Knole and the Sackvilles

by V. Sackville-West

THE STONE COURT: BOURCHIER’S GATEHOUSE

Long and narrow, with dark shining floors, armorial glass in the windows, rich plaster-work ceilings, and portraits on the walls, they are splendidly sombre and sumptuous. The colour of the Cartoon Gallery, when I have come into it in the evening, with the sunset flaming through the west window, has often taken my breath away. I have stood, stock still and astonished, in the doorway. The gallery is ninety feet in length, the floor formed of black oak planks irregularly laid, the charm of which is that they are not planks at all, but solid tree-trunks, split in half, with the rounded half downwards; and on this oak flooring lie the blue and scarlet patches from the stained west window, more subduedly echoed in the velvets of the chair coverings, the coloured marbles of the great Renaissance fireplace, and the fruits and garlands of the carved woodwork surrounding the windows. There is nothing garish: all the colours have melted into an old harmony that is one of the principal beauties of these rooms. The walls here in the Cartoon Gallery are hung with rose-red Genoa velvet, so lovely that I almost regret Mytens’ copies of the Raphael cartoons hiding most of it; but if, at Knole, one were too nicely reluctant to sacrifice the walls, whether panelled or velvet-hung, then all the pictures would have to be stacked on the floor of the attics. The same regret applies to the ball-room, where the Elizabethan panelling—oak, but originally painted white, turned by age to ivory—is so covered up as to be unnoticeable behind the Sackville portraits of ten generations. Fortunately, the frieze in the ball-room cannot be hidden. It used to delight me as a child, with its carved intricacies of mermaids and dolphins, mermen and mermaids with scaly, twisting tails and salient anatomy, and I was invariably contemptuous of those visitors to whom I pointed out the frieze but who were more interested in the pictures. It always fell to my lot to “show the house” to visitors when I was living there alone with my grandfather, for he shared the family failing of unsociability, and whenever a telegram arrived threatening invasion he used to take the next train to London for the day, returning in the evening when the coast was clear. It mattered nothing that I was every whit as bored by the invasion as he could have been; in a divergence between the wishes of eighty and the wishes of eight, the wishes of eight went to the wall.

§ vi

There are other galleries, older and more austere than the Cartoon Gallery. They are not quite so long, they are narrower, lower, and darker, and not so exuberant in decoration; indeed, they are simply and soberly panelled in oak. They have the old, musty smell which, to me, whenever I met it, would bring back Knole. I suppose it is really the smell of all old houses—a mixture of woodwork, pot-pourri, leather, tapestry, and the little camphor bags which keep away the moth; the smell engendered by the shut windows of winter and the open windows of summer, with the breeze of summer blowing in from across the park. Bowls of lavender and dried rose-leaves stand on the window-sills; and if you stir them up you get the quintessence of the smell, a sort of dusty fragrance, sweeter in the under layers where it has held the damp of the spices. The pot-pourri at Knole is always made from the recipe of a prim-looking little old lady who lived there for many years as a guest in the reigns of George I and George II. Her two rooms open out of one of the galleries, two of the smallest rooms in the house, the bedroom hung with a pale landscape of blue-green tapestry, the sitting-room panelled in oak; and in the bedroom stands her small but pompous bed, with bunches of ostrich-plumes nodding at each of the four corners. Strangers usually seem to like these two little rooms best, coming to them as they do, rather overawed by the splendour of the galleries; they are amused by the smallness of the four-poster, square as a box, its creamy lining so beautifully quilted; by the spinning-wheel, with the shuttle still full of old flax; and by the ring-box, containing a number of plain-cut stones, which could be exchanged at will into the single gold setting provided. The windows of these rooms, furthermore, look out on to the garden; they are human, habitable little rooms, reassuring after the pomp of the Ball-room and the galleries. In the sitting-room there is a small portrait of the prim lady, Lady Betty Germaine, sitting very stiff in a blue brocaded dress; she looks as though she had been a martinet in a tight, narrow way.

