CHAPTER I

The House

§ i

There are two sides from which you may first profitably look at the house. One is from the park, the north side. From here the pile shows best the vastness of its size; it looks like a mediaeval village. It is heaped with no attempt at symmetry; it is sombre and frowning; the grey towers rise; the battlements cut out their square regularity against the sky; the buttresses of the old twelfth-century tithe-barn give a rough impression of fortifications. There is a line of trees in one of the inner courtyards, and their green heads show above the roofs of the old breweries; but although they are actually trees of a considerable size they are dwarfed and unnoticeable against the mass of the buildings blocked behind them. The whole pile soars to a peak which is the clocktower with its pointed roof: it might be the spire of the church on the summit of the hill crowning the mediaeval village. At sunset I have seen the silhouette of the great building stand dead black on a red sky; on moonlight nights it stands black and silent, with glinting windows, like an enchanted castle. On misty autumn nights I have seen it emerging partially from the trails of vapour, and heard the lonely roar of the red deer roaming under the walls.

§ ii

The other side is the garden side—the gay, princely side, with flowers in the foreground; the grey walls rising straight up from the green turf; the mullioned windows, and the Tudor gables with the heraldic leopards sitting stiffly at each corner. The park side is the side for winter; the garden side the side for summer. It has an indescribable gaiety and courtliness. The grey of the Kentish rag is almost pearly in the sun, the occasional coral festoon of a climbing rose dashed against it; the long brown-red roofs are broken by the chimney-stacks with their slim, peaceful threads of blue smoke mounting steadily upwards. One looks down upon the house from a certain corner in the garden. Here is a bench among a group of yews—dark, red-berried yews; and the house lies below one in the hollow, lovely in its colour and its serenity. It has all the quality of peace and permanence; of mellow age; of stateliness and tradition. It is gentle and venerable. Yet it is, as I have said, gay. It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house. It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky; it settles down into its hollow amongst the cushioned tops of the trees; the brown-red of those roofs is the brown-red of the roofs of humble farms and pointed oast-houses, such as stain over a wide landscape of England the quilt-like pattern of the fields. I make bold to say that it stoops to nothing either pretentious or meretricious. There is here no flourish of architecture, no ornament but the leopards, rigid and vigilant. The stranger may even think, upon arrival, that the front of the house is disappointing. It is, indeed, extremely modest. There is a gate-house flanked by two square grey towers, placed between two wings which provide only a monotony of windows and gables. It is true that two or three fine sycamores, symmetrical and circular as open umbrellas, redeem the severity of the front, and that a herd of fallow deer, browsing in the dappled shade of the trees, maintains the tradition of an English park. But, for the rest, the front of the house is so severe as to be positively uninteresting; it is quiet and monkish; “a beautiful decent simplicity,” said Horace Walpole, “which charms one.” There is here to be found none of the splendour of Elizabethan building. A different impression, however, is in store when once the wicket-gate has been opened. You are in a courtyard of a size the frontage had never led you to expect, and the vista through a second gateway shows you the columns of a second court; your eye is caught by an oriel window opposite, and by other windows with heraldic bearings in their panes, promise of rooms and galleries; by gables and the heraldic leopards; by the clock tower which gives an oddly Chinese effect immediately above the Tudor oriel. Up till a few years ago Virginia creeper blazed scarlet in autumn on the walls of the Green Court, but it has now been torn away, and what may be lost in colour is compensated by the gain in seeing the grey stone and the slight moulding which runs, following the shape of the towers, across the house.

On the whole, the quadrangle is reminiscent of Oxford, though more palatial and less studious. The house is built round a system of these courtyards: first this one, the Green Court, which is the largest and most magnificent; then the second one, or Stone Court, which is not turfed, like the Green Court, but wholly paved, and which has along one side of it a Jacobean colonnade; the third court is the Water Court, and has none of the display of the first two: it is smaller, and quite demure, indeed rather like some old house in Nuremberg, with the latticed window of one of the galleries running the whole length of it, and the friendly unconcern of an immense bay-tree growing against one of its walls. There are four other courts, making seven in all. This number is supposed to correspond to the days in the week; and in pursuance of this conceit there are in the house fifty-two staircases, corresponding to the weeks in the year, and three hundred and sixty-five rooms, corresponding to the days. I cannot truthfully pretend that I have ever verified these counts, and it may be that their accuracy is accepted solely on the strength of the legend; but, if this is so, then it has been a very persistent legend, and I prefer to sympathise with the amusement of the ultimate architect on making the discovery that by a judicious juggling with his additions he could bring courts, stairs, and rooms up to that satisfactory total.

