Knole and the Sackvilles

§ i

Edward Sackville was succeeded by his son Richard, married to Lady Frances Cranfield, a considerable heiress, who, on the death of her brother, inherited the fortune and property of their father, Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, sometime Treasurer to James I. I mention this marriage especially, because it brought to the Sackvilles the house called Copt Hall in Essex and its contents, which included much of the finest furniture now at Knole, some of the tapestry, the many portraits of the Cranfields by Mytens and Dobson, the series of historical portraits in the Brown Gallery, and the Mytens copies of Raphael’s cartoons. There are a number of receipts at Knole to no less than six different carriers, for wagon-loads of effects removed from Copt Hall to Knole at the cost of £2. 5s. per load. From Copt Hall also came the carved stone shield now in the Stone Court on the roof of the Great Hall. The Copt Hall estate was sold in 1701 for the approximate sum of twenty thousand pounds. The draft of the marriage settlement is at Knole:

The Earl of Middlesex is to assure ten thousand pounds to the Earl of Dorset in marriage with the Lady Frances Cranfield to the Lord Buckhurst to be paid in times and manner following:

He is to retain the money in his hands, paying yearly to the young couple towards their maintenance by equal portions at Michaelmas and our Lady Day £800 per annum until a jointure be made of £1500 per annum, by the Lord Buckhurst joining with the Earl of Dorset when he shall come to full age.

And if the Lord Buckhurst [which God forbid] shall decease before the said lady, or a jointure so made, then the ten thousand pound shall be the sole use of the said lady. But if the said lady [which God forbid] should die before the Lord Buckhurst without children, the said portion or so much shall remain not laid out by consent of the Earl of Dorset in purchasing in lands or leases, shall be paid to the said Earl of Dorset.

And in the same connection there are some notes from Edward, Lord Dorset to Lord Middlesex, one written “this Thursday morning at 5 of the clock,” apologising for the “bad character” which Lord Middlesex must decipher—and indeed the writing is all but illegible—but he is obliged to write as he must go presently into Kent to dispose some bargains and sales.

No particular interest attaches to Richard Sackville, save that he translated Le Cid into English verse and wrote a poem on Ben Jonson, but there are at Knole some memorandum books in his handwriting (between 1660 and 1670) which are worth quoting, I think, for the following illuminating extracts:

There are various other notes in the same books: Thomas Porter, going to Knole, was to have five shillings a week board-wages; and, judging from the following, Lord Dorset evidently could not wholly trust his memory unaided: “My French shot-bag; an hammer, and some playthings for Tom, a bone knife, etc. A great Iron chafing-dish, or a fire-pan to set it upon.” And again, “A silver porringer for little Tom.”

Another day he notes:

Old lead cast at Knole for the two turrets weighing 1500 lbs. Old lead cast for the cistern weighing 1200 lbs. Sold 13th Aug. 1662 to Edmund Giles and Edward Bourne the Advowson of the Rectory and Parsonage of Tooting in Surrey for an £100 and paid my wife.

There is also a receipt:

Nov. 14, 1671. Rec^d of the Right Hon. RICHARD Earl of DORSET, in full of all wages bills and accounts whatsoever from ye beginning of ye World to this day ye full sum of five pounds seven shillings and sixpence I say rec’d by JOHN WALL GROVE.

§ ii

This Richard Sackville and Frances Cranfield had seven sons and six daughters. There are some delightful portraits of the little girls at Knole, one in particular of Lady Anne and Lady Frances, painted in a garden, leading a squirrel on a blue ribbon, and in the chapel at Withyham there is an elaborate monument to commemorate the youngest son, Thomas, no doubt the “little Tom” for whom the playthings and the silver porringer were to be remembered. The monument bears the following inscription:

