The Spencer Family

Louis XIV was therefore not buying Sunderland in order to gain control of the cabinet, since that would have been money wasted. Secretaries of state could not deliver up a pliant cabinet through the power of their office. And, as we have seen, persuading the cabinet to unite was neither an easy objective nor a decisive conclusion. What Louis wanted was Sunderland’s direct access to the King of England’s ear — something he enjoyed completely from 1679 to 1680 and from 1683 to 1685 under Charles II, and from 1685 to 1688 under James II. There were other periods when he was a force in the kingdom, but these were his glory years — in terms of his power, that is, rather than of the ethics of his conduct.

For an example of how dependent such a senior government figure was on the King’s favour, one has only to look at the ease with which the mighty Sunderland was dismissed in 1680. This was because he had voted in favour of the Exclusion of the future James II from the English throne for his Catholic beliefs. A political miscalculation of this magnitude on Sunderland’s behalf — Sir William Temple noted that the secretary of state was acting not only ‘against his master’s mind, but his express command’ — led to Charles II going so far as to order that Sunderland’s name be erased from the list of the Privy Council; this, even though probably no secretary had previously enjoyed such power before, having established an unprecedented control over the Privy Council. This had been achieved through starting to institutionalize his position at the head of a recognizable hierarchy, through the initiation of a recognizable structure of public government, which involved regular salaries being paid to political office holders, the concept of a proper business organization, and continuity of tenure of office.

Sunderland was aware that as much control as possible over the Privy Council was an effective way of consolidating his influence. This, combined with the control of intelligence information that came to the secretaries of state, was the cornerstone of Robert’s power, but his real gift was in making his ruler believe that he was indispensable. The proof of his success lay in the fact that he persuaded three such different monarchs — the outwardly Anglican but secretly Catholic Charles II, the fervently Catholic James II, and the Protestant champion, William III — all to turn to a man they knew to have no scruples, but whose political gifts they needed, just as surely as he craved the trappings and financial benefits of office they gave him in return.

There are several pivotal moments in Robert Sunderland’s career which demonstrate his extraordinary lack of principles and his ability to survive politically. The first came in the wake of the Duke of Monmouth’s unsuccessful rebellion against James II. Monmouth had been one of the conspirators in the Rye House Plot of 1683, in which the prospect of murdering Charles II and James had been entertained. While two of the leaders of the plot, Russell and Sydney, were executed, Monmouth was sent into exile.

Monmouth was a royal bastard, the natural son of Charles II, which largely explains this leniency. He had joined with Sunderland and the Duchess of Portsmouth to bring down Danby after Sunderland had been appointed principal secretary of state in 1679. However, he had clearly learned little about his erstwhile political ally, if he expected their past unity of aims to count for anything when he truly needed Sunderland’s help.

On James II’s accession in 1685, Monmouth planned a rebellion to place himself on the throne. His forces arrived from the Netherlands in June of that same year. Sunderland, as administrative director of the army, passed James’s orders to his forces in the west. On 6 July, Monmouth was routed at the Battle of Sedgemoor, and he was captured and sent to the Tower of London, while his forces were brutally dispatched by the victorious Stuart army and judiciary.

Monmouth was not over-concerned by his incarceration, for he felt confident that he would once again be spared the ultimate sanction for treason. But this confidence was misplaced, because it relied on Sunderland standing by his word — for Sunderland had secretly promised Monmouth a pardon, should he confess nothing during his interrogation. Doubtless this was because, had Monmouth told the entire truth about his plans, he would have revealed that Sunderland had been secretly negotiating with him, in case he was successful in his insurrection.

By the time Monmouth had destroyed his own credibility by contradicting himself repeatedly during questioning, Sunderland realized that he needed to be rid of a man who could expose his own double-dealing, and quickly. Sunderland intercepted a letter written by Monmouth to the King, and had it destroyed, ensuring James never knew of its existence. There was to be no question of Monmouth’s being allowed to live any longer than was strictly necessary. His execution was not long in coming; this for a man who had had a personal guarantee from Sunderland, the King’s chief minister, that his life would never be in danger because of his sworn protection.

