Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

KNOLE and the SACKVILLES

John Frederick Sackville, 3^rd. Duke of Dorset K.G.
From the portrait at Knole by Gainsborough.

KNOLE
and
THE SACKVILLES

by

V. SACKVILLE-WEST

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1922

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

TABLE OF DESCENT

CONTENTS

The dome of Knole, by fame enrolled,

The Church of Canterbury,

The hops, the beer, the cherries there,

Would fill a noble story.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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

On the whole, the quadrangle is reminiscent of Oxford, though more palatial and less studious. The house is built round a system of these courtyards: first this one, the Green Court, which is the largest and most magnificent; then the second one, or Stone Court, which is not turfed, like the Green Court, but wholly paved, and which has along one side of it a Jacobean colonnade; the third court is the Water Court, and has none of the display of the first two: it is smaller, and quite demure, indeed rather like some old house in Nuremberg, with the latticed window of one of the galleries running the whole length of it, and the friendly unconcern of an immense bay-tree growing against one of its walls. There are four other courts, making seven in all. This number is supposed to correspond to the days in the week; and in pursuance of this conceit there are in the house fifty-two staircases, corresponding to the weeks in the year, and three hundred and sixty-five rooms, corresponding to the days. I cannot truthfully pretend that I have ever verified these counts, and it may be that their accuracy is accepted solely on the strength of the legend; but, if this is so, then it has been a very persistent legend, and I prefer to sympathise with the amusement of the ultimate architect on making the discovery that by a judicious juggling with his additions he could bring courts, stairs, and rooms up to that satisfactory total.

A stone lobby under the oriel window divides the Green Court from the Stone Court. In summer the great oak doors of this second gate-house are left open, and it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no barrier checked him.

It becomes impossible, after passing through the formality of the two first quadrangles, to follow the ramblings of the house geographically. They are so involved that, after a lifetime of familiarity, I still catch myself pausing to think out the shortest route from one room to another. Four acres of building is no mean matter.

§ iii

Into the very early mediaeval history of the house I do not think that I need enter. It is suggested that a Roman building once occupied the site, and that some foundations which were recently unearthed beneath the larder—evidently one of the oldest portions—once formed part of that construction. The question of dating the existing buildings, however, is quite sufficiently complicated without going back to a building which no longer exists. Nor do I think that the early owners—the Pembrokes, or the Say and Seles—offer the smallest interest; if we knew precisely what parts of the house we owed to them severally it would be another matter, but the mediaeval records are very scanty. It is safe to say, generally speaking, that the north side is the oldest side; it is the most sombre, the most massive, and the most irregular; there are buttresses, battlements, and towers, but no gables and no embellishments—nothing but solid masonry. Up in the north-east corner is the old kitchen, and the old entrances through dark archways at the top of stairways. The passages here, of thick stone, twist oddly, and their ceilings are groined by semi-arches which have become lost and embedded in the alterations to the stone-work. It is a dark, massive, little-visited corner, this nucleus of Knole.

The house, or such portions of it as then existed, was bought from William, Lord Say and Sele, by Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, on June 30, 1456, and it is clear from the numerous bills among the archives at Lambeth Palace that both he and his more notable successor, Cardinal Morton, carried out extensive additions, alterations, and repairs. It is, however, a very difficult task to determine what parts of the building definitely belong to this period, for, what with the additions of the archbishops and the alterations of the later Sackvilles, all is confusion. It would appear, for instance, that upon a foundation of Tudor masonry the Sackvilles constructed the Elizabethan gables which are now so characteristic a feature of the house; but it is less easy to say exactly how much the first Tudor archbishop found there on his arrival of earlier workmanship. A further confusing factor is the great fire which took place in 1623, and is reported to have destroyed a large part of the building—but exactly where, and how much, we cannot say. Nor are the accounts at Lambeth very illuminating:

In divers costs and expenses made this year [1467] for repairing the manor of Knole, carriage for the two cart loads of lathes from Panters to the manor, 14d. For carriage of thirty loads of stone for the new tower, 7d. load = 16/9. Carriage of six loads of timber at 7d. = 3/6. Carriage of one fother of lead from London to Knole, 3/4.

The next year, 1468:

Repairs at Knole. One labourer for 6 days work in the great chamber and the new seler, 2/-. Making of 700 lathes to the new tower, 14d. One labourer 4½ days in the old kitchen, 4d. Item, for 1 j M¹ of walle prygge (sic) to the stable and other places, 13d. One cowl to the masonry, 12d.

THE GREEN COURT: BOURCHIER’S ORIEL

The “great chamber” referred to here was in all probability the present Great Hall, which we know to have been built by Bourchier about 1460, although it was altered by Thomas Sackville, who put in the present ceiling, panelling, and oak screen. Thomas also built the Great Staircase in 1604–8, leading to the Ball-room, which is of the time of Bourchier. I expect this is the “seler” referred to, meaning solar and not cellar, as might be thought; or did it mean the present colonnade, which is also of Bourchier’s building, in 1468? The position of the “new tower” is nowhere specified, but I wonder whether it is not the tower beside the chapel, where there is a stone fireplace bearing Bourchier’s cognisance—the double knot—and the same device in a small pane of stained glass in the window. This tower, moreover, goes commonly by the name of Bourchier’s Tower.

There are a few more items mentioned in the Lambeth papers, 1468–9: “Repairs at Knole. Repairs at one house set aside for the slaughter of sheep and other [animals?] for the use of the Lord’s great house at Sevenoaks, 113s. 2d.” This, I think, is certainly the old slaughter-house which forms one side of the Queen’s Court. It is obviously a very old building. But there is one point in this account which is of interest, namely, that Knole should at this date have been referred to as the “great house.” This would seem to prove that the greater mass of the building was already in existence, since by the latter half of the fifteenth century there were already many houses and palaces in England whose bulk would argue that the current standard of greatness might be high and the adjective not too readily applied. The Primate owned, moreover, up to the time of the Reformation no less than twelve palaces and houses of residence in the diocese of Canterbury alone, namely, Bekesburn, Ford, Maidstone, Charing, Saltwood, Aldington, Wingham, Wrotham, Tenterden, Knole, Otford, and Canterbury. It seems, therefore, unlikely that Knole should be singled out as a “great house” unless there were good justification for the expression.

Bourchier also built the Brown Gallery about 1460, and at or about the same date he put up the machicolations over the gate-house between the Green Court and the Stone Court. Towards the end of the same century, Morton, his successor, “threw out an oriel window which rendered the machicolations useless, and showed that all idea of such fortifications was at an end.” It is not known precisely how much Morton built at Knole. It is even uncertain whether he or Bourchier built the Chapel. The Lambeth records cease with some small repairs in 1487–88, so we have nothing to go upon—all the more pity, for Morton was a great prelate, forgotten now in the greater fame of the Tudor dynasty, “his name buried,” says his chronicler, “under his own creation.” This cardinal, having succeeded Bourchier in 1486, held the Primacy for fourteen years, and died at Knole in 1500. I pass over his successors, Dean and Wareham, for I do not know how much they did at Knole. Cranmer, the next archbishop, enjoyed the house for seven years only, when he was compelled—quite amicably, but nevertheless compelled—to present it to Henry VIII, whose fancy it had taken. Here the accounts begin again,[^[1]] although they give very little indication: £872 by Royal Warrant in 1543, £770 in 1548, £80 in 1546—three sums which would now be equivalent, roughly, to £30,000.

After Henry VIII Knole continued as Crown property, passing now and then temporarily into the hands of various favourites, until in 1586 it was given by Queen Elizabeth to her cousin, Thomas Sackville, and has remained in the possession of his family ever since.

§ iv

The main block, therefore, meanders from Henry VII through Henry VIII to Elizabeth and James I: that is to say, roughly, from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth. There may be earlier out-buildings and later excrescences, but it is safe to say that the greater portion was built in the reigns of the Tudors. It is all of the same Kentish rag, with the exception of a row of gables which have been plastered over, and which were probably once of the beam-and-plaster fashion so prevalent at that date in Kent. With this exception the walls are of the grey stone, in many places ten and twelve feet thick, cool in summer, and, for some reason, not particularly warm in winter. The rooms are, for the most part, rather small and rather low; they break out, of course, now into galleries, now into a ball-room, now into a banqueting-hall, but the majority of them are small, friendly rooms—not intimidating; some people might even think them poky, relative to the size of the house. I do not think that they are poky. They are eminently rooms intended to be lived in, and not merely admired, though no doubt a practical consideration was present in the problem of heating to determine their size. Yet from an old diary preserved at Knole, and from which in its place I shall have the opportunity to give extracts, it is clear that in the early seventeenth century at all events the life of the house was carried on largely in one or the other of the long galleries. Now, none of the galleries has more than one fireplace. It must have been very cold. The old braziers that could be carried about the room as occasion required still stand in the rooms where they were used, and so do the copper warming-pans, shining and perforated, which were thrust into the beds to warm them before the arrival of the occupant. The principal beds, of course, must have been magnificently stuffy. They are four-posters, so tall as to reach from floor to ceiling, with stiff brocaded curtains that could completely enclose the sleeper. But on winter days I cannot believe that the group ever moved very far away from the fireplace or the brazier; and indeed, judging from the same diary, they seemed always to be “keeping their chamber” on account of coughs, colds, rheumatism, or ague when they were not keeping it because they were “sullen” with one another, or “brought to bed” of a son or a daughter.

