Thomas Sackville

“ His elder brother Mortimer (1820–1888) was created Baron Sackville in 1876. Privately educated at home, Lionel served as assistant precis writer to the fourth earl of Aberdeen when secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1845, and after further employment in the foreign office was appointed attache to the British legation at Lisbon in July 1847. He was transferred successively to Naples (1848) , Stuttgart (1852) , Berlin (1853) , was promoted to be secretary of legation at Turin 1858, and was transferred to Madrid in 1864. ”

“ 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. ”

“ John Parsons, organist and master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey, where he was buried in 1623. Herrick addresses another poem to her sister Thomasine:—
"Grow up in beauty, as thou dost begin,
And be of all admired, Thomasine".
502. 'Tis sin to throttle wine. Martial, I. xix. 5: Scelus est jugulare Falernum.
506. Edward, Earl of Dorset, Knight of the Garter, grandson of Thomas Sackville, author of Gorboduc. He succeeded his brother, Richard Sackville, the third earl, in 1624, and died in 1652. Clarendon describes a duel which he fought with Lord Bruce in Flanders. ”

“ Penn answered that she had them from Sir Thomas himself. Therefore, I conclude, Sir Thomas must have revealed to her what he spared my lady."
Mr. Chandos shook his head with a proud, repellant air.
"I don't believe it, Hill. However Mrs. Sackville might have learnt them, rely upon it it was not from Sir Thomas. She was no favourite of his."
"Misfortunes never come singly," resumed Hill, quitting the subject with a sort of grunt. "Mrs. Freeman could not have fallen ill at a worse time." ”

“ West on the death (16 Oct. 1888) of his elder brother Mortimer, first Baron Sackville, had succeeded to the title by special remainder a fortnight previous to his departure from the United States, and had inherited the historic property of Knole Park near Sevenoaks, where he passed the rest of his life. ”

“ He married, before 1638, Lady Frances, daughter of Lionel Cranfield, first earl of Middlesex [q. v.] , and eventually heiress to her brothers; she married, secondly, Henry Powle [q. v.] , master of the rolls, and died on 20 April 1687. He had seven sons and six daughters. His eldest son was Charles Sackville, sixth earl of Dorset [q. v.] In memory of his youngest child Thomas (b. 3 Feb. 1662, d. at Saumur 19 Aug. 1675) he contemplated a monument in the Sackville Chapel in Withyham church, which he had rebuilt. ”

“ It contained nineteen tragic legends by six poets, William Baldwin, George Ferrers, “Master” Cavyll, Thomas Chaloner, Thomas Phaer and John Skelton. In 1563 appeared a second edition with eight additional poems by William Baldwin, John Dolman, Sackville, Francis Segar, Thomas Churchyard and Cavyll. Sackville contributed the Complaint of Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, to which he prefixed an Induction. ”

“ In 1604, he was created Earl of Dorset by James I. He died suddenly at the council-table, in consequence of a dropsy on the brain."—Specimens of the British Poets, by Thomas Campbell, London, 1819, ii. 134, sq.] ↑ Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset [1637-1706] , esteemed the most accomplished man of his day, was alike distinguished in the voluptuous court of Charles II. and the gloomy one of William III. He behaved with great gallantry in the sea-fight with the Dutch in 1665; on the day previous to which he composed his celebrated song ["To all you Ladies now at Land"] . ”

“ A Catalogue of the Household, and Family of the Right Honourable RICHARD, EARL of DORSET, in the year of our Lord 1613; and so continued until the year 1624, at Knole, in Kent.
At MY LORD’S TABLE My Lord My Lady My Lady Margaret My Lady Isabella Mr. Sackville Mr. Frost John Musgrave Thomas Garret At THE PARLOUR TABLE Mrs. Field Mrs. Willoughby Mrs. Grimsditch Mrs. Stewkly Mrs. Fletcher Mrs. Wood Mr. Dupper, Chaplain Mr. Matthew Caldicott, my Lord’s favourite Mr. Edward Legge, Steward Mr. Peter Basket, Gentleman of the Horse Mr. Marsh, Attendant on my Lady 79Mr. Wooldridge Mr. Cheyney Mr. ”

“ See GERMAINE, Lady Betty Berkeley Castle, 169 BLACKMORE, his poem Prince Arthur quoted, 148 BOURCHIER, Archbishop of Canterbury, buys Knole from Lord Say & Sele, 5 Builds on to Knole, 6, 7 Encloses the park, 21 Allows glass-making in the park, 24 BOWRA, a cricketer, 182 BRUCE, Lord, his duel with Edward Sackville, 84–90 BUCKHURST, Lord. See SACKVILLE, Thomas house at Withyham, 18 ”

“ Sackville, in this tragedy, did not work with the potent mastery of his Induction; his fire seems smothered in each exact line; he steals on with care but with fear, as one treading on ice, and appears not to have settled in his mind the true language of emotion, for we feel none. He is ethical more than dramatic. His lifeless personages have no distinctness of character; his speeches are scholastic orations: but the purity of his diction and the aptness of his epithets are remarkable; his words and phrases are transparent; and he may be read with ease by those not versed in ancient lore. ”