Of the other children, save of the eldest, there is no record, or none worth quoting: many of them died, as happened with such pitiable frequency, at a very early age: Lionel, aged three; Catherine, aged one; Cranfield, aged fourteen days; Elizabeth, aged two years; Anne, aged three. The eldest son, however, is one of the most jovial and debonair figures in the Knole portrait-gallery, Charles, the sixth Earl—let us call him the Restoration Earl—the jolly, loose-living, magnificent Mæcenas, “during the whole of his life the patron of men of genius and the dupe of women, and bountiful beyond measure to both.” He furnished Knole with silver, and peopled it with poets and courtesans; he left us the Poets’ Parlour, rich with memories of Pope and Dryden, Prior and Shadwell, D’Urfey and Killigrew; he left us the silver and ebony stands on which he was in the habit in hours of relaxation of placing his cumbersome periwig; he left us his portraits, both as the bewigged and be-ribboned courtier, and as the host, wrapped in a loose robe, a turban twisted round his head; he left us his gay and artificial stanzas to Chloris and Dorinda, and his rousing little song written on the eve of a naval engagement. He is not, perhaps, a very admirable figure. He was not above trafficking in court appointments; he disturbed London by a rowdy youth; he was reported to have passed on his mistresses to the King; he ended his life in mental and moral decay with a squalid woman at Bath. He followed the fashions of his age, and the most that can be claimed for him is that he should stand, along with his inseparables Rochester and Sedley, as the prototype of that age. But for all that, there is about such geniality, such generosity, and such munificence, a certain coarse lovableness which holds an indestructible charm for the English race. It is that which makes Charles the Second a more popular monarch than William the Third: Herrick a more popular poet than Milton. Last but not least, Charles Sackville is connected with that most attractive figure of the English stage—Nell Gwyn.

It is not known precisely in what year he was born, but it was either 1639, 1640, or 1642, so that he must have been a young man somewhere in the neighbourhood of twenty when Charles II came to the throne. He had been educated by a tutor, one Jennings, and sent abroad with him: as Jennings wrote home of him in measured terms surprising in that age of sycophancy, saying “I doubt not he will attain to some perfection,” he probably held but a low opinion of the abilities of his pupil. I do not know at what age Lord Buckhurst, as he then was, returned to England, but he must have been quite young, for in 1660 he becomes Colonel of a regiment of foot, commands 104 men, and receives a yearly allowance of £70 from his father, and the references to him in Pepys begin in 1661 when he was not more than twenty-one or twenty-two. He was, says Dr. Johnson with characteristic disapproval and severity, “eager of the riotous and licentious pleasures which young men of high rank, who aspired to be thought wits, at that time imagined themselves entitled to indulge.” Many of his pranks have been placed on record. They are neither very funny nor very edifying. On one occasion he and his brother Edward, with three friends, were committed to Newgate for killing an innocent man in a brawl, and should no doubt have been tried for murder, but as those contretemps could be arranged with very little difficulty the charge was modified to manslaughter.^[8] On another occasion, the full details of which are not allowed to remain in the expurgated edition of Pepys, Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, and Sir Thomas Ogle got drunk at the Cock Tavern in Bow Street, where they went out on to a balcony, and Sedley took off all his clothes and harangued the crowd which collected below: the crowd, in indignation, drove them in with stones, and broke the windows of the house; for this offence all three gentlemen were indicted and Sedley was fined £500. On yet another occasion Buckhurst and Sedley spent the night in prison for brawling with the watch, and were delivered only on the King’s intervention. On yet another, Pepys records that “the King was drunk at Saxam with Sedley and Buckhurst, the night that my Lord Arlington came thither, and would not give him audience, or could not.” These and similar exploits recall the more celebrated escapade of Rochester as an astrologer, which at least had in it a humorous element entirely lacking in the mere rioting of drunken young men like Buckhurst and Sedley. 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 hundred 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. It is difficult to imagine an era in English history more favourable to a young man of his type and fortune than the early years of Charles II, when the King himself was the ringleader in the outburst of revolt against that iron-grey period of Puritanism through which the country had just passed. Dresses became extravagant, silver ornate, speech licentious; the theatres, which had been closed for over twenty years, reopened, the costumes and scenery being now on an elaborate scale never contemplated before; women—a daring innovation—appeared in the women’s rôles; the King and his brother patronised the play-houses with all the young bloods of the court; coaches clattered through the streets of London, yes, even on a Sunday. There is, of course, another side to the picture—the sullen disapproval of the serious-minded, the squalor of a London shortly to be rotted by plague and terribly purified by fire—but with this side we have in the present connection no concern. We are in the gay upper stratum of prosperity and fashion, fortunate in the extraordinary vividness of our visualisation; we know not only the principal characters, but also the crowd of “supers” pressing behind them; we know their comings and goings, their intrigues, their rivalries, their amusements, the names of their mistresses. We are now at Whitehall, now at Epsom, now at Tunbridge Wells, now at Richmond. We are, indeed, very deeply in Pepys’ debt.