A stone lobby under the oriel window divides the Green Court from the Stone Court. In summer the great oak doors of this second gate-house are left open, and it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no barrier checked him.

It becomes impossible, after passing through the formality of the two first quadrangles, to follow the ramblings of the house geographically. They are so involved that, after a lifetime of familiarity, I still catch myself pausing to think out the shortest route from one room to another. Four acres of building is no mean matter.

§ iii

Into the very early mediaeval history of the house I do not think that I need enter. It is suggested that a Roman building once occupied the site, and that some foundations which were recently unearthed beneath the larder—evidently one of the oldest portions—once formed part of that construction. The question of dating the existing buildings, however, is quite sufficiently complicated without going back to a building which no longer exists. Nor do I think that the early owners—the Pembrokes, or the Say and Seles—offer the smallest interest; if we knew precisely what parts of the house we owed to them severally it would be another matter, but the mediaeval records are very scanty. It is safe to say, generally speaking, that the north side is the oldest side; it is the most sombre, the most massive, and the most irregular; there are buttresses, battlements, and towers, but no gables and no embellishments—nothing but solid masonry. Up in the north-east corner is the old kitchen, and the old entrances through dark archways at the top of stairways. The passages here, of thick stone, twist oddly, and their ceilings are groined by semi-arches which have become lost and embedded in the alterations to the stone-work. It is a dark, massive, little-visited corner, this nucleus of Knole.

The house, or such portions of it as then existed, was bought from William, Lord Say and Sele, by Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, on June 30, 1456, and it is clear from the numerous bills among the archives at Lambeth Palace that both he and his more notable successor, Cardinal Morton, carried out extensive additions, alterations, and repairs. It is, however, a very difficult task to determine what parts of the building definitely belong to this period, for, what with the additions of the archbishops and the alterations of the later Sackvilles, all is confusion. It would appear, for instance, that upon a foundation of Tudor masonry the Sackvilles constructed the Elizabethan gables which are now so characteristic a feature of the house; but it is less easy to say exactly how much the first Tudor archbishop found there on his arrival of earlier workmanship. A further confusing factor is the great fire which took place in 1623, and is reported to have destroyed a large part of the building—but exactly where, and how much, we cannot say. Nor are the accounts at Lambeth very illuminating:

In divers costs and expenses made this year [1467] for repairing the manor of Knole, carriage for the two cart loads of lathes from Panters to the manor, 14_d._ For carriage of thirty loads of stone for the new tower, 7_d._ load = 16/9. Carriage of six loads of timber at 7_d._ = 3/6. Carriage of one fother of lead from London to Knole, 3/4.

The next year, 1468:

Repairs at Knole. One labourer for 6 days work in the great chamber and the new _seler_, 2/-. Making of 700 lathes to the new tower, 14_d._ One labourer 4½ days in the old kitchen, 4_d._ Item, for 1 j M^1 of walle prygge (_sic_) to the stable and other places, 13_d._ One cowl to the masonry, 12_d._

The “great chamber” referred to here was in all probability the present Great Hall, which we know to have been built by Bourchier about 1460, although it was altered by Thomas Sackville, who put in the present ceiling, panelling, and oak screen. Thomas also built the Great Staircase in 1604–8, leading to the Ball-room, which is of the time of Bourchier. I expect this is the “seler” referred to, meaning solar and not cellar, as might be thought; or did it mean the present colonnade, which is also of Bourchier’s building, in 1468? The position of the “new tower” is nowhere specified, but I wonder whether it is not the tower beside the chapel, where there is a stone fireplace bearing Bourchier’s cognisance—the double knot—and the same device in a small pane of stained glass in the window. This tower, moreover, goes commonly by the name of Bourchier’s Tower.

