Knole and the Sackvilles

by V. Sackville-West

§ i

The new Duke of Dorset was only five years old when his father’s dignities descended so prematurely on to his small yellow head, but he had a capable mentor in the person of his mother, and before two years had elapsed her authority was reinforced by that of a stepfather. This was Lord Whitworth, recently Ambassador to the Courts of Catherine II. and Paul I. The circumstances of Lord Whitworth’s recall had been in the least degree mysterious. Various rumours were current; amongst others, that he had offended the Czar in the following somewhat ludicrous manner: the Czar having forbidden that any empty carriage should pass before a certain part of his palace, Lord Whitworth, uninformed of the regulation, ordered his coach to meet him at a point which would entail passing over the forbidden area. The sentry held up the coach; the servants persisted in driving on; they came to blows; and the Czar, when the affair came to his ears, ordered Lord Whitworth’s servants to be beaten, the horses to be beaten, and the coach to be beaten too. Lord Whitworth, in a fit of rage and petulance, dismissed his servants, ordered the horses to be shot, and the coach to be broken into pieces and thrown into the Neva.

He appears to have had at least one trait in common with the Sackvilles themselves, at any rate in early life, for it was said of him that he was “more distinguished during this period of his career by success in gallantries than by any professional merits or brilliant services.” Even at the time of his marriage, when, returning from Russia to England, he found available the wealthy and desirable relict of his friend the late Dorset, he was heavily entangled with a lady named Countess Gerbetzow, whose partiality for the English Ambassador had been such that she had placed her own fortune at his disposal for the purpose of clothing himself and defraying the expenses of his household. In return for this affection and assistance Lord Whitworth promised her marriage as soon as she could divorce her husband; but during the course of the divorce proceedings the Ambassador was recalled, and left for England on the understanding that Countess Gerbetzow would follow him there as soon as she conveniently could. Meanwhile he made the acquaintance of the more eligible duchess, became engaged to her, and lost no time in marrying her. Countess Gerbetzow had, however, by now obtained her divorce, and was travelling across Europe on her way to England: at Leipzic she learnt from a newspaper that Lord Whitworth in London was engaged to the Duchess of Dorset. Indignant and outraged, she flew post-haste to London. Too late: she arrived only to find that the marriage had already been celebrated. But she would not allow the matter to rest there, and “her reclamations, which were of too delicate and serious a nature to be despised, at length compelled the duchess, most reluctantly, to pay her Muscovite rival no less a sum than ten thousand pounds.” Whether the duchess continued to think Lord Whitworth worth the price is not recorded. If he was an expensive husband, he was certainly from the worldly standpoint a very successful one, and that was a standpoint the duchess was not likely to despise. He became successively Ambassador to the French Republic, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and an earl, but “we may nevertheless be allowed to doubt,” observes Wraxall, who claims Lord Whitworth’s personal friendship,

whether a humbler matrimonial alliance might not have been attended with more felicity ... united to a woman of inferior fortune and condition ... he would certainly have presented an object of more rational envy and respect than as the second husband of a duchess, elevated by her connections to dignities and offices, subsisting on her possessions, and who will probably ere long inter him with an earl’s coronet on his coffin.—I return [says Wraxall, having thus dismissed the pair] to Marie Antoinette.

I doubt whether the little duke was allowed a very exuberant enjoyment of his boyhood with this couple in authority over him. Children were strictly brought up in that generation, and it is clear that the duchess was by nature a severe and not very sympathetic woman. The little boy and his sisters must have been docile and well behaved in the great house and gardens which belonged to him in name only, but which in practice were entirely under his mother’s control, for her to alter the windows as she pleased, and to put Lord Whitworth’s cognizance in the stained glass beside the Sackville arms. I visualize—I scarcely know why—the duchess and Lord Whitworth almost as the jailers of the small inheritor. There is nothing to justify such a theory; and, indeed, very little record remains of that short life: there is his rocking-horse—an angular, long-necked, maneless animal, which in due course became my property, after passing through the two intervening generations—his brief friendship with Byron as a schoolboy, and his portrait as a tall, fair young man in dark blue academical robes. There is very little else to mark his passage across the stage of Knole. He came, late in time, of a race never remarkable for strength of character, and the obituary notice which described him as having possessed gentle and engaging manners, tinctured by shyness, and of amiable temper, probably came nearer to the truth than the generality of such eulogies. Byron has told us nothing in the least illuminating of his friend. He has left a long address in verse, included in Hours of Idleness, in which he is careful to explain that the duke was his fag at Harrow,

Whom still affection taught me to defend,

And made me less a tyrant than a friend,

Though the harsh custom of our youthful band

Bade thee obey, and gave me to command,

and equally careful to remind him that they might in later years meet in the House of Lords,

Since chance has thrown us in the self-same sphere,

Since the same senate, nay, the same debate,

May one day claim our suffrage for the state.

