The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer

One of the most powerful women of Tudor and Stuart England, Alice Spencer (1560–1637)—an ancestor of the late Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales—was born to well-to-do sheep farmers and rose to become the formidable matriarch of one of the most prominent families in British history. The story of her ascent is the subject of A Woman of Influence: The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2023), the first book by Vanessa Wilkie, the William A. Moffett Senior Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History at The Huntington.

Through her marriage to the 5th Earl of Derby, Alice enjoyed modest renown, but it wasn’t until her husband’s sudden death that she and her family’s future changed forever.

Faced with a lawsuit from her brother-in-law over her late husband’s estates, Alice raised eyebrows by marrying England’s most powerful lawyer, Thomas Egerton (1540–1617), who would later become 1st Baron Ellesmere. Together, they were victorious in their legal pursuits. Alice also devoted attention to securing appropriate husbands for her daughters, increasing her family’s land holdings and securing bright futures for her grandchildren. But they would not completely escape scandals, as Alice’s son-in-law, the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, committed a series of sexual offenses that shocked the nation and led to his execution in 1631.

Wilkie—who earned her Ph.D. in British history from the University of California, Riverside, before joining The Huntington in 2013—tells the full story of Alice Spencer Stanley Egerton for the first time in her vividly narrated and meticulously researched book, which is the product of her many years of immersion in archival materials related to Alice at The Huntington and beyond.

I talked with Wilkie about her experiences at The Huntington that led to her writing about Alice Spencer and how they have shaped the crafting of her groundbreaking book.

How did you first learn about Alice Spencer? And why did you choose to write about her and her three daughters?

I first met Alice as a supporting character in Cynthia Herrup’s phenomenal book A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven. Herrup was the first historian to thoroughly narrate, contextualize, and unpack the Castlehaven trials, and I became curious about the family of women at the center of her story.

What materials at The Huntington did you use while conducting research for your doctoral dissertation on Alice Spencer?

I used two archives of family papers: the Ellesmere Collection, which contains materials from six generations of the Egerton family, and the Hastings Collection. The Huntington’s founder, Henry E. Huntington, bought the Ellesmere manuscripts in 1917—one of his earliest archival purchases from the U.K.—and the Hastings papers in 1927, just before his death. Alice and her daughters married into these families in the early 17th century, and two of her daughters were influential early matriarchs of each family. I could not have done this research without these two collections, and they remain two of the most used archives at The Huntington.

Once I combed through every document—legal briefs, correspondence, even astrological charts—that had anything to do with Alice, her daughters, and their kin, I then turned to the 16th- and 17th-century rare book collections. I also relied on The Huntington’s enormous general collections that contain scholarly monographs published in more recent decades, and centuries, to help me flesh out their lives and world. And I started chatting with and learning from all the early modern history and literary scholars who come to conduct research at The Huntington. The Huntington’s documents and rare books are great resources, and just as valuable is the community of scholars here.

Were there curators at The Huntington who helped as you delved into the materials?

Mary Robertson, who preceded me in my role at The Huntington, taught me to read early modern handwriting in her paleography seminar. Sue Hodson, then-curator of literary manuscripts, co-taught the seminar and taught me about watermarks. And Steve Tabor, curator of rare books, answered questions for me when I was a graduate student and didn’t quite understand how to move from using manuscripts to systematically working through printed sources.

I didn’t fully understand at the time, but now I certainly know, that there were several archivists and book catalogers who made my research possible—some still work at The Huntington and others have long departed. Not to mention all the Reader Services staff who deciphered my confused requests and ensured that I had material to work with every time I set foot in the reading room.

Doing this research as a graduate student felt like such a solo mission, but in hindsight, I can see all the experts who were around me, helping me to find my way through.

How did your approach to these materials differ from your scholarly predecessors in the field?

Quite frankly, I focused on the women. I didn’t want to find a space for women in a preexisting historical narrative. I wanted to start with a woman and build the world around her.

Others have done this before, but they didn’t do it with Alice. They hadn’t looked at the Castlehaven trials exclusively from the women’s point of view, and they hadn’t yet written about how the connected aspects of gender, status, and age influenced the trials. Some historians had argued that the trials were an anomaly and therefore you couldn’t really use them to discern a larger outcome. The more I looked at the lives of these women before the trials, the more I came to understand how they influenced, and survived, the outcomes.

Alice Spencer and members of her family were notable patrons of significant poets and playwrights of their era: Edmund Spenser (who claimed to be a distant relative), William Shakespeare, John Marston, Ben Jonson, and John Milton. Could you describe what connections you found between Alice’s family fortunes and their patronage of writers?

Literary scholars have long associated Alice and her daughters with these Renaissance writers, and I didn’t discover any new or unknown secret texts. But what I did discover is that these women, and their families, commissioned literary entertainments, called masques, when they had major legal victories or political achievements. I found a pattern for when these families relied on literary entertainments—by Marston and Milton, in particular—and how they entwined literature, performance, and their family success. This aspect of the work opens up a new model for people to consider when other families commissioned entertainments.