The second illustration of Robert’s true character took place in 1686, the second year of James II’s reign, when Sunderland was locked in a power struggle with Edward Hyde and his supporters, to become James’s chief adviser. Robert had lost favour under Charles II for voting publicly against the possibility of a Catholic heir succeeding to the English throne. However, with such a prize as supreme political power in the nation within his grasp, Sunderland was happy to convert to Catholicism — something the more principled Hyde just could not bring himself to do. Grateful that his minister had come over to what he sincerely believed to be the true faith, James duly invested Sunderland with the pre-eminence that he sought. However, James was well aware of the depths of treachery Sunderland was capable of, writing in the same year that he promoted him: ‘Sunderland, besides having a pension from the Prince of Orange, had one also from the King of France. He was the most mercenary man in all the world: veered with all the winds.’

James was not so fickle. However, his dogged promotion of Catholicism was bringing him into ever sharper conflict with the predominantly Anglican political class, as well as with the Church of England itself. The position became strained beyond breaking point when the two Protestant daughters of the King, Princess Mary and Princess Anne, were superseded in the succession by the birth of a little boy, the Prince of Wales, on 10 June 1688. It was believed that James would doubtlessly bring him up to be a Catholic king. As a result, an invitation was sent to Princess Mary’s Dutch husband, William of Orange, to come to England to usurp his own father-in-law.

To some extent, William and Mary were to owe their throne to Sunderland’s treachery. James found out only after William was on his way to England that his most senior and most highly rewarded adviser had been playing his usual double game, and dismissed him on 27 October 1688. James later discovered that Sunderland had been communicating regularly with William via Sunderland’s uncle, Henry Sidney, who was James’s representative at The Hague, in the Netherlands. In order to cover his tracks, Sunderland had persuaded James to command that all foreign ministers, including Sidney, correspond solely and directly with Sunderland.

In what became known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, James II and his supporters slipped off to France, and the reign of William and Mary began, with remarkably little English blood having been spilt.

This could have marked the end of Sunderland’s life, let alone his career. He was widely hated, and was known to be a man of the lowest possible moral calibre. However, he was merely disgraced, and exiled. Almost unbelievably, within five years he had inveigled himself back into royal favour, not only as William III’s confidant, but also as a key figure in the control of the liberal Whig politicians, with whom the Spencers were to identify strongly over the next 230 years.

There were no official parties in English politics at this time, but the definable difference between Whigs and Tories was becoming apparent: the Whigs, keen to check abuses of royal power and champions of the rights of the people at large; the Tories, ardent royalists and stolid supporters of the Anglican Church as a cement for the Establishment as a whole.

Before Robert, the Spencers had long shown sympathies that would later be termed Whig — hence the ghastly irony of the death of Robert’s own father, fighting beside people whose cause he decried, while being slain by his ideological compatriots — but it was the Machiavellian Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, who established his family as one of the key Whig aristocratic dynasties over the succeeding quarter of a millennium.

His Whig sympathies alone would have been enough to have made Princess — later Queen — Anne uneasy about Robert Sunderland. Although, during her own reign, Anne did support a Whig ministry while Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, was her favourite, Anne felt more at ease with the Tories. Yet her dislike of Sunderland went way beyond the political; it was deeply personal. Her letters on the man are as damning as it is possible to be. During her father James’s reign she wrote to her sister Mary:

You may remember I have once before ventured to tell you that I thought Lord Sunderland a very ill man, and I am more confirmed every day in that opinion. Everybody knows how often this man turned backwards and forwards in the late King’s [Charles II’s] time, and now, to complete all his virtues, he is working with all his might to bring in Popery. He is perpetually with the priests, and stirs up the King to do things faster than I believe he would of himself.

