V. Sackville-West

“ 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 ”

“ One luxury, indeed, she permitted herself: she smoked a pipe. Into all the details of her household she looked with a careful eye; already in the days when she was living at Knole she had used up Richard Dorset’s old shirts to make clouts, now at Appleby she saw to the preserving of fruit, she had her cheeses made at Brougham, sixteen at a time, she got her coal from her own pits, she had all delinquents into her own room and scolded them till they were probably thankful to be dismissed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ I doubt whether the little duke was allowed a very exuberant enjoyment of his boyhood with this couple in authority over him. Children were strictly brought up in that generation, and it is clear that the duchess was by nature a severe and not very sympathetic woman. The little boy and his sisters must have been docile and well behaved in the great house and gardens which belonged to him in name only, but which in practice were entirely under his mother’s control, for her to alter the windows as she pleased, and to put Lord Whitworth’s cognizance in the stained glass beside the Sackville arms. ”

“ Lady Derby was an impulsive, headstrong, attractive creature, capable of real passion under all her lightheartedness and easy virtue; her husband was unfaithful to her; her rival more sage and experienced than she herself; her lover ready to take what he could without incurring an irksome responsibility. My grandfather’s sister, Lady Derby, used to show at Knowsley the window through which the Duke of Dorset was reported to have been admitted to the house, disguised as a gardener, and it was commonly supposed that the infant Lady Elizabeth Stanley was in reality the duke’s daughter. ”

“ Dorset would no doubt have proved a perfectly adequate ambassador in normal times, but that vast situation with its infinite ramifications was beyond an intellect that accepted for granted the existing régime under which dukes were born for pleasure and labourers were not. But with all the foresight in the world it is difficult to see what he could have done, or how the course of history could have been affected, had he sent home grave warnings instead of babbling of the diamond necklace and M. Montgolfier.
There was another distraction for him in Paris: Giannetta Baccelli, an Italian dancer. ”

“ But strong water and his diligence quickly recovered me; when I escaped a great danger, for my Lord’s surgeon, when nobody dreamt of it, came full at me with his Lord’s sword; and had not mine with my sword interposed himself, I had been slain by those base hands, although my Lord Bruce, weltering in his blood, and past all expectation of life, conformable to all his former carriage, which was undoubtedly noble, cried out “Rascal, hold thy hand!” So may I prosper, as I have dealt sincerely with you in this relation, which I pray you, with the enclosed letter, deliver to my Lord Chamberlain. ”

“ And with this last name I come to the final tribute paid to the splendid Dorset—Pope’s epitaph upon his monument in the Sackville chapel at Withyham:
Dorset, the grace of courts, the Muses’ pride,
Patron of arts, and judge of nature, died. ”

“ Dorset became Lord Chamberlain, and employed his influence and patronage annexed to his functions, as he had long employed his private means, in encouraging genius and alleviating misfortune. One of the first acts which he was under the necessity of performing must have been painful to a man of so generous a nature, and of so keen a relish for whatever was excellent in arts and letters. Dryden could no longer remain Poet Laureate. ”

“ I visualize—I scarcely know why—the duchess and Lord Whitworth almost as the jailers of the small inheritor. There is nothing to justify such a theory; and, indeed, very little record remains of that short life: there is his rocking-horse—an angular, long-necked, maneless animal, which in due course became my property, after passing through the two intervening generations—his brief friendship with Byron as a schoolboy, and his portrait as a tall, fair young man in dark blue academical robes. There is very little else to mark his passage across the stage of Knole. ”

“ Nevertheless, I imagine that Knole perceived under the duchess’ régime a considerable contrast with the days of the merry and pleasure-loving Baccelli. The new duchess was a severe and orderly lady, “under the dominion of no passion except the love of money, her taste for power and pleasure always subordinate to her economy,” and the duke himself, perhaps under the influence of his wife, began to turn from his extravagant ways towards parsimony, curtailing his expenses in spite of the enormous increase in his income, and becoming, moreover, irascible, fretful, morbid, and quarrelsome. ”