As you dug deeper into Alice’s story, your archival research extended beyond The Huntington. What were some of the other places you visited, and what sources did you encounter there?

I visited UCLA’s Clark Library; traveled across the country to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.; and went across the Atlantic to the British Library in London and the National Archives in Kew. I also visited various local record offices around the U.K. If “my ladies” owned land in a certain area, then I found items about them in the archives there. I read legal documents, marriage settlements, wills, deeds, acts of Parliament, letters, account books, poetry, and death certificates.

Alice spent most of her life in the village of Harefield, in Middlesex. I made two visits there to see her tomb and the almshouses, or homes for the poor, that she commissioned in her will. The people of Harefield were unbelievably generous to an American scholar who showed up and wanted to know about their local patroness. In 2016, the two women who lived in Alice’s almshouses opened their homes to me and shared stories of their own lives. (One of the women had a framed picture of George Clooney in her living room, which, as you can imagine, sparked all kinds of conversation.)

Your research introduced you to current members of the Stanley family who live at Knowsley Hall, where Alice Spencer dwelled when she was the Countess of Derby. Could you tell us how that came about and what sources the family made available to you?

In 2015, Stephen Lloyd, the private curator for Lord and Lady Derby at Knowsley Hall, showed up in my office at The Huntington. He was here doing research and had read my dissertation about Alice and her three daughters. We got to talking, and in 2016, I found myself sitting in the state dining room at Knowsley Hall, built for a visit from King Henry VII, the very room in which Alice would have sat and hosted dinners when she lived there. It was surreal. The next day, I presented a paper about Alice and her family’s literary patronage at a conference Lord and Lady Derby hosted about their ancestors’ connections to Shakespeare.

Lord and Lady Derby also made their private library available to me, and I started doing research on a fantastically decorated manuscript made in the 1630s for Alice, which memorialized the death of her youngest daughter. I also spent time with the funeral account book for Henry Stanley, 4th Earl of Derby and Alice’s father-in-law, and a few other books in their collection. Lord and Lady Derby and Stephen Lloyd remain enthusiastic supporters of my work.

Your doctoral dissertation was structured thematically, and then, when you wrote your current book about Alice, you told her story chronologically. What made you decide to do this? And were there challenges you encountered as you made the transition?

I wrote my dissertation in thematic chapters because this allowed me to better engage with existing scholarly literature and frame how Alice and her daughters exemplified or defied historians’ common understandings about marriage, motherhood, religious piety, literary and political patronage, the Castlehaven trials, death rituals, and legacy building. My dissertation wasn’t about getting to know Alice and her daughters better. Instead, it focused on how looking at the relationships among them expanded the boundaries of what we know regarding the lives of early modern elite English women.

Later, I decided to write a narrative nonfiction book about Alice instead of an academic book. Doing so, I thought, would help a broader audience of readers learn about Renaissance England through the prism of Alice’s perspective.

As someone who has lived with Alice for a long time, recasting her life chronologically made me see her in completely different ways. I was able to track her as she aged and see her daughters come more fully into their own than I did when thinking about them more as case studies for various categories of historical analysis. They became even more human to me as I followed them through time.

But the transition from a thematic to a chronological approach was hard. Even though I had a structure outlined, piles of research, and all the major touchstones worked out, writing this book meant starting all over again, facing a blank computer screen. It also meant that the academic arguments had to take a backseat to the narrative, and I had never been taught how to write that way—in fact, I had been specifically trained not to write that way. This is where my agent and editor came in. They taught me how to turn Alice’s life into a story, and then they trusted me to piece it together.

Whenever I found myself slipping back into the comfort of academic argument in my writing, I thought about something my agent, Gráinne Fox, told me early on: “Imagine you’ve met some of your girlfriends for a glass of wine at the end of the day and you start by saying, ‘I had the best day in the archive. I found this great moment when ….’” There were so many times I had to stop typing, sit back, and just start talking aloud to myself to get the story back on track.

Now that you have finished your book, looking back on it, how has your perspective on Alice Spencer and her era changed? Why do you think she was so successful?

In hindsight, I see Alice as successful but brutal. She was steadfast, consistent, disciplined, and callous. And, through her, we can learn so much about how women could thrive and rise, and the price that people paid for this to happen. We also better understand how this aggressively patriarchal system could work for women like Alice. She was successful because she wanted to work within the system, and she found allies who would benefit when she did. I absolutely did not write this book to valorize her. She was not a trailblazer or a champion for anyone but her family and the Renaissance aristocratic status quo.

You can preorder A Woman of Influence: The Spectacular Rise of Alice Spencer in Tudor England from the Huntington Store.

Kevin Durkin is the editor of Huntington Frontiers and the managing editor in the Office of Communications and Marketing at The Huntington.