RENAISSANCE WOMAN
As the chatelaine of Althorp – the 500-year-old Northamptonshire estate where Diana, Princess of Wales spent her childhood – Countess Spencer balances respect for history with a forward-thinking outlook and a strong social conscience. By Frances Hedges
We step inside the glorious Althorp House with its chic chatelaine, the remarkable Countess Spencer
We are perched in the back of Countess Spencer’s Land Rover Defender, hurtling through Althorp’s vast grounds in the hope of coming across some newborn lambs. It is one of those gloriously crisp, clear days of early spring when the sky is a perfect cerulean blue, and despite the stubborn chill in the air, our photographer is determined we take advantage of the bucolic setting. The Countess (‘Karen, please’), full of energy even after six hours of being on set, has offered to drive us to one of her favourite spots on the estate, where, true to her promise, we find a whole flock of sheep, gambolling about obligingly.
Clad in a pair of borrowed wellies (worn at Karen’s insistence, after she took one look at my hopelessly urban footwear and whisked me straight to the bootroom), with afternoon tea awaiting me back at the house, I feel as though I have stumbled into an episode of Downton Abbey – except that our hostess has none of the airs and graces of Lady Mary Crawley. Karen is, after all, a country girl at heart, born in Canada to a father who worked in – and loved – the National Parks. So it’s perhaps no wonder that she is at ease in these verdant Northamptonshire surroundings, happy to tramp through the mud in a pair of jodhpurs and riding boots, or lark about on the grass with Otis, Sasha and Hunter, the family’s mischievous Labradors.
This summer marks the first time since her marriage in 2011 to Charles, 9th Earl Spencer, that Karen will be able to embrace rural living all year round. ‘In a way, life here is about to begin,’ she says, explaining that she will soon be based permanently at Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral seat. For the past eight years, she has been dividing her time between this stately home and LA’S Pacific Palisades, where she moved when she was 23 and previously shared a household with her first husband, the film and television producer Mark Gordon. Although the pair divorced in 2003, she has continued to spend at least half the year in California to be close to their two daughters – until now, when ‘the youngest is about to go to college in New York and I’m finally going to be able to live here fulltime’. She and Charles have a sixyearold daughter of their own, Charlotte Diana (her middle name is a tribute to Charles’ late sister Diana, Princess of Wales, whose final resting place is in the grounds of Althorp), and Karen can think of no better place for her to grow up. ‘Charlotte’s having a little taste of what my childhood was like – that freedom to roam, but within an enormous park with a wall around it,’ she says. ‘As a parent, it’s fantastic.’
The couple made headlines in 2016 when they installed a bouncy castle in the state diningroom – a grand, soaring space whose design was originally modelled on the ballroom at Buckingham Palace – so that Charlotte and her
‘THE PORTRAITS ON THE WALLS AND THE FURNITURE AROUND ME ARE A CONSTANT REMINDER THAT I AM A TINY PART OF A VERY BIG LINEAGE’
friends would have somewhere to play. ‘You try having a house full of kids for the weekend when it’s pouring outside – I bet you’ll want a bouncy castle too,’ says Karen, laughing, though she gives her husband the credit for the original idea. ‘Charles was already renting one – I just thought it would be more sensible to buy it outright!’ Either way, its presence is testament to their shared belief that, despite its 500-year history, Althorp is, as Karen puts it, ‘a house to be lived in, not a museum’. The rooms may be immaculately preserved, each bed fully dressed and every gilded frame free from dust (‘You need a special Hoover to clean them, and some serious scaffolding to reach the top’), but this is also quite clearly a cherished family home: there are photos of all the children, including a charming shot of Charlotte on her sixth birthday, and one of the tables is laid for a dinner party that the couple are hosting after the shoot. ‘My favourite thing about life here is the English country-house weekend, which is a completely foreign concept to those of us from North America,’ says Karen. ‘When I moved in, I made them a bit more glam: we switched dinner on Saturday nights to black tie, because everyone wants to dress up – the venue demands it. Plus, it’s a great excuse for me to wear the Spencer jewellery…’
That jewellery – along with Althorp’s 650 works of art, 10,000 books, Roman busts, Meissen and Sèvres porcelain, 17th-century chinoiserie and countless other treasures – is steeped in history. Anyone who has seen the Oscarwinning film The Favourite will be fascinated to learn that a diamond necklace Queen Anne once gave as a gift to Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (played by Rachel Weisz in the movie) is part of Karen’s collection, having been passed down through Sarah’s grandson, John Spencer, to whom she left her vast personal wealth. ‘I love that it all goes back to an unconventional woman who was ahead of her time,’ says Karen, gazing up at a huge oil painting of the Duchess that hangs in the Saloon at Althorp. Does she ever feel oppressed by the presence of all those ancestors, I wonder. ‘I think it helps keep everything in perspective,’ Karen responds. ‘The portraits on the walls and the furniture around me are a constant reminder that I am a tiny part of a very big lineage. I hope that I can make a small contribution to the continuation of that legacy.’
