§ ii
She is living (1616) principally at Knole, sometimes in London, sometimes making an expedition into the North to join her mother, who in all her difficulties was her counsellor and ally. The perpetual topic of the diary is the dispute with her husband:
“My Coz: Russell came to me the same day, and chid me, and told me of all my faults and errors, he made me weep bitterly, then I spoke a prayer of Owens, and came home by water where I took an extreme Cold.”
The Archbishop [of Canterbury] my Lord William Howard, my Lord Rous, my Coz: Russell, my brother Sackville, and a great company of men were all in the gallery at Dorset House, where the Archbishop took me aside and talked with me privately one hour and half, and persuaded me both by Divine and human means to set my hand to their arguments. But my answer to his Lordship was that I would do nothing until my Lady [her mother] and I had conferred together. Much persuasion was used by him and all the company, sometimes terrifying me and sometimes flattering me.
Next day was a marvellous day to me, for it was generally thought that I must either have sealed the argument or else have parted from my Lord.
She then starts for the North—a hazardous journey—to confer with her mother.
We had two coaches in our company with four horses apiece and about twenty-six horsemen. I came to my lodgings [at Derby] with a heavy heart considering how many things stood between my Lord and I.
We went from the Parsons’ House near the Dangerous Moors, being eight miles and afterwards the ways so dangerous the horses were fain to be taken out of the coach to be lifted down the hills. This day Rivers’ horse fell from a bridge into the river. We came to Manchester about ten at night.
Dorset was not above subjecting her to petty annoyances and humiliations, for he sends messengers after her with “letters to show it was my Lord’s pleasure that the men and horses should come away without me, so after much falling out betwixt my Lady [her mother] and them, all the folks went away, there being a paper drawn to show that they went away by my Lord’s direction and contrary to my will.[[3]] At night I sent two messengers to my folks to entreat them to stay. For some two nights my mother and I lay together, and had much talk about this business.”
In order to get back to London she has to borrow a coach from her mother, from whom she takes a “grievous and heavy parting.” Arrived at Knole, “I had a cold welcome from my Lord,” and a day or two later he takes his departure for London, sending constant messengers and letters, to know whether she will give way to his demands. “About this time,” she sadly writes—it is April, spring at Knole, and she then aged twenty-six—“about this time I used to rise early in the morning and go to the Standing in the garden, and taking my prayer book with me beseech God to be merciful to me and to help me as He always hath done.”
Meanwhile Dorset’s threats increase in virulence: on the first of May he sends Mr. Rivers to tell her she shall live neither at Knole nor at Bolbrook; on the second he sends Mr. Legg to tell the servants he will come down once more to see her, which shall be the last time; and on the third he sends Peter Basket, his gentleman of the horse, with a letter to say “it was his pleasure that the Child should go the next day to London ... when I considered that it would both make my Lord more angry with me and be worse for the Child I resolved to let her go; after I had sent for Mr. Legg and talked with him about that and other matters I wept bitterly.”
On the fourth “... the Child went into the litter to go to London.” There is no comment. It must have been a pathetic little departure.
On the ninth she received, besides the news that her mother was dangerously ill, “a letter from my Lord to let me know his determination was the Child should go to live at Horsley, and not come hither any more, so as this was a very grievous and sorrowful day to me.” An unusual bitterness escapes from her pen:
All this time my Lord was in London where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to Cocking and Bowling Alleys, to plays and horse races, and commended by all the world. I stayed in the country, having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreement, so as I may truly say I am like an owl in the desert.
And a few days later:
My Lord came down from London, my Lord lying in Leslie Chamber and I in my own. My Lord and I after supper had some talk, we fell out and parted for that night.
There was worse to come, for at the end of the month her mother died, “which I held as the greatest and most lamentable cross that could have befallen me,” and, mixed up with this sorrow, which is evidently genuine, is the fear that she may be definitely dispossessed of the inheritance of her forefathers. She found, however, that she had the disposal of the body, “which was some contentment to my aggrieved soul.” Her sorrows begin to lighten. Dorset, probably perceiving his bullying to be worse than useless against a woman of her mettle, tries a different tack: “My Lord assured me how kind and good a husband he would be to me”; they patch up a reconciliation, and she makes over to him certain of her Cumberland estates in default of heirs; they agree that Mrs. Bathurst, apparently a bone of contention, should “go away from the Child ... so that my Lord and I were never greater friends than at this time ... and my Lord brought me down to the coach side where we had a loving and kind parting.” He even joined her in the North, and she records how at Appleby Castle she set up the “green velvet bed where the same night we went to lie there,” and how “in the afternoon I wrought stitchwork and my Lord sat and read by me.”
