CHAPTER IV

Knole in the Reign of James I RICHARD SACKVILLE 3rd Earl _of_ Dorset _and_ LADY ANNE CLIFFORD

§ i

It so happens that a remarkably complete record has been left of existence at Knole in the early seventeenth century—an existence compounded of extreme prodigality of living, tedium, and perpetual domestic quarrels. We have a private diary, in which every squabble and reconciliation between Lord and Lady Dorset is chronicled; every gown she wore; every wager he won or lost (and he made many); every book she read; every game she played at Knole with the steward or with the neighbours; every time she wept; every day she “sat still, thinking the time to be very tedious.” We have even a complete list of the servants and their functions, from Mr. Matthew Caldicott, my Lord’s favourite, down to John Morockoe, a Blackamoor. It would, out of this quantity of information, be possible to reconstruct a play of singular accuracy.

The author of the diary was a lady of some fame and a great deal of character: Lady Anne Clifford, the daughter and sole heiress of George, Earl of Cumberland, and wife to Richard, Earl of Dorset. Cumberland was himself a picturesque figure. He was Elizabeth’s official champion at all jousts and tilting, a nobleman of great splendour, and in addition to this display of truly Elizabethan glitter and parade he had the other facet of Elizabethan _virtù_: the love of adventure, which carried him eleven times to sea, to the Indies and elsewhere, “for the service of Queen Elizabeth,” says his daughter in the life she wrote of him, “for the good of England, and of his own person.” She gives an account of her own appearance:

I was very happy in my first constitution both in mind and body, both for internal and external endowments, for never was there child more equally resembling both father and mother than myself. The colour of mine eyes were black, like my father, and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively, like my mother’s; the hair of my head was brown and very thick, and so long that it reached to the calf of my legs when I stood upright, with a peak of hair on my forehead and a dimple in my chin like my father, full cheeks and round face like my mother, and an exquisite shape of body resembling my father.

After this description, more remarkable for exactness perhaps than for modesty, she adds:

But now time and age hath long since ended all these beauties, which are to be compared to the grass of the field (_Isaiah_ xl., 6, 7, 8; _1 Peter_ i., 24). For now when I caused these memorables of my self to be written I have passed the 63rd year of my age.

Having put this in by way of a saving clause, she proceeds again complacently:

And though I say it, the perfections of my mind were much above those of my body; I had a strong and copious memory, a sound judgement, and a discerning spirit, and so much of a strong imagination in me as that many times even my dreams and apprehensions beforehand proved to be true; so as old Mr. John Denham, a great astronomer, that sometime lived in my father’s house, would often say that I had much in me in nature to show that the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the bands of Orion were powerful both at my conception and my nativity.

She was innocent of unnecessary diffidence. Yet she was not without gratitude:

I must not forget to acknowledge that in my infancy and youth, and a great part of my life, I have escaped many dangers, both by fire and water, by passage in coaches and falls from horses, by burning fevers, and excessive extremity of bleeding many times to the great hazard of my life, all which, and many cunning and wicked devices of my enemies, I have escaped and passed through miraculously, and much the better by the help and prayers of my devout mother, who incessantly begged of God for my safety and preservation (_Jas._ v., 16).

To her mother she seems to have been excessively devoted; and indeed, in the midst of this stubborn and peremptory character, the most vulnerable spot is her tenderness for her relations; those of her relations, that is to say, with whom she was not at mortal enmity.

The death of Queen Elizabeth, which occurred when Anne Clifford was a girl of thirteen, was a disappointment to her in more ways than one, for “if Queen Elizabeth had lived she intended to prefer me to be of the Privy Chamber, for at that time there was as much hope and expectation of me as of any other young lady whatsoever,” and moreover “my Mother and Aunt of Warwick being mourners, I was not allowed to be one, because I was not high enough, which did much trouble me then.” She was not even allowed the privilege of watching by the great Queen’s body after it had come “by night in a Barge from Richmond to Whitehall, my Mother and a great Company of Ladies attending it, where it continued a great while standing in the Drawing Chamber, where it was watched all night by several Lords and Ladies, my Mother sitting up with it two or three nights, but my Lady would not give me leave to watch, by reason I was held too young.” It is to be regretted that the writer, who possessed so vivid and unself-conscious a pen, should have been thus defrauded of setting upon record the scene in which the old Queen, stiff as an effigy, and blazing with the jewels of England, lay for the last time in state, by the light of candles, among the great nobles whom in her lifetime she had bullied and governed, and whom even in death the rigidity of that bejezabelled presence could still overawe.

Although she had not been allowed to see the dead Queen, Lady Anne was taken to see the new King, but did not find the court to her liking:

We all went to Tibbalds to see the King, who used my Mother and Aunt very graciously, but we all saw a great change between the fashion of the Court as it is now and of that in the Queen’s time, for we were all lousy by sitting in the chamber of Sir Thomas Erskine.

This unpropitious introduction was the first she had to James I, but it was by no means her last meeting with him, for she relates several later on which might more properly be called encounters.

About two years after Elizabeth’s death Lord Cumberland died, “very patiently and willingly of a bloody flux,” leaving Anne Clifford his only surviving child and heiress, then being aged about fifteen years. Her father cannot have been much more than a name to her, for although “endowed with many perfections of nature befitting so noble a personage, as an excellent quickness of wit and apprehension, an active and strong body, and an affable disposition and behaviour,” he “fell to love a lady of quality,” which created a breach between himself and his wife, and “when my Mother and he did meet, their countenance did show the dislike they had one of another, yet he would speak to me in a slight fashion and give me his blessing.... My Father used to come to us sometimes at Clerkenwell, but not often, for he had at this time as it were wholly left my Mother, yet the house was kept still at his charge.” All this early part of her life, I ought to explain, is related by her in the Lives of her parents and herself, which she compiled in her old age; and partly from a diary of reminiscences, a transcript of which is at Knole, and which she appears to have written at the same time as the more detailed Diary which she was then (1616–1619) keeping from day to day. She had a happy childhood with her mother, and cousins of her own age—“All this time we were merry at North Hall. My Coz. Frances Bouchier and my Coz. Francis Russell and I did use to walk much in the garden, and were great with one another. I used to wear my Hair-coloured Velvet every day, and learned to sing and play on the Bass-Viol of Jack Jenkins, my Aunt’s boy.”

