beyond the general building line, is a kind of “Jack o’ Both Sides,”
for it has another, and quite different, frontage on to the parallel
street. It was in those days the starting and arrival point of a coach
to and from London, supported by a select few who had business in the
metropolis, and from that circumstance was called the “United Friends.”
Peacock, the coachman, was said to bear a striking resemblance to
Tony Weller, which is not remarkable when we consider that Dickens
constructed that plethoric, red-cheeked person from the typical
stage-coachman of his age. There were then, in fact, “Tony Wellers,”
like “Samivel’s” father, on every road. The coach was jointly owned by
Benjamin Worthy Horne, John Stephens, and John Newman.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BLACKBOY” INN.]
The “Wheatsheaf” has long since been transformed into offices, and the
“Crown,” that once owned a gallows-sign stretching across the road,
has been given a modernised grey stucco front, and looks rather like
a banking establishment. Among minor inns, the “Blackboy,” displaying
the effigy of a little nigger, is of considerable age, and takes its
name from the now extinct local Blackboy family who flourished greatly
in Sevenoaks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more
modern inns include the “Bricklayers’ Arms,” whose device—_not_ granted
by the College of Arms—is an ingenious arrangement of plumb-board and
trowel.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BRICKLAYERS’ ARMS.”]
But all Sevenoaks inns, past or present, yield in interest to the fine
old mansion facing the high road near the church, and known as “The Old
House.” All details of its history have been lost, and it is only known
that it was once the “Three Cats”—probably “The Cats”—inn, celebrated
by that late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century poet, Tom Durfey,
who was kept by his patron, the sixth Earl of Dorset, at Knole as a
mirth-maker and general bacchanalian laureate. You cannot imagine a
poet with the Christian name of Tom being other than a bard of the
barrel; and as for Tom Durfey, he was the most bacchic songster, and
the dirtiest rhymester of all the dirty dogs of his age: which is why
he is so reprobated by the good—and so read.
In his song in praise of the “Incomparable Strong Beer of Knoll,” he
says:
There’s Adams, in hoping to pleasure his town,
Declares the best French wine is sold at the “Crown,”
And well it may be, for he takes good rates,
And so does my jolly sleek friend at the “Cats.”
But to strong beer my praises must come,
Leave them to isinglass, egg-whites, and stum.
Beer, fine as Burgundy, lifts high my soul
When Joudrain perks up for the honour of Knoll.
The “Cats” of course derived its sign from the arms of the lords of the
manor, the Sackvilles of Knole, whose “supporters” are two leopards
argent spotted sable, easily to be mistaken by the rustics of a land
where leopards are not among the native fauna, for cats. It must have
been an aristocrat among inns, for it remains still one of the noblest
houses in Sevenoaks, with handsome red brick frontage of the time of
William the Third or Queen Anne, with beautiful gardens in the rear,
and others, equally beautiful, in front, on the opposite side of the
road. It must have ceased to be an inn shortly after Tom Durfey wrote,
for it has been in occupation as a private residence of the Austen
family since about the middle of the eighteenth century.
Opposite is the very beautiful, characteristically “Queen Anne”-style
house, “The Chantry,” standing next the church and on the site of a
demolished ecclesiastical building. It has lately been most exquisitely
restored.
The church itself, a large building with a tall tower, is of a somewhat
uninteresting Perpendicular design. The curious may notice in the
churchyard a stone to “Milenda,” wife of one Joseph Kennard.
A monument in the north aisle to William Lambarde, who wrote the
“Perambulation of Kent,” and died in 1601, was removed from Greenwich.
Among the others, there are singularly modest tablets to the Amhersts.
The most important is that to the charitable Lady Boswell, who died
1692, aged apparently thirty-seven, for the inscription says: “During
xxxvii years she conversed amõg us mortals.” She left sums for “fifteen
of the poorest Children to be instructed in y^e Catechism of ye Church
of England,” and for the much more practical purpose of teaching them
to “write and cast accompts” and to apprentice them to “handycraft
trades or employments.” Her school is a prominent, and very grim,
object on entering the town.
