The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  Béon and Gabriel also needed to spare the public embarrassment of Lord Lytton who, like Lionel’s other diplomatic colleagues, knew that Flora was illegitimate. And so, when the word ‘légitime’ was pronounced by the Maire at the civil marriage ceremony in Paris on 16 June 1888, half a dozen of the forty or fifty guests, led by Béon and Gabriel, coughed exaggeratedly and in unison to drown out the obvious lie. Victoria ‘did object inwardly, but I made no objection. I had nothing to do with it.’ This was the first of many little conspiracies, orchestrated by Béon and Gabriel but in which the Sackvilles were complicit, that were to come back to haunt the family. Gabriel and Béon laughed and congratulated themselves afterwards on the success of their trick as they repaired to the Hôtel de l’Empire.

  The religious ceremony, a couple of days later, was conducted by the Bishop of Soissons, from the Salansons’ native Picardy, who, according to Le Gaulois, gave a most elevated address on the institution of Christian marriage. It took place in the English Roman Catholic church of St Joseph, in the Avenue Hoche, not far from the convent school the girls had attended a decade before. Flora – as her future brother-in-law, the young Lionel, read in a newspaper cutting shown him by an Oxford contemporary – wore a white silk dress with a flowing veil and sprays of orange blossom. ‘Toutes les notabilités de la colonie anglaise et les membres de l’ambassade assistaient à cette cérémonie,’ continued Le Gaulois. Victoria agreed that ‘the whole ceremony was one of a lady of high position being married to a French gentleman’ – although not one, she added, of particularly high standing.

  Lionel and his two unmarried daughters returned via London, where they spent a few days, to the United States and rented a holiday home for the summer in Beverly, Massachusetts. One rainy day, while Victoria was away, her father was drawn, through sheer boredom, into the indiscretion that was to cost him his diplomatic career: an indiscretion that was particularly uncharacteristic for someone who so rarely, as his colleagues observed, put pen to paper.

  Lionel had been tricked into answering a letter from a ‘Mr Murchison’, a former British subject now naturalised in the US, in which he was asked for his opinion as to which of the candidates in the forthcoming presidential election would be most favourable to Britain’s interests. Flouting all protocol, Lionel replied, suggesting the Democrat candidate, the incumbent president Grover Cleveland, and in October, the Republicans (who had posed the trick question) had Lionel’s unwise response published in the New York Tribune. There was an outcry, with popular indignation mounting as the date of the election approached. ‘It was ironical,’ someone later remarked to Vita, ‘that your grandfather of all people, the most taciturn of men, should have been sacked for expressing himself too freely.’

  Victoria and Amalia were staying with the Trevor family at Glenview, their late-Victorian country mansion overlooking the Hudson River, when, according to one of the Trevors, ‘the ground was blown from under the feet of Sackville-West by the exposure of his foolish letter . . . Victoria was terribly upset and bemoaned the fact because she said that her father never would have answered that letter if she had been with him. I think Victoria was clever enough really to have kept her father on the rails.’

  Lionel was recalled from Washington in disgrace. Before they left, the Sackvilles held, as was the custom, a sale of their personal effects at the legation, a sort of upmarket yard sale: from bric à brac, including brass hot-water kettles and old parasols, to items of far greater value, such as the brougham, the buggy, and the landau and Victoria carriages. The sale was a great success, with any objects bearing the Sackville family monogram and crest fetching particularly high prices.

  The Washington Evening Star recorded the final days in the city of Victoria, the young woman who ‘has never made a mistake in all the delicate social duties that she has been required to perform in seven years at the British legation’. Victoria and her father spent their last evening with Mrs Whitney in her box at Albaugh’s theatre, but the exact hour of their departure from Washington ‘was kept within the circle of their intimate friends, as Lord Sackville [as he now was] feared an unkind demonstration at the station’. The following day, 23 November, Lionel and his daughters left Washington by train. As the train rounded the curve, they waved the bouquets of yellow roses they were carrying from the vestibule of the front car until they passed out of sight.