§ v

The galleries are perhaps the most characteristic rooms in such a house.

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.

§ viii

In a remote corner of the house is the Chapel of the Archbishops, small, and very much bejewelled. Tapestry, oak, and stained-glass—the chapel smoulders with colour. It is greatly improved since the oak has been pickled and the mustard-yellow paint removed, also the painted myrtle-wreaths, tied with a gilt ribbon, in the centre of each panel, with which the nineteenth century adorned it, when it was considered “very simple, plain, and neat in its appearance, and well adapted for family worship.” The hand of the nineteenth century fell rather heavily on the chapel: besides painting the oak yellow and the ceiling blue with gold stars, it erected a Gothic screen and a yellow organ; but fortunately these are both at the entrance, and you can turn your back on them and look down the little nave to the altar where Mary Queen of Scots’ gifts stand under the Perpendicular east window. All along the left-hand wall hangs the Gothic tapestry—scenes from the life of Christ, the figures, ungainly enough, trampling on an edging of tall irises and lilies exquisitely designed; and “Saint Luke in his first profession,” wrote Horace Walpole irreverently, “holding a urinal.” There used to be other tapestries in the house; there was one of the Seven Deadly Sins set, woven with gold threads, and there was another series, very early, representing the Flood and the two-by-two procession of the animals going into a weather-boarded Ark; but these, alas, had to be sold, and are now in America.

THE STONE COURT

The chapel looks strange and lovely during a midnight thunderstorm: the lightning flashes through the stone ogives of the east window, and one gets a queer effect, unreal like colour photography, of the colours lit up by that unfamiliar means. A flight of little private steps leads out of my bedroom straight into the Family Pew; so I dare to say that there are few aspects under which I have not seen the chapel; and as a child I used to “take sanctuary” there when I had been naughty: that is to say, fairly often. They never found me, sulking inside the pulpit.

§ ix

There would, of course, be many other aspects from which I might consider Knole; indeed, if I allowed myself full licence I might ramble out over Kent and down into Sussex, to Lewes, Buckhurst, and Withyham, out into the fruit country and the hop country, across the Weald, over Saxonbury, and to Lewes among the Downs, and still I should not feel guilty of irrelevance. Of whatever English county I spoke, I still should be aware of the relationship between the English soil and that most English house. But more especially do I feel this concerning Kent and Sussex, and concerning the roads over which the Sackvilles travelled so constantly between estate and estate. The place-names in their letters recur through the centuries; the paper is a little yellower as the age increases, the ink a little more faded, the handwriting a little less easily decipherable, but still the gist is always the same: “I go to-morrow into Kent,” “I quit Buckhurst for Knole,” “my Lord rode to Lewes with a great company,” “we came to Knole by coach at midnight.” The whole district is littered with their associations, whether a village whose living lay in their gift, or a town where they endowed a college, or a wood where they hunted, or the village church where they had themselves buried. Sussex, in fact, was their cradle long before they came into Kent. Buckhurst, which they had owned since the twelfth century, was at one time an even larger house than Knole, and to their own vault in its parish church of Withyham they were invariably brought to rest. Their trace is scattered over the two counties. But this was not my only meaning; I had in mind that Knole was no mere excrescence, no alien fabrication, no startling stranger seen between the beeches and the oaks. No other country but England could have produced it, and into no other country would it settle with such harmony and such quiet. The very trees have not been banished from the courtyards, but spread their green against the stone. From the top of a tower one looks down upon the acreage of roofs, and the effect is less that of a palace than of a jumbled village upon the hillside. It is not an incongruity like Blenheim or Chatsworth, foreign to the spirit of England. It is, rather, the greater relation of those small manor-houses which hide themselves away so innumerably among the counties, whether built of the grey stone of south-western England, or the brick of East Anglia, or merely tile-hung or plastered like the cottages. It is not utterly different from any of these. The great Palladian houses of the eighteenth century are in England, they are not of England, as are these irregular roofs, this easy straying up the contours of the hill, these cool coloured walls, these calm gables, and dark windows mirroring the sun.

CHAPTER II
The Garden and Park

§ i

You come out of the cool shadowy house on to the warm garden, in the summer, and there is a scared flutter of white pigeons up to the roof as you open the door. You have to look twice before you are sure whether they are pigeons or magnolias. The turf is of the most brilliant green; there is a sound of bees in the limes; the heat quivers like watered gauze above the ridge of the lawn. The garden is entirely enclosed by a high wall of rag, very massively built, and which perhaps dates back to the time of the archbishops; its presence, I think, gives a curious sense of seclusion and quiet. Inside the walls are herbaceous borders on either side of long green walks, and little square orchards planted with very old apple-trees, under which grow iris, snapdragon, larkspur, pansies, and such-like humble flowers. There are also interior walls, with rounded archways through which one catches a sight of the house, so that the garden is conveniently divided up into sections without any loss of the homogeneity of the whole. Half of the garden, roughly speaking, is formal; the other half is woodland, called the Wilderness, mostly of beech and chestnut, threaded by mossy paths which in spring are thick with bluebells and daffodils.

Airco Aerials Ltd.
KNOLE FROM AN AEROPLANE

The old engravings show the gardens to have been, from the seventeenth century onwards, very much the same as they are at present. There are a few minor variations, but as the early engravers were not very particular as to accuracy their evidence cannot be accepted as wholly reliable. We have, besides these engravings, a fairly large number of records relating to both the park and gardens. The earliest of these that I have been able to trace is dated 1456, to the effect that Archbishop Bourchier in that year enclosed the park—a smaller area then than is covered by it now; and in 1468 there is a bill, “Paid for making 1000 palings for the enclosure of the Knole land, 6s. 8d.” But the first accounts for the garden proper appear to date from the reign of Henry VIII (State papers of Henry VIII), when, in 1543, Sir Richard Longe was paid “for making the King’s garden at Knole.” Then there is a gap of nearly a century, save for the references to the garden in Lady Anne Clifford’s Diary, such as “25th October, 1617. My Lady Lisle and my Coz: Barbara Sidney [came?] and I walked with them all the Wilderness over. They saw the Child and much commended her. I gave them some marmalade of quince, for about this time I made much of it”; and her constant notes of how she took her prayer-book “up to the standing” [which I take to be what we now call the Duchess’ Seat], or of how she picked cherries in the garden with the French page, and he told her how he thought that all the men in the house loved her. For the year 1692, however, there are some bills among the Knole papers, such as “Mr. Olloynes, gardener, wages £12 per annum,” and some bills for seeds and roots, “Sweet yerbs, pawsley, sorrill, spinnig, spruts, leeks, sallet, horse-rydish, jerusalem hawty-chorks,” and another bill for seeds for £2. 0s. 5d. Coming to the eighteenth century, there are more detailed accounts, amongst others an agreement of what was expected in those days of a head gardener and the remuneration he might hope to receive:

14th Aug., 1706. Ric. Baker, Gardener with Lionel Earl of Dorset and Middlesex. To serve his Lordship as Gardener at Knole for the term of one year ½ to begin in March 1706. That he will reserve all the fruit which shall be growing in the garden for his Lordship’s use. That he will at his own charge during the said term preserve all Trees and Greens now in the garden, and will maintain the trees in good husbandlike manner by pruning and trimming, dunging and marling the same in seasonable times, and likewise at his own charge will provide all herbs and other things convenient for my Lord’s kitchen there when in season. He undertakes to maintain at his own charge all such walks as are now in ye said Garden, by mowing, cleaning, and rolling the same, and will preserve all such flowers and plants as are now in the gardens, and that he will be at all the charges of repairing all the glass frames, etc. belonging to the Garden Trade, and will provide for the present use of the Gardens 50 loads of dung.

In return for this service he was to be allowed £30 per annum, and

rooms and conveniences in the house for his business, and to hand all such dung, etc. as shall be made about the house for the use of ye gardens, and that he may have the privilege of disposing [for his own use] all such beans, peas, cabbages, and other kitchen herbs as shall be spared, over and above that what is used in my Lord’s kitchen.

THE GARDEN SIDE (SOUTH FRONT)

It is not very clear where such a large number of fruit trees were to be used, but on an engraving of about 1720 I find a wall extending right across the garden to the two stone pillars which, surmounted by carved stone urns, still remain, this wall being planted with fruit trees, so I should think it very probable that this would account for it.

In 1777 new hot-houses and “Pineries” were built, and £175 paid for “two hot-houses full stocked with pine apples and plants.”

§ ii

Surrounding the house and gardens lies the park, with its valleys, hills, and woods, and its short brown turf closely bitten by deer and rabbits. Its beeches and bracken, its glades and valleys, greatly excited the admiration of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, who visited it in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and she wrote with enthusiasm of shade rising above shade with amazing and magnificent grandeur, and of one beech in particular spreading “its light yet umbrageous fan” over a seat placed round the bole. With all its grandeur and luxuriance, she said, there was nothing about this beech heavy or formal; it was airy, though vast and majestic, and suggested an idea at once of the strength and fire of a hero. She would call a beech tree, she added, and this beech above every other, the hero of the forest, as the oak was called the king.

