name as ‘Spenser’.

Interestingly, the claim of kinship came not from the Spencers, but from Edmund Spenser himself. As Evelyn Philip Shirley concluded, in The Noble and Gentle Men of England: ‘The poet Spenser boasted that he belonged to this house; though … the precise link of genealogical connexion cannot now perhaps be ascertained.’

Edmund Spenser will be for ever remembered as the author of the poem The Faerie Queene. Born in London in 1552, he described the city in his ‘Prothalamion’ as:

My most kindly nurse

That to me gave this life’s first native source.

Educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, he matriculated in 1569, leaving the university as a Master of Arts in 1576. Two years later he became a member of the Earl of Leicester’s household, working from Leicester House in the Strand. For a man who has since become such a celebrated man of letters — the Prince of Poets in his Time — there is a measure of absurdity in the humble task he performed as deliverer of dispatches to Leicester’s overseas correspondents.

In 1580 Spenser became secretary to Arthur, fourteenth Lord Grey de Wilton, who was then going to Ireland as Lord Deputy. Spenser stayed in Ireland — apart from a couple of visits to England — until the close of 1598. At various stages he was Clerk of the Munster Council — where he made, and enjoyed, the acquaintance of Sir Walter Raleigh — and Sheriff of Cork, an appointment that resulted in Spenser’s house, Kilcolman Castle, being plundered by a discontented Irish mob. He fled with his family to London, died a month later in January 1599, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

An interesting footnote to his time in Ireland lies in the identity of the man who shared his rooms in Chancery in 1593: Maurice, Lord Roche of Fermoy. Three hundred and sixty-one years later, Maurice Roche, Lord Fermoy, witnessed the union of his daughter Frances to Johnnie Spencer, Viscount Althorp — my parents’ marriage — in the same abbey where Edmund Spenser was buried.

The question of kinship to the Spencer family was one that preoccupied Spenser throughout his working life. In one of his greatest works, ‘Colin Clouts come Home againe’, Spenser referred to Elizabeth, Alice and Anne as the ‘sisters three’:

The honour of the noble family

Of which I meanest boast myself to be.

Certainly, the kinship cannot have been over-close: in ‘Muiotpotmos’, a poem dedicated to Elizabeth Spencer — by then Lady Carey — Spenser expresses his gratitude that his claim is recognized by her, in the line ‘… for name or kindred’s sake by you vouchsafed’.

Similarly, Spenser writes to Alice Spencer, in his dedication to her of ‘The Teares of the Muses’:

Most brave and beautiful ladie; the things, that make ye so much honored of the world as ye bee, are such, as (without my simple lines testimonie) are thoroughlie knowen to all men; namely, your excellent beautie, your vertuous behaviour, and your noble match with that most honourable Lord, the very Paterne of right Nobilitie: but the causes, for which ye have thus deserved of me to be honored, (if honor it be at all,) are both your particular bounties, and also some private bands of affinitie, which it hath pleased your Ladyship to acknowledge.

If the kinship had been intimate, then there would have been no need for the vouchsafing by Elizabeth, nor the acknowledging by Alice; indeed, if the blood link had been close, it would have appeared odd for Spenser to have harped on about it. However, similarly, the claim must have been logically sustainable, or else it would not have been presented by the poet, nor accepted by the Spencer ladies.

The reason behind dedicating poetry to influential ladies of breeding was flattery. Not content with fawning to their human charms, Spenser transformed the three Spencer girls into mythical muses — Phyllis (Elizabeth), Charillis (Anne) and sweet Amaryllis (Alice):

Phyllis the faire is the eldest of the three:

The next to her is bountifull Charillis;

But th’youngest is the highest in degree,

Phyllis, the floure of rare perfection,

Faire spreading forth her leaves with fresh delight,

That, with their beauties amorous reflexion,

Bereave of sence each rash beholders sight.

But sweet Charillis is the paragone

Of peerless price, and ornament of praise,

Admir’d of all, yet envied of none,

Through the myld temperance of her goodly raies.

The Spencer daughters were the recipients of other dedications from contemporary writers and Alice’s home was frequented by artists of all kinds. Her husband, Lord Strange, the grandson of Mary, Dowager Queen of France, a sister of England’s Henry VIII, was a friend of poets, and even wrote some verse himself. He also was the patron of the company of actors who had previously been attached to the Earl of Leicester, ‘Lord Strange’s Company’. Spenser, keen to stay on the right side of such a benefactor of the arts, called Strange ‘the very Paterne of right Nobilitie’, and even praised the lord’s amateur artistic efforts posthumously:

He, whilst he lived, was the noblest swain

That ever piped upon an oaten quill,

Both did he other, which could pipe maintain,

And eke could pipe himself with passing skill.