She gives many particulars of how she spent her days in the North. I fancy she was a good deal happier there, and more at home, and consequently more lighthearted, than at Knole. At the same time she was anxious to go back to London to rejoin Dorset, but this for some reason he was not disposed to allow. She consoled herself with innocuous occupations:
This month I spent in working and reading. Mr. Dunbell read a great part of the History of the Netherlands.... Upon the 1st I rose by times in the morning and went up to the Pagan Tower to my prayers, and saw the sun rise.... Upon the 4th I sat in the Drawing Chamber all the day at my work.... Upon the 9th I sat at my work and heard Rivers and Marsh read Montaigne’s Essays, which book they have read almost this fortnight.... Upon the 12th I made an end of my cushion of Irish stitch, it being my chief help to pass away the time at work.... Upon the 21st was the first day I put on my black silk grogram gown.... Upon the 20th I spent most of the day in playing at Tables. All this time since my Lord went away I wore my black Taffety night-gown[[4]] and a yellow Taffety waistcoat and used to rise betimes in the morning and walk upon the leads and afterwards to hear reading. Upon the 23rd I did string the pearls and diamonds left me by my mother into a necklace.
At last the summons came, and “upon the 24th Basket set out from London to Brougham Castle to fetch me up. I bought of Mr. Cleborn who came to see me a clock and a save-Guard [= cloak] of cloth laced with black lace to keep me warm on my journey.” Dorset sent in the retinue to fetch her, moreover, a cook, a baker, and a Tom Fool.
Her arrival in London was auspicious: Dorset and a company of relatives came out to meet her at Islington, so that there were in all ten or eleven coaches, and when she arrived at Dorset House she found the house “well dressed up against I came,” and the Child met her in the gallery. Moreover, “all this time of my being at London I was much sent to and visited by many” (the young heiress, whose matrimonial disputes had raised so much dust at Court, was an object of interest and curiosity), and she made friends: “My Lady Manners came in the morning to dress my head. I had a new black wrought Taffety gown which my Lady St. John’s tailor made. She used often to come to me, and I to her, and was very kind one to another.” Such troubles as she had were but slight: “I dined above in my chamber and wore my night-gown because I was not very well, which day and yesterday I forgot that it was fish day and ate flesh at both dinners. In the afternoon I played at Glecko[[5]] with my Lady Gray and lost £27 odd money.” So far, so good. She gave a sweet-bag to the Queen for a New Year’s gift, and was kissed by the King. She went to see the play of the Mad Lover; she went to the Tower to see Lord and Lady Somerset, lying there since their arraignment; she went to the Court to see Lord Villiers created Earl of Buckingham; she ate a “scrambling supper” and went to see the Masque on Twelfth Night. She betrays with an unsophisticated and rather charming ingenuity her delight in these things. But the storm scowled at her over the rim of the horizon, and presently it broke. The first entries are like the splash of the first big rain-drops: “We came from London to Knole; this night my Lord and I had a falling out about the land.” Next day she has Mr. Sandy’s book about the government of the Turks read aloud to her, but “my Lord sat the most part of the day reading in his closet.” Next day his sulks materialized, and he “went up to London upon the sudden, we not knowing it till the afternoon.”
Six days later—there are no entries in the diary to record the suspense of these six days—she is sent for to London to see the King, a higher test for her strength of mind, even, than the former persuasions of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Will she capitulate at last? or will she come out with her flag still flying? the tongues of London wagged. The interview is best given in her own words:
Upon the 17th when I came up, my Lord told me I must resolve to go to the King next day. Upon the 18th being Saturday, I went presently after dinner to the Queen to the Drawing Chamber where my Lady Derby told the Queen how my business stood, and that I was to go to the King, so she promised me she would do all the good in it she could. When I had stayed but a little while there I was sent for out, my Lord and I going through my Lord Buckingham’s chamber, who brought us into the King, being in the Drawing Chamber. He put out all those that were there, and my Lord and I kneeled by his chair side, when he persuaded us both to peace and to put the whole matter wholly into his hands, which my Lord consented to, but I beseeched His Majesty to pardon me for that I would never part from Westmoreland while I lived upon any condition whatsoever, sometimes he used fair means and persuasions and sometimes foul means, but I was resolved before, so, as nothing would move me, from the King we went to the Queen’s side, and brought my Lady St. John to her lodging and so we went home.
There is a little note at the side of this entry: “The Queen gave me warning not to trust my matters absolutely to the King lest he should deceive me.”