Princess Anne’s opinion of Robert’s wife was equally low. Anne was the daughter of George Digby, Second Earl of Bristol, who had been a Royalist general in the English Civil War, and of Lady Anne Russell. According to Louis XIV’s envoys in England, Barillon and Bonrepaux, Anne Sunderland was the lover, during her marriage, of Henry Sidney, reputedly the handsomest man of his time, but also her own husband’s uncle. Sidney was a renowned ladies’ man, and was, according to Burnet, ‘a man of sweet and caressing temper, and had no malice in his heart, but too great a love of pleasure’. Extramarital affairs were certainly not uncommon at court at this time, though Sidney’s and Anne’s lack of discretion over the matter was considered shoddy. But it was not Lady Sunderland’s questionable sexual morality that attracted the Princess’s condemnation, but rather her general character; reservations she was prepared to communicate to her sister, Princess Mary, with the utmost candour:

His lady [Anne] too is as extraordinary in her kind, for she is a flattering, dissembling, false woman; but she has so fawning and endearing a way that she will deceive anybody at first, and it is not possible to find out all her ways in a little time. She cares not at what rate she lives, but never pays anybody. She will cheat, though it be for a little. Then she has had her gallants, though may be not as many as some ladies here; and with all these good qualities she is a constant Church-woman, so that to outward appearance one would take her for a saint, and to hear her talk you would think she was a very good Protestant; but she is as much one as the other, for it is certain that her lord does nothing without her.

This led to Princess Anne’s withering conclusion that, ‘Sure there never was a couple so well matched as she and her husband, for as she is throughout all her actions the greatest jade that ever was, so is he the subtellest workingest villain that is on the face of the earth.’

It was not to be long, though, before even she would be drawn into Robert Sunderland’s web of influence. First, he managed to secure for one of his daughters, Lady Anne Spencer, a court position with the Princess. This was a less than successful appointment: not only did Lady Anne spend months unable to perform her duties, being constantly ill, but, even when in healthy attendance, she was treated with open distrust by her employer, ‘knowing from whence she comes’.

Secondly, during the reign of William and Mary, which began in 1688, there were strong tensions between the rival royal courts of the two sisters. To Robert, a divided royal house was something to be avoided. He meant to straddle the current and future reigns with the minimum of fuss, so he made it his mission to smooth over the differences. Unsurprisingly, when one takes into account his previous record of being able to ingratiate himself even with those who knew he was totally untrustworthy, Robert managed to bring about a measure of reconciliation in the mid-1690s. According to Anne’s favourite, Sarah Churchill, Sunderland ‘showed himself a man of sense and breeding’ in his dealings with her mistress at that time.

The death from smallpox of Queen Mary in December 1694 was seen by Sunderland as the perfect opportunity to bring a full rapprochement between King William III and his sister-in-law Princess Anne. With Sunderland’s encouragement, Anne wrote her brother-in-law a letter of condolence. Soon after, again at Sunderland’s behest, William offered Anne the use of St James’s Palace, as fitting accommodation for the monarch-in-waiting.

Given Anne’s hatred of Sunderland, clearly stated in her correspondence of a few years earlier, it is testimony to his diplomatic skills that, on her own accession to the throne in 1702, Queen Anne settled a £2,000 per annum pension on Sunderland, out of gratitude for his help during the previous years.

As a family man, Robert was less successful than in his professional life. He and Anne suffered the loss, as was common at the time, of children in infancy: their third son, Henry, and fourth daughter, Mary, dying soon after their respective births. And Isabella, the third of the four daughters, died before marriage. Of the four children who survived into adulthood, the eldest son — and heir — Robert, Lord Spencer, was to be one of the most dissolute young men of his generation. The eldest of seven children, he was born in 1666 and went up to be educated at Oxford in 1680.

We learn something of his character at that stage from his grandmother, Dorothy, First Countess of Sunderland, in a letter to Lord Halifax:

He has no good nature, nor good humour: he is scornful and too pretending … He comes to me seldom, seems weary in a minute, talks of my company as if I picked them up off the streets. My Lord Sunderland [her son, Robert, Second Earl of Sunderland] at his age did nothing like it. He will be spoiled, I can see it.