There are a few more items mentioned in the Lambeth papers, 1468–9: “Repairs at Knole. Repairs at one house set aside for the slaughter of sheep and other [animals?] for the use of the Lord’s great house at Sevenoaks, 113_s._ 2_d._” This, I think, is certainly the old slaughter-house which forms one side of the Queen’s Court. It is obviously a very old building. But there is one point in this account which is of interest, namely, that Knole should at this date have been referred to as the “great house.” This would seem to prove that the greater mass of the building was already in existence, since by the latter half of the fifteenth century there were already many houses and palaces in England whose bulk would argue that the current standard of greatness might be high and the adjective not too readily applied. The Primate owned, moreover, up to the time of the Reformation no less than twelve palaces and houses of residence in the diocese of Canterbury alone, namely, Bekesburn, Ford, Maidstone, Charing, Saltwood, Aldington, Wingham, Wrotham, Tenterden, Knole, Otford, and Canterbury. It seems, therefore, unlikely that Knole should be singled out as a “great house” unless there were good justification for the expression.

Bourchier also built the Brown Gallery about 1460, and at or about the same date he put up the machicolations over the gate-house between the Green Court and the Stone Court. Towards the end of the same century, Morton, his successor, “threw out an oriel window which rendered the machicolations useless, and showed that all idea of such fortifications was at an end.” It is not known precisely how much Morton built at Knole. It is even uncertain whether he or Bourchier built the Chapel. The Lambeth records cease with some small repairs in 1487–88, so we have nothing to go upon—all the more pity, for Morton was a great prelate, forgotten now in the greater fame of the Tudor dynasty, “his name buried,” says his chronicler, “under his own creation.” This cardinal, having succeeded Bourchier in 1486, held the Primacy for fourteen years, and died at Knole in 1500. I pass over his successors, Dean and Wareham, for I do not know how much they did at Knole. Cranmer, the next archbishop, enjoyed the house for seven years only, when he was compelled—quite amicably, but nevertheless compelled—to present it to Henry VIII, whose fancy it had taken. Here the accounts begin again,[1] although they give very little indication: £872 by Royal Warrant in 1543, £770 in 1548, £80 in 1546—three sums which would now be equivalent, roughly, to £30,000.

After Henry VIII Knole continued as Crown property, passing now and then temporarily into the hands of various favourites, until in 1586 it was given by Queen Elizabeth to her cousin, Thomas Sackville, and has remained in the possession of his family ever since.

§ iv

The main block, therefore, meanders from Henry VII through Henry VIII to Elizabeth and James I: that is to say, roughly, from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth. There may be earlier out-buildings and later excrescences, but it is safe to say that the greater portion was built in the reigns of the Tudors. It is all of the same Kentish rag, with the exception of a row of gables which have been plastered over, and which were probably once of the beam-and-plaster fashion so prevalent at that date in Kent. With this exception the walls are of the grey stone, in many places ten and twelve feet thick, cool in summer, and, for some reason, not particularly warm in winter. The rooms are, for the most part, rather small and rather low; they break out, of course, now into galleries, now into a ball-room, now into a banqueting-hall, but the majority of them are small, friendly rooms—not intimidating; some people might even think them poky, relative to the size of the house. I do not think that they are poky. They are eminently rooms intended to be lived in, and not merely admired, though no doubt a practical consideration was present in the problem of heating to determine their size. Yet from an old diary preserved at Knole, and from which in its place I shall have the opportunity to give extracts, it is clear that in the early seventeenth century at all events the life of the house was carried on largely in one or the other of the long galleries. Now, none of the galleries has more than one fireplace. It must have been very cold. The old braziers that could be carried about the room as occasion required still stand in the rooms where they were used, and so do the copper warming-pans, shining and perforated, which were thrust into the beds to warm them before the arrival of the occupant. The principal beds, of course, must have been magnificently stuffy. They are four-posters, so tall as to reach from floor to ceiling, with stiff brocaded curtains that could completely enclose the sleeper. But on winter days I cannot believe that the group ever moved very far away from the fireplace or the brazier; and indeed, judging from the same diary, they seemed always to be “keeping their chamber” on account of coughs, colds, rheumatism, or ague when they were not keeping it because they were “sullen” with one another, or “brought to bed” of a son or a daughter.

