When John Spencer, the 8th Earl Spencer, lay unconscious in a London hospital in the autumn of 1978 with bleeding on his brain, doctors told his wife to order a coffin. She refused. Instead, she sat by his bedside playing Madame Butterfly until he opened his eyes. For the 14 years that followed, she ran Althorp, the family estate, and the sales began.
Van Dyck portraits left the house. Gold made for the first Duke of Marlborough left the house. The family’s own papers, dating from the 16th century onward, were sold to the British Library. His son would later say that a fifth of 500 years of collecting had gone.
No one has ever published a list of what was sold, and the woman everyone blamed could not legally have sold a single piece of it. She was born Raine McCorquodale on September 9, 1929, in Mayfair, to Barbara Cartland, the prolific novelist who would write 723 romance books, and Alexander McCorquodale, an army officer from a printing fortune. Her parents divorced in the early 1930s, and her mother later married her former husband’s cousin. Raine remained the only child of the first marriage, the part of the story everyone had agreed to move past.
She was raised with governesses and sent to a school in Quebec during the war, where other girls kicked her with their boots. Back in England, she attended school in Bedfordshire and was often top of her class. Her mother criticized her appearance instead of her marks. She read Jung, Freud, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Marx.
She was forbidden Conrad. Everything Raine was later accused of at Althorp traces back through her mother. Barbara Cartland wrote 723 titles, dictated an estimated 8,000 words a day, and in 1976, the year her daughter married an earl, wrote 23 novels, a record for a single year. She was a Conservative councillor on Hertfordshire County Council and had the longest entry in Who’s Who by the early 1980s.
She had taken the most private thing in the world and turned it into a production line. Her daughter grew up inside that. When the English aristocracy later looked at Raine Spencer and saw someone who was loud where they were quiet, energetic where they were languid, and visibly pleased with her own effort, they were looking at a Cartland. In 1947, aged 18, she came out as a debutante and was named Debutante of the Year.
In July 1948, she married Gerald Leger, a Coldstream guardsman who would become the 9th Earl of Dartmouth. They were installed in a large Belgravia house with a staff of five. She was 18, married, titled in prospect, and entirely without anything to do. In her early 20s, she became the youngest member of Westminster City Council and stayed in local government for the next 17 years.
She sat on the town planning, parks, and personnel committees. She learned how a city was actually run from the inside. She had four children, William in 1949, Robert in 1953, Charlotte in 1963, and Henry in 1968, and kept working through all of them. She stood and lost in Lewisham South, a Labour-held seat, although this loss has been quietly upgraded to a win in more than one account of her life.
She was not elected there. Where she was elected handsomely was Richmond upon Thames at the Greater London Council election on April 13, 1967, topping the poll with 35,246 votes. She was returned again in 1970 with 29,591. Her subject was the built environment.
By the early 1970s, she was operating at the national level. Ahead of the United Nations conference on the human environment at Stockholm in June 1972, she was appointed one of four working party chairmen, tasked with producing a report on the human habitat. Her report was published as “How Do You Want to Live? ” Three years later, she chaired the UK effort for European Architectural Heritage Year.
Then there is Covent Garden, the single hardest fact to reconcile with everything that came afterwards. She chaired the joint development committee presiding over plans for the wholesale redevelopment of the market district with offices, hotels, shops, and a leisure center. In July 1972, the public inquiry inspector approved the scheme. Protesters had already besieged her house.
Within weeks of the approval, she resigned, saying the theory behind the project was well-meaning but that no individuals or bodies representing the public supported it, and that the proposals were out of date and out of tune with public opinion, which feared a faceless concrete jungle. She said she was unable to work for a project in which she no longer believed and which could do unnecessary and irreparable damage to an historic part of London. Four years later, the woman who had walked away from a chairmanship rather than concrete over Covent Garden married into a house that needed more money than it could raise, and the country would spend the next four decades calling her a vandal. John Spencer was born on January 24, 1924, the only son of the 7th Earl Spencer.