  There was, however, one consolation for Lionel’s recall in disgrace from Washington. On 1 October, Lionel’s older brother Mortimer had died childless at the age of sixty-eight, and unexpectedly Lionel had inherited Knole and the Sackville title. From now on, the Misses West started to call themselves Sackville West again.

  See Notes on Chapter 3

  4

  The Surprise Inheritance

  ‘I am so worried about the future,’ Victoria wrote in her diary towards the end of 1888, after a particularly rough Atlantic crossing. On their return to England from America after the Murchison Affair, the future was uncertain. Despite the hundreds of letters of support he received from friends, former colleagues and members of the American public, and despite his own best efforts to defend his actions (which he later published privately in My Mission to the United States), Lionel had left his job in disgrace. He was still on full pay but, as he told Victoria, he could not ‘count on its continuance if nothing turns up’, and it looked increasingly unlikely that he would get another post (he was to be retired on a pension in April 1889). Most worrying of all, Knole itself, which he had inherited so unexpectedly, was encumbered with problems.

  Like all landowners, the Sackvilles had been hit by the agricultural depression of the 1870s and 1880s, in which land rents fell by around fifty per cent. In any case, the Sackville estates were already far too small to support Knole, one of the largest private houses in the country. In 1883 these estates consisted of a total of 8,551 acres, yielding £11,250 a year, a pittance compared with those commanded by Lionel’s sisters, the Duchess of Bedford and the Countess of Derby.

  The Sackvilles’ immediate problems included the succession duties that had to be paid on Mortimer’s death, and the complication of Mortimer’s will itself. Mortimer had become increasingly deranged in his dotage, claiming that his servants were plotting to poison him, and falling out with all the members of his family except his wife. In his will, he left much of his personal estate to Queen Victoria’s four Maids of Honour (he was only a life tenant of Knole itself, so he could not leave that as well). Whether this was to spite his relatives or whether, as Vita suggested, ‘he had private reasons for wishing to benefit one of them, and hit on the method of doing it without singling her out into scandalous publicity’, the Sackvilles contested the will. They believed that the Maids of Honour would not dare to come to court and face the scandal, and would settle out of court instead – which they did. In the meantime, however, as Victoria wrote to Max, there was ‘no money whatever to be paid to Papa for at least two years . . . We are in a bad fix for the present, as Knole is so expensive to keep up.’

  Knole itself had begun to look a bit shabby. A book of photographs, presented as a memento to Queen Victoria in 1881, celebrated the ancient magnificence of the house and its treasures: the tapestries, and the paintings by Reynolds and Gainsborough, which the family’s advisers were now looking to sell (and several of which were soon to find their way to the sale rooms). But there is plenty of evidence, too, of a general neglect and decrepitude. Ivy clings to the walls, winding itself through cracks in the leaded windows, and giving the house an overgrown and forlorn feel. The glowing green-and-gold tapestries that swathe the walls may look magnificent in Mortimer’s book of photographs, but they were a little threadbare; the russet velvets that covered the chairs of state were frayed; the silver furniture was tarnished; and, here and there, the portraits of ancient Sackvilles sprouted a fungal bloom after centuries of exposure to the damp. In the attic galleries, which had been used for hundreds of years as store rooms, priceless chairs, chests and table tops
were arrayed along the walls, the marquetry slowly flaking to the floor with the mounds of frass left by the woodworm. Then as now, leaks developed at points in the several acres of roof, with the water dripping into buckets strategically placed on the floor, or onto the objects themselves, and the lath and plaster hanging in festoons from the ceiling. Accounts of the time describe fires periodically breaking out in the chimneys of this labyrinthine mansion, the smoke billowing out through the wood panelling, and the sound of rats scuttling and scratching behind the wainscots.

  For the truth is that Sackvilles have never been quite rich enough for the size of their house. Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who took possession of Knole in 1604, may have turned a draughty and ramshackle medieval mansion into a Renaissance palace – a great show house to celebrate his success as Lord Treasurer to King James I – but within a generation, the house that Thomas had remodelled was too big. Built to accommodate a household of more than a hundred people, Knole’s exceptional size was already an anachronism.

