Althorp

IV

Although nobody knows when the first house stood in its present position, essential repair work to the front wall of the Wootton Hall in the 1950s revealed medieval windows, which seemed to the workmen and experts of the time to predate the 1508 structure that was my ancestors’ first home here. There would have been nothing strange about building over a prior structure: a good site was a good site after all, and why waste materials?

Initially my family was interested in Althorp for the grazing, rather than because it might provide a suitable second home to Wormleighton. In 1486 they were nearing the peak of their skill at rearing huge flocks of sheep, and land accumulation was a natural consequence of their success. At first they were only able to lease the land that now constitutes the bulk of the Park from the Catesby family, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire squires, one of whose number was a major protagonist of the ill-fated Gunpowder Plot in 1605.

But in 1508 Althorp was bought by John Spencer for £800, and the house that you see today had its heart constructed as the family’s Northamptonshire base. It took only four years for the new occupants to create a park, initially comprising 300 acres of grassland, 100 acres of woodland, and 40 acres of water. At that stage it was called ‘Oldthorpe’. Prior to that, in the Domesday Book of 1087, it had been catalogued as ‘Olletorp’, which meant ‘Olla’s Thorp’. My father told me that Olla was a Saxon lord. In the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively, it was recorded as ‘Holtropp’ and ‘Aldrop’. The ancient roots of the name explain the reason why ‘Althorp’ is pronounced ‘Awltrupp’, rather than as it would appear on paper; for ‘thorp’ is a Scandinavian word, which would have been pronounced as ‘throop’, or perhaps ‘thrupp’. From the Danish, it would have been most accurately translated as meaning ‘daughter settlement’.

During my childhood I never heard any of my family refer to the place as ‘Allthorp’. My grandfather only ever called it ‘Awl-trupp’, as did all his generation. My father resigned himself to the wrong pronunciation, because he was fed up with correcting those who, understandably, did not know the traditional one. He would also say with a smile that it helped people find it on the map, which might encourage day-trippers to come and spend money in Raine’s gift shop.

When I inherited the place in 1992, the BBC Pronunciation Department sent me a letter, stating their hope that I would revert to the correct pronunciation, and giving me strict guidelines on what this should be. I assured them that I did not know it as anything else, and would therefore do so. I felt slightly let down then, at the time of my late sister’s funeral, when the BBC agreed with their ITV rivals to go for ‘Allthorp’. Even more so when it was later reported to me that an American television correspondent describing the final moments of that tragic ceremony at Westminster Abbey, when my youngest sister’s funeral took place, concluded with: ‘The coffin will now go to its final resting place, at Antwerp.’ Diana would have enjoyed that.

Eventually you come to terms with the fact that people call the place what they want; so long as they respect and accept its history, which is for the most part unequivocal.

The original John Spencer — there were many more, since pretty much every eldest son since has been endowed with this most English of first names — was an accumulator: when he acquired Althorp, he also became lord of the manor of Penny Compton, in Warwickshire, Stoneton, Nobottle, Great Brington, Little Brington, Harlestone, Glassthorpe, Flore, Wicken, Wyke Hamon, Upper Boddington, Lower Boddington and Hinton. There were also land acquisitions in Badby, Daventry, Barby, Guilsborough, East Haddon, Holdenby, Brockhall, Hanging Houghton and Church Brampton.

The previous year, 1507, John had secured the lordship of Wormleighton from the Cope family, and started to build the manor house for himself and sixty of his relatives. I have a sneaking suspicion that my early sixteenth-century ancestors must have struck their Northamptonshire and Warwickshire neighbours as appallingly voracious in their acquisitions, and more than a little nouveau riche in the way they threw their money about. The neighbours were probably correct, except on one count: this was not the willy-nilly scattering of money it may have appeared to be, but the considered accumulation of some of the finest grazing land in England. Direct connections with over half these acquisitions survive today.

The original John Spencer became known in family circles as ‘the Founder’. We know of little that happened to Althorp in the immediate aftermath of his scatter-gun buying. It seems probable that the new house in Northamptonshire enjoyed a fair amount of family occupation; a fact borne out by the Founder’s son’s will, which ‘ordered hospitality to be kept in his houses at Althorp, &c., by his heir, after his decease, according as he had done’. We also know that it was a moated house, being built within living memory of the discord of the Wars of the Roses, so the moat would have been decorative but with defensive undertones.

