Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals Read online

  Since George I (like George II after him) made frequent summer visits to Hanover, there was a great political opportunity for those ministers who accompanied the King, particularly if, like Sunderland, they spoke fluent French and German, and were ready to carry out policies benefiting Hanover rather than Britain.

  Through his unscrupulous readiness to follow King George’s wishes, Sunderland outmanoeuvred his Whig rivals, Lord Townshend and Robert Walpole, becoming First Lord of the Treasury in 1718, and as such was effectively the junior partner in a joint prime ministership with the brilliant diplomat, James, Earl Stanhope, in charge of foreign policy.

  Now into portly middle-age, Sunderland had come to resemble his father as a master of political intrigue and also as a skilful courtier and as such now got himself appointed to Sarah’s old position as Groom of the Stole, with its invaluable proximity to the person of the King. This was important for Sunderland in his role of power-broker for the Whigs, since it gave him access to the royal patronage that won elections and built political alliances.

  Although this must have meant that Sunderland had finally abandoned his Republican beliefs, this did not stop him being, on occasion, as outrageous and politically extreme as ever, as he demonstrated during King George’s very public disagreement with his son, the Prince of Wales, in 1717. Such was the King’s anger and frustration with his son and heir that the First Lord of the Admiralty seriously suggested kidnapping the Prince and marooning him on a desert island until he begged forgiveness and recovered his sense of duty. Typically, Sunderland went one step further and in one of the most outrageous state papers ever presented to a British monarch, calmy suggested that the King should have the Prince of Wales murdered. As he told him, ‘It is true he is your son, but the son of God himself was sacrificed for the good of mankind.’

  Since the rift between King George and his son was soon repaired, it was fortunate that His Majesty had the sense to ignore Sunderland’s somewhat extreme advice, and placed the unusual memorandum in his private safe, where it was discovered after his death by the intended victim, George II.

  To be fair to Sunderland, it was also in the course of this quarrel that he helped to define the status of the royal grandchildren, in a legal judgment which by a strange coincidence today continues to affect his own extremely distant but direct descendants, Prince William and Prince Harry. In order to resolve the argument between the King and the Prince of Wales over who controlled the upbringing and education of the royal grandchildren, it was Sunderland who suggested putting the question to the judges - who by an overwhelming majority stated that according to the constitution the ultimate decision on such matters unquestionably rested with the monarch.

  But while prospering politically, Sunderland again fell foul of Sarah when he decided to remarry - this time to the fifteen year old heiress, Judith Tichborne. Lord Hervey had nicknamed Sarah ‘Mount Etna’ after the great volcano, and when she heard the news she instantly erupted, raining down slander and obloquy on Sunderland like red hot lava. On one day she was telling everyone she knew that he was homosexual, the next that he was visiting the women of the town. He was dishonest and utterly despicable. Then she finally produced an allegation for which there could be no forgiveness – that by his behaviour as a husband, Sunderland had killed her daughter.

  ‘If she had been the wife of any man in the world but my Lord Sunderland, she had been now living, which had been happy for her poor children and for me.’

  Sunderland was more than tough enough to cope with this. As J.C. Kenyon puts it, ‘his rudeness complemented her intolerableness’, and finally the slanders ceased. But so did contact between the two sides of the family, leaving Sunderland to savour married life for the third time round as devotedly as ever.

  He had loved all his wives, and within three years of marrying Judith had fathered as many children. Without Sarah’s fatal intervention he seems to have been a kind and a devoted father, treating his young wife and children with a bluff sort of older man’s bonhomie. One gets a touch of this in a short note tucked away among his papers in which he tells his ‘dear wife Judith’ that he will be late coming home, and in case any of the children miss him, she is to ‘kiss the little bastards for me’.

