ALTHORP: THE STORY OF AN ENGLISH HOUSE
Charles Spencer

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

This edition first published by Endeavour Press Ltd. in 2015

First published in 1998 by Viking

Copyright © Charles Spencer, 1998

Cover image © Getty Images

Charles Spencer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008373191

Version: 2020-07-28

Dedication

For Grandfather, without whom

Althorp would no longer belong to my family,

and, indeed, may not have survived at all.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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

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 attributes. Particularly striking are the plaster flowers on the ceiling, the work of Colen Campbell, one of the greatest architects of the early eighteenth century As a tour guide twenty-odd years ago, I used to notice that, as soon as I had revealed that each of the dozens of flowers was of a unique design, the visitors would take the comment as a challenge, straining to spot two that were identical. They tried in vain to find a flaw in Campbell’s artful design.

And then there is the Wootton Hall floor, which looks as though it is part of the original sophisticated design. In fact, the black and white checked marble was a twentieth-century addition, part of the subtle remodelling performed, with the most limited of budgets, by my great-grandfather, Robert, when he became earl in 1910.

Robert had used this room for the lying in state of his half-brother, the Red Earl, so the surrounding population could pay their respects to the venerable old man of the county, who had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Gladstone’s choice as his successor as Prime Minister. Photographs show the Red Earl, his beard no longer dramatically red but shot through with grey, his proud face restful above his Knight of the Garter robes.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century the floor was of simple stone, a reminder that this was not always an enclosed room, but the archway to the central courtyard of the original, Tudor house. Robert’s black and white marble replaced the piecemeal repairs of his father, Frederick, the Fourth Earl, who had put down brown and blue tiles. It is hard to see how that colour scheme could have worked in such a space. The 1910 switch to marble finally put a line through any link with the days when horse and carriage arrived inside, as opposed to in front of, Althorp.

IV

Although nobody knows when the first house stood in its present position, essential repair work to the front wall of the Wootton Hall in the 1950s revealed medieval windows, which seemed to the workmen and experts of the time to predate the 1508 structure that was my ancestors’ first home here. There would have been nothing strange about building over a prior structure: a good site was a good site after all, and why waste materials?

Initially my family was interested in Althorp for the grazing, rather than because it might provide a suitable second home to Wormleighton. In 1486 they were nearing the peak of their skill at rearing huge flocks of sheep, and land accumulation was a natural consequence of their success. At first they were only able to lease the land that now constitutes the bulk of the Park from the Catesby family, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire squires, one of whose number was a major protagonist of the ill-fated Gunpowder Plot in 1605.

But in 1508 Althorp was bought by John Spencer for £800, and the house that you see today had its heart constructed as the family’s Northamptonshire base. It took only four years for the new occupants to create a park, initially comprising 300 acres of grassland, 100 acres of woodland, and 40 acres of water. At that stage it was called ‘Oldthorpe’. Prior to that, in the Domesday Book of 1087, it had been catalogued as ‘Olletorp’, which meant ‘Olla’s Thorp’. My father told me that Olla was a Saxon lord. In the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively, it was recorded as ‘Holtropp’ and ‘Aldrop’. The ancient roots of the name explain the reason why ‘Althorp’ is pronounced ‘Awltrupp’, rather than as it would appear on paper; for ‘thorp’ is a Scandinavian word, which would have been pronounced as ‘throop’, or perhaps ‘thrupp’. From the Danish, it would have been most accurately translated as meaning ‘daughter settlement’.

During my childhood I never heard any of my family refer to the place as ‘Allthorp’. My grandfather only ever called it ‘Awl-trupp’, as did all his generation. My father resigned himself to the wrong pronunciation, because he was fed up with correcting those who, understandably, did not know the traditional one. He would also say with a smile that it helped people find it on the map, which might encourage day-trippers to come and spend money in Raine’s gift shop.

When I inherited the place in 1992, the BBC Pronunciation Department sent me a letter, stating their hope that I would revert to the correct pronunciation, and giving me strict guidelines on what this should be. I assured them that I did not know it as anything else, and would therefore do so. I felt slightly let down then, at the time of my late sister’s funeral, when the BBC agreed with their ITV rivals to go for ‘Allthorp’. Even more so when it was later reported to me that an American television correspondent describing the final moments of that tragic ceremony at Westminster Abbey, when my youngest sister’s funeral took place, concluded with: ‘The coffin will now go to its final resting place, at Antwerp.’ Diana would have enjoyed that.

Eventually you come to terms with the fact that people call the place what they want; so long as they respect and accept its history, which is for the most part unequivocal.