The confidence of the sixteenth-century Spencers that they were in this part of Northamptonshire to stay is demonstrated by the planting of oak trees in the Park. In my early teens I used to come across stone tablets throughout the property. The Founder’s grandson was the first to leave his mark in this way. You can still read, carved on a tablet:

‘This Wood was Planted by

Sir John Spencer Knight

Grandfather of Robert Lord

Spencer in the Yearers of

our Lord 1567 and 1568.’

A similar memorial in near-by woodland states:

‘This Wood was Planted by

Sir John Spencer Knight

Father of Robert Lord

Spencer in the yeare

of our Lord 1589.’

The latter is in ‘Sir John’s Wood’, a corner of the Park between the old kennels and the outskirts of Great Brington. The year of this planting is perhaps its most significant feature, since it was the one immediately following the destruction of the Spanish Armada. My father said that, nervous of further invasion fleets from Philip II, many magnates planted trees to provide timber for the construction of a stronger English naval force. Four centuries on these plantations have been spared active duty, and are now reaching the end of their non-combatant lives. It is amazing to think that they have seen everything that has gone on in Althorp Park through succeeding generations. Indeed, since the house has been subject to major transformations during each century of its existence, they are almost the purest reminders of the original tastes and aspirations of the Founder and his sixteenth-century successors.

I say ‘almost’ because one room in Althorp is as it was when the first structure was erected by my family: the Picture Gallery.

V

I love the Picture Gallery. As a tour guide, I would show the visitors round the ground door of the house, with its contents well-ordered but conventional: chairs by the fireplace, bookcases against the wall, side-tables where you would expect them. The only surprises for those unfamiliar with the place lay in the variety of the objects and the sheer number of paintings on the walls.

The Picture Gallery then offers a complete change of pace, almost a change of venue, as the Georgian influences are thrown back and the starkness of the original Tudor roots of the place are laid bare. I defy anybody to walk into that room and not catch their breath: it is designed to provoke that reaction. For this is 115 feet of oak passageway, 20 feet wide and 19 high. It is like looking down a kaleidoscope, with glittering images all the way along the sides, but with the brightest of all at the end.

You have to have a pretty striking painting to bring people’s attention to a focal point over 100 feet away, when there is so much to distract them on either side. Over the centuries many pictures have left my family’s ownership. Thankfully, Van Dyck’s War and Peace remains.

It was never actually bought by any of my ancestors, but was a gift from an in-law. It shows George Digby, Second Earl of Bristol, and William. First Duke of Bedford, both standing in noble arrogance, brothers-in-law and aristocrats; the full-length epitome of self-assuredness and male beauty. Marchioness Grey; a visitor to the Picture Gallery in 1748, summed it up best in a letter to a friend: ‘Indeed there is a gracefulness and life in the figures beyond what I ever saw, they are quite animated and a strength of colouring that strikes you from one end of that gallery to the other. It is so beautiful that a picture which hangs by it is hurt by its situation.’ It is the quintessential ‘swagger portrait’.

The painting has become known as War and Peace because of the way the two men have been placed in their respective contexts: the Duke is the dominant figure, in bright red, with silver lace, a breastplate in front of him and a helmet behind; and behind is Digby, in less dashing black satin and laced ruff, surrounded by symbols of learning and culture, the satellites of peace. It has always been my favourite painting in the house, because of its sense of drama. Forget the ‘Peace’ aspect of the double portrait: to me as a boy, these men encapsulated what I then saw as the glamour of warfare — in particular, of the English Civil War, which I took to be about thundering cavalry charges behind Prince Rupert of the Rhine, when passion and gallantry seemed more seductive than the relentless professional discipline of the opposing Parliamentarians.

My grandfather was so concerned that this painting should never be exposed to destruction in a fire that he had the nearest tall window in the Gallery turned into a huge door-like structure with hinges down one side, so that the whole frame could be lifted off the wall and lowered down to safety outside. My father, who sold a fair proportion of the finer objects in the house, once promised me that he would never allow War and Peace to join the seemingly endless exodus to Bond Street salerooms. It has an almost sacred place at the heart of the collection, being at once the most valuable item in the house and the most striking. To many it is one of the greatest Van Dycks still in private ownership, and I am proud that it remains at Althorp.

