He then takes up his tale anew with the first earl of Bedford.

Shirley in his famous Noble and Gentle men,' followed Wiffen and Brydges' Collins,' writing:

Although this family may be said to have made their fortune in the reign of Henry VIII. yet there is no reason to doubt that the Russells are sprung from a younger branch of an ancient baronial family of whom the elder line barons of Parliament in the time of Edward III.

were

But, in their Great Governing Families (1865), Sanford and Townsend dismissed the story with these sceptical words :

They may possibly have an old pedigree. Immense labour has been expended in tracing it by genealogists dependent on the family, and it now lacks nothing except historic proof (II. 25). It was, however, hardly fair to assert that, beyond 1509, "all is genealogical, i.e. more or less plausible guesswork." There is no reason to doubt the pedigree up to Henry Russell, returned, as we have seen, for Weymouth, under Henry VI. The association, therefore, of the Russells with the House of Commons, can be carried back at least four and a half centuries, while it is quite possible that men of their race represented in Parliament their fellow-burgesses five hundred years ago. It was thus appropriate enough that this great Whig name should have been so closely connected with the passing of the first Reform bill, which placed the balance of political power in the hands of that very class from which the Russells originally sprang.

1 3rd Ed., 1866.

VII

The Rise of the Spencers

THAT quaint old work Lloyd's State Worthies is responsible for this sketch of the first Lord Spencer:

He was the fifth knight of his family, in an immediate succession, well allied and extracted, being descended from the Spencers, earls of Gloucester and Winchester. In the first year of the reign of king James [1603], being a moneyed man, he was created baron of Wormeleiton in the county of Warwick. He had such a ready and quick wit, that once speaking in parliament of the valour of their English ancestors in defending the liberty of the nation, returned this answer to the earl of Arundel, who said unto him: "Your ancestors were then keeping of sheep"; "If they kept sheep, yours were then plotting of treason."

This 'scene,' which made, at the time, no small stir, took place on 8 May 1621. It is somewhat differently recorded by Dr. Gardiner, on the authority of a State Paper. According to him it was Lord Spencer who first reminded Arundel that two of his ancestors had been condemned to death, upon which Arundel, "stung by the retort replied, with all the haughty insolence of his nature":

I do acknowledge that my ancestors have suffered, and it may

be for doing the king and the country good service, and in such time as when, perhaps, the lord's ancestors that last spoke, were keeping sheep.

An interesting biography of this, the first Lord Spencer, is contained in Colvile's Warwickshire Worthies (pp. 712-721), the information being brought together from a number of sources. From Arthur Wilson's Life of James is quoted the panegyric :

Like the old Roman dictator from the farm, he made the country a virtuous court, where his fields and flocks brought him more happy contentment than the various and mutable dispensations of a court can contribute; and when he was called to the Senate he was more vigilant to keep the people's liberties from being a prey to the encroaching power of monarchy, than his harmless and tender lambs from foxes and ravenous creatures.1

2

The wealth, the hospitality, and the high character of this Lord Spencer were spoken to by divers writers, Camden terming him "a worthy encourager of virtue and learning.' He seems to have inherited the tastes of his ancestors, with whom Lord Arundel taunted him, and, like 'Coke of Holkham,' in later times, to have devoted himself to farming and breeding stock. Thus it was that Fuller, himself a Northamptonshire man, tells us, writing about the middle of the seventeenth century, that Warwickshire was famous for its sheep, to which the Spencers had owed their rise. They

were

most large for bone, flesh, and wool about Worm

1 This passage is also quoted in Collins' Peerage (1779), I.

357.

2 Ibid.

leighton [the Spencers' seat]. In this shire the complaint of J. Rous [d. 1491] continueth and increaseth that sheep turn cannibals, eating up men, horses, and towns; their pastures make such depopulation."

The first lord's grandfather and namesake, who died in 1586, had "employed his thoughts on husbandry as of most skill and profit to his country; for at his death he had numerous flocks of sheep and other cattle in his grounds and parks of Althorp and Wormleighton."

2

The haughty words of the head of the Howards referred to a fact of much interest, which was then, probably, notorious. Alone, perhaps, among the English nobility, the Spencers owed their riches and their rise, neither to the favour of a court, nor to the spoils of monasteries, nor to a fortune made in trade, but to successful farming. That a fortune

1 Fuller's Warthies. Compare the testimony of Dugdale below, p. 285. Fuller seems to be referring to Rous' Historia Regum Anglie (Ed. Hearne, 1745), pp. 120-137, where the writer denounces to Henry VII. the destruction of townships in East Warwickshire. It is interesting to note that Hodnell and Radbourne are among those he names.

Collins ut supra. Harrison had complained about this time. of the "enormity" of the aristocracy dealing with "such like affairs as belong not to men of honour, but rather to farmers or graziers; for which such, if there be any, may well be noted (and not unjustly) to degenerate from true nobility, and betake themselves to husbandry." A case in point is that of Thomas Lord Berkeley (1523-1533), styled by Smyth, the historian of his house, "Thomas the Sheepmaster." This bearer of a famous title is described by him as "living a kind of grazier's life, having his flocks of sheep sommering in one place and wintering in other places as hee observed the fields and pastures to bee found and could bargaine best cheape."

could then be made by a pursuit which now spells ruin, may seem at first sight strange; but there was a time in England, under the early Tudors, when sheep-farming meant a road to fortune, as it did, in our own time, for Australia's "shepherd kings." Those were days when a sheep's wool proved indeed a "golden fleece."1

The trend of historical study, of late, towards economics and social evolution, has caused much attention to be given to the great development of pasture, at the cost of arable, resulting from the large profits derived from the growth of wool.' For more than a century the face of the country was undergoing a vast change, and its economic conditions being profoundly modified, by the depopulation of the rural districts, where the highly profitable growth of wool was ousting the labours of the plough. In vain did Henry VII. and Henry VIII. alike endeavour to check this great movement by acts of parliament and other measures, backed though they were, in Mr. Corbett's words, "by all the preachers and thinkers of the day." John Spencer was one of those ordered by Wolsey to destroy his enclosures, and restore his land to tillage, in 1518 or 1519, but we find an act of parliament in 1534 still denouncing

"divers persons to whom God in His goodness hath disposed great plenty," studying "how they might accumulate into few

1 Harrison (circ. 1580) wrote, of "our great sheepmasters," that sometimes one owned 20,000 sheep.

2

* See, for instance, Mr. Leadam's Domesday of Inclosures (2 vols.), published by the Royal Historical Society.