George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackvile

“ Her dress was particularly elegant, white, and all English manufacture. She made us observe her blend was as handsome as Lady Mayo's French blend. "I hope all the ladies will patronize the English blend of silk," she said. She is a very pretty figure, and her dress so moderate, sleeves and head-dress much less than the hideous fashion.'
[*] Charles Sackville Germain, fifth Duke of Dorset, K.G., was a son of the first Viscount Sackville, and born 1767. He became Viscount Sackville 1785, and succeeded his cousin, the fourth Duke of Dorset, in 1815. ”

“ During these transactions, the unfortunate Queen of Poland died suddenly at Dresden; a witness of calamities to which she had not contributed, and which she had in vain remained there to temper.
In England, Sir John Ligonier, to whom the supreme command of the British armies was entrusted, was created a Viscount of Ireland, and a Marshal, with his seniors, Sir Robert Rich and Lord Molesworth. Lord George Sackville succeeded as Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance; and by that employment escaped the unwelcome command in America, which he could not with any grace have otherwise avoided. ”

“ A motion in the House of Lords by the Marquis of Carmarthen that Germain, being still under sentence of court-martial, was an unfit person for a peerage, was rejected, as was a similar motion on the day he took his seat. Sackville's last years were spent chiefly in retirement on his estates. His health was latterly enfeebled by guttering of long standing from stone, and his death is said to have been hastened by his efforts to be in his place in the House of Lords at the discussion of certain 'propositions' sent up by the Irish parliament. ”

“ He possessed good sense, matured by knowledge of the world (Wraxall, Memoirs) . A member of the Hambledon Club and a patron of cricket, he was one of the committee by whom the original laws of the Marylebone Club were drawn up. On 4 Jan. 1790 he married Arabella Diana, daughter of Sir Charles Cope, bart., of Brewerne, Oxfordshire; and he left two daughters and a son, George John Frederick, who, dying from a fall in the hunting field in 1815, was succeeded as fifth and last duke by his cousin, Charles Sackville Germain (1767–1843) , son of Lord George Sackville Germain [q. v.] ”

“ Pitt accepted a place in the Administration.
[78] Grace, daughter to the Lord Viscount Shannon, and wife of Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, Master of the Horse to the Prince. She succeeded Lady Archibald Hamilton as Mistress of the Robes.
[79] The following remarkable anecdote was told me by Mr. Fox, who said the King himself told it him, and that the late Lord Hervey had told him the same particular from the Queen. One day, when the Prince was but a boy, his Governor was complaining of him: the Queen, whose way (as the King said) was to excuse him, said, “Ah! ”

“ Few characters have abused civil and military positions more than the man who first, as a British general, disgraced the noble name of Sackville on the battlefield of Minden in 1759, and then, as a cabinet minister, disgraced throughout America the plebeian one of Germain, which he took in 1770 with a suitable legacy attached to it. His crime at Minden was set down by the thoughtless public to sheer cowardice. But Sackville was no coward. He had borne himself with conspicuous gallantry at Fontenoy. He was admired, before Minden, by two very brave soldiers, Wolfe and the Duke of Cumberland. ”

“ James’s Street, his Grace Charles Sackville, Duke of Dorset, in the 58th year of his age. His Grace received the first rudiments of his education at Westminster School, in which he was introduced by the late celebrated Prior, and there gave strong indication of genius. The Duke afterwards visited France and Italy, with the latter of which countries he was particularly delighted, being accompanied by the late learned and very benevolent Mr. Spence, who cherished the love which his Grace naturally bore to the Polite Arts. At his return from his travels, he encouraged learning and learned men. ”

“ App. iii. p. 63) . A number of his official letters written while he was lord-lieutenant of Ireland are printed in Grattan's ‘Life,’ (vols. i. and ii.) ; and several letters written by him between 1777 and 1780 to Lord George Germain are in the possession of Mr. Stopford Sackville of Drayton House, Northamptonshire (Hist. MSS. Comm. 9th Rep. App. iii. pp. 1, 58–67) . Buckinghamshire died at Blickling Hall on 3 Sept. ”

