Daughter of the first Lord Revelstoke and sister to Maurice Baring, the well-known author and man of letters, in her own quiet and unspectacular way Margaret was a remarkable person. Not very good looking and painfully shy with strangers, she blossomed and shone in the privacy of her family circle or in the company of those who shared her own interests. Like all the Barings, she was a good linguist and well read both in French and English. But her great love was music. A
talented violinist, she had studied at the Royal College of Music and played second violin in a very competent quartet.
After her marriage, she regularly conducted a choir of 500 voices drawn from all over Northamptonshire. Having married, in July 1887, Charles Robert Spencer, half-brother and heir of the 5th Earl Spencer, they made their home in Dallington Hall. She would fill it to bursting with a party of musical friends large enough to form an orchestra; and they would spend happy days making music for themselves or playing at charity concerts.
Only twice in her life was she seen to burst into tears: once when the old family nannie died, and again when she heard the news of her husband's defeat in the 1895 election. To her husband Margaret Spencer was a joy and support; to her children she was a loved and loving mother filling their lives with interest and laughter. She encouraged them to share her love of books and music, reading to them in both French and English, usually from old favourites of her own, but sometimes from "The Jungle Book", the latest novelty of the day. Of an evening when they had gone to bed, she would carry her Stradivarius violin up to the night-nursery and lull them to sleep  with the strains of Schumann's "Trauemerei". 
When on 4 July 1906 she died of heart failure after giving birth to a third daughter, all the warmth and happiness of family life died with her.

The Spencers of Althorp, Georgina Battiscombe.
 

Source: Leo van de Pas