Chapter Five ‘Someone with a Natural Nobility Who Was Classless…’
Chapter Five
‘Someone with a natural nobility who was classless…’
The Park has a quintessential English beauty.
When you enter its gates, it is as if you have been transported back centuries.
The land rises and falls in the gentle parabola of ‘ridge and furrow’ lines, the visible legacy of medieval ploughing techniques that show this rich soil has been worked for many centuries.
Diana’s and my Spencer ancestors were highly successful medieval sheep farmers. They came from their first great house, Wormleighton in Warwickshire, to rent Althorp’s fields, grazing their flocks there from before Columbus took his first steps on American soil.
Eventually wealthy enough to buy rather than rent Althorp’s fertile pasture, they built a classically Tudor red-brick house at its centre in 1508. The original structure still exists under the eighteenth-century limestone cladding you see on Althorp House’s exterior today.
After Wormleighton was badly damaged in the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century, Althorp became the Spencer family headquarters. From this place, set in five hundred acres of parkland, they sent out into the world a succession of eye-catching daughters.
One of these, Lady Diana Spencer, was lined up by her ambitious and powerful grandmother to marry the then Prince of Wales.
This was in 1731, exactly 250 years before Diana married Prince Charles.
The matriarch’s scheme for the Spencer girl, whom she called ‘dear little Di’, nearly succeeded, but was sunk at the last moment by powerful political enemies.
Another, Lady Georgiana Spencer, dazzled late eighteenth-century London with her prettiness, hostility to convention, flair for fashion and charisma.
The contemporary politician and writer Horace Walpole recorded how her ‘youth, figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty, and modest familiarity, make her a phenomenon’.
As a teenager, full of optimism, Georgiana wed the Duke of Devonshire, one of England’s foremost aristocrats.
It was a marriage that looked eminently suitable but proved disastrous.
The duke was said to have been born old, while he would complain that his wife was unserious.
Georgiana became constant fodder for the burgeoning national press, while pursuing sincere political goals that many thought unsuitable for such a high-born lady.
She was an activist, who supported the independence of the American colonies, and was also at the heart of London society.
Georgiana’s vicious treatment in the press led her to write privately: ‘I am really so vexed (tho I don’t say so) at the abuse in the newspapers that I have no heart left.
It is very hard they shd single me out…’
Georgiana scandalized many of her class when becoming an exceptionally hands-on mother.
She even – shockingly, for an upper-class lady of the time – breast-fed her own offspring.
But her children, one of whom was known as ‘Harry-o’, always remembered with gratitude and joy her vibrant love and presence as a parent.
Georgiana separated from the duke and battled personal demons, including an eating disorder, before dying tragically young.
Thousands assembled outside her London home on hearing of her death, to show their sense of loss.
Meanwhile the future George IV greeted news of Georgiana’s parting with ‘The best-natured and the best-bred woman in England is gone.’
A few years after Georgiana’s death, the duke would marry his longtime mistress.
*
Through the generations, the Spencer sons tended to be more humdrum than the daughters.
They plodded along, doing their stolid best for Crown and country.
The second Earl Spencer headed the Royal Navy in the 1790s.
The third helped to pilot an act through Parliament that extended the right to vote to many in the middle classes, while also fighting for the abolition of slavery.
The fourth and sixth earls served, respectively, Queen Victoria and Edward VII as Lord Chamberlain, the senior royal courtier.
They were both also Members of Parliament, and the fourth was a decorated admiral.
The fifth earl twice served as viceroy in Ireland, during mid-nineteenth-century turbulence – he believed in Irish Home Rule – and also headed the Navy.
After the First World War, the aristocracy lost its hereditary hold on power.
My grandfather, wounded in that same conflict, served as the Queen’s representative, the Lord Lieutenant, in Northamptonshire, encouraging good works in her name in the community.
My father, godson of Edward VIII, was Mentioned in Despatches for his bravery in World War Two, then served George VI as equerry,[*1] before continuing that role under Elizabeth II.
Queen and courtier had a romantic connection, which was ended by Lord Mountbatten. He summoned my father and told him that any ambitions he had for securing the Queen’s affections were out of the question. He must end whatever nonsense he was part of.
Perhaps Mountbatten was clearing the way for his nephew, Prince Philip. Whatever, my father, brought up on a code of respect for the Royal Family and having spent years in the military obeying senior officers, stepped aside as commanded. Afterwards, he loathed Mountbatten with a passion.
My father’s regimental chaplain would later go on record about the significant counselling and support he had provided for my father’s broken heart, after his relationship with the Queen was terminated.