He was a captain in the Royal Scots Greys, landed in France the day after the D-Day landings, and led the operation that liberated two French villages. He was equerry to George VI and then to the young Queen Elizabeth until 1954. He married the Honorable Frances Roche at Westminster Abbey in 1954 with the Queen in the congregation. They had five children: Sarah, Jane, a son named John who died within hours of his birth in 1960, Diana in 1961, and Charles in 1964.
Then it fell apart in the ugliest available way. Frances left in 1967 for Peter Shand Kydd. The children were not allowed to go back to London with their mother that Christmas. The divorce came in 1969, and John was granted custody after his former mother-in-law went into court and gave evidence against her own daughter.
Diana’s memory, given in her own voice, was of seeing her father slap her mother across the face while she hid behind a door and listened to her mother cry. By the time Raine arrived, those four children had already lived through the destruction of one family. They were not defending a happy home from an interloper. They were defending the wreckage of one.
On June 9, 1975, the 7th Earl died and John succeeded. What he inherited was magnificent and close to unaffordable. Althorp is a Grade I listed house dating from about 1508, standing in roughly 13,000 acres, and with it came estate duty, which in the mid-1970s could take more than three-quarters of what a man left behind. The family was already selling to pay it before Raine was anywhere near the house.
He had met Raine, then Lady Dartmouth, in about 1971. In 1972, chairing the Heritage Year Committee, she appointed the newly separated Earl to head its youth panel. The affair is dated to 1973. The Dartmouths divorced in 1976.
On July 14, 1976, at Caxton Hall, Raine married the 8th Earl Spencer and became mistress of Althorp. His four children were not there. They had not been consulted. Sarah was 21, Jane 19, Diana 15, and Charles 12.
The nickname arrived almost at once: Acid Rain. The children would chant the old rhyme at her and stop deliberately short of the second line. The name is recorded in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on their father, which tells you how completely the joke won. Nearly 50 years later, most people who know anything about this woman know that and nothing else.
The house she married into was not neutral ground. The children had been moved into Althorp only the previous year out of Park House on the Sandringham estate, where they had grown up and where their brother had died. They had lost their mother in 1969 and the only home they remembered in 1975. In July 1976, a woman they had not been asked about arrived with a title and a great many opinions.
They closed ranks. Ingrid Seward, who has spent a career close to this family, said without much softening that all the Spencer children behaved very badly to Raine. It was not only Diana. They were purposely ganging up on her.
The campaign ran for the better part of two decades, and it was not always petty. In September 1989 at Althorp, Diana pushed her stepmother down the stairs. She said so herself on tape in her own voice years later, and the line she used was not apologetic. She pushed her down the stairs, she said, and it gave her enormous satisfaction.
What the children were meeting was a personality with no reverse gear. She went to the hairdresser once a week, and the bouffant was famous and unmoving. She had a huge, trilling charm and a wicked sense of humor. She also had, in the words of an acquaintance, the manner of a person whose eyes were always looking for someone more interesting in the room.
Both of those things were true at once. But the children’s problem with her was never really taste, whatever they said later. It was that their father adored her. He had come out of the wreck of 1969 into a marriage with a woman who ran at life full tilt, who organized him, who took an interest in the house, and who quite plainly made him happy.
To four children who had watched their mother leave, that was not a stepmother. That was a replacement. Underneath all of it sat the actual problem. Althorp cost a fortune continuously, and it did not have one.
The Persian rugs were rotting. The Victorian lampshades were coming apart. The 7th Earl had already offered the seat furniture from the family’s London house to the nation in lieu of tax. Raine looked at that and did what she had done at Westminster and at County Hall and at Covent Garden: she treated it as a campaign.
She would raise the money, modernize the house, open it properly to the public, and make it pay. The only question was what she intended to sell to do it. The selling started before she had power. The first great picture left Althorp in 1977, when the Earl was in perfect health.
That year, the National Gallery bought Van Dyck’s portrait of Lady Elizabeth Thimelby and her sister by private treaty directly from Earl Spencer. The painting had been in the family since 1682. In the same year, the Gainsborough portrait drawings commissioned by the first Earl Spencer were sold as well. This matters more than any other single fact in this story.
Raine Spencer could not sell anything at Althorp. English aristocratic property does not work that way. The contents belonged to her husband. He owned them, negotiated them, signed for them, and took the money.
A second wife has no standing in a patrilineal inheritance whatsoever. Every single object that left Althorp between 1976 and 1992 left it because the 8th Earl Spencer decided that it should. Nor was he inventing anything. In 1892, the 5th Earl sold some 40,000 rare books from the Althorp Library.
In 1924, the 7th Earl sold a Titian. In 1977, the same year as the Van Dyck, the V&A took the Spencer House seat furniture offered in lieu of tax. Three generations across nearly a century had done the same arithmetic and reached the same answer. What the family had never had was somebody standing next to the transaction who could be blamed for it.
The Spencer collection was not a country house assortment of ancestors in wigs. It included five Van Dyck apostles, a Guercino that had begun as an altarpiece, an Albani bought by Sarah, first Duchess of Marlborough, a Carlo Dolci bought in 1740, a Salvator Rosa bought by the first Earl in 1761, a Castiglione that Horace Walpole had written about, and a pair of solid gold ice pails, 22 carat, made for the first Duke of Marlborough himself. This was a collection of national importance in a private house, and the state’s answer to the question of how a private family was supposed to hold on to it was to tax the family until it could not. Raine’s own account of the years that followed was given to a magazine many years later and is one sentence long: she got flak, but it was what John wanted to do.
The defense has real force. It also has a limit. Between 1976 and 1992, the pace and the scale of the selling changed after the autumn of 1978, when the man who owned everything stopped being able to run anything. What she had was influence over a man who adored her at a moment when he was physically diminished and reliant on her.
That is not the same as legal power. In the summer of 1978, the Earl and Countess Spencer were two years married. He was well. Then one day in September, in the courtyard at Althorp, he fell down.
He was taken to Northampton General with what Raine later called a cerebral hemorrhage, and the first prognosis was as bad as a prognosis gets. At some point, when things were at their worst, she told his brother-in-law matter-of-factly that she would be out of Althorp one way or another. Read one way, it is a woman making arrangements over a dying man. Read the other way, it is a woman who had been married two years, knew exactly what her position was worth without him, and was saying so out loud without self-pity.
He did not die. Raine insisted on moving him to the National Hospital in Queen Square in London, where he underwent a long operation. After that, he lay in a coma. How long is one of those facts the record cannot settle.
Andrew Morton says several months. One biography says six agonizing weeks. The same book’s own chronology says four months. What is not in dispute is that for a very long time the 8th Earl Spencer was not there, and through all of it, his four children were kept out of the room.
Diana’s account in her own voice on tape is flat and unforgiving. She said they saw a side of Raine they had not anticipated because she basically blocked them out of the hospital and would not let them see their father. Morton records that nurses were instructed to prevent the children from seeing the earl as he lay helpless in his private room. Diana’s own estimate of how long the exclusion lasted was about 16 weeks.
There is a defense for the exclusion, given by the journalist Penny Junor. Raine thought it would be better if he had peace and rest and no agitation. He was a man with a bleed in his brain and a family that had spent two years at war with his wife. She made a decision about who came through the door.
Whether that was clinical judgment or possession is not something the record can settle. Then the situation got worse. In November, an abscess on his lung burst. He was moved to Brompton in South Kensington, and for a second time his life hung in the balance.
He had contracted double pneumonia, and then contracted it again. By his own later count, the doctors put him on the death list eight times. They kept at his wife to order a coffin. She would not order it.
What she did instead was find a drug that was not lawfully available anywhere in the United Kingdom. There was a compound sitting in a laboratory at Heywood’s Heath in Sussex that had not finished its clinical trials. It was a German-made antibiotic called Asicyclin, not yet tested or marketed in Britain. A friend of hers, Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, later Duke of Portland, was chairman of the British arm of Bayer.
She asked him to use his connections to get hold of some. He put it on a train to Victoria. The drug was unlicensed for sale or use in the UK, and it was going to be administered to an earl in a London hospital by doctors who would carry the consequences. She persuaded them.
Anthony Holden, writing in 1981 while John Spencer was alive to contradict him, put it plainly: the Earl was very near death when the Asicyclin was administered, and he soon showed remarkable signs of recovery. The drug later completed its trials and was permitted onto the British market. Alongside the pharmacology, there was the other thing she did which cannot be measured. She sat by the bed.
She talked to him. She played him Madame Butterfly over and over, refusing to let him slip away. One afternoon, with the Puccini going in the background, he opened his eyes and was back. Her mother had coached her on the wording.
“Do not say, Johnny, please get well,” Barbara Cartland told her daughter. “Say, Johnny, you will get well. ”
Raine’s description of that period was given to the Daily Express. She was a survivor, she said, and people forgot that at their peril.
There was pure steel up her backbone. Nobody destroyed her, and nobody was going to destroy Johnny so long as she could sit by his bed. He came home. The dates conflict, as everything in this story conflicts.
Morton has him released in January 1979. The Telegraph has him back at Althorp by May. The figure most often used is eight months in hospital. What came home was not quite the same man.
Diana’s verdict was blunt: he basically changed character. He was one person before, and he was certainly a different person after. He never entirely recovered. When he walked his daughter up the aisle of St.
Paul’s in July 1981, he was unsteady on his feet. Speaking to the writer Ralph Martin in 1985, he said it about as clearly as a man can say anything. Without Raine, he said, he would not be there. He would be dead.
Raine had saved his life by sheer willpower. The doctors had him on the death list eight times, and they kept at her to order a coffin. They said he would need a miracle to survive. Raine was his miracle.
From the spring of 1979, the 8th Earl Spencer was a man who owed his life to his wife, who had never entirely recovered, and who was an active and consenting party to everything that left the house. For the 13 years that remained to him, whatever Raine wanted done at Althorp was what happened at Althorp, and what Raine wanted was money. The art trade had a phrase for what was happening at Althorp in the 1980s: a small stream. The Spencer pictures, the Art Newspaper said looking back in 1990, had passed through Wildenstein’s across the decade, quietly and privately.
Almost none of it went under the hammer with a catalogue and a public record. It went through dealers by negotiation, one at a time. Here is what went, as far as anyone has ever been able to establish. In 1979, Guido Reni’s “Liberality and Modesty” was sold by the 8th Earl to Wildenstein and Company in New York.
In 1981, Andrea Sacchi’s painting of the musician Marc’Antonio Pasqualini being crowned by Apollo went through the same dealers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for £270,000. It hangs there now. 1982 was the heaviest year. In a single block sale to the London dealers Colnaghi went five Van Dyck apostles, a Van Dyck oil sketch of St.
Jerome, Francesco Albani’s “Holy Family and Angels,” Carlo Dolci’s “Marriage of St. Catherine,” and Guercino’s “St. Luke Painting the Virgin. ” In the same year, Reynolds’s portrait of the painter Angelica Kauffman went to the dealer Artemis.
Castiglione’s “Noah’s Sacrifice,” the picture Horace Walpole had admired, was sold and is now in Los Angeles. In 1984, the Marlborough ice pails, the pair of solid gold vessels made for the first Duke, went to the British Museum. Salvator Rosa’s “Witches at Their Incantations,” bought by the first Earl in 1761, went to the National Gallery. In the same year, the family sold its own memory: the Spencer manuscript archive, the political papers and correspondence running from the 16th to the 20th century, went to the British Library.
The Friends of the National Libraries put £5,000 towards it. The price paid was not recorded. In 1985, Henry Holland’s original architectural drawings for Althorp itself, about 185 of them, followed the papers into the British Library. In 1986, the British Museum bought a Chelsea ewer and basin of about 1750.
Set out in a list, it is a decade of steady, careful, professionally handled dispersal running through the best dealers in London and New York, ending mostly in national collections. It is not looting. But it is also unmistakably the sound of a house being fed to the market a piece at a time, and every year of it fell inside the 14 years when the man who signed the papers had never fully recovered from a bleed in his brain and had a wife who had saved his life. Charles Spencer’s accounting, given years later, was a single sentence.
Between 1976 and 1992, 20% of the contents of Althorp were sold, which equated to a whole century of his family’s five centuries of acquisitions disappearing. And here is the thing that has never been resolved. There is no list. There is no published inventory of what left Althorp in those years.
No catalogue, no schedule, no audited total. There was no lawsuit, no forensic audit, no heritage body intervention. No export licence was deferred. The single most quoted figure in the whole affair, that £15 million of Althorp’s contents were sold, comes from an essay in a magazine written 17 years after the Earl’s death and is offered as an impression rather than an account.
About £2 million went into redecorating Althorp, and the Earl’s son would say the result had the wedding cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco. Take the defense first. The house Raine walked into in 1976 was tired in the specific expensive way that great houses are tired. She put in central heating, new bathrooms, and carpeting.
She made a building of about 1508 habitable by the standards of the late 20th century, and Sir Roy Strong, then director of the V&A, publicly praised her restoration. Then she set about making it earn. They realized they had to bring in up to half a million pounds a year. The house was let for events, there were musical soirees, she learned Japanese to attract business, and there was a gift shop and a tea room.
It did not work as well as she needed it to. It did not help that she banned wheelchairs from the house, or that she could not conceal what she thought of the paying public. Coming out of the private wing one day and finding a group of tourists in her way, she said it out loud: “Ah, the dreaded public. ”
The decoration itself became the scandal that the sales oddly never quite did.
There was heavy new gilding and new wallpaper. Critics called the result a bordello, an Arab gin palace, a Moroccan brothel. Her stepson supplied the line that outlived all of them about the wedding cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco. And in the middle of it, she performed one act that the family has never forgiven.
She took down a grand portrait of Robert, first Baron Spencer, and hung in its place a life-size oil painting of herself in her prime. There was a limit, she said, to how many solemn-looking men in wigs you can have looking down on you. Then there is the ledger. The Telegraph, setting it down in her obituary, recorded that the early sales raised over £2 million and that the money went where it was supposed to go, to the estate duties.
That is exactly the argument the defense has always rested on, and it appears to be true. But the paper did not stop there. Later proceeds, it recorded, went on a house in Mayfair, on three properties at Bognor, and on a Rolls-Royce. At some point in those years, somebody in the house overheard a row.
Richard Barber’s biography of Charles Spencer records it through a source who was there. They could hear Lord Althorp in the library accusing his father and his stepmother of destroying 500 years of family heritage. The man who owned every object in the building had already decided whose side he was on, and had done since a hospital bed in South Kensington in the winter of 1978. The 8th Earl Spencer died on Sunday, March 29, 1992.
He was 68 years old. He had gone into a hospital in St. John’s Wood on the 21st of March with pneumonia, and reports were good. Prince William, who was nine, had been in to see his grandfather the day before the family left for a skiing holiday.
Then the Earl had a heart attack and died. The scene that follows is the most repeated in this entire story and the least verified. The account says that two days after the death, the new Earl Spencer put his stepmother out of the house, that she could take nothing she could not prove was hers, and that her staff were dismissed without notice. It says a maid packed her clothes into Louis Vuitton suitcases, that Diana saw the Spencer emblem on the cases and declared them family property, that the whole wardrobe was repacked into black bin liners, and that the sacks were kicked down the stairs.
That version comes from two biographies written six and 15 years afterwards. It is not contemporary reporting. The Telegraph, when it came to write her obituary, hedged the central detail explicitly and said Diana had allegedly ordered the cases replaced with black bin liners. Raine never publicly confirmed any of it.
Charles Spencer has never publicly discussed it. What sits underneath the anecdote is firmer and in its way worse. She was reportedly refused permission to remove furniture from Althorp unless she could prove purchase. It is the demand of a man who believes that things have been going out of his family’s house without a record and who has decided that nothing else is leaving without one.
And that is where the whole story finally arrives. No itemized public account of the dispersal has ever been produced, and nobody has ever been able to point to a private one either. There is no inventory of what left Althorp between 1976 and 1992. No legal action and no audit.
The dispersal of a nationally important collection happened entirely in private, was conducted lawfully by the man who owned it, and left behind no document that anybody has ever been able to point at. She left with what her husband had wanted her to have, reported as £4 million and a house in Mayfair. She was 62. She had been Countess Spencer for 16 years.
After one more marriage, she would go back to that title and die with it 24 years later. In the country at large, she had one reputation and one only: she was the woman who emptied Althorp. A year after the eviction, a note arrived asking whether they might be friends and whether she would come to lunch. It was from Diana.
The account of it comes from Raine Spencer standing in a coroner’s court in December 2007 under oath at the inquest into the princess’s death. Asked whose idea it had been, she answered twice with the same three words: at her instigation. Diana had written her a note saying, “Please let us be friends, and will you come to lunch? ” And from then on, the relationship became very close.
Consider what that took from a woman who four years earlier had been pushed down a staircase by the person now writing the note. Diana always said, Raine told the court, that Raine had no hidden agenda. So many people, because she was so popular and so world-famous, wanted something out of her. It was a very draining life.
Diana would ring up and come round at very short notice and sit in her house on the sofa. She wanted them to be seen in public together, which Raine said was so nice, because after years of feuding she wanted to make it quite clear that they were close friends. By 1993, the Princess of Wales knew exactly what it was to be the outsider in that family, to have your motives assumed, to be discussed rather than asked. She had spent her adolescence doing it to Raine and her adulthood having it done to her, and she recognized her stepmother the moment she became her.
The friendship ran until Diana’s death. There were lunches in London, Hermès scarves as presents, and a photographed table at the Connaught Grill in March 1997, five months before her death. It also produced a job. At a lunch in 1996 with Mohamed Al-Fayed, Diana said, half joking, that it was terrible about Raine and what could be done.
Al-Fayed said he would give her a job. A fortnight later, he invited her onto the board of Harrods International, and she stayed on it for the rest of her life. In between there had been one more marriage. In 1993, after a courtship of 33 days, she married a French count, sold the wedding pictures to a magazine, and divorced him two years later, after which she went back to being Raine, Countess Spencer, and stayed enormously close friends with him.
No other Spencer ever reconciled with her. None of them came to her wedding, and when she died, none of them came to that either. In July 2010, the 9th Earl Spencer sold £21 million of Althorp’s contents through Christie’s in a public, catalogued sale across three days. The old masters evening sale raised about £19 million on its own.
A Rubens picture of a commander being armed for battle made £9,041,250, the second highest price ever paid for a Rubens at auction. A Guercino made £5,193,250, an artist record. Then came the attic sale and the Spencer carriages, 757 lots. The total across the week came to £21,762,288.
The purpose was a £10 million restoration, including a nine-month job re-roofing the house with over 50 tons of lead. Every word of that justification is true, and it is the same justification his father and stepmother had offered. He was praised for it where they were condemned. He explained himself to Country Life.
His aim with the sale, he said, was to make Althorp pulsate with life again. And then the sentence that ought to end every account of Raine Spencer ever written: “I find the sales cathartic. ”
Raine Spencer died on October 21, 2016, aged 87, at her London home after a short illness. The announcement was made by her eldest son from her first marriage, the 10th Earl of Dartmouth.
The funeral was private at her own wish. Her four Leger children were there. No Spencer came. She was buried at Mortlake in Richmond, and a headstone was put up in 2021.
The following July, her own possessions went through Christie’s, 287 lots, and made £1,951,938 for her family. The top lot was a gold, ruby, and diamond brooch by Van Cleef & Arpels that Lord Spencer had given her in 1980, which made £221,000. Further down the catalogue, past the French furniture, were the clothes. The sea-blue Balmain ball gown she had worn on television went for £500.
The scarlet Balmain went for £250. The whole contents of a life went under a hammer with a catalogue and a public record of every price, which is a courtesy the collection at Althorp never once received. And somewhere in a Northamptonshire house that she made warm and habitable and hideous, and that her stepson made beautiful again with the proceeds of a sale three times the size of hers, the walls still have the gaps in them. Nobody has ever published a list of what went.
There was a woman who sat by a bed in 1978 and refused to order the coffin. And there is a house that was saved twice by selling pieces of itself. Between those two facts is a story that England decided it already understood.