Tatler Dynasties: Meet the Spencers

The princes’ first cousin is the much less publicity shy Lady Kitty Spencer, an adorably accented three-time Tatler cover star, Dolce darling and Bulgari ambassador, ever present at London’s smartest events. Raised in South Africa with her equally eligible brother Viscount Althorp and the glamorous society twins Amelia and Eliza, recently the covers of Tatler’s March issue, they’re the children of Earl Spencer and his first wife, waifish ex-model (shot vampishly for the cover by David Bailey in 1990) Victoria Lockwood.

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Lady Amelia and Lady Eliza Spencer are the March cover

By Rebecca Cope

Charles, the ninth Earl, a journalist and historian, has written several books and been married three times – he has seven children altogether. But he’s still probably best known for his electrifying address, pillorying the press and royal family, at his sister’s funeral. (He has a way with grand gestures, famously evicting his much disliked stepmother ‘Acid’ Raine Spencer from Althorp on his father’s death, and reportedly kicked her possessions down the stairs in bin bags.) At the time of his Westminster Abbey diatribe, he was midway through divorcing Victoria – their marriage having crumbled due to his affairs (one of his lovers unhelpfully sold the story to the News of the World) – and her struggles with addiction and anorexia.

In the years since, the Spencers’ public image has improved exponentially – to the extent that the only recent flurry of news stories about them came in 2016 when Karen, the new Countess Spencer, installed a bouncy castle in the dining room at Althorp for their then three-year-old daughter Charlotte. All very sweet.

Land
The magnificent Van Dyck and Lely-strewn Althorp House, where the Spencer family have been based since 1508. There’s also the 13,000-acre estate, properties in Northamptonshire, Norfolk and Warwickshire and Spencer House in London, which is let to the Rothschilds’ RIT Capital Partners. It was a bounty set in traction by the earliest Spencers, who made so great a fortune as sheep farmers in the 15th century that by the reign of James I, the first Lord Spencer was said to be the richest man in England.

Ladies Di

Diana, Princess of Wales, succeeded where another Lady Diana Spencer failed. Her namesake, the second daughter of Charles Spencer, the third Earl of Sunderland, is remembered for a failed arranged marriage to Frederick, Prince of Wales in the 1730s. Her grandmother, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (of The Favourite fame) tried to marry her in a secret ceremony in the lodge of Windsor Great Park to George II’s heir apparent, but was thwarted by the Prime Minister Robert Walpole. But she wasn’t the only Spencer that might have been Princess of Wales – Diana’s older sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale dated Prince Charles first (a fact that is today well known thanks to the fourth season of The Crown).

Here is a visual history of the Spencer family in action, from the 2nd Earl Spencer to the current, the 9th.