In a similar way Nash, the satirist, acknowledged the patronage of Elizabeth Spencer, Lady Carey, while also taking the opportunity to doff his hat with respect to a far greater literary talent than his own, when he recorded in his dedication to ‘Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem’: ‘Divers well-deserving Poets have consecrated their endeavours to your praise. Fame’s eldest favorite, Maister Spencer, in all his writings he prizeth you.’

Later generations of the Spencer family were to honour their blood link with Edmund Spenser. When George John, Second Earl Spencer, found his vast collection of books was spilling out from the library at Althorp in the early nineteenth century, his wife, Lavinia, named one of the sitting rooms ‘The Spenser Library’, filled it with volumes of poetry, and had a portrait of Edmund placed above the fireplace there. The earl and his wife — both highly educated — seem to have agreed with the opinion of their friend, the historian Edward Gibbon, when he wrote: ‘The nobility of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough, but I exhort them to consider The Faery Queene as the most precious jewel in their coronet.’

4. A Worthy Founder

Sir John Spencer II, father of these muse-like daughters, died in 1586. His eldest son, Sir John III, knighted on his father’s death by Queen Elizabeth, followed him in January 1599. This ancestor of mine can have had little idea that evidence of his life at Althorp would still be visible in the Park 400 years on. However, that is the case, for Sir John III planted a large wood at the rear of Althorp, which is only now reaching the end of its natural life. The oldest oaks still growing there today were planted at his instruction in 1589. My father told me that, the Spanish Armada having been defeated the year before the wood was seeded, it was Sir John III’s intention to boost the timber stocks, in order to be able to help the English Navy to build more ships, should such an invasion be attempted again in the future.

Other than that, he is remembered by my family for increasing the Althorp estate by buying Little Brington, a village a couple of miles from Althorp, in 1592. The vendor was Francis Bernard, and the price £2,150. Some property in that village, like the mighty oaks in the Park, remains in my family’s possession today.

In stark contrast to his father’s fertility, the third Sir John had but one son, by his wife Mary, sole daughter and heir of Sir Robert Catlyn, the Lord Chief Justice. Named after his illustrious maternal grandfather, Robert Spencer was a truly remarkable man, a lynchpin in the family’s history, but also the object of great respect during his own lifetime.

Much of this esteem flowed from qualities that have been seen in generations of Spencers, both before and after Robert’s tenure of Althorp: a keen and able participation in the family’s farming enterprises, a lack of personal political ambition, and a relentless defence of the rights of the English citizen against the abuses of the Crown, as well as the ability to stand aloof from the self-serving infighting of the court. Soon after his death, it was said of Robert:

He made the country a virtuous court, where his fields and flocks brought him more calm and happy contentment than the various and unstable dispensations a Court can contribute, and when he was called to the Senate he was more vigilant to keep the people’s liberties from being a prey to the encroaching power of monarchy than his harmless and tender lambs from foxes and ravenous creatures.

The Spencer family is perhaps unique, of the old English aristocracy, in tracing the roots of its noble title back to the relatively prosaic world of agriculture. The more usual paths to the House of Lords were via military distinction, or through royal blood links — legitimate or illegitimate. The humble farming ancestry of the Spencers was highly unusual, but so was the wealth that inspired husbandry had amassed for the family.

Robert, the fifth Spencer knight in succession, was able to cement his family’s rise from gentry to nobility by building on his forefathers’ endeavours. His personal involvement in the farming operation is shown by references to his attending markets in the West Country in 1597, accompanied by his bailiff, in a quest to improve the bloodline of his cattle, beasts of particular importance to the late sixteenth-century household: the Althorp domestic accounts of the time record that 200 lbs of butter were consumed every week the family was in residence.

We also know that Robert insisted on overseeing the entire agricultural operation on his home farm, at Muscot, five miles from Althorp, where he grew not only rye and barley, but also hops. He was a familiar sight, atop his horse, a small cob palfrey, constantly looking for ideas on how to improve the way tasks were handled, and with a reputation for being unusually approachable to his workers.

Writing in the 1860s, the vicar of Brington, the Reverend J. N. Simpkinson, working from the accounts and records in the Althorp Muniment Room, recreated the scene that would have been witnessed, if one could have been transported back to Robert’s tenure of the Estate:

Lord Spencer never allowed himself to drop behind the agricultural improvements of the day: and the system he had adopted gave employment to many of the women of the villages around as well as to their husbands and fathers. He had introduced the cultivation of hops, both at Muscot farm and in Althorp park; and troops of women were wanted in the hop-grounds, in the spring and early summer, for weeding and tying. Then the meadows had to be ‘clotted’: and, in the parts of the park which were laid for hay, care must be taken to gather the sticks, and rake up the ‘orts’ — the litter, that is, that lay on the ground where the cattle had been foddered in the winter. And in the early part of June, the women were busy in weeding the young quickset hedges; fresh portions of which Lord Spencer added, year by year, to the enclosures on his estate … Lord Spencer treated his labourers liberally. Besides the regular pay (sixpence a day for men, and three-pence for women) he would kill two or three sheep to regale them on such occasions; besides supplying them amply with beer, and plenty of bread to eat with it — excellent bread, such as was not often to be had by labourers in those days, half of barley and half of rye; and at the conclusion would hire a ‘minstrel’, to make merry for them: often coming himself with a party from Althorp, to take part in the final rejoicings.

