The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  On 3 July 1889, Victoria visited Knole for the first time. She travelled down from London with Maria Cheston, her friend from Washington, and lunched at the Royal Crown Hotel in Sevenoaks. At the house she met the housekeeper Mrs Knox ‘who seems nice and obliging; I was particularly struck by the paintings and the tapestries; and the order which reigns throughout the house and gardens is remarkable . . . The house is absolutely vast.’ So immense, in fact, that you could easily get lost in it, she continued. Later in July, she was back at Knole with her father and L.C., before finally moving in on 24 August. ‘Cela me semble drôle to keep house,’ she wrote in her diary; ‘I don’t particularly enjoy it, but it’s a big distraction; and I need things to distract me from an idée fixe which obsesses me.’

  The nature of this ‘idée fixe’ is not completely clear, although it may have had something to do with the fact that, less than a month before, while staying with family friends on the south coast, she had met her cousin Lionel, William Edward’s oldest son, my great-uncle. Over the course of the summer, she was to meet Lionel at other house parties, including one at Buckhurst with the De La Warrs. ‘Lionel’, she wrote, ‘is as kind as could be’, and he appeared equally taken with his older cousin. He was also, in the likely event of Victoria’s father failing to produce any legitimate sons, the ultimate heir to the Sackville title and to Knole. Although L.C. had visited Knole with Victoria and her father on 23 July, it looked as if this relationship was floundering and the engagement off.

  Just as she was getting to know her first cousin, Victoria was also discovering the Knole estate, picking fruit in the kitchen garden, exploring the 1,000-acre deer park, and immersing herself in the fabric of the house and its contents. From the day she arrived, she slept in what had been Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s Room in the sixteenth century, when Knole had been the private residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury. She tried on jewels from the safe which, she claimed, pleased her Papa, spent an afternoon admiring the magnificent silver in the Plate Room, and helped Mrs Knox look for china in the cupboards. Every evening she discussed the following day’s menu with the chef. Within her first week there, she had read the diary of Lady Anne Clifford, a previous châtelaine of Knole. Lady Anne’s account of daily life and domestic drama in the house in the early seventeenth century, it later transpired, was to prefigure Victoria’s own diary, with its feelings of bitterness and betrayal, of disappointment and disinheritance. But, for now, there was a sense of settling down after all the years of wandering – and a serenity in the photographs for which Victoria posed for the local photographer Charles Essenhigh Corke. In scenes of a touching domesticity, staged in the midst of Knole’s ancient show rooms, she sits at a spinning wheel, her hair falling to the ground, or works on her embroidery, or affects to read. She looks wistful at times, her face in profile displaying the fineness of its features, although from some angles there is a heavier set to her jaw that would become more pronounced with age.

  In August, the Prince of Wales wrote to Victoria from Homburg that he was very sorry not to see her there, ‘but quite understand the reason & am so glad that you and your Father are residing at Knole – which is one of the finest & almost unique place [sic] in England. Nothing would give us greater pleasure than visiting it next year as it is many years since we were there.’

  Victoria was learning to love the deference that her new position demanded. ‘Le mot “Sackville” a un effet magique ici,’ she noted approvingly in her diary, and the ‘bowing and scraping’ (one of only a few English expressions in her predominantly French prose), and the way the servants queued to see her as she went out to dinner in a ‘ravishing dress of pink crêpe de chine trimmed with white ribbons’. She liked visiting ‘the wives of the Estate staff in their little cottages’, and the novelty of arriving at the annual hunt ball at the Royal Crown Hotel, with the crowd shouting three cheers for Lord Sackville: ‘Hip, hip, hurrah!’ How, she asked herself, would she ever be able to accustom herself now to ‘une existence pauvre’?

  Young Lionel had been aware of the circumstances surrounding his cousin’s birth since his mother had told him in Homburg in 1882, and was very sensitive to Victoria’s predicament. ‘Lionel knows how much I have suffered on account of my birth,’ wrote Victoria, ‘and he has told me that he would be only too happy to give up Knole if that made any difference. He is so good & so kind.’ On 6 September (just over a month after they had first met), Lionel declared his love for Victoria in the King’s Room, and explained to her the following day the means by which ‘Vicky’s house [as he described Knole] could always be her house.’

  An idea was beginning to form: an idea planted by Lionel himself, but nurtured by the hints of neighbours and other suitors. The young diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, who was hopelessly in love with Victoria, realised that she would never be as happy as at Knole and told her, unwittingly, that she should therefore marry Lionel. Similarly, several of Victoria’s visitors told her what a pity it would be if she did not stay at Knole for the rest of her life. ‘Ah! If only they knew how easy that would be for me,’ she confided slyly to her diary. How ‘Providentiel’ it would be if she were to marry her first cousin.

  Victoria was torn once again by the visit of L.C. to Knole for three days at the beginning of October. They drove over to Ightham Mote and Chevening, and walked in the park at Knole, admiring the view of the house from afar: from the north, in particular, Knole looks immense, with its outbuildings – a barn, an old brewhouse, a granary, and workshops for carpenters, bricklayers and painters – clustering higgledy-piggledy beneath the Clock Tower, like the yards and farm buildings of a medieval village.