In 1688, the diarist John Evelyn reported good things of the second Spencer son, Charles — ‘a youth of extraordinary hopes, very learned for his age and ingenious, and under a Governor of extraordinary worth’ — but he qualified that praise with a less sanguine look at the heir to the Sunderland title:

Happy were it could as much be said of the elder brother, the Lord Spencer, who, rambling about the world, dishonours both his name and family, adding sorrow to sorrow, to a mother who had taken all imaginable care of his education: but vice, more and more predominantly, gives slender hopes of his reformation …

Evelyn was put in an invidious position when he had to judge between his allegiance to Anne, Second Countess of Sunderland, and his justifiable disregard for her first-born. Robert and Anne’s high living had left the Spencer family finances in some disarray, Robert’s taste for gambling compounding the problems brought about by their extravagant lifestyle and constant pursuit of artistic acquisitions.

Anne decided that the simplest solution would be to marry her eldest son to an heiress. She therefore asked Evelyn to effect an introduction, with a view to a match being made, between Robert Spencer and Jane Fox, the daughter of Sir Stephen Fox, a millionaire financier. Evelyn, though always keen to stay in favour with prestigious society hostesses, judged that Robert was such a liability that he simply could not get involved, even if it meant incurring her ladyship’s displeasure. As he himself recorded:

Come my Lady Sunderland to desire that I would [make] a match to Sir Stephen Fox for her son, Lord Spencer, to marry Miss Jane, Sir Stephen’s daughter. I excus’d myself all I was able for the truth is I was afraid he would prove an extravagant man: for though a youth of extraordinary parts, and had an excellent education to render him a worthy man, yet his early inclinations to extravagance made me apprehensive that I should not serve Sir Stephen by proposing it like a friend: this now being his only daughter, well bred, and likely to receive a large share of her father’s opulence.

Robert Spencer’s remaining years were to show that Evelyn deserved the undying gratitude of Sir Stephen Fox, as Robert degenerated into a life of boorish — indeed, drunken and violent — behaviour. In August 1685, with his father one of the most important people in the kingdom, Robert and two friends went round to the home of the Earl of Carnarvon — whose forefather had perished with Robert’s own grandfather at Newbury — and whipped him. According to Sir Edmund Verney, the aristocratic trio also indulged in ‘some other peccadillos in his [Carnarvon’s] castle besides’.

This escapade resulted in Robert being sent abroad by his family, in temporary banishment. But if the Spencers had hoped he would return a changed man, it was to prove a forlorn hope. Within a year, we find Sir John Reresby noting, ‘My Lord Spencer is not well by the ill usage he and the rest of his company received from the constables and watch three nights ago, being upon a high ramble.’ Far from bridling at the thrashing his son had received from these officers, Robert Sunderland only grumbled, ‘It was pity it was not worse.’

Robert Spencer’s life was now unravelling fast. His father tried to channel his aggressive instincts, and put some structure into his son’s life, by buying him an officer’s commission in the army. It was not enough. In March 1687, young Robert exceeded even his usual ability to disgrace himself, interrupting a church service in Suffolk with his sword drawn, uttering profanities, and attempting to pull the preacher out of the pulpit. The congregation rushed to the priest’s defence, pummelling the errant young aristocrat, stripping his clothes off his back, and subjecting him to further humiliations.

Robert had inherited a modicum of the persuasive charms of his father, and he knew how to ingratiate himself to his monarch. He showed great contrition for his appalling behaviour, and simultaneously claimed that he had been converted to Roman Catholicism. This was — as Robert well knew — bound to be a popular development with James II. Sure enough, the King now asked Spencer to represent him on a diplomatic mission to the Duke of Modena, brother to the Queen, Mary. But this was trust unwisely placed. Robert headed straight for the whoring and drinking places of Paris, and indulged himself to such an extent that, by the time he reached Turin, tales of his excesses were widely known.

Living at such a pace took its inevitable toll. Spencer was unable even to reach Modena, being too ill to complete his mission. He stayed for several months in Turin, before retracing his steps to Paris. It was to be his final trip; and it was suitable that he should end his days in this city, which had witnessed the most excessive behaviour of a truly spoilt and irresponsible youth. He died on 16 September 1688, the Marquis de Dagneau recording in his diary:

‘Milord Spencer, fils aine du Comte de Sunderland, est mort cette nuit a Paris pour avoir trop bu d’eau de vie.’

