The portrait by Gainsborough in the ball-room is of a man with a curved mouth, deep grey eyes, and powdered hair brushed back off his forehead. He looks out from the oval of his framing, beautiful and melancholy. “I have always looked on him as the most dangerous of men,” said the Duchess of Devonshire, “for with that beauty of his he is so unaffected, and has a simplicity and a persuasion in his manner that makes one account very easily for the number of women he has had in love with him.” There is much in him which recalls his forefather, Charles, the Dorset of the Restoration, but this is a personality less opulent, less voluminous, more wistful and more romantic; all his accessories are essentially of the eighteenth century—his Chinese page, his diamonds, his scarf-pin, his Italian mistress who caused so much scandal by dancing at the Opera in Paris with his Garter bound about her forehead. He is the immediate precursor of the generation which replaced by Gothic the Tudor windows in the Orangery, made serpentine some of the straight paths in the garden, and decorated the windows in the Colonnade with representations of knights in full armour. He himself escaped the baronial tendencies. He belonged to an age more delicate, more exquisite; an age of quizzing glasses, of flowered waistcoats, of buckled shoes, and of slim bejewelled swords. When he had his mistress sculpted, it was lying full-length on a couch, naked save for a single rose looping up her hair. When he had her drawn, it was pointing her little foot in the first step of a dance, a tambourine in her hand, and the Chinese boy in the background. When he wrote to his friends, it was in a bored, nonchalant style, half in English and half in French. His manner was “soft, quiet, and ingratiating.” He treated the women who loved him with an easy heartlessness which failed to diminish their affection. He was possessed of no very great talents but those calculated to render life agreeable to him in the circles into which he was born, for it was his good fortune to be born handsome, rich, charming, and a duke, in a century when those qualifications were a certain passport to success.
John Frederick Sackville became Duke of Dorset at the age of twenty-four. He was the son of that Lord John Sackville who passes across the annals of the family early in life as a poet and cricketer, and later as a sad and shabby figure, “always dirtily clad,” living under mild restraint at Vevey, a victim to melancholia. There was, however, no hint as yet of this hereditary strangeness of temper in his son, the new Duke of Dorset. The young man came brilliantly into his new possessions, paid the undertaker £66 6s. for the late duke’s funeral, paid the Sheriff £418 2s. for “things taken at Knole”—from which it would seem that the late duke had died in debt—bought four thousand ounces of silver, and entertained his neighbours and tenantry to a feast in celebration of his succession, at which sixty stone of beef, mutton, and veal were consumed, thirty-four pounds of wax-lights used, and musicians provided. It is curious to see how the price of wine had altered between the days of Charles II and this time; namely, 1769. Claret now cost 54s. a dozen, Burgundy 60s. a dozen, Champagne 97s. a dozen, and port for the servants’ table cost 20s. a dozen, in comparison with the few shillings paid per gallon a century earlier. The only thing which did not [see p. [133]] alter in proportion is beer, for which 35s. a hogshead was paid in the seventeenth century and £2 10s. a hogshead in the eighteenth. The young duke’s time, we are told, was “devoted to gallantry and pleasure among the fashionable circles as well in France and Italy as in England,” a phrase which begins to acquire a fatally familiar ring through the generations of the family. Perhaps nothing else could reasonably be expected of him. Life offered him too great an ease and too many advantages; why should he have rejected them? Before he had been for a year in the enjoyment of his honours and estates he had set out on the Grand Tour accompanied by the celebrated Nancy Parsons and a train of singers, actors, and Bohemians, who clustered round him in every European capital which he visited. Echoes of his extravagance and his escapades come down to us from Paris and from Rome. He entertained lavishly every evening, inviting only those who could amuse his already blasé appetite; he rescued his Nancy Parsons in the nick of time as she was about to be abducted from a masked ball by a noble Venetian; he indulged his taste for the fine arts “even beyond the limits of his fortune”; he bought a Perugino, he bought a doubtful Titian, and a number of Italian primitives; he bought from a Mr. Jenkins in Rome “the figure of Demosthenes in the act of delivering an oration, a fine Grecian relick in marble,” and a