But this is just the centrepiece of a room laden with glories; one that has long been recognized as something out of the ordinary. In 1760 Horace Walpole wrote: ‘Althorpe [sic] has several very fine pictures by the best Italian hands, and a gallery of all one’s acquaintances by Vandyke [sic] and Lely.’ He went on to boast, ‘In the gallery I found myself quite at home; and surprised the housekeeper by my familiarity with the portraits.’ I imagine the housekeeper was only too pleased to see the back of him.

Indeed, it would have been surprising if the Picture Gallery’s subject matter had not been familiar to any man of learning. There are portraits of James I, looking dour and unattractive, his natural shyness betrayed by the hostility with which he seems to greet the onlooker. Whenever I look at this portrait, I think of James’s exasperation at his advisers’ insistence that he show himself more to his people, to rival the way in which his predecessor, Elizabeth I, had so successfully played the public relations game. ‘God’s wounds!’ he finally exploded. ‘And would they also see my arse?’ The anger and the coarseness of the first king of Scotland and England are there, clearly visible, in the Picture Gallery at Althorp.

Charles II, on the other hand, looks smugly down on the Gallery, as well he might, since a dozen of the paintings there, by his court artist, Sir Peter Lely, comprise a collection that has come to be known as the ‘Windsor Beauties’. These are Charles’s principal mistresses. Heavy-bosomed, with ringleted hair, they are not obviously beautiful by modern standards, but they have a sexiness, an air of confidence in their own desirability, that doubtless explains their popularity with their monarch.

At the time of Walpole’s remarks, the portrait of another monarch was also in the Picture Gallery: Lady Jane Grey, ‘The Nine Days’ Queen’, painted by Lucas de Heere. It is still at Althorp, though in a different room now, and shows Lady Jane aged sixteen, a year before her execution, sitting in a room at Broadgate, her father’s family home in Leicestershire, reading a religious text, pretty in a red velvet dress. It is poignant to see the devotion to Protestantism of this young girl, a devotion that was to lose her her head when the Catholics overthrew her, the sincere and innocent pawn of power-broking lords.

As you look today at the sheer handsomeness of this room, with its panelling along the walls and its wide wooden floorboards, you feel the history of the house at its rawest. Tudor ladies liked to use the length of the gallery for exercise, walking up and down it on wet days, in order to spare their long skirts and dresses from being dragged through the mud outside. There would have been little in the way of furniture in such a space. However, generations previous to ours were much more flexible in their use of the rooms, so we hear one eighteenth-century female house guest recalling the Picture Gallery as being ‘a fine room for walking about in — we always breakfast there’.

Indeed, in 1695 the neighbouring nobility and gentry gathered to dine there. They had come to pay their respects to William III, as he in turn had come to secure the support of Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland and master of Althorp, one of the least trusted, but most influential, politicians of his time. To quote from Thomas Macaulay’s History of England:

It seems strange that he [William] should, in the course of what was really a canvassing tour, have honoured with such a mark of favour a man so generally distrusted and hated as Sunderland. But the people were determined to be pleased. All Northamptonshire crowded to kiss that royal hand in that fine gallery which had been embellished by the pencil of Vandyck and made classic by the muse of Waller, and the Earl tried to conciliate his neighbours by feasting them at eight tables, all blazing with plate.

Two hundred and ninety-nine years later I gave a dinner party in the same room. The occasion was not a royal visit nor a political exercise, but the rather more humdrum business of my thirtieth birthday. There was one table, with 128 people seated round it, allowing this often neglected section of the house to come alive for an evening; a faint echo of past glories, but I hope enjoyable enough. Since the kitchens were 300 yards away, the food was pretty average — shades of Grandfather’s time! — but the sight of the room ‘blazing with plate’ once more was something I will never forget.

In the Picture Gallery, between the ‘Windsor Beauties’ and War and Peace, is a tiny door cut neatly into the oak panelling. It is almost never used and leads to a modest staircase that joins the Pink Suite, a guest bedroom, to the rest of the house. My great-aunt, Margaret Douglas-Home, was the youngest of six children who lived at Althorp from 1910 onwards. She was Grandfather’s baby sister, and she lived a solitary existence, mainly with the servants, because her mother had haemorrhaged to death within hours of Margaret’s birth. Family folklore has it that Margaret’s father Robert, Sixth Earl Spencer, who was famously in love with his wife, never fully forgave his youngest child for the part she had unwittingly played in leaving him an inconsolable widower.