Karen is being modest: she has already, of course, had
an enormously significant impact on life at Althorp. Quite apart from the small personal touches she has brought to the home (‘I’ve done some rather major feng shui – if you were to look behind the some of the paintings you might be surprised by what you find,’ she tells me cryptically), she is a superb ambassador, leading tours of the house and grounds for guests, and is now planning to extend her influence beyond the estate and into the community. ‘A family like ours, with the space and the incredibly lucky position that we have, has a responsibility to effect positive change,’ she says. Her focus will be on the cause that is closest to her heart: the emotional wellbeing of society’s most vulnerable children. ‘I’m interested in what can be done to support caregivers, because we know that their wellbeing ultimately has an effect on the children they look after.’
Although she is still in the exploratory stages of any local humanitarian efforts (‘I’m just starting to put my toe in and see where I might be of service’), Karen’s track record suggests that she won’t give up easily. She originally became interested in childcare systems as a young mother, when she attended parenting classes based on the teachings of the late orphanage founder Emmi Pikler. Intrigued by her progressive approach, which centred on the value of supportive relationships and independent development to child health, in 2003 Karen made up her mind to visit the Pikler Institute in Hungary. ‘I’d recently got divorced and all of a sudden I’d gone from being with my two daughters 24/7 to having a lot of free time when they were with my ex-husband,’ she explains. ‘I had a week to myself while they were on vacation and lots of people were telling me I should go to this or that spa, but I thought, “What do I really want to do?” So I went to Budapest.’
It turned out to be the best decision of her life: inspired by the work of this small residential-care centre, which was making drastic improvements to children’s wellbeing, Karen founded her own non-profit organisation, Whole Child International, in 2004. Her mission was to take some of the institute’s simplest, most effective practices, such as keeping all of the children in the same, family-like groups each day, and implement them where help was needed the most. ‘Between 2004 and 2010, I must have visited 140 orphanages in 27 countries,’ she recalls. ‘I needed to understand what the problem looked like in all different places and cultures.’ She was surprised by the initial resistance she encountered – some organisations refuse to work with orphanages at all, arguing that they are open to abuse – but faced down the naysayers with her signature determination. ‘I feel quite comfortable defending the fact that, as long as there are children living in residential centres, I’m going to advocate for them receiving the highest-quality care possible,’ she says.
It would certainly be hard for any critic to argue with Whole Child’s findings. Data collected in 2009 from the charity’s work in Nicaragua, where it ran a governmentsupported initiative based at the El Divino Niño children’s home in Managua, showed that the participants had a healthier weight and height for their age than those in other forms of care, and were much less likely to be aggressive, withdrawn or intellectually disabled. It’s a sign of the scale of Karen’s ambition that she didn’t stop there. ‘With those findings, we could have just patted ourselves on the back,’ she says, ‘but I said, let’s keep on measuring, because that’s how you learn.’ When she identified a drop-off in improvements over the long term, she insisted on delving deeper into the research to create more sustainable change. The result was the development of an eight-month university-certificate training programme for caregivers and policy-makers that is now being implemented in El Salvador as part of a large-scale scheme with funding from the Inter-american Development Bank. ‘It will be a comprehensive overhaul of the country’s childcare system,’ says Karen.
I ask if she is ever daunted by the prospect of overseeing such colossal projects while remaining jointly responsible for the running of Althorp. ‘I think when I first came to the house, I had enough experience of hiring teams and managing challenges to know that I would be able to figure it out,’ she replies. Like every working mother, though, she occasionally struggles with finding a balance between her job and looking after her children. ‘Being passionate about what you do is a blessing and a curse,’ she acknowledges. ‘I work 60 hours a week, but I tend to start early before Charlotte’s up – that buys me a little more time so that I can be more present after school. I’m not the perfect savvy homemaker who stays at home with her kids, but at the end of the day I would hope that my daughters find something they really care about too. You have to lead by example.’ Hers is a fine example indeed, and surely one that would make every generation of the Spencer family proud. Althorp House and Park (www.spencerofalthorp.com) is open to visitors from 1 July to 31 August.