  ‘Here I am torn between Lionel & Löys’, she wrote; ‘both of them know how they stand vis à vis each other, because I have always been très loyale towards them both. “I will either be a marchioness or a peeress”; I know which I’d prefer . . . Löys begs me not to abandon him, although he knows what it would mean for me to keep my beautiful chateau. I understand him so well; he has been so unselfish. I’ve come to believe that he loves me tout son coeur.’ Poor Lionel wrote to Victoria regularly from Erfurt, where he was learning German for his Foreign Office exams, his tone becoming increasingly desperate as he realised that the Marquis was staying at Knole: ‘Je te trouve parfaite ma chérie, in every possible way. Physically you are perfectly lovely and morally you are the most noble, pure-minded person I could ever have imagined possibly could exist. You are my very idea of what a woman ought to be and my only ambition is to make myself a little more worthy of you . . . but my own darling, try and arrange everything loyalement with Abroad [which is how he referred to L.C.] and make me happy for ever.’

  Gradually, Victoria was won over by Lionel and his attentions, and by the more practical considerations. Whatever wealth L.C. could bring to a marriage (and he became even richer on the death of his uncle), Victoria did not want to give up Knole; and, as she argued, ‘happiness has to come before ambition’. Lionel acknowledged that he was, from a worldly point of view, nothing compared to the Marquis: ‘My darling I know you are not a bit worldly or ambitious but he can give you everything to make you happy and comfortable and you would be able to do so much for your sisters and brothers and I can give you nothing – not even a home.’ But he could, eventually, give her Knole. On 11 December, Lionel took her up to see the King’s Room by moonlight, and on the way down proposed formally. Victoria accepted. ‘Jour de ma vie,’ she wrote in her diary, echoing the Sackville-West family motto. These were the words, it was said, uttered in 1356 by one of the West ancestors on being knighted after the Battle of Poitiers for his part in the capture of the French King. Across the centuries, the motto still had a celebratory, seize-the-moment resonance for a generation of Sackvilles, whose present was as yet not overwhelmed by the past.

  L.C. was due to arrive at Knole a couple of days later, and when she told him that she had accepted Lionel, he would not believe her. ‘You can’t have, I can’t give you up. You are
mine,’ he sobbed. To console him, she told him that her decision was not just for her own ‘bonheur’, but for that of her family too. It was a means, ‘providentiellement’, of caring for her father, guaranteeing the future of her brothers, and legitimising her own name. Towards the end of his visit, Victoria concluded that ‘L. and L.C. are both very honourable men and love me so truly and unselfishly; they just want me to be happy.’ She asked herself whether she was marrying for love. ‘Par amour? Je n’en sais rien . . . I am so tired of the struggle my life has become and wonder what the future holds.’

  It was not just L.C. who was in ‘un état de prostration complète’ when he left Knole. A year of stress was beginning to have its effect on Victoria too, and she left for Christmas with her aunt Mary at Knowsley utterly exhausted. Aunt Mary knew nothing yet of Victoria’s secret engagement to Lionel, but she certainly approved of her having turned down L.C. in order to stay with her father.

  Although she had accepted Lionel, Victoria began 1890 in an agony of indecision, at her ‘wits’ end’, as she wrote in her diary. Should she marry L.C. or L.? ‘How the New Year fills me with anxiety; and how well I know which one I would like to marry.’ As L.C. continued to bombard her daily with bouquets of flowers from Cannes – anemones, mimosa, roses – Victoria’s resolve hardened. In March, they told her father their news, and then the other members of the family. Victoria’s marriage to her first cousin solved many problems. It gave her a sense of legitimacy, enabling her to share in her father’s inheritance. But it also served a strategic family function, reconciling – for the time being at least – the two branches of the family, the legitimate and the illegitimate, by bringing one of the bastards back into the fold. This was a theme to which she returned soon after her marriage, claiming in a letter to Max that ‘marriage has reinstated me altogether from a family point of view’, and that now she was married, she felt far less the ‘stain’ of her birth.

  Victoria’s father declared himself pleased (as well he might, since part of Victoria’s so-called sacrifice had been made specifically in order to care for him). His only worries were that Lionel might not ‘stick to’ Victoria – how right he proved to be – and that his prospective son-in-law had ‘nothing to do or any position in anything’. William Edward was surprised at first, but told his son that he would offer his ‘provisional consent’ until they had met to discuss his concerns. As he wrote to his brother, ‘there are several objections: youth; religion; cousinship &c but I do not think they need stand in the way if they are really attached to one another’.

  Victoria was five years older than Lionel, although she downplayed the objection of her fiancé’s youth by knocking two years off her age. ‘Nobody in the family knows my real age,’ she confided in a letter to Béon in March 1890, announcing her engagement to the heir to Knole, ‘a very nice, pretty boy . . . a little younger than me’. She told people that she was twenty-five and a half years old, and begged Béon to ‘keep well my secret and say I am born in 1864 if anybody asks you’.