This quasi-exile from the rest of the family must have been very hurtful to a young girl of great sensitivity and insight. However, Aunt Margaret, who outlived all her siblings by over a decade, was never one to feel sorry for herself, and she threw herself into living in such a huge house with enormous enthusiasm. I used to visit her in her tiny cottage in Norfolk, and listen in awe as this highly entertaining, deeply intelligent lady recalled snippets from her childhood.

‘And, of course, there was the girl in grey slippers,’ she suddenly volunteered one day, after a moment’s involuntary rasping due to emphysema.

‘What girl with grey slippers?’ I asked.

‘Oh, haven’t I told you about my friend? She lived in the Picture Gallery, by the little door. I never told anyone at the time, because I knew they would just say, “Oh, Margaret!” and roll their eyes at me. But she was there, all right. I used to spend hours with her, just talking. She was so small, so fine looking, with the most beautiful grey satin slippers. When we had finished, she would just drift away through the door.’

‘And what would you talk about?’ I prompted, half-cynic, half-believer.

‘Well, that’s the curious part. I never could recall what we said to one another. We would just talk, and as soon as the conversation was concluded, I would not remember a word we had said. It didn’t bother me; no, not at all. What was said wasn’t important; the fact that we played together was the important part.’

It is easy to dismiss this tale as the musings of a confused octogenarian, nearing the end of her life. But Aunt Margaret was remarkably lucid until her final months, recalling with the most extraordinary detail events from her earliest years — ranging from George V’s Coronation to her more bizarre relations’ visits to Althorp — and I feel that she genuinely believed she had had these games with her anonymous friend, whose footwear was more memorable than any other feature. Whether the girl was in fact imaginary, ghostly or whatever, for me the little door will always be the home of ‘the girl with the grey slippers’.

VI

I have never seen a ghost; not at Althorp, nor elsewhere. People who believe in them will be relieved to know that many other people claim to have done so. The nearest I have ever got to being personally involved in a sighting was in 1994, when I had friends staying for a weekend in the summer.

The day before the guests arrived I had been thumbing through some leather-bound volumes relating to the house. One of these was a book of press-cuttings from the mid-nineteenth century kept by my great-great-grandfather, Frederick, Fourth Earl Spencer. In it was a curious story about a house party at Althorp, attended by, among others, the Dean of Lincoln.

One morning, so the article said, the Dean came down to breakfast with the family and rather frostily complained to the then earl that in future he would prefer it if he was left undisturbed after retiring for the night. My ancestor asked the Dean to expand. It transpired that the Dean had been awoken by a figure dressed as a groom entering his room, holding candles, who had gone round the bed, checking all the candles were properly snuffed out.

Apparently, there was silence from my family. They then asked for an exact description of the ‘groom’. After this was given, they all agreed that it was the ghost of the previous earl’s favourite servant — indeed, a groom — whose job it was to go round all the rooms at night, after everyone had retired, to check that no naked flame was still burning.

The day I read this, I thought nothing more of it. I closed the book, which I had never opened before, and put it back in the bookshelf, an anonymous red spine in several shelves of similar volumes.

On the Sunday evening, I was helping my guests down with their luggage from the same room, the Oak Bedroom, when the girl of the couple said, ‘Do you know, I swear that someone came in here last night.’ I did not pay much attention at first, because I thought it could have been someone going to bed late, who had had trouble finding their own room.

‘And the strange thing is, he was holding a candelabrum and wearing an old uniform, a cloak.’ Well, I have a broad range of guests at Althorp, but none eccentric enough to dress up like that. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said, and ran up to where Joyce, the housekeeper, was cataloguing articles for a new museum she had created, showing off some of the more curious historic items that had previously been confined to storage rooms. I was about to bring down a groom’s cloak, when I hesitated, and reached instead for a footman’s uniform. If she’s fibbing, I thought, this’ll catch her out. I then raced back downstairs again, and showed the clothing to my guest. ‘Almost …’ she said, ‘but it was longer more like this …’ And she described in detail the apparel of an early nineteenth-century Spencer groom.

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