As I have said, the park was first enclosed by Bourchier in 1456, the year in which he bought Knole on the 30th of June. In the muniments at Lambeth are a number of papers relating to the expenses of this great builder, and there is the interesting fact that glass-making was carried on in the park, and I only wish that more detailed accounts existed of this industry, which, thanks to the Huguenots, had been pretty widely introduced into the South of England. I should like to know exactly where their glass-foundry was, and whether they made use of the sand on the portion known as the Furze-field, now a rabbit warren; and I should also very much like to know whether—as seems probable—they supplied any of the glass for the windows in the house.

It would appear that the park, now entirely under grass, was once ploughland, for there is at Knole a deed of the time of Richard Sackville, fifth Earl of Dorset—that is to say, the middle of the seventeenth century—which accords to four farmers “the liberty to plough anywhere in the Park except in the plain set out by my Lord and the ground in front of the house, and to take three crops, and it is agreed that one-third of each crop after it is severed from the ground shall be taken and carried away by my Lord for his own use. The third year, the farmers to sow the ground with grass seed if my Lord desires it, and they are to be at the charge of the seed, the tillage, and the harvest.” Later on, in the time of Charles I, hops were grown, not only around the park, but also in it. Women employed in picking the hops were paid 5d. a day, but for cleaning and weeding the ground they only received 3d. At this time also cattle were fed in the park during the summer, and belonging to the same date (about 1628) are the bills for “Moles caught, 1½d. each”; “Mowing the meadows,” at the rate of 1s. 6d. per acre; “Making hay,” also at 1s. 6d. per acre; “Carriage of hay from the meadows to Knole barn,” [1]s. 4d. per load; “one hay fork and 2 hay forks together,” 1s. 8d. For “hunting conies by night and ferret by day” 4s. was paid; the expenses involved by the “conies” for one year were exactly £10, which included £5 5s., a year’s wages for the “wariner”; but, on the other hand, this was money well expended, for the revenue from “conies sold” covers no less than a fifth part of the year’s total income. The “wariner,” although his £5 5s. a year hardly seems excessive, did better than the “wood-looker,” who, for his woodreeveship for a year, was paid only £2.

The accounts of how and when the various outlying portions of the park were taken in can only be of local interest, and I do not therefore propose to go into them. They were mostly bought by John Frederick, the third duke, and by Lord Whitworth, who had married John Frederick’s widow. The ruins round the queer little sham Gothic house called the Bird House—which always frightened me as a child because I thought it looked like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel, tucked away in its hollow, with its pointed gables—were built for John Frederick’s grandfather about 1761, by one Captain Robert Smith, who had fought at Minden under Lord George Sackville, of disastrous notoriety, and who lived for some time at Knole, a parasite upon the house; they apparently purport to be the remains of some vast house, in defiance of the fact that no upper storey or roof of proportionate dimensions could ever possibly have rested upon the flimsy structure of flint and rubble which constitute the ruins. They, together with the Bird House, form an amusing group of the whims and vanities of two different ages. But, to go back to the park, I conclude with the following letter, which is among the papers at Knole:

A GATEWAY INTO THE GARDEN

To his Grace the DUKE of DORSET.

My Lord,

I Elizabeth Hills sister and executor of Mrs. Anne Hills deceased of Under River in the Parish of Seal and whose corpse is to be interred in the Parish Church of Seal: but the High Road leading thereto by Godden Green being very bad and unsafe for carriages: I beg leave of yr Grace to permit the proper attendants to pass with the corpse, in a hearse with the coaches in attendance through Knole Park: entering the same at Faulke [sic] Common Gate and going out at the gate at Lock’s Bottom: and you’ll oblige

Your Grace’s most obedient serv^t

ELIZA HILLS.

UNDER RIVER,

18 Oct., 1781.

§ iii

So much, then, for the setting; but it is no mere empty scene. The house, with its exits and entrances, its properties of furniture and necessities, its dressing-tables, its warming-pans, and its tiny silver eye-bath still standing between the hair-brushes—the house demands its population. Whose were the hands that have, by the constant light running of their fingers, polished the paint from the banisters? Whose were the feet that have worn down the flags of the hall and the stone passages? What child rode upon the ungainly rocking-horse? What young men exercised their muscles on the ropes of the great dumb-bell? Who were the men and women that, after a day’s riding or stitching, lay awake in the deep beds, idly watching between the curtains the play of the firelight, and the little round yellow discs cast upon walls and ceiling through the perforations of the tin canisters standing on the floor, containing the rush-lights?

Thus the house wakes into a whispering life, and we resurrect the Sackvilles.

CHAPTER III
Knole in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth
THOMAS SACKVILLE
1st
Earl of Dorset

§ i

Such interest as the Sackvilles have lies, I think, in their being so representative. From generation to generation they might stand, fully equipped, as portraits from English history. Unless they are to be considered in this light they lose their purport; they merely share, as Byron wrote to one of their number:

... with titled crowds the common lot,

In life just gazed at, in the grave forgot ...

The mouldering ’scutcheon, or the herald’s roll,

That well-emblazoned but neglected scroll,

Where lords, unhonoured, in the tomb may find

One spot, to leave a worthless name behind:

There sleep, unnoticed as the gloomy vaults

That veil their dust, their follies, and their faults:

A race with old armorial lists o’erspread

In records destined never to be read.

But let them stand each as the prototype of his age, and at the same time as a link to carry on, not only the tradition but also the heredity of his race, and they immediately acquire a significance, a unity. You have first the grave Elizabethan, with the long, rather melancholy face, emerging from the oval frame above the black clothes and the white wand of office; you perceive all his severe integrity; you understand the intimidating austerity of the contribution he made to English letters. Undoubtedly a fine old man. You come down to his grandson: he is the Cavalier by Vandyck hanging in the hall, hand on hip, his flame-coloured doublet slashed across by the blue of the Garter; this is the man who raised a troop of horse off his own estates and vowed never to cross the threshold of his house into an England governed by the murderers of the King. You have next the florid, magnificent Charles, the fruit of the Restoration, poet, and patron of poets, prodigal, jovial, and licentious; you have him full-length, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, in his Garter robes and his enormous wig, his foot and fine calf well thrust forward; you have him less pompous and more intimate, wrapped in a dressing-gown of figured silk, the wig replaced by an Hogarthian turban; but it is still the same coarse face, with the heavy jowl and the twinkling eyes, the crony of Rochester and Sedley, the patron and host of Pope and Dryden, Prior and Killigrew. You come down to the eighteenth century. You have on Gainsborough’s canvas the beautiful, sensitive face of the gay and fickle duke, spoilt, feared, and propitiated by the women of London and Paris, the reputed lover of Marie Antoinette. You have his son, too fair and pretty a boy, the friend of Byron, killed in the hunting-field at the age of twenty-one, the last direct male of a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy.

§ ii

The Sackvilles are supposed to have gone into Normandy in the ninth century with Rollo the Dane, and to have settled in the neighbourhood of Dieppe, in a small town called Salcavilla, from which, obviously, they derived their name. Much as I relish the suggestion of this Norse origin, I am bound to add that the first of whom there is any authentic record is Herbrand de Sackville, contemporary with William the Conqueror, whom he accompanied to England. Descending from him is a long monotonous list of Sir Jordans, Sir Andrews, Sir Edwards, Sir Richards, carrying us through the Crusades, the French wars, and the wars of the Roses, but none of whom has the slightest interest until we get to Sir Richard Sackville, temp. Henry VIII-Elizabeth—from his wealth called Sackfill or Fillsack, though not, it appears, “either griping or penurious,” a man of some note, and thus qualified by Roger Ascham: “That worthy gentleman, that earnest favourer and furtherer of God’s true religion; that faithful servitor to his prince and country; a lover of learning and all learned men; wise in all doings; courteous to all persons, showing spite to none, doing good to many; and, as I well found, to me so fast a friend as I never lost the like before”; and in this same connection I may quote further from Ascham’s preface to The Scholemaster, in which he records a conversation which took place in 1593 between himself and Sir Richard Sackville, when dining with Sir William Cecil: Sir Richard, after complaining of his own education by a bad schoolmaster, said, “But seeing it is but in vain to lament things past, and also wisdom to look to things to come, surely, God willing (if God lend me life), I will make this my mishap some occasion of good hap to little Robert Sackville, my son’s son; for whose bringing up I would gladly, if so please you, use specially your good advice.”... “I wish also,” says Ascham, “with all my heart, that young Mr. Robert Sackville may take that fruit of this labour that his worthy grandfather purposed he should have done. And if any other do take profit or pleasure hereby, they have cause to thank Mr. Robert Sackville, for whom specially this my Scholemaster was provided.”

This Sir Richard was the founder of the family fortune, which was to be increased by his son and squandered after that by nearly all his descendants in succession. It was he who bought, in 1564, for the sum of £641 5s. 10½d., “the whole of the land lying between Bridewell and Water Lane from Fleet Street to the Thames.” This property, now of course of almost fabulous value, included the house then known as Salisbury House, having belonged to the see of Salisbury, which presently became Dorset House in 1603, and presently again was divided into Great Dorset House and Little Dorset House, as the London house of the Sackvilles. A wall enclosed house and gardens from the existing line of Salisbury Court south to the river, and shops and tenements in and near Fleet Street from St. Bride’s to Water Lane (Whitefriars Street). These were not the only London possessions of the Sackvilles. Later on they overflowed into the Strand, and another Dorset House sprang up, on the site of the present Treasury in Whitehall, to take the place of the older house in Salisbury Court, which had been destroyed in the Great Fire. It is idle and exasperating to speculate on the modern value of these City estates.