The original John Spencer — there were many more, since pretty much every eldest son since has been endowed with this most English of first names — was an accumulator: when he acquired Althorp, he also became lord of the manor of Penny Compton, in Warwickshire, Stoneton, Nobottle, Great Brington, Little Brington, Harlestone, Glassthorpe, Flore, Wicken, Wyke Hamon, Upper Boddington, Lower Boddington and Hinton. There were also land acquisitions in Badby, Daventry, Barby, Guilsborough, East Haddon, Holdenby, Brockhall, Hanging Houghton and Church Brampton.

The previous year, 1507, John had secured the lordship of Wormleighton from the Cope family, and started to build the manor house for himself and sixty of his relatives. I have a sneaking suspicion that my early sixteenth-century ancestors must have struck their Northamptonshire and Warwickshire neighbours as appallingly voracious in their acquisitions, and more than a little nouveau riche in the way they threw their money about. The neighbours were probably correct, except on one count: this was not the willy-nilly scattering of money it may have appeared to be, but the considered accumulation of some of the finest grazing land in England. Direct connections with over half these acquisitions survive today.

The original John Spencer became known in family circles as ‘the Founder’. We know of little that happened to Althorp in the immediate aftermath of his scatter-gun buying. It seems probable that the new house in Northamptonshire enjoyed a fair amount of family occupation; a fact borne out by the Founder’s son’s will, which ‘ordered hospitality to be kept in his houses at Althorp, &c., by his heir, after his decease, according as he had done’. We also know that it was a moated house, being built within living memory of the discord of the Wars of the Roses, so the moat would have been decorative but with defensive undertones.

The confidence of the sixteenth-century Spencers that they were in this part of Northamptonshire to stay is demonstrated by the planting of oak trees in the Park. In my early teens I used to come across stone tablets throughout the property. The Founder’s grandson was the first to leave his mark in this way. You can still read, carved on a tablet:

‘This Wood was Planted by

Sir John Spencer Knight

Grandfather of Robert Lord

Spencer in the Yearers of

our Lord 1567 and 1568.’

A similar memorial in near-by woodland states:

‘This Wood was Planted by

Sir John Spencer Knight

Father of Robert Lord

Spencer in the yeare

of our Lord 1589.’

The latter is in ‘Sir John’s Wood’, a corner of the Park between the old kennels and the outskirts of Great Brington. The year of this planting is perhaps its most significant feature, since it was the one immediately following the destruction of the Spanish Armada. My father said that, nervous of further invasion fleets from Philip II, many magnates planted trees to provide timber for the construction of a stronger English naval force. Four centuries on these plantations have been spared active duty, and are now reaching the end of their non-combatant lives. It is amazing to think that they have seen everything that has gone on in Althorp Park through succeeding generations. Indeed, since the house has been subject to major transformations during each century of its existence, they are almost the purest reminders of the original tastes and aspirations of the Founder and his sixteenth-century successors.

I say ‘almost’ because one room in Althorp is as it was when the first structure was erected by my family: the Picture Gallery.

V

I love the Picture Gallery. As a tour guide, I would show the visitors round the ground door of the house, with its contents well-ordered but conventional: chairs by the fireplace, bookcases against the wall, side-tables where you would expect them. The only surprises for those unfamiliar with the place lay in the variety of the objects and the sheer number of paintings on the walls.

The Picture Gallery then offers a complete change of pace, almost a change of venue, as the Georgian influences are thrown back and the starkness of the original Tudor roots of the place are laid bare. I defy anybody to walk into that room and not catch their breath: it is designed to provoke that reaction. For this is 115 feet of oak passageway, 20 feet wide and 19 high. It is like looking down a kaleidoscope, with glittering images all the way along the sides, but with the brightest of all at the end.

You have to have a pretty striking painting to bring people’s attention to a focal point over 100 feet away, when there is so much to distract them on either side. Over the centuries many pictures have left my family’s ownership. Thankfully, Van Dyck’s War and Peace remains.

It was never actually bought by any of my ancestors, but was a gift from an in-law. It shows George Digby, Second Earl of Bristol, and William. First Duke of Bedford, both standing in noble arrogance, brothers-in-law and aristocrats; the full-length epitome of self-assuredness and male beauty. Marchioness Grey; a visitor to the Picture Gallery in 1748, summed it up best in a letter to a friend: ‘Indeed there is a gracefulness and life in the figures beyond what I ever saw, they are quite animated and a strength of colouring that strikes you from one end of that gallery to the other. It is so beautiful that a picture which hangs by it is hurt by its situation.’ It is the quintessential ‘swagger portrait’.

