The Hastings Road and the "Happy Springs of Tunbridge"

by Charles G. Harper

XVII

When you know Sevenoaks well, have learned its geographical situation, and have inquired into its surroundings, you will begin to perceive that it was once very humbly dependent upon the great historic residence of Knole, whose park it on one side fringes. Knole divides with the not far distant Penshurst the reputation of being the finest baronial pile in England. If their ancient lords could return to Penshurst and Knole they would still find there many of the buildings and appointments they knew; and if the less ancient Elizabethans and Jacobeans were permitted to revisit their homes they would see them very much as they were, and so come back without any sense of strangeness.

Knole, of course, takes its name from its hilly situation. There are dim and fragmentary records of a former house, away back in the reign of King John. At that time it belonged to a great historical personage, William Mareschal, Earl of Pembroke, to whom it came as part of his wife’s dowry. Eventually it fell to the family of de Say, who for more than a hundred years ruled the estate, when for an interval it passed into other hands, only to be repurchased by a Fiennes, who was on his mother’s side a de Say. This unfortunate Fiennes had the ill luck to live in the troubled time of Henry the Sixth, and was further unfortunate in attracting the favour of that ill-starred King, who heaped many distinctions upon him, all to his undoing. He was created Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Constable of Dover Castle, member of the King’s Council, Lord Chamberlain, and Lord Treasurer of England; and, in fact, closely resembled in real life Pooh Bah, the “Lord High Everything Else” of The Mikado.

The title of Lord Saye and Sele, which still exists as a barony, re-created in 1603, in the Fiennes family, has a fine sound of irrevocability about it—a kind of “do and dare,” “what I have said I have said” connotation—to which it has really no sort of right. Saye, as we have seen, was a family name, and Sele has in this connection nothing to do with sealing, signing, and delivering as act and deed. It comes from the village of Seal, on the other side of Knole Park.

The amazing prosperity and court favour shown to Lord Saye and Sele raised up many enemies for him, and the King was obliged, first to sequester him from the office of Lord Treasurer, and then to commit him to the Tower of London, merely to secure him from the violence of the discontented people, then seething in the rebellion of Jack Cade, in 1450. That insurrection brought an exciting moment to Sevenoaks, for Cade and his army, pursued by some twenty thousand of the King’s troops from their riotous place of assemblage on Blackheath, turned at bay upon them, and in the disastrous skirmish of Sole Fields, within sight of Knole, slew the King’s commander, Sir Humphrey Stafford. Cade, assuming the armour of the fallen knight, marched to London, where, according to Shakespeare, he struck the historic London Stone with his sword and proclaimed himself “lord of this city.” He did more than that, for he brought the unhappy Lord Saye and Sele forth from his hiding-hole in the Tower, and hacked his head off at the Standard in Cornhill, afterwards offering revolting barbarities to his body.

It was the son of this victim of popular revolt who, six years later, reduced to extremities in the troubles of the time, sold Knole to Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, for a sum representing £2,500 at the present day. The manor-house of that time was old and dilapidated, and Bourchier pulled it down and built the gatehouse and the principal front of the present group of buildings. Thirty years later he died and left Knole to the See; and, with all other archbishops, was ex officio, so to speak, collated to the Realms of the Blest. He was succeeded by Archbishop Morton, who reigned fourteen years; by Henry Dene (two years), by Warham for thirty years; and then by Cranmer, who in 1537, from motives of policy, surrendered it to the Crown.

Politic indeed, for the Archbishops of Canterbury at that time owned no fewer than sixteen palaces, and men were beginning to inquire by what right lords spiritual were so gorged with things temporal; just as in these times of ours the phenomenal wealth of great landowners is beginning to arouse an inconvenient criticism.

Knole came to the Sackvilles, whose collateral descendants still own it, from Queen Elizabeth, who in 1567 gave it to Thomas Sackville, a cousin on her mother’s side. He already owned Buckhurst, and she created him therefore Baron Buckhurst; which is, as every one will acknowledge, a fruity-flavoured title. “Baron Buckhurst:” how finely it trips off the tongue! The Queen gave as a reason for her gift the “keeping him near her court and councils, that he might repair thither on any emergency with more expedition than he could from his seat of Buckhurst in Sussex, the roads to which county were at times impassable.”

Lord Buckhurst was, in fact, a persona grata at court: a man of wit, a poet, a dramatist. Also a man of tact and management, for in his old age, in 1603, he was created Earl of Dorset by Gloriana’s successor, James the First.

And so the descent continued from first to seventh earl, who succeeded like chapters in a history, of which a new volume opened with the seventh earl being created a duke.

The fourth duke, George John Frederick Sackville, came to a tragic end in 1815, in his twenty-second year. He was an adventurous horseman, and on a visit to Lord Powerscourt, in Ireland, fell with his horse in the hunting-field at Killiney. The horse fell on him and crushed in his chest.

They brought his body home with every circumstance of mortuary pomp, as befitted a duke; he lay in state at many inns on the several stages of the Holyhead Road, from Ireland to London, and finally was laid to rest with his fathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in Sussex.

With the widow of his cousin and successor in the title, the fifth and last duke, another volume ended, in 1825.

The ownership of Knole devolved upon Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister of the unfortunate fourth duke. She married the fifth Earl De La Warr, and thus changed the name of the lords of Knole to that of Sackville-West. Her eldest son became in due course Lord De La Warr: to the younger sons she left Knole, and in their favour the barony of Sackville was created, in 1876.