That is the royal writer Alexander Larman on what a newspaper now pays to serialise a book, reported by LBC in the context of Charles Spencer’s memoir of his sister. It is also a neat summary of the problem with pricing the 9th Earl Spencer. He owns one of the oldest private estates in England, he has written ten books, and almost none of it has a number attached that anyone has published and stood behind.
A word on method. Every figure below is credited to the organisation that produced it, with the year it was produced. Where a figure is secondhand, that is stated. Where no reliable figure exists, we say so instead of splitting the difference, which rules out the SEO pages currently quoting anything between £60 million and £200 million with no identifiable source, some of which confuse the 8th Earl with the 9th.
1. The Sunday Times Rich List put Earl Spencer at £125m in 2020, joint 955th in Britain
This is the most recent published estimate of his personal wealth that carries a named compiler. The Rich List pegged the earl at £125m, or about $170m, ranking him joint 955th-richest in the United Kingdom. Two things are worth holding onto about that placing. It is a wealth list, not an audit, and it sits well outside the top 900, which tells you that an ancestral seat of 13,000 acres with a van Dyck collection does not, on the Rich List’s own arithmetic, buy a seat near the front of the room. Dozens of people with no title, no listed buildings and no 500-year provenance are ranked above him.
2. The previous published estimate, from 2009, was about £111m
Before the 2020 entry, the comparable number is a 2009 Sunday Times Rich List estimate of $149 million, roughly £111 million. Set the two side by side and the implied movement over eleven years is around £14 million, which in the context of an illiquid estate is noise rather than a trend. No Rich List entry for Charles Spencer from 2024, 2025 or 2026 was located in the research for this piece, and we are not going to assert that he has dropped off it; absence from a search pass is not absence from a list. What can be said plainly is that the newest estimate anyone can point to, with a publisher’s name on it, is now six years old. Anything presented as a crisp 2026 valuation has been reverse-engineered by someone with a traffic target.
3. Althorp itself has never been publicly valued, and even the acreage is reported two ways
The honest answer to “how much is Althorp worth” is that nobody outside the estate office knows, and the estate office has not said. IBTimes, in the only serious explainer on the subject, notes that there is no publicly confirmed valuation for the full estate and that the hundreds-of-millions figures in circulation should be treated as estimates rather than anything official. The same report gives the estate as around 13,000 acres, about 5,261 hectares, containing 28 listed buildings. Northants Live reports 13,500 acres. Hello has described the gardens as 550 acres within the wider estate, including the walled gardens and the Oval Lake where Diana is buried. A property that cannot be sold intact, cannot be mortgaged like a flat and cannot be compared to anything else on the market is a property with no price until the day there is one.
4. The family bought in with sheep money in 1508, and the house the money built dates from 1688
Northamptonshire County Council’s Historic Environment Record states that in 1508 Sir John Spencer acquired a 300-acre estate around Althorp and put up the house that forms the core of the one standing today; the Axminster Heritage account adds that the purchase was funded by the family’s sheep-rearing business. The present mansion dates to 1688, replacing an earlier house that Charles I had visited, and its interior is generally reckoned the strongest asset in it: portraits including several by Anthony van Dyck, plus porcelain and furniture. The library is down to 10,000 titles and is used by the current earl for his own work. The house is shut to the public for most of the year and opens for two months. Five hundred and eighteen years from sheep to a two-month visiting season is a reasonable return.
5. The 8th Earl’s estate was valued at about £88m in 1992, and most of it was never cash
Charles Spencer inherited on the death of his father, John Spencer, on 29 March 1992. The 8th Earl’s estate was valued at around £88 million, equivalent to roughly £200 million today, according to the same reporting that carries the Rich List figures. Crucially, most of that wealth sat in Althorp, its furnishings and other family assets rather than in money, and the lion’s share was placed in trust for children and grandchildren. That single sentence explains most of the confusion online. An heir can be the custodian of a nine-figure asset base, appear on a Rich List, and still run a house that requires a visitor season, a shop, a book career and a broadcasting career to keep it upright. Inheritance in this register is a job description.
6. Three hundred and ten acres at Dallington went to Persimmon Homes for a reported £60m
The clearest instance of the estate converting land into money comes from Dallington, Northamptonshire. Hello reports, citing The Telegraph, that 310 acres there were sold to the housebuilder Persimmon Homes for £60 million; the original Telegraph report was not independently retrieved for this piece, so treat it as a secondhand figure rather than a confirmed one. Spencer’s own stated reason for selling, set out in an article he wrote for the Daily Mail, was the volume of waste increasingly being dumped on the land. Whatever the sum, the mechanism is the one every large English estate eventually reaches: the acreage at the edge pays for the acreage in the middle.
7. Ten books, four Sunday Times bestsellers, twelve languages, and an advance Penguin will not disclose
Spencer had written nine non-fiction books, four of them Sunday Times bestsellers, before his memoir of Diana. Penguin Random House announced Swan Song: Diana, My Sister on 20 August 2026 and published it on 22 September 2026 through the Michael Joseph imprint in the UK, with US publication the same day, ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Diana’s death in August 2027; the publisher Daniel Bunyard acquired world all-language rights from Spencer’s literary agent, Caroline Michel, and the book is to be translated into twelve languages. What the advance was, Penguin has not said. What the newspaper paid for serialisation, the newspaper has not said either. Twelve territories of a book about the most photographed woman of the twentieth century is a serious piece of income by any publishing standard, and it remains, as a number, entirely private.
8. Louis, Viscount Althorp, inherits the estate and the earldom, ahead of three older sisters
Male-preference primogeniture decides this, not a will. Althorp passes to Louis Spencer, Viscount Althorp, the eldest son, who becomes the 10th Earl Spencer; Prince William and Prince Harry, Diana’s sons, are outside the line entirely. The Sun has estimated the inheritance at “a staggering £100m”, a figure that reaches us through a secondary citation and has not been verified at source, so it belongs in quotation marks rather than in a spreadsheet. Earl Spencer has seven children, four from his marriage to Victoria Lockwood, two from his marriage to Caroline Freud and one from his marriage to Karen Gordon, and he married the archaeologist Cat Jarman in May 2026. Lady Kitty Spencer, the eldest daughter, has said of the arrangement: “We’ve grown up understanding that it’s Louis to inherit, and Louis will do an incredible job”, as reported by Northants Live, the original interview outlet not identified in that report.
So what is Earl Spencer actually worth in 2026?
The defensible answer is that the last estimate with an institution’s name on it is £125 million, published by the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, up from about £111 million in 2009. Everything else that matters is unpriced: Althorp has no public valuation, the collection inside it has no public valuation, the Dallington sale figure reaches us secondhand, the book advance is undisclosed and the inheritance figure attached to Louis is a tabloid estimate. Anyone publishing a precise 2026 total has either seen documents nobody else has or has made it up, and the second is considerably more likely. The fortune is real, visible from the A428, and almost entirely unquoted.
Cover photograph: Edwardx via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
