Knole and the Sackvilles

by V. Sackville-West

§ i

The first duke of Dorset remains to me, in spite of much reading, but an indistinct figure. I do not know whether the fault is mine or his. Perhaps he was a man of little personality; certainly he was lacking in the charm of his scapegrace father or of his frivolous great-nephew, the third duke. And yet he is a personage of some solidity: weighty, Georgian solidity. The epithets chosen by his contemporaries to describe him are all concordant enough, “a man of dignity, caution, and plausibility,” “worthy, honest, good-natured,” “he preserved to the last the good breeding, decency of manner, and dignity of exterior deportment of Queen Anne’s time, never departing from his style of gravity and ceremony,” “a large-grown, full person,” and finally—the words come almost with the shock of being precisely what we were waiting for—“in spite of the greatest dignity in his appearance, he was in private the greatest lover of low humour and buffoonery.” He was fitted, if I piece together rightly my scraps of evidence, to lead the life of a country gentleman, performing his duty towards his county, entertaining his friends, enjoying with them after dinner the low humour to which he inclined, rolling out his laughter in the Poets’ Parlour, slapping his great thighs, and rejoining his wife afterwards in the spirit of affectionate domesticity which induced him to begin his letters to her “dear, dear, dear girl,” or “my dear, dear Colly.” He lived, says one account of him, after detailing his amiable qualities as a kind husband and father, “in great hospitality all his life, and he was so respected that when at Knole on Sundays the front of the house was so crowded with horsemen and carriages as to give it rather the appearance of a princely levee than the residence of a private nobleman.” It was his misfortune that he was not allowed to remain leading this kind of life so much to his taste: “the poor Duke of Dorset,” said Lord Shelburne, “was made by his son to commence politician at sixty.” The local offices which he held were well suited to his disposition and abilities; the titles of Custos Rotulorum, Lord Lieutenant of Kent, Constable of Dover Castle, and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports sit admirably upon his rather provincial dignity. He could discharge these offices while surrounding himself with friends, and keeping open house at Knole. He was surely happy at Knole, with the duchess and the duchess’ friend Lady Betty Germaine installed in her two little rooms in a corner of the house, and the correspondence with Dean Swift, and the echoes of the Restoration reaching him in the shape of dedications from Prior and Pope, who had been his father’s friends. He must have been happy superintending the building of the “ruins” in the park, in ordering the removal of the clock from the roof of the Great Hall to a safer place over Bourchier’s oriel, in putting up the balustrade in the Stone Court, in adding to the picture-gallery his own full-length Kneller, painted in Garter robes—a dignified and ponderous addition—in continuing his father’s kindly and contemptuous patronage of Durfey, in entertaining the Prince of Wales, in receiving the present of a pair of elk-antlers measuring 7 foot from tip to tip, in playing at cards with his wife and Lady Betty, in watching the bull-baiting in the park, in inspiring the following tribute on the occasion of his birthday:

Accept, with unambitious views,

The tribute of a female muse;

Free from all flattery and art,

She only boasts an honest heart;

An heart that truly feels your worth,

And hails the day that gave you birth;

Of younger men let others boast,

Since Dorset is my constant toast;

Nor need the gayer world be told

That Dorset never can grow old;

And with unerring truth agree,

There’s none so young, so blithe as he,

With sprightly wit his jokes abound,

Well-bred, he deals good-humour round;

The maid forgets her fav’rite swain,

When Dorset speaks, he fights in vain;

The lover too, do all he can,

Strives, but in vain, to hate the man.

With this kind wish I end my lays,

Be ever young with length of days.

or such appreciation of his Christmas hospitality as this:

Our liquor at all times to nature gives fire,

Infuses new blood, and new thoughts can inspire.

Your wife, she may scold, undaunted you’ll sing,

For he that is drunk is as great as a King.

In the field, if all night you lie under a willow,

The soft easy snow shall be your down pillow.

There’s nothing can hurt you without or within

When you’ve beef in your belly and Punch in your skin.

It is true that certain discordant notes troubled from time to time this Georgian harmony. The house-steward killed the black page in the passage; and the duke’s sons themselves were unsatisfactory; even the favourite son, Lord George, who was the apple of his father’s eye, fell into disgrace and was court-martialled on a charge of disobedience and cowardice. “I always told you,” said Lord John on hearing of this, “that George was no better than myself.” This affair of the battle of Minden must have been a heavy blow to the duke, but although Lord George was not exonerated he retained all his father’s doting affection. Still, the mud had been slung at him and not a little had stuck. The two other sons were a source of sorrow: Lord John, after devoting his youth to cricket, went off his head; and Lord Middlesex, the eldest of the three, was an altogether deplorable character, prompting these verses, based upon an old saying about the family:

Folly and sense in Dorset’s race

Alternately do run,

As Carey one day told his Grace

Praising his eldest son.

But Carey must allow for once

Exception to this rule,

For Middlesex is but a dunce,

Though Dorset be a fool.

I quote the verses as they stand, though “dunce” seems scarcely the right description to apply to Lord Middlesex, that dissolute and extravagant man of fashion, who squandered large sums of money upon producing operas, that “proud, disgusted, melancholy, solitary man,” whose conduct savoured so strongly of madness. Certain family characteristics appeared in him which had skipped his father, and his father and he, consequently and not unnaturally, were not on very good terms. The duke, indeed, did not know what to make of his eldest son and heir. “Upon my word, Mr. Cary,” he said, when Mr. Cary asked him loudly at the play whether Lord Middlesex was to undertake the opera again next season, “I have not considered what answer to make to such a question.” Both Lord Middlesex and Lord John being so unsatisfactory, Lord George was, and remained, his father’s favourite. Lord George, in an even greater degree than his father, is an incongruity among the Sackvilles, a departure from type. In spite of all his mistakes, his misjudgments, and his misfortunes, he was a man of greater ability than most of them, of greater energy than the common run of his indolent and pleasure-loving race, of a further-reaching ambition. He did not begin life as the eldest son, coming in due course to be the head of the family, and languidly accepting the civil or diplomatic posts which were pressed upon him; such career as he had he made for himself. Unlike his predecessors or their descendants, he was neither an ambassador, a poet, nor a patron of art or letters—“I have not,” he wrote, “genius sufficient for works of mere imagination”—but first a soldier and then a statesman, both disastrously. It is not my intention to go into the details of his public career; my ignorance is too great of the tangle of Georgian politics; nor am I qualified to discuss whether he did or did not disobey his orders at Minden, whether he was or was not largely responsible for the loss of America, whether he did or did not write the Letters of Junius; such questions are treated in histories of the period. Nor can I deal with the enormous number of letters on political subjects written both by and to Lord George: I have looked into them more than once, and have come away merely bewildered by the cross-threads of home politics, by the names of remembered or forgotten statesmen, by the fall and reconstruction of Ministries, by the crises of Whigs and Tories. So I judge it best to leave Lord George alone, “hot, haughty, ambitious, and obstinate, a sort of melancholy in his look which runs through all the Sackville family,” and to seek neither to blacken nor to whitewash his character. I scarcely regard him as one of the Sackvilles, perhaps because he broke away from the family traditions into unfamiliar paths, perhaps also because he earned his own peerage, inherited a large house of his own, and led an existence separate from Knole. Living at Knole among its portraits and its legends which grew into the very texture of one’s life, it was, I suppose, inevitable that one should grow up with pre-conceived affections or indifferences, and for some reason Lord George never awakened my interest or my sense of relationship. He was a public character, not a relation.