The painting has become known as War and Peace because of the way the two men have been placed in their respective contexts: the Duke is the dominant figure, in bright red, with silver lace, a breastplate in front of him and a helmet behind; and behind is Digby, in less dashing black satin and laced ruff, surrounded by symbols of learning and culture, the satellites of peace. It has always been my favourite painting in the house, because of its sense of drama. Forget the ‘Peace’ aspect of the double portrait: to me as a boy, these men encapsulated what I then saw as the glamour of warfare — in particular, of the English Civil War, which I took to be about thundering cavalry charges behind Prince Rupert of the Rhine, when passion and gallantry seemed more seductive than the relentless professional discipline of the opposing Parliamentarians.

My grandfather was so concerned that this painting should never be exposed to destruction in a fire that he had the nearest tall window in the Gallery turned into a huge door-like structure with hinges down one side, so that the whole frame could be lifted off the wall and lowered down to safety outside. My father, who sold a fair proportion of the finer objects in the house, once promised me that he would never allow War and Peace to join the seemingly endless exodus to Bond Street salerooms. It has an almost sacred place at the heart of the collection, being at once the most valuable item in the house and the most striking. To many it is one of the greatest Van Dycks still in private ownership, and I am proud that it remains at Althorp.

But this is just the centrepiece of a room laden with glories; one that has long been recognized as something out of the ordinary. In 1760 Horace Walpole wrote: ‘Althorpe [sic] has several very fine pictures by the best Italian hands, and a gallery of all one’s acquaintances by Vandyke [sic] and Lely.’ He went on to boast, ‘In the gallery I found myself quite at home; and surprised the housekeeper by my familiarity with the portraits.’ I imagine the housekeeper was only too pleased to see the back of him.

Indeed, it would have been surprising if the Picture Gallery’s subject matter had not been familiar to any man of learning. There are portraits of James I, looking dour and unattractive, his natural shyness betrayed by the hostility with which he seems to greet the onlooker. Whenever I look at this portrait, I think of James’s exasperation at his advisers’ insistence that he show himself more to his people, to rival the way in which his predecessor, Elizabeth I, had so successfully played the public relations game. ‘God’s wounds!’ he finally exploded. ‘And would they also see my arse?’ The anger and the coarseness of the first king of Scotland and England are there, clearly visible, in the Picture Gallery at Althorp.

Charles II, on the other hand, looks smugly down on the Gallery, as well he might, since a dozen of the paintings there, by his court artist, Sir Peter Lely, comprise a collection that has come to be known as the ‘Windsor Beauties’. These are Charles’s principal mistresses. Heavy-bosomed, with ringleted hair, they are not obviously beautiful by modern standards, but they have a sexiness, an air of confidence in their own desirability, that doubtless explains their popularity with their monarch.

At the time of Walpole’s remarks, the portrait of another monarch was also in the Picture Gallery: Lady Jane Grey, ‘The Nine Days’ Queen’, painted by Lucas de Heere. It is still at Althorp, though in a different room now, and shows Lady Jane aged sixteen, a year before her execution, sitting in a room at Broadgate, her father’s family home in Leicestershire, reading a religious text, pretty in a red velvet dress. It is poignant to see the devotion to Protestantism of this young girl, a devotion that was to lose her her head when the Catholics overthrew her, the sincere and innocent pawn of power-broking lords.

As you look today at the sheer handsomeness of this room, with its panelling along the walls and its wide wooden floorboards, you feel the history of the house at its rawest. Tudor ladies liked to use the length of the gallery for exercise, walking up and down it on wet days, in order to spare their long skirts and dresses from being dragged through the mud outside. There would have been little in the way of furniture in such a space. However, generations previous to ours were much more flexible in their use of the rooms, so we hear one eighteenth-century female house guest recalling the Picture Gallery as being ‘a fine room for walking about in — we always breakfast there’.

Indeed, in 1695 the neighbouring nobility and gentry gathered to dine there. They had come to pay their respects to William III, as he in turn had come to secure the support of Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland and master of Althorp, one of the least trusted, but most influential, politicians of his time. To quote from Thomas Macaulay’s History of England:

It seems strange that he [William] should, in the course of what was really a canvassing tour, have honoured with such a mark of favour a man so generally distrusted and hated as Sunderland. But the people were determined to be pleased. All Northamptonshire crowded to kiss that royal hand in that fine gallery which had been embellished by the pencil of Vandyck and made classic by the muse of Waller, and the Earl tried to conciliate his neighbours by feasting them at eight tables, all blazing with plate.

Two hundred and ninety-nine years later I gave a dinner party in the same room. The occasion was not a royal visit nor a political exercise, but the rather more humdrum business of my thirtieth birthday. There was one table, with 128 people seated round it, allowing this often neglected section of the house to come alive for an evening; a faint echo of past glories, but I hope enjoyable enough. Since the kitchens were 300 yards away, the food was pretty average — shades of Grandfather’s time! — but the sight of the room ‘blazing with plate’ once more was something I will never forget.

