The Spencer Family Read online

  The beleaguered Edward II and the Despensers refused to break ranks with one another. Hugh Senior was cornered in Bristol, where he was handed over to the barons by his own men. The old man, being in his ninetieth year, might have expected a modicum of mercy; but it was not to be. Indeed, he failed even to be granted a trial, and was condemned to death, unheard. It was ordered that his execution should be that of a common criminal, and so he was hanged. The King and the younger Hugh were forced to watch his grisly end on the scaffold before them.

  Despenser Junior had avoided the same fate by agreeing to surrender voluntarily, while holed up in the castle of Caerphilly. In return, his captors had solemnly guaranteed the safety of his life and limbs, hopeful that, after witnessing the demise of his father, Hugh would finally desert his king. However, this he would not do; so he was turned loose. He had overlooked the need, in such ruthless times, of extending his period of invulnerability, though, and he was almost immediately recaptured. This time the only guarantee he had was that he would be treated without mercy, and in that he was not to be disappointed: on 28 November 1326, he shared his father’s fate; the only consolation, for a descendant, lies in the fact that it was very much preferable to sharing that of his monarch.

  Unsurprisingly, given the brutal deaths of the three preceding heads of the family, the Despensers chose to adopt a lower profile over the following generations. There was a royal marriage of sorts, when Hugh Junior’s grandson Thomas, Earl of Gloucester, wed Edward III ‘s granddaughter, Constance. The only son, Richard, died when just fourteen, and with him was extinguished the senior line of the Despenser family.

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  Grandfather’s contention was that our family sprang from a junior branch of the same family: from Geoffrey Despenser, in fact, the brother of the first of the three Hughs, the courageous figure slain at the battle of Evesham. We know little about Geoffrey, except that he was the first founder of Marlow Abbey in Buckinghamshire, and was a witness to Henry II’s Confirmation of Lands to Bungey Abbey in Suffolk. Later in Henry II’s reign, there is record of the donation by Geoffrey Despenser of the Church of Boynton to Bridlington Priory.

  When he died, in 1251, Geoffrey left a son and heir, John, who was a minor. When he came of age, four years later, he was knighted by Henry III. This John was influential enough to obtain, in 1256, the Bull from Pope Alexander, which directed the Bishop of Salisbury to agree that ‘John Despenser be allowed to build a chapel, and have a chaplain in his manor of Swalefield, which John is prepared to endow, since the manor lies in a forest, making it unsafe for him and his family to go to the main church near-by, because of the amount of criminals lurking in the said forest.’

  John was a man of war rather than a man of God. He joined the barons against Henry III, and was taken prisoner at the Battle of Northampton. His manors of Castle Carton and Cavenby, in Lincolnshire, were confiscated. But the barons prevailed and Sir John was released in 1264.

  His son and heir, William, has left behind almost no trace of his existence. All we know about him is that he styled himself ‘William le Despencer of Belton’; and he lived at Defford, where he died during the reign of Edward III . His son, John, was a more remarkable figure, serving in the retinue of John, King of Castile, in his voyage to Spain, as a result of which he received the King’s Letters of Protection for one year, dated 6 March 1386. On his return to England, he became a Squire of the Body to King Henry V, as well as Keeper of his Great Wardrobe. John accompanied his monarch, one of the most heroic English personalities of the Middle Ages, on his expeditions to fight in France.

  John and his wife Alice had a son, Nicholas, who was the father of Thomas and William Despencer. The elder of the two, Thomas, produced Henry Spencer (the first time the name was used in the family without its Norman prefix of ‘De-’), of Badby, Northamptonshire, the county which, beyond all others, has been associated ever since with the Spencer name.

  Henry married Isabel, with whom he had four boys. When he died, in 1476, Henry’s last will was sealed with the coat of arms that the family still bears today.