[Illustration: OLD MANSION, FORMERLY THE “CATS” INN.]
The most famous native of Sevenoaks is undoubtedly the mediæval Sir
William Sevenoke, whose career was remarkably romantic. According to
all received accounts, he was a foundling, discovered as a baby in
the hollow of a tree in the immediate neighbourhood of the town by
one Sir William Rumpstede, who named him “William” after himself,
and “Sevenoke,” or “Sevenoaks,” after the town; brought him up, and
apprenticed him to Hugh de Bois, citizen and ferrer (or ironmonger), of
London.
Let us linger a moment to consider how popular in ancient times was
this finding of neglected children in casual places by charitable
knights. The frequency of it is a little suspicious. The most famous
foundling incident (after that of Moses) is the finding, early in the
fourteenth century, of one of the ancestors of the Stanleys. According
to the legend, Sir Thomas de Latham was walking with his lady, who was
childless, in his park, when they drew near to a wild and lonely spot
where they found a baby boy, dressed in rich swaddling clothes, in an
eagle’s nest. The knight acted astonishment; the good unsuspecting
lady looked upon the baby as a present from heaven. It was adopted
and educated in the name of Latham, eventually succeeding to his
father’s and his adopted mother’s property. In the course of years this
foundling’s daughter Isabel married Sir John Stanley, who adopted the
Eagle and Child crest still borne by the Earls of Derby.
But to return to William Sevenoke. He became a grocer, and eventually,
in 1418, Lord Mayor of London, became Member of Parliament, was
knighted, and was granted for coat of arms seven acorns. To him
Sevenoaks owes its endowed Grammar School and almshouses. Whether they
were descendants of his whose name became corrupted into Sennocke is
not quite clear, but it is quite certain that the unlovely name of
Snooks derives from a further debasement of it.
The schools and almshouses were rebuilt in 1727, and are generally
thought by passing strangers to be a workhouse or a penitentiary. It
will thus be gathered that they are not beautiful. If strict discipline
may be read into the ancient seal of the school, then it was in old
times governed on the principle of Winchester, “learn or be whopped,”
for that device exhibits a gigantic, Jove-like master presiding over a
number of scholars, evidently in fear of the immense birch he holds in
his right hand. A resolute application of the weapon represented here
would undoubtedly result in abolishing laziness in the scholar given a
taste of it.
[Illustration: SEAL OF SEVENOAKS GRAMMAR SCHOOL.]
XVII
When you know Sevenoaks well, have learned its geographical situation,
and have inquired into its surroundings, you will begin to perceive
that it was once very humbly dependent upon the great historic
residence of Knole, whose park it on one side fringes. Knole divides
with the not far distant Penshurst the reputation of being the finest
baronial pile in England. If their ancient lords could return to
Penshurst and Knole they would still find there many of the buildings
and appointments they knew; and if the less ancient Elizabethans
and Jacobeans were permitted to revisit their homes they would see
them very much as they were, and so come back without any sense of
strangeness.
Knole, of course, takes its name from its hilly situation. There are
dim and fragmentary records of a former house, away back in the reign
of King John. At that time it belonged to a great historical personage,
William Mareschal, Earl of Pembroke, to whom it came as part of his
wife’s dowry. Eventually it fell to the family of de Say, who for
more than a hundred years ruled the estate, when for an interval it
passed into other hands, only to be repurchased by a Fiennes, who was
on his mother’s side a de Say. This unfortunate Fiennes had the ill
luck to live in the troubled time of Henry the Sixth, and was further
unfortunate in attracting the favour of that ill-starred King, who
heaped many distinctions upon him, all to his undoing. He was created
Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Constable of
Dover Castle, member of the King’s Council, Lord Chamberlain, and Lord
Treasurer of England; and, in fact, closely resembled in real life Pooh
Bah, the “Lord High Everything Else” of _The Mikado_.