“ So the house must have drowsed, evening after evening, before Chase ever came near it, with the only difference that from one of those doors had emerged an old lady dressed in black silk, leaning on a stick, an arbitrary old lady, who had slowly descended the polished stairs, carefully placing the rubber ferule of her stick from step to step, and helping herself on the banisters with the other hand, instead of the alien clerk from Wolverhampton, who hesitated to go downstairs to dinner because he feared there would be a servant in the room to wait upon him. ”

“ Fortune is the butler, isn’t he? Well, the butler told me all the servants were very busy.”
“Then it might be as well not to disturb them? At any rate, the old lady won’t run away,” said Mr. Nutley jocosely.
8“No, perhaps we needn’t disturb them.” Chase was relieved to escape the necessity of giving an order to a servant.
They went downstairs together.
“Hold on to the banisters, Mr. Chase; these polished stairs are very tricky. Fine old oak; solid steps too; but I prefer a drugget myself. Good gracious, how that peacock startled me! Look at it, sitting on the ledge outside the window. ”

“ It is not very surprising to learn that although he “inherited not only the paternal estate of the Sackvilles but likewise that of the Cranfields, Earls of Middlesex in right of his mother, yet at his decease his son, then only eighteen years of age, possessed so slender a fortune that his guardians when they sent him to travel on the Continent allowed him only eight 118hundred pounds a year for his provision,” nor that “extenuated by pleasures and indulgences, he sank into a premature old age.” Before sinking into this old age, however, he lived through the full enjoyment of a splendid youth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Despite the excesses of his early life, and the probably malicious innuendoes of the Earl of Mulgrave in his ‘Essay upon Satyr,’ Sackville's character was not unamiable. His munificence to men of letters speaks for itself, and tempts us to accept in the main the favourable estimate of Prior, overcoloured as it is by the writer's propensity to elegant compliment, his confessed obligations to Dorset, and its occurrence in a dedication to his son. ”

“ The news of the encounter, then, circulated rapidly, and excited intense amusement, and the most lively satisfaction, on the part of the British officers.
On Sackville's arrival in England he was tried by court martial, sentenced to be cashiered, and declared incapable of again serving his majesty in any military capacity. This the king proclaimed officially to be a sentence worse than death and, taking a pen, he himself struck out his name from the list of privy councillors. ”

“ A great uproar arose in the field below; the crowd scattered, and down the pathway thus cleft they saw, by the light of the flames, a small black shape bundling helter-skelter along, till a ring of shouting men closed round it and hid it from view.
“Rounding up the wild beasts,” said Lovel, amused. “They won’t sacrifice them on the stones,—not they. They’ll all be chivvied back into their cages after a few louts have got a nip on the ankle. I wonder how many will remain at large? All the old women of the village will be going about to-morrow with umbrellas and pokers. ”

“ Many’s the pleasant hour you spend over books or in your garden; gentle and pleasant. There was a time when you rode rough as a boy; but that’s over now. Your finger nails are smooth,” he said, taking her hand and examining it critically by the vague light of the flames; “the hand of a lady,” and he lifted it up and sniffed it. “Scented too!” he said. “Scented for Calladine to kiss and fondle,” and gently he gave it back into her keeping, shaking his head. “Ah, Miss Warrener, it was a terrible mistake you made when you rode your pony in your little shepherd’s cap ”

“ 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. ”

“ There were not many girls in the party; she knew why, and a sense of triumph came over her; they might affect to despise Lovel, but for all that they did not care to see him married to one of their own number,—ah, how clever she had been!—not many girls; two men, doddering on their sticks; and a group of young men, the lounging, insolent handsome young men, with their hands stuck into the belts of their smocks, chewing straws for all the world as though they had been in the Waggon of Hay and not on the threshold of a church. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A letter is quoted in which Sackville is described as 'the gayest man in Ireland except his father.' Sackville became a major-general in 1755, and, after vacating the Irish secretaryship, was appointed to command a brigade of line encamped on Chatham upper lines. ”

“ She couldn’t tell herself why she had so set her heart on Lovel, if it wasn’t for that air of his,—so set her heart on him that she was ready to take on the zany and the old witch and all, if only she could get him. He had never looked twice at her, for all she had tried hard enough to attract his attention; yet she preferred him to any young man in the village, even to Peter Gorwyn, the smith’s son, with his muscular six foot two, with whom she had made so merry on the day of the Scouring, or Job Lackland, who played the fiddle and whose appearance of fair girlishness was so misleading. ”

“ Henry she was conscious of a fugitive relief.
“Then I needn’t feel selfish about keeping you here,” she said, “and it will be a nice rest for you after your journey and all the business you had to do in London. Now if you have quite finished, we might go out? It gets dark so quickly.” They went out; already the fresh beauty of the day was passing, it was colder, and there was more grey and less gold between the trees. “Let us go up to the top of the garden,” said Mrs. Martin, who felt she could not bear to keep the secret of the three hundred acres to herself a moment longer. ”