§ ii
This Richard Sackville and Frances Cranfield had seven sons and six daughters. There are some delightful portraits of the little girls at Knole, one in particular of Lady Anne and Lady Frances, painted in a garden, leading a squirrel on a blue ribbon, and in the chapel at Withyham there is an elaborate monument to commemorate the youngest son, Thomas, no doubt the “little Tom” for whom the playthings and the silver porringer were to be remembered. The monument bears the following inscription:
Stand not amaz’d [Reader] to see us shed
From drowned eyes vain offerings to ye dead
For he whose sacred ashes here doth lie
Was the great hopes of all our family.
To blaze whose virtues is but to detract
From them, for in them none can be exact.
So grave and hopeful was his youth,
So dear a friend to piety and truth,
He scarce knew sin, but what curst nature gave,
And yet grim death hath snatch’d him to his grave.
He never to his Parents was unkind
But in his early leaving them behind,
And since hath left us and for e’er is gone
What Mother would not weep for such a Son—
May this fair Monument then never fade,
Or be by blasting time or age decay’d.
That the succeeding times to all may tell
Here lieth one that liv’d and died well—
Here lies the thirteenth child and seventh son
Who in his thirteenth year his race had run.
THOMAS SACKVILLE.
Of the other children, save of the eldest, there is no record, or none worth quoting: many of them died, as happened with such pitiable frequency, at a very early age: Lionel, aged three; Catherine, aged one; Cranfield, aged fourteen days; Elizabeth, aged two years; Anne, aged three. The eldest son, however, is one of the most jovial and debonair figures in the Knole portrait-gallery, Charles, the sixth Earl—let us call him the Restoration Earl—the jolly, loose-living, magnificent Mæcenas, “during the whole of his life the patron of men of genius and the dupe of women, and bountiful beyond measure to both.” He furnished Knole with silver, and peopled it with poets and courtesans; he left us the Poets’ Parlour, rich with memories of Pope and Dryden, Prior and Shadwell, D’Urfey and Killigrew; he left us the silver and ebony stands on which he was in the habit in hours of relaxation of placing his cumbersome periwig; he left us his portraits, both as the bewigged and be-ribboned courtier, and as the host, wrapped in a loose robe, a turban twisted round his head; he left us his gay and artificial stanzas to Chloris and Dorinda, and his rousing little song written on the eve of a naval engagement. He is not, perhaps, a very admirable figure. He was not above trafficking in court appointments; he disturbed London by a rowdy youth; he was reported to have passed on his mistresses to the King; he ended his life in mental and moral decay with a squalid woman at Bath. He followed the fashions of his age, and the most that can be claimed for him is that he should stand, along with his inseparables Rochester and Sedley, as the prototype of that age. But for all that, there is about such geniality, such generosity, and such munificence, a certain coarse lovableness which holds an indestructible charm for the English race. It is that which makes Charles the Second a more popular monarch than William the Third: Herrick a more popular poet than Milton. Last but not least, Charles Sackville is connected with that most attractive figure of the English stage—Nell Gwyn.
CHARLES SACKVILLE, 6th Earl of Dorset, K.G.
