A Woman of Influence: The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England - Hardcover

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Vanessa Wilkie is the William A. Moffett Senior Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. She has a PhD in British history and gender history and an MA in public history from the University of California, Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles. A Woman of Influence is her first book.

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Chapter 1: Spencers on the Rise

CHAPTER ONE SPENCERS ON THE RISE

“A Mere Knight’s Daughter”

It was a frosty winter day in 1636 when Alice Spencer, Dowager Countess of Derby, entered the tiny country church of St. Mary the Virgin. A patchwork of stone and brick with a stubby crenellated tower, the church had served the faithful in the village of Harefield, some twenty-five miles west of London, since the twelfth century. Alice herself had worshipped there for nearly four decades. Age and the cold winter had taken a toll on her body, but her mind was as sharp as ever. It was not piety that drew her to the church that particular day. The seventy-six-year-old Dowager Countess of Derby had come to inspect the tomb she had commissioned for herself. She determinedly made her way to the upper chancel, at the far end of the church next to the pulpit, and gazed upon the massive painted-stone monument that had just been completed to her exacting specifications. Alice could not leave something this important in the hands of her surviving family; she intended to prepare for her death with the same controlling eye and attention to detail she employed in all aspects of her life. Her choice of location ensured that her final resting place would serve as the backdrop to every sermon delivered in the small church. When the parishioners’ minds wandered, their eyes would be drawn to the vibrant heraldry, carved canopy, and pious figures carved into her burial site. She must have taken pleasure in the thought that the stone behemoth would ensure that generations to come would be continuously reminded of her life, her deeds, and, most important, her family.

Two sides of the tomb were nestled against the heavy walls of the church, but Alice could walk along the front and foot of her memorial to inspect every detail of the carving. The effigy of her body, swathed in a red dress and with her hands at her chest pressed in a prayerful position, was laid on a carved stone curtain painted black. Three small niches supported the tablet on which her effigy rested, and tucked into each recess was a small kneeling figure of a woman in a matching red dress. The figures represented her three beloved daughters, who could be told apart only by the small heraldic crest carved next to each one. Alice, like her peers, read heraldry as a second language. It took only a passing glance to know who was who, although she might well have lingered over the crest for her eldest daughter. She would want to ensure that there were no indications of her daughter’s disastrous second marriage. Alice had spent the last five years of her life desperately trying to sever any connections between her family and her disgraced son-in-law. She would never allow his badge to adorn the monument that would serve as the most prominent and enduring marker of her life.

Standing alongside her tomb, Alice looked down at the effigy of her own body with its long waves of hair cascading down around the shoulders. Her stone face was smooth and pale, revealing no sign of the passage of time; the carver had made her ageless. As Alice’s eyes moved up toward the top of the tomb, past the carved black-and-gold tablets that recounted her own two marriages and the noble positions held by each of her long-dead husbands, her gaze reached the top of the green-and-gold carved stone canopy that arched up over her recumbent figure. Four crowned griffins, the symbol of the Spencer family, peered out in different directions from pedestals at the base of the dome. The tomb was topped with Alice’s own coat of arms, flanked by supporters of another Spencer griffin, on the right, and the stag, a symbol of the Stanley family, on the left, representing her dear first husband. A countess’s coronet sat atop the coat of arms, reaching up to Heaven. Alice knew that someday soon her body would be interred in the base of that tomb. The monument reflected everything she wanted to be remembered for, presenting her carefully crafted legacy for the ages. But there had been far more to Alice’s life than any monument could portray.

Nearly 150 years earlier, Alice’s ancestors could only have hoped that a member of their family would someday hold such a high place in aristocratic society. The Spencers of the early 1500s were midland farmers, shrewd and lucky enough to grow their modest lands and enterprises over time. Alice’s grandfather William Spencer of Radbourn purchased the estate of Althorp in Northamptonshire, seventy-five miles northwest of London, in 1508 with money he had made in the sheep trade. At the time, the residence at Althorp was a large Tudor manor house, a two-story redbrick building with thick, exposed wooden beams and long, narrow windows. Though far from a lavish Tudor palace or the colossal estate Althorp would eventually become, it was a more spacious and comfortable home than most farmers in England possessed at the time. The high ceilings, private rooms, multiple fireplaces, thick roof, and decorative furnishings kept the Spencers warm in winter and set them apart from their neighbors.

The rules of feudal England dictated that land was the currency of power and the primary source of wealth. The ancient aristocracy passed their lands from one generation to the next and wielded power over tenant farmers, but men such as William Spencer, men with no titles, used their modest incomes to buy land when they could and thus gradually carved out their own small pockets of power. The monarch had the prerogative to grant land, which came with aristocratic titles as well, to families who had served the Crown. The arrangement made some families powerful, although not necessarily wealthy, and in turn bolstered their loyalty to the reigning monarch, an essential strategy for maintaining political stability. From the Crown’s perspective, however, it could often be more lucrative to sell land to families such as the Spencers rather than to grant the privilege of ownership to peers. So when a feudal king wanted to go to war, for example, selling land was a quick way to raise money. After 1536, when King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and placed all ecclesiastical lands in England under his jurisdiction, the Tudor king had a bounty of lands to distribute, either to ensure the loyalty of noble families or to sell to gentry families and bring cash into the royal treasury. But the aristocracy feared that if more families could simply purchase land rather than inheriting it and thus gain local power, the social and political supremacy of the peerage would be threatened.1

The Spencers would soon become one of the families the ancient nobility was worried about. William became Sir William in 1529, when he was knighted by Henry VIII. He died just three years later, in 1532, and his son, John, inherited Althorp and the other parcels and estates his father had acquired. A knighthood was not hereditary, so John, like his father and grandfather before him, hoped that one day the reigning monarch would decide to grant him the same title in recognition of his loyalty and as an acknowledgment of his family’s local influence. Capitalizing on the rich grazing lands he had inherited, John continued to invest in the sheep and wool trade, and by the middle of the century, he was one of the nation’s leading providers of wool, mutton, and sheep. In 1545, he married Katherine Kitson, the daughter of Sir Thomas Kitson of Hengrave Hall, Suffolk, a wealthy merchant. Eight...