It was a lovely fall evening in November 1977. The Althorp estate, the ancestral home of the aristocratic Spencer family in Northamptonshire, was ablaze with lights. Charles, Prince of Wales, was staying there for a pheasant-shooting weekend, and a dance was being held to celebrate. Prince Charles had been casually dating Lady Sarah Spencer, but it was her younger sister, 16-year-old Diana, whom he asked to show him the mansion’s famed picture gallery. But Sarah would have none of it. “[Diana] was about to comply,” biographer Sally Bedell Smith writes, “when Sarah intervened and told Diana to ‘push off.’”
The next day, Diana and Prince Charles chatted during a shoot, and an amazed Diana had a revelation. “Why would anyone like him be interested in me?” she wondered, per Bedell Smith, “and it was interest.”
Prince Charles was far from the only royal to visit the Althorp estate. Over the centuries, the blue-blooded Spencers hosted Queen Anne of Denmark, Charles I, Princess Alexandra, and Queen Mary and George V. Today, Diana’s brother Charles Spencer, ninth Earl Spencer, owns the massive estate with its main house of more than 100 rooms, many smaller buildings, and 13,000 acres of land, including beautiful parks and gardens, as well as the private island where his famous sister is buried.
The Althorp Estate’s Beginnings
The first recorded mention of a place then known as “Olletorp” appears in the Domesday Book of 1086. Originally a small village, it had become deserted by 1505, due to the Black Death, as some historians believe. In 1508, John Spencer, whose family were wildly successful sheep farmers, wool traders, and landowners, purchased what is now known as Althorp for 800 British pounds from a family named Catesby.
Here, John, nicknamed “the founder,” built a moated red brick Tudor mansion. As subsequent Spencers earned riches, status, and titles, Althorp grew. In 1688, the original mansion was almost totally rebuilt and the parklands were redesigned.
“The house, or rather palace, at Althorpe is a noble uniform pile in form of a half H, built of brick and freestone ‘a la moderne’; the hall is well, the staircase excellent; the rooms of state, galleries, offices, and furniture, such as may become a great prince,” diarist John Evelyn wrote, per Althorp: The Story of an English House. “It is situate in the midst of a garden, exquisitely planned and kept and all this in a park walled in with hewn stone, planted with rows and walks of trees, canals and fishponds and stored with game.”
Over the years a Palladian-style stable block designed by architect Robert Morris, a falconry, and a charming villa for the head gardener were added. But the most dramatic, and some believe unfortunate, renovation occurred in 1788. Architect Henry Holland covered the original red Tudor brick of the main house with beige tiles, and Corinthian pillars, from Roche Abbey stone in Yorkshire, were also added. The current earl Spencer regrets the loss of the red brick. “I have never, ever heard anyone call the exterior of Althorp beautiful,” he writes in the informative and amusing Althorp: The Story of an English House, published in 1998.
But overall, the Althorp estate continued to please those who visited. “Althorp is a fine seat, in the middle of a charming park, planted with several fine groves,” one visitor wrote. “’Tis moated, but the moat was drained, and turned into a garden so fine, that Monsieur La Quinteney took the plan for some of his work at Versailles.”
The Spencer Family’s Art Collection at Althorp House
Most impressive was the grand hall, which served as the entrance to Althorp. Known as Wootton Hall, the towering space features large paintings of equestrian pursuit, painted by the artist John Wootton. One historian described it as “the noblest Georgian room in the county.”
But the star of the Althorp estate was and is the sun-kissed picture gallery, a legendary 115-foot-long hall that features original Tudor-era wood paneling. “I defy anybody to walk into that room and not catch their breath,” Charles Spencer writes. “It was designed to provoke that reaction.”
Displayed in the hall are dozens of historic portraits, including Anthony Van Dyck’s triumphant War and Peace. “So many arched, moist-eyed beauties offering to please the egos of the Spencer males, so many self-assured political operators under the luxuriant periwigs of self-confident men,” Tina Brown writes of the gallery in The Diana Chronicles. “At one end there’s a bevy of Charles II’s mistresses painted by the court artist Sir Peter Lely…. There is something unsettling about the uniform vivacity of the mistresses and chatelaines on the wall.”
The eccentric, cultured Spencers’ art collection became legendary, as did George John, second Earl Spencer’s, priceless library of more than 100,000 books. But during the Victorian era, as the Spencers faced financial challenges, many of these treasures, including much of the library, were sold. In 1936, a portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein was also sold.