  There have been those who have disputed Spencer claims to spring from the same blood as the mighty Despensers. Certainly, on the page, the case appears proven. I hope I can be forgiven for going through the family tree in such detail, but I feel it is a helpful exercise in order to explain Grandfather’s thesis, while being aware that, at times, the preceding paragraphs must have all the appeal of one of those interminable chapters in Genesis, where so and so begets someone or other, seemingly ad infinitum.

  It would not have been necessary to write down all the various links if the Despenser claim were undisputed; but that is not the case. At the time that the Tudor Spencers claimed such links with their presumed forefathers, they were accepted without question; indeed, as late as 1724, a contemporary chronicler was able to confirm that Althorp was ‘the manor and seat of the noted Family of the Spencers descended from the ancient Barons Spencer of whom Hugh Spencer the Father and Son, favourites of King Edward II were’.

  But in 1859, Evelyn Philip Shirley, in The Noble and Gentle Men of England, was a little more sniffy about the Despenser connection, although he failed to specify where the problem lay: ‘The Spencers claim a collateral descent from the ancient baronial house of Le Despencer,’ he wrote, ‘a claim which, without being irreconcilable perhaps with the early pedigrees of that family, admits of very grave doubts and considerable difficulties.’ Shirley concluded his judgement with a concession, though: ‘It seems to be admitted that they descend from Henry Spencer [of Badby].’

  The highly knowledgeable historian William Camden was convinced by the Despenser link, accepting the above family tree in full, and yet contemporary commentators still hold the claim as being open to question. In the course of compiling this book, I have studied the family papers in some depth, and fail to see where the problem lies. Perhaps, by the end of the eighteenth century, it just looked unnecessarily greedy and self-serving for the Spencers to claim prominence and position so very far back in the annals of the history of England?

  Writing 200 years ago, Sir Egerton Brydges, the editor of Collins’s Peerage, struck on a compromise position over this matter, which hints that my theory may hold some water: ‘The present family of Spencer are sufficiently great,’ wrote Brydges, ‘and have too long enjoyed vast wealth and high honours, to require the decoration of feathers in their caps which are not their own. Sir John Spencer, their undisputed ancestor, and the immediate founder of their fortune, lived in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII; and three hundred years of riches and rank may surely satisfy a regulated pride.’

  I am happy to settle for that. I doubt whether Grandfather would be too pleased about it, though.

  2. The Early Spencers

  My family was never very imaginative with Christian names. Perhaps having a surname as solid as ‘Spencer’ led them to think that it had to be counterbalanced by something similarly uncompromising in its simplicity? At least this would explain the vast preponderance of ‘Johns’ in the family tree: my brother, who died soon after birth in 1960, was the thirteenth eldest son to be given the name in a little over 500 years.

  As a result, prior to my family being created peers, and after they were established as rich landowners in the Midlands, we encounter a succession of Sir John Spencers. The first of these was the eldest great-grandson of Henry Spencer of Badby, who had first borne the modern Spencer name and coat of arms. By the time this Spencer — let us call him ‘Sir John’ — was a man, his branch of the Spencer family had begun to concentrate its land and talents in the heart of the English Midlands — specifically in Warwickshire, which was the centre of the burgeoning English wool trade.

  By early Tudor times, at the end of the fifteenth century, sheep farming had become a significant industry. The weaving of wool, together with the manufacture of flax and hemp, was greatly improved by the arrival of cloth-dressers who had fled to England after persecution on mainland Europ
e.

  To some, the trend of turning ploughed land over to grazing was deeply unsettling. Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, written at the start of the sixteenth century, decried ‘the increase of pasture, by which sheep may be now said to devour men and unpeople not only villages but towns’. Apart from the social upheaval implicit in this change of land usage, there was also resentment, again vocalized by More, that the sheep ‘are in so few hands, and these are so rich ...’, allowing unscrupulous and greedy men to raise ‘the price as high as possible’.