From the portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole
It is not known precisely in what year he was born, but it was either 1639, 1640, or 1642, so that he must have been a young man somewhere in the neighbourhood of twenty when Charles II came to the throne. He had been educated by a tutor, one Jennings, and sent abroad with him: as Jennings wrote home of him in measured terms surprising in that age of sycophancy, saying “I doubt not he will attain to some perfection,” he probably held but a low opinion of the abilities of his pupil. I do not know at what age Lord Buckhurst, as he then was, returned to England, but he must have been quite young, for in 1660 he becomes Colonel of a regiment of foot, commands 104 men, and receives a yearly allowance of £70 from his father, and the references to him in Pepys begin in 1661 when he was not more than twenty-one or twenty-two. He was, says Dr. Johnson with characteristic disapproval and severity, “eager of the riotous and licentious pleasures which young men of high rank, who aspired to be thought wits, at that time imagined themselves entitled to indulge.” Many of his pranks have been placed on record. They are neither very funny nor very edifying. On one occasion he and his brother Edward, with three friends, were committed to Newgate for killing an innocent man in a brawl, and should no doubt have been tried for murder, but as those contretemps could be arranged with very little difficulty the charge was modified to manslaughter.[[8]] On another occasion, the full details of which are not allowed to remain in the expurgated edition of Pepys, Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, and Sir Thomas Ogle got drunk at the Cock Tavern in Bow Street, where they went out on to a balcony, and Sedley took off all his clothes and harangued the crowd which collected below: the crowd, in indignation, drove them in with stones, and broke the windows of the house; for this offence all three gentlemen were indicted and Sedley was fined £500. On yet another occasion Buckhurst and Sedley spent the night in prison for brawling with the watch, and were delivered only on the King’s intervention. On yet another, Pepys records that “the King was drunk at Saxam with Sedley and Buckhurst, the night that my Lord Arlington came thither, and would not give him audience, or could not.” These and similar exploits recall the more celebrated escapade of Rochester as an astrologer, which at least had in it a humorous element entirely lacking in the mere rioting of drunken young men like Buckhurst and Sedley. It is not very surprising to learn that although he “inherited not only the paternal estate of the Sackvilles but likewise that of the Cranfields, Earls of Middlesex in right of his mother, yet at his decease his son, then only eighteen years of age, possessed so slender a fortune that his guardians when they sent him to travel on the Continent allowed him only eight hundred pounds a year for his provision,” nor that “extenuated by pleasures and indulgences, he sank into a premature old age.” Before sinking into this old age, however, he lived through the full enjoyment of a splendid youth. It is difficult to imagine an era in English history more favourable to a young man of his type and fortune than the early years of Charles II, when the King himself was the ringleader in the outburst of revolt against that iron-grey period of Puritanism through which the country had just passed. Dresses became extravagant, silver ornate, speech licentious; the theatres, which had been closed for over twenty years, reopened, the costumes and scenery being now on an elaborate scale never contemplated before; women—a daring innovation—appeared in the women’s rôles; the King and his brother patronised the play-houses with all the young bloods of the court; coaches clattered through the streets of London, yes, even on a Sunday. There is, of course, another side to the picture—the sullen disapproval of the serious-minded, the squalor of a London shortly to be rotted by plague and terribly purified by fire—but with this side we have in the present connection no concern. We are in the gay upper stratum of prosperity and fashion, fortunate in the extraordinary vividness of our visualisation; we know not only the principal characters, but also the crowd of “supers” pressing behind them; we know their comings and goings, their intrigues, their rivalries, their amusements, the names of their mistresses. We are now at Whitehall, now at Epsom, now at Tunbridge Wells, now at Richmond. We are, indeed, very deeply in Pepys’ debt.
In this world, therefore, so intimately familiar to any reader of the great diarist, Lord Buckhurst moves noisily with Rochester and Buckingham, Etherege and Sedley, “the first gentleman,” says Horace Walpole, “of the voluptuous court of Charles II.” We are told that he refused the King’s offers of employment in order to enjoy his pleasures with the greater freedom, or, as he himself wrote with much frankness:
May knaves and fools grow rich and great,
And the world think them wise,
While I lie dying at her feet
And all the world despise.
Let conquering Kings new triumphs raise,
And melt in court delights:
Her eyes can give much brighter days,
Her arms much softer nights.
This did not prevent him from enrolling as a volunteer in the Dutch war of 1665, when he was present at a naval battle, and when the song which he was reported to have written on the eve of the engagement was brought to London and bandied from mouth to mouth about the town. Dr. Johnson shows himself sceptical as to this picturesque legend of the origin of the verses. “Seldom is any splendid story wholly true,” he observes; and continues, “I have heard from the Earl of Orrery, that Lord Buckhurst had been a week employed upon it, and only re-touched, or finished it, on the memorable evening.” However this may be, both song and story remain: I have told the story, and quote the song:
To all you ladies now at land
We men at sea indite;
But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write:
The Muses now, and Neptune too,
We must implore to write to you,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
For though the Muses should prove kind
And fill our empty brain,
Yet if rough Neptune rouse the wind
To wave the azure main,
Our paper, pen and ink, and we,
Roll up and down our ships at sea,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
Then if we write not by each post,
Think not we are unkind;
Nor yet conclude our ships are lost
By Dutchman or the wind:
Our tears we’ll send a speedier way,
The tide shall bring them twice a day,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
The King with wonder and surprise
Will swear the seas grow bold,
Because the tides will higher rise
Than e’er they did of old:
But let him know it is our tears
Bring floods of grief to Whitehall stairs,[[9]]
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
Should foggy Opdam chance to know
Our sad and dismal story,
The Dutch would scorn so weak a foe
And quit their fort at Goree;
For what resistance can they find
From men who’ve left their hearts behind?—
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
Let wind and weather do its worst,
Be you to us but kind,
Let Dutchmen vapour, Spaniards curse,
No sorrow we shall find:
’Tis then no matter how things go,
Or who’s our friend, or who’s our foe,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
To pass our tedious hours away
We throw a merry main,
Or else at serious ombre play;
But why should we in vain
Each other’s ruin thus pursue?