bronze cast of the Gladiator Repellens, on whose shield he caused his own coat-of-arms to be embossed. This kind of existence he continued to lead for two or three years, when he threw over Nancy Parsons, returned to England, and became the lover of a Mrs. Elizabeth Armistead. Meanwhile, it appears from his account-books that large sums were being spent by his orders on both outdoor and indoor repairs at Knole. He put down new floors, altered some of the windows, and bought further enormous quantities of silver, 5920 ounces in one year alone, costing £2463 17s. 7d., and including a hundred and forty-four silver plates, eight dozen each of forks and spoons, dishes of all kinds, covers, and tureens. Occupied with Knole, love affairs, and cricket, he dawdled away a particularly gilded youth. Details from his account-books give a good idea of his expenses and occupations:
| £ | s. | d. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mrs. Gardiner, lace ruffles | 41 | 0 | 0 |
| Butler, new chain | 80 | 0 | 0 |
| Opera, expenses last winter | 17 | 19 | 0 |
| Opera, subscription | 21 | 0 | 0 |
| Paid Sir Joshua Reynolds | 78 | 15 | 0 |
Mrs. Elizabeth Armistead reigned for three years, but the duke had other diversions in other circles: the gay, frivolous, and wanton Lady Betty Hamilton, trailing from ball to ball with her suitors in her wake, set her heart upon him, and he, not unresponsive, was ready to trifle so long as he was not expected to marry. Lady Betty was finally married off to Lord Derby, reputed the ugliest and the richest peer in England.
Many were the means employed till Lord Derby’s constant and assiduous care veiled the ugliness of his person before the idol he worshipped. Time and despair made Lady Betty give a hasty and undigested consent. After a day of persecutions from every quarter, while a hair-dresser was adorning her unhappy head, she traced the consent with a pencil on a scrap of paper, and sent it wet with her tears to her mother.
A re-shuffle now took place: the duke became the new Lady Derby’s lover, and Lord Derby became the lover of Mrs. Armistead. This arrangement, however, was not of long duration. Lord Derby fell in love with Elizabeth Farren; Lady Derby, it was rumoured, ran away and had to be brought back by her brother, the Duke of Hamilton: still bent upon marrying the Duke of Dorset, she wished to divorce Lord Derby, but was foiled by the prudence of Miss Farren. The gossips of London were much excited by all these occurrences. Lady Sarah Lennox wrote: “It is no scandal to tell you it is imagined that the Duke of Dorset will marry Lady Derby. I am told she has been and still is most thoroughly attached to him.” It would be satisfactory to know exactly what part Dorset played; I fear not a very creditable one. Lady Derby was an impulsive, headstrong, attractive creature, capable of real passion under all her lightheartedness and easy virtue; her husband was unfaithful to her; her rival more sage and experienced than she herself; her lover ready to take what he could without incurring an irksome responsibility. My grandfather’s sister, Lady Derby, used to show at Knowsley the window through which the Duke of Dorset was reported to have been admitted to the house, disguised as a gardener, and it was commonly supposed that the infant Lady Elizabeth Stanley was in reality the duke’s daughter. But when the affair threatened to become too serious he was only too ready to resume his travels abroad.
I can only suppose that it was during one of his absences that Horace Walpole went to Knole and found it not at all to his liking, for he draws a picture of the place in a state of desertion which would surely not have been warranted had the duke and his household been in occupation:
I came to Knole [he writes to Lady Ossory], and that was a medley of various feelings! Elizabeth and Burleigh and Buckhurst; and then Charles [he means Richard] and Anne, Dorset and Pembroke, and Sir Edward Sackville, and then a more engaging Dorset, and Villiers and Prior, and then the old duke and duchess, and Lady Betty Germaine, and the court of George II.
The place is stripped of its beeches and honours, and has neither beauty nor prospects. The house, extensive as it is, seemed dwindled to the front of a college, and has the silence and solitude of one. It wants the cohorts of retainers, and the bustling jollity of the old nobility, to disperse the gloom. I worship all its faded splendour, and enjoy its preservation, and could have wandered over it for hours with satisfaction, but there was such a heterogenous housekeeper as poisoned all my enthusiasm. She was more like one of Mrs. St. John’s Abigails than an inhabitant of a venerable mansion, and shuffled about in slippers, and seemed to admire how I could care about the pictures of such old frights as covered the walls.