George Spencer, 1st Earl of Sunderland

“ In 1695, Spencer had taken his seat in the House of Commons as member for Tiverton, and had, during two sessions, conducted himself as a steady and zealous Whig.
The party to which he had attached himself might perhaps have reasonably considered him as a hostage sufficient to ensure the good faith of his father; for the Earl was approaching that time of life at which even the most ambitious and rapacious men generally toil rather for their children than for themselves. But the distrust which Sunderland inspired was such as no guarantee could quiet. ”

“ Lady Sunderland was the daughter of the Earl of Leicester, and sister of Algernon Sydney. She was born in 1620, and at the age of nineteen married Henry Lord Spencer, who was killed in the battle of Newbury in 1642. After her husband's death, she retired to Brington in Northamptonshire, until, wearied with the heavy load of housekeeping, she came to live with her father and mother at Penshurst. ”

“ On the death of his half-brother, George Fulke, second baron, on 12 Nov. 1828, he succeeded to the title. He did not take much part in the debates of the House of Lords, but on 6 Dec. 1831 he made an earnest speech in favour of the Reform Bill in the debate on the address. He was appointed lord-lieutenant of Worcestershire on 29 May 1833. He died at the house of his brother-in-law, the third Earl Spencer, in the Green Park, on 30 April 1837, aged 55. ”

“ He became Under-Secretary for the Colonies in 1780, and also served in America against his fellow-countrymen. On his return he entered the service of the Elector of Bavaria, and received the honour of knighthood from George III. He came back to England in 1795, and devoted the remainder of his life to scientific research. His experiments for the improvement of fireplaces and chimneys have proved of lasting benefit to mankind.
[20] Lord Henry Spencer (1770–1795) , second son of George, third Duke of Marlborough. He died at Berlin, to which court he had been accredited as Envoy-Extraordinary. ”

“ Such a character is George John Earl Spencer! A nobleman, not less upright and weighty in the senate than polished and amiable in private life; who, cool and respected amidst the violence of party, has filled two of the most important offices of state in a manner at once popular and effective; and who, to his general love of the fine arts, and acquaintance with classical literature, has superadded the noble achievement of having collected the finest private library in Europe! ”

“ Saies, With the grace of God and St George of England,
The feild this day shall goe with mee.
'I haue noe forgotten,' Spencer sayd,
'Since there was feild foughten att Walsingam,
When the horsse did heare the trumpetts sound,
He did beare ore both horsse and man.'
The day was sett, and togetther they mett,
With great mirth and melodye,
With minstrells playing, and trumpetts soundinge,
With drumes striking loud and hye.
The first race that Spencer run,
I-wis hee run itt wonderous sore;
He [hitt] the knight vpon his brest,
But his speare itt burst, and wold touch noe more. ”

“ The earl's second wife having died in April 1716, after a career of considerable influence on the political life of her time, in 1717 he married an Irish lady of fortune, Judith Tichborne (d. 1749) . By Lady Anne Churchill he had three sons and two daughters. ”

“ Lord Spencer was always favourable to Catholics, but it was in the spirit of generosity to a fallen, or justice to an injured people. He never dreamt his own son would be one of the first to reap the benefit of the measures he advocated in Parliament. The letter he received from Leicester in January, 1830, must have been a shock indeed. Besides, a member of this aristocratic house descending to such a level {201} must be considered a family disgrace—an event to be wept over as long as there was one to glory in the name of Spencer, or feel for its prestige. ”

“ It is true that the sort of man Earl Spencer was—and he was once the ordinary type of great lord in politics—is still to be found, but you shall hardly find him in affairs. And he has, perhaps, a little coarsened; he has grown too horsey, and lost his old taste for things of the mind. Earl Spencer was Master of the Pytchley, and astonished John Morley by the zest with which he set out on a fourteen-mile drive to the meet on a pouring wet morning, after being up half the night talking politics. ”