In this world, therefore, so intimately familiar to any reader of the great diarist, Lord Buckhurst moves noisily with Rochester and Buckingham, Etherege and Sedley, “the first gentleman,” says Horace Walpole, “of the voluptuous court of Charles II.” We are told that he refused the King’s offers of employment in order to enjoy his pleasures with the greater freedom, or, as he himself wrote with much frankness:

This did not prevent him from enrolling as a volunteer in the Dutch war of 1665, when he was present at a naval battle, and when the song which he was reported to have written on the eve of the engagement was brought to London and bandied from mouth to mouth about the town. Dr. Johnson shows himself sceptical as to this picturesque legend of the origin of the verses. “Seldom is any splendid story wholly true,” he observes; and continues, “I have heard from the Earl of Orrery, that Lord Buckhurst had been a week employed upon it, and only re-touched, or finished it, on the memorable evening.” However this may be, both song and story remain: I have told the story, and quote the song:

With this song—which is really very good of its kind, and, I think, deserves its fame—Pepys says that he “occasioned much mirth,” although at the time of repeating it he was under the impression that it was written by three authors in collaboration. It seems to have achieved popularity, and was set to music, also a parody was written of it by Lord Halifax under the title “The New Court: Being an Excellent New Song to an old Tune of ‘To all you Ladies now at hand’ by the Earl of Dorset,” and of which the following is the opening verse:

It is shortly after this battle that Nell Gwyn first appears in Lord Buckhurst’s life. London’s two theatres—the Duke’s Theatre, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the King’s Theatre, or, more familiarly, The Theatre, in Drury Lane—were then the great new resort and amusement, from the King and his brother in their boxes down to the rabble in the pit. Until the reign of Charles II the presence of the King in a common play-house was an unknown thing: such plays or masques as they had witnessed were always specially performed for them either in the halls or cock-pits of their palaces, but it now became the fashion for not only the King and the Duke of York, but also for the Queen to patronise the theatres. There were other innovations. The public was no longer satisfied with the makeshift scenery of pre-Commonwealth days, which had too often consisted of a placard hung upon a nail, “A wood,” or “A throne-room,” or whatever it might be. Nor were the dresses of the actors as careless as they had formerly been, but patrons of the stage would give their old clothes, which, if shabby, were no doubt still sufficiently magnificent to produce their effect at a distance. Even a step further in progress was the appearance of women on the stage, “foul and undecent women now, and never till now, permitted to appear and act,” says Evelyn, full of indignation, “who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses and to some their wives, witness the Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, Prince Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them.” A theatre of that day must have been a noisy, ruffling, ill-lighted place. The ceiling immediately above the pit was either open to the sky or else inadequately covered over, so that in the event of rain the whole of the pit was apt to surge into the dry parts of the theatre. The ladies in the audience, especially if the performance happened to be a comedy, sat for the most part in masks. The sallow face of the King, framed by the heavy curls, leered down over the edge of a box. In the body of the theatre lounged the bucks of the town, exchanging pleasantry and impudence with the orange-girls who were so indispensable a feature.