§ v

The galleries are perhaps the most characteristic rooms in such a house.

Long and narrow, with dark shining floors, armorial glass in the windows, rich plaster-work ceilings, and portraits on the walls, they are splendidly sombre and sumptuous. The colour of the Cartoon Gallery, when I have come into it in the evening, with the sunset flaming through the west window, has often taken my breath away. I have stood, stock still and astonished, in the doorway. The gallery is ninety feet in length, the floor formed of black oak planks irregularly laid, the charm of which is that they are not planks at all, but solid tree-trunks, split in half, with the rounded half downwards; and on this oak flooring lie the blue and scarlet patches from the stained west window, more subduedly echoed in the velvets of the chair coverings, the coloured marbles of the great Renaissance fireplace, and the fruits and garlands of the carved woodwork surrounding the windows. There is nothing garish: all the colours have melted into an old harmony that is one of the principal beauties of these rooms. The walls here in the Cartoon Gallery are hung with rose-red Genoa velvet, so lovely that I almost regret Mytens’ copies of the Raphael cartoons hiding most of it; but if, at Knole, one were too nicely reluctant to sacrifice the walls, whether panelled or velvet-hung, then all the pictures would have to be stacked on the floor of the attics. The same regret applies to the ball-room, where the Elizabethan panelling—oak, but originally painted white, turned by age to ivory—is so covered up as to be unnoticeable behind the Sackville portraits of ten generations. Fortunately, the frieze in the ball-room cannot be hidden. It used to delight me as a child, with its carved intricacies of mermaids and dolphins, mermen and mermaids with scaly, twisting tails and salient anatomy, and I was invariably contemptuous of those visitors to whom I pointed out the frieze but who were more interested in the pictures. It always fell to my lot to “show the house” to visitors when I was living there alone with my grandfather, for he shared the family failing of unsociability, and whenever a telegram arrived threatening invasion he used to take the next train to London for the day, returning in the evening when the coast was clear. It mattered nothing that I was every whit as bored by the invasion as he could have been; in a divergence between the wishes of eighty and the wishes of eight, the wishes of eight went to the wall.

§ vi

There are other galleries, older and more austere than the Cartoon Gallery. They are not quite so long, they are narrower, lower, and darker, and not so exuberant in decoration; indeed, they are simply and soberly panelled in oak. They have the old, musty smell which, to me, whenever I met it, would bring back Knole. I suppose it is really the smell of all old houses—a mixture of woodwork, pot-pourri, leather, tapestry, and the little camphor bags which keep away the moth; the smell engendered by the shut windows of winter and the open windows of summer, with the breeze of summer blowing in from across the park. Bowls of lavender and dried rose-leaves stand on the window-sills; and if you stir them up you get the quintessence of the smell, a sort of dusty fragrance, sweeter in the under layers where it has held the damp of the spices. The pot-pourri at Knole is always made from the recipe of a prim-looking little old lady who lived there for many years as a guest in the reigns of George I and George II. Her two rooms open out of one of the galleries, two of the smallest rooms in the house, the bedroom hung with a pale landscape of blue-green tapestry, the sitting-room panelled in oak; and in the bedroom stands her small but pompous bed, with bunches of ostrich-plumes nodding at each of the four corners. Strangers usually seem to like these two little rooms best, coming to them as they do, rather overawed by the splendour of the galleries; they are amused by the smallness of the four-poster, square as a box, its creamy lining so beautifully quilted; by the spinning-wheel, with the shuttle still full of old flax; and by the ring-box, containing a number of plain-cut stones, which could be exchanged at will into the single gold setting provided. The windows of these rooms, furthermore, look out on to the garden; they are human, habitable little rooms, reassuring after the pomp of the Ball-room and the galleries. In the sitting-room there is a small portrait of the prim lady, Lady Betty Germaine, sitting very stiff in a blue brocaded dress; she looks as though she had been a martinet in a tight, narrow way.

