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.