  By now it must have seemed that Sunderland had finally escaped from Sarah’s influence for ever. He had grown powerful and rich on his own account, and besides Althorp he could enjoy Sunderland House in Piccadilly, now virtually complete. Here he had gardens and an orchard and would soon begin to plan an elaborate library to his heart’s content. Away from the Marlboroughs and the storms around them, he should have been a happy man at last. Then there was suddenly another crisis, which yet again brought Sarah back to his attention.

  As First Lord of the Treasury he became involved in the scheme to reduce the National Debt by encouraging the public to exchange government bonds for shares in the profitable South Sea Company. Together with several other leading politicians, he was undoubtedly bribed with shares to gain his backing, and as speculation mounted it produced the great financial racket known to history as the South Sea Bubble.

  Shrewd as ever over money, Sarah had been investing in the South Sea Company for several years and continued doing so, both on her own account and as a trustee for her husband. Sunderland invested heavily as well. But whereas Sarah, with what Winston Churchill called ‘her repellent common sense’, saw that the bubble had to burst and pulled out just before it did, Sunderland, like most of the investors, including George I, did not.

  For Sunderland it was a disaster. Much of the financial establishment was ruined, in the City bankers were committing suicide, and Sunderland himself had lost heavily. To make it that much worse, he knew that Sarah and Marlborough had made a fortune, estimated at more than £100,000 between them. Then came the final blow - a threat of impeachment in parliament which looked like ending his career in politics. As it was, he was just saved by an inspired speech and some skilful backstage pressure and bribery by the extremely able Norfolk squire Sir Robert Walpole - for which Sarah never forgave him.

  As a quid pro quo for Walpole’s support, Sunderland had to relinquish to him his post of First Lord of the Treasury, but he clung to his position of Groom of the Stole, which meant that the power and income of this once professed Republican now came entirely from the King.

  It might have been better had Sunderland now retired from active politics himself and enjoyed the pleasures of his private life - studying in his splendid library at Sunderland House, becoming a better father to his children and returning to the country roots of the Spencers in the peace of Althorp. But once again lack of money stopped him doing this, even had he genuinely wished to. For once again, exactly like his father, he had failed to use any of the gains from office to increase the Spencer fortunes, which were barely adequate to sustain his earldom. Since most of his savings had vanished in the Bubble, he was forced to continue his career in politics, but ambition must have also spurred him on. Not yet fifty, and in the prime of life, he was far too proud and angry to yield to an upstart, however talented, like Robert Walpole.

  He did his best to put the little Norfolk squire in his place in the general election of April 1722, but it was an uphill task, with Walpole free at the Treasury to use the Secret Service money for electioneering. And as the first electoral returns began to show that Walpole’s followers were winning, Sunderland fell ill with pleurisy.

  Sunderland House was already a place of mourning, his eldest son by Judith having died there two days earlier after an unsuccessful smallpox inoculation. Mortally sick himself, Sunderland, the onetime atheist, sought comfort from a Church of England clergyman. Despite his prayers the illness worsened and, as inconsistent in his death as in life, Charles, third Earl of Sunderland died in the bosom of the Church of England at the age of only forty-eight on 19 April 1722.

  Sunderland House remained unfinished and, although he theoretically left his wife and children £75,000 in shares, the face value
on many of the share certificates proved obsolete. His two other children by Judith both died young, as did their mother. After the Earl’s death the King of Denmark offered his executors the then enormous sum of £30,000 for his library, but since they were counting on the children soon inheriting much larger fortunes from the Marlboroughs, the offer was refused. As for Sarah, Sunderland’s welcome death now left her free to treat her Spencer grandchildren exactly as she wanted.

  Chapter 4

  A Liberated Woman

  Sarah Marlborough (1660-1744)

  Marlborough, like Nelson, should have died in battle. Instead, with Blenheim Palace now complete, he lingered on thanks largely to Sarah’s devoted nursing. After seeing him, the politician James Craggs wrote: ‘I love him well enough to wish it were over; he is a melancholy memento.’ But it was as if Sarah would not let him die, and when finally he did, just two months after Sunderland, she sank into deep depression.

