Knole and the Sackvilles

by V. Sackville-West

Though Dorset be a fool.

I quote the verses as they stand, though “dunce” seems scarcely the right description to apply to Lord Middlesex, that dissolute and extravagant man of fashion, who squandered large sums of money upon producing operas, that “proud, disgusted, melancholy, solitary man,” whose conduct savoured so strongly of madness. Certain family characteristics appeared in him which had skipped his father, and his father and he, consequently and not unnaturally, were not on very good terms. The duke, indeed, did not know what to make of his eldest son and heir. “Upon my word, Mr. Cary,” he said, when Mr. Cary asked him loudly at the play whether Lord Middlesex was to undertake the opera again next season, “I have not considered what answer to make to such a question.” Both Lord Middlesex and Lord John being so unsatisfactory, Lord George was, and remained, his father’s favourite. Lord George, in an even greater degree than his father, is an incongruity among the Sackvilles, a departure from type. In spite of all his mistakes, his misjudgments, and his misfortunes, he was a man of greater ability than most of them, of greater energy than the common run of his indolent and pleasure-loving race, of a further-reaching ambition. He did not begin life as the eldest son, coming in due course to be the head of the family, and languidly accepting the civil or diplomatic posts which were pressed upon him; such career as he had he made for himself. Unlike his predecessors or their descendants, he was neither an ambassador, a poet, nor a patron of art or letters—“I have not,” he wrote, “genius sufficient for works of mere imagination”—but first a soldier and then a statesman, both disastrously. It is not my intention to go into the details of his public career; my ignorance is too great of the tangle of Georgian politics; nor am I qualified to discuss whether he did or did not disobey his orders at Minden, whether he was or was not largely responsible for the loss of America, whether he did or did not write the Letters of Junius; such questions are treated in histories of the period. Nor can I deal with the enormous number of letters on political subjects written both by and to Lord George: I have looked into them more than once, and have come away merely bewildered by the cross-threads of home politics, by the names of remembered or forgotten statesmen, by the fall and reconstruction of Ministries, by the crises of Whigs and Tories. So I judge it best to leave Lord George alone, “hot, haughty, ambitious, and obstinate, a sort of melancholy in his look which runs through all the Sackville family,” and to seek neither to blacken nor to whitewash his character. I scarcely regard him as one of the Sackvilles, perhaps because he broke away from the family traditions into unfamiliar paths, perhaps also because he earned his own peerage, inherited a large house of his own, and led an existence separate from Knole. Living at Knole among its portraits and its legends which grew into the very texture of one’s life, it was, I suppose, inevitable that one should grow up with pre-conceived affections or indifferences, and for some reason Lord George never awakened my interest or my sense of relationship. He was a public character, not a relation.

§ ii

The early impressions of the first duke, who grew to be so pompous, stout, and good-natured, and whose three sons gave him in their several ways so much anxiety, are not unattractive. There is a picture of him as a little slim boy, with his sister and their pet fawn; and there is Lord George’s own anecdote of his father’s childhood:

My father, having lost his own mother, was brought up chiefly by the Dowager Countess of Northampton, his grandmother. She being particularly acceptable to Queen Mary, that Princess commanded her always to bring her little grandson, Lord Buckhurst, to Kensington Palace, though at that time hardly four years of age, and he was allowed to amuse himself with a child’s cart in the gallery. King William, like almost all Dutchmen, never failed to attend the tea-table every evening. It happened that her Majesty having one afternoon by his desire made tea, and waiting for the King’s arrival, who was engaged on business in his cabinet at the other extremity of the gallery, the boy, hearing the Queen express her impatience at the delay, ran away to the closet, dragging after him the cart. When he arrived at the door, he knocked, and the King asking “Who is there?” “Lord Buck,” answered he. “And what does Lord Buck want with me?” replied his Majesty. “You must come to tea directly,” said he, “the Queen is waiting for you.” King William immediately laid down his pen and opened the door. Then taking the child in his arms, he placed Lord Buckhurst in the cart, and seizing the pole drew them both along the gallery to the room in which were seated the Queen, Lady Northampton, and the company. But no sooner had he entered the apartment, than, exhausted with the effort, which had forced the blood upon his lungs, and being constitutionally asthmatic, he threw himself into a chair, and for some minutes was incapable of uttering a word, breathing with the utmost difficulty. The Countess of Northampton, shocked at the consequences of her grandson’s indiscretion, would have punished him, but the King intervened on his behalf.

When a young man he went on the inevitable Grand Tour. This journey, it is fair to assume, which was taken at the instigation of his mother’s relations, was designed to keep him away from the influence of his enfeebled father and of his step-mother, Ann Roche, quite as much as for the benefit of his education. His father was very angry at this withdrawal of his son from his authority, and wrote to him:

i hear my Lady Northampton has ordered you not to obey me; if you take any notice of what she says i have enough in my power to make you suffer for it beyond what she will make you amends for. But i cannot imagine you to be such a fool as to be governed by the passion and folly of anybody.

Your affectionate father,

DORSET.

i expect you will come away by the next yocht.