The rest of the poem is an exhortation to the duke, whose “passive tutors, fearful to dispraise,” may

View ducal errors with indulgent eyes,

And wink at faults they tremble to chastise,

to be worthy of the record his ancestors have left him; of he who “called, proud boast! the British drama forth,” and of that other one, Charles, “The pride of princes, and the boast of song”—to become, in fine, “Not Fortune’s minion, but her noblest son.” One suspects, in fact, that Byron himself viewed the errors of his ducal fag with an indulgent eye, and the depth of the friendship, on Byron’s part at least, is easily measured by the letters he wrote on hearing of the duke’s death—letters whose cynicism is perhaps atoned for by their frankness:

GEORGE JOHN FREDERICK SACKVILLE, 4th Duke of Dorset
LADY MARY SACKVILLE LADY ELIZABETH SACKVILLE
From the portrait at Knole by Hoppner

I have just been—or, rather, ought to be—very much shocked by the death of the Duke of Dorset [he wrote to Tom Moore]. We were at school together, and then I was passionately attached to him. Since, we have never met—but once, I think, in 1805—and it would be a paltry affectation to pretend that I had any feeling for him worth the name. But there was a time in my life when this event would have broken my heart; and all I can say for it now is that—it is not worth breaking.

Adieu—it is all a farce.

And he alludes to it once more, a fortnight later, again writing to Moore, to say that “the death of poor Dorset—and the recollection of what I once felt, and ought to have felt now, but could not,” has set him pondering.

That, then, is all which the boy could leave behind him—that he should set Byron, for a moment, pondering. From such slight traces—the English little boy of the Hoppner, the old-fashioned rocking-horse, and the portrait of the fair young man—we have to reconstruct as best we can an entire personality. We have to figure him running about the garden at Knole; kissing his mother’s hand—surely never throwing his arms about her—his grave little bow to Lord Whitworth; the “your Grace” of his nurse’s behests; the brief contact with the dazzling personality of Byron at Harrow; the stir with which he cannot have failed to anticipate the advantages of his life and his emancipation. We have the account of him playing tennis, when a ball hit him in the eye, and obliged him to be for ever after “continually applying leeches and blisters and ointments and other disagreeable remedies,” and to be “very moderate in all exercises that heat or agitate the frame.” We have, finally, his tragic end at the age of twenty-one, to which additional poignancy is lent by the fact that he had recently become engaged.

He had gone to Ireland, where his stepfather was then Viceroy, to stay with his friend and quondam school-fellow Lord Powerscourt. On the day after his arrival the two young men, with Lord Powerscourt’s brother, Mr. Wingfield, went out hunting, and after a fruitless morning they were about to return home when they put up a hare:

The hare made for the inclosures on Kilkenny Hill. They had gone but a short distance, when the Duke, who was an excellent forward horseman, rode at a wall, which was in fact a more dangerous obstacle than it appeared to be.... The Duke’s mare attempted to cover all at one spring, and cleared the wall, but, alighting among the stones on the other side, threw herself headlong, and, turning in the air, came with great violence upon her rider, who had not lost his seat; he undermost, with his back on one of the large stones, and she crushing him with all her weight on his chest, and struggling with all her might to recover her legs. The mare at length disentangled herself and galloped away. The Duke sprang upon his feet, and attempted to follow her, but soon found himself unable to stand, and fell into the arms of Mr. Farrel, who had run to his succour, and to whose house he was conveyed. Lord Powerscourt, in the utmost anxiety and alarm, rode full speed for medical assistance, leaving his brother, Mr. Wingfield, to pay every possible attention to the Duke. But, unfortunately, the injury was too severe to be counteracted by human skill; life was extinct before any surgeon arrived. Such was the melancholy catastrophe that caused the untimely death of this young nobleman. He had been of age only three months, and had not taken his seat in the House of Lords [1815].

The author of this obituary notice was at great pains to clear the young man of any charge of “unseasonable levity”:

It has been said [he observes] that the Duke, in his dying moments, made use of the expression “I am off.” He did so; but not, as has been very erroneously supposed, by way of heroic bravado, or in a temper of unseasonable levity; but simply to signify to his attendants, who, in pulling off his boots, had drawn him too forward on the mattress, and jogged one of the chairs out of its place, that he was slipping off, and wanted their aid to help him up into his former position. He was the last person in the world to be guilty of anything like levity upon any solemn occasion, much less in his dying moments. The fact was, when he used the expression “I am off” he had become very faint and weak, and was glad to save himself the trouble of further utterance....

Now suppose a stranger to the real character of this excellent youth to have heard no more of him than what he would be most likely to hear of one whose constitutional modesty concealed his virtues, namely, that he was very fond of cricket, that he hurt his eye with a tennis-ball, that he lost his life hunting, that his last words were “I am off”; would not a person possessed of this information, and no more, naturally conclude that the Duke was a young man of trivial mind, addicted to idle games and field sports, and apt to make light of serious things? How false a notion would such a person form of the late Duke of Dorset! As to the four circumstances above alluded to, if he was fond of cricket, it was in the evening generally that he played. When he hurt his eye [it was on the 7th of December] he had been at his books all the morning, and went between dinner and dusk to take one set at tennis. When he lost his life hunting, he had not hunted ten times the whole season. And what have been represented as his last words were not his last words; and, even if they were, they had no other meaning than “Pray prevent a helpless man from slipping down out of his place.” That he was not a mere sportsman, a mere idler, or a mere trifler, witness the wet eyes that streamed at every window in the streets of Dublin as his hearse was passing by; witness the train of carriages that composed his funeral procession; witness the throng of Nobility and Gentlemen that attended his remains to the sea-shore; witness the families he had visited in Ireland; witness the reception of his corpse in England; witness the amazing concourse of friends, tenantry, and neighbours, that came to hear the last rites performed, and to see him deposited in the tomb; witness the more endeared set of persons who still mean to hover round the vault where he is laid!