The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  Prince Duleep Singh had developed Elveden as a great shooting estate, where he could entertain his neighbour, the Prince of Wales, who owned the 8,000-acre Sandringham Estate just over the border in Norfolk. The house and its supporting complex of stables, servants’ wings, kitchens, and kitchen gardens were all geared towards shooting and the hosting of lavish shooting parties. The birds would be driven out of their hiding places in the trees and hedges towards the guns and blasted from the sky in dense falling flocks by the tweed-suited members of the shooting party. The gentlemen would break for lunch in a heated tent, laid with wooden floorboards, decorated with flowers and gleaming with silver plate. The bag for the three days the Sackville-Wests were at Elveden consisted of 2,445 pheasants, 174 partridges, 104 hares and 491 rabbits – a respectable total, even considering the intense competitiveness of the time.

  On their last day at Elveden, the Sackville-Wests received a telegram that threatened to overturn those ancient tables of precedence. Henry, they read, had written to Lord Sackville from Paris, claiming he had documents that proved he was Lord Sackville’s legitimate son and therefore heir both to the title and to Knole itself. On Friday 30 October, Victoria and her husband left Elveden in a hurry and, without breaking their journey in London, went straight to Knole to comfort her worried father; the following day, she walked him round the kitchen garden in an attempt to distract him.

  In the letter to his father, asking for his legitimacy to be recognised, Henry complained that all his efforts earlier in the year to establish the truth about his birth had been resisted; indeed, that as long as he could remember, he had felt that his ‘name and position was being tampered with’. He blamed ‘foreign influences’ – in particular, his sister Victoria – for encouraging his father to deprive him ‘of a place I have every right to have near you as your legitimate son, and all I am asking you in letting bygones be bygones is to restore me my place and social position near you for the future’.

  Lord Sackville was later to allege that Henry’s letter was the first time he had ever heard it claimed that any of the children were legitimate, ‘except as regards the inaccurate statements to that effect in the several Registers of births, marriages, etc.’ that he himself had signed. In his written reply to his son on 31 October, he was at a loss to understand why Henry had not alluded to the matter when he had seen him in London earlier in the year; but decided ‘to take this opportunity to tell you most emphatically that I never was married to your mother, and that consequently you, as well as your brothers and sisters, are illegitimate children’. He invited his son to meet him at the Lord Warden Hotel, Dover, with ‘all the papers and declarations you refer to in your letter . . . when I should have a better opportunity of stating the facts of the case to you’.

  Lord Sackville suggested the grandiose Lord Warden Hotel, not just because it took its name from an office held by the Sackvilles in the eighteenth century, but also because it was ideally placed by Admiralty Pier where the cross-Channel steamers berthed. After their interview, he hoped, Henry could be packed straight back to Paris. Henry, however, declined a meeting in Dover on the grounds that the documents – including birth certificates for Flora, Amalia and Henry, stating they were legitimate – were in the hands of his lawyers. In any case, Knole not Dover was, he felt, the proper ‘place for a meeting between father and son, considering it is in reality their mutual home . . . and I do not wish bearing your name and being your son to hide myself from the public gaze and knowledge of being the same’. At this point, Lord Sackville felt there was little point in discussing the matter any further, ‘as it is perfectly evident that you entirely fail to appreciate or understand that any such statements if made were made solely with the object of shielding your mother, yourself, and your sisters as far as was possible under unfortunate circumstances’.

  On Saturday 7 November, Henry telegrammed his father at Knole, threatening to take steps on Monday if no more satisfactory answer was received before then. The same day he also wrote to his cousin Gilbert, the new Earl De La Warr, as head of the family. As the result of a strange sequence of wills, titles and family circumstances – and, in particular, of a provision, known as the ‘shifting clause’, which precluded the Earl De La Warr from inheriting Knole as well as Buckhurst – Knole had, during the 1870s, mutated from principal family mansion into the preserve of younger sons, while Buckhurst, the home of the De La Warrs, had become the senior inheritance. ‘My dear Cousin,’ Henry wrote to a man he had never met before, ‘As chief of the family I am writing to you for justice, knowing you to be honourable in every way.’ He enclosed a circular memorandum and a copy of a letter sent to other members of the family – in which ‘you will see, I am sure, the fairness of my demand so cruelly opposed by my father, and notice in his answers the influence under which he is so firmly held of one who is not even his daughter [Victoria], and consequently not one of us, who for the sake of working her own ends has planned, and is executing the ruin of us all’. To his appeal to Gilbert’s sense of fair play, he appended a threat: ‘nothing whatever will make me renounce a name or interest belonging to me, and the day I am forced by foul play to abandon all I most cherish in this world, then that day I will drag down with me this name I would be ashamed to own then’.

