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

A Woman of Influence

The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England

Vanessa Wilkie

To Matt, who has been there for every iteration of this

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, all of Europe used the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar. In October 1582, most countries in western Europe shifted to the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII. To make the conversion, they skipped ahead ten days and then resumed consecutive dating in a twelve-month cycle. After that, English dating, which remained in the old Julian system, was ten days behind the rest of western Europe. For example, June 20 in France was June 10 in England.

To complicate matters further, continental Europe advanced its year on January 1, whereas England took March 25 to be the first day of the new calendar year. For example, an English woman would date a letter 10 March 1592, whereas a Spanish woman would date a letter written on that same day 20 March 1593. Countries that used the Julian calendar were said to use the Old Style (O.S.) of dating, whereas those on the Gregorian calendar were in the New Style (N.S.), and when people wrote letters between England and the European continent, they would frequently mark their dates O.S. or N.S. to help keep things straight. England remained on the Julian calendar until 1752.

In this book, the Old Style dates are retained, but New Years is taken to be January 1, so years have been modernized, while days and months remain in the old style. Dates are rendered in the Americanized format of month-day-year, for example, December 31, 1594.

Spelling and punctuation were not standardized in England until the eighteenth century, and even then, standards evolved gradually. In this book, printed book titles are represented as they appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the spelling and grammar of all quotes from printed works and manuscripts have been modernized and standardized according to todays conventions. Abbreviations have been expanded and modernized. All spellings have been converted to standard American English conventions.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England used a currency system based on pounds (), shillings (s), and pence (d):

1 = 20 s

1 s = 12 d

The UK and Ireland shifted to a decimalized currency system on February 15, 1971.

There is not a simple or clean formula for converting money in the past to modern values. Inflation is just one complication, but money did not buy the same things in sixteenth-century England that it buys today, not only because there were different commodities but because commodities had a different value. For example, in preindustrial feudal Europe, a horse was essential for both tilling fields and transportation, whereas today horses, though prized, serve a different function in society and are therefore valued differently.

Monetary value, however, can still be a useful marker. For this reason, monetary amounts are listed in this book as they were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and are followed by a modern equivalent estimate generated by the online Currency Converter: 12702017, provided by the National Archives in the United Kingdom. This amount is also presented in current US dollars based on the online XE Currency Converter. These amounts should not be read as precise but are merely intended to provide a rough comparison for modern readers.

Mark what radiant state she spreads,

In circle round her shining throne

Shooting her beams like silver threads:

This, this is she alone,

Sitting like a Goddess bright

In the center of her light

I will bring you where she sits,

Clad in splendor as befits

Her deity.

Such a rural Queen

All Arcadia hath not seen.

John Milton, Arcades

For Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby, c. 1632

T oday, the Spencer family name is known the world over, and Althorp, their ancestral estate, is the home of the ninth Earl and Countess Spencer. A small island in an ornamental lake on Althorps grounds is the final resting place of the earls sister, Diana, Princess of Wales. When the summer days turn warm and before the autumn chill sets in, visitors flock to the colossal estate to pay their respects to the Peoples Princess, tour the Spencer home filled with works of art and artifacts, and daydream about what it might have been like to grow up in one of the worlds most famous houses or even to have one of the worlds most famous last names. Some visitors push their imaginations deeper into the past, to the Althorp of the eighteenth century, when it was the childhood home of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, who in recent decades has come alive again as a protagonist in books and films. Georgiana certainly made a splash in her era and Princess Diana remains a beloved figure to this day, but it was another young Spencer woman who first put the family on the map.

When Alice Spencer was born at Althorp on May 4, 1559, the estate was nothing more than a modest manor home in the middle of some of the best pasture lands in the northern hemisphere, and its owners were a family of sheep farmers. Alice was born the youngest daughter of a country knight, and by the age of twenty-one, she had become among the first of her family to join the ranks of the English aristocracy by marrying Ferdinando Stanley, heir to the earldom of Derby and great-great-grandson of King Henry VII. Her last name may have changed and her social circle broadened, but she never forgot where she had come from.

It can be tempting to see Alices life as an origin story of a family that is now a dynasty, but to look solely through that lens would be to miss so much. Alice Spencer, who used the title Dowager Countess of Derby for most of her life, lived fully and assertively in her own time, maintaining an unwavering devotion to preserving and elevating the status of the people she loved.