These orange-girls stood in the pit, crying “Oranges! will you have any oranges?” and were under the control of a superior known as Orange Moll, a famous figure of London theatre life. One may quote, to give some further idea of the relations between the young dandies and the orange-sellers, some of the stage directions in Shadwell’s True Widow, in the fourth act, laid in the Playhouse, “Several young coxcombs fool with the orange-women,” or “He sits down and lolls in the orange-wench’s lap,” or, “Raps people on the back and twirls their hats, and then looks demurely, as if he did not do it.” Amongst these girls, at the beginning of her career, was Nell Gwyn, of whom Rochester wrote:

and who has come down to us as a figure full of disreputable charm, witty Nelly, pretty Nelly, Nelly whose foot was least of any woman’s in England, Nelly who paid the debts of those whom she saw being haled off to prison, Nelly the pert, the apt, the kind-hearted, Nelly who “continued to hang on her clothes with her usual negligence when she was the King’s mistress, but whatever she did became her.” This merry creature said of herself that she was brought up in a brothel and served strong waters to gentlemen: it is probable that she was born in the Coal Yard at Drury Lane (now Goldsmith Street), and, wherever she may have been brought up, at a very early age she joined the orange-girls at the King’s Theatre. In due time her looks and her wit attracted attention and she went on the stage. Pepys, who was evidently much taken with the “bold merry slut,” leaves a particularly charming record of her one May day:

May 1st. To Westminster, in the way meeting many milkmaids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them; and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and bodice, looking upon one; she seemed a mighty pretty creature.

This being in May (1657), when Nell was sixteen, and had already been acting for at least two years, in July of the same year the diarist was told, which troubled him, that “my Lord Buckhurst hath got Nell away from the King’s House, and gives her £100 a year, so as she hath sent her parts to the house and will act no more.”

was sung of Buckhurst. He was then twenty-seven or so, Nell Gwyn sixteen, and together they kept “merry house” at Epsom. Pepys went down to Epsom one day and heard reports of their merriments: he pitied Nelly, exclaiming, “Poor girl!” and pitied still more her loss to the King’s Theatre; but he does not expressly state whether he saw the pair or not. In any case, the housekeeping at Epsom did not continue for very long, for by August she was again acting in London, and Pepys had “a great deal of discourse with Orange Moll, who tells us that Nell is already left by my Lord Buckhurst, and that he makes sport of her, and swears she hath had all she could get of him.” It would appear from this that Buckhurst, contrary to what has been said of him, did not sell Nell Gwyn to the King, for even Pepys, who would surely have been among the first and best informed, does not mention the King having “sent for Nelly” until January of the following year. I hope, therefore, that the charges of his having accepted bribes in exchange for Nelly may be exploded. A great many things were whispered—that he had been promised the peerage of Middlesex, that he had been given a thousand pounds a year, that he had been sent on “a sleeveless errand” into France to leave the coast clear for the King, that he refused to give her up until he had been repaid for all the expenses she had entailed upon him. I do not think that such a Jewish spirit is at all in keeping with the rest of his character as we know it, with his generosity and general lavishness, nor does it seem probable that he would so have bargained with a king whose favour he was anxious to retain. By 1669 it is certain that Nell was definitely the King’s mistress and all connection with Buckhurst over. But we find that years afterwards the house called Burford House, at Windsor, is granted by Charles II to Charles, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, W. Chaffinch, Esq., and others, in trust for Ellen Gwyn for life, with remainder to the Earl of Burford, the King’s natural son, in tail male; further, among the Knole papers is the original deed of 1683 appointing Lord Dorset her trustee and trustee to her son by Charles II; and, dated 1678, there is an allusion to her former lover in one of Nell’s infrequent and ill-spelt letters: “My lord Dorseit apiers worze in thre months, for he drinks aile with Shadwell and Mr. Haris at the Duke’s house all day long.”