  Sir Thomas may well have had John Spencer in mind when launching this attack, as his herds were famous throughout England for their size and strength. However, there is no record of Sir John I having been either unscrupulous or heartless. A shrewd marriage to Isabell Graunt had secured for the Spencers the addition of an excellent inheritance at Snitterfield, also in Warwickshire; but, otherwise, it was through skilful husbandry that he managed to build up his landholdings so consistently. Five centuries on, the two key estates — Wormleighton and Althorp — remain in my family’s hands, both still demonstrating the fertility and quality that attracted Sir John’s interest all those generations ago.

  The family’s association with Wormleighton dates back 530 years. It is a village close to the Three-Shire Stone which marks the junction of Warwickshire with Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. On a clear day the Malvern Hills can be seen to the west, while from the roof of the tower in the village, Coplow in Leicestershire and the city of Coventry are both visible in the distance. My father told me that this beautiful hamlet marks the furthest point from the sea in all of England.

  The earliest deed relating to Wormleighton in my family documents dates from the reign of King John, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and is a record of a grant of services from seven acres of land by Cecilia, widow of Simon Dispensator. By coincidence, ‘Dispensator’ is the Latin word for ‘Despenser’, or steward.

  It was not until John Spencer, father of Sir John I, that my family had direct dealings with the village of Wormleighton, and it was only with the agricultural expansion of Sir John I that the Spencers bought the land that was to become the centre of their sheep-farming empire. He paid William Cope, a financial officer of the royal household, £1,900 for the estate in 1508. In November of that year, all evidences, charters and other documentation relating to the estate were delivered to John Spencer. They remained at Althorp until they were sold in the 1980s.

  The success of Sir John I can be gauged by his soon receiving a copy of a statute from London, condemning ‘divers covetous persons, [who], espying the great profit of sheep, have gotten into their hands great portions of the ground of this realm, converting the pasture from tillage and keep some 12,000, some 20,000, some 24,000 sheep, whereby churches and towns be pulled down, rents of land enhanced, and prices of cattle and victuals greatly raised’. For Sir John, the figure was reputedly just under 20,000 sheep. Family legend has it that he was never able actually to reach the 20,000 mark because, every time his flocks approached that total, they were blighted by disease or accident.

  Having failed to cut back on his sheep farming after receiving the statute, Sir John now received a direct order from the court, to grub up his fences and plough up the land. Unwilling to cut himself off from such a profitable form of farming without a fight, Sir John appealed to Henry VIII himself, to be allowed to continue his business, underlining several points that he insisted should be taken into consideration before a final decision about him and his sheep was made. First, that there had been no timber within fourteen miles of the manor of Wormleighton, whereas he had ‘set all manner of wood and sowed acorns both in the hedgerows and also betwixt the hedges adjoining the old hedges’; secondly, that he had personally been responsible for ‘building and maintaining of the Church and bought all ornaments as crosses, books, copes, vestments, chalices and censers ... And where they never had but one priest, I have had and intend to have 2 or 3’; and, thirdly, that despite the danger and difficulty of the transport operation, he sold his fat cattle annually in London and in other towns and cities that required entrepreneurs like his good self to supply their urban needs.

  Sir John’s submissions were accepted. He continued with his accumulation of wealth undisturbed by central authority, and built Wormleighton Manor for himself and sixty relatives. It was a huge structure — old ground plans suggest it was perhaps three or four times larger than Althorp — and as such it remained the chief seat of the Spencers till the 1640s, when much of it was destroyed by the Royalists in the English Civil War.

  What is left today shows that it was a classic piece of architecture of the time following the period of continued civil unrest that Sir Walter Scott romantically termed ‘the Wars of the Roses’. It was a defensible structure, with castellations and narrow windows, and yet it had no moat, indicating an increased expectation of peace. The whole building was based around three courtyards, accessed by an imposing gatehouse.

  The two biggest rooms that remain in the sole surviving wing are large — thirty-one foot long by twenty-two foot wide. The brewhouse lies on the ground floor, with bay windows, and, above, you can still see the Star Chamber, an early Tudor courtroom, its oak lintels and panels originally painted with stars (it was the fashion in Tudor times to paint oak). The dimensions of the rooms justify the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner’s conclusion that ‘The Manor house of the Spencers must once have been a grand affair, perhaps as grand as Compton Wynyates.’