“ The detestation which Lord Spencer expressed for his father’s opinions, and especially for those which he had adopted on his conversion to the Church of Rome, was, however, sincere. On the death of Lord Sunderland, he took care to manifest his unseemly disrespect, by casting out of the library which his father had collected, all the works of the holy fathers, or, as he called them, “dregs of antiquity,” which he considered well 287replaced by the works of Machiavel. ”

“ Indenture of 24th June, 1674, between Sir Chas. Harboard and John Hanson, by direction of the Earl of Devonshire, and the Earl of Sunderland, recited in Indenture of 12th March, 1717–8, between Thos. Stonor, etc. and Sir Godfrey Kneller (Close Roll, 5 Geo. I. (5117) ) . Sunderland’s purchase of the Earl of Bristol’s interest in the freehold was not effected until February, 1683–4 (Deed in possession of the London County Council) just before his sale of the premises. ”

“ I gave your Lordship's letter to the King. He cannot yet be persuaded that the new guards will hurt his affairs so much as I believe they will. Sir William T. is now here, and will speak to him of them ”

“ Spencer formed the acquaintance of Sir Thomas Fremantle while they were both at Dunton under the charge of Mr. Blomfield. Fremantle went to Oxford and he to Cambridge, but they continued the intimacy, begun here, to which Spencer pays cordial tributes of unfeigned gratitude. Sir Thomas was a welcome guest at Althorp; he and George used to spur each other on to renewed exertions in the pursuit of literary honours. Spencer formed a plan for the long vacation, and went, on March 25, to Oxford, to lay the subject before Fremantle ”

“ Sunderland could not gainsay him. In his own heart he felt a curious chill of apathy, as if it was nearing the end; the very sunshine without, falling so placidly on thatch and flowering tree, looked strangely remote. It seemed a long time to Robert Spencer since he had been at leisure to notice the mysterious light of spring. He laughed also, but with a softer note than the King had used.
"Rest is good after labour," he said irrelevantly.
William was also looking out of the window at fields and clouds.
"God alone knoweth if I am damned or saved," he remarked strongly ”

“ In the old days the ordinary course of a young man was first to take up politics as a game, and then to adopt it as a vocation. The game lost interest when the sides became grotesquely unequal, and the vocation is no longer felt.
A man like Earl Spencer is, therefore, not merely rare in present-day politics; he is almost unknown. The Peers who still take an interest in the affairs of the nation are not territorial, but rather urban and even suburban Peers. ”

“ Lord Nelson informed Earl Spencer, in a private letter, as well as the Admiralty Board in a public one to Mr. Nepean, that he had desired Commodore Troubridge to send extracts of all his letters to him, as temporary commander in chief of the Mediterranean fleet, with the terms on which the French evacuated the Roman state. "I sincerely congratulate your lordship," concludes Lord Nelson to Earl Spencer, "on this event, so honourable to our country; for the French would treat with no country but Britain." ”

“ Under his rule the lives and liberties of honest men were taken away by juries packed with landlords, or their partisans, on the testimony of hired or terrified wretches, who were generally the most guilty of the gangs that were banded together for unlawful purposes during the land war. Earl Spencer ruled by means which must necessarily have involved innocent men in the punishment of the guilty, and his name is the best hated of all the bad viceroys that ever ruled Ireland. ”

“ The interest we have now in all these "understandings," engagements, and so-called alliances is personal rather than national. So far as England is concerned, they led to a squabble and a split in George's administration. It would hardly be worth while to go into a minute history of the quarrel between Townshend and Stanhope, Sunderland and Walpole. ”

“ Occasionally, also, though not very often, an attempt is made to show that Mr. Spencer is not so much of a philosopher after all—only a kind of all-round writer on a great variety of subjects, in not one of which he has any superior competence. ”