  ‘Whoever has been once so happy as I have been and have nothing left but mony which from my humour, I don’t want much of, deserves to be pity’d,’ she lamented.

  Hardly surprisingly, few did pity her, certainly not the members of her family, who knew that, although one of the richest women in the country, her eagerness for ‘mony’ was as strong as ever. But just as nobody could doubt her devotion to the ‘dear Duke’ while he was alive, with his death the actress in her made her play the tragic widow tending the sacred flame of his memory. She was good at feeling sorry for herself, but this could clearly not continue. Now in her early sixties, she was as full of energy as ever, and since she had preserved not only her ‘mony’ but her looks, people wondered if she would remarry. Finally her friend the proud Duke of Somerset plucked up courage and proposed. Some thought she might accept, but then, dramatically, she turned him down in words that belong to Sarah Marlborough’s legend.

  ‘If I were young and handsome as I was, instead of old and faded as I am, and you could lay the empire of the world at my feet, you should never share the heart and hand that once belonged to John Duke of Marlborough.’

  Nobly said - but as with so many of the best lines in history, it is doubtful that she spoke them. Almost certainly she wrote them later, partly for posterity and partly to obscure the truth. For the truth was that, had Sarah wed the Duke of Somerset, it would have meant sacrificing not only the hand once sanctified by Marlborough’s love but something more important still - her secret role as Mrs Freeman. For Mrs Freeman had not died with the end of the relationship with Mrs Morley, nor with the Queen’s own death in 1714. With Marlborough’s demise Mrs Freeman really came into her own. And it was as Mrs Freeman that Sarah came to the decision which was to have such amazing consequences for the Spencers.

  By the time of Marlborough’s death in 1732 there were already two great separate fortunes - over a million pounds left in trust by the Duke himself, of which Sarah was principal trustee, and her personal fortune, which was entirely her own and fast approaching similar proportions. What did she intend to do with it?

  The fact that her daughter Henrietta was now Duchess of Marlborough in her own right had done nothing to endear her to Sarah, especially as she always referred to her as ‘the Dowager Duchess’, a method of address she found offensive. But as Henrietta’s son Willigo Godolphin would finally inherit both Blenheim and the title, it was assumed that finally the two fortunes would be united to create the sort of massively endowed grand dukedom that Marlborough himself had hoped for. Certainly, had Sarah been truly anxious to carry out the wishes of her dear departed, this would have been her ultimate intention, and the joint fortunes would have provided the future Dukes of Marlborough with a vast endowment to maintain their honour and position as the first Duke had intended. But Sarah did not rush to do this. Already she had other plans which were more in tune with her highly independent nature.

  The overriding theme of Sarah Marlborough’s life was her determination to control her destiny. As an old woman, she was still boasting to the Duke of Bridgewater that ‘nobody upon earth ever governed me nor ever shall’; just as when little more than a child of fifteen, she had shown the same instinct to control her life when she made John Churchill marry her.

  Once married, she had acted in the only way she could, bearing his children, backing his career and sublimating her considerable ambition in his success. This was not difficult for her, since she was devoted to her handsome, brave, resourceful husband. But as the relationship with Princess Anne developed Sarah had found a separate role for herself as Mrs Freeman. And Mrs Freeman’s priorities were different from those of happily married Sarah Churchill. As Mrs Freeman, she was increasingly asserting the rights of a ‘free man’ in the presence of the Queen of England and she learned to make the most of them, for by dominating Mrs Morley, Sarah was able to extort all those honours and riches from the court for Mr Freeman and herself. Once she had adopted these two very different roles in life, Sarah started to become two different women.

  As Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, she was still the proudest and most supportive wife of the greatest hero of his age. But as Mrs Freeman she was increasingly aware that without her years of dedicated labour with the Queen, there would have been no fortune, no power and precious little in the way of honour for her or for her husband. At times she used to grumble that she had ‘laboured like a pack-horse’ for her husband’s glory, for without the work of Mrs Freeman, Churchill would not have been a Duke, let alone have reached the battlefield of Blenheim.

