1st. That each individual attend twice a week for the purpose of exercising from half after Six o’clock to half after Eight o’clock in the Evening. 2nd. As a regular attendance is particularly essential, it is proposed that the small Sum of Sixpence be paid by every person not present to answer to his Name when called over at the time appointed, unless it appears he is prevented by Sickness, which forfeits, should there be any, shall be spent by the Corps at the end of the year in any manner they shall think proper. 3rd. That every Man appears clean and properly accoutered. 4thly. That they do their utmost Endeavour to learn their Exercise, paying proper respect to their Officers.

Finally, they wish it to be clearly understood that their Services shall not be required to extend further than the Parish and Neighbourhood of Sevenoaks, unless it be for the purpose of guarding Prisoners or Convoys as far as one Stage.

KNOLE, 22 May 1798.

But it is improbable that the duke had much to do with the raising or organisation of this corps, for during the last twenty months of his life his irascibility turned to definite melancholia, and he remained at Knole more or less alone with the duchess keeping a jealous guard over him. It is impossible not to draw the parallel between his end and that of Charles the Restoration earl, his great-grandfather, remembering especially the wildness and extravagance in which both had spent their youth; but whereas Charles was carried away to Bath at the end by that sordid woman Ann Roche, the duke was carefully tended in his own great house by the reserved and prudent woman he had married, too dignified to be accused save under the veil of polite phrases of intriguing to get the control of his affairs into her own hands. So he sank gradually, and in 1799, at the age of fifty-four, he died, when it was found that he had so disposed of his lands, his fortune, and his boroughs that Arabella Diana was left with so great an accumulation of wealth and of parliamentary influence as had “scarcely ever vested, among us, in a female, and a widow.”

CHAPTER IX
Knole in the Nineteenth Century

§ i

The new Duke of Dorset was only five years old when his father’s dignities descended so prematurely on to his small yellow head, but he had a capable mentor in the person of his mother, and before two years had elapsed her authority was reinforced by that of a stepfather. This was Lord Whitworth, recently Ambassador to the Courts of Catherine II. and Paul I. The circumstances of Lord Whitworth’s recall had been in the least degree mysterious. Various rumours were current; amongst others, that he had offended the Czar in the following somewhat ludicrous manner: the Czar having forbidden that any empty carriage should pass before a certain part of his palace, Lord Whitworth, uninformed of the regulation, ordered his coach to meet him at a point which would entail passing over the forbidden area. The sentry held up the coach; the servants persisted in driving on; they came to blows; and the Czar, when the affair came to his ears, ordered Lord Whitworth’s servants to be beaten, the horses to be beaten, and the coach to be beaten too. Lord Whitworth, in a fit of rage and petulance, dismissed his servants, ordered the horses to be shot, and the coach to be broken into pieces and thrown into the Neva.

He appears to have had at least one trait in common with the Sackvilles themselves, at any rate in early life, for it was said of him that he was “more distinguished during this period of his career by success in gallantries than by any professional merits or brilliant services.” Even at the time of his marriage, when, returning from Russia to England, he found available the wealthy and desirable relict of his friend the late Dorset, he was heavily entangled with a lady named Countess Gerbetzow, whose partiality for the English Ambassador had been such that she had placed her own fortune at his disposal for the purpose of clothing himself and defraying the expenses of his household. In return for this affection and assistance Lord Whitworth promised her marriage as soon as she could divorce her husband; but during the course of the divorce proceedings the Ambassador was recalled, and left for England on the understanding that Countess Gerbetzow would follow him there as soon as she conveniently could. Meanwhile he made the acquaintance of the more eligible duchess, became engaged to her, and lost no time in marrying her. Countess Gerbetzow had, however, by now obtained her divorce, and was travelling across Europe on her way to England: at Leipzic she learnt from a newspaper that Lord Whitworth in London was engaged to the Duchess of Dorset. Indignant and outraged, she flew post-haste to London. Too late: she arrived only to find that the marriage had already been celebrated. But she would not allow the matter to rest there, and “her reclamations, which were of too delicate and serious a nature to be despised, at length compelled the duchess, most reluctantly, to pay her Muscovite rival no less a sum than ten thousand pounds.” Whether the duchess continued to think Lord Whitworth worth the price is not recorded. If he was an expensive husband, he was certainly from the worldly standpoint a very successful one, and that was a standpoint the duchess was not likely to despise. He became successively Ambassador to the French Republic, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and an earl, but “we may nevertheless be allowed to doubt,” observes Wraxall, who claims Lord Whitworth’s personal friendship,

whether a humbler matrimonial alliance might not have been attended with more felicity ... united to a woman of inferior fortune and condition ... he would certainly have presented an object of more rational envy and respect than as the second husband of a duchess, elevated by her connections to dignities and offices, subsisting on her possessions, and who will probably ere long inter him with an earl’s coronet on his coffin.—I return [says Wraxall, having thus dismissed the pair] to Marie Antoinette.

I doubt whether the little duke was allowed a very exuberant enjoyment of his boyhood with this couple in authority over him. Children were strictly brought up in that generation, and it is clear that the duchess was by nature a severe and not very sympathetic woman. The little boy and his sisters must have been docile and well behaved in the great house and gardens which belonged to him in name only, but which in practice were entirely under his mother’s control, for her to alter the windows as she pleased, and to put Lord Whitworth’s cognizance in the stained glass beside the Sackville arms. I visualize—I scarcely know why—the duchess and Lord Whitworth almost as the jailers of the small inheritor. There is nothing to justify such a theory; and, indeed, very little record remains of that short life: there is his rocking-horse—an angular, long-necked, maneless animal, which in due course became my property, after passing through the two intervening generations—his brief friendship with Byron as a schoolboy, and his portrait as a tall, fair young man in dark blue academical robes. There is very little else to mark his passage across the stage of Knole. He came, late in time, of a race never remarkable for strength of character, and the obituary notice which described him as having possessed gentle and engaging manners, tinctured by shyness, and of amiable temper, probably came nearer to the truth than the generality of such eulogies. Byron has told us nothing in the least illuminating of his friend. He has left a long address in verse, included in Hours of Idleness, in which he is careful to explain that the duke was his fag at Harrow,