Nell Gwyn thus passed out of Lord Buckhurst’s life, which she had so briefly entered, a well-assorted pair, I think, in every respect—he, idle, spoilt, heavy and magnificent; she, coarse, witty, feminine. There is a portrait of her at Knole, which I suppose was acquired by him, and I once happened to see a set of spoons in a loan exhibition which were catalogued as bearing the arms of Sackville with those of Nell Gwyn. The Sackville shield was correct enough, but whether the other quarterings were the arms of Gwyn, or whether indeed the orange-girl was entitled to any heraldic device, I am, of course, unable to say.

§ iii

Pomp, wealth, and infirmities now began to take the place of brilliant youth and comparative irresponsibility. The frivolous Lord Buckhurst became Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, he succeeded to the estates of the Cranfields, he married, he was made Lord Chamberlain, he was given the Garter, and he had a fit of apoplexy in the King’s bedroom. In order to recover his health he went abroad; his passport is at Knole, on yellow parchment, with the King’s signature at the top:

Charles the Second by the Grace of God, etc., to all admirals, vice-admirals, captains of our ships at sea, governors, commanders, soldiers, mayors, sheriffs, justices of the peace, bailiffs, constables, customers, controllers, searchers, and all other our loving subjects whom it may concern, greeting:

Whereas our right trusty and right well-beloved cousin Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex hath desired our licence to go beyond the seas for recovery of his health, we are graciously pleased to condescend thereunto, and accordingly our will and pleasure is, and we do hereby require, that you permit and suffer the said Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex with six servants by name Richard Raphael, Robert Pennock, Thomas Bridges, —— Solomon, John Carter, and Christopher Garner, also forty pounds in money, and all baggage, utensils, carriages, and necessaries to the said Earl belonging, freely to embark in any of our ports and from thence to pass beyond the seas without any let, hindrance, or molestation whatsoever. And you are likewise to permit the said Earl and his servants at their return back into this Kingdom to pass with like freedom, into the same, affording them [as there may be occasion] all requisite aid and furtherance as well going as returning. And for so doing this shall be your warrant.

Given at our court at Windsor, the 23rd day of August 1681, in the three and thirtieth year of our reign.

There is also a letter from one of the servants mentioned in the passport, saying that they had had a good passage to Dieppe, “except Mr. Raphael, who was kind to ye fishes.”

There is another letter, from the Mr. Raphael in question, written home to Robert Pennock from Paris while on the same journey, saying that his Lordship wants the pond finished against the spring, orders the gardener to manure all the trees, and wishes Pennock to obtain a sure-footed nag, as his Lordship intends for the future only to make use of a saddle-horse between Copt Hall and London to prevent the pain of the gravel, of which infirmity his Lordship has lately been much troubled.

About this time he married. I have in my hands one of his love-letters, in faded ink; there is no date, no beginning, and no signature: it is superscribed “for the Countess of Falmouth,” and enclosed is a lock of reddish-brown hair—most dead and poignant token—of surprising length when one considers the heavy wig which was to be worn over it.

I must beg leave that we may be a little earlier than ordinary at Hick’s hall to-day, for to-morrow, i may be so miserable as not to see you; besides i am in pain till i can clear some doubts that have kept me waking all night; something i observed in your looks which shewed you had been displeased, at what i dare not ask; but till i know i must suffer the torment of uncertain guessing; though i am pretty well assured i could not be concerned in it [more than in the trouble it gave you]; being so perfectly yours, that it will of necessity be counted your own fault if ever i offend you, since ’tis you alone have the government not only of all my actions but of my very thoughts, to confirm you in the belief of this truth i do from this moment give up to you all my pretences to freedom or any power over myself, and though you may justly think it below you to be owned the sovereign of so mean a dominion as my heart, i have yet confidence upon my knees to offer it you; since never any prince could boast of so clear a title, and so absolute power, as you shall ever possess in it.

