Author: Spencer, William Robert
Biography:
SPENCER, William Robert (1770-1834: ODNB)
The younger son of Lord Charles Spencer (1740-1820), MP for Oxfordshire, and his wife Mary Beauclerk (1743-1812), he was born at Kensington Palace, London, on 9 Jan. 1770 and baptised on 7 Feb. (He was the uncle of Frederick Charles Spencer, q.v.) Educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford (matric. 1786), he did not take a degree but enjoyed fashionable society and established a reputation as a man of the world and a wit. On 13 Dec. 1791, probably at Walworth, Durham, he married the young widow of Count Franz Sales von Spreti, Susan Jenison (1700-c. 1840), daughter of Count Francis Jenison Walworth, chamberlain to the Elector Palatine. They had seven children. Spencer’s translation of Bürger’s (q.v.) Leonora was widely admired and reprinted; his later collections of mostly occasional verse were reviewed as polished but rather facile. The Year of Sorrow (1804) reflects on a number of deaths in 1803, including that of his wife’s widowed mother at Heidelberg, Germany. He also wrote a play, Urania (1802), for Drury Lane. With a growing family, Spencer gave up his seat in parliament to accept a position as commissioner of stamps in 1797, but in 1825 he moved to Paris to live more economically. There he died on 23 Oct. 1834; he was buried at Harrow church on 13 Nov. GM has a full, informative obituary which includes details about the later careers of the Spencers’ children but not of Susan Spencer. The ODNB evidence that she died at Mannheim, Germany, on 5 Feb. 1840 is quite compelling. (ODNB 21 Nov. 2024; Alumni Oxonienses; ancestry.com 21 Nov. 2024; findmypast.com 21 Nov. 2024; MR 45 [1804], 288-92; GM [Jan. 1835], 98-9)
Other Names:
- W. R. Spencer