Download PDF The Spencers: A Personal History of an English Family, by Charles Spencer, Earl Spencer
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The Spencers: A Personal History of an English Family, by Charles Spencer, Earl Spencer
Download PDF The Spencers: A Personal History of an English Family, by Charles Spencer, Earl Spencer
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Best known in recent history for Lady Diana Spencer, who became the Princess of Wales when she married Prince Charles in 1981, the Spencer family has had close ties to English royalty for at least 500 years. Indeed, Diana's grandfather claimed that "the word Spencer derives from the Norman word for Steward, or Head of Household: 'Despenser,'" and that their ancestor was steward to the household of William the Conqueror in 1066. While historians have debated both sides of this particular family legend, it is indisputable that from the early 16th century Diana's forebears had moved beyond their origins as sheep farmers to forge intimate connections with the English court.
In addition to generations of Spencer barons, earls, and dukes, there were politicians and poets, courtiers and clerics, soldiers and scoundrels. There was an earlier Lady Diana Spencer, who nearly married the Prince of Wales in 1730 and who, like the modern Diana, died tragically young. Sir Winston Churchill was a Spencer; for generations his family name was hyphenated as Spencer-Churchill. The history of the family is alive with many other fascinating characters: from Henry Spencer, who gave Charles I the astonishing sum of £10,000 on the eve of the Civil War; through the scandalous society beauty Georgiana Devonshire, daughter of the first Countess Spencer, who sold her kisses for votes in favor of Charles James Fox; to George John, the Second Earl, owner of the greatest private library in Europe and patron of Horatio Nelson.
In many ways the story of the Spencer family is really the story of England-or at least of the English aristocracy. Using archives and documents previously unavailable and incorporating his personal experiences of the family, Charles Spencer offers a fascinating, rich, and illuminating social history.
- Sales Rank: #999133 in Books
- Published on: 2000-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 6.50" w x 1.25" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 350 pages
Amazon.com Review
That this book would have been less likely without a certain English princess is beyond dispute. Even Charles Spencer won't deny the influence famous sister had in keeping the family image prominent in both the public eye and the marketplace, whether that means books or Althorp guided tours. Yet he avoids capitalizing on Diana's name, and in the process creates a lively history of a powerful family in an age when, as Spencer writes, "the aristocracy ... is most often perceived as an anachronism." The Spencers first came to the fore in the 15th and 16th centuries. Prosperous Northamptonshire sheep farmers who spun wool into gold, their influence in both politics and the military grew steadily until no Cabinet was complete without a Spencer. Their family tree in subsequent centuries featured a few common themes, including patronage of the arts, a liberal Whig sensibility, books and bookmakers, and sons who chose between the ecclesiastical cloth and the gaming cloth. But they were perhaps most interesting for their women, strong-willed, resolute characters like Sarah Marlborough, Lavinia Spencer, and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. While the Spencer men held power, their wives wielded it. And what of the most famous female Spencer of all, Diana? The author wisely deals with her in less than a paragraph, aware of the glut of words already used up on her life. Unfortunately such discipline doesn't extend to the publishers, who include a picture of her on the book's cover and say that its contents put her life into "vivid context." This is to do an injustice to her brother's cause, for his mix of historical research and family legends makes for a readable account in its own right, enlivened rather than spoiled by his engaging and distinctively Spencerian voice. --David Vincent
From Publishers Weekly
In this long-winded saga, Spencer (Althorp: The Story of an English House), the Ninth Earl Spencer and brother to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, guides us through the Spencer family's long history. Supposedly begun by Robert Despenser (steward to William the Conqueror) in 1066, the earliest ancestry of the Spencers remains in disputeAbut there is no doubt that the family line goes at least as far back as the Middle Ages, when a series of wealthy landowners named John Spencer made a fortune herding sheep. Placing biographical portraits of family members against a carefully researched historical background, Spencer goes into the sort of excruciating detail that will interest only those with the most consuming interest in English aristocracy. There are, however, some compelling sections about those Spencers who raised themselves up through scandalous political scheming. Robert Spencer (1641-1702), the Earl of Sunderland, plotted to unseat King James II because the king was a Catholic, but after the scheme failed the unprincipled Robert converted to Roman Catholicism. Sarah Marlborough, related to the Spencers through marriage, had a long, colorful career of aggressively advancing her family's interests. But Spencer provides disappointingly little insight into the most famous Spencer of all time, Princess Diana. And although ably written and extensively researched, this book doesn't have enough of a narrative thread to keep the pages turning. B&w and color photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The ninth Earl Spencer has written an entertaining, informative history of his family. Admitting that "this book would have generated less interest" had his sister Diana not married the Prince of Wales, Spencer nonetheless manages not only to hold the reader's interest but to convey just how remarkable a family the Spencers were (and are). From the "widely hated" Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland, "known to be a man of the lowest possible moral calibre," to the Honourable George Spencer, who horrified many in his family by converting to Catholicism and becoming the saintly Father Ignatius, Spencer presents a "warts and all" view of his family. Making use of previously unavailable family documents, he does not discuss the private lives of his parents or his sisters, and readers expecting intimate details of Princess Diana's life will be disappointed. Spencer (Althorp: The Story of an English House) has a degree in modern history from Oxford. A nice complement to John Pearson's Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals (LJ 12/99), this volume is recommended for libraries that serve Anglophiles.
-DElizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Marvelous Scholarship!
By HeyJudy
Those of us who remember when Lady Diana Spencer got engaged to Prince Charles may recall news commentators mentioning her baby brother, a college student then nicknamed "Champagne Charlie." Well, Champagne Charlie has grown up and, with the death of his father, he has become Earl Spencer of Althrop. Youthful pranks behind him, he now evidences his fine education and his excellent mind.
Admittedly, it must be easier to be fascinated by a family with a millennium-long and distinguished history when that family is your own. Nor has it ever been disputed that the Spencers have been in England longer than the current royal family, the Windsors, by at least seven centuries. So it turns out that the one link, the most compelling link for contemporary readers, to the much-loved Princess of Wales is only the most recent chapter in an important story. At no moment in the last millennium was there ever an event in English history in which a Spencer did not play a major role, including Sir Winston Churchill, whose family name actually was "Spencer Churchill."
In THE SPENCERS, without ever stating this explicitly, Charles Spencer makes it clear that the Windsors, with their Hanoverian/ Saxe-Coburg/ Battenberg family history, chose poor Diana precisely to provide Prince Charles' offspring, including any future kings he might sire, with a true English heritage.
That being said, anyone buying this book in the hopes of getting some inside information about the late Princess of Wales is going to be disappointed. She is relegated to a single paragraph on the final page. This is much to Earl Spencer's credit; it would be distasteful to see him try to exploit his sister's memory for simple profit. And there are plenty of other books, tawdry books, which do just that.
If Charles Spencer's goal was to demonstrate that there is much more to Spencer family history than merely the obsession with his poor sister, he proves that he is entitled to this thesis. By temperment, intellect and education, he seems to have been the perfect choice to have written this book. And if he seems, at times, a bit proud...well, he's entitled. The Spencers have a important background, a background about which Earl Spencer writes lyrically.
THE SPENCERS will be valuable to students of history for its view of an entire millennium as seen through the prism of a single family's experience.
7 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Self-Serving History, But Interesting, Too
By P A Brown
Charles Spencer is very careful to make almost no direct references to his more famous sister, Diana, in his family history "The Spencers," but her picture appears on the jacket, for marketing purposes I guess. He does make several veiled (thinly veiled) references to Diana's ancestors who similarly suffered from being misunderstood by the press and being ahead of their times. Diana was no Georgiana, let's leave it at that. The book, while free of any scholarly pretenses (there are no footnotes and the bibliography is scanty), is rife with fascinating characters, some of whom are not really related to the Spencer clan at all. For example, the Earl of Spencer devotes an entire chapter to the famous Sarah Churchill, First Duchess of Marlborough, who was merely a mother-in-law to a Spencer. She did serve the role of uniting the two families through her complicated bequests, but she is most widely known as the Power Behind the Throne to Queen Anne, and her lengthy treatment in this book is inappropriate. However, several other Spencers (most emphatically Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire) led fascinating lives, and the author tells their stories with sympathy and the occasional dash of venom or wit. This is not a book for serious historians, and it has all-too obvious agendas(slurring his step-mother Raine among them), but it whizzes through some of England's most interesting epochs and may inspire some to look deeper elsewhere.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A Family of Humans
By Herbert Boomhower
What impressed me the most about this book (hence the reason for my review's title) was Charles Spencers' claim that he would write the truth about his ancestors, warts and all. This he succeeded in doing admirably, for the story that followed kept me fascinated in its very history but also in its author's great gift for storytelling, which, to me, is the greatest way to determine whether someone is really a good writer or not. I was naturally amused at the end of the book when Mr. Spencer decided not to publish the details of his recent family's lives, saying that a modicum of privacy was indicated. However, he didn't mind at all "dishing the dirt" on those who came before. That said, Mr. Spencer, or Earl Spencer as he is styled in Great Britain, tells a fascinating story of a family that, rotters and saints, actually helped shape a nation. As I acknowledged before, the author tells an interesting story in a very interesting way. The author also impressed me with an amazing sense of continuity, considering he included collateral branches of his family into the narrative that somehow didn't detract from the rest of the book. Kudos to Charles Spencer for giving us a fascinating history lesson.
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