The Diary at Knole jumps without any warning or transition from the reminiscences of youth to 1616. It begins with a sad little hint of the weariness that was to follow: “All the time I stayed in the country I was sometimes merry and sometimes sad, as I had news from London.” She had then been married for seven years to Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, grandson to Queen Elizabeth’s old Treasurer, who was himself anxious for the match, writing to Sir George Moore about “that virtuous young lady, the Lady Anne Clifford,” and soliciting Moore’s good offices with Lady Cumberland.

There were, in all, five children of the marriage: three little boys, who all “died young at Knole where they were born,” and two little girls, of whom Margaret, born in 1614, figures largely in the Diary and is the only one to concern us, since Isabel was not born till some years after Lady Anne had ceased to keep the Diary. Lady Anne’s mother travelled to London from the North in order to be present at the birth of Margaret, the first child; but by a strange mischance the journey was rendered vain, for, having gone “into the Tower of London to see some friends there, where, the gates being shut up by an accident that happened, she was kept there till after her daughter was delivered of her first child, though she had made a journey purposely from Appleby Castle, in Westmoreland, to London.” Not only does the Diary contain constant references to this little girl, but Lady Anne’s letters to her mother, now at Appleby, are rarely without some comment—

she begins to break out very much upon her head, which I hope will make her very healthful [a curious theory]. She hath yet no teeth come out, but they are most of them swelled in the flesh, so that now and then they make her very froward. I have found your Ladyship’s words true about the nurse had for her, for she hath been one of the most unhealthfullest women that I think ever was, and so extremely troubled with the toothache and rheums and swelling in her face as could be, and one night she fell very ill, and was taken like an ague so as she had but little milk left, and so I was enforced to send for the next woman that was by to give my child suck, whom hath continued with her ever since, and I thank God the child agrees so well with her milk as may be, so I mean not to change her any more. It is a miracle to me that the child should prosper so well. She is but a little one, I confess, but a livelier and merrier thing was there never yet seen.

Dorset also was fond of the little girl, for in other letters to her mother Anne says, after apologising for her bad writing, which she terms “scribbling,” “my Lord is as fond of her as can be, and calls her his mistress”; and again, “My Lord to her is a very kind, loving, and dear father, and in everything will I commend him, saving only in this business of my land, wherein I think some evil spirit works, for in this he is as violent as possible, so I must either do it next term or else break friendship and love with him”; and Dorset was, on his side, of the same opinion, for in a letter written to her at Knole, which begins “Sweet Heart,” and sends messages to the child, he adds to his wife, “whom in all things I love and hold a sober woman, your land only excepted, which transports you beyond yourself, and makes you devoid of all reason.” It would appear that but for this unfortunate question of the lands and money they might have lived happily together, affection not lacking, and on Anne’s part at any rate good will not lacking either, as witness her constant defence of him, even to her mother:

It is true that they have brought their matters so about that I am in the greatest strait that ever poor creature was, but whatsoever you may think of my Lord, I have found him, do find him, and think I shall find him, the best and most worthy man that ever breathed, therefore, if it be possible, I beseech you, have a better opinion of him, if you know all I do, I am sure you would believe this that I write, but I durst not impart my mind about when I was with you, because I found you so bitter against him, or else I could have told you so many arguments of his goodness and worth that you should have seen it plainly yourself.

They were married when she was nineteen and he was twenty, and two days after their marriage he succeeded to his father’s titles and estates: “We have no other news here but of weddings and burials, the Earl of Dorset died on Monday night leaving a heaire [?] widow God wot, and his son seeing him past hope the Saturday before married the Lady Anne Clifford.” In spite, however, of all they had to make life pleasant—their youth, their wealth, and the privileges of their position—they spent the succeeding years in making it as unpleasant as they possibly could for one another.

I hardly think that it is necessary or even interesting to go into the legal details of the long dispute over Lord Cumberland’s will. The interest of Anne and Richard Dorset is human, not litigious. It may therefore be sufficient to say that by the terms of his will Lord Cumberland bequeathed the vast Clifford estates in Westmoreland to his brother Sir Francis Clifford, with the proviso that they should revert to Anne, his daughter, in the event of the failure of heirs male, a reversion which eventually took place, thirty-eight years after his death. What he does not appear to have realized was that the estates were already entailed upon Lady Anne; and that he was, by his will, illegally breaking an entail which dated back to the reign of Edward II.

