Althorp

The Story of an English House

Charles Spencer

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780008373191
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

The definitive history of one of England’s greatest houses: Althorp, where for five hundred years the Spencer family have made their home.

Charles Spencer’s house of Althorp in Northamptonshire is where he and his sister Princess Diana grew up, and where she is buried. In this rich history, Spencer traces the house’s life from the sixteenth century through to Charles’ sleepless nights there as a child and the estate’s transformation into a site of global mourning. He weaves together the architecture, the story of how it amassed one of the largest private art collections in the country, the characters – by turns forbidding and elitist, warm and exuberant – and much more.

The perfect guide to a great English house, this book also tells a broader story of the social and political vicissitudes that have shaped the Spencer family’s wealth, taste and attitudes over the years.

I

I can’t remember exactly when I realized that Althorp would come my way. Certainly I was conscious of the fact by the time of my grandfather’s eightieth birthday in 1972, when the local paper in Northamptonshire took a photograph of him, me and my father, and referred to the ‘three generations’ in rather dynastic terms.

It was an unsettling thought for an introspective and shy little boy: this leviathan of an edifice being my responsibility, my home. I remember a cousin, who had traditionally made no secret of his wish to lord it at Althorp, looking momentarily optimistic when, aged seven or eight, I declared to him that I would never live there.

My reservations stemmed from two facts: I had not lived there in my early childhood, and could not contemplate leaving the security of Park House, in Sandringham, where we were based with my father: and Althorp seemed such an old man’s house, reflecting my grandfather’s Edwardian tastes, in a chilling time-warp complete with the permeating smell of Trumper’s hair oil and the ubiquitous tocking of grandfather clocks — their ticking always seemed too subtle a sound, getting absorbed in the oak of the floorboards and the fabric of the tapestries.

Another problem was actually getting to Althorp. It was over two hours in the car from Park House, and that was an age in my father’s too-smooth Jaguar, with the result that we would reach the Park gates after several stops for car-sickness. There would then be the stately pace through the Park, as my father absorbed the magic of this most English of settings, where the twentieth century was not welcome and where natural beauty was the perpetual theme.

We would nudge past lambs, a reminder of my ancestors’ great flocks from medieval times, ignore the turn-off to the Falconry, and cruise on to the cattle grid. There were no ‘sleeping policemen’ then, which made the grid that much more of a feature. And there, on the right, would be the façade of a house that had been home to nearly five centuries of Spencers, and would one day, they told me, swallow me up too. The Stables, with their mellow, yellow glow of ironstone, looked so much softer, so much more inviting — the warmth of the feminine, in contrast to the house’s steely masculinity.

I have never, ever, heard anyone call the exterior of Althorp beautiful. Not even architectural historians, whom you might expect to stick up for their own, have defended it thus. The dappled grey of the external tiles emits no feeling of joy, the shallowness of their form betrayed by the drabness of their effect. How I have longed that my great-great-great-grandfather had ignored fashion and stuck with the original red-brick façade, rather than let Henry Holland impose his grey, Georgian tastes on a Tudor and Stuart gem. But the work was done; and, on a practical level, it has ensured the outward survival of Althorp, without too much maintenance, for over two centuries. The trouble is, it looks like a ‘practical’ solution. No romantic would ever countenance such a course.

So imagine a small boy, arriving after a long journey at the most imposing of settings, with family expectation oozing from every elderly pore of every adult relation, and you will understand part of the reason why Althorp, and its inheritance, was not something that I overly looked forward to.

It all seems very spoilt and immature now, I appreciate; but I had no idea that I would ever be able to impose my own tastes and priorities on something so historic, so very settled, for my grandfather was not known as ‘the curator earl’ without reason, and for him Althorp was a living conservation exercise, where he could catalogue and maintain, with enormous diligence, while sharing the collection generously with fellow members of the intelligentsia, and reluctantly with those who in no way matched his vast knowledge.

My memory of those days is of orderly druggets, dust sheets and uniformity. My grandmother’s joie de vivre was limited to ‘Grandmother’s Sitting Room’, with beautiful, deep blue, hand-painted frescoes and formal furniture that reflected her cool and natural aristocracy; a slice of sophistication in an otherwise stolidly traditional English stately home.