Sir Richard Sackville died in 1566, when his son Thomas was already thirty years of age. Very little is known about Thomas’ early life; we only know that he went for a short time to Oxford (Hertford), and subsequently to the Inner Temple. While at Oxford he attracted some attention as a poet and writer of sonnets, but I have only been able to find one of these early sonnets, written for Hoby’s translation of the Courtier of Count Baldessar Castilio (published in 1561), and which I quote, not so much for its worth as for its interest as a little-known work from the pen of one who, as the author of our earliest tragedy, has a certain renown:

These royal Kings, that rear up to the sky

Their palace tops, and deck them all with gold:

With rare and curious works they feed the eye,

And show what riches here great princes hold.

A rarer work, and richer far in worth,

Castilio’s hand presenteth here to thee:

No proud nor golden court doth he set forth

But what in court a courtier ought to be.

The prince he raiseth huge and mighty walls,

Castilio frames a wight of noble fame:

The King with gorgeous tissue clads his halls,

The court with golden virtue decks the same

Whose passing skill, lo, Hoby’s pen displays

To Britain folk a work of worthy praise.

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.

Returning yesterday to Shene, I received as from your Lordships how her highness stood greatly displeased with me, for that I had not in better sort entertained the Cardinal.

He goes on to speak of his “great grief” and his “sorrowful heart,” especially, he says, “being to her Majesty as I am,” and proceeds with the attempt to justify himself for his supposed niggardliness:

I brought them in to every part of the house that I possessed, and showed them all such stuff and furniture as I had. And where they required plate of me, I told them as troth is, that I had no plate at all. Such glass vessel as I had I offered them, which they thought too base; for napery I could not satisfy their turn, for they desired damask work for a long table, and I had none other but plain linen for a square table. The table whereon I dine myself I offered them, and for that it was a square table they refused it. One only tester and bedstead not occupied I had, and those I delivered for the Cardinal himself, and when we could not by any means in so short a time procure another bedstead for the bishop, I assigned them the bedstead on which my wife’s waiting women did lie, and laid them on the ground. Mine own basin and ewer I lent to the Cardinal and wanted myself. So did I the candlesticks for mine own table, with divers drinking glasses, small cushions, small pots for the kitchen, and sundry other such like trifles, although indeed I had no greater store of them than I presently occupied; and albeit this be not worthy the writing, yet mistrusting lest the misorder of some others in denying of such like kind of stuff not occupied by themselves, have been percase informed as towards me, I have thought good not to omit it. Long tables, forms, brass for the kitchen, and all such necessaries as could not be furnished by me, we took order to provide in the town; hangings and beds we received from the yeoman of the wardrobe at Richmond, and when we saw that napery and sheets could nowhere here be had, I sent word thereof to the officers at the Court, by which means we received from my lord of Leicester 2 pair of fine sheets for the Cardinal, and from my lord Chamberlain one pair of fine for the bishop, with 2 other coarser pair, and order beside for 10 pair more from London.

At which time also because I would be sure your Lordships should be ascertained of the simpleness and scarcity of such stuff as I had here, I sent a man of mine to the Court, specially to declare to your Lordships that for plate, damask, napery and fine sheets, I had none at all and for the rest of my stuff neither was it such as with honour might furnish such a personage, nor yet had I any greater store thereof than I presently occupied, and he brought me this answer again from your Lordships that if I had it not I could not lend it. And yet all things being thus provided for, and the diet for his Lordship being also prepared, I sent word thereof to Mr. Kingesmele and thereupon the next day in the morning about nine of the clock the Cardinal came to Shene where I met and received him almost a quarter of a mile from the house, and when I had first brought the Cardinal to his lodging, and after the bishop to his, I thought good there to leave them to their repose. Thus having accommodated his Lordship as well as might be with so short a warning, I thought myself to have fully performed the meaning of your Lordships’ letters unto me, and because I had tidings the day before that a house of mine in the country by sudden chance was burned ... I took horse and rode the same night towards those places, where I found so much of my house burned as 200 marks will not repair....

This is not at all in accordance with his reputation for hospitality:

He kept house for forty and two years in an honourable proportion. For thirty years of these his family consisted of little less, in one place or another, than two hundred persons. But for more than twenty years, besides workmen and other hired, his number at the least hath been two hundred and twenty daily, as appeared upon check-role. A very rare example in this present age of ours, when housekeeping is so decayed.

I think that this reputation, and the enormous sums which he spent upon the enlargement and beautifying of Knole, make all the more remarkable the statements in the foregoing letter: that he had neither napery, plate, nor sheets, and that in order to provide his guest with a basin and ewer he was obliged to do without them himself. It is apparent also from his will that he indulged himself in the luxury of various musicians, “some for the voice and some for the instrument, whom I have found to be honest in their behaviour and skilful in their profession, and who had often given me after the labour and painful travels of the day much recreation and contatation with their delightful harmony.” “Musicians,” it was said, “the most curious he could have,” so that in these extravagances he was not parsimonious, although he disregarded the common comforts of life.

LEAD PIPE-HEADS
Put up by Thomas Sackville in 1605
Figs. 1 to 4, Stone Court. Fig. 5, Over King’s Bedroom Window. Figs. 6 and 7, South Front. Fig. 8, Stone Court. Fig. 9, Water Court.

In June 1566 Queen Elizabeth had presented him with Knole, but, because the house was then both let and sub-let, it was not until 1603 that he was able to take possession. Tradition says that the Queen bestowed Knole upon him because she wished to have him nearer to her court and councils, and to spare him the constant journey between London and Buckhurst, over the rough, clay-sodden roads of the Weald, at that date still an uncultivated and almost uninhabited district, where droves of wild swine rootled for acorns under the oaks. He does not appear to have spent very much time at Knole during the first years of his ownership, for in a letter written in September 1605, to Lord Salisbury, he says: “I go now to Horsley, and thence to Knole, where I was not but once in the first beginnings all the year, whence for three or four days to Buckhurst, where I was not these seven years.” This did not prevent him from spending a great deal of money on the house; unfortunately there is no record of what he spent between 1603 and 1607, but for the last ten months of his life alone there is a total, spent on buildings, material, and stock, for four thousand one hundred and seven pounds, eleven shillings, and ninepence—an equivalent, in round figures, to forty thousand of modern money. To account for these sums, it is known that he built the Great Staircase, transformed the Great Hall to its present state, and put in the plaster-work ceilings and marble chimney-pieces. He also put up the very lovely lead water-spouts in the courtyards.

The good fortune of Lord Buckhurst did not come to an end with the death of Queen Elizabeth. He was one of those who travelled to meet the new King on his journey down from the North, was confirmed by him in his tenure of the office of Lord Treasurer, and early in the following year was created Earl of Dorset. The illuminated patents of creation are at Knole, showing portraits of both Elizabeth and James I, not very flattering to either; and the Lord Treasurer’s chest is at Knole likewise, a huge coffer covered in leather and thickly studded with large round-headed brass nails. There is a warrant, signed by him as Lord Treasurer, for increasing the duty on tobacco, “That tobacco, being a drug brought into England of late years in small quantities, was used and taken by the better sort only as physic to preserve health; but through evil custom and the toleration thereof that riotous and disorderly persons spent most of their time in that idle vanity.” This warrant, which is dated 1605, shows how little time had elapsed since its introduction before tobacco established its popularity.

He was now advancing in years, and his own letters prove that his health was not very good. In one letter, written to Cecil, he complains that he cannot rest more than two or three hours in the night at most, also that he is constantly subject to rheums and cold and coughs, forced to defend himself with warmth, and to fly the air in cold or moist weathers. In another letter, also written to Cecil, he again complains of a cough, and says that he cannot come abroad for three or four days at least. But his devotion to his public affairs was greater than his attention to his health, for he says, “I have by the space of this month and more foreborne to take physic by reason of her Majesty’s business, and now having this only week left for physic I am resolved to prevent sickness, feeling myself altogether distempered and filled with humours, so as if her Majesty should miss me I beseech you in respect hereof to excuse me.” In 1607, when the old man was seventy-one, there was a report current in London that he was dead, but on the King sending him a diamond, and wishing that he might live so long as that ring would continue, “My Lord Treasurer,” says a letter dated June 1607, “revived again.” In the following year, however, he died dramatically in harness, of apoplexy while sitting at the Council table in Whitehall. His funeral service took place in Westminster Abbey, but his body was taken to Withyham, where it now lies buried in the vault of his ancestors.

§ iii

I have dealt as briefly as possible with the Lord Treasurer’s life, because no one could pretend that the history of his embassies or his occupations of office could have any interest save to a student of the age of Elizabeth. But as a too-much-neglected poet I should like presently to quote the opinions of those well qualified to judge, showing that he was, at least, something of a pioneer in English literature—crude, of course, and uniformly gloomy; too gloomy to read, save as a labour of love or conscience; but nevertheless the author—or part-author—of the earliest English tragedy, and, in some passages, a poet of a certain sombre splendour. That he was a true poet, I think, is unquestionable, unlike his descendant Charles, who by virtue of one song in particular continues to survive in anthologies, but who was probably driven into verse by the fashion of his age rather than by any genuine urgency of creation.

The tragedy of Gorboduc, whose title was afterwards altered to Ferrex and Porrex, was written in collaboration with Thomas Norton, although the exact share of each author is not precisely known and has been much argued.