It is easy to judge, from this broad indication, the infinite possibilities for litigation amongst persons contentiously minded. Such persons were not lacking. There was Lady Cumberland, Anne’s mother, bent upon safeguarding the rights of her daughter. There was Francis, the new Earl of Cumberland, equally bent upon preserving what had been left to him by will. There was Richard Dorset, whose own fortune was not adequate to his extravagance, and who, having married an heiress, was determined for his own sake that that heiress should not be defrauded of her inheritance, or that, if she was to be defrauded, he at least should receive ample compensation. And finally there was Anne herself, who was more resolved than any of them that she and the North of England should not be parted. Dorset’s part, of the four, was the most elaborate and the most discreditable. He would have been willing for his wife to renounce some of her claims in return for the compromise of ready cash. Anne, however, remained single-hearted throughout: she was the legal heiress of the North, and the North she would have; and in the midst of the otherwise sordid and mercenary dispute, in which Dorset used every means of coercion, she remains fixed in her perfectly definite attitude of obstinacy, unswayed by her husband, his relations, her own relations, their friends, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the King himself, their remonstrances, their threats, their vindictiveness, and the actual injuries she had to endure over a long stretch of years. In the end she got the better of them all, and the last picture of her left by the “Lives” is that of a triumphant and imperious old lady, retired to the stronghold of her northern castles, where her authority could stand “against sectaries, almost against Parliaments and armies themselves”; refusing to go to court “unless she might wear blinkers”; moving with feudal, with almost royal, state between her many castles, from Appleby to Pendragon, from Pendragon to Brougham, from Brougham to Brough, from Brough to Skipton; building brew-houses, wash-houses, bake-houses, kitchens, stables; sending word to Cromwell that as fast as he should knock her castles about her ears she would surely put them up again; endowing almshouses; ruling over her almswomen and her tenants; receiving, like the patriarchal old despot that she was, the generations of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren.

Before she could reach these serene waters, however, she had many storms to weather, and to bear the “crosses and contradictions” which caused her to write “the marble pillars of Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish.” Richard Sackville in his own day was a byword for extravagance, and was bent on extorting from his wife for the purposes of his own pleasure the utmost resources of her inheritance. His portrait is at Knole, a full-length by Van Somer; he has a pale, pointed face, dark hair growing in a peak, and small mean eyes, and is dressed entirely in black with enormous silver rosettes on his shoes. There is also the very beautiful miniature of him by Isaac Oliver in the Victoria and Albert Museum, showing the richness of his clothes, his embroidered stockings, and his hand resting upon the extravagantly-plumed helmet on the table beside him.

His life is an empty record of gambling, cock-fighting, tilting; of balls and masques, women and fine clothes. “Above all they speak of the Earl of Dorset,” says a contemporary letter, after describing the lavishness of some of the costumes worn in a Court masque in which he was taking part, “but their extreme cost and riches make us all poor,” and Clarendon says of him, “his excess of expenditure, in all the ways to which money could be applied, was such that he so entirely consumed almost the whole great fortune which descended to him, that when he was forced to leave the title to his younger brother he left, in a manner, nothing to him to support it.” The enormous estates which he inherited, the careful accumulation of the old Lord Treasurer, he sold in great part, in order to squander the proceeds upon his amusements; before he had been in possession for three years he had sold the manor of Sevenoaks, and had “conveyed” Knole itself to one Henry Smith (retaining, however, the house at a rent of £100 a year for his own use), and in the course of rather less than ten years he had sold estates, including much of Fleet Street and the Manor of Holborn, to the value of £80,616, or nearly a million of modern money.

In Aubrey’s _Bodleian Letters_ there is an anecdote concerning him, not devoid of humour:

He [Sir Kenelm Digby] married that celebrated beauty and courtesan, Mrs. Venetia Stanley, whom Richard, Earl of Dorset, kept as his concubine, had children by her, and settled on her an annuity of £500 per annum; which after Sir Kenelm Digby married her was unpaid by the Earl: Sir Kenelm Digby sued the Earl, after marriage, and recovered it. Venetia Stanley was a most beautiful and desirable creature ... sanguine and tractable, and of much suavity.

In those days Richard, Earl of Dorset, lived in the greatest splendour of any nobleman of England.

After her marriage she [Venetia Stanley] redeemed her honour by her strict living. Once a year the Earl of Dorset invited her and Sir Kenelm to dinner, where the Earl would behold her with much passion, yet only kiss her hand.

Later on in his life a certain Lady Peneystone appears, who considerably complicated the already difficult relations between Anne and himself.

Anne Clifford herself, in spite of all that she had to endure at his hands, gives a charitable account of him.

This first lord of mine was in his own nature of a just mind, of a sweet disposition, and very valiant in his own person.

He was ... so great a lover of scholars and soldiers, as that with an excessive bounty towards them, or indeed any of worth that were in distress, he did much to diminish his estate, as also with excessive prodigality in housekeeping, and other noble ways at court, as tilting, masqueing, and the like, Prince Henry being then alive, who was much addicted to these exercises, and of whom he was much beloved.

What his wife says of his being a great lover of scholars is borne out by his friendship with and patronage of Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and Drayton. Nothing else remains to his credit. He is utterly eclipsed—weak, vain, and prodigal—by the interest of that woman of character, his wife, knowing so well to “discourse of all things, from predestination to slea[2] silk,” and by the faithful picture that is her Diary.

§ ii

She is living (1616) principally at Knole, sometimes in London, sometimes making an expedition into the North to join her mother, who in all her difficulties was her counsellor and ally. The perpetual topic of the diary is the dispute with her husband:

“My Coz: Russell came to me the same day, and chid me, and told me of all my faults and errors, he made me weep bitterly, then I spoke a prayer of Owens, and came home by water where I took an extreme Cold.”

The Archbishop [of Canterbury] my Lord William Howard, my Lord Rous, my Coz: Russell, my brother Sackville, and a great company of men were all in the gallery at Dorset House, where the Archbishop took me aside and talked with me privately one hour and half, and persuaded me both by Divine and human means to set my hand to their arguments. But my answer to his Lordship was that I would do nothing until my Lady [her mother] and I had conferred together. Much persuasion was used by him and all the company, sometimes terrifying me and sometimes flattering me.

Next day was a marvellous day to me, for it was generally thought that I must either have sealed the argument or else have parted from my Lord.

She then starts for the North—a hazardous journey—to confer with her mother.

We had two coaches in our company with four horses apiece and about twenty-six horsemen. I came to my lodgings [at Derby] with a heavy heart considering how many things stood between my Lord and I.