The title of Lord Saye and Sele, which still exists as a barony,
re-created in 1603, in the Fiennes family, has a fine sound of
irrevocability about it—a kind of “do and dare,” “what I have said I
_have_ said” connotation—to which it has really no sort of right. Saye,
as we have seen, was a family name, and Sele has in this connection
nothing to do with sealing, signing, and delivering as act and deed. It
comes from the village of Seal, on the other side of Knole Park.
The amazing prosperity and court favour shown to Lord Saye and Sele
raised up many enemies for him, and the King was obliged, first to
sequester him from the office of Lord Treasurer, and then to commit
him to the Tower of London, merely to secure him from the violence of
the discontented people, then seething in the rebellion of Jack Cade,
in 1450. That insurrection brought an exciting moment to Sevenoaks,
for Cade and his army, pursued by some twenty thousand of the King’s
troops from their riotous place of assemblage on Blackheath, turned at
bay upon them, and in the disastrous skirmish of Sole Fields, within
sight of Knole, slew the King’s commander, Sir Humphrey Stafford. Cade,
assuming the armour of the fallen knight, marched to London, where,
according to Shakespeare, he struck the historic London Stone with his
sword and proclaimed himself “lord of this city.” He did more than
that, for he brought the unhappy Lord Saye and Sele forth from his
hiding-hole in the Tower, and hacked his head off at the Standard in
Cornhill, afterwards offering revolting barbarities to his body.
It was the son of this victim of popular revolt who, six years later,
reduced to extremities in the troubles of the time, sold Knole to
Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, for a sum representing £2,500 at
the present day. The manor-house of that time was old and dilapidated,
and Bourchier pulled it down and built the gatehouse and the principal
front of the present group of buildings. Thirty years later he died
and left Knole to the See; and, with all other archbishops, was _ex
officio_, so to speak, collated to the Realms of the Blest. He was
succeeded by Archbishop Morton, who reigned fourteen years; by Henry
Dene (two years), by Warham for thirty years; and then by Cranmer, who
in 1537, from motives of policy, surrendered it to the Crown.
Politic indeed, for the Archbishops of Canterbury at that time owned
no fewer than sixteen palaces, and men were beginning to inquire by
what right lords spiritual were so gorged with things temporal; just
as in these times of ours the phenomenal wealth of great landowners is
beginning to arouse an inconvenient criticism.
Knole came to the Sackvilles, whose collateral descendants still own
it, from Queen Elizabeth, who in 1567 gave it to Thomas Sackville,
a cousin on her mother’s side. He already owned Buckhurst, and she
created him therefore Baron Buckhurst; which is, as every one will
acknowledge, a fruity-flavoured title. “Baron Buckhurst:” how finely
it trips off the tongue! The Queen gave as a reason for her gift
the “keeping him near her court and councils, that he might repair
thither on any emergency with more expedition than he could from his
seat of Buckhurst in Sussex, the roads to which county were at times
impassable.”
Lord Buckhurst was, in fact, a _persona grata_ at court: a man of wit,
a poet, a dramatist. Also a man of tact and management, for in his old
age, in 1603, he was created Earl of Dorset by Gloriana’s successor,
James the First.
And so the descent continued from first to seventh earl, who succeeded
like chapters in a history, of which a new volume opened with the
seventh earl being created a duke.
The fourth duke, George John Frederick Sackville, came to a tragic end
in 1815, in his twenty-second year. He was an adventurous horseman, and
on a visit to Lord Powerscourt, in Ireland, fell with his horse in the
hunting-field at Killiney. The horse fell on him and crushed in his
chest.
They brought his body home with every circumstance of mortuary pomp, as
befitted a duke; he lay in state at many inns on the several stages of
the Holyhead Road, from Ireland to London, and finally was laid to rest
with his fathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in Sussex.
With the widow of his cousin and successor in the title, the fifth and
last duke, another volume ended, in 1825.
The ownership of Knole devolved upon Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister
of the unfortunate fourth duke. She married the fifth Earl De La
Warr, and thus changed the name of the lords of Knole to that of
Sackville-West. Her eldest son became in due course Lord De La Warr:
to the younger sons she left Knole, and in their favour the barony of
Sackville was created, in 1876.
