Knole and the Sackvilles

by V. Sackville-West

Your assured loving husband

RICHARD DORSET.

“His debts,” says one Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, “are £60,000, so that he does not leave much.” In his will he bequeaths to his “dearly beloved wife all her wearing apparel and such rings and jewels as were hers on her marriage, and the rock ruby ring which I have given her,” also “my carriage made by Mefflyn, lined with green cloth and laced with green and black silk lace, and my six bay coach geldings.”

THE VENETIAN AMBASSADOR’S BEDROOM

§ iii

Her portraits change as her years advance, and the lines of determination harden about her mouth. Her true life—the life for which she was most truly fitted—only began after she had passed her fiftieth year, when with the death of her kinsman Lord Cumberland the northern estates passed calmly and naturally into her hands at last. All the quarrels and litigation and anxiety of her youth were left behind her; she had buried Lord Dorset; she had buried Lord Pembroke after a second marriage as disastrous and as contentious as the first; she had borne Sackville children and Herbert children; she had been long-suffering though adamant, submissive though immovable; she had moped in the sumptuous prisons that were Knole and Wilton; now she was free to turn tyrant herself over her own undisputed realm. She wasted nothing of the opportunity. Away from London, away from the influence of the Court, entrenched in her numerous castles in the North, she ruled autocratically over her servants, her tenants, her neighbours, and the generations and ramifications of her family. No detail of comings and goings, no penny of expenditure escaped her vigilant eye or her recording pen; and her diary, that document of intimacy, autocracy, piety, and exactitude, carries its entries down to the very day before her death. With public or political events she scarcely ever concerned herself, but on the other hand no detail of her own private life or of the existence of those around her was too small to excite her comment. Whether her laundry-maids went to church, whether she pared her finger and toe nails, whether her dog puppied, whether she received letters, whether she washed her feet and legs (this is on the 22nd of February, the last occasion being on the 13th of December preceding), whether she kissed the sempstress—all is noted with the same precision and gravity. No anniversary or coincidence is allowed to pass unobserved. That amazing memory extended back over threescore years; and, moreover, she had the immense volumes of her notebooks for reference, date for date. Her past was ever present to her, the agreeable and the disagreeable merged into one landscape of consonant tone, and whether she observes that this day sixty years ago she travelled with her blessed mother, or fell out with Dorset, it is with the same complacency and satisfaction at having the tiny anniversary to record. This vigorous mind was not, perhaps, planned on a very broad scale. It was self-centred and self-sufficient; severe but not reckless; no fine carelessness endears her to us, or surprises; even her acts of generosity, and they were numerous, are recorded with the same scrupulous accuracy. She could not give two shillings to a child without setting it down. Her generosity, like all her other acts, was methodical; she rewarded her servants for definite services with extra wages; she kept ready to hand a supply of little presents, because it was contrary to her ideas of hospitality that any visitor, however humble, should go away empty-handed, and was careful to consider what particular gift would be most acceptable to the recipient, frequently choosing something of practical utility, such as gloves or lengths of cloth for women, money or ruffles for men; and these idiosyncracies run true all through her character, for, conversely, although she was prepared to be generous in her treatment of others, she was equally determined that she herself should be fairly treated by them, and frequent are the entries in her diary to this effect: “In the morning did I see Mr. Robert Willison of Penrith paid for a rundlet of sack, but I was very angry with him because I thought it too dear, and told him I would have no more of him, and then he slipped away from me in a good hurry.” She would always pay cash too, and bullied her special almswomen, whom she would not allow to ask for credit with the tradesmen of Appleby.

Her rights were her rights, and she had always had a great idea of them. One recognizes the spirit that told the King she “would never be parted from Westmoreland,” in the old litigant that went unhesitatingly and repeatedly to law over niceties connected with small portions of her estates, content to spend large sums of money in lawyers’ fees if only she could succeed—as she invariably did—in proving her point. There is one story which illustrates both her tenacity and her humour—the story of a certain tenant whose rent included a hen due yearly to the lady of the manor. This tribute he neglected to hand over. Lady Anne instantly had the law on him, spent £400 in enforcing her claim, won her case, received the hen, invited her defeated opponent to dinner with her, and caused the bird to be cooked for them both as the staple dish of the meal.