To the modern reader [says Professor Saintsbury] Gorboduc is scarcely inviting, but that is not a condition of its attractiveness to its own contemporaries. [It] is of the most painful regularity; and the scrupulosity with which each of the rival princes is provided with a counsellor and a parasite to himself, and the other parts are allotted with similar fairness, reaches such a point that it is rather surprising that Gorboduc was not provided with two queens—a good and a bad. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to the modern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre in the choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there there are signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the Induction, but for the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and begin afresh at their beginning with a staccato movement and a dull monotony of cadence which is inexpressibly tedious.

Professor Saintsbury rightly points out that the dullness of Gorboduc to our ideas is not a criterion of the effect it produced on readers of its own day. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, while excepting it from the particular charges he brings against all other English tragedies and comedies, and granting that “it is full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy,” finds fault with it in an unexpected quarter, namely, that it fails in two unities, of time and place, so that the modern criticism of its “painful regularity” was far from occurring to a mind intent upon a yet more rigorous form.

In spite of its manifest imperfections [says the Cambridge Modern History], the tragedy of Gorboduc has two supreme claims to honourable commemoration. It introduced Englishmen who knew no language but their own to an artistic conception of tragedy, and it revealed to them the true mode of tragic expression.

I might also quote here the sonnet of a greater poet, who owed much, if not to Gorboduc, at least to the Induction—Edmund Spenser.

In vain I think, right honourable lord,

By this rude rhyme to memorize thy name,

Whose learnèd muse hath writ her own record

In golden verse worthy immortal fame.

Thou much more fit (were leisure to the same)

Thy gracious sovereign’s praises to compile,

And her imperial majesty to frame

In lofty numbers and heroic style.

But sith thou may’st not so, give leave awhile

To baser wit his power therein to spend,

Whose gross defaults thy dainty pen may file,

And unadvisèd oversights amend.

But evermore vouchsafe it to maintain

Against vile Zoylus’ backbitings vain.

There is also a sonnet by Joshua Sylvester, of which I will only quote the anagram prefixed to it:

Sackvilus Comes Dorsetius

Vas Lucis Esto decor Musis

Sacris Musis celo devotus

But although there can scarcely be two opinions about Gorboduc—that it is sometimes noble, and always dull—Sackville’s two other poems, the Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates and the Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham, have never met with the recognition they deserve, save for the discriminating applause of men of letters. I do not say that they are works which can be read through with an unvarying degree of pleasure; there are stagnant passages which have to be waded through in between the more admirable portions. But such portions, when they are reached, do contain much of the genuine stuff of poetry, impressive imagery, a surprising absence of cumbersome expression—especially when the reader bears in mind that Sackville was writing before Spenser, and long before Marlowe—and a diction which is consistently dignified and suitable to the gravity of the theme. Take these stanzas for instance:

And first within the porch and jaws of hell

Sat deep Remorse of Conscience, all besprent

With tears; and to herself oft would she tell

Her wretchedness, and cursing never stent

To sob and sigh; but ever thus lament,

With thoughtful care, as she that, all in vain,

Would wear and waste continually in pain.

Next saw we Dread, all trembling: how he shook

With foot uncertain, proffered here and there,

Benumbed of speech, and, with a ghastly look,

Searched every place, all pale and dead for fear,

His cap borne up with staring of his hair,

’Stoin’d and amazed at his own shade for dread

And fearing greater dangers than he need.

And next, in order sad, Old Age we found,

His beard all hoar, his eyes hollow and blind,

With drooping cheer still poring on the ground,

As on the place where Nature him assigned

To rest, when that the sisters had untwined

His vital thread, and ended with their knife

The fleeting course of fast-declining life.

These stanzas are from the Induction. Or take the following from the Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham:

Midnight was come, and every vital thing

With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest;

The beasts were still, the little birds that sing

Now sweetly slept beside their mother’s breast,

The old and all well shrouded in their nest;

The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease,

The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace.

The golden stars were whirled amid their race,

And on the earth did with their twinkling light,

When each thing nestled in his resting place,

Forget day’s pain with pleasure of the night;

The fearful deer of death stood not in doubt,

The partridge dreamt not of the falcon’s foot.

These quotations will give some kind of idea of Sackville’s matter and manner, and of the Mirror, which survives among the classic monuments of English poetry, says Courthope, only by virtue of the genius of Sackville. For the rest, not wishing to be thought prejudiced, I should like to quote copiously from Professor Saintsbury’s Elizabethan Literature, since therein is expressed, a great deal better than I could express it, my own view of Sackville’s poetry, and by calling in the testimony of so excellent, scholarly, and delightful an authority I may be freed from the charge of partiality which I should not at all like to incur.

The next remarkable piece of work done in English poetry after Tottel’s Miscellany—a piece of work of greater actual poetic merit than anything in the Miscellany itself—was ... the famous Mirror for Magistrates, or rather that part of it contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst.... The Induction and the Complaint of Buckingham, which Sackville furnished to it in 1559, though they were not published till four years later, completely outweigh all the rest in value. His contributions to the Mirror for Magistrates contain the best poetry written in the English language between Chaucer and Spenser, and are most certainly the originals or at least the models of some of Spenser’s finest work. He has had but faint praise of late years.... I have little hesitation in saying that no more astonishing contribution to English poetry, when the due reservations of that historical criticism which is the life of all criticism are made, is to be found anywhere. The bulk is not great: twelve or fifteen hundred lines must cover the whole of it. The form is not new, being merely the 7–line stanza already familiar in Chaucer. The arrangement is in no way novel, combining as it does the allegorical presentment of embodied virtues, vices, and qualities with the melancholy narrative common in poets for many years before. But the poetical value of the whole is extraordinary. The two constituents of that value, the formal and the material, are represented here with a singular equality of development. There is nothing here of Wyatt’s floundering prosody, nothing of the well-intentioned doggerel in which Surrey himself indulges and in which his pupils simply revel. The cadences of the verse perfect, the imagery fresh and sharp, the presentation of nature singularly original, when it is compared with the battered copies of the poets with whom Sackville must have been most familiar, the followers of Chaucer from Occleeve to Hawes. Even the general plan of the poem—the weakest part of nearly all poems of this time—is extraordinarily effective and makes one sincerely sorry that Sackville’s taste or his other occupations did not permit him to carry out the whole scheme on his own account. The Induction, in which the author is brought face to face with Sorrow, and the central passages of the Complaint of Buckingham, have a depth and fullness of poetical sound and sense for which we must look backwards a hundred and fifty years, or forwards nearly five and twenty....

He has not indeed the manifold music of Spenser—it would be unreasonable to expect that he should have it. But his stanzas are of remarkable melody, and they have about them a command, a completeness of accomplishment within the writer’s intentions, which is very noteworthy in so young a man. The extraordinary richness and stateliness of the measure has escaped no critic. There is indeed a certain one-sidedness about it, and a devil’s advocate might urge that a long poem couched in verse (let alone the subject) of such unbroken gloom would be intolerable. But Sackville did not write a long poem, and his complete command within his limits of the effect at which he evidently aimed is most remarkable.

THE GREAT STAIRCASE (UPPER FLIGHT)
Built by Thomas Sackville, 1604–8

The second thing to note about the poem is the extraordinary freshness and truth of its imagery. From a young poet we always expect second-hand presentations of nature, and in Sackville’s day second-hand presentation of nature had been elevated to the rank of a science.... It is perfectly clear that Thomas Sackville had, in the first place, a poetical eye to see, within as well as without, the objects of poetical presentment; in the second place, a poetical vocabulary in which to clothe the results of his seeing; and in the third place, a poetical ear by aid of which to arrange his language in the musical co-ordination necessary to poetry. Wyatt had been notoriously wanting in the last; Surrey had not been very obviously furnished with the first; and all three were not to be possessed by anyone else till Edmund Spenser arose to put Sackville’s lessons in practice on a wider scale and with a less monotonous lyre. It is possible that Sackville’s claims in drama may have been exaggerated—they have of late years rather been undervalued; but his claims in poetry proper can only be overlooked by those who decline to consider the most important part of poetry. In the subject of even his part of the Mirror there is nothing new; there is only a following of Chaucer, and Gower, and Occleeve, and Lydgate, and Hawes, and many others. But in the handling there is one novelty which makes all others of no effect or interest: it is the novelty of a new poetry.

CHAPTER IV
Knole in the Reign of James I
RICHARD SACKVILLE
3rd
Earl of Dorset
and
LADY ANNE CLIFFORD

§ i

It so happens that a remarkably complete record has been left of existence at Knole in the early seventeenth century—an existence compounded of extreme prodigality of living, tedium, and perpetual domestic quarrels. We have a private diary, in which every squabble and reconciliation between Lord and Lady Dorset is chronicled; every gown she wore; every wager he won or lost (and he made many); every book she read; every game she played at Knole with the steward or with the neighbours; every time she wept; every day she “sat still, thinking the time to be very tedious.” We have even a complete list of the servants and their functions, from Mr. Matthew Caldicott, my Lord’s favourite, down to John Morockoe, a Blackamoor. It would, out of this quantity of information, be possible to reconstruct a play of singular accuracy.