The gallery leading to these rooms is called the Brown Gallery. It is well named—oak floor, oak walls, and barrelled ceiling, criss-crossed with oak slats in a pattern something like cat’s cradle. Some of the best pieces of the English furniture are ranged down each side of this gallery: portentously important chairs, Jacobean cross-legged or later love-seats in their original coverings, whether of plum and silver, or red brocade with heavy fringes, or green with silver fringes, or yellow silk sprigged in black, or powder-blue; and all have their attendant stool squatting beside them. They are lovely, silent rows, for ever holding out their arms, and for ever disappointed. At the end of this gallery is a tiny oratory, down two steps, for the use of the devout: this little, almost secret, place glows with colour like a jewel, but nobody ever notices it, and on the whole it probably prefers to hide itself away unobserved.

There is also the Leicester Gallery, which preserves in its name the sole trace of Lord Leicester’s brief ownership of Knole. The Leicester Gallery is very dark and mysterious, furnished with red velvet Cromwellian farthingale chairs and sofas, dark as wine; there are illuminated scrolls of two family pedigrees—Sackville and Curzon—richly emblazoned with coats of arms, drawn out in 1589 and 1623 respectively; and in the end window there is a small stained-glass portrait of “Herbrand de Sackville, a Norman notable, came into England with William the Conqueror, A.D. 1066.” (Herbrandus de Sackville, Praepotens Normanus, intravit Angliam cum Gulielmo Conquestore, Anno Domini MLXVI.) There is also a curious portrait hanging on one of the doors, of Catherine Fitzgerald Countess of Desmond, the portrait of a very old lady, in a black dress and a white ruff, with that strange far-away look in her dead blue eyes that comes with extreme age. For tradition says of her that she was born in the reign of Edward the Fourth and died in the reign of Charles the First, breaking her leg incidentally at the age of ninety by falling off a cherry tree; that is to say, she was a child when the princes were smothered in the Tower, a girl when Henry the Seventh came to the throne, and watched the pageant of all the Tudors and the accession of the Stuarts—the whole of English history enclosed between the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War. She must have been a truly legendary figure in the country by the time she had reached the age of a hundred and forty or thereabouts.

It is rather a frightening portrait, that portrait of Lady Desmond. If you go into the gallery after nightfall with a candle the pale, far-away eyes stare past you into the dark corners of the wainscot, eyes either over-charged or empty—which? The house is not haunted, but you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house’s benevolence before you can wander through the state-rooms after nightfall with a candle. The light gleams on the dull gilding of furniture and into the misty depths of mirrors, and startles up a sudden face out of the gloom; something creaks and sighs; the tapestry sways, and the figures on it undulate and seem to come alive. The recesses of the great beds, deep in shadow, might be inhabited, and you would not know it; eyes might watch you, unseen. The man with the candle is under a terrible disadvantage to the man in the dark.

§ vii

As there are three galleries among the state-rooms, so are there three principal bedrooms: the King’s, the Venetian Ambassador’s, and the Spangled Room. The King’s bedroom is the only vulgar room in the house. Not that the furniture put there for the reception of James the First is vulgar: it is excessively magnificent, the canopy of the immense bed reaching almost to the ceiling, decked with ostrich feathers, the hangings stiff with gold and silver thread, the coverlet and the interior of the curtains heavily embroidered with a design of pomegranates and tiger-lilies worked in silver on a coral satin ground, the royal cipher embossed over the pillows—all this is very magnificent, but not vulgar. What is vulgar is the set of furniture made entirely in silver: table, hanging mirror, and tripods—the florid and ostentatious product of the florid Restoration. There is a surprising amount of silver in the room: sconces, ginger-jars, mirrors, fire-dogs, toilet-set, rose-water sprinklers, even to a little eye-bath, all of silver, but these smaller objects have not the blatancy of the set of furniture. Charles Sackville, for whom it was made, cannot have known when he had had enough of a good thing.

It is almost a relief to go from here to the Venetian Ambassador’s Bedroom. Green and gold; Burgundian tapestry, mediaeval figures walking in a garden; a rosy Persian rug—of all rooms I never saw a room that so had over it a bloom like the bloom on a bowl of grapes and figs. I cannot keep the simile, which may convey nothing to those who have not seen the room, out of my mind. Greens and pinks originally bright, now dusted and tarnished over. It is a very grave, stately room, rather melancholy in spite of its stateliness. It seems to miss its inhabitants more than do any of the other rooms. Perhaps this is because the bed appears to be designed for three: it is of enormous breadth, and there are three pillows in a row. Presumably this is what the Italians call a letto matrimoniale.