Althorp Finds an Advocate
But the Althorp estate found a protector in Albert Edward John (Jack) Spencer, seventh Earl Spencer, known as the curator earl. A fastidious, serious man derisively nicknamed “Jolly Jack,” the seventh earl obsessively guarded his estate’s treasures, once forcing distant relative Sir Winston Churchill to put out his cigar lest he set fire to the precious books he was studying.
“My grandfather dominated…Althorp,” Charles Spencer writes. “He combined the authority of his inherited statue with the assuredness of encyclopedic knowledge. He could recite not only the creator of every piece of furniture, but also how much it cost, when and where it was repaired, as well as stating from which room in which Spencer property it had originated.”
In 1953 Jack opened the estate to the public, an increasingly common money-making measure during the 20th century. When his son and heir, Johnnie, brought his new bride, Frances, to visit Althorp, she was not impressed. She felt an “‘enormous sadness’ that was ‘strange…like you’re…locked in [a museum] after it’s shut,’” Bedell Smith wrote. Frances’s four children, particularly the youngest, Diana and Charles, felt the same way.
Princess Diana and Charles Spencer’s Teenage Years at Althorp
“Althorp seemed such an old man’s house,” Charles Spencer recalls, “reflecting my grandfather’s Edwardian tastes, in a chilling time warp, complete with the permeating smell of Trumper’s hair oil and the ubiquitous tocking of Grandfather’s clocks.”
Curious and mischievous, Charles and Diana grew up in the relatively cozy (only 10 bedrooms) Park House on the Sandringham Estate. When they went to visit their grandparents at the Althorp estate, Charles recalls being scared. His sensitive sister felt similarly.
“For the young Diana Spencer, this long noble heritage was not so much impressive as terrifying. She never relished visits to the ancestral home of Althorp,” Andrew Morton writes in Diana: Her True Story—in Her Own Words. “There were too many creepy corners and badly lit corridors peopled with portraits of long-dead ancestors whose eyes followed her unnervingly.”
To boot, the Althorp estate was said to be haunted. According to their great-aunt Margaret Douglas-Home, her best friend in childhood was a wisp of a girl in gray slippers who would chat with her for hours. “When we had finished,” Douglas-Home recalled, “she would just drift away, through the door.”
There was one happy room in Althorp. Known as grandmother’s sitting room, it was the favorite room of Cynthia, Countess Spencer, the children’s beloved, kindly grandmother. Preserved to this day, it features charming blue frescoes and has an elegant, feminine feel absent in the rest of the house.
Cynthia died in 1972, and Jack followed in 1975. Johnnie Spencer was now the eighth Earl Spencer and Althorp was his birthright and burden. “When I was 13 we moved to Althorp in Northampton,” Princess Diana told Morton. “That was a terrible wrench, leaving Norfolk, because that’s where everybody who I’d grown up with lived.” (By then, Frances and Johnnie were divorced, and Johnnie got custody of Diana and Charles.)
Diana never became particularly fond of the Althorp estate, but she found ways to amuse herself. She and Charles would play in the pool Johnnie installed for them and explore the vast ground in Charles’s blue beach buggy. “On summer days she would practice her arabesques on the sandstone balustrades of the house,” Morton writes. “When the visitors had gone she danced in the black-and-white marble entrance hall, known officially as Wootton Hall, beneath portraits of her distinguished ancestors.”
While Diana danced, Charles and the staff would watch through the keyhole. They were impressed. Diana also loved hanging out with Althorp’s eccentric and inclusive staff, particularly in the kitchen. “Diana even used to cook for the staff,” cleaner Betty Andrews told Tina Brown. “She loved to make bread-and-butter pudding for us and rice or milk pudding for herself…. She would [also] put [her brother Charles’s] things in the washing machine and then iron them for him.”
But any sense of family at Althorp was shattered in 1977, when their new stepmother, Raine, became the mistress of Althorp. Strong-willed and controlling, Raine (the daughter of famed romance novelist Barbara Cartland), began to make drastic changes to Althorp. She banished the children (who nicknamed her “Acid Raine”) to the attic, turned the chapel into storage, and began to sell off Althorp’s treasures.
“Immediately a whirlwind of change ripped through Althorp as the new mistress endeavoured to turn the family home into a paying proposition so that the awesome debts the new Earl had taken on could be paid off,” Morton writes. “The staff were pared to the bone and in order to open the house to paying visitors the stable block was turned into a tea room and gift shop.”
Johnnie, jovial and work-shy, was more than willing to spend his days at the Althorp wine shop, where he gossiped with visitors about anything and everything. “Good day today,” he would tell the family happily after closing up the shop. “Two divorces and a hysterectomy!”