XVIII
The long street of Sevenoaks acts, as it were, the office of screen
to the leafy glades, the hills and dells of Knole Park, to which you
come along an alley between the houses. It is an extremely large park,
and in many places peculiarly beautiful. To set down in this place
its acreage and its circumference of six miles would convey a very
dim impression of its proportions, but if we say it is two-thirds the
size of Richmond Park its extent will be more generally understood.
The house itself—if it be no derogation to style Knole merely a
house—stands quite half a mile within the park, on a height, and looks,
with its ranges of gables, towers, roofs, and chimney-pots, like
some mediæval town. Great herds of red and fallow deer browse amid
the bracken, or shelter under the great beeches, and regard the many
visitors with an amiable and fearless expression, except in the “fence
months,” October and November, when they are quite ferocious, and
bellow day and night like the bulls of Bashan.
[Illustration: KNOLE, FROM THE ROAD.]
Knole is a “show place.” You may roam where you please in the park, and
on most days, within easily ascertainable hours, you can be shown over
the vast place on payment of two shillings. You would not be permitted
so much in the millionaires’ palaces of democratic America.
In this gigantic place Lord Sackville and his family occupy a small
suite of rooms furnished in modern style, and, if you consider it
closely, are practically the caretakers of a vast museum of antiquities
maintained at their own expense. The place is so extensive, and the
maintenance and repairs so costly, that it would require the revenue of
one of the great landlords of London to keep it up, and, in addition,
to live in fitting state, and the Sackville-Wests have not those
resources.
Some day a paternal Government will come to the rescue of owners of
historic houses of public interest. There is a widely prevalent idea
that all governments are paternal to one class, and act in a dominie
and minatory manner to the others. Conservatives, in this belief, play
the beneficent father to the aristocracy and their fringe, and waggle
weapons of punishment at the lower classes; while the Liberals (in the
accepted idea) pat the middle classes and the working men on the head
and give them something to go away and play with; and then, turning up
their sleeves and selecting a fine birch-rod, bid dukes and earls to
come here this instant moment and take their trousers down. It is not
really precisely like that, but Sir William Harcourt did something of
the kind with his Death Duties. At any rate, those are the respective
aspirations of free and enlightened voters on either side.
A fatherly Conservative Government may, therefore, some day be expected
to come handsomely to the rescue of the owners of historic mansions:
owners with acres of reception-rooms, picture-galleries, and baronial
halls; owners with long pedigrees but slim purses, who can scarcely
afford even to keep their many windows cleaned, let alone maintain
floors and roofs and keep the moth out of priceless ancient tapestries
and silken hangings. Such a Government will allocate grants annually
to those proprietors who habitually admit sightseers, and who make
application for aid; and surely the principle would be just, for
it certainly is scarcely fair to the proprietors of such places as
Knole, if witness to their good nature, that they should expend their
substance chiefly for the delight of the tourist and sightseer.
The next step would be a competitive measure introduced by the
inevitable Liberal Government ordained by the well-known fickleness
of the electorate, by which all historic mansions would be scheduled
and administered as to their “show” parts by a Department responsible
for the safe and careful keeping of artistic and historic treasures,
endangered by the carelessness, the poverty, or even the uninstructed
enthusiasm of their owners. It will all some day come to pass.
It is obvious that a great range of buildings like Knole, covering
nearly four acres, dating back, in part, four hundred years, and filled
to overcrowding with things precious intrinsically and by association,
must involve the existence of a large staff; and it must be at least
equally obvious that no lord of Knole could without great physical
effort use even a respectable proportion of his three hundred and
sixty-five rooms, traverse his fifty-two staircases, or look forth
daily from more than ten per cent. of his five hundred and forty
windows.
The house stands in what is probably the least attractive portion of
the park, where the grass is tough and wiry, and like that of some
untended prairie. The long, dark-grey, stone front, pierced with
mullioned windows, is like that of an ancient Oxford college. You are
personally struck with the resemblance, and, reading the impressions
of bygone visitors, you find they have all been impressed in the same
way. Every gable is surmounted by the leopard “_sejant affronté_” of
the Sackville coat of arms, looking like so many tomcats obeying the
instruction of some unseen drill-master: “Eyes right.”