So the tranquil and crowded years spun themselves out for her, and she grew to be an old woman and a contented one, for she had attained at last the existence and occupations best suited to her. Her life was full: the things which filled it were small things, perhaps, but if they satisfied her who should cavil? Her journeyings alone occupied much of her time: those extraordinary progresses from castle to castle, she herself travelling in her horse-litter, her ladies in the coach-and-six, her menservants on horseback, her women in other coaches, and a rabble of small fry following, so that the miniature army which accompanied her amounted sometimes to as many as three hundred. Often this retinue would include members of her family, or some of her neighbours; they travelled over the moors of the North, by rough roads, “uncouth and untrodden, those mountainous and almost impassable ways,” stopping on the way in those highland villages which had not yet been honoured by a visit from the great old lady or received her bounty, and, coming at the end of the journey to Brougham, to Brough, to Barden, to Skipton, to Pendragon, or to Appleby, Lady Anne would receive her dependants one by one in her own chamber, give her hand to the men, kiss the women, and dismiss them again to their own homes. Her health was no longer very good, but that was never allowed to deter her from her plans: her courage and vigour triumphed always over the treacherous flesh, greatly to the concern of those about her. On one occasion, travelling from Appleby to Brougham, she was delayed at the start by a “swounding fit,” when she had to be carried to a bed and laid there near a “great fire”; much persuasion was used that she “would not travel on so sharp and cold a day, but she, having before fixed on that day, and so much company being come purposely to wait on her, she would go.” As she reached her litter, however, she fainted again, “Yet as soon as that fit was over she went.” Arrived at Brougham she fainted for the third time, but on being upbraided by her friends and servants for her stubbornness in making the journey, she replied that she knew she must die, and it was the same thing to her to die on the way as in her house, in her litter or in her bed, and furthermore would not acknowledge any necessity why she should live, but saw every necessity for keeping to her resolution. “If she will, she will, you may depend on’t,” they said of her, “if she won’t, she won’t, and there’s an end on’t.”

Now that there was no one to reproach her, as Dorset had been accustomed to reproach her, for her lack of finery and absence of proper vanity, she dressed always in rough black serge, she shaved her head, her fare was of the plainest, and her personal economy was pushed to the length of such small eccentricities as using up every stray scrap of paper for her correspondence. One luxury, indeed, she permitted herself: she smoked a pipe. Into all the details of her household she looked with a careful eye; already in the days when she was living at Knole she had used up Richard Dorset’s old shirts to make clouts, now at Appleby she saw to the preserving of fruit, she had her cheeses made at Brougham, sixteen at a time, she got her coal from her own pits, she had all delinquents into her own room and scolded them till they were probably thankful to be dismissed. At the same time she never forgot those that had served her faithfully; she would send her own coach to bring some old retainer to visit her; the marriages, morals, and vicissitudes of her meanest servant were a matter of interest to her; their marriage portions she made her own affair. Besides her servants, her own family gave her much food for thought and preoccupation: it is true that of her seven children only two—her two Sackville daughters—had lived to grow up, but they by now had produced a cohort of grandchildren, whose visits to Lady Anne were a source of infinite pleasure to the old lady. It is, altogether, a pleasant and seemly end to such a life. She had attained the great age of eighty-six; her diary was filled with religious references; she never dwelt upon her death, but it is clear that she can never for one moment have dreaded it. She had lived up consistently to her principles and to her motto: “Preserve your loyalty, defend your rights,” and was ready to go whenever the call should come. “I went not out all this day,” is the last entry in her diary, and the next day (22nd of March 1676), there is an entry in another hand, “The 22nd day the Countess died.”