Checked out and suffering the after-effects of a major stroke, Johnnie did not stop Raine when she began selling artworks, including 11 Van Dykes, and antique furniture for low prices. Charles Spencer estimates that between 1977 and 1992, 20% of Althorp’s treasures were auctioned off.
Johnnie’s children were furious. “They minded terribly what she did to Althorp,” a Spencer cousin told Brown. “It was so overpolished and overgilded and over shiny. She ruled his life and spent his money.” Even Prince Charles attempted to reason with Raine, but he was forcefully shut down.
Charles Spencer’s Estate Management
When Johnnie died in 1992, Charles Spencer found that he had inherited a mess. The estate was losing almost half a million pounds a year and many of its priceless artworks had been sold. The cost of maintaining the grounds was staggering. He began to find new ways to turn things around, just as his famous sister was looking for a soft place to land.
After her separation from Prince Charles in 1992, Diana began looking for a refuge. She asked her brother if she could live in Althorp’s charming gardener’s house, a four-bedroom villa on the grounds, and he agreed. “At long last,” Diana told a friend. “I can make a cozy nest of my own.”
But only three weeks later, Charles reneged on his offer, worried about press intrusion and security issues. Diana was furious, and the two were temporarily estranged. Charles asserts that he did offer her other houses on the estate, but she never lived at Althorp again.
Princess Diana’s Final Resting Place
Diana would come home for good much too soon. After her death on August 31, 1997, the Spencers decided to bury Princess Diana at Althorp instead of the final resting place of her relatives, which was St. Mary the Virgin church in Great Brington. They decided to bury her on a small island in the middle of the ornamental Oval Lake. “[It would] act as a buffer against the interventions of the insane and ghoulish, the thick mud presenting a further line of defense,” Charles Spencer recalled. “We all agreed that, with its beauty and tranquility, this was the place for Diana to be.”
After her devastating funeral at Westminster Abbey, Charles Spencer later learned that an American broadcaster had stated that her final resting place would be Antwerp. Charles had to laugh. “Diana would have enjoyed that,” he said.
Prince Harry would never forget the burial at Althorp. “When the hearse finally got to Althorp the coffin was removed again and carried across the pond, over a green iron bridge hastily positioned by military engineers, to a little island, and there it was placed upon a platform,” he writes in Spare. “Willy and I walked across the same bridge to the island…. My body convulsed and my chin fell and I began to sob uncontrollably into my hands. I felt ashamed of violating the family ethos, but I couldn’t hold it in any longer.”
In 1998, Charles Spencer opened a Diana exhibition in the stables of Althorp, which was open to the public for a couple months in the summer and then toured the US during the remainder of the year. It was controversial, since it was a partially commercial operation, and closed in 2014. But in July and August, visitors can still pay their respects at a Doric temple in Diana’s honor that faces the island. The island itself is accessible only by boat, and only open to family and close friends.
Prince William and Prince Harry’s Relationship to Althorp
It has become a place of pilgrimage for her sons. In 2011, Prince William and Kate Middleton paid their respects on the island before their wedding. In 2017, Prince William and Prince Harry rowed over to their mother’s gravesite in honor of the 20th anniversary of her death.
Once they were there, the brothers had a deep conversation. “He said he thought Mummy was here. Meaning…among us,” Harry wrote of William in Spare. “I think she’s been in my life, Harold. Guiding me. Setting things up for me. I think she’s helped me start a family. And I feel as though she’s helping you now too. I nodded. Totally agree. I feel as though she helped me find Meg. Willy took a step back. He looked concerned. That seemed to be taking things a bit far. Well, now, Harold, I’m not sure about that. I wouldn’t say THAT!”
Five years later, Harry brought Meghan Markle to “meet” his mother, and she knelt down, pressing her hands against the gravestone, praying for clarity and guidance.
Althorp Now
Today the Althorp estate is open to the public in July and August. Charles Spencer has become an inventive caretaker, renting the property for events, appearing in documentaries about Althorp, writing numerous books, and embarking on much needed renovations. Guests can enjoy refreshments at the Stables Café and buy souvenirs from the gift shop.
An avid historian, Charles has also opened Althorp to archaeologists attempting to find a long-rumored lost Anglo-Saxon Village. Dr. Cat Jarman, who would later become Charles’s fourth wife, participated in the excavation, which has found a number of Roman-era artifacts. The two appear in the docuseries Secrets of the Dead and host the podcast The Rabbit Hole Detectives with Reverend Richard Coles. Just as his family has for 19 generations, so far he has found a way to keep Althorp, and Spencer history, alive.
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