“ Both Lord Middlesex and Lord John being so unsatisfactory, Lord George was, and remained, his father’s favourite. Lord George, in an even greater degree than his father, is an incongruity among the Sackvilles, a departure from type. In spite of all his mistakes, his misjudgments, and his misfortunes, he was a man of greater ability than most of them, of greater energy than the common run of his indolent and pleasure-loving race, of a further-reaching ambition. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Prudent and long-suffering, no doubt the duchess had in her mind the advantages she intended to secure when she should be no longer a wife and sick-nurse, but a widow. Baccelli’s statue was in the attic, and Mr. Ozias Humphrey, of the Royal Academy, was quite out of favour because he went to Knole in the duke’s absence and took possession of a room without previously showing proper attention to the duchess. She presided calmly, while the duke fretted and economized, and quarrelled with his friends, and deteriorated in intellect, and became a prey to gloom, and grew old and sad before his time ”

“ 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. ”

“ Next door to the Music Room hangs the lovely full-length of the three children, painted by Hoppner while on that uncomfortable visit. One is bound to admit that their appearance bears no impress of the grand, solemn, and gloomy household in which they were being brought up. The little boy, rosy, flaxen-curled, in high nankeen trousers and a soft frilly shirt, has his arms round his baby sister, who, with bare toes, is looking sulkily at her elder sister’s shoes; they are out in the park; nothing could be more natural or unconstrained. ”

“ For the verses which he occasionally composed, unstudied as they are, exhibit the traces of a genius which, assiduously cultivated, would have produced something great. In the small volume of his works may be found songs which have the easy vigour of Suckling, and little satires which sparkle with wit as splendid as those of Butler.
One can, perhaps, scarcely agree with Macaulay in this estimate of Dorset’s literary gifts. ”

“ 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 15depths of mirrors, and startles up a sudden face out of the gloom ”

“ 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. ”

“ Life offered him too great an ease and too many advantages; why should he have rejected them? Before he had been for a year in the enjoyment of his honours and estates he had set out on the Grand Tour accompanied by the celebrated Nancy Parsons and a train of singers, actors, and Bohemians, who clustered round him in every European capital which he visited. Echoes of his extravagance and his escapades come down to us from Paris and from Rome. He entertained lavishly every evening, inviting only those who could amuse his already blasé appetite ”

“ THE GLORY OF KNOLE
Knole most famous in Kent still appears,
Where mansions surveyed for a thousand long years,
In whose domes mighty monarchs might dwell,
Where five hundred rooms are, as Boswell [11] can tell! 151I do not think that Durfey can have been very greatly esteemed by his patron, nor yet on very intimate terms with him, but kept rather, contemptuously, as permanent rhymester to Dorset’s little court, for another picture, small, obscure, but entertainingly intimate, shows him in humble company in the Steward’s Room with Lowry, the Steward; George Allan, a clothier ”

“ 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. ”

“ Besides her servants, her own family gave her much food for thought and preoccupation: it is true that of her seven children only two—her two Sackville daughters—had lived to grow up, but they by now had produced a cohort of grandchildren, whose visits to Lady Anne were a 78source of infinite pleasure to the old lady. It is, altogether, a pleasant and seemly end to such a life. She had attained the great age of eighty-six; her diary was filled with religious references; she never dwelt upon her death, but it is clear that she can never for one moment have dreaded it. ”

“ Little peace-offerings came from time to time from Dorset; on one occasion he sends “half a buck, with an indifferent kind letter,” and on another occasion “My Lord sent Adam to trim the Child’s hair, and sent me the dewselts of two deer and wrote me a letter between kindness and unkindness.” “Still working and being extremely melancholy” is the entry of one summer day, and a day later, “Still working and sad.” A little after this she “rode on horseback to Withyham to see my Lord Treasurer’s tomb, and went down into the vault, and came home again [to Knole] weeping the most part of the day.” ”

“ The solemnity of Lord Dorset cannot have been out of place in such a court. Honours now crowded rapidly upon him, although at one moment he was temporarily deprived of all his offices for taking part in political intrigues. He was made a Knight of the Garter, six years later he was made a duke, he was given the office of Lord Steward, and finally he entered upon the first lap of his unfortunate career as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Before this, however, he was for the second time called upon to be the bearer of news of accession to a King of England. ”