Knole and the Sackvilles

by V. Sackville-West

And wink at faults they tremble to chastise,

to be worthy of the record his ancestors have left him; of he who “called, proud boast! the British drama forth,” and of that other one, Charles, “The pride of princes, and the boast of song”—to become, in fine, “Not Fortune’s minion, but her noblest son.” One suspects, in fact, that Byron himself viewed the errors of his ducal fag with an indulgent eye, and the depth of the friendship, on Byron’s part at least, is easily measured by the letters he wrote on hearing of the duke’s death—letters whose cynicism is perhaps atoned for by their frankness:

GEORGE JOHN FREDERICK SACKVILLE, 4th Duke of Dorset
LADY MARY SACKVILLE LADY ELIZABETH SACKVILLE
From the portrait at Knole by Hoppner

I have just been—or, rather, ought to be—very much shocked by the death of the Duke of Dorset [he wrote to Tom Moore]. We were at school together, and then I was passionately attached to him. Since, we have never met—but once, I think, in 1805—and it would be a paltry affectation to pretend that I had any feeling for him worth the name. But there was a time in my life when this event would have broken my heart; and all I can say for it now is that—it is not worth breaking.

Adieu—it is all a farce.

And he alludes to it once more, a fortnight later, again writing to Moore, to say that “the death of poor Dorset—and the recollection of what I once felt, and ought to have felt now, but could not,” has set him pondering.

That, then, is all which the boy could leave behind him—that he should set Byron, for a moment, pondering. From such slight traces—the English little boy of the Hoppner, the old-fashioned rocking-horse, and the portrait of the fair young man—we have to reconstruct as best we can an entire personality. We have to figure him running about the garden at Knole; kissing his mother’s hand—surely never throwing his arms about her—his grave little bow to Lord Whitworth; the “your Grace” of his nurse’s behests; the brief contact with the dazzling personality of Byron at Harrow; the stir with which he cannot have failed to anticipate the advantages of his life and his emancipation. We have the account of him playing tennis, when a ball hit him in the eye, and obliged him to be for ever after “continually applying leeches and blisters and ointments and other disagreeable remedies,” and to be “very moderate in all exercises that heat or agitate the frame.” We have, finally, his tragic end at the age of twenty-one, to which additional poignancy is lent by the fact that he had recently become engaged.

He had gone to Ireland, where his stepfather was then Viceroy, to stay with his friend and quondam school-fellow Lord Powerscourt. On the day after his arrival the two young men, with Lord Powerscourt’s brother, Mr. Wingfield, went out hunting, and after a fruitless morning they were about to return home when they put up a hare:

The hare made for the inclosures on Kilkenny Hill. They had gone but a short distance, when the Duke, who was an excellent forward horseman, rode at a wall, which was in fact a more dangerous obstacle than it appeared to be.... The Duke’s mare attempted to cover all at one spring, and cleared the wall, but, alighting among the stones on the other side, threw herself headlong, and, turning in the air, came with great violence upon her rider, who had not lost his seat; he undermost, with his back on one of the large stones, and she crushing him with all her weight on his chest, and struggling with all her might to recover her legs. The mare at length disentangled herself and galloped away. The Duke sprang upon his feet, and attempted to follow her, but soon found himself unable to stand, and fell into the arms of Mr. Farrel, who had run to his succour, and to whose house he was conveyed. Lord Powerscourt, in the utmost anxiety and alarm, rode full speed for medical assistance, leaving his brother, Mr. Wingfield, to pay every possible attention to the Duke. But, unfortunately, the injury was too severe to be counteracted by human skill; life was extinct before any surgeon arrived. Such was the melancholy catastrophe that caused the untimely death of this young nobleman. He had been of age only three months, and had not taken his seat in the House of Lords [1815].