The author of the diary was a lady of some fame and a great deal of character: Lady Anne Clifford, the daughter and sole heiress of George, Earl of Cumberland, and wife to Richard, Earl of Dorset. Cumberland was himself a picturesque figure. He was Elizabeth’s official champion at all jousts and tilting, a nobleman of great splendour, and in addition to this display of truly Elizabethan glitter and parade he had the other facet of Elizabethan virtù: the love of adventure, which carried him eleven times to sea, to the Indies and elsewhere, “for the service of Queen Elizabeth,” says his daughter in the life she wrote of him, “for the good of England, and of his own person.” She gives an account of her own appearance:

I was very happy in my first constitution both in mind and body, both for internal and external endowments, for never was there child more equally resembling both father and mother than myself. The colour of mine eyes were black, like my father, and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively, like my mother’s; the hair of my head was brown and very thick, and so long that it reached to the calf of my legs when I stood upright, with a peak of hair on my forehead and a dimple in my chin like my father, full cheeks and round face like my mother, and an exquisite shape of body resembling my father.

After this description, more remarkable for exactness perhaps than for modesty, she adds:

But now time and age hath long since ended all these beauties, which are to be compared to the grass of the field (Isaiah xl., 6, 7, 8; 1 Peter i., 24). For now when I caused these memorables of my self to be written I have passed the 63rd year of my age.

Having put this in by way of a saving clause, she proceeds again complacently:

And though I say it, the perfections of my mind were much above those of my body; I had a strong and copious memory, a sound judgement, and a discerning spirit, and so much of a strong imagination in me as that many times even my dreams and apprehensions beforehand proved to be true; so as old Mr. John Denham, a great astronomer, that sometime lived in my father’s house, would often say that I had much in me in nature to show that the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the bands of Orion were powerful both at my conception and my nativity.

She was innocent of unnecessary diffidence. Yet she was not without gratitude:

I must not forget to acknowledge that in my infancy and youth, and a great part of my life, I have escaped many dangers, both by fire and water, by passage in coaches and falls from horses, by burning fevers, and excessive extremity of bleeding many times to the great hazard of my life, all which, and many cunning and wicked devices of my enemies, I have escaped and passed through miraculously, and much the better by the help and prayers of my devout mother, who incessantly begged of God for my safety and preservation (Jas. v., 16).

To her mother she seems to have been excessively devoted; and indeed, in the midst of this stubborn and peremptory character, the most vulnerable spot is her tenderness for her relations; those of her relations, that is to say, with whom she was not at mortal enmity.

The death of Queen Elizabeth, which occurred when Anne Clifford was a girl of thirteen, was a disappointment to her in more ways than one, for “if Queen Elizabeth had lived she intended to prefer me to be of the Privy Chamber, for at that time there was as much hope and expectation of me as of any other young lady whatsoever,” and moreover “my Mother and Aunt of Warwick being mourners, I was not allowed to be one, because I was not high enough, which did much trouble me then.” She was not even allowed the privilege of watching by the great Queen’s body after it had come “by night in a Barge from Richmond to Whitehall, my Mother and a great Company of Ladies attending it, where it continued a great while standing in the Drawing Chamber, where it was watched all night by several Lords and Ladies, my Mother sitting up with it two or three nights, but my Lady would not give me leave to watch, by reason I was held too young.” It is to be regretted that the writer, who possessed so vivid and unself-conscious a pen, should have been thus defrauded of setting upon record the scene in which the old Queen, stiff as an effigy, and blazing with the jewels of England, lay for the last time in state, by the light of candles, among the great nobles whom in her lifetime she had bullied and governed, and whom even in death the rigidity of that bejezabelled presence could still overawe.

Although she had not been allowed to see the dead Queen, Lady Anne was taken to see the new King, but did not find the court to her liking:

We all went to Tibbalds to see the King, who used my Mother and Aunt very graciously, but we all saw a great change between the fashion of the Court as it is now and of that in the Queen’s time, for we were all lousy by sitting in the chamber of Sir Thomas Erskine.

This unpropitious introduction was the first she had to James I, but it was by no means her last meeting with him, for she relates several later on which might more properly be called encounters.

About two years after Elizabeth’s death Lord Cumberland died, “very patiently and willingly of a bloody flux,” leaving Anne Clifford his only surviving child and heiress, then being aged about fifteen years. Her father cannot have been much more than a name to her, for although “endowed with many perfections of nature befitting so noble a personage, as an excellent quickness of wit and apprehension, an active and strong body, and an affable disposition and behaviour,” he “fell to love a lady of quality,” which created a breach between himself and his wife, and “when my Mother and he did meet, their countenance did show the dislike they had one of another, yet he would speak to me in a slight fashion and give me his blessing.... My Father used to come to us sometimes at Clerkenwell, but not often, for he had at this time as it were wholly left my Mother, yet the house was kept still at his charge.” All this early part of her life, I ought to explain, is related by her in the Lives of her parents and herself, which she compiled in her old age; and partly from a diary of reminiscences, a transcript of which is at Knole, and which she appears to have written at the same time as the more detailed Diary which she was then (1616–1619) keeping from day to day. She had a happy childhood with her mother, and cousins of her own age—“All this time we were merry at North Hall. My Coz. Frances Bouchier and my Coz. Francis Russell and I did use to walk much in the garden, and were great with one another. I used to wear my Hair-coloured Velvet every day, and learned to sing and play on the Bass-Viol of Jack Jenkins, my Aunt’s boy.”

The Diary at Knole jumps without any warning or transition from the reminiscences of youth to 1616. It begins with a sad little hint of the weariness that was to follow: “All the time I stayed in the country I was sometimes merry and sometimes sad, as I had news from London.” She had then been married for seven years to Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, grandson to Queen Elizabeth’s old Treasurer, who was himself anxious for the match, writing to Sir George Moore about “that virtuous young lady, the Lady Anne Clifford,” and soliciting Moore’s good offices with Lady Cumberland.

RICHARD SACKVILLE, 3rd Earl of Dorset, K.G.
From the miniature by Isaac Oliver in the Victoria and Albert Museum

There were, in all, five children of the marriage: three little boys, who all “died young at Knole where they were born,” and two little girls, of whom Margaret, born in 1614, figures largely in the Diary and is the only one to concern us, since Isabel was not born till some years after Lady Anne had ceased to keep the Diary. Lady Anne’s mother travelled to London from the North in order to be present at the birth of Margaret, the first child; but by a strange mischance the journey was rendered vain, for, having gone “into the Tower of London to see some friends there, where, the gates being shut up by an accident that happened, she was kept there till after her daughter was delivered of her first child, though she had made a journey purposely from Appleby Castle, in Westmoreland, to London.” Not only does the Diary contain constant references to this little girl, but Lady Anne’s letters to her mother, now at Appleby, are rarely without some comment—

she begins to break out very much upon her head, which I hope will make her very healthful

Dorset also was fond of the little girl, for in other letters to her mother Anne says, after apologising for her bad writing, which she terms “scribbling,” “my Lord is as fond of her as can be, and calls her his mistress”; and again, “My Lord to her is a very kind, loving, and dear father, and in everything will I commend him, saving only in this business of my land, wherein I think some evil spirit works, for in this he is as violent as possible, so I must either do it next term or else break friendship and love with him”; and Dorset was, on his side, of the same opinion, for in a letter written to her at Knole, which begins “Sweet Heart,” and sends messages to the child, he adds to his wife, “whom in all things I love and hold a sober woman, your land only excepted, which transports you beyond yourself, and makes you devoid of all reason.” It would appear that but for this unfortunate question of the lands and money they might have lived happily together, affection not lacking, and on Anne’s part at any rate good will not lacking either, as witness her constant defence of him, even to her mother:

It is true that they have brought their matters so about that I am in the greatest strait that ever poor creature was, but whatsoever you may think of my Lord, I have found him, do find him, and think I shall find him, the best and most worthy man that ever breathed, therefore, if it be possible, I beseech you, have a better opinion of him, if you know all I do, I am sure you would believe this that I write, but I durst not impart my mind about when I was with you, because I found you so bitter against him, or else I could have told you so many arguments of his goodness and worth that you should have seen it plainly yourself.

They were married when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and two days after their marriage he succeeded to his father’s titles and estates: “We have no other news here but of weddings and burials, the Earl of Dorset died on Monday night leaving a heaire [?] widow God wot, and his son seeing him past hope the Saturday before married the Lady Anne Clifford.” In spite, however, of all they had to make life pleasant—their youth, their wealth, and the privileges of their position—they spent the succeeding years in making it as unpleasant as they possibly could for one another.

I hardly think that it is necessary or even interesting to go into the legal details of the long dispute over Lord Cumberland’s will. The interest of Anne and Richard Dorset is human, not litigious. It may therefore be sufficient to say that by the terms of his will Lord Cumberland bequeathed the vast Clifford estates in Westmoreland to his brother Sir Francis Clifford, with the proviso that they should revert to Anne, his daughter, in the event of the failure of heirs male, a reversion which eventually took place, thirty-eight years after his death. What he does not appear to have realized was that the estates were already entailed upon Lady Anne; and that he was, by his will, illegally breaking an entail which dated back to the reign of Edward II.