[Illustration: THE GATEWAY, KNOLE.]
The sternly walled-in character of Knole would discourage a burglar,
just as it was intended to give pause to any hostile visitor; for
the times when it was built were halting between the necessity for
fortresses and the liking for magnificence and display. Thus Knole
partakes of the character of both castle and palace.
XIX
No armed guard meets you now: only a porter. There are many kinds of
porters. There is the fish-porter of Billingsgate; there are also the
railway-porter and the warehouse-porter, to name none others; but
it is unthinkable to class the porter of Knole with these. Porters,
I should suppose, by the etymology of their name, to be bearers of
burdens, carriers, humpers of grievous loads; but this dignified person
is rather of the bank-porter variety, own brother to those of the
Bank of England, and carries nothing but a highly respectable suit of
clothes and an aristocratic air. I am quite sure he is more dignified
than even Lord Sackville himself, and his portly presence, his black
swallow-tailed coat, his silk hat, and his red waistcoat give a more
soothing effect of the permanence of things than even the grey walls of
Knole can manage to impart.
The porter’s lodge itself is a little museum of antiquities. There are
the flint-lock muskets, the torch-holders, the brass-bound leather
skullcaps, the cartridge-boxes, halberds, and other weapons of offence
and defence belonging to the Earls and Dukes of Dorset from Jacobean
to Mid-Georgian times: necessary equipments for the bodyguard of my
lords and their visitors in those “good” old days. Here, too, you see
the ancient horn-lanterns and the silver maces that were part of the
display and the feeble illumination of those trains; and on the whole
you are very glad that this is the twentieth century, and that these
are outworn relics whose use has long since passed.
The gatehouse tower and porter’s lodge lead into the first, or Green
Court, one of the seven quadrangles included within the group of
buildings, and so called from its lawns and to distinguish it from the
next, flagged with pavement, and styled the Stone Court. The first
is graced by two classic bronze statues: the “Venus Anadyomene” and
the “Gladiator Repellens.” The Stone Court leads by an insignificant
loggia, supported on Jacobean pillars, to the Great Hall, built between
the years 1603-8 by that magnificent person the first Earl of Dorset,
who in all those years gave constant employment to two hundred men, in
his alterations and repairs, and spent £20,000 on furnishing a bedroom
for the expected visit of James the First to him.
The Great Hall was the banqueting-room. It has a boldly carved oak
screen, in the characteristic Jacobean taste, but painted and grained,
in some barbaric period, to _resemble_ oak! Oak, you will observe,
painted to resemble itself! To paint the lily and to gild refined gold
were no greater works of supererogation. It is difficult to understand
why it was done, here and elsewhere.
Ascending by the Painted Staircase, you come, in succession, to the
Ball-room, the Reynolds Room, the Cartoon Gallery, the King’s Bedroom,
the Chapel Room, Organ Room, Brown Gallery, Lady Betty Germaine’s
rooms, old Billiard-room, Spangled Bedroom, Crimson Drawing-room,
and so forth; seventeen in all, filled with the most wonderful old
furniture, gigantic bedsteads, priceless china, paintings by the most
revered masters, and portraits of a long dignified line of Sackvilles,
Earls and Dukes of Dorset: great gentlemen and great patrons of the
arts.
[Illustration: THE STONE COURT, KNOLE.]
There they hang; rows of them. Grave-faced, dignified personages, whom
not all the feminine frippery that characterised masculine costume in
Elizabethan, Carolean, and Jacobean times can make look foolish. They
look responsible persons, weighted with the mellow gravity that could
not well be absent in times when the headsman’s axe was an institution.
But they could not _all_ be so wise as they look; something—and that
not in small or grudging measure—must be due to courtly palettes. The
thought is treason towards the Muse of History, of course; but surely
_we_ of this day, rich as we are in the little tin gods of politics,
have not the monopoly of them, and may find an invertebrate Balfour or
so amid these reverend seigneurs who look so inscrutably wise.
XX