“ Their mutual haughtiness and reserve had early impaired the connexion of Lord Bute and Pitt. The Prince’s Court had secrets of their own; nor was Pitt more communicative to the successor of his grandfather’s measures. The affair of Lord George Sackville, who was patronized by the Prince, widened the breach.
Rewards were now bestowed on the meritorious Commanders. Sir Edward Hawke, a man void of ostentation or ambition, was rewarded with an annual pension of 1500l. for thirty years. Admiral Boscawen [238] was made General of Marines, and Saunders Lieutenant-General ”

“ Sackville was admitted to be an extremely able man; and as he had passed through Fontenoy and been wounded in that action, it is not easy to call him a coward. But the courage of some men is not the same on every day; and the evidence produced at the court-martial shows, I think, too plainly that on the day of Minden Sackville's courage failed him. [355] The King published the sentence of his dismissal from the Army in a special order, with very severe but not undeserved comment; and Lord George Sackville henceforth disappears from British battlefields. ”

“ There is no blame due to Sackville in that he did not invent what no single man invented, and what even in England, where only it has been originally attained, took some thirty years of the genius of the nation working through innumerable individual tentatives and failures to bring about. ”

“ If a very clever man is combined in any enterprise with people of less prominence, it is ten to one that he gets all the credit of the adventure. But the evidence on this point goes to prove that it was not until the work was well advanced that Sackville contributed to it at all. The inventor of the Mirror for Magistrates seems, rather, to have been George Ferrers, a prominent lawyer and politician, who was master of the King's Pastimes at the very close of Henry VIII.'s reign. Ferrers was ambitious to create a drama in England, and lacked only genius to be the British Aeschylus. ”

“ He was a tall man, with a long face, rather strong features, clear blue eyes, a large make, though rather womanly, not too corpulent, and a mixture of quickness and a sort of melancholy in his look which runs through all the Sackville family, such as is seen in the antique statues often to accompany great beauty. ”

“ The Duke of Dorset arriving in his coach and six, almost immediately afterwards, George the Second quitted Kew the same evening for London.
George the Second, as Prince of Wales, had been on terms of personal friendship with the duke. He had stayed at Knole, when half an ox, four sheep, and a calf were provided, besides the following items for his visit:
The duke’s first essay in Ireland was not unsuccessful: he left affairs alone as far as he possibly could and was tolerably popular. It was only the second time, twenty years later, that he and Lord George incurred so much dislike. ”

“ Lord George Germain was in love with his cousin, Miss De Baron! It would be long to tell, and perhaps unnecessary, how that young lady had made herself feared by the ladies of Manor Cross. Her father, a man of birth and fortune, but not perhaps with the best reputation in the world, had married a Germain of the last generation, and lived, when in the country, about twenty miles from Brotherton. He was a good deal on the turf, spent much of his time at card-playing clubs, and was generally known as a fast man. ”

“ Fox, Lord Granville, and Lord Anson, had foretold that they would be refused; Newcastle and the Chancellor insisted they would be sent; demanded them, and were refused. On this a message was delivered to both Houses to notify his Majesty’s having sent for the Hessians in his pay: it was received with some murmurs, but not opposed. Lord George Sackville, either to throw difficulties on the Duke of Newcastle, with whom he was angry on Irish accounts, or to pay court to the Throne, hinted a preference to Hanoverians, whose behaviour as soldiers he much commended. ”

“ I also must remind you that, at the present moment, her majesty is watched in all directions. Major Williams is employed by the government to be a spy upon all occasions, and drove his [395] carriage with four grey horses to Epsom last races, and remained upon the ground until the queen drove away. At this time, he occupied an elegantly furnished house in Sackville-street. P. Macqueen, M. P., a protégé of Lord Liverpool's, was doubtless the person who arranged the business with the premier. ”