The last time I remember being with my grandmother was outside this room, through the French windows in her Rose Garden, her head swathed in bandages after an unsuccessful operation to root out a brain tumour, giggling as we played with her hose-pipe, neither splashing the other but threatening to, before we hugged each other tight, me breathless with childish excitement, she knowing that there would not be too many hugs left with her grandchildren during this lifetime. She died that November.

My grandfather dominated the rest of Althorp. He combined the authority of his inherited status with the assuredness of encyclopaedic knowledge. He could recite not only the creator of every piece of furniture, but also how much it cost, when and where it was repaired, as well as stating from which room in which Spencer property it had originated.

Grandfather pored over the family records in the Muniment Room, a musty apartment beyond the dinginess of his own secretary’s garret, where 500 years of Spencer papers were amassed: medieval household accounts, letters from leading Jacobean political figures, and reminiscences of Victorian house parties, all stored together.

Grandfather once found Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill, busy researching for his biography of their mutual ancestor, the First Duke of Marlborough, smoking a cigar in this holy of holies, and made him douse it immediately in a glass of water. I’m not sure who would, on reflection, have been more taken aback at this: Churchill for the uncompromising abruptness of his host, or my grandfather, who would not have considered whom he was ordering about until alter the immediate threat to his archives had been extinguished. As a rule, Grandfather was very conscious of people’s status.

The Muniment Room is now gone, its contents with the British Library, much of it awaiting cataloguing. I doubt whether Grandfather ever thought of anything as mundane as an index; he knew his way round those family papers half instinctively and half through the accumulated experience of thousands of hours spent researching his family history, which he found a great deal more interesting than anyone or anything else on the planet.

Yet that is to take nothing away from the contribution made by Grandfather to the continuity of possession of the bulk of the contents of Althorp. He survived the swingeing taxation regimes of the 1950s to 1970s through parsimony, keeping a standard of living that he probably felt to be below that of his birthright, but single-minded in his quest to keep all his inheritance together.

There were mistakes, of course. In the 1930s, short of cash as ever and determined to finance my father’s education, he sold the great Holbein of Henry VIII. In King Charles’ catalogue, this masterpiece was described with relish by His Majesty’s curator:

No hair is visible under the cap or beside the cars; the hairs of the beard and moustaches are very fine and thin. The eyeballs are clear blue-grey … The sleeves of his doublet are of cloth of gold; the underdress is of lavender grey covered with a beautiful pattern in fine lines … The picture is painted in oil on a very solid piece of English oak.

Grandfather sold Holbein’s small but perfect portrait for £10,000. To be fair, that must have seemed a fortune at the time. However, it is now the centrepiece of the Thyssen collection in Madrid, and the last time I heard it valued, several years ago, the exports were speaking in terms of $50 million. Even allowing for inflation and every other possible variable since, this was clearly not a good sale. Indeed, my father would often readily admit, with that wonderful twinkle in his eye, that his education, although solid, was perhaps slightly over-priced, when taking capital sales into account. In fact, my family often made the wrong choice when it came to selling things off; of which, more later.

But, for now, let’s return to those early visits to Althorp. They were not particularly fun-filled occasions; I can clearly remember that. On arrival, Ainsley Pendrey the butler, would open the door and be charming, always crisply turned out in his black and white, his hair smoothed back, his smile genuine. As a child, you tended to register these glimmers of happiness.

My father and grandfather had an uneasy relationship — there were no sinister reasons for this; rather, I believe, Grandfather found it hard to accept that his custodianship of Althorp was to be limited by his own mortality, and he did not enjoy seeing his successor, in middle age, quietly awaiting his turn as master of the house. The fact that the next earl was his own flesh and blood was irrelevant: Grandfather and Althorp were so intertwined in his own psyche that anyone else entering into the relationship was an intruder.

For his part, my father was wary of Grandfather’s temper, and was conscious of the fact that he would not be allowed to have any say in the dealings of Althorp until the old man had breathed his last. It was sad, particularly in the years following Grandmother’s death and my parents’ divorce, that these two lonely men, who both had so much to give, could not break through the distance they had established between one another, to enjoy each other as men, even if not as father and son.

I remember ‘the three generations’ sitting down to a lunch in the Tapestry Dining Room. It was silent, apart from the noises of my grandfather eating with great gusto, a napkin tucked in around his neck, hanging down over his popping-out tummy, and it was very sad and tense. We all missed Grandmother, who would have kept proceedings if not the food light; a touchstone for us all and a facilitator of easy relations. But her place was empty. Her peerless posture, backbone absolutely straight, was gone for ever. We were all lost without her.