We went from the Parsons’ House near the Dangerous Moors, being eight miles and afterwards the ways so dangerous the horses were fain to be taken out of the coach to be lifted down the hills. This day Rivers’ horse fell from a bridge into the river. We came to Manchester about ten at night.

Dorset was not above subjecting her to petty annoyances and humiliations, for he sends messengers after her with “letters to show it was my Lord’s pleasure that the men and horses should come away without me, so after much falling out betwixt my Lady [her mother] and them, all the folks went away, there being a paper drawn to show that they went away by my Lord’s direction and contrary to my will.[3] At night I sent two messengers to my folks to entreat them to stay. For some two nights my mother and I lay together, and had much talk about this business.”

In order to get back to London she has to borrow a coach from her mother, from whom she takes a “grievous and heavy parting.” Arrived at Knole, “I had a cold welcome from my Lord,” and a day or two later he takes his departure for London, sending constant messengers and letters, to know whether she will give way to his demands. “About this time,” she sadly writes—it is April, spring at Knole, and she then aged twenty-six—“about this time I used to rise early in the morning and go to the Standing in the garden, and taking my prayer book with me beseech God to be merciful to me and to help me as He always hath done.”

Meanwhile Dorset’s threats increase in virulence: on the first of May he sends Mr. Rivers to tell her she shall live neither at Knole nor at Bolbrook; on the second he sends Mr. Legg to tell the servants he will come down once more to see her, which shall be the last time; and on the third he sends Peter Basket, his gentleman of the horse, with a letter to say “it was his pleasure that the Child should go the next day to London ... when I considered that it would both make my Lord more angry with me and be worse for the Child I resolved to let her go; after I had sent for Mr. Legg and talked with him about that and other matters I wept bitterly.”

On the fourth “... the Child went into the litter to go to London.” There is no comment. It must have been a pathetic little departure.

On the ninth she received, besides the news that her mother was dangerously ill, “a letter from my Lord to let me know his determination was the Child should go to live at Horsley, and not come hither any more, so as this was a very grievous and sorrowful day to me.” An unusual bitterness escapes from her pen:

All this time my Lord was in London where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to Cocking and Bowling Alleys, to plays and horse races, and commended by all the world. I stayed in the country, having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreement, so as I may truly say I am like an owl in the desert.

And a few days later:

My Lord came down from London, my Lord lying in Leslie Chamber and I in my own. My Lord and I after supper had some talk, we fell out and parted for that night.

There was worse to come, for at the end of the month her mother died, “which I held as the greatest and most lamentable cross that could have befallen me,” and, mixed up with this sorrow, which is evidently genuine, is the fear that she may be definitely dispossessed of the inheritance of her forefathers. She found, however, that she had the disposal of the body, “which was some contentment to my aggrieved soul.” Her sorrows begin to lighten. Dorset, probably perceiving his bullying to be worse than useless against a woman of her mettle, tries a different tack: “My Lord assured me how kind and good a husband he would be to me”; they patch up a reconciliation, and she makes over to him certain of her Cumberland estates in default of heirs; they agree that Mrs. Bathurst, apparently a bone of contention, should “go away from the Child ... so that my Lord and I were never greater friends than at this time ... and my Lord brought me down to the coach side where we had a loving and kind parting.” He even joined her in the North, and she records how at Appleby Castle she set up the “green velvet bed where the same night we went to lie there,” and how “in the afternoon I wrought stitchwork and my Lord sat and read by me.”

She gives many particulars of how she spent her days in the North. I fancy she was a good deal happier there, and more at home, and consequently more lighthearted, than at Knole. At the same time she was anxious to go back to London to rejoin Dorset, but this for some reason he was not disposed to allow. She consoled herself with innocuous occupations:

This month I spent in working and reading. Mr. Dunbell read a great part of the _History of the Netherlands_.... Upon the 1st I rose by times in the morning and went up to the Pagan Tower to my prayers, and saw the sun rise.... Upon the 4th I sat in the Drawing Chamber all the day at my work.... Upon the 9th I sat at my work and heard Rivers and Marsh read Montaigne’s _Essays_, which book they have read almost this fortnight.... Upon the 12th I made an end of my cushion of Irish stitch, it being my chief help to pass away the time at work.... Upon the 21st was the first day I put on my black silk grogram gown.... Upon the 20th I spent most of the day in playing at Tables. All this time since my Lord went away I wore my black Taffety night-gown[4] and a yellow Taffety waistcoat and used to rise betimes in the morning and walk upon the leads and afterwards to hear reading. Upon the 23rd I did string the pearls and diamonds left me by my mother into a necklace.

At last the summons came, and “upon the 24th Basket set out from London to Brougham Castle to fetch me up. I bought of Mr. Cleborn who came to see me a clock and a save-Guard [= cloak] of cloth laced with black lace to keep me warm on my journey.” Dorset sent in the retinue to fetch her, moreover, a cook, a baker, and a Tom Fool.

Her arrival in London was auspicious: Dorset and a company of relatives came out to meet her at Islington, so that there were in all ten or eleven coaches, and when she arrived at Dorset House she found the house “well dressed up against I came,” and the Child met her in the gallery. Moreover, “all this time of my being at London I was much sent to and visited by many” (the young heiress, whose matrimonial disputes had raised so much dust at Court, was an object of interest and curiosity), and she made friends: “My Lady Manners came in the morning to dress my head. I had a new black wrought Taffety gown which my Lady St. John’s tailor made. She used often to come to me, and I to her, and was very kind one to another.” Such troubles as she had were but slight: “I dined above in my chamber and wore my night-gown because I was not very well, which day and yesterday I forgot that it was fish day and ate flesh at both dinners. In the afternoon I played at Glecko[5] with my Lady Gray and lost £27 odd money.” So far, so good. She gave a sweet-bag to the Queen for a New Year’s gift, and was kissed by the King. She went to see the play of the Mad Lover; she went to the Tower to see Lord and Lady Somerset, lying there since their arraignment; she went to the Court to see Lord Villiers created Earl of Buckingham; she ate a “scrambling supper” and went to see the Masque on Twelfth Night. She betrays with an unsophisticated and rather charming ingenuity her delight in these things. But the storm scowled at her over the rim of the horizon, and presently it broke. The first entries are like the splash of the first big rain-drops: “We came from London to Knole; this night my Lord and I had a falling out about the land.” Next day she has Mr. Sandy’s book about the government of the Turks read aloud to her, but “my Lord sat the most part of the day reading in his closet.” Next day his sulks materialized, and he “went up to London upon the sudden, we not knowing it till the afternoon.”