  Victoria had clearly won her future father-in-law’s heart, which was hardly surprising, wrote Lionel’s sister Mary, when she was so pretty. But William Edward did insist that any children of the marriage should be raised in the Church of England. This was to be a condition of his consent, along with the demand that Lionel get a profession. To this end, Lionel tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate an arrangement with Cardinal Manning whereby any boys from the marriage would be brought up Protestant and any girls Catholic.

  As to the third objection, marriage between first cousins was becoming increasingly acceptable among the landowning classes during the nineteenth century. At the very least, it kept estates firmly within the family, mitigating any need to make expensive marriage settlements that divided the inheritance. Queen Victoria, that model of propriety, had sanctioned the trend by marrying her cousin Albert. And Charles Darwin, too, who settled at Down House, about ten miles from Knole, had married his first cousin Emma. Although Darwin later came to believe that ‘interbreeding during many generations is highly injurious’, the evidence of his own family, and research by his son George, suggested that there was little correlation between consanguinity and the incidence of disabilities.

  There was very little opposition from other senior members of the family. ‘My dear Victoria,’ wrote Aunt Mary, ‘Your letter rather took my breath away – yet it ought not for I heard a rumour last summer which roused my suspicions. If you are happy dear Victoria I am happy too. There is the great objection of the first cousins but I am bound to say I see no others. Lionel’s youth frightens me . . . I see a hundred thousand advantages to set against objections which might be raised.’ Aunt Mary was particularly happy that there was someone to look after her brother, since she thought it most unlikely that he would ever marry. Even Aunt Bessie seemed contented, and her daughter Ella, Victoria’s cousin, hoped that the Duke of Bedford would allow his wife to get to know Victoria before the marriage. In the event, she did not attend Victoria’s wedding, but sent a cheque for £500. Aunt Constance was not to come either, as ‘nothing’, she wrote, ‘will induce Uncle R[eggie] to come to a wedding at Knole’, the house that he had lost in a bitter court battle with his brother Mortimer.

  On the Sackville side, only Cecilie sounded a note of caution, observing very presciently that Lionel and Victoria would not be happy living with Papa, ‘car cela emmène des ennuis inévitables’. One of these ennuis, as Victoria noted, was that ‘poor Papa is by no means always in a good mood’. Her father was constitutionally gloomy, a condition exacerbated by the humiliation of the Murchison Affair, and often rude in company, although generally charming in tête à tête with his daughter.

  To her brothers, Victoria stressed the strategic advantages of her marriage. Announcing her engagement in a letter to Max, she acknowledged that she was ‘very much in love’, but ascribed her future happiness to the fact that she would now never have to leave her father: ‘You know that formerly I could not make up my mind ever to marry, as I felt it my duty to stay with dear papa and take care of him in his old age; now the difficulty is overcome . . . you must remember that later on in life what will be within my means I shall do for you.’

  Henry, who had just received £8 from his father to purchase a new heifer (possibly to replace the cow he claimed Max had taken from him) was also pleased with news of the engagement. ‘And will still be more pleased,’ he wrote to Victoria, in a letter that would later assume great significance:

  when I hear of Amalia’s engagement. You will then be all safe and there will only remain me for Father to deal with. Victoria, when you come to think of it, a father could not have done more for his children than father has done for us; how kind he has always been towards us. Remember we are his illegitimate children. What pluck he displayed in taking you all over the place so as to enable you to marry well; he could not have done more for us two than to send us far away, we would never have got on in England had we mixed with young men of good families who would only have jeered at us on account of our illegitimacy; thoroughly tried to educate us both in classic and farming matters, and started Max, and is still helping him by sending him a yearly allowance and now he is helping me too. He is a grand old man, this is what I think of him.

  The only source of tension with Victoria’s brothers was the obvious disparity in their lifestyles. This was to become a continuing theme of dissatisfaction. In Washington, Victoria had been in the habit of sending Max’s wife hand-me-down dresses, but even that stopped when Victoria claimed they were ‘really too shabby’ to send to Mary, posting some fashion plates from the newspapers instead. Mary later complained to Victoria ‘in not at all a nice way that I was “horrid not to send her dresses any more, seeing that I was now rich” etc. etc.’. Victoria argued, in turn, that she now lived ‘entirely in the country’ and had ‘only plain woollen and cotton dresses’, and that it was therefore distinctly unfriendly of Mary to reproach her in this way.

  Victoria�
��s sisters, too, were pleased at first with her engagement to Lionel, for it meant that she could stay with Papa and help look after their interests, as well as those of their brothers. At this stage the sisters were still genuinely fond of each other. Amalia was living at Knole with her father for several months of the year, on equal terms with Victoria. And when she was with Flora in Paris, as she was in the autumn of 1889, they would send Victoria at Knole a copy of Le Figaro every day; Victoria would send them vegetables from the kitchen garden in return.