This royal romance, and its failure, were very much kept as a family secret. My father’s paternal aunt, Lady Margaret Douglas-Home, wrote to him four days before Diana’s wedding, to bless him for his decades of discreet self-sacrifice:
Darling Johnnie,
I am the only person left who knows the whole story, & I so admire and love you so much for it all…
She also marvelled at how the world was about to come full circle, with my father’s daughter marrying the Queen’s son:
I felt I must write you one line to say how much I think of you, especially on next Wednesday…
All my love,
Margaret
Irony lies in the obvious fact that, had my father and the Queen’s budding romance progressed exponentially to marriage, Diana (and Prince Charles) would never have been born.
*
When facing challenging times in her princess years, Diana would buck herself up by saying, ‘Remember you’re a Spencer!’ It was, for her, a reassuring connection to a bloodline that had done its bit, over the centuries, serving the nation.
To Diana, Althorp was the embodiment of the Spencer spirit. She was proud of its dignified grandeur, on several occasions telling me with sparkling delight, ‘It certainly knocks Highgrove[*2] into a cocked hat!’
She spent countless happy hours as a teenager in her black leotard tap dancing in Althorp’s entrance hall, compensating a little for her ballet hopes being dashed once she grew too tall.
This hallway’s checkered black-and-white marble floor gave up a clipped yet rich sound to her fast-moving tap shoes, strong enough to penetrate the closed mahogany double doors.
A frieze swathes the upper plasterwork of the beautifully proportioned space.
It contains gorgeously painted classical fronds, which are broken by the strong punctuation of the carved face of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt.
Her stern countenance looked down on her namesake, my tap-dancing sister, lost in musical rhythm, from high up at the centre of each of the four walls.
Diana’s greatest connection was with Althorp’s gardens and parkland.
For her (as for me), the family headquarters’ true beauty lay not in its size, or its accumulated contents, but rather in its landscape.
She liked to help Althorp’s gamekeepers with their work.
It is worth remembering that Diana was essentially a country girl, before the demands of her public, married life saw her having to spend so much time in London.
She would walk outside for hours at Althorp, music accompanying her – she enjoyed singing to herself and often listened to her Walkman as she went.
In her early teens, with a hostile stepmother inside, and our father increasingly disengaged from our day-to-day life as his poor health plateaued, she spent a lot of her time alone in Althorp’s parkland, or tagging along with the estate’s outdoor staff.
Diana’s favourite spot was the Round Oval, the ornamental lake that had been dug out in a part of Althorp’s gardens known as ‘the Wilderness’ in the nineteenth century.
This patch of water was a place of pleasure for our Victorian ancestors and their numerous house parties.
It looked beautiful in the summer. There was a boathouse then (its footings are still visible) so the family and their friends could row through the clear water, which is fed by a natural spring.
Also, at a time when winters were so much colder than now, it provided ice skating in the most private of settings.
It was on the edge of its one island that Charlotte, a beautiful, childless Spencer countess, buried generations of her adored dachshunds.
Diana and I would sometimes borrow the gamekeeper’s punt and go over to look at the graves, as stubby as their occupants’ legs, dotted along one side of this evocative islet.
The path encircling the Round Oval forms a break halfway between the tall lime trees that constitute a natural outer border to this magical spot and the lake itself.
In summer, when the limes are in full leaf, there is nowhere more splendid in the entire park.
It feels like a cathedral dedicated to Nature.
At the far end of the Round Oval from the House stands a temple formed in the classical style.
This structure was built as the Summer House in the gardens of the Admiralty in London by order of George John, 2nd Earl Spencer, Diana’s and my great-great-great-grandfather.
This ancestor was in charge of the Royal Navy when it squared up to Napoleon’s France in the late eighteenth century.
We were brought up on the story that George John was an admirably progressive thinker. He was the patron of Brunel, the great engineer, and a close friend of Garrick, the foremost Shakespearean actor of his age, who died immediately after a visit to Althorp.
George John was also an innovative chief of the Navy.
Struck by the qualities of Horatio Nelson, George John controversially promoted him above his seniors to command the British fleet in the Mediterranean.
When Nelson triumphed over the French at the battle of the Nile, in 1798, George John built the memorial temple out of gratitude to God for the great victory.
It was subsequently moved to Althorp by another Spencer, who commanded the Navy in the late nineteenth century, when the grounds of the Admiralty in London were being remodelled.
It has stood by the Round Oval ever since.
There has always been a bench in this temple. It is a place to dream, to meditate, and to retreat to. Nobody ever seemed to disturb this spot, and it was where we two youngest children of the family felt safe from the world. It was our Althorp sanctuary.
Skip Notes
*1 A military officer serving as a personal attendant to the Crown, with responsibility for many of the day-to-day logistics of the monarch’s calendar.
*2 Her marital home in the countryside with Prince Charles.