  After his great victories, the gap between Mrs Freeman and the Duchess of Marlborough widened. As she gloried in his vast success, the Duchess was genuinely proud to have been his pack-horse, but for Mrs Freeman the Duke’s achievements served as a reminder of the handicaps she suffered as a woman, for the contrast between her situation and her husband’s could not have been more glaring. Simply because he was a man, Marlborough had been free to live a life of extraordinary richness, devoted to politics, diplomacy and the pursuit of glory. But for Sarah none of this had been remotely possible, and at times she grew bitter on the subject. She knew her worth and genuinely wished she had been born a man.

  The political disadvantages of her gender particularly frustrated her. ‘I am confydent I should have been the greatest Hero that ever was known in the Parliament Hous if I had been so happy as to have been a man,’ she said impatiently. She was haunted by the thought. Why was it, she asked, that ‘the things that are worth naming will ever be done from the influence of men?’

  She knew the answer, and now that the Duke was dead Mrs Freeman decided to assert herself. In the process she made herself one of history’s great precursors of the modern liberated woman.

  With all her failings, Sarah was profoundly realistic, and she knew that in a world where privilege and power were exclusively reserved for men, no woman, even one of her considerable determination, could enter such strict male preserves as politics, warfare, or the law, which produced ‘the things that are worth naming’.

  But there was just one area she could enter, and where her extraordinary flair had already revealed itself. This area was money. For money was one of the few things in seventeenth and eighteenth century England that was gender free, and thanks to Marlborough’s willingness to let her treat her fortune as her own, she could compete with men on terms of relative equality.

  As Frances Harris writes, ‘As much a Whig in private as in public affairs, she had come to consider this financial independence to be not merely an indulgence on Marlborough’s part, but an essential human right and liberty; without it she’d have been reduced to the level of the dispossessed country peasantry, “who neither plow nor sew, because they can’t call it their own”.’

  Marlborough understood this and, being astute enough to realise that Sarah was a match for him financially, had increasingly left her to manage their joint fortunes during his frequent absences abroad. With her ‘repellent common sense’, she had a sort of genius for investment and it was largely thank
s to her that Marlborough’s own fortune reached such great proportions.

  Another area in which she acted with the freedom of a man was property and building. She loved to be involved in building, and had all the instincts of a modern property developer. It was she who finally took charge of the disastrous muddle over Blenheim Palace, and it was largely thanks to her that it was finished. She also took total charge of acquiring a piece of royal land opposite St James’s Palace in London, and then building on it the Duke’s proud London residence of Marlborough House.

  But financially Sarah’s greatest coup had come with the collapse of the notorious South Sea Company. Again her ‘common sense’ prevailed against what she knew to be the sheer stupidity of all those sheep-like male investors - the King and her own son-in-law included - who had let their greed impair their powers of judgement. She made a fortune by selling before the crash and one can understand how much this fortune, won in the face of overwhelming male competition, must have meant to her.

  But the £100,000 she had earned for herself and Marlborough meant even more to her than this. In England, where land and property had always been regarded as the best and safest form of investment, there was normally no eagerness to sell and landed estates rarely came on the market. But the South Sea crash occurred on such a scale that the countryside was littered with failed investors desperate to avoid bankruptcy and the debtor’s prison. This placed her in the wonderful position of not only having made a fortune at the expense of the male race and several of her enemies, but of having a whole range of virtually unheard-of bargains to invest it in.

  Being Sarah, she took her time and chose extremely shrewdly, at first buying estates in Surrey and Northamptonshire. She was particularly pleased to get the estate at Chippenham, conveniently situated near her house in Windsor Park, which had been confiscated from Robert Knight, the South Sea Company cashier, and which she liked to boast was ‘the finest farm in England’.