A WOMAN OF INFLUENCE

How an Elizabethan farmer’s daughter single-handedly brought her family into the aristocracy through marriage, manipulation, and lawsuits.

At the beginning, Wilkie provides multiple family trees before delving into her intricate biography of a woman largely known through the legal documents that surrounded her life and marriages. Alice Spencer (1559-1637) was the youngest daughter of a wealthy sheep farmer in Althorp in Northamptonshire. In 1580, she was shrewdly maneuvered into marriage to Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, heir to the fourth Earl of Derby. At the time, she received a jointure, which “specified properties to be held in reserve for the wife if she were to become a widow, and she could draw income from those lands for the rest of her life.” In an era of strict social hierarchy, Alice had married into a family related to Queen Elizabeth I; thus, her place in the aristocracy was secured. However, this was also a time of Catholic persecution, with various family members suspected of Catholic leanings, and she and her husband had to be careful to curry favor with the Protestant queen as well as becoming conspicuous patrons of the arts. Upon her husband’s death, Alice wisely circumvented the legal challenges of her powerful brother-in-law by marrying Thomas Egerton, one of England’s highest court officials. To tighten the knots, she married off one of her daughters to Egerton’s son. Subsequent court challenges included garnering royal shelter for her other daughter after she scandalously accused her aristocratic husband and his servant of rape. As the author shows, Alice was remarkable in her ability to forge her own identity in a highly patriarchal era. “Alice was not a feminist,” writes Wilkie, “but she was an operator and a woman who was cognizant of the power that came with her social status, power she was eager to wield.”

Diligent archival research reveals a unique, independent Elizabethan woman.