Six days later—there are no entries in the diary to record the suspense of these six days—she is sent for to London to see the King, a higher test for her strength of mind, even, than the former persuasions of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Will she capitulate at last? or will she come out with her flag still flying? the tongues of London wagged. The interview is best given in her own words:

Upon the 17th when I came up, my Lord told me I must resolve to go to the King next day. Upon the 18th being Saturday, I went presently after dinner to the Queen to the Drawing Chamber where my Lady Derby told the Queen how my business stood, and that I was to go to the King, so she promised me she would do all the good in it she could. When I had stayed but a little while there I was sent for out, my Lord and I going through my Lord Buckingham’s chamber, who brought us into the King, being in the Drawing Chamber. He put out all those that were there, and my Lord and I kneeled by his chair side, when he persuaded us both to peace and to put the whole matter wholly into his hands, which my Lord consented to, but I beseeched His Majesty to pardon me _for that I would never part from Westmoreland while I lived upon any condition whatsoever_, sometimes he used fair means and persuasions and sometimes foul means, but I was resolved before, so, as nothing would move me, from the King we went to the Queen’s side, and brought my Lady St. John to her lodging and so we went home.

There is a little note at the side of this entry: “The Queen gave me warning not to trust my matters absolutely to the King lest he should deceive me.”

The affair was not allowed to rest there. Two days later she was again summoned before the King, and a sour, unedifying spectacle the majesty of James I must have presented, thus confronted with the young obstinacy of the heiress of Westmoreland:

I was sent for up to the King into his Drawing Chamber, where the door was locked and nobody suffered to stay here but my Lord and I, my Uncle Cumberland, my Coz: Clifford, my Lords Arundel, Pembroke and Montgomery, Sir John Digby. For lawyers there were my Lord Chief Justice Montague, and Hobart Yelverton the King’s Solicitor, Sir Randal Crewe that was to speak for my Lord and I. The King asked us all if we would submit to his judgement in this case, my uncle Cumberland, my Coz: Clifford, and my Lord answered they would, but I would never agree to it without Westmoreland, at which the King grew in a great chaff. My Lord of Pembroke and the King’s solicitor speaking much against me, at last when they saw there was no remedy, my Lord, fearing the King would do me some public disgrace, desired Sir John Digby would open the door, who went out with me and persuaded me much to yield to the King. Presently after my Lord came from the King, when it was resolved that if I would not come to an agreement there should be an agreement made without me.

After these encounters she retired to Knole, while Dorset remained in London, “being in extraordinary grace and favour with the King.” She, poor thing, resumed at Knole the pitiful monotony of her country existence, which to a mind so vigorous must have been irksome in the extreme, and the Diary becomes again the record of her small occupations threaded with the worry and sorrow of her dissensions with her husband. It is illuminating that she never criticizes him; there are references to his “worth and nobleness of disposition”; her spirit, although high and emancipated enough to stand out against the King in the defence of Westmoreland, could not conceive revolt against the subjection of matrimony. It is an idea which never once enters her head. She even writes him a letter to give him “humble thanks for his noble usage toward me in London”; but a very little while after this “Thomas Woodgate came from London and brought a squirrel to the Child, and my Lord wrote me a letter by which I perceived my Lord was clean out with me, and how much my enemies have wrought against me.”

Conscientious as she is, she no longer finds enough events to justify a daily entry. Perhaps—who knows? for my part I strongly suspect it—her fighting spirit preferred even the ordeals and excitements of London to the tedium of Knole. She has very little to tell: only the gowns she wore, the books she read, the games she played with the steward, and the ailments of the Child.

At this time I wore a plain green flannel gown that William Pinn made me and my yellow taffety waistcoat. Rivers used to read to me in Montaigne’s _Essays_, and Moll Neville in the _Fairy Queen_. The Child had a bitter fit of her ague again insomuch I was fearful of her that I could hardly sleep all night and I beseeched God Almighty to be merciful and spare her life.

This ague of the Child’s is a constant preoccupation. I suppose that it was a kind of convulsion, for which the cure was a “salt powder to put in her beer.” On certain days a return of it appears to have been confidently expected, for I find: “upon the 4th should have been the Child’s fit, but she missed it,” and two days later she has “a grudging of her ague.” There is a good deal about the Child—never referred to under any other designation until she attains her 5th birthday, after which she is promoted to “my Lady Margaret.” The portrait of her which is here reproduced hangs over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s sitting-room; her ring dangles on a ribbon round her neck, and her hair is done in an elaborate manner which defied all my efforts, when I was the same age, to do my own in the same way.

She was an amusement and a consolation, as well as a source of anxiety, to her mother. Her garments are carefully noted:

The 28th was the first time the Child put on a pair of whalebone bodice.... The Child put on her red bays coat.... I cut the Child’s strings from off her coats and made her use togs alone, so as she had two or three falls at first but had no hurt with them.... The Child put on her first coats that were laced, with lace being of red bays.... I began to dress my head with a roll without a wire. I wrote not to my Lord because he wrote not to me since he went away. After supper I went out with the child who rode a pie-bald nag. The 14th, the Child came to lie with me which was the first time that ever she lay all night in a bed with me since she was born;

and another time she speaks of “the time being very tedious with me, as having neither comfort nor company, only the Child.”