“ They both travel through Wales, visit Snowdon, Carnarvon, and meet a body of Cambridge men reading with a tutor at Conway.
September 29th, he took the mail to London, and thus ended his long vacation. He stays at Wimbledon with his own family until the time for returning to Cambridge again. He relates in the journal that a man comes to teach Lady Spencer, his mother, how to bind books. This may be thought a strange kind of recreation for a lady of high rank ”

“ Sunderland was stained with treacheries, disloyalties, corrupt practices, and shameless false-dealing, the very least of which were more than the one lapse that was wearing Shrewsbury to misery with remorse.
The Earl took another tone.
"Think of the King. You call yourself friend to him; he is as harrassed now as he ever was before the war. He hath not too many men to help him—the Tories grow in strength every day. ”

“ To curtail, for the benefit of a small privileged class, prerogatives which the Sovereign possesses and ought to possess for the benefit of the whole nation, was the object on which Spencer's heart was set. During many years he was restrained by older and wiser men; and it was not till those whom he had early been accustomed to respect had passed away, and till he was himself at the head of affairs, that he openly attempted to obtain for the hereditary nobility a precarious and invidious ascendency in the State, at the expense both of the Commons and of the Throne. ”

“ It is never easy to estimate justly any contemporary work—we stand too near it to see its true proportions—but it seems to not a few that Mr. Spencer may fairly claim a place in the front rank of the intellect of the world. ”

“ The London Times, in not the friendliest of criticisms, says that even persons who do not accept the author's Philosophy will rejoice that he has been able to complete it, and adds that as it stands it "is a marvel of erudition: every page exhibits the wealth and variety of illustration for which Mr. Spencer is justly famous." ”

“ Lord Spencer died in 1910 at the age of seventy-four, and it can be said of him, as of the late Duke of Devonshire, that he could have risen to greater heights had he not been born with a sense of modesty adorned by a good nature that permitted younger men to pass him, and left him without a {288} trace of rancour or bitterness. ”

“ Spencer's position, he writes for mankind at large, not for powers or principalities, for courts or for coteries. If his labors bring him the honor of his fellow-men, that is the highest reward he craves; to honors as commonly understood he is indifferent. He is the "Great Commoner" of philosophy, and without the aid of titles sways the thought of the world more potently than any other man of this generation. ”

“ Spencer's philosophy rests on a sound foundation, as so many are prepared to admit, and if his views on the conditions of political and social well-being are legitimately deduced from the cardinal principles of that philosophy, then sooner or later the world must accept them or—suffer the consequences of rebellion against the teachings of right reason. ”

“ Sunderland watched all these things with some misgiving. Under all his honours and greatness was a lurking uneasiness. He began to lose his courage at being so hated; hints of impeachment had risen in the House more than once; he could scarcely show his face abroad without a burst of popular fury. In the opinion of the people he should not have been intrusted with one of the highest offices under the Crown, but have been starving in exile, or dead, long since in the Tower, as his colleague under James—Lord Jefferies. The ministers, too, could ill disguise their dislike of him. ”

“ Spencer is growing younger with the years. He really looks brighter and more enjoying than he ever did before, since he was in the really young, happy time of fresh discussion and inquiry. His is a friendship which wears well, because of his truthfulness. He always asks with sympathetic interest how you are going on. ”

“ Spencer says that if there had been another and higher progress commensurate with the material advance there would be nothing to wish, he says nothing which very many Americans have not felt and said, and he adds an improvement from history which had occurred to many Americans, and had been strongly stated by them, that while the republics of the Middle Ages surrounded themselves with material splendor, their liberty decayed. ”

“ Spencer is a very impracticable man—that is, he undertakes to conform his conduct to right principles, and his decided views as to the proper functions of government put an interdict upon the far greater number of posts that might otherwise be fit. ”

“ Strange fact, the Honourable George Spencer a beggar! And happier, under all the trials and crosses incident to such a life, than if he had lived in the luxury of Althorp. Religion is carrying out to-day what its Founder began eighteen hundred years ago. He left the kingdom of heaven to live on the charity of His own creatures. ”