  The general gloom had been intensified by the gradual withdrawal of Knole from the outside world, as Mortimer descended into his private hell. Mortimer had become irritated by the popularity of the park, complaining about people ‘galloping promiscuously about’, and in 1883 he had posts placed across the main gate to prevent horses, and even prams, from entering. There was a public outcry. On the night of 18 June 1884, 1,500 people from Sevenoaks broke down the posts across the entrance and, singing ‘Britons never never shall be slaves’, marched on the house where they deposited the posts at the main door, smashed a few windows, and shouted abuse at Lord Sackville. Mortimer felt so threatened that he soon left Knole, to live for a time in the Grand Hotel at Scarborough.

  On the morning of 11 August 1887, while Mortimer and his wife were still in Scarborough, a fire broke out in the corner of the Great Barn at Knole, setting light to 300 tons of hay. Although the fire was under control by mid-afternoon, it did £3,000 worth of damage and could so easily have spread through the stables to the North Wing, with devastating consequences. Crowds of people flocked to Knole to watch the spectacle, and to help. The irony was not lost in one contemporary account: ‘Although Lord Sackville has been wont rigidly to exclude the public of late years from Knole, on Tuesday last the people literally saved his mansion by ignoring his exclusiveness and flocking at the first sound of alarm in hundreds to the place, where they manned the hand-engines and assisted in other ways to subdue the flames.’

  It was also ironic, perhaps, given the possessiveness the place was to inspire in several of his children, that Lionel himself was not keen at first to live at Knole. Victoria thought he preferred Wildernesse – the nearby home of his friends, the Hillingdons, where he spent a lot of time – a hundred times more than the house he had just inherited. ‘Knole is a regular white elephant,’ he wrote to Max from Cannes in February 1889, enclosing an advance of £100 on his allowance, ‘and I do not expect to get much benefit out of it.’ This was confirmed by Victoria in a letter to her brother in which she claimed that her father had had to borrow the money to send his son. ‘You have no idea how much he must borrow to keep up Knole. All that is very unfair and trying.’ She went on to advise Max with all her heart not to ‘have any more children, as you say they cost such a lot to bring up’ (Max and Mary were to go on to have four) and enclosed some photographs of herself – ‘My photos don’t give you an idea of what I am like, as I always look so cross in them, and yet I never feel cross! People tell me right and left that I am very pretty but please, dearest Max, don’t think for a minute that it makes me vain; my head has never been turned by success or compliments.’

  As worrying to Victoria as the family’s financial future was her precarious position as an illegitimate child; Victoria was always acutely conscious of this ‘stain’, as she described it, that went beyond the merely social to the very heart of her identity. In Pepita, Vita explained her mother’s later materialism and cynicism in the light of her illegitimacy: ‘I see now that owing to the difficult beginnings of her life, and to the stigma which had lain over her birth, making everything delicate and doubtful, she had unconsciously absorbed the idea that the world was a hard place where one must fight one’s own battle for one’s own best advantage.’ She noted a change around the time of her mother’s departure for Washington: ‘Then everything had been startlingly reversed. Instead of anxiety, there was security; instead of being the unwanted little foreigner, hustled away at a stranger’s approach, she had become the spoilt young hostess at Washington, the autocratic young mistress of Knole . . . Yet none of this, I think, ever succeeded in obliterating those early impressions: life had treated her harshly once, and might at any moment do so again; therefore one must make the most of the opportunity when it offered, and one must, in fairness, teach one’s child the same lesson as a possible safeguard when needed.’

  For centuries, under English common law, any child born outside matrimony was considered to be ‘nobody’s child’, and therefore unable to inherit family titles or land. This law was pilloried in one Victorian novel, in particular. In No Name by Wilkie Collins, the Vanstone sisters are cruelly disinherited when it transpires that – for perfectly good reasons – their parents had never married, and that they are therefore bastards. ‘Mr Vanstone’s daughters are Nobody’s Children,’ explains one of the lawyers in the novel, ‘and the law leaves them helpless . . . I am far from defending the law of England, as it affects illegitimate offspring. On the contrary, I think it a disgrace to the nation. It visits the sins of the parents on the children.’ One of the daughters goes a stage further in describing her position (in the third person): ‘She is a nameless, homeless, friendless wretch. The law which takes care of you, the law which takes care of all legitimate children, casts her like carrion to the winds. It is your law – not hers. She only knows it as the instrument of a vile oppression, an insufferable wrong.’ Collins himself had fathered three illegitimate children and wrote about the predicament with great passion, tackling not just the legal context but broader questions of name and identity. The sensational twists and turns of his novel would be echoed in some of the later episodes of the increasingly Gothic Sackville saga.