For the rest, she was thrown back upon her own resources. Dorset came and went, and in between whiles there are small, vivid pictures of existence at Knole:

After supper I walked in the garden and gathered cherries, and talked with Josiah [the French page] who told me he thought all the men in the house loved me.

And again:

About this time [April 1617] my Lord made the steward alter most of the rooms in the house and dress them up as fine as he could and determined to make all his old clothes in purple stuff for the Gallery and Drawing Chamber.

_March 1617. 5th._ Couch puppied in the morning.

_8th._ I made an end of reading _Exodus_. After supper I played at Glecko with the steward as I often do after dinner and supper.

_9th._ I went abroad in the garden and said my prayers in the standing.

_10th._ I was not well at night, so I ate a posset and went to bed.

_11th._ The time grew tedious, so as I used to go to bed about 8 o’clock I did lie a-bed till 8 the next morning.

_14th._ I made an end of my Irish stitch cushion.

_15th._ My Lord came down to Buckhurst. This day I put on my mourning grogram gown and intend to wear it till my mourning time is out, because I was found fault with for wearing such ill clothes.

_22nd._ I began a new Irish stitch cushion.

_24th._ We made Rosemary cakes.

Two days later Dorset arrived from Buckhurst, and they walked together in the park and the garden. “I wrought much within doors and strived to sit as merry a face as I could upon a discontented heart”; but in spite of this entry they seem to have remained on fairly friendly terms until Easter.

_30th._ I spent in walking and sitting in the park, having my mind more contented than it was before my Lord came from Buckhurst.

_5th April._ My Lord went up to my closet and said how little money I had left contrary to all they had told him, sometimes I had fair words from him and sometimes foul, but I took all patiently, and did strive to give him as much content and assurance of my love as I could possibly, yet _I told him I would never part with Westmoreland_. After supper, because my Lord was sullen and not willing to go into the nursery, I had Mary bring the Child to him in my chamber.

_7th._ My Lord lay in my chamber.

_13th._ My Lord supped privately with me in the Drawing Chamber, and had much discourse of the manners of the folks at court.

By the _17th_, My Lord told me he was resolved never to move me more in these business because he saw how fully I was bent;

but evidently he did not stick to this good resolution, because, on April 20th, Easter-day, “My Lord and I had a great falling-out,” and a few days later, “This night my Lord should have lain with me, but he and I fell out about matters.”

By the next day, however, they were friends again; they played at Burley Break upon the lawn; and “this night my Lord came to lie in my chamber.” The next day, too, was spent in peace, and she “spent the evening in working and going down to my Lord’s closet, where I sat and read much in the Turkish history, and Chaucer.”

So it goes on. It becomes, perhaps, a little monotonous, save that it is always so human, and so modern. One sympathizes with her in her weaknesses even more than in her defiance; when, for instance, she writes amicable letters to all her relations-in-law, sending them locks of the Child’s hair, being “desirous to win the love of my Lord’s kindred by all the fair means I could,” in reality stealing a march upon Dorset in order to get them on her side. One day she chronicles, “This night I went into a bath,” but whether this event was of such rarity as to deserve special mention is not explained. At Whitsuntide they all went to church, but “my eyes were so blubbered with weeping that I could scarce look up,” and in the afternoon of the same day they again “fell out.” But she consoles herself with new clothes—or was that an additional penance? for she was never given to personal vanity—“I essayed on my sea-water green satin gown and my damask embroidered with gold, both which gowns the tailor which was sent from London made fit for me to wear with open ruffs after the French fashion.” Little peace-offerings came from time to time from Dorset; on one occasion he sends “half a buck, with an indifferent kind letter,” and on another occasion “My Lord sent Adam to trim the Child’s hair, and sent me the dewselts of two deer and wrote me a letter between kindness and unkindness.” “Still working and being extremely melancholy” is the entry of one summer day, and a day later, “Still working and sad.” A little after this she “rode on horseback to Withyham to see my Lord Treasurer’s tomb, and went down into the vault, and came home again [to Knole] weeping the most part of the day.” This is perhaps not very surprising. I have been down into that vault myself, and it is not a cheerful expedition. In a small, dark cave underground, beneath the church, among grey veils of cobwebs, the coffins of the Sackvilles are stacked on shelves; they go back to the fourteenth century, and are of all sizes, from full-grown men down to the tiny ones lapped in lead. But, of course, when Anne Clifford went there there were not so many as there are now; the pompous ones were not yet in their places, with their rusty coronets, save those of the old Treasurer and his son; and their blood did not run in the veins of Lady Anne, so on the whole she had less reason to be impressed than I.

The Diary continues in very much the same strain until it comes to an end with December 1619, the year 1618 being entirely missed out. By that time both Dorset and Anne were in bad health; but whereas he was to die five years later, at the age of thirty-five, she, made of tougher stuff, was to survive him by fifty-two years. His last letter to her, written to her on the very day of his death, shows all the affection which was so undermined by that question of her lands:

_26th March, 1624._

Sweet Heart,

I thank you for your letter. I had resolved to come down to Knole, and to have received the Blessed Sacrament, but God hath prevented it with sickness, for on Wednesday night I fell into a fit of casting, which held me long, then last night I had a fit of fever. I have for my physician Dr. Baskerville and Dr. Fox. I thank God I am now at good ease, having rested well this morning. I would not have you trouble yourself till I have occasion to send for you. You shall in the meantime hear daily from me. So, with my love to you, and God’s blessing and mine to both my children, I commend you to God’s protection.

Your assured loving husband RICHARD DORSET.

