Colonel Nicholas Spencer (1633 23 September 1689) was an English-born merchant, planter and politician in colonial Virginia. Born in Cople, Bedfordshire, Spencer migrated to the Westmoreland County, Virginia, where he became a planter and which he twice briefly represented in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Spencer later served as the colony's Secretary and on the Governor's Council, rising to become its President. On the departure of his cousin Thomas Colepeper, 2nd Baron Colepeper in 1683, he was named Acting Governor (1683–84), in which capacity Spencer served until the arrival of Governor Lord Howard of Effingham. Spencer's role as agent for the Colepepers helped him and his cousin Lt. Col. John Washington, ancestor of George Washington, secure the patent for their joint land grant of the Mount Vernon estate.
Early and family life Nicholas Spencer was born to an aristocratic English family long seated at Cople, Bedfordshire.Archival sources record correspondence between Col. Nicholas Spencer of Nomini, Westmoreland County, Virginia, and Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland, an English nobleman born in Paris in 1641, and the son of Henry Spencer, 1st Earl of Sunderland, born at Althorp, Northamptonshire, in 1620. Col. Spencer of Virginia and the 2nd Earl of Sunderland were related. The family was related to the Spencer family of Northamptonshire, with whom they shared a coat of arms. The Visitations of Bedfordshire: Annis Domini 1566, 1582, and 1634, by William Harvey, Robert Cooke, George Owen, The Harleian Society, London, 1864 The Visitations of Bedfordshire, William Harvey, Robert Cooke, College of Arms, 1884A branch of this Spencer family of Northamptonshire lived at Althorp, a Spencer family home built atop the old (and now lost) village of Althorp. The descendants of John Spencer, who became the country's wealthiest man due to his ownership of tremendous flocks of sheep, built Althorp, a large estate located five miles (8 km) from Northampton, the large market town that was the traditional home of the Northamptonshire Spencers. The owner of Althorp today is Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer. In 1531 the Spencers bought the manor of Rowlands at Cople,Rowlands Manor, Bedfordshire County Council: Manors, bedfordshire.gov.uk which they owned for several centuries.Cople, Manor of Nicholas Spencer, Esq., Bedford Estate (Russell) Archives, The National Archives, nationalarchives.gov.uk Nicholas Spencer, Sr., father of the Virginia emigrant, and his wife, the former Mary Gostwick, second daughter of Sir Edward Gostwick, 2nd Baronet, "Gostwicke", The Visitations of Bedfordshire, William Harvey, Robert Cooke, George Owen, Richard Saint-George, College of Arms, London, 1884 had several sons, of these William inherited the family estates but died childless after making his heir his nephew, also William, son of his next-brother Nicholas who had moved to Virginia.The House of Commons, 1690-1715, Vol. I, David Hayton, Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002 Another brother, Robert Spencer later removed from Surry County, Virginia, to Talbot County, Maryland, where his descendants long lived at Spencer Hall, the family plantation.Thomas Family of Talbot County, Maryland, and Allied Families, Richard Henry Spencer, Williams & Wilkins Company, Baltimore, 1914There is some evidence that Robert Spencer, Nicholas' brother, left Virginia and lived for a time in Barbados, before finally settling on Spencer Creek in Talbot County, Maryland, where he died prior to 1688.
Virginia career Immigration Nicholas Spencer sailed from London to Westmoreland County, Virginia, during the tobacco boom of the 1650s, and became agent for his cousin John Colepeper, 1st Baron Colepeper.George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America, Robert F. Dalzell, Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Lee Baldwin Dalzell, Oxford University Press, 2000 Colepeper had inherited his father's share of ownership in the Virginia Company in 1617, and was subsequently knighted and afterwards raised to the peerage. He became the one-seventh proprietor of the Northern Neck of Virginia under the charter of 1649. Colepeper never lived in the colonies, and his son Thomas Culpeper, 2nd Baron Culpeper of Thoresway, who lived at Leeds Castle, did not arrive in Virginia until 1680, twenty years after the tobacco boom ended in a bust prompted by wars with the Dutch and French and the Navigation Act of 1660. Nicholas Spencer had sailed to Virginia to help oversee his cousin John's investment, helping to colonize the frontier during the English Civil War in the mother county, and would survive Bacon's Rebellion.