The gallery leading to these rooms is called the Brown Gallery. It is well named—oak floor, oak walls, and barrelled ceiling, criss-crossed with oak slats in a pattern something like cat’s cradle. Some of the best pieces of the English furniture are ranged down each side of this gallery: portentously important chairs, Jacobean cross-legged or later love-seats in their original coverings, whether of plum and silver, or red brocade with heavy fringes, or green with silver fringes, or yellow silk sprigged in black, or powder-blue; and all have their attendant stool squatting beside them. They are lovely, silent rows, for ever holding out their arms, and for ever disappointed. At the end of this gallery is a tiny oratory, down two steps, for the use of the devout: this little, almost secret, place glows with colour like a jewel, but nobody ever notices it, and on the whole it probably prefers to hide itself away unobserved.

There is also the Leicester Gallery, which preserves in its name the sole trace of Lord Leicester’s brief ownership of Knole. The Leicester Gallery is very dark and mysterious, furnished with red velvet Cromwellian farthingale chairs and sofas, dark as wine; there are illuminated scrolls of two family pedigrees—Sackville and Curzon—richly emblazoned with coats of arms, drawn out in 1589 and 1623 respectively; and in the end window there is a small stained-glass portrait of “Herbrand de Sackville, a Norman notable, came into England with William the Conqueror, A.D. 1066.” (_Herbrandus de Sackville, Praepotens Normanus, intravit Angliam cum Gulielmo Conquestore, Anno Domini MLXVI._) There is also a curious portrait hanging on one of the doors, of Catherine Fitzgerald Countess of Desmond, the portrait of a very old lady, in a black dress and a white ruff, with that strange far-away look in her dead blue eyes that comes with extreme age. For tradition says of her that she was born in the reign of Edward the Fourth and died in the reign of Charles the First, breaking her leg incidentally at the age of ninety by falling off a cherry tree; that is to say, she was a child when the princes were smothered in the Tower, a girl when Henry the Seventh came to the throne, and watched the pageant of all the Tudors and the accession of the Stuarts—the whole of English history enclosed between the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War. She must have been a truly legendary figure in the country by the time she had reached the age of a hundred and forty or thereabouts.

It is rather a frightening portrait, that portrait of Lady Desmond. If you go into the gallery after nightfall with a candle the pale, far-away eyes stare past you into the dark corners of the wainscot, eyes either over-charged or empty—which? The house is not haunted, but you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house’s benevolence before you can wander through the state-rooms after nightfall with a candle. The light gleams on the dull gilding of furniture and into the misty depths of mirrors, and startles up a sudden face out of the gloom; something creaks and sighs; the tapestry sways, and the figures on it undulate and seem to come alive. The recesses of the great beds, deep in shadow, might be inhabited, and you would not know it; eyes might watch you, unseen. The man with the candle is under a terrible disadvantage to the man in the dark.

§ vii

As there are three galleries among the state-rooms, so are there three principal bedrooms: the King’s, the Venetian Ambassador’s, and the Spangled Room. The King’s bedroom is the only vulgar room in the house. Not that the furniture put there for the reception of James the First is vulgar: it is excessively magnificent, the canopy of the immense bed reaching almost to the ceiling, decked with ostrich feathers, the hangings stiff with gold and silver thread, the coverlet and the interior of the curtains heavily embroidered with a design of pomegranates and tiger-lilies worked in silver on a coral satin ground, the royal cipher embossed over the pillows—all this is very magnificent, but not vulgar. What is vulgar is the set of furniture made entirely in silver: table, hanging mirror, and tripods—the florid and ostentatious product of the florid Restoration. There is a surprising amount of silver in the room: sconces, ginger-jars, mirrors, fire-dogs, toilet-set, rose-water sprinklers, even to a little eye-bath, all of silver, but these smaller objects have not the blatancy of the set of furniture. Charles Sackville, for whom it was made, cannot have known when he had had enough of a good thing.

It is almost a relief to go from here to the Venetian Ambassador’s Bedroom. Green and gold; Burgundian tapestry, mediaeval figures walking in a garden; a rosy Persian rug—of all rooms I never saw a room that so had over it a bloom like the bloom on a bowl of grapes and figs. I cannot keep the simile, which may convey nothing to those who have not seen the room, out of my mind. Greens and pinks originally bright, now dusted and tarnished over. It is a very grave, stately room, rather melancholy in spite of its stateliness. It seems to miss its inhabitants more than do any of the other rooms. Perhaps this is because the bed appears to be designed for three: it is of enormous breadth, and there are three pillows in a row. Presumably this is what the Italians call a _letto matrimoniale_.