This enjoyment of a simple, rural life was maintained, despite his increasing importance as a man of influence in the country at large.

When Elizabeth I died, the new King James I was eager to cement his position, so he made it his business to identify the key men in the kingdom, to secure their loyalty. Robert Spencer, reputedly with more ready money than any other man in the kingdom, was clearly somebody whose support was desirable. This explains the honour that was paid to him and to his family when James’s queen, Anne of Denmark, and his heir, Henry, Prince of Wales, stayed at Althorp during their progress to their new palaces in June 1603. It was repaid in full by Robert, who commissioned Ben Jonson to write a masque to be performed as a welcome for the royal guests, in the Park at Althorp. Queen Anne was intrigued by this novel art form — a marked improvement on the Danish court’s idea of entertainment, which centred around the men present drinking enormous quantities of alcohol until they could consume no more — and it was thanks to this performance at Althorp that masques became a part of fashionable royal entertainment in the early seventeenth century.

Partly because of his wealth, partly because of the appreciation of the royal party for their gracious reception at Althorp, and partly because new men of note were needed to buoy up the Stuart hold on the throne of England, Robert was made Baron Spencer of Wormleighton later in 1603. His first task was to act as ambassador for the King, and to invest England’s ally, Frederic, Duke of Wurttemberg, with the highest order of chivalry, a knighthood of the Garter. The baron and the duke vied with each other in the fabulousness of their retinues, and in their gifts to each other, dazzling those who witnessed their meeting with their displays of wealth and munificence.

Robert did not involve himself in court life back in England; it was of no interest to him. However, he took his duties as a member of the Upper House of Parliament seriously, trying to remain loyal to his monarch, while becoming increasingly perturbed by the royal inclination to be overbearing in its attitude to the people’s representatives. James’s belief in the Divine Right of Kings to rule — and raise money — as they saw fit, flew in the face of Spencer’s belief in the need for respect for the people’s elected representatives.

Diligent though Robert was, his agricultural provenance was not forgotten by some of his fellow peers. Once, while he was speaking in the House of Lords on the bravery displayed by former generations in guarding the liberties of England, the Earl of Arundel — conscious of four centuries of aristocratic blood in his own veins — interrupted contemptuously, ‘My Lord, when these things were doing, your ancestors were keeping sheep!’ Robert, apparently without missing a beat, retorted: ‘When my ancestors were keeping sheep, as you say, your ancestors were plotting treason.’ Arundel exploded with rage, to such an extent that he was sent to the Tower of London for his unseemly conduct, until he had calmed down and was ready to apologize to Robert for the rudeness of his insult.

Despite his misgivings about James’s conduct as king, it is clear that James himself had only the greatest respect for Robert. Indeed, when it came to finding a suitable Midland home for his second son, Prince Charles, James was persuaded to choose Holdenby, across the valley from Althorp, in the hope that some of Robert’s virtues would rub off on his boy. As the Reverend Simpkinson neatly phrased it, Robert was ‘a nobleman who had attained a very great reputation and influence, not only in the midland counties, but also in the House of Lords, and in whom the king rightly believed that he should secure a most valuable neighbour and counsellor for his son’. The bond between the King and the baron was strengthened, when both lost their eldest sons in 1612 — the Spencer heir at Blois, in France, and Henry, Prince of Wales, after catching a chill playing tennis.

It was not Robert’s first taste of family tragedy. His wife, Margaret Willoughby, was a lady of interesting pedigree. Her father was Sir Francis Willoughby, himself the son of Henry Willoughby and Anne, daughter of the Second Marquess of Dorset. Dorset was a landowner in the vicinity of Althorp, who had conveyed the manor of Newbottle (now Nobottle) to the first John Spencer in 1511. Dorset’s son, the Third Marquess, has gone down in history as the man who pushed forward his daughter, Lady Jane Grey, on the death of Edward VII In 1553. The hapless Jane was queen for all of nine days, before being deposed by Mary Tudor. She was subsequently beheaded.

The first Baroness Spencer was, therefore, the first cousin once removed of Lady Jane Grey. This may explain why the only known portrait painted of Lady Jane during her brief life is at Althorp. She is shown as a devoted Christian, reading her Psalter, very much an innocent. There is nothing threatening about her, nothing ambitious or devious; just a naïve young girl, overtaken by other people’s scheming, and unfairly paying for their manipulations with her life.