The affair was not allowed to rest there. Two days later she was again summoned before the King, and a sour, unedifying spectacle the majesty of James I must have presented, thus confronted with the young obstinacy of the heiress of Westmoreland:
I was sent for up to the King into his Drawing Chamber, where the door was locked and nobody suffered to stay here but my Lord and I, my Uncle Cumberland, my Coz: Clifford, my Lords Arundel, Pembroke and Montgomery, Sir John Digby. For lawyers there were my Lord Chief Justice Montague, and Hobart Yelverton the King’s Solicitor, Sir Randal Crewe that was to speak for my Lord and I. The King asked us all if we would submit to his judgement in this case, my uncle Cumberland, my Coz: Clifford, and my Lord answered they would, but I would never agree to it without Westmoreland, at which the King grew in a great chaff. My Lord of Pembroke and the King’s solicitor speaking much against me, at last when they saw there was no remedy, my Lord, fearing the King would do me some public disgrace, desired Sir John Digby would open the door, who went out with me and persuaded me much to yield to the King. Presently after my Lord came from the King, when it was resolved that if I would not come to an agreement there should be an agreement made without me.
After these encounters she retired to Knole, while Dorset remained in London, “being in extraordinary grace and favour with the King.” She, poor thing, resumed at Knole the pitiful monotony of her country existence, which to a mind so vigorous must have been irksome in the extreme, and the Diary becomes again the record of her small occupations threaded with the worry and sorrow of her dissensions with her husband. It is illuminating that she never criticizes him; there are references to his “worth and nobleness of disposition”; her spirit, although high and emancipated enough to stand out against the King in the defence of Westmoreland, could not conceive revolt against the subjection of matrimony. It is an idea which never once enters her head. She even writes him a letter to give him “humble thanks for his noble usage toward me in London”; but a very little while after this “Thomas Woodgate came from London and brought a squirrel to the Child, and my Lord wrote me a letter by which I perceived my Lord was clean out with me, and how much my enemies have wrought against me.”
Conscientious as she is, she no longer finds enough events to justify a daily entry. Perhaps—who knows? for my part I strongly suspect it—her fighting spirit preferred even the ordeals and excitements of London to the tedium of Knole. She has very little to tell: only the gowns she wore, the books she read, the games she played with the steward, and the ailments of the Child.
At this time I wore a plain green flannel gown that William Pinn made me and my yellow taffety waistcoat. Rivers used to read to me in Montaigne’s Essays, and Moll Neville in the Fairy Queen. The Child had a bitter fit of her ague again insomuch I was fearful of her that I could hardly sleep all night and I beseeched God Almighty to be merciful and spare her life.
This ague of the Child’s is a constant preoccupation. I suppose that it was a kind of convulsion, for which the cure was a “salt powder to put in her beer.” On certain days a return of it appears to have been confidently expected, for I find: “upon the 4th should have been the Child’s fit, but she missed it,” and two days later she has “a grudging of her ague.” There is a good deal about the Child—never referred to under any other designation until she attains her 5th birthday, after which she is promoted to “my Lady Margaret.” The portrait of her which is here reproduced hangs over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s sitting-room; her ring dangles on a ribbon round her neck, and her hair is done in an elaborate manner which defied all my efforts, when I was the same age, to do my own in the same way.
She was an amusement and a consolation, as well as a source of anxiety, to her mother. Her garments are carefully noted:
The 28th was the first time the Child put on a pair of whalebone bodice.... The Child put on her red bays coat.... I cut the Child’s strings from off her coats and made her use togs alone, so as she had two or three falls at first but had no hurt with them.... The Child put on her first coats that were laced, with lace being of red bays.... I began to dress my head with a roll without a wire. I wrote not to my Lord because he wrote not to me since he went away. After supper I went out with the child who rode a pie-bald nag. The 14th, the Child came to lie with me which was the first time that ever she lay all night in a bed with me since she was born;
and another time she speaks of “the time being very tedious with me, as having neither comfort nor company, only the Child.”
For the rest, she was thrown back upon her own resources. Dorset came and went, and in between whiles there are small, vivid pictures of existence at Knole:
LADY MARGARET SACKVILLE
Daughter of Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset, and Lady Anne Clifford
“THE CHILD”
From the portrait at Knole by Mytens
After supper I walked in the garden and gathered cherries, and talked with Josiah [the French page] who told me he thought all the men in the house loved me.
And again:
About this time [April 1617] my Lord made the steward alter most of the rooms in the house and dress them up as fine as he could and determined to make all his old clothes in purple stuff for the Gallery and Drawing Chamber.
March 1617. 5th. Couch puppied in the morning.
8th. I made an end of reading Exodus. After supper I played at Glecko with the steward as I often do after dinner and supper.
9th. I went abroad in the garden and said my prayers in the standing.
10th. I was not well at night, so I ate a posset and went to bed.
11th. The time grew tedious, so as I used to go to bed about 8 o’clock I did lie a-bed till 8 the next morning.
14th. I made an end of my Irish stitch cushion.
15th. My Lord came down to Buckhurst. This day I put on my mourning grogram gown and intend to wear it till my mourning time is out, because I was found fault with for wearing such ill clothes.
22nd. I began a new Irish stitch cushion.