“His debts,” says one Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, “are £60,000, so that he does not leave much.” In his will he bequeaths to his “dearly beloved wife all her wearing apparel and such rings and jewels as were hers on her marriage, and the rock ruby ring which I have given her,” also “my carriage made by Mefflyn, lined with green cloth and laced with green and black silk lace, and my six bay coach geldings.”

§ iii

Her portraits change as her years advance, and the lines of determination harden about her mouth. Her true life—the life for which she was most truly fitted—only began after she had passed her fiftieth year, when with the death of her kinsman Lord Cumberland the northern estates passed calmly and naturally into her hands at last. All the quarrels and litigation and anxiety of her youth were left behind her; she had buried Lord Dorset; she had buried Lord Pembroke after a second marriage as disastrous and as contentious as the first; she had borne Sackville children and Herbert children; she had been long-suffering though adamant, submissive though immovable; she had moped in the sumptuous prisons that were Knole and Wilton; now she was free to turn tyrant herself over her own undisputed realm. She wasted nothing of the opportunity. Away from London, away from the influence of the Court, entrenched in her numerous castles in the North, she ruled autocratically over her servants, her tenants, her neighbours, and the generations and ramifications of her family. No detail of comings and goings, no penny of expenditure escaped her vigilant eye or her recording pen; and her diary, that document of intimacy, autocracy, piety, and exactitude, carries its entries down to the very day before her death. With public or political events she scarcely ever concerned herself, but on the other hand no detail of her own private life or of the existence of those around her was too small to excite her comment. Whether her laundry-maids went to church, whether she pared her finger and toe nails, whether her dog puppied, whether she received letters, whether she washed her feet and legs (this is on the 22nd of February, the last occasion being on the 13th of December preceding), whether she kissed the sempstress—all is noted with the same precision and gravity. No anniversary or coincidence is allowed to pass unobserved. That amazing memory extended back over threescore years; and, moreover, she had the immense volumes of her notebooks for reference, date for date. Her past was ever present to her, the agreeable and the disagreeable merged into one landscape of consonant tone, and whether she observes that this day sixty years ago she travelled with her blessed mother, or fell out with Dorset, it is with the same complacency and satisfaction at having the tiny anniversary to record. This vigorous mind was not, perhaps, planned on a very broad scale. It was self-centred and self-sufficient; severe but not reckless; no fine carelessness endears her to us, or surprises; even her acts of generosity, and they were numerous, are recorded with the same scrupulous accuracy. She could not give two shillings to a child without setting it down. Her generosity, like all her other acts, was methodical; she rewarded her servants for definite services with extra wages; she kept ready to hand a supply of little presents, because it was contrary to her ideas of hospitality that any visitor, however humble, should go away empty-handed, and was careful to consider what particular gift would be most acceptable to the recipient, frequently choosing something of practical utility, such as gloves or lengths of cloth for women, money or ruffles for men; and these idiosyncracies run true all through her character, for, conversely, although she was prepared to be generous in her treatment of others, she was equally determined that she herself should be fairly treated by them, and frequent are the entries in her diary to this effect: “In the morning did I see Mr. Robert Willison of Penrith paid for a rundlet of sack, but I was very angry with him because I thought it too dear, and told him I would have no more of him, and then he slipped away from me in a good hurry.” She would always pay cash too, and bullied her special almswomen, whom she would not allow to ask for credit with the tradesmen of Appleby.

Her rights were her rights, and she had always had a great idea of them. One recognizes the spirit that told the King she “_would never be parted from Westmoreland_,” in the old litigant that went unhesitatingly and repeatedly to law over niceties connected with small portions of her estates, content to spend large sums of money in lawyers’ fees if only she could succeed—as she invariably did—in proving her point. There is one story which illustrates both her tenacity and her humour—the story of a certain tenant whose rent included a hen due yearly to the lady of the manor. This tribute he neglected to hand over. Lady Anne instantly had the law on him, spent £400 in enforcing her claim, won her case, received the hen, invited her defeated opponent to dinner with her, and caused the bird to be cooked for them both as the staple dish of the meal.

So the tranquil and crowded years spun themselves out for her, and she grew to be an old woman and a contented one, for she had attained at last the existence and occupations best suited to her. Her life was full: the things which filled it were small things, perhaps, but if they satisfied her who should cavil? Her journeyings alone occupied much of her time: those extraordinary progresses from castle to castle, she herself travelling in her horse-litter, her ladies in the coach-and-six, her menservants on horseback, her women in other coaches, and a rabble of small fry following, so that the miniature army which accompanied her amounted sometimes to as many as three hundred. Often this retinue would include members of her family, or some of her neighbours; they travelled over the moors of the North, by rough roads, “uncouth and untrodden, those mountainous and almost impassable ways,” stopping on the way in those highland villages which had not yet been honoured by a visit from the great old lady or received her bounty, and, coming at the end of the journey to Brougham, to Brough, to Barden, to Skipton, to Pendragon, or to Appleby, Lady Anne would receive her dependants one by one in her own chamber, give her hand to the men, kiss the women, and dismiss them again to their own homes. Her health was no longer very good, but that was never allowed to deter her from her plans: her courage and vigour triumphed always over the treacherous flesh, greatly to the concern of those about her. On one occasion, travelling from Appleby to Brougham, she was delayed at the start by a “swounding fit,” when she had to be carried to a bed and laid there near a “great fire”; much persuasion was used that she “would not travel on so sharp and cold a day, but she, having before fixed on that day, and so much company being come purposely to wait on her, she would go.” As she reached her litter, however, she fainted again, “Yet as soon as that fit was over she went.” Arrived at Brougham she fainted for the third time, but on being upbraided by her friends and servants for her stubbornness in making the journey, she replied that she knew she must die, and it was the same thing to her to die on the way as in her house, in her litter or in her bed, and furthermore would not acknowledge any necessity why she should live, but saw every necessity for keeping to her resolution. “If she will, she will, you may depend on’t,” they said of her, “if she won’t, she won’t, and there’s an end on’t.”