In the Picture Gallery, between the ‘Windsor Beauties’ and War and Peace, is a tiny door cut neatly into the oak panelling. It is almost never used and leads to a modest staircase that joins the Pink Suite, a guest bedroom, to the rest of the house. My great-aunt, Margaret Douglas-Home, was the youngest of six children who lived at Althorp from 1910 onwards. She was Grandfather’s baby sister, and she lived a solitary existence, mainly with the servants, because her mother had haemorrhaged to death within hours of Margaret’s birth. Family folklore has it that Margaret’s father Robert, Sixth Earl Spencer, who was famously in love with his wife, never fully forgave his youngest child for the part she had unwittingly played in leaving him an inconsolable widower.

This quasi-exile from the rest of the family must have been very hurtful to a young girl of great sensitivity and insight. However, Aunt Margaret, who outlived all her siblings by over a decade, was never one to feel sorry for herself, and she threw herself into living in such a huge house with enormous enthusiasm. I used to visit her in her tiny cottage in Norfolk, and listen in awe as this highly entertaining, deeply intelligent lady recalled snippets from her childhood.

‘And, of course, there was the girl in grey slippers,’ she suddenly volunteered one day, after a moment’s involuntary rasping due to emphysema.

‘What girl with grey slippers?’ I asked.

‘Oh, haven’t I told you about my friend? She lived in the Picture Gallery, by the little door. I never told anyone at the time, because I knew they would just say, “Oh, Margaret!” and roll their eyes at me. But she was there, all right. I used to spend hours with her, just talking. She was so small, so fine looking, with the most beautiful grey satin slippers. When we had finished, she would just drift away through the door.’

‘And what would you talk about?’ I prompted, half-cynic, half-believer.

‘Well, that’s the curious part. I never could recall what we said to one another. We would just talk, and as soon as the conversation was concluded, I would not remember a word we had said. It didn’t bother me; no, not at all. What was said wasn’t important; the fact that we played together was the important part.’

It is easy to dismiss this tale as the musings of a confused octogenarian, nearing the end of her life. But Aunt Margaret was remarkably lucid until her final months, recalling with the most extraordinary detail events from her earliest years — ranging from George V’s Coronation to her more bizarre relations’ visits to Althorp — and I feel that she genuinely believed she had had these games with her anonymous friend, whose footwear was more memorable than any other feature. Whether the girl was in fact imaginary, ghostly or whatever, for me the little door will always be the home of ‘the girl with the grey slippers’.

VI

I have never seen a ghost; not at Althorp, nor elsewhere. People who believe in them will be relieved to know that many other people claim to have done so. The nearest I have ever got to being personally involved in a sighting was in 1994, when I had friends staying for a weekend in the summer.

The day before the guests arrived I had been thumbing through some leather-bound volumes relating to the house. One of these was a book of press-cuttings from the mid-nineteenth century kept by my great-great-grandfather, Frederick, Fourth Earl Spencer. In it was a curious story about a house party at Althorp, attended by, among others, the Dean of Lincoln.

One morning, so the article said, the Dean came down to breakfast with the family and rather frostily complained to the then earl that in future he would prefer it if he was left undisturbed after retiring for the night. My ancestor asked the Dean to expand. It transpired that the Dean had been awoken by a figure dressed as a groom entering his room, holding candles, who had gone round the bed, checking all the candles were properly snuffed out.

Apparently, there was silence from my family. They then asked for an exact description of the ‘groom’. After this was given, they all agreed that it was the ghost of the previous earl’s favourite servant — indeed, a groom — whose job it was to go round all the rooms at night, after everyone had retired, to check that no naked flame was still burning.

The day I read this, I thought nothing more of it. I closed the book, which I had never opened before, and put it back in the bookshelf, an anonymous red spine in several shelves of similar volumes.

On the Sunday evening, I was helping my guests down with their luggage from the same room, the Oak Bedroom, when the girl of the couple said, ‘Do you know, I swear that someone came in here last night.’ I did not pay much attention at first, because I thought it could have been someone going to bed late, who had had trouble finding their own room.

‘And the strange thing is, he was holding a candelabrum and wearing an old uniform, a cloak.’ Well, I have a broad range of guests at Althorp, but none eccentric enough to dress up like that. ‘Hang on a minute,’ I said, and ran up to where Joyce, the housekeeper, was cataloguing articles for a new museum she had created, showing off some of the more curious historic items that had previously been confined to storage rooms. I was about to bring down a groom’s cloak, when I hesitated, and reached instead for a footman’s uniform. If she’s fibbing, I thought, this’ll catch her out. I then raced back downstairs again, and showed the clothing to my guest. ‘Almost …’ she said, ‘but it was longer more like this …’ And she described in detail the apparel of an early nineteenth-century Spencer groom.

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