  While waiting for Mortimer’s will to be settled before moving into Knole, Lionel spent the winter in Cannes with his two unmarried daughters. Socially they were a great success, ‘dining with the greatest personages’; they were pretty, accomplished, and Amalia, at least, was a competent pianist and enjoyed performing in ‘private theatricals’ in people’s villas. As Victoria wrote to Max in February 1889: ‘I am glad to see that “le monde” and society are friendly disposed towards us, in spite of the blot on our name. Everybody knows of it, but no one says the least thing which can make me feel it . . . But you have no idea, dear Max, how much I feel my position, and I am often very nervous and unhappy about it . . . I quite agree with you that it would be better if we had never been born.’

  It was not long before Victoria caught the eye of the Prince of Wales – an interest on his part that she was to swear in a letter to Béon was ‘altogether paternal’. She had met the Prince for the first time on 19 February, at a dinner given by the de Falbes. She was ‘terriblement intimidée’, and took another guest, Miss Stonor, with her as chaperone when the Prince asked her to accompany him to the smoking room after dinner. He agreed to sign her carte de dîner on condition that she send him a photograph of herself. A week later, she was dancing the quadrille d’honneur with the Prince at a ball (‘he was searching me out everywhere’), and the following day travelled with him on the train to Nice for the ‘Bataille des Fleurs et des Confetti’. Amalia often accompanied them, and for the rest of 1889, the letters Victoria received from the Prince of Wales usually referred to Amalia as well, and ended with greetings to both her father and her sister.

  It was a heady time for Victoria. At dinner with the Goldsmids in early February, she met the fabulously wealthy Marquis de Löys Chandieu – ‘L.C.’, a
s she referred to him in her diary. After a whirlwind courtship conducted at dinners, balls and a day trip to Monte Carlo, where they watched the clay pigeon shooting, and played roulette, L.C. proposed. By the end of the month, Victoria had been introduced to his mother and sister, and he had written to Cardinal de Hohenlohe in Rome seeking a dispensation for a mixed marriage – for Victoria was Catholic while the Marquis was Protestant. The Cardinal advised that there was a canton in Switzerland where the permission they sought might be granted, but Victoria already sensed that the religious obstacles were insurmountable. She had several ‘stormy interviews’ with L.C. on the subject, and it soon became clear that the Marquis’s mother strongly opposed mixed marriages. Victoria’s friends, on the other hand, advised her that there could be no harm in her raising any children of the marriage as Protestants, if that were to be a condition.

  At the same time as Victoria was failing to make any firm resolutions about the engagement – persuading herself one day that she should marry L.C. and the next that she should give him up – she was also doing her best to marry Amalia off. Although the sisters were, in many ways, equals, going to the same picnics and so on, Victoria’s six years of seniority, and her years of acting as confidante to her father, encouraged her to assume responsibility. Whether it was a question of finding suitors for Amalia, getting her invited to parties, or simply arranging her accommodation, Victoria had views. Should Amalia return to England or, if some remuneration could be agreed (and Gabriel was always quite demanding on this point, eventually agreeing a sum of 600 francs a month), could she live with the newlywed Flora and Gabriel Salanson in Paris? When Amalia sought permission and money to return to Cannes later that year, it was Victoria who was inclined to say no: she was conscious of the reputation of her sisters and, by extension, herself – a sensitivity heightened by the stain of her illegitimacy. Miss Hillier, their former governess, also thought that Amalia was far too independent. Their father, on the other hand, agreed to Amalia’s request on condition that Amalia never went out alone and did not act in plays. Nevertheless, the following year, Amalia asked her father’s permission to act in a play, and Victoria telegraphed back: ‘No’ – ‘It’s much better if she doesn’t expose herself to malicious gossip.’