Knole came to the Sackvilles, whose collateral descendants still own it, from Queen Elizabeth, who in 1567 gave it to Thomas Sackville, a cousin on her mother’s side. He already owned Buckhurst, and she created him therefore Baron Buckhurst; which is, as every one will acknowledge, a fruity-flavoured title. “Baron Buckhurst:” how finely it trips off the tongue! The Queen gave as a reason for her gift the “keeping him near her court and councils, that he might repair thither on any emergency with more expedition than he could from his seat of Buckhurst in Sussex, the roads to which county were at times impassable.”
Lord Buckhurst was, in fact, a persona grata at court: a man of wit, a poet, a dramatist. Also a man of tact and management, for in his old age, in 1603, he was created Earl of Dorset by Gloriana’s successor, James the First.
And so the descent continued from first to seventh earl, who succeeded like chapters in a history, of which a new volume opened with the seventh earl being created a duke.
The fourth duke, George John Frederick Sackville, came to a tragic end in 1815, in his twenty-second year. He was an adventurous horseman, and on a visit to Lord Powerscourt, in Ireland, fell with his horse in the hunting-field at Killiney. The horse fell on him and crushed in his chest.
They brought his body home with every circumstance of mortuary pomp, as befitted a duke; he lay in state at many inns on the several stages of the Holyhead Road, from Ireland to London, and finally was laid to rest with his fathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in Sussex.
With the widow of his cousin and successor in the title, the fifth and last duke, another volume ended, in 1825.
The ownership of Knole devolved upon Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister of the unfortunate fourth duke. She married the fifth Earl De La Warr, and thus changed the name of the lords of Knole to that of Sackville-West. Her eldest son became in due course Lord De La Warr: to the younger sons she left Knole, and in their favour the barony of Sackville was created, in 1876.
XVIII
The long street of Sevenoaks acts, as it were, the office of screen to the leafy glades, the hills and dells of Knole Park, to which you come along an alley between the houses. It is an extremely large park, and in many places peculiarly beautiful. To set down in this place its acreage and its circumference of six miles would convey a very dim impression of its proportions, but if we say it is two-thirds the size of Richmond Park its extent will be more generally understood. The house itself—if it be no derogation to style Knole merely a house—stands quite half a mile within the park, on a height, and looks, with its ranges of gables, towers, roofs, and chimney-pots, like some mediæval town. Great herds of red and fallow deer browse amid the bracken, or shelter under the great beeches, and regard the many visitors with an amiable and fearless expression, except in the “fence months,” October and November, when they are quite ferocious, and bellow day and night like the bulls of Bashan.
