Staring from every wall are Spencers, generations of them: standing, seated,
stern, smiling, all posed and painted in oils. Their eyes follow you around
the saloon, a vast central hall lit by a creamy natural light and shimmering
chandeliers, down the long corridors and gilded apartments of Althorp, the
family’s private stately home in Northamptonshire.
There are gentlemen decked out in bright velvet jackets and hunting breeches,
with guns and dogs, ladies with dainty faces in pastel silks, sober and
suited earls - and at the top of the stairs is a full-length portrait of a
figure whose head, although tilted away, holds one’s gaze. It is the late
Princess Diana.
Perched on a chintzy sofa in the splendid but rather chilly Sunderland room -
one of the only state apartments in Althorp not decorated with family
portraits, it instead has more than two dozen oils of square-built bulls, a
passion of the third earl - I meet the eyes of the ninth, Charles Spencer.
Wearing newly acquired glasses, Spencer, 44, tall and sandy-haired, with
pink-flushed cheeks, is dressed in an open-necked shirt, charcoal jeans and
a dark blazer. His glance keeps flickering towards the tape machine and to
the red light that indicates our conversation is being recorded. In 1997, as
“the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning before a
world in shock”, he delivered the eulogy at his sister’s funeral that
catapulted him into the limelight. He has since become wary of the press and
has successfully sued 11 times.
Today, the room in which he wrote the speech feels antiseptic and strangely
unlived-in compared with the riot of colour and 500 years’ worth of antiques
in the rest of the house. It is not exactly homely: the walls are white, the
floorboards are stained ebony and what was once his grandmother’s sitting
room is dominated by two brown sofas and a Bang & Olufsen television
switched to Sky Sports. Spencer is a passionate cricket fan and player,
entertaining teams from The History Channel and The Spectator every summer
on a pitch added in the 1880s. It is the only part of the estate his eldest
son, Louis, 14, who stands to inherit, would like to change. “Sadly, he’s
not into cricket, and wants to install a football pitch,” he says.
A twice-divorced father of six children (the others are Kitty, 17, twins Eliza
and Amelia, 15, Ned, 4 and Lara, 2), Spencer spent the first years of his
childhood with Diana and their two elder sisters, Jane and Sarah, at Park
House, in Sandringham, Norfolk. His first memories of Althorp were of a
gloomy house with furniture shrouded in dust sheets. It was dominated by the
presence of his grandfather, Albert, the seventh earl, who was “always
dressed in three-piece tweed suits, with a watch chain, and smelt of
Trumper’s hair oil”.
In 1975, when Spencer was 11, his grandfather died and his father, Edward, who
had won custody of his four children after divorcing his first wife, Frances
Burke Roche (later Shand Kydd), moved the family to Althorp. “We all pleaded
with my father not to move from Norfolk,” Spencer says.Of Althorp, he
recalls: “I wouldn’t say it was lonely, but it was quite an isolated
existence.”
The grey-tiled, Grade I-listed building - in the family since the Spencers
bought it in 1508 for £800 - has been altered markedly over the years,
butthe decade that followed the arrival of the eighth earl was more dramatic
than most. Edward’s second wife, Raine, whom he married in 1976 - to the
horror of his children, who nicknamed her “Acid Raine” - made her mark on
Althorp, her influence increasing considerably after her husband suffered a
stroke in 1978. She spent more than £2m on redecoration, giving the house
what Spencer has described as “the wedding-cake vulgarity of a five-star
hotel in Monaco” - and, he claims, she sold 20% of the contents to pay its
running costs.
When Edward died in 1992, Raine was swiftly evicted and Spencer, then 27, took
charge, embarking on a vast restoration project, much of it intended to undo
his stepmother’s work and remove every trace of her years there. “The trend
now is to preserve everything in a sort of National Trust or English
Heritage aspic, but this is not that sort of house,” he says. “Obviously we
observe all the rules, but this house has changed so many times, and so has
each room’s purpose. Everyone who’s come in here has left their mark on the
place.”
Spencer went back through generations of paint and wallpaper scraps,
redecorating some 50 rooms. Silk wallpapers were painstakingly restored and
paintings and furniture recovered from the attic, with the aim of recreating
the grand 18th-century house it once was.
One of the first rooms he tackled was the master bedroom: “I got rid of all
the pink.” In the saloon, the walls were strippedof their dark-brown and
orange paper, while the South Drawing Room, which had been decked out in red
flock wallpaper, with matching swags and floor-length curtains, and “gilded
to within an inch of its life”, is now a tranquil living room painted
catmint green and hung with yet morefamily portraits, by Joshua Reynolds. “I
started from a low base,” he says. “So, really, whatever I did was hopefully
an improvement.”
The work, which included redoing the plumbing, updating security and
fire-safety measures, as well as constructing a lavatory block with a
165,000-litre septic tank to cater for visitors, inspired Spencer’s first
book, Althorp: The Story of an English House, which was written in a
“cathartic” 3½ weeks and published 10 years ago. This coincided with the
opening by Spencer of a memorial to his sister, whose body is buried on an
island in the grounds and whose life is celebrated in a museum in the
converted stables. He has since published three more.
The 115ft Long Gallery, on the first floor, is probably the only room whose
purpose and structure has not changed during the house’s history. The
paintings, all in matching ornate gold frames, include portraits of James I,
Lady Jane Grey, Charles II, a selection of bosomy Restoration beauties and
the centrepiece, Van Dyck’s War and Peace. It was here that, last month,
almost 200 members of the Spencer family gathered for a candlelit dinner to
celebrate Althorp’s 500th anniversary.
Like most owners of stately homes, Spencer opens the house to the public,
albeit for just 60 days a year, as well as for “appropriate” corporate
engagements and weddings. The setting for so many other people’s fairy tales
hasn’t become one for him. He married Caroline Freud, his second wife, on
the estate in 2001; they divorced two years ago.
Together, they founded an annual literary festival, in part a homage to
another ancestor, the second earl, an avid collector of books who amassed
more than 43,000 first editions. This month, in honour of the anniversary,
Spencer will take his place alongside guests such as John Humphrys, Julian
Clary, Andrew Motion, Andrew Horowitz and Sir Michael Jackson, to discuss
his book on the house.
“It is a labour of love,” says Spencer, who has plans to expand the festival
to include wine tastings and a farmers’ market. “It won’t make a penny. I
wanted to have an event that fits in here and makes authors really welcome.
They’re all invited to stay with their spouses, lovers or whoever they want
to bring. It’s relaxed, like an old-fashioned salon, but not nearly so
pretentious.”
Spencer has tried to make Althorp a family home, but says it has been an
impossible task and now spends part of his time at a £5m townhouse in north
London. “Recently, I’ve had to admit to a level of defeat,” he says. “I love
this house and I’ll give it everything I can, but occupying it with a family
is incredibly difficult. It’s tough on the children - they don’t understand
that last weekend they could race around on their bikes and now they can’t
go out because there’s a wedding.
“I remember my mother saying that the saddest thing she ever saw among her
contemporaries was those who had become slaves to bricks and mortar,” he
adds. “I have enough things going on in the rest of my life to put
this in context.”
His real connection, he says, is not with the house, but with its surrounding
parkland. “I was walking last night with my dogs when everyone had left,” he
says. “It was pretty special. I loved that.” And, unlike in the house, there
are no watching eyes.
Althorp: The Story of an English House by Charles Spencer is published by
Viking. The fifth Althorp literary festival runs from Friday to Sunday.
Tickets start at £5; 01604 770107, www.althorp.com
