Although it seems like Harry is breaking with tradition, in many ways the Prince is actually just following in the footsteps of his maternal family. Photo / Netflix
A headstrong redhead causing scandalous rifts with the Royal family and courting publicity all the while. No, not just Harry, but many of his great-great-great-great-ancestors, too.
In his Netflix show, Harry has been reasserting how much he is his “mother’s son”, making decisions that are “all heart”. And although it seems like Harry is breaking with tradition by starting a new life in California, in many ways the Prince is actually just following in the footsteps of his maternal family, the Spencers, living out a rebellious legacy that stretches back through the centuries.
“The Spencers are difficult,” the Queen Mother once observed to a friend, according to Tina Brown’s biography The Diana Chronicles. And that’s certainly one way of putting it. Harry’s family tree on the Spencer side is full of unconventional disruptors who craved glamour, challenged the status quo and ripped up the royal rule book.
“Harry’s lineage is a really fascinating mix of royalty, aristocracy and glamorous, rich heiresses,” says historian Dr Carolyn Harris, author of Raising Royalty: 1000 Years of Royal Parenting. “The house of Spencer can be traced all the way back to sheep farmers in medieval times.” But there’s royal blood in the Spencer clan, too.
“He is descended from not one, but two illegitimate children of King Charles II of England: Henry Fitzroy and Charles Lennox, via two of his great-great-grandmothers, Adelaide Seymour and Rosalind Bingham,” adds Harrison.
“Then also on his mother’s side there are American links, so in a way, Harry is getting back to his roots by settling in California. Diana’s maternal great-grandmother, Frances Ellen Work, was an American heiress who divorced her husband in 1891 on the grounds of desertion. It was a high-profile case that appeared in all the newspapers at the time.”
Harry clearly identifies very strongly as a Spencer, Harris points out, “and we can draw many parallels between the unconventional path that he’s taken and that of his ancestors, as well as the clever way many of them used the media to their own advantage”.
For example, one of the first Spencers to cause a royal ruckus was Robert Spencer, the 2nd Earl of Sunderland. In the 1670s, he orchestrated King Charles II’s secret pact with France and also became one of James II’s closest advisers, known for his diplomacy, but also his duplicity.
“Nearly 300 years on, my father would talk about him with an ashamed, resigned chuckle,” Charles, the present Earl Spencer, writes in The Spencers: A Personal History of an English Family. Robert was known to be “cunning, supple [and] shameless” with “a restless and mischievous temper, and an abject spirit”; Harry may be starting a new life in California, but maybe the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
With her rose-gold hair and blue eyes, Lilibet Diana is “very Spencer-like”, according to Harry – just like him and his mum. But that’s not all the youngest member of the Montecito Mountbatten-Windsors stands to inherit from that side of the family. Just as, one day, her young cousins may show traits of the Middleton clan, so Lilibet will undoubtedly find genetics playing a part in her life, just as they have in Harry’s.
“Harry is extremely proud of his Spencer heritage, as was his mother, who spoke to him about it at great length when he was growing up,” says Ingrid Seward, royal commentator and editor of Majesty magazine. “The Spencer family are known for being outspoken, all action, leading with the heart, not the head. Not only does Harry look very Spencer with his red hair, but he calls his aunts Sarah and Jane his ‘red aunts’.”
With the bushy ginger beard he is currently rocking, Harry certainly resembles his ancestor John Spencer, the 19th-century politician who was known as the “Red Earl”. But the Spencer trait of auburn locks – and shaping royal history – can actually be traced a few generations back, to Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.
Played by Rachel Weisz in the Oscar-winning film The Favourite, Sarah started as a maid in the court of James II and became the most powerful woman in England through her manipulative control of Queen Anne. In 1700, Sarah arranged the marriage of her distant relation Charles Spencer, the future 3rd Earl of Sunderland, to her favourite daughter, Anne.
Centuries before the modern Diana and Prince Charles wed, Sarah attempted to marry her favourite granddaughter – the original Lady Diana – to the broke Frederick, Prince of Wales, with a promise of a £100,000 dowry. The plan fell through after King George II was warned by his prime minister to find a wife “less politically threatening” for his son.
And Harry’s current family feuds have antecedents. Sarah ended up falling out with her granddaughter Anne and disinheriting her grandson Charles, 5th Earl of Sunderland. Alexander Pope said of her: “Full sixty years the World has been her Trade,/ The wisest Fool much Time has ever made./ From loveless youth to unrespected age,/ No Passion gratify’d except her Rage.” Harry would probably say she just needed a good therapist.
Then there’s Diana’s great-great-great-great-aunt Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. The daughter of John, 1st Earl Spencer and his wife, Margaret, the teenage Georgiana became a sensation in 18th-century London. But she found that her cold, older husband was not as interested in her as everyone else (remind you of anyone?)
Like Harry in his youth, Georgiana had a reputation for hard partying – she was a gambling addict with a laudanum dependency who was always having to borrow money. Scandal turned to calamity when Georgiana became pregnant by the future prime minister Charles Grey and she was banished to France.
But Georgiana set the fashions of the day – popularising French hair powder and tall hairstyles among other trends – and also campaigned tirelessly for the Whig party, while the newspapers documented her every move. “You live so constantly in public you cannot live for your own soul,” her mother, Lady Spencer, wrote to her.
The Spencer tendency to choose passion over propriety is strong in Diana’s immediate family, too. Her mother, the heiress Frances Roche, was quickly disillusioned with country life as a young aristocratic mother. “I’m so bloody bored with opening village fetes,” she told a friend. It was no wonder that the fiery Frances wanted more from life. “She was very attractive and blonde and sexy with such joie de vivre and fun about her,” a friend told Brown for The Diana Chronicles.
By the 1960s, Frances escaped to London and started an affair with married bon vivant and wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd. She separated from Diana’s father and fought for custody of the children but lost, partially due to her own mother, Baroness Fermoy, who testified against her. Social outcasts, the Shand Kydds eventually moved to the coast of Scotland.
Diana’s older sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale also inherited this rebellious Spencer spirit. According to Brown’s book, she was kicked out of boarding school and once rode her horse into her grandmother’s living room. Sarah had her own romance with Prince Charles, and introduced her younger sister to him.
Then there’s Diana’s younger brother Charles, who has seven children from three marriages and is known for speaking his mind. At his speech at Diana’s funeral, he famously pledged that “we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men, so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly, as you planned”.
His daughters are certainly singing their own tune. The model Kitty Spencer, 31, recently wed multimillionaire businessman Michael Lewis, 63 (five years older than her father). “Sometimes I feel like my family should be on The Jerry Springer Show,” she once said. “From the outside, the structure looks so dysfunctional. However, every single member of my family is part of my happiness.”
So, what clues can we glean about Harry’s future from how his famous forebears ended up? Although – like Harry – many of them were banished or exiled or moved abroad, nearly all of them ended up coming back to the royal court. Whether it’s dynasty or destiny, there’s no doubt we can expect many more surprises from this Spencer.