24th. We made Rosemary cakes.
Two days later Dorset arrived from Buckhurst, and they walked together in the park and the garden. “I wrought much within doors and strived to sit as merry a face as I could upon a discontented heart”; but in spite of this entry they seem to have remained on fairly friendly terms until Easter.
30th. I spent in walking and sitting in the park, having my mind more contented than it was before my Lord came from Buckhurst.
5th April. My Lord went up to my closet and said how little money I had left contrary to all they had told him, sometimes I had fair words from him and sometimes foul, but I took all patiently, and did strive to give him as much content and assurance of my love as I could possibly, yet I told him I would never part with Westmoreland. After supper, because my Lord was sullen and not willing to go into the nursery, I had Mary bring the Child to him in my chamber.
7th. My Lord lay in my chamber.
13th. My Lord supped privately with me in the Drawing Chamber, and had much discourse of the manners of the folks at court.
By the 17th, My Lord told me he was resolved never to move me more in these business because he saw how fully I was bent;
but evidently he did not stick to this good resolution, because, on April 20th, Easter-day, “My Lord and I had a great falling-out,” and a few days later, “This night my Lord should have lain with me, but he and I fell out about matters.”
By the next day, however, they were friends again; they played at Burley Break upon the lawn; and “this night my Lord came to lie in my chamber.” The next day, too, was spent in peace, and she “spent the evening in working and going down to my Lord’s closet, where I sat and read much in the Turkish history, and Chaucer.”
So it goes on. It becomes, perhaps, a little monotonous, save that it is always so human, and so modern. One sympathizes with her in her weaknesses even more than in her defiance; when, for instance, she writes amicable letters to all her relations-in-law, sending them locks of the Child’s hair, being “desirous to win the love of my Lord’s kindred by all the fair means I could,” in reality stealing a march upon Dorset in order to get them on her side. One day she chronicles, “This night I went into a bath,” but whether this event was of such rarity as to deserve special mention is not explained. At Whitsuntide they all went to church, but “my eyes were so blubbered with weeping that I could scarce look up,” and in the afternoon of the same day they again “fell out.” But she consoles herself with new clothes—or was that an additional penance? for she was never given to personal vanity—“I essayed on my sea-water green satin gown and my damask embroidered with gold, both which gowns the tailor which was sent from London made fit for me to wear with open ruffs after the French fashion.” Little peace-offerings came from time to time from Dorset; on one occasion he sends “half a buck, with an indifferent kind letter,” and on another occasion “My Lord sent Adam to trim the Child’s hair, and sent me the dewselts of two deer and wrote me a letter between kindness and unkindness.” “Still working and being extremely melancholy” is the entry of one summer day, and a day later, “Still working and sad.” A little after this she “rode on horseback to Withyham to see my Lord Treasurer’s tomb, and went down into the vault, and came home again [to Knole] weeping the most part of the day.” This is perhaps not very surprising. I have been down into that vault myself, and it is not a cheerful expedition. In a small, dark cave underground, beneath the church, among grey veils of cobwebs, the coffins of the Sackvilles are stacked on shelves; they go back to the fourteenth century, and are of all sizes, from full-grown men down to the tiny ones lapped in lead. But, of course, when Anne Clifford went there there were not so many as there are now; the pompous ones were not yet in their places, with their rusty coronets, save those of the old Treasurer and his son; and their blood did not run in the veins of Lady Anne, so on the whole she had less reason to be impressed than I.
The Diary continues in very much the same strain until it comes to an end with December 1619, the year 1618 being entirely missed out. By that time both Dorset and Anne were in bad health; but whereas he was to die five years later, at the age of thirty-five, she, made of tougher stuff, was to survive him by fifty-two years. His last letter to her, written to her on the very day of his death, shows all the affection which was so undermined by that question of her lands:
26th March, 1624.
Sweet Heart,
I thank you for your letter. I had resolved to come down to Knole, and to have received the Blessed Sacrament, but God hath prevented it with sickness, for on Wednesday night I fell into a fit of casting, which held me long, then last night I had a fit of fever. I have for my physician Dr. Baskerville and Dr. Fox. I thank God I am now at good ease, having rested well this morning. I would not have you trouble yourself till I have occasion to send for you. You shall in the meantime hear daily from me. So, with my love to you, and God’s blessing and mine to both my children, I commend you to God’s protection.
Your assured loving husband
RICHARD DORSET.
“His debts,” says one Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, “are £60,000, so that he does not leave much.” In his will he bequeaths to his “dearly beloved wife all her wearing apparel and such rings and jewels as were hers on her marriage, and the rock ruby ring which I have given her,” also “my carriage made by Mefflyn, lined with green cloth and laced with green and black silk lace, and my six bay coach geldings.”
THE VENETIAN AMBASSADOR’S BEDROOM