This link to royalty — albeit relatively obscure, and certainly extremely short-lived — did not spare Robert’s wife from one of the common scourges of women at this time: death in childbirth; although the child, Margaret, survived. As the heartbroken widower recorded in his own hand in the first pages of his Account Book, after the details of the seven children that he had successfully fathered:

Anno Domi: 1597. At Allthrop. The xvii of August it plesed the Allmighty God to take to his mercy Margarite my most loving wife having borne to me all these children afore named they all now living and being married ix yeare and a halfe … her vertues surpassed all.

By coincidence, in 1906 my great-grandfather, another Robert Spencer, lost his wife, also a Margaret, in childbirth. Both children of the ill-fated births were daughters, and both were named after their deceased mothers. Although both Roberts lived for a considerable time after bereavement, neither remarried.

Robert, First Baron Spencer, died in 1627, choosing to have his bowels buried at Wormleighton — from where his baronial title gained its name — and his body at Brington, beside the beloved Margaret, who had died thirty years beforehand. In the sermon preached at his funeral, the congregation was reminded that it had been Robert’s custom to feed fifteen poor persons every Monday, as well as giving alms at all other times, and relieving the distress of all who came to the gates of his mansions; that he had been a lenient landlord and a kind master, providing amply for his servants in their old age; that he had been held in such high estimation by his friends, that many of them entrusted their whole estates — and the education of their children — to his care; that his ‘singular skill in antiquities, arms, and alliances’ was not less noted than his constant integrity and uprightness of life and conversation; and also that, in the management of his great estates, he had made a ‘careful frugality the fuel of his continual hospitality’.

5. The Washington Connection

William, Second Baron Spencer, was reputed to have inherited the qualities of his father just as suredly as he had inherited his estates. A monument to his memory was to record that he was a tender husband, loving father, faithful friend, a sincere worshipper of God, devoted to his king, and a patriot of his country. During his lifetime, with the tensions between Crown and Parliament increasing all the time, balancing the latter two demands became an ever more difficult task.

In the general celebrations at Charles Stuart’s becoming Prince of Wales in 1616, William had been created a Knight of the Bath. Keenly involved in the political life of the nation, he was elected one of the Knights of the Shire for Northamptonshire in three different parliaments in James I’s reign, and in two of Charles I’s.

William’s wife would have a marked effect on his political stance. She was Lady Penelope Wriothesley, daughter of the Earl of Southampton — the patron of William Shakespeare, and a figure known for his antipathy to the court faction.

By the second decade of his reign, James I was resorting to highly dubious means to raise money without suffering the intrusions and counter-demands of Parliament. The King was seen to be undermining the House of Lords, by selling peerages to fill his coffers. A letter of June 1618 from a Thomas Lorkin to an unnamed friend gives an indication of where Penelope stood on such questionable use of royal power, since her politics were known to have reflected those of her father and brother closely:

Ere long you are likely to hear of a new creation of my Lord Rich, my Lord Compton, Lord Peter, and Candish or Chandos, I remember not whether, are to be made Earles and to pay ten thousand pounds a piece, which is allotted for the expense of the progresse; my Lord Spencer likewise was nominated, but diverted as they say by my Lord of Southampton (whose daughter his eldest sonne marryed) from accepting it.

Penelope was a considerable force for good at Althorp. Her father-in-law, lonely after his Margaret’s death, invited her and William to live in the mansion with him, handing over day-to-day administration of the housekeeping to Penelope, while increasing the privacy that the young couple could enjoy through the provision of a drawing room for the new lady of the house and a closet for William. If the old First Baron had hoped the young couple would bring a bit of life to proceedings at Althorp, they did not disappoint, producing thirteen children, the old iron cradle, looked after by Nurse Detheridge, frequently coming out of storage, with its ‘canopy and a covering of silver velvet, laced with open spangle lace of gold and silver, and curtains of the same stuff suitable, fringed with crimson silk and silver’.

Running Althorp efficiently was a task Penelope took to with aplomb. Before her involvement, the accounts for the household had been kept by the bailiff, and by the steward of the household. These books showed the various items of expenditure pertaining to the kitchen, the stables, the park and the farms. Lord Spencer and William would inspect such accounts weekly. However, they were not precise enough for Penelope’s liking. She introduced a more comprehensive and accessible system, whereby the rate, as well as the extent, of all household expenditure could be exactly monitored. Through a cursory glance, Penelope could discover what was in store, and what needed to be ordered. As Simpkinson admiringly wrote,

The estimated value of every bullock and sheep that was killed, and of every other article of farm produce which was brought into the house, appeared to her as important to know and to record, as the money which had gone to defray the purchases of the cater: while the last column of the book informed her practised eye every Saturday which of the stores was running low, and how soon it would need replenishing.