We were undone when we left you,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
But now our fears tempestuous grow
And cast our hopes away;
Whilst you, regardless of our woe,
Sit careless at a play;
Perhaps permit some happier man
To kiss your hand, or flirt your fan,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
When any mournful tune you hear
That dies in every note
As if it sighed with each man’s care
For being so remote,
Think then how often love we’ve made
To you, when all those tunes were played,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
In justice you cannot refuse
To think of our distress,
When we for hopes of honour lose
Our certain happiness:
All those designs are but to prove
Ourselves more worthy of your love,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
And now we’ve told you all our loves,
And likewise all our fears.
In hopes this declaration moves
Some pity for our tears:
Let’s hear of no inconstancy,
We have too much of that at sea—
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
With this song—which is really very good of its kind, and, I think, deserves its fame—Pepys says that he “occasioned much mirth,” although at the time of repeating it he was under the impression that it was written by three authors in collaboration. It seems to have achieved popularity, and was set to music, also a parody was written of it by Lord Halifax under the title “The New Court: Being an Excellent New Song to an old Tune of ‘To all you Ladies now at hand’ by the Earl of Dorset,” and of which the following is the opening verse:
To all you Tories far from Court
We Courtiers now in play
Do write, to tell you how we sport
And laugh the hours away.
The King, the Turks, the Prince, and all
Attend with us each Feast and Ball.
With a fa, etc.
It is shortly after this battle that Nell Gwyn first appears in Lord Buckhurst’s life. London’s two theatres—the Duke’s Theatre, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the King’s Theatre, or, more familiarly, The Theatre, in Drury Lane—were then the great new resort and amusement, from the King and his brother in their boxes down to the rabble in the pit. Until the reign of Charles II the presence of the King in a common play-house was an unknown thing: such plays or masques as they had witnessed were always specially performed for them either in the halls or cock-pits of their palaces, but it now became the fashion for not only the King and the Duke of York, but also for the Queen to patronise the theatres. There were other innovations. The public was no longer satisfied with the makeshift scenery of pre-Commonwealth days, which had too often consisted of a placard hung upon a nail, “A wood,” or “A throne-room,” or whatever it might be. Nor were the dresses of the actors as careless as they had formerly been, but patrons of the stage would give their old clothes, which, if shabby, were no doubt still sufficiently magnificent to produce their effect at a distance. Even a step further in progress was the appearance of women on the stage, “foul and undecent women now, and never till now, permitted to appear and act,” says Evelyn, full of indignation, “who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses and to some their wives, witness the Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, Prince Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them.” A theatre of that day must have been a noisy, ruffling, ill-lighted place. The ceiling immediately above the pit was either open to the sky or else inadequately covered over, so that in the event of rain the whole of the pit was apt to surge into the dry parts of the theatre. The ladies in the audience, especially if the performance happened to be a comedy, sat for the most part in masks. The sallow face of the King, framed by the heavy curls, leered down over the edge of a box. In the body of the theatre lounged the bucks of the town, exchanging pleasantry and impudence with the orange-girls who were so indispensable a feature.