Anne, Second Countess of Sunderland’s match-making skills may have been stymied by John Evelyn’s good judgement, with regard to her eldest son, but she got her way with her daughter Elizabeth, whom she forced into a child marriage with Lord Clancarty, an Irish nobleman of enormous landed wealth. The lack of love in the relationship is underlined by the fact that, after several years, the union remained unconsummated.

Clancarty was a Jacobite sympathizer, supporting the deposed James II against William III and Mary in Ireland. With the failure of the Jacobite campaign, Clancarty was declared an outlaw, and so he fled to the exiled Stuart court at St Germain. The Clancarty estates in Ireland were confiscated, and handed to William III ‘s favourite, Portland.

Anne Sunderland was appalled that her daughter’s marital wealth had been taken from her, and planned ways of having it restored to her through the pardoning of Clancarty. It was decided to encourage Clancarty to come to consummate his marriage, the assumption being that his father-in-law, Sunderland, could then persuade William III to grant him a pardon, which, in turn, would lead to the restitution of the Clancarty estates.

At the end of 1698, Clancarty sneaked into England to fulfil the marital obligations that had previously been beyond him. However, his brother-in-law, Charles Spencer, reported the whereabouts of the outlawed Clancarty to the authorities, and the latter was arrested while in the unaccustomed position of being in bed with his wife.

With his usual inclination for self-preservation over integrity, Robert Sunderland publicly distanced himself from the ensuing scandal by disowning the innocent in this sorry tale, his daughter Elizabeth. However, Sarah Marlborough joined Anne Sunderland in seeking clemency for Clancarty, and she being the right-hand woman of Princess Anne, William yielded, pardoning Clancarty, while allowing him a pension on the condition that Irish peer remain abroad for the rest of his life, and that he no longer base himself in the enemy Jacobite camp.

Elizabeth Clancarty decided that the scandal had made her continued life in England too grim to contemplate, so she accompanied Clancarty into exile in Hamburg. She was never happy there, but it was where she spent the remainder of her very sad life. At least her marriage was consummated and she did become a mother, although she died before her eldest reached the age of six.

The Clancarty affair had occurred after Robert Sunderland’s retirement from active political life. He had resigned his positions in 1697, the year in which he had been made Lord Chamberlain and a Lord of Regency, much to the disappointment of William III, who still believed him an indispensable adviser and ally, despite the cries of the Tories, who never left their monarch in any doubt as to their horror that such a man should have the King’s ear.

Robert Sunderland lived out the remaining five years of his life at Althorp, surrounded by the spoils of his treacherous, self-seeking career. On his death, in September 1702, even a supporter such as Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, had to concede that Robert ‘had really a great many good qualities, with some bad ones’.

Bishop Burnet was similarly generously disposed to the wily statesman in death, summing up his gifts and shortcomings thus:

Lord Sunderland was a man of a clear and ready apprehension, and a quick decision in business. He had too much heat, both of imagination and passion, and was apt to speak very freely both of persons and things. His own notions were always good, but he was a man of great expense and … he went into the prevailing counsels at Court, and he changed sides often, with little regard either to religion or to the interests of his country. He raised many enemies to himself by the contempt with which he treated those who differed from him. He had indeed the superior genius to all the men of business that I have yet known; and he had the dexterity of insinuating himself so entirely into the greatest degree of confidence with three succeeding Princes, who set up on very different interests, that he came by this to lose himself so much that even those who esteemed his parts depended little on his firmness.

Within a few years of Robert Sunderland’s death, Queen Anne’s Whig ministry decided to commission the writer Edmund Smith to chronicle the history of the 1688 Revolution, showing the Whig influence in the event to its best possible effect. When being told his task by Addison, Smith retorted, ‘What shall I do with the character of Lord Sunderland?’ The implication was clear. Smith would have to address the deviousness and treachery of this most eminent of Whigs, if he were to give the full and true version of events; and yet that would show the Whigs in such a poor light, that the point of the propaganda exercise would clearly be severely compromised. Rather than deal with Sunderland and his disgraceful conduct, it was agreed that the history should not be written.