  The Sackvilles to whom Henry sent circulars included his uncle, William Edward, and his aunts, the Duchess of Bedford and the Dowager Countess of Derby. He described how he had been for ten years, since 1886, in Africa. Had it not been for his discovery, a couple of months before, of certain facts – and he enclosed copies of the birth and baptism certificates for himself, Flora and Amalia – he might have continued to believe that the three of them were illegitimate and that Colonel [William Edward] Sackville-West was Lord Sackville’s heir. ‘Now as my father denies all these declarations and facts and above all his own signature, I am fully determined whatever may be the consequence to hold onto my rights to the very end . . . And in ending wish to call your attention to the position of my sister Pepita [Victoria] who alone has benefited, viz., my father’s position and existence when she had not even the presumption of having a single act signed by him as shows her act of baptism and the non-existence of her birth.’

  There is something rather pathetic about Henry’s letter, with all its awkward syntax and malapropisms, and its overfamiliarity with barely known relations. Sent from temporary lodgings in the Avenue Malakoff in Paris, it arrived at some of the grandest addresses in England, inviting mockery as well as fear. Even Henry realised this, on one occasion writing self-consciously to Gilbert ‘as I hear that my English is much ridiculed by the family’.

  People have always been fascinated by tales of pretenders and impostors: from Perkin Warbeck, who laid claim to the Tudor throne in the late fifteenth century, to the Grand Duchess Anastasia who, it was claimed, escaped the massacre of the Russian royal family at Ekaterinburg, and cropped up at regular intervals throughout the twentieth century. But in no century has the story of the wronged rightful heir, who emerges from nowhere to ask questions about the legal foundations of property and the aristocratic principle, been more popular than in the nineteenth century. Tales of claims to ancient titles, of ‘secret’ marriages, lost heirs and disputed wills became the stuff of stage melodramas and the staple fare of the so-called ‘penny dreadfuls’. Henry’s claim had some of the ingredients of the case of the Tichborne Claimant, one of the great causes célèbres of the nineteenth century, in which a butcher from the town of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales in Australia claimed that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, the supposedly drowned heir to a Hampshire estate.

  The Tichborne Claimant became an unlikely hero of the British working classes. His cause was taken up by the newspapers, and the two court cases – the first to establish his claim in 1871–2 and the second, his subsequent trial for perjury, in 1873–4 – were two of the longest in English history, and fashionable spectacles in themselves, attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales. Even after he had b
een sent to prison, there were public meetings up and down the country in support of this ‘tragic’ Englishman supposedly laid low by an aristocratic conspiracy. The Tichborne Claimant died destitute in lodgings in London on April Fool’s Day, 1898, but his pauper’s burial in Paddington Cemetery was attended by more than five thousand people.

  Henry’s claim, too, played to the Victorian preoccupation with illegitimacy and identity, and challenged the existing social order in much the same way. Initial reactions from the family were predictably dusty. Lady Derby acknowledged Henry’s letter on 13 November and returned the enclosures: ‘I am sure you ought to arrange to accept your father’s offer to see you quietly as he proposed, and not insist upon meeting at Knole.’ From then on, she hoped that all enquiries about the legitimacy of Lord Sackville’s children should be filtered through her son, Lord Sackville-Cecil. Aunt Constance, the Dowager Countess De La Warr, returned Henry’s papers on the fifteenth, with the excuse that, ‘It is a matter in which I cannot interfere’.

  Earl De La Warr was more sympathetic, although as he explained in a letter to Henry, the request had put him ‘in a somewhat difficult position’. ‘But as head of the family,’ he claimed, ‘I will endeavour so far as I can to see that justice is done to my uncle and his children, and you may rest assured that I am absolutely impartial in the matter.’ He handed all the papers to a lawyer friend of his, Mr Marshall Hall, and asked Henry to be ‘guided entirely by him before taking any further steps’. The same day, Gilbert wrote to his uncle Lionel explaining what