These orange-girls stood in the pit, crying “Oranges! will you have any oranges?” and were under the control of a superior known as Orange Moll, a famous figure of London theatre life. One may quote, to give some further idea of the relations between the young dandies and the orange-sellers, some of the stage directions in Shadwell’s True Widow, in the fourth act, laid in the Playhouse, “Several young coxcombs fool with the orange-women,” or “He sits down and lolls in the orange-wench’s lap,” or, “Raps people on the back and twirls their hats, and then looks demurely, as if he did not do it.” Amongst these girls, at the beginning of her career, was Nell Gwyn, of whom Rochester wrote:
... the basket her fair arm did suit,
Laden with pippins and Hesperian fruit;
This first step raised, to the wondering pit she sold
The lovely fruit smiling with streaks of gold,
and who has come down to us as a figure full of disreputable charm, witty Nelly, pretty Nelly, Nelly whose foot was least of any woman’s in England, Nelly who paid the debts of those whom she saw being haled off to prison, Nelly the pert, the apt, the kind-hearted, Nelly who “continued to hang on her clothes with her usual negligence when she was the King’s mistress, but whatever she did became her.” This merry creature said of herself that she was brought up in a brothel and served strong waters to gentlemen: it is probable that she was born in the Coal Yard at Drury Lane (now Goldsmith Street), and, wherever she may have been brought up, at a very early age she joined the orange-girls at the King’s Theatre. In due time her looks and her wit attracted attention and she went on the stage. Pepys, who was evidently much taken with the “bold merry slut,” leaves a particularly charming record of her one May day:
May 1st. To Westminster, in the way meeting many milkmaids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them; and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and bodice, looking upon one; she seemed a mighty pretty creature.
This being in May (1657), when Nell was sixteen, and had already been acting for at least two years, in July of the same year the diarist was told, which troubled him, that “my Lord Buckhurst hath got Nell away from the King’s House, and gives her £100 a year, so as she hath sent her parts to the house and will act no more.”
None ever had so strange an art
His passion to convey
Into a listening virgin’s heart
And steal her soul away
was sung of Buckhurst. He was then twenty-seven or so, Nell Gwyn sixteen, and together they kept “merry house” at Epsom. Pepys went down to Epsom one day and heard reports of their merriments: he pitied Nelly, exclaiming, “Poor girl!” and pitied still more her loss to the King’s Theatre; but he does not expressly state whether he saw the pair or not. In any case, the housekeeping at Epsom did not continue for very long, for by August she was again acting in London, and Pepys had “a great deal of discourse with Orange Moll, who tells us that Nell is already left by my Lord Buckhurst, and that he makes sport of her, and swears she hath had all she could get of him.” It would appear from this that Buckhurst, contrary to what has been said of him, did not sell Nell Gwyn to the King, for even Pepys, who would surely have been among the first and best informed, does not mention the King having “sent for Nelly” until January of the following year. I hope, therefore, that the charges of his having accepted bribes in exchange for Nelly may be exploded. A great many things were whispered—that he had been promised the peerage of Middlesex, that he had been given a thousand pounds a year, that he had been sent on “a sleeveless errand” into France to leave the coast clear for the King, that he refused to give her up until he had been repaid for all the expenses she had entailed upon him. I do not think that such a Jewish spirit is at all in keeping with the rest of his character as we know it, with his generosity and general lavishness, nor does it seem probable that he would so have bargained with a king whose favour he was anxious to retain. By 1669 it is certain that Nell was definitely the King’s mistress and all connection with Buckhurst over. But we find that years afterwards the house called Burford House, at Windsor, is granted by Charles II to Charles, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, W. Chaffinch, Esq., and others, in trust for Ellen Gwyn for life, with remainder to the Earl of Burford, the King’s natural son, in tail male; further, among the Knole papers is the original deed of 1683 appointing Lord Dorset her trustee and trustee to her son by Charles II; and, dated 1678, there is an allusion to her former lover in one of Nell’s infrequent and ill-spelt letters: “My lord Dorseit apiers worze in thre months, for he drinks aile with Shadwell and Mr. Haris at the Duke’s house all day long.”
Nell Gwyn thus passed out of Lord Buckhurst’s life, which she had so briefly entered, a well-assorted pair, I think, in every respect—he, idle, spoilt, heavy and magnificent; she, coarse, witty, feminine. There is a portrait of her at Knole, which I suppose was acquired by him, and I once happened to see a set of spoons in a loan exhibition which were catalogued as bearing the arms of Sackville with those of Nell Gwyn. The Sackville shield was correct enough, but whether the other quarterings were the arms of Gwyn, or whether indeed the orange-girl was entitled to any heraldic device, I am, of course, unable to say.