Would fill a noble story.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| JOHN FREDERICK SACKVILLE, 3RD DUKE OF DORSET. From the portrait at Knole by GAINSBOROUGH | [Frontispiece] |
| NORTH-EAST VIEW OF KNOLE. From the drawing by T. BRIDGEMAN To face page | [2] |
| THE GREEN COURT, BOURCHIER’S ORIEL | [6] |
| THE STONE COURT, BOURCHIER’S GATEHOUSE | [10] |
| THE STONE COURT | [16] |
| KNOLE FROM AN AEROPLANE | [20] |
| THE GARDEN SIDE | [22] |
| A GATEWAY INTO THE GARDEN | [26] |
| A CONFERENCE OF ENGLISH AND SPANISH PLENIPOTENTIARIES AT SOMERSET HOUSE IN 1604. From the painting by MARC GHEERHARDTS in the National Portrait Gallery | [32] |
| LEAD PIPE-HEADS. Put Up by THOMAS SACKVILLE in 1605 | [38] |
| THE GREAT STAIRCASE (UPPER FLIGHT). Built by THOMAS SACKVILLE 1604–8 | [46] |
| RICHARD SACKVILLE, 3RD EARL OF DORSET, K.G. From the miniature by ISAAC OLIVER in the Victoria and Albert Museum | [52] |
| LADY ANNE CLIFFORD, wife of RICHARD SACKVILLE, 3rd Earl of Dorset. From the portrait at Knole by MYTENS | [56] |
| LADY MARGARET SACKVILLE, daughter to RICHARD SACKVILLE, 3rd Earl of Dorset, and LADY ANNE CLIFFORD: “The Child.” From the portrait at Knole by MYTENS | [68] |
| THE VENETIAN AMBASSADOR’S BEDROOM | [72] |
| EDWARD SACKVILLE, 4TH EARL OF DORSET, K.G. From the portrait at Knole by VANDYCK | [84] |
| THE TWO SONS OF EDWARD, 4TH EARL OF DORSET: RICHARD, LORD BUCKHURST and THE HON. EDWARD SACKVILLE. From the portrait at Knole by CORNELIUS NUIE | [106] |
| CHARLES SACKVILLE, 6TH EARL OF DORSET, K.G. From the portrait by Sir GODFREY KNELLER in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole | [116] |
| THE BROWN GALLERY. Built by ARCHBISHOP BOURCHIER in 1460 | [148] |
| LADY BETTY GERMAINE. From the portrait at Knole by C. PHILLIPS To face page | [168] |
| LADY BETTY GERMAINE’S BEDROOM AT KNOLE | [172] |
| HWANG-A-TUNG, A CHINESE BOY, page to the 3rd Duke of Dorset. From the portrait at Knole by Sir JOSHUA REYNOLDS | [192] |
| JOHN FREDERICK SACKVILLE, 3RD EARL OF DORSET; ARABELLA DIANA, 3RD DUCHESS OF DORSET; THE EARL OF MIDDLESEX; LADY ELIZABETH SACKVILLE, and LADY MARY SACKVILLE. From a silhouette by A. T. TERSTAN 1797. The property of LADY SACKVILLE | [196] |
| GEORGE JOHN FREDERICK SACKVILLE, 4TH EARL OF DORSET; LADY MARY SACKVILLE, and LADY ELIZABETH SACKVILLE. From the portrait at Knole by HOPPNER | [204] |
| ROCKING-HORSE, once the property of the 4th Duke of Dorset: A RECEIPT from GAINSBOROUGH | [208] |
CHAPTER I
The House
§ i
There are two sides from which you may first profitably look at the house. One is from the park, the north side. From here the pile shows best the vastness of its size; it looks like a mediaeval village. It is heaped with no attempt at symmetry; it is sombre and frowning; the grey towers rise; the battlements cut out their square regularity against the sky; the buttresses of the old twelfth-century tithe-barn give a rough impression of fortifications. There is a line of trees in one of the inner courtyards, and their green heads show above the roofs of the old breweries; but although they are actually trees of a considerable size they are dwarfed and unnoticeable against the mass of the buildings blocked behind them. The whole pile soars to a peak which is the clocktower with its pointed roof: it might be the spire of the church on the summit of the hill crowning the mediaeval village. At sunset I have seen the silhouette of the great building stand dead black on a red sky; on moonlight nights it stands black and silent, with glinting windows, like an enchanted castle. On misty autumn nights I have seen it emerging partially from the trails of vapour, and heard the lonely roar of the red deer roaming under the walls.
§ ii
The other side is the garden side—the gay, princely side, with flowers in the foreground; the grey walls rising straight up from the green turf; the mullioned windows, and the Tudor gables with the heraldic leopards sitting stiffly at each corner. The park side is the side for winter; the garden side the side for summer. It has an indescribable gaiety and courtliness. The grey of the Kentish rag is almost pearly in the sun, the occasional coral festoon of a climbing rose dashed against it; the long brown-red roofs are broken by the chimney-stacks with their slim, peaceful threads of blue smoke mounting steadily upwards. One looks down upon the house from a certain corner in the garden. Here is a bench among a group of yews—dark, red-berried yews; and the house lies below one in the hollow, lovely in its colour and its serenity. It has all the quality of peace and permanence; of mellow age; of stateliness and tradition. It is gentle and venerable. Yet it is, as I have said, gay. It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house. It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky; it settles down into its hollow amongst the cushioned tops of the trees; the brown-red of those roofs is the brown-red of the roofs of humble farms and pointed oast-houses, such as stain over a wide landscape of England the quilt-like pattern of the fields. I make bold to say that it stoops to nothing either pretentious or meretricious. There is here no flourish of architecture, no ornament but the leopards, rigid and vigilant. The stranger may even think, upon arrival, that the front of the house is disappointing. It is, indeed, extremely modest. There is a gate-house flanked by two square grey towers, placed between two wings which provide only a monotony of windows and gables. It is true that two or three fine sycamores, symmetrical and circular as open umbrellas, redeem the severity of the front, and that a herd of fallow deer, browsing in the dappled shade of the trees, maintains the tradition of an English park. But, for the rest, the front of the house is so severe as to be positively uninteresting; it is quiet and monkish; “a beautiful decent simplicity,” said Horace Walpole, “which charms one.” There is here to be found none of the splendour of Elizabethan building. A different impression, however, is in store when once the wicket-gate has been opened. You are in a courtyard of a size the frontage had never led you to expect, and the vista through a second gateway shows you the columns of a second court; your eye is caught by an oriel window opposite, and by other windows with heraldic bearings in their panes, promise of rooms and galleries; by gables and the heraldic leopards; by the clock tower which gives an oddly Chinese effect immediately above the Tudor oriel. Up till a few years ago Virginia creeper blazed scarlet in autumn on the walls of the Green Court, but it has now been torn away, and what may be lost in colour is compensated by the gain in seeing the grey stone and the slight moulding which runs, following the shape of the towers, across the house.
NORTH-EAST VIEW OF KNOLE
From the drawing by T. Bridgeman