Administrator, planter, legislator and agent
On arriving in the colony, Spencer secured a lucrative appointment as customs collector, in addition to administrator of his cousin's Virginia estates. (Spencer's job as agent for his Colepeper cousins included such functionary tasks as seizing 'winter beaver skins' or casks of tobacco for debts owed the Colepeper interests).Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts Preserved in the Capitol at Richmond, William Pitt Palmer, Sherwin McRae, Raleigh Edward Colston, Henry W. Flournoy, Published by R.F. Walker, Richmond, Va., 1875 Spencer and his neighbor and longtime burgess John Washington jointly held the post of customs collector on the Potomac. (After Washington died in 1677, Spencer was sole customs collector on the Potomac.) He also won his own land grant. But Spencer was, unlikely as it sounds, apparently an efficient administrator on his own, later being appointed to additional posts in Virginia by virtue of his abilities.The House of Commons, 1690-1715, Vol. I, David Hayton, Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002 Apparently a pragmatic administrator, Spencer was also a hard-nosed capitalist. When it came to slavery, for instance, Spencer weighed the benefits of enslaved labor in a strictly cost-benefit way. "The low price of Tobacco," Spencer wrote, "requires it should bee made as cheap as possible, and that Blacks can make it cheaper than Whites."Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740, Anthony S. Parent, Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, UNC Press, 2003 Spencer's rationale for slavery was probably as succinctly heartless as any committed to paper.
Spencer's role as an aristocratic bureaucrat in the new colony proved tricky. While simultaneously attempting to rationalize slavery, Spencer was also writing to the Privy Council in England about the Virginia Colony's precarious place on the edge of Catholic Maryland. "Unruly and unorderly spirits lay hold of ye motion of affairs," Spencer wrote, "and that under the pretext of Religion, soe as from those false glasses to pretend to betake themselves to Arms... from the groundless that the few Papists in Maryland and Virginia had conspired to hyre the Seneca Indians, to ye Cutting off, and totall distroying of all ye Protestants."Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia, Edward L. Bond, Mercer University Press, 2000Spencer's tolerance of the Catholic faith, especially given the intolerance in England, said something about the new colony in which he had planted himself. Spencer himself named George Brent, from a prominent Maryland Catholic family that had relocated to Stafford County, Virginia, as a trustee of his estates in his will.
At the same time, the forces that were propelling the Virginia Colony into the forefront of American economic and social might – primarily the raising of tobacco based on slavery – were simultaneously making Spencer's administrative role tricky. The Virginia colony of the era was, as the eminent colonial historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote, "the volatile society." There were popular uprisings such as Bacon's Rebellion, as well as the tobacco plant-cutting riots. A communication to the Crown in 1674 noted that his opposition to the Bacon Rebellion, for instance, had taken a toll on Spencer's estates. Having done the country "very good service against the Rebells, in that hee affected part of the Country where he resided, and as wee are credibly informed, by his Correspondence here is much Impaired in his Estate by the late Rebells."Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record: The Official Account of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, Samuel Wiseman, Michael Leroy Oberg, Lexington Books, 2005 Westmoreland County voters twice named Spencer as one of their representatives in the House of Burgesses, and each time he served alongside his neighbor John Washington.Cynthia Miller Leonard, The Virginia General Assembly 1619-1978 (Richmond: Virginia State Library 1978) p. 40
In 1682 Spencer wrote to London in the wake of the events roiling Virginia. "Bacon's Rebellion," Spencer told colonial overseers in London, "had left an itching behind it". It was "plaine" that the class tensions stirred by the Rebellion had lingered, with a "mutinous mob" subsequently engaged in "wild and extravagant" rioting, going from farm to farm, tearing tobacco plants out by their roots. The Virginia government reacted harshly with militia patrols and the promise of steep fines. The "frenzy," according to Spencer, destroyed crops on over 200 plantations, and was driven by a glutted tobacco market which had depressed prices. Even the wives, Spencer wrote, took up hoes laid down by their husbands and continued to rip out the plants. Such civil disobedience, Nicholas Spencer saw, was the price paid by colonial administrators acting the foil for the empire's merchants back home.Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia, Terri L. Snyder, Cornell University Press, 2003
When taken with symptoms of illness, Spencer wrote to his brother in England outlining his pains, and asked him to consult an English doctor and send him the diagnosis as quickly as possible.The Chesapeake in the 17th Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, Thad W. Tate, David L. Ammerman, W.W. Norton & Company, 1979
Nor was Spencer's role as his Colepeper cousins' agent an easy job. As landlords of an almost-feudal domain eventually encompassing over five million acres (20,000 km²) in the new colony, the Colepeper Northern Neck grant, eventually passed on to their Fairfax heirs, came to be seen by some colonists as an onerous reminder of English aristocratic privilege. In Colepeper's absence, it fell to their relation Spencer to do the heavy-lifting of collecting rents and taxes on the Colepeper barony.Bulletin of the Fauquier Historical Society, August 1921, Fauquier Historical Society, Old Dominion Press, Warrenton, Va., 1921