The pride of the Sackvilles

Knole is a country house the size of a small village in the Kent countryside. For the past 400 years it has been inhabited by 13 generations of a single family, the Sackvilles. The present Lord Sackville, Robert Sackville-West who lives with his family there, has written a scholarly book on Knole’s effect on the family and vice versa.

It was Thomas Sackville who in the 1590s transformed a late medieval manor house into the Renaissance mansion that has become today’s tourist attraction. Like the Cecils, who were his colleagues in government, he made little distinction between enriching the crown and his own family, just as today’s MPs fiddled expenses to feather their own nests. As a loyal servant of Elizabeth and James I, he became one of the richest landowners in England. Yet Knole, the pride of Thomas Sackville, conferring prestige in a status-based society, cannot quite match the magnificence of Blenheim or Hatfield. Although several members of the family occupied great offices of state, the Sackvilles never became as powerful as the Cecils or Churchills.

The prosperity, indeed the continued existence, of such great estates depended on the family’s production of suitable heirs. Thomas’s lands passed to Richard Sackville, a hopelessly lavish gambler. In 16 years he spent what his forefathers had taken a century to acquire, leaving debts the equivalent today of six million pounds. He tried to get hold of his wife Lady Anne Clifford’s inheritance with the help of James I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, but she defied them all. Scarcely surprisingly, their marriage broke down and she recorded her sufferings in her diary. Patterns repeat themselves. Two centuries later, Victoria, the wife of Lionel, initially found her husband ‘a dream in bed’; but family quarrels wore down her once colourful personality. Her husband found solace in his mistresses.