  Like Compton Wynyates, one of the great treasures of early English architecture, Wormleighton was to have its Northamptonshire counterpart. Whereas the Comptons had Castle Ashby, the Spencers acquired Althorp.

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  When Sir John Spencer I looked for further land to satisfy his desire for agricultural expansion, his eye fell on the land of his cousins, the Catesbys. Like the Spencers, they were an ancient family, with roots in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire. John de Catesby had been sheriff of the latter county in 1425, and by this stage he had bought Althorp from the Lumley family; in a deed of 1421, he styled himself ‘lord of Olthorp’. But it was an estate that was to remain in the Catesby family for only two generations, for John’s grandson allowed Sir John Spencer to lease Althorp for the grazing of his sheep, from 1486. Twenty-two years later, convinced of the supreme quality of the land, Spencer bought it from Catesby for £800.

  The rest of the Catesby family history at this stage was even less happy than this unfortunate sale might indicate. The John Catesby who last owned Althorp had a brother, Sir William, Sheriff of Northampton during Edward IV’s time, and subsequently Chancellor of the Exchequer to Richard III. Sir William, with Sir Richard Ratcliffe and Viscount Lovell, effectively formed a triumvirate that governed King Richard’s lands for him, giving rise to the following ditty:

  The Rat, the Cat, and Lovell our dog,

  Rule all England under the hog.

  The hog being the hunchbacked Richard III, retribution for the neat but deeply libellous couplet was harsh: its author, Collingbourn, was ‘hanged, headed, and quartered’ on London’s Tower Hill.

  Richard III was subsequently slain in 1485, at the climax of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Bosworth, and the loyal Catesby was captured there, too. In the three days between the battle and his own execution, Sir William had time to sort out his affairs; and, in his will, he directed ‘that John Spencer have his L.xli [£41] with the old money that I owe’.

  Thanks to their active Catholicism, there was to be no peaceful retiring into the ranks of the growing gentry class for the Catesbys. We hear of another Sir William Catesby who, in 1581, was brought before the Court of the Star Chamber, a judicial innovation of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, for harbouring Jesuits, and for being present at the celebration of mass. Thanks to statutes recently brought in by Queen Elizabeth, both were serious offences, and Sir William was punished accordingly.

  It was doubtless partly out of a feeling that his father
had been harshly treated that Sir William’s only surviving son embarked on a life of rebellion. Certainly, Robert Catesby was a man destined to make his mark somewhere, and it appears to have been a waste of his great potential that his religious convictions forced him into a life of sedition. As the historian Baker wrote: ‘He was a man of considerable talents, insinuating manners, and inflexible resolution; daring and fertile in expedients, but subtle and circumspect in the development of his purposes; and ready to sacrifice his life, his fortune, and every feeling of humanity, in defence of the Roman Catholic cause.’

  Contemporaries commented on his great height — ‘above two yards high’ — and his exceptional good looks, being ‘one of the chief gallants of the time’, as well as on his character, ‘so liberal and apt to help of all sorts, as it got him much love’.

  Robert had supported the Earl of Essex in his doomed rebellion, his subsequent pardon costing £3,000. In 1605, he garnered everlasting infamy through his involvement in the equally unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up King James I and his Parliament which failed when Guy Fawkes was arrested before he could ignite his explosives.

  Hearing that the plot had been compromised Catesby, with Rockwood, Percy and other fellow conspirators, fled from London, covering the first eighty miles in seven hours, heading for Holbeach, a house in Staffordshire owned by a sympathizer. From here there proved to be no escape: a sheriff and his posse kept them holed up in the house for two days, before it was accidentally torched. Catesby and Percy had to choose between burning to death and making a hopeless bolt for freedom. Percy was shot, and died two days later of his wounds; Robert Catesby was shot dead. He left behind a widow, Catherine, herself the daughter of a Spencer girl.