“ Elizabeth and Burleigh and Buckhurst; and then Charles [he means Richard] and Anne, Dorset and Pembroke, and Sir Edward Sackville, and then a more engaging Dorset, and Villiers and Prior, and then the old duke and duchess, and Lady Betty Germaine, and the court of George II.
The place is stripped of its beeches and honours, and has neither beauty nor prospects. The house, extensive as it is, seemed dwindled to the front of a college, and has the silence and solitude of one. It wants the cohorts of retainers, and the bustling jollity of the old nobility, to disperse the gloom. ”

“ In a short time he would be as tired of the rank of King as he now is of his own; he is only fit to live 'en philosophe', with clever people about him." The King added, "He loves what is right; he is truly virtuous, and does not want under standing."
M. de St. Germain said, one day, to the King, "To think well of mankind, one must be neither a Confessor, nor a Minister, nor a Lieutenant of Police."—"Nor a King," said His Majesty. ”

“ 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 ”

“ What man could do under the circumstances he did, and did handsomely and loftily. He fell, and his ideal empire was dismembered, not through his own misconduct, but because Sir George Germain overestimated the importance of his Kentish holiday, and underestimated the difficulty of conquering those remote and inferior creatures, the colonists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There’s nothing can hurt you without or within
When you’ve beef in your belly and Punch in your skin. 155It is true that certain discordant notes troubled from time to time this Georgian harmony. The house-steward killed the black page in the passage; and the duke’s sons themselves were unsatisfactory; even the favourite son, Lord George, who was the apple of his father’s eye, fell into disgrace and was court-martialled on a charge of disobedience and cowardice. “I always told you,” said Lord John on hearing of this, “that George was no better than myself.” ”

“ Lord George Sackville had made the apology of Lord Loudun, whose idle conduct in America was much censured; yet where Lord George wished to have him remain, lest, on a change of commanders, he himself should be named. Pitt said, “In what hands were we?—in those of a most gracious King:” on whom he made a panegyric, and of which the least part was not his Majesty’s goodness to him since he last took the Seals. [89] How the King had listened even to him, though least in Administration—though least, he hoped to continue in it with honour: and he spoke of the great concord among the Ministers. ”

“ An American Woman's Retort.
Lord Sackville was never much of a lover of America, and what love he ever had was considerably affected by his dismissal in disgrace as British ambassador in President Cleveland's administration.
Some time after his return he was a guest of honor at a dinner which was also attended by Lady Randolph Churchill, now Mrs. Cornwallis West, who is an American. His lordship did not air his personal grievances, but he lost no opportunity of decrying everything American. He was especially severe upon American table manners. ”

“ He amassed a great deal of wealth, and Sir Robert Naunton said his name should be “fill-sack,” rather than “Sack-ville.” He was on friendly terms with Roger Ascham, whom he advised to write his Scholemaster. In 1604 his son Thomas was created earl of Dorset, and from him the earls and dukes of Dorset (q.v.) of the Sackville family were descended.
Mortimer Sackville-West was a younger son of George John Sackville-West, 5th Earl de la Warr (See De la Warr) : his mother, Elizabeth, Baroness Buckhurst, being a daughter of John Frederick Sackville, 3rd duke of Dorset. ”

“ His wife Mary (d. 1645) , daughter of Sir George Curzon, was governess to the sons of Charles I., the future kings Charles II. and James II. His character is thus summed up by S. R. Gardiner: “Pre-eminent in beauty of person, and in the vigour of a cultivated intellect, he wanted nothing to fit him for the highest places in the commonwealth but that stern sense of duty without which no man can be truly great.”
Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset (1638–1706) , English poet and courtier, son of Richard Sackville, 5th earl (1622–1677) , was born on the 24th of January 1638. ”