(1737 - 1814), dau. of Stephen Poyntz; see John, 1st Viscount Spencer.
1763 - 4, 1769 - 70 see John, 1st Viscount Spencer
1792 - 4 see Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Henrietta, Viscountess Duncannon
Lady Spencer survived her husband over thirty years. Between 1792 and 1794 she returned to Italy, much of the time with her two remarkably spirited daughters, Georgiana and Henrietta, who had become respectively the Duchess of Devonshire and Viscountess Duncannon (later Countess Bessborough). Most of her later travels are described elsewhere, but there are additional references to Lady Spencer alone.
She looked 'unhappy and as if she wished to get away from herself' when she was at Lausanne in September 1792,1 but in Rome she continued the Spencer patronage, Flaxman producing for her thirty-one illustrations to the tragedies of Aeschylus between 1792 and 1795.2 In Naples she started the waistcoat club, knitting clothes for allied troops engaged in the French wars.3 The same month she was offering her apartment to Sarah Bentham, who found it too small.4 She spent some time with the Palmerstons, who arrived in Naples in mid-December, accompanying them to Capri,5 and later to Florence and Venice (25 - 27 May 1794).6 In March 1794 Thomas Brand discovered Lady Spencer in Salerno with Edward Poore, looking at manuscripts in the Benedictine monastery at La Cava; she 'has a general leave from the Pope to carry temptation into any religious house she pleases', wrote Brand, 'and to display her singular beauty to monks of all orders'.7
1. Connell 1957, 269. 2. Constable, Flaxman, 46, 99. 3. HMC Ailesbury, 259. 4. Bentham jnl.MSS (11 Nov. 1793). 5. Connell 1957, 300. 6. Holland Jnl., 1:126. ASV is 770. 7. HMC Ailesbury, 261 (11 Mar. 1794).