Now that there was no one to reproach her, as Dorset had been accustomed to reproach her, for her lack of finery and absence of proper vanity, she dressed always in rough black serge, she shaved her head, her fare was of the plainest, and her personal economy was pushed to the length of such small eccentricities as using up every stray scrap of paper for her correspondence. One luxury, indeed, she permitted herself: she smoked a pipe. Into all the details of her household she looked with a careful eye; already in the days when she was living at Knole she had used up Richard Dorset’s old shirts to make clouts, now at Appleby she saw to the preserving of fruit, she had her cheeses made at Brougham, sixteen at a time, she got her coal from her own pits, she had all delinquents into her own room and scolded them till they were probably thankful to be dismissed. At the same time she never forgot those that had served her faithfully; she would send her own coach to bring some old retainer to visit her; the marriages, morals, and vicissitudes of her meanest servant were a matter of interest to her; their marriage portions she made her own affair. Besides her servants, her own family gave her much food for thought and preoccupation: it is true that of her seven children only two—her two Sackville daughters—had lived to grow up, but they by now had produced a cohort of grandchildren, whose visits to Lady Anne were a source of infinite pleasure to the old lady. It is, altogether, a pleasant and seemly end to such a life. She had attained the great age of eighty-six; her diary was filled with religious references; she never dwelt upon her death, but it is clear that she can never for one moment have dreaded it. She had lived up consistently to her principles and to her motto: “Preserve your loyalty, defend your rights,” and was ready to go whenever the call should come. “I went not out all this day,” is the last entry in her diary, and the next day (22nd of March 1676), there is an entry in another hand, “The 22nd day the Countess died.”

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_ Mr. Wooldridge Mr. Cheyney Mr. Duck, _Page_ Mr. Josiah Cooper, _a Frenchman, Page_ Mr. John Belgrave, _Page_ Mr. Billingsley Mr. Graverner, _Gentleman Usher_ Mr. Marshall, _Auditor_ Mr. Edwards, _Secretary_ Mr. Drake, _Attendant_

_At_ THE CLERKS’ TABLE IN THE HALL

Edward Fulks and John Edwards, _Clerks of the Kitchen_ Edward Care, _Master Cook_ William Smith, _Yeoman of the Buttery_ Henry Keble, _Yeoman of the Pantry_ John Mitchell, _Pastryman_ Thomas Vinson, _Cook_ John Elnor, _Cook_ Ralph Hussie, _Cook_ John Avery, _Usher of the Hall_ Robert Elnor, _Slaughterman_ Benjamin Staples, _Groom of the Great Chamber_ Thomas Petley, _Brewer_ William Turner, _Baker_ Francis Steeling, _Gardener_ Richard Wicking, Gardener Thomas Clements, _Under Brewer_ Samuel Vans, _Caterer_ Edward Small, _Groom of the Wardrobe_ Samuel Southern, _Under Baker_ Lowry, _a French boy_

THE NURSERY

Nurse Carpenter Widow Ben Jane Sisley Dorothy Pickenden

_At_ THE LONG TABLE IN THE HALL

Robert Care, _Attendant on my Lord_ Mr. Gray, _Attendant likewise_ Mr. Roger Cook, _Attendant on my Lady Margaret_ Mr. Adam Bradford, _Barber_ Mr. John Guy, _Groom of my Lord’s Bedchamber_ Walter Comestone, _Attendant on my Lady_ Edward Lane, _Scrivener_ Mr. Thomas Poor, _Yeoman of the Wardrobe_ Mr. Thomas Leonard, _Master Huntsman_ Mr. Woodgate, _Yeoman of the Great Chamber_ John Hall, _Falconer_ James Flennel, _Yeoman of the Granary_ Rawlinson, _Armourer_ Moses Shonk, _Coachman_ Anthony Ashly, _Groom of the Great Horse_ Griffin Edwards, _Groom of my Lady’s Horse_ Francis Turner, _Groom of the Great Horse_ William Grynes, _Groom of the Great Horse_ Acton Curvett, _Chief Footman_ James Loveall, _Footman_ Sampson Ashley, _Footman_ William Petley, _Footman_ Nicholas James, _Footman_ Paschal Beard, _Footman_ Elias Thomas, _Footman_ Henry Spencer, _Farrier_ Edward Goodsall John Sant, _the Steward’s Man_ Ralph Wise, _Groom of the Stables_ Thomas Petley, _Under Farrier_ John Stephens, _the Chaplain’s Man_ John Haite, _Groom for the Stranger’s Horse_ Thomas Giles, _Groom of the Stables_ Richard Thomas, _Groom of the Hall_ Christopher Wood, _Groom of the Pantry_ George Owen, _Huntsman_ George Vigeon, _Huntsman_ Thomas Grittan, _Groom of the Buttery_ Solomon, _the Bird-Catcher_ Richard Thornton, _the Coachman’s Man_ Richard Pickenden, _Postillion_ William Roberts, _Groom_ The Armourer’s Man Ralph Wise, _his Servant_ John Swift, _the Porter’s Man_ John Atkins, _Men to carry wood_ Clement Doory, _Men to carry wood_

THE LAUNDRY-MAIDS’ TABLE

Mrs. Judith Simpton Mrs. Grace Simpton Penelope Tutty, _the Lady Margaret’s Maid_ Anne Mills, _Dairy-Maid_ Prudence Bucher Anne Howse Faith Husband Elinor Thompson Goodwife Burton Grace Robinson, _a Blackamoor_ Goodwife Small William Lewis, _Porter_

KITCHEN AND SCULLERY

Diggory Dyer Marfidy Snipt John Watson Thomas Harman Thomas Johnson John Morockoe, _a Blackamoor_