We know a good deal about Lord Dorset’s expenses and finances. We know that on the death of his mother he obtained an additional income of £1744 14s. 11d. a year from her estates. We know that thirty-four houses in the Strand were granted to him, and let as follows:

We know that twenty-four tenements east of Somerset House were granted to him for ninety-nine years at a yearly rent of £24 10s. 4d.—and that out of them he should have made £1768 a year, as witness the list I reproduce, taken from a manuscript at Knole, but either he or his bailiff must disgracefully have neglected his business, for on Lord Dorset’s death many rents were found to be in arrear, one tenant’s yearly rent of £30 having accumulated to the sum of £235 5s. 6d., or nearly eight years’ owing, and another rent of £17 18s. 4d. had accumulated to arrears of £111 19s. 10½d. His servants’ accounts, too, were in a state of confusion, and some of the wages unpaid up to three years.

His total income for the year 1698–99 was £7650 4s. 3½d.—the curious accuracy of these sums does not seem to tally with the confusion to which I have referred—that is to say, about £40,000 of modern money. It may be interesting, while on this subject, to show some of the means common among the great nobles for filling their pockets. In 1697, for instance, we read that “My Lord Chamberlain Dorset has sold the keepership of Greenwich Park to the Earl of Romney” [James Vernon to Matthew Prior], and in the same year—this is when he was getting on in years and entirely withdrawing from politics—“Lord Dorset hath resigned his office of Lord Chamberlain to the Earl of Sunderland for the sum of ten thousand pounds,” but where was this sum to come from? not out of Lord Sunderland’s pocket; no, but “which his Majesty pays.” There was yet another method by which money might conveniently be raised: it is well illustrated by Dorset’s petition regarding the dues on tobacco:

To the King’s most Ex^t Ma^ty

The humble Petition of CHARLES Earl of Middlesex.

Humbly Sheweth

That by the act [for preventing planting of tobacco in England and for regulating the Plantation Trade] all ships that shall return from any of yr Maj^ties foreign plantations and not return to yr Maj^ties Kingdom of England, Dominion of Wales or Town of Berwick upon Tweed, and there pay the customs and duties ... shall be confisable and their bonds forfeited. That the Phenix of London, Richard Pidgeon Commander and several other ships have ... discharged merchandizes of the growth of yr Maj^ties Plantations, in yr Kingdom of Ireland, so that by law they are forfeited as by the said Act produceable may appear.

May it therefore please yr Sacred Maj^ty to grant yr Petitioner all forfeitures as well past as to come on accompt of the said Act, with power to depute such persons as he shall think fitting, to look upon and take care that no such abuses shall be in ye future.

To this petition I should like to add another, representing the other point of view, that of the unfortunate people who had the King’s soldiers quartered upon them in intolerable numbers, and were, as it appears, not refunded for the expenses to which they had been put. I add this the more willingly, as Dorset was commonly reputed the friend of the poor, and it is said of him that “crowds of poor daily thronged his gates, expecting thence their bread. The lazy and the sick, as he accidentally saw them, were removed from the street to the physician, and not only cured but supplied with what might enable them to resume their former calling. The prisoner has often been released by my Lord’s paying the debt, and the condemned been pardoned, through his intercession with the sovereign.”

To the Right Hon^ble CHARLES Earl of Dorset and Middlesex.

The humble petition of the Innholders and Alehouse Keepers in the parish of Sevenoaks in the county of Kent, Humbly Sheweth,

That your said petitioners have every year since ye coming of his present Majesty had either foot or horse quartered on them, even much beyond their neighbours ... The said innkeepers are willing to serve their King and Country, but beyond their ability cannot, they therefore humbly pray that care may be taken for procuring their arrears due, or at least to prevent more soldiers coming on them, which they understand are, unless your Honour will stand in the gap ...