§ viii

In a remote corner of the house is the Chapel of the Archbishops, small, and very much bejewelled. Tapestry, oak, and stained-glass—the chapel smoulders with colour. It is greatly improved since the oak has been pickled and the mustard-yellow paint removed, also the painted myrtle-wreaths, tied with a gilt ribbon, in the centre of each panel, with which the nineteenth century adorned it, when it was considered “very simple, plain, and neat in its appearance, and well adapted for family worship.” The hand of the nineteenth century fell rather heavily on the chapel: besides painting the oak yellow and the ceiling blue with gold stars, it erected a Gothic screen and a yellow organ; but fortunately these are both at the entrance, and you can turn your back on them and look down the little nave to the altar where Mary Queen of Scots’ gifts stand under the Perpendicular east window. All along the left-hand wall hangs the Gothic tapestry—scenes from the life of Christ, the figures, ungainly enough, trampling on an edging of tall irises and lilies exquisitely designed; and “Saint Luke in his first profession,” wrote Horace Walpole irreverently, “holding a urinal.” There used to be other tapestries in the house; there was one of the Seven Deadly Sins set, woven with gold threads, and there was another series, very early, representing the Flood and the two-by-two procession of the animals going into a weather-boarded Ark; but these, alas, had to be sold, and are now in America.

The chapel looks strange and lovely during a midnight thunderstorm: the lightning flashes through the stone ogives of the east window, and one gets a queer effect, unreal like colour photography, of the colours lit up by that unfamiliar means. A flight of little private steps leads out of my bedroom straight into the Family Pew; so I dare to say that there are few aspects under which I have not seen the chapel; and as a child I used to “take sanctuary” there when I had been naughty: that is to say, fairly often. They never found me, sulking inside the pulpit.

§ ix

There would, of course, be many other aspects from which I might consider Knole; indeed, if I allowed myself full licence I might ramble out over Kent and down into Sussex, to Lewes, Buckhurst, and Withyham, out into the fruit country and the hop country, across the Weald, over Saxonbury, and to Lewes among the Downs, and still I should not feel guilty of irrelevance. Of whatever English county I spoke, I still should be aware of the relationship between the English soil and that most English house. But more especially do I feel this concerning Kent and Sussex, and concerning the roads over which the Sackvilles travelled so constantly between estate and estate. The place-names in their letters recur through the centuries; the paper is a little yellower as the age increases, the ink a little more faded, the handwriting a little less easily decipherable, but still the gist is always the same: “I go to-morrow into Kent,” “I quit Buckhurst for Knole,” “my Lord rode to Lewes with a great company,” “we came to Knole by coach at midnight.” The whole district is littered with their associations, whether a village whose living lay in their gift, or a town where they endowed a college, or a wood where they hunted, or the village church where they had themselves buried. Sussex, in fact, was their cradle long before they came into Kent. Buckhurst, which they had owned since the twelfth century, was at one time an even larger house than Knole, and to their own vault in its parish church of Withyham they were invariably brought to rest. Their trace is scattered over the two counties. But this was not my only meaning; I had in mind that Knole was no mere excrescence, no alien fabrication, no startling stranger seen between the beeches and the oaks. No other country but England could have produced it, and into no other country would it settle with such harmony and such quiet. The very trees have not been banished from the courtyards, but spread their green against the stone. From the top of a tower one looks down upon the acreage of roofs, and the effect is less that of a palace than of a jumbled village upon the hillside. It is not an incongruity like Blenheim or Chatsworth, foreign to the spirit of England. It is, rather, the greater relation of those small manor-houses which hide themselves away so innumerably among the counties, whether built of the grey stone of south-western England, or the brick of East Anglia, or merely tile-hung or plastered like the cottages. It is not utterly different from any of these. The great Palladian houses of the eighteenth century are _in_ England, they are not _of_ England, as are these irregular roofs, this easy straying up the contours of the hill, these cool coloured walls, these calm gables, and dark windows mirroring the sun.