SEAL OF SEVENOAKS
GRAMMAR SCHOOL.
The schools and almshouses were rebuilt in 1727, and are generally thought by passing strangers to be a workhouse or a penitentiary. It will thus be gathered that they are not beautiful. If strict discipline may be read into the ancient seal of the school, then it was in old times governed on the principle of Winchester, “learn or be whopped,” for that device exhibits a gigantic, Jove-like master presiding over a number of scholars, evidently in fear of the immense birch he holds in his right hand. A resolute application of the weapon represented here would undoubtedly result in abolishing laziness in the scholar given a taste of it.
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.