Knole and the Sackvilles

by V. Sackville-West

But for the rest concerning these early poems one must take his contemporary Jasper Heywood’s eulogy on trust:

There Sackville’s sonnets sweetly sauced

And featly finèd be.

A CONFERENCE OF ENGLISH AND SPANISH PLENIPOTENTIARIES AT SOMERSET HOUSE IN 1604
From the painting by Marc Gheerhardts at the National Portrait Gallery
At the top right-hand corner, nearest the window, Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, K.G., Lord High Treasurer of England

It seems that Sackville’s works were all written in the first half of his life, and that later on, as honours came to him, he altogether abandoned what might have been a first-rate literary career for a second-rate political one—more’s the pity. “A born poet,” says Mr. Gosse, “diverted from poetry by the pursuits of statesmanship.” He is a very good instance of the disadvantage of fine birth to a poet. But for the fact that he was born the Queen’s cousin, through the Boleyns, and the son of a father holding various distinguished offices, he might never have entered a political arena where he was destined to have as competitors such statesmen as Burleigh, and such favourites as Leicester and Essex. Amongst his contemporary poets, Surrey and Wyatt both died while Sackville was still a child; when Spenser was born, Sackville was already sixteen; when Sidney was born, he was eighteen; when Shakespeare was born, he was a full-grown man of twenty-eight. He had thus the good fortune to be born at a time when English poets of much standing were rare, an opportunity of which he might have taken greater advantage had not the accident of his birth persuaded him to abandon poetry for more serious things as the dilettantism of his youth. For he was comparatively young when he wrote both Gorboduc and the Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates. Gorboduc was first performed by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple before the Queen in 1561, when Sackville was twenty-five, and the Induction was first published in 1563, when he was twenty-seven; but already in or about 1557, when he was only just over twenty, he had composed the plan for the whole of the Mirror for Magistrates, intending to write it himself, although subsequently from want of leisure he left the composition of all but the induction or introduction, and the Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham, to others.

By the age of twenty-one, however, responsibilities were already upon him. He was married; and he was a member of Parliament, not merely once but twice over, as appears from the journals of the House of Commons: “For that Thomas Sackville, Esq., is returned for the County of Westmoreland, and also for the Borough of East Grinstead in Sussex, and doth personally appear for Westmoreland, it is required by this House that another person be returned for the said borough.” How this double election can have come about I cannot explain. It seems to have done him no harm in his parliamentary career; not only was he returned member for Aylesbury in 1563, but he took an active part in introducing bills, etc. About this time he went to travel in France and Italy, where for some mysterious reason he got himself thrown into prison; the reason was probably pecuniary, for we are told that he was “of the height of spirit inherent in his house,” and lived too magnificently for his means; so I think the assumption is in favour of his having got temporarily into debt. If, indeed, he shared in any measure the tastes of his descendants, nothing is more likely. Back in England again, the successes of his career rushed upon him. His father was just dead; he was the head of his family; he inherited its wealth and estates; he was at the propitious age of thirty; he was related to the Queen; he was marked out to prosper. Within the next thirty years or so he was, successively, knighted and created Lord Buckhurst of Buckhurst, in the county of Sussex; given the house and lands of Knole by the Queen, that she might have him near her court and councils; sent to France and the Netherlands as special ambassador from Elizabeth; made a Knight of the Garter; Chancellor of Oxford, where he sumptuously entertained the Queen; made Lord High Treasurer of England in 1599; High Steward of England at the trial of Essex, where he sat in state under a canopy and pronounced sentence and an exhortation, says Bacon, “with gravity and solemnity.” By this time, I imagine, he had in very truth become the grave and solemn personage one sees in all his portraits—not that his mind, even in early youth, can have been otherwise than grave and solemn if at the age of twenty he had been capable of imagining a vast poem on so dreary and Dantesque a plan as the Mirror for Magistrates, devised, says Morley in his English Literature, “to moralise those incidents of English history which warn the powerful of the unsteadiness of fortune by showing them, as in a mirror, that ‘who reckless rules, right soon may hap to rue.’” Also, from a letter written by Lord Buckhurst to Lord Walsingham, it is clear that he had no sympathy with ostentation, but only with honest worth: “And, Sir, I beseech you send over as few Court captains as may be; but that they may rather be furnished with captains here [in the Low Countries], such as by their worthiness and long service do merit it, and do further seek to shine in the field with virtue and valiance against the enemy than with gold lace and gay garments in Court at home.” In 1586 Lord Buckhurst was one of the forty appointed on the commission for the trial of Mary Stuart, and although his name is not amongst those who proceeded to Fotheringay, nor later in the Star Chamber at Westminster when she was condemned to death, yet he was sent to announce the sentence to death, and received from her in recognition of his tact and gentleness in conveying this news the triptych and carved group of the Procession to Calvary now on the altar in the chapel at Knole.

He was, in fact, absent from none of the councils of the nation, and I have no doubt that he discharged his duties with all seriousness and honesty. Poetry—a frivolous pursuit—had long since been left behind. The poet had become the statesman. Nevertheless there were times when his very integrity was the cause of bringing him into disfavour with the intolerant mistress he served, notably on one occasion when he refused to take the part of Leicester and was indignantly confined to his house for nine or ten months by Royal mandate. And there was another occasion, amusing as showing the extreme simplicity in which even a man like Lord Buckhurst, who had the reputation of lavish living in his own day, conducted his daily life. Buckhurst, then being at the royal palace of Shene, was desired by the Queen to entertain Odet de Coligny, Cardinal of Chatillon, and did so, but with the result made clear in the following letter, of which I give extracts:

To the Right Honourable the Lords of her Majesty’s Privy Council be this delivered.

My duty to your Lordships most humbly remembered.