The food was always indescribably bad — the epitome of overcooked English ghastliness, which was acceptable in the 70s but wouldn’t be countenanced even in a prison canteen today. I know my memory isn’t playing tricks when I recall with a shudder that the vegetables were boiled onions. Yes, it was that grim.

Lunch concluded with Grandfather performing his trick, which both thrilled and disgusted us, his grandchildren. He didn’t like coffee, but it did have the benefit of being hot, and it could dissolve sugar, so Grandfather would ladle in heaped spoonfuls — and these were large spoons, designed to trowel into sugar bowls, rather than quarry neatly off the top — into his half-cup of weak coffee, then flick the whole, treacly contents into his mouth, crunching the undissolved crystals with huge satisfaction. In his lonely old age, his tastebuds had become his closest friends.

By this stage, I had looked at all the familiar features in this room which made it human for a small boy, rather than simply another assembly of family treasures. The two tapestries were wonderfully vivid, protected by the darkness of a room that had but one window and was replete with sombre oak panelling, brought from the original Spencer home of Wormleighton, in neighbouring Warwickshire. The panelling must have looked imposing in the Court of the Star Chamber of that mansion, the bulk of which — and it was a bulk, being four times the size of Althorp — was burnt down by Royalists in the English Civil War. But in that smallest of the house’s dining rooms it just looked sombre.

The tapestries, however, with their bucolic scenes, one of gypsies and one of farming, were stimulating for a young mind, keen to distance itself from the far-too-adult tensions of the room. The blue of the jay reminded me of the birds you would often see on the approach to the Falconry at the back of the Park. The sheep and cattle were familiar beasts, of course; the goats marginally less so. But the faces of the gypsies were what entranced me, with their fresh features and their lively eyes. To me, they were real.

My reverie and lunch ended as my father and grandfather stood up. There seemed to be relief all round that the ordeal by food was over. I walked over to Grandfather, and placed my hand in his as we left the room. Unused to receiving simple, unquestioning love, the old man started to cry. I didn’t notice it myself, but my father told me, many years later, with regret in his voice that this was a rare breaching of the tough veneer of a man who lost his mother at a very young age and somehow never recovered from the blow.

II

During our childhood my sisters and I rarely stayed the night at Althorp when my grandfather was there. If we did, it was in the Night Nursery, between the Nursery proper and Grandmother’s Bedroom.

It was a terrifying house to stay in: the vastness of the place was somehow even more pronounced at night, with the sound of footsteps outside the room, and the opening and closing of doors discernible. This was the nightwatchman, doing his hourly patrols, with torch in one hand and cosh in the other. At least his presence was expected: it was the unexplained creakings of the ancient building’s infrastructure that really caused alarm — especially to children terrified of the dark. Our short candles never lasted the whole night.

The nightwatchman had the least enviable job on the Estate, single-handedly watching over the treasures of Althorp between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The first lines of defence were the shutters on the windows, complete with bells hanging from the inside. In 1954 these were breached, Higgerson, the nightwatchman, bursting into Grandfather’s room to tell him that he had seen an intruder in the South Drawing Room. Armed with his service revolver, with which he had regrettably blown his horse’s ear off during cavalry manœuvres forty years earlier, Grandfather charged downstairs, loosing off a shot at the fleeing figure. Perhaps because he was neither equine, nor stationary, the thief got away unscathed, with a painted picture frame under his arm. Grandfather concluded, with the disdain he reserved for anyone who came to Althorp, criminal, guest or day-tripper — who failed to understand the worth of the house’s contents, that the dimwitted intruder had probably thought the frame was gold.

Back then, and until quite recently, there was no sophisticated burglar alarm nor smoke detection system. The nightwatchmen — the first of whom I recall, Mr Ward, with his twinkly eyes, rosy cheeks, grey goatee beard and thinning hair, looked like a highly animated elf — had a huge responsibility, with only their hourly call to the police as a link with the wider world.