It is easy to judge, from this broad indication, the infinite possibilities for litigation amongst persons contentiously minded. Such persons were not lacking. There was Lady Cumberland, Anne’s mother, bent upon safeguarding the rights of her daughter. There was Francis, the new Earl of Cumberland, equally bent upon preserving what had been left to him by will. There was Richard Dorset, whose own fortune was not adequate to his extravagance, and who, having married an heiress, was determined for his own sake that that heiress should not be defrauded of her inheritance, or that, if she was to be defrauded, he at least should receive ample compensation. And finally there was Anne herself, who was more resolved than any of them that she and the North of England should not be parted. Dorset’s part, of the four, was the most elaborate and the most discreditable. He would have been willing for his wife to renounce some of her claims in return for the compromise of ready cash. Anne, however, remained single-hearted throughout: she was the legal heiress of the North, and the North she would have; and in the midst of the otherwise sordid and mercenary dispute, in which Dorset used every means of coercion, she remains fixed in her perfectly definite attitude of obstinacy, unswayed by her husband, his relations, her own relations, their friends, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the King himself, their remonstrances, their threats, their vindictiveness, and the actual injuries she had to endure over a long stretch of years. In the end she got the better of them all, and the last picture of her left by the “Lives” is that of a triumphant and imperious old lady, retired to the stronghold of her northern castles, where her authority could stand “against sectaries, almost against Parliaments and armies themselves”; refusing to go to court “unless she might wear blinkers”; moving with feudal, with almost royal, state between her many castles, from Appleby to Pendragon, from Pendragon to Brougham, from Brougham to Brough, from Brough to Skipton; building brew-houses, wash-houses, bake-houses, kitchens, stables; sending word to Cromwell that as fast as he should knock her castles about her ears she would surely put them up again; endowing almshouses; ruling over her almswomen and her tenants; receiving, like the patriarchal old despot that she was, the generations of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren.

LADY ANNE CLIFFORD
Wife to Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset
From the portrait at Knole by Mytens

Before she could reach these serene waters, however, she had many storms to weather, and to bear the “crosses and contradictions” which caused her to write “the marble pillars of Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish.” Richard Sackville in his own day was a byword for extravagance, and was bent on extorting from his wife for the purposes of his own pleasure the utmost resources of her inheritance. His portrait is at Knole, a full-length by Van Somer; he has a pale, pointed face, dark hair growing in a peak, and small mean eyes, and is dressed entirely in black with enormous silver rosettes on his shoes. There is also the very beautiful miniature of him by Isaac Oliver in the Victoria and Albert Museum, showing the richness of his clothes, his embroidered stockings, and his hand resting upon the extravagantly-plumed helmet on the table beside him.

His life is an empty record of gambling, cock-fighting, tilting; of balls and masques, women and fine clothes. “Above all they speak of the Earl of Dorset,” says a contemporary letter, after describing the lavishness of some of the costumes worn in a Court masque in which he was taking part, “but their extreme cost and riches make us all poor,” and Clarendon says of him, “his excess of expenditure, in all the ways to which money could be applied, was such that he so entirely consumed almost the whole great fortune which descended to him, that when he was forced to leave the title to his younger brother he left, in a manner, nothing to him to support it.” The enormous estates which he inherited, the careful accumulation of the old Lord Treasurer, he sold in great part, in order to squander the proceeds upon his amusements; before he had been in possession for three years he had sold the manor of Sevenoaks, and had “conveyed” Knole itself to one Henry Smith (retaining, however, the house at a rent of £100 a year for his own use), and in the course of rather less than ten years he had sold estates, including much of Fleet Street and the Manor of Holborn, to the value of £80,616, or nearly a million of modern money.

In Aubrey’s Bodleian Letters there is an anecdote concerning him, not devoid of humour:

He [Sir Kenelm Digby] married that celebrated beauty and courtesan, Mrs. Venetia Stanley, whom Richard, Earl of Dorset, kept as his concubine, had children by her, and settled on her an annuity of £500 per annum; which after Sir Kenelm Digby married her was unpaid by the Earl: Sir Kenelm Digby sued the Earl, after marriage, and recovered it. Venetia Stanley was a most beautiful and desirable creature ... sanguine and tractable, and of much suavity.

In those days Richard, Earl of Dorset, lived in the greatest splendour of any nobleman of England.

After her marriage she [Venetia Stanley] redeemed her honour by her strict living. Once a year the Earl of Dorset invited her and Sir Kenelm to dinner, where the Earl would behold her with much passion, yet only kiss her hand.

Later on in his life a certain Lady Peneystone appears, who considerably complicated the already difficult relations between Anne and himself.

Anne Clifford herself, in spite of all that she had to endure at his hands, gives a charitable account of him.

This first lord of mine was in his own nature of a just mind, of a sweet disposition, and very valiant in his own person.

He was ... so great a lover of scholars and soldiers, as that with an excessive bounty towards them, or indeed any of worth that were in distress, he did much to diminish his estate, as also with excessive prodigality in housekeeping, and other noble ways at court, as tilting, masqueing, and the like, Prince Henry being then alive, who was much addicted to these exercises, and of whom he was much beloved.

What his wife says of his being a great lover of scholars is borne out by his friendship with and patronage of Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and Drayton. Nothing else remains to his credit. He is utterly eclipsed—weak, vain, and prodigal—by the interest of that woman of character, his wife, knowing so well to “discourse of all things, from predestination to slea[^[2]] silk,” and by the faithful picture that is her Diary.

§ ii

She is living (1616) principally at Knole, sometimes in London, sometimes making an expedition into the North to join her mother, who in all her difficulties was her counsellor and ally. The perpetual topic of the diary is the dispute with her husband:

“My Coz: Russell came to me the same day, and chid me, and told me of all my faults and errors, he made me weep bitterly, then I spoke a prayer of Owens, and came home by water where I took an extreme Cold.”

The Archbishop [of Canterbury] my Lord William Howard, my Lord Rous, my Coz: Russell, my brother Sackville, and a great company of men were all in the gallery at Dorset House, where the Archbishop took me aside and talked with me privately one hour and half, and persuaded me both by Divine and human means to set my hand to their arguments. But my answer to his Lordship was that I would do nothing until my Lady [her mother] and I had conferred together. Much persuasion was used by him and all the company, sometimes terrifying me and sometimes flattering me.

Next day was a marvellous day to me, for it was generally thought that I must either have sealed the argument or else have parted from my Lord.

She then starts for the North—a hazardous journey—to confer with her mother.

We had two coaches in our company with four horses apiece and about twenty-six horsemen. I came to my lodgings [at Derby] with a heavy heart considering how many things stood between my Lord and I.

We went from the Parsons’ House near the Dangerous Moors, being eight miles and afterwards the ways so dangerous the horses were fain to be taken out of the coach to be lifted down the hills. This day Rivers’ horse fell from a bridge into the river. We came to Manchester about ten at night.

Dorset was not above subjecting her to petty annoyances and humiliations, for he sends messengers after her with “letters to show it was my Lord’s pleasure that the men and horses should come away without me, so after much falling out betwixt my Lady [her mother] and them, all the folks went away, there being a paper drawn to show that they went away by my Lord’s direction and contrary to my will.[^[3]] At night I sent two messengers to my folks to entreat them to stay. For some two nights my mother and I lay together, and had much talk about this business.”

In order to get back to London she has to borrow a coach from her mother, from whom she takes a “grievous and heavy parting.” Arrived at Knole, “I had a cold welcome from my Lord,” and a day or two later he takes his departure for London, sending constant messengers and letters, to know whether she will give way to his demands. “About this time,” she sadly writes—it is April, spring at Knole, and she then aged twenty-six—“about this time I used to rise early in the morning and go to the Standing in the garden, and taking my prayer book with me beseech God to be merciful to me and to help me as He always hath done.”

Meanwhile Dorset’s threats increase in virulence: on the first of May he sends Mr. Rivers to tell her she shall live neither at Knole nor at Bolbrook; on the second he sends Mr. Legg to tell the servants he will come down once more to see her, which shall be the last time; and on the third he sends Peter Basket, his gentleman of the horse, with a letter to say “it was his pleasure that the Child should go the next day to London ... when I considered that it would both make my Lord more angry with me and be worse for the Child I resolved to let her go; after I had sent for Mr. Legg and talked with him about that and other matters I wept bitterly.”

On the fourth “... the Child went into the litter to go to London.” There is no comment. It must have been a pathetic little departure.

On the ninth she received, besides the news that her mother was dangerously ill, “a letter from my Lord to let me know his determination was the Child should go to live at Horsley, and not come hither any more, so as this was a very grievous and sorrowful day to me.” An unusual bitterness escapes from her pen:

All this time my Lord was in London where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to Cocking and Bowling Alleys, to plays and horse races, and commended by all the world. I stayed in the country, having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreement, so as I may truly say I am like an owl in the desert.

And a few days later:

My Lord came down from London, my Lord lying in Leslie Chamber and I in my own. My Lord and I after supper had some talk, we fell out and parted for that night.

There was worse to come, for at the end of the month her mother died, “which I held as the greatest and most lamentable cross that could have befallen me,” and, mixed up with this sorrow, which is evidently genuine, is the fear that she may be definitely dispossessed of the inheritance of her forefathers. She found, however, that she had the disposal of the body, “which was some contentment to my aggrieved soul.” Her sorrows begin to lighten. Dorset, probably perceiving his bullying to be worse than useless against a woman of her mettle, tries a different tack: “My Lord assured me how kind and good a husband he would be to me”; they patch up a reconciliation, and she makes over to him certain of her Cumberland estates in default of heirs; they agree that Mrs. Bathurst, apparently a bone of contention, should “go away from the Child ... so that my Lord and I were never greater friends than at this time ... and my Lord brought me down to the coach side where we had a loving and kind parting.” He even joined her in the North, and she records how at Appleby Castle she set up the “green velvet bed where the same night we went to lie there,” and how “in the afternoon I wrought stitchwork and my Lord sat and read by me.”

