ALTHORP has been home to the Spencer family for nearly 500 years, and contains a fascinating variety of pictures, furniture and ceramics, as well as boasting some fine interiors. Like many great country houses, it has benefited from the discriminating and varied collecting of generations of occupants, their marriages and chance provisions. But the Spencers have also had the knack of going to the right people; its collection of portraits is particularly fine, and justly famous. As a record of a family, and as a record of English portraiture, it is outstanding. The roll-call of names - Rubens, Van Dyck, Reynolds, Gains-borough - will be familiar to everyone. But there are numerous rare and beautiful paintings by lesser-known artists which will appeal to casual visitors and connoisseurs alike. In the decorative arts, from carpets to candelabra, there is much which is distinguished. Here are reflected not just the enthusiasms and idiosyncrasies of their collectors, but invariably the course of the arts and the epochs in which these pieces are found. Likewise, the house itself is not the product of any one period, but has changed over the years. Its re-modellings naturally show the prevailing taste of the time, woven into a broader synthesis. The true medium for harmony, however, has been the house's continual ownership and occupation by the same family.

The House
There has been a house at Althorp since, at the latest, the beginning of the sixteenth century. Sir John Spencer acquired a 300-acre estate around Althorp in 1508; and his grandson, another Sir John, had made Althorp the principal Spencer home by the time of his death in 1586. Previously, the family had lived primarily at Wormleighton, in Warwick-shire, much of which was to be destroyed in the English Civil War. The house the first Sir John erected at Althorp provides the shape for the one today, and consisted of an enclosed courtyard with projecting wings on the south side. There are no surviving illustrations of this first structure (although windows were uncovered during general repairs in the 1950s). It is presumed to have been unaltered until Dorothy, long-widowed wife of the First Earl of Sunderland, roofed in the courtyard and installed the grand staircase across the central axis in 1660-62. The house was then of red brick. However, for the well-travelled Second Earl of Sunderland it was both unfashionable and unequal to his status as court power-broker. He introduced an Italian architect who set about 'classicising' the façade. Weldon stone Corinthian and Composite columns were added, and a balustrade placed on the elevation. In the upstairs west wing he transformed the great hall - the ubiquitous living space common to Elizabethan houses - into the long gallery. Outdoors, Le Nôtre, of Versailles fame, laid down the designs for the garden. His plans were brought over from Paris, and included a partial draining and in-filling of the moat. As the historian John Evelyn wryly noted at the time: 'The House or rather Palace at Althorp is a noble pile in form of a half H, built of brick and freestone à la moderne; the hall is well, the staircase excellent; the rooms of state, galleries, offices and furniture such as may become a great prince. It is situated in the midst of a garden exquisitely planted and kept . with rows and walks of trees, canals and fishponds .'. The next additions were carried out by the Fifth Earl of Sunderland in about 1730-32, when he decorated the hall. A Palladian design was drawn up by Colin Campbell. However, he died in 1729, and it was left to Roger Morris to carry out the work. In 1772, part of the roof fell in. Years of benign neglect were compounded by the First Earl Spencer's prior interest in the construction of his London mansion, Spencer House. Only after his son's accession was an overhaul considered.

Henry Holland
The architect taken on was Henry Holland, whose first commission had been for Brooks's Club, a favourite meeting place for the Whig aristocracy. The politically active Spencers, as founder members, had long been Whig supporters, but they had been isolated from power by a decade of Lord North's discredited Tory rule. This ended in 1770 and heralded a change in fortunes for both patron and architect. Architecture often reflects political values, and Holland's espousal of a freer mixture of French neo-classical and native tradition had endeared him to his sponsors, who were tired of the Establishment's neo-Palladianism. In the politically schematised climate of the time, this mattered. After Brooks's Club, Holland's commissions came in quick succession. While at Althorp, he also worked on the Prince Regent's Marine House at Brighton (later Nash's Xanadu-like Pavilion), and on a re-design for Carlton House. At the outset, the Earl wrote: 'We have got Mr Holland here who has brought his plans with him. I have a notion they would be very clever ones . but the Quomodo is the difficulty. I must be content with making the apartments we live in weatherproof and saving the house from tumbling down.' The external treatment given to Althorp reflected both the Earl's finances and fashionable imperatives. Rather than cover the existing walls in white brick, Holland substituted 'mathematical' or rebate tiles, so-called because of their precision fit, flush-mounted to look like brick. The tile appears to be a cosmetic outgrowth of a weather-proofing tile, which Holland also experimented with at Brighton. Holland also added simple pediments to the north and south fronts, corridors to the projecting wings, and new dressings in the Roche Abbey stone from Yorkshire, and pilasters in local Kingsthorpe stone for the front entrance. The roof was also lowered, and the chimneys constructed anew. On the outside, the house is much today as Holland decreed, characterised above all by conscious restraint and a lack of ornament. The style is party dictated by Holland's desire to respect Caroline and Palladian antecedents; but also by his innate Englishness. There are classical and French elements, but they are subservient to the overall modesty of the scheme. Internally, Holland's precepts were tempered by practical concerns. He relocated the state rooms to the west wing of the ground floor (in a reversion to pre-Palladian practice). Low ceilings confined his scope for grandeur, but not that for domestic convenience. The Long Library was extended and the gallery painted. The then Lady Spencer praised the scheme as 'the image of comfort - so convenient, so cheerful, so neat, so roomy, yet so compact .' How deliberately the Holland alterations responded to family directives on this score is not clear. Certainly, after the completion of Spencer House a few years previously, the Spencers had at their disposal, in the heart of London, one of the grandest mansions. Inevitably, with their involvement in public life too, the family's social life devolved there. Althorp, by contrast, best provided space and repose. Holland's last act was to extend the house to the east with offices screened by shrubbery. He undertook this landscaping himself, much to the fury of his assistant Lapidge, an understudy to Lancelot 'Capability' Brown - who was also Holland's father-in-law. The work was finished smoothly enough, but it had been stalled by other difficulties. The Earl had bargained for modest alterations; Holland, unswayed by client considerations - the 'Quomodo' - wanted a more extensive scheme. Mid-way through, in the best builder-developer tradition, he had therefore advanced money in order to complete - but with interest. This seems to have become accepted by the second half of the eighteenth century, and there were dozens of sub-contractors to pay. Holland's final bill came to £20,257, less five per cent commission. The Earl paid, but only through that familiar aristocratic recourse, the disposal of a rotten borough (Okehampton), and another property, Chilworth Manor in Surrey. Holland's general scheme was barely touched for a hundred years. Two libraries on the north-east corner came - and went - according to the demands of book-buying Earls. The present gardens, including the oval pond, were laid out in the 1860s by W.M. Teulon. Then in 1877 the Fifth Earl had J. MacVicar Anderson add the State Dining-Room, and so remove the anomaly of cooking and eating in opposite wings. He also enlarged the Saloon and opened up the west and north ranges more or less into the continuous reception suite seen today.

Althorp by John Vorsterman, 1677. With the original red brick before refacing. The gardens and grounds are laid out in the geometric French style to plans by Andre Le Notre who designed the gardens at Versailles. To the right is Holdenby House, where Charles 1 was imprisoned and arrested.

Spencer Hose, London [Left] c. 1760. English School. Looking across Green Park with Buckingham House on the right

Spencer House
Spencer House, the last great mansion in London still in private hands, is the outstanding surviving example of the decorative talents of James Stuart. Built in 1756-65 by the Hon. John, later First Earl Spencer, who wanted a home worthy of his wealth and ambition, it was constructed by John Vardy under the direction, and possibly the design, of Col. John Gray, secretary of the Society of Dilletanti. Although the exterior is grand enough in a neo-Palladian manner, the house became instantly famous for the suite of first floor rooms decorated by Stuart. Dubbed 'Athenian Stuart' even within his lifetime, Stuart was the pioneer of the Greek Revival in Britain, and for ten years after his return from Greece and Italy in 1755, he was a serious rival to Robert Adam. His rooms at Spencer House have been described as 'the most magnificent interiors of eighteenth-century London', unsurpassed for the dazzling quality of the fittings and the unity of architecture, furniture and decoration. Drawing heavily upon the buildings he had documented abroad, Stuart constructed a ballroom like a Roman palace; a painted room in the Roman arabesque style, called a 'phoenix' by Arthur Young; a music room; the Rubens Room; a dressing-room with fantastic pineapple-capitalled columns, and throughout furniture and paintings in situ. Not all is flamboyance though. On the contrary, Stuart anticipated much of what was to come in Britain; an interest in the antique, and the embrace of classical forms which Adam was to make his trademark. His own career, however, never developed its full promise. In 1924 Spencer House was leased, and much of the furniture along with the mahogany doors, was removed to Althorp. The main pieces are identified in the room descriptions.