One Christmas Eve we children went to chat to the nightwatchman in the Staff Room. I don’t remember his name, but I do know that he was a very unhappy man — my father said that he had a horrendously difficult wife, which explained his choice of job — and that we quickly established that he had no Christmas presents to look forward to. We were appalled, for my father always festooned us with presents, our stockings alone being the envy of our schoolfriends. We retreated upstairs for a conference, and then reappeared with our offering poorly wrapped ‘whimsies’, animal figurines that we both collected. It was the only time I ever saw that particular nightwatchman smile.

III

Before the nightwatchman, there was a night porter on constant duty through the night; more servant than security officer. The hall porter’s chair from Spencer House, the family’s London seat, can still be seen in the main entrance hall at Althorp. It’s a wonderfully comfortable piece of furniture, with padded red leather, no doubt so the hall porter could doze, while being in an almost-ready state if summoned in the darkness hours.

This room is known as the Wootton Hall, so-called because of the huge canvases on the walls, painted by the early eighteenth-century artist, John Wootton, employed by a former Charles Spencer, then owner of Althorp, to capture his patron’s love of equestrian sports, particularly fox-hunting. All the local squirearchy are captured, but so also are the other components of the hunt — the kennel men, the grooms, even the terriers and earth-stoppers. I love the way the pictures cross-refer: the prime characters from the portraits becoming bit-part men, expert in their roles, in the bigger pictures. We even have the hunting horn from one of the paintings sitting today on the hall porter’s chair.

Wootton painted all these works in 1733, in his studio in Marylebone, London, before they were transported to their permanent home at Althorp. According to the diary of the First Earl of Egremont, when he saw these works for the first time before they were actually dispatched to Charles Spencer, they fully confirmed Wootton to be ‘the best painter of horses in England’. Certainly they make for an impressive welcome to the house, in the perfectly proportioned hall, two storeys high. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the great architectural historian, rated this ‘the noblest Georgian room in the county’ of Northamptonshire.

For a room that has such elegance, with its made-to-measure paintings, it has a varied history, with an assortment of objects covering the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. This is typical of Althorp, for it has changed appearance regularly, both inside and out, since my family moved there in 1508. It has also been the most consistently inhabited of several houses owned by my family over the generations, and has ended up this century as the final repository of the cream of the Spencer family’s chattels.

It is not only the hall porter’s chair whose provenance is Spencer House. The handsome hall chairs — a set of a dozen — are not upholstered, since the family’s visitors would have braved all types of weather on their journey on horseback, and there was no point in having quality fabric ruined by damp or muddy coats. They are my favourite pieces of furniture in the house, the griffin from the family coat of arms painted boldly on their backs against a cool grey-blue background.

Then there is the sedan chair, rediscovered in the Stable Block in 1911, but originally from Spencer House; the Countess’s transport through the squalor of London’s streets in the eighteenth century.

Behind you as you enter is a pair of marble statues of ‘blackamoors’, images of captured slaves to some Roman household, discovered in the silt of the River Tiber, and given to the First Duke of Marlborough by his brother — and brother-in-arms — General Charles Churchill. Apart from lacking the bows they should clearly be holding, they are in extraordinarily fine condition, the marble almost unblemished, their quivers by their sides still full, for such classical works, they have a remarkably relaxed air, almost modern in stance and expression.

Above them hang various flags. The one that used to capture my imagination as a boy was the White Ensign from the motor torpedo boat commanded by my hero, Cecil Spencer, my great-uncle. I had always been interested in him because we shared a birthday, fellow Taureans. Beyond that coincidence, his derring-do was thrilling to a little boy — great-nephew or not.

He had drawn the Germans’ fire from the main strike force when Admiral Roger John Brownlow Keyes took Zeebrugge for the British in 1918. A copy of the Admiral’s commendation at Uncle Cecil’s courage explains why he ended the Great War with two Distinguished Service Crosses, the Croix de Guerre and a reputation for bravery that makes his eventual death, falling off a horse on Malta, tragically mundane.

The extraordinary quality this room has is in demanding that your eye roves round it, exploring all its attri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter IX
• Chapter X
• Chapter XI
• Chapter XII
• Chapter XIII
• Chapter XIV
• Chapter XV
• Chapter XVI
• Chapter XVII
• Chapter XVIII
• Chapter XIX
• Chapter XX
• Chapter XXI
• Chapter XXII
• Chapter XXIII
• Chapter XXIV
• Chapter XXV
• About the Author
• About the Publisher