She gives many particulars of how she spent her days in the North. I fancy she was a good deal happier there, and more at home, and consequently more lighthearted, than at Knole. At the same time she was anxious to go back to London to rejoin Dorset, but this for some reason he was not disposed to allow. She consoled herself with innocuous occupations:

This month I spent in working and reading. Mr. Dunbell read a great part of the History of the Netherlands.... Upon the 1st I rose by times in the morning and went up to the Pagan Tower to my prayers, and saw the sun rise.... Upon the 4th I sat in the Drawing Chamber all the day at my work.... Upon the 9th I sat at my work and heard Rivers and Marsh read Montaigne’s Essays, which book they have read almost this fortnight.... Upon the 12th I made an end of my cushion of Irish stitch, it being my chief help to pass away the time at work.... Upon the 21st was the first day I put on my black silk grogram gown.... Upon the 20th I spent most of the day in playing at Tables. All this time since my Lord went away I wore my black Taffety night-gown[^[4]] and a yellow Taffety waistcoat and used to rise betimes in the morning and walk upon the leads and afterwards to hear reading. Upon the 23rd I did string the pearls and diamonds left me by my mother into a necklace.

At last the summons came, and “upon the 24th Basket set out from London to Brougham Castle to fetch me up. I bought of Mr. Cleborn who came to see me a clock and a save-Guard [= cloak] of cloth laced with black lace to keep me warm on my journey.” Dorset sent in the retinue to fetch her, moreover, a cook, a baker, and a Tom Fool.

Her arrival in London was auspicious: Dorset and a company of relatives came out to meet her at Islington, so that there were in all ten or eleven coaches, and when she arrived at Dorset House she found the house “well dressed up against I came,” and the Child met her in the gallery. Moreover, “all this time of my being at London I was much sent to and visited by many” (the young heiress, whose matrimonial disputes had raised so much dust at Court, was an object of interest and curiosity), and she made friends: “My Lady Manners came in the morning to dress my head. I had a new black wrought Taffety gown which my Lady St. John’s tailor made. She used often to come to me, and I to her, and was very kind one to another.” Such troubles as she had were but slight: “I dined above in my chamber and wore my night-gown because I was not very well, which day and yesterday I forgot that it was fish day and ate flesh at both dinners. In the afternoon I played at Glecko[^[5]] with my Lady Gray and lost £27 odd money.” So far, so good. She gave a sweet-bag to the Queen for a New Year’s gift, and was kissed by the King. She went to see the play of the Mad Lover; she went to the Tower to see Lord and Lady Somerset, lying there since their arraignment; she went to the Court to see Lord Villiers created Earl of Buckingham; she ate a “scrambling supper” and went to see the Masque on Twelfth Night. She betrays with an unsophisticated and rather charming ingenuity her delight in these things. But the storm scowled at her over the rim of the horizon, and presently it broke. The first entries are like the splash of the first big rain-drops: “We came from London to Knole; this night my Lord and I had a falling out about the land.” Next day she has Mr. Sandy’s book about the government of the Turks read aloud to her, but “my Lord sat the most part of the day reading in his closet.” Next day his sulks materialized, and he “went up to London upon the sudden, we not knowing it till the afternoon.”

Six days later—there are no entries in the diary to record the suspense of these six days—she is sent for to London to see the King, a higher test for her strength of mind, even, than the former persuasions of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Will she capitulate at last? or will she come out with her flag still flying? the tongues of London wagged. The interview is best given in her own words:

Upon the 17th when I came up, my Lord told me I must resolve to go to the King next day. Upon the 18th being Saturday, I went presently after dinner to the Queen to the Drawing Chamber where my Lady Derby told the Queen how my business stood, and that I was to go to the King, so she promised me she would do all the good in it she could. When I had stayed but a little while there I was sent for out, my Lord and I going through my Lord Buckingham’s chamber, who brought us into the King, being in the Drawing Chamber. He put out all those that were there, and my Lord and I kneeled by his chair side, when he persuaded us both to peace and to put the whole matter wholly into his hands, which my Lord consented to, but I beseeched His Majesty to pardon me for that I would never part from Westmoreland while I lived upon any condition whatsoever, sometimes he used fair means and persuasions and sometimes foul means, but I was resolved before, so, as nothing would move me, from the King we went to the Queen’s side, and brought my Lady St. John to her lodging and so we went home.

There is a little note at the side of this entry: “The Queen gave me warning not to trust my matters absolutely to the King lest he should deceive me.”

The affair was not allowed to rest there. Two days later she was again summoned before the King, and a sour, unedifying spectacle the majesty of James I must have presented, thus confronted with the young obstinacy of the heiress of Westmoreland:

I was sent for up to the King into his Drawing Chamber, where the door was locked and nobody suffered to stay here but my Lord and I, my Uncle Cumberland, my Coz: Clifford, my Lords Arundel, Pembroke and Montgomery, Sir John Digby. For lawyers there were my Lord Chief Justice Montague, and Hobart Yelverton the King’s Solicitor, Sir Randal Crewe that was to speak for my Lord and I. The King asked us all if we would submit to his judgement in this case, my uncle Cumberland, my Coz: Clifford, and my Lord answered they would, but I would never agree to it without Westmoreland, at which the King grew in a great chaff. My Lord of Pembroke and the King’s solicitor speaking much against me, at last when they saw there was no remedy, my Lord, fearing the King would do me some public disgrace, desired Sir John Digby would open the door, who went out with me and persuaded me much to yield to the King. Presently after my Lord came from the King, when it was resolved that if I would not come to an agreement there should be an agreement made without me.

After these encounters she retired to Knole, while Dorset remained in London, “being in extraordinary grace and favour with the King.” She, poor thing, resumed at Knole the pitiful monotony of her country existence, which to a mind so vigorous must have been irksome in the extreme, and the Diary becomes again the record of her small occupations threaded with the worry and sorrow of her dissensions with her husband. It is illuminating that she never criticizes him; there are references to his “worth and nobleness of disposition”; her spirit, although high and emancipated enough to stand out against the King in the defence of Westmoreland, could not conceive revolt against the subjection of matrimony. It is an idea which never once enters her head. She even writes him a letter to give him “humble thanks for his noble usage toward me in London”; but a very little while after this “Thomas Woodgate came from London and brought a squirrel to the Child, and my Lord wrote me a letter by which I perceived my Lord was clean out with me, and how much my enemies have wrought against me.”

Conscientious as she is, she no longer finds enough events to justify a daily entry. Perhaps—who knows? for my part I strongly suspect it—her fighting spirit preferred even the ordeals and excitements of London to the tedium of Knole. She has very little to tell: only the gowns she wore, the books she read, the games she played with the steward, and the ailments of the Child.

At this time I wore a plain green flannel gown that William Pinn made me and my yellow taffety waistcoat. Rivers used to read to me in Montaigne’s Essays, and Moll Neville in the Fairy Queen. The Child had a bitter fit of her ague again insomuch I was fearful of her that I could hardly sleep all night and I beseeched God Almighty to be merciful and spare her life.

This ague of the Child’s is a constant preoccupation. I suppose that it was a kind of convulsion, for which the cure was a “salt powder to put in her beer.” On certain days a return of it appears to have been confidently expected, for I find: “upon the 4th should have been the Child’s fit, but she missed it,” and two days later she has “a grudging of her ague.” There is a good deal about the Child—never referred to under any other designation until she attains her 5th birthday, after which she is promoted to “my Lady Margaret.” The portrait of her which is here reproduced hangs over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s sitting-room; her ring dangles on a ribbon round her neck, and her hair is done in an elaborate manner which defied all my efforts, when I was the same age, to do my own in the same way.

She was an amusement and a consolation, as well as a source of anxiety, to her mother. Her garments are carefully noted:

The 28th was the first time the Child put on a pair of whalebone bodice.... The Child put on her red bays coat.... I cut the Child’s strings from off her coats and made her use togs alone, so as she had two or three falls at first but had no hurt with them.... The Child put on her first coats that were laced, with lace being of red bays.... I began to dress my head with a roll without a wire. I wrote not to my Lord because he wrote not to me since he went away. After supper I went out with the child who rode a pie-bald nag. The 14th, the Child came to lie with me which was the first time that ever she lay all night in a bed with me since she was born;

and another time she speaks of “the time being very tedious with me, as having neither comfort nor company, only the Child.”

For the rest, she was thrown back upon her own resources. Dorset came and went, and in between whiles there are small, vivid pictures of existence at Knole:

LADY MARGARET SACKVILLE
Daughter of Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset, and Lady Anne Clifford
“THE CHILD”
From the portrait at Knole by Mytens

After supper I walked in the garden and gathered cherries, and talked with Josiah [the French page] who told me he thought all the men in the house loved me.

And again:

About this time [April 1617] my Lord made the steward alter most of the rooms in the house and dress them up as fine as he could and determined to make all his old clothes in purple stuff for the Gallery and Drawing Chamber.

March 1617. 5th. Couch puppied in the morning.

8th. I made an end of reading Exodus. After supper I played at Glecko with the steward as I often do after dinner and supper.