Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals by John Pearson

Author:John Pearson [Pearson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Great Britain, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9781448207770
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Reform and After

John Charles, third Earl Spencer (1782-1845) and Frederick, fourth Earl Spencer (1798-1857)

Apart from his mother, almost everyone who came in contact with John Charles, Lord Althorp, ended up loving him. For John Charles was that rare and irresistible phenomenon – an honest, genuinely good man. In his way he was also a great man. Gladstone called him ‘the very best leader of the House of Commons that any party ever had’. And Sarah Marlborough’s biographer, Frances Harris, believes that in him, ‘Sarah’s desire to found a great and politically responsible family, endowed with her own fortune, was finally realised’.

He was born at Spencer House on 30 May 1782, and his fate -and with it the fate of several future generations of Spencers – seems to have been dictated by his early reaction to that sharp-tongued, deeply unmaternal woman, his mother Lavinia, second Countess Spencer. Disliking the whole process of human reproduction, she was unable to forgive her first-born child for the discomfort and pain he caused her at his birth. She neglected him during her long trips abroad and when he showed genuine affection for his father she could not forgive him for that either.

Children have a way of turning into what their parents want them not to be and, as he grew, John Charles became what he may have thought would give his mother most displeasure – he was graceless, incoherent, slow of speech and distinctly dull. With his father, he became a different child, but for much of his childhood his father was working fourteen hours a day at the Admiralty, directing the long sea war which culminated in Nelson’s victories, and John Charles was more or less neglected. According to family tradition it was a Swiss footman at Spencer House who taught him to read. And at Harrow, where the future lords Byron, Palmerston and Melbourne were already sparkling among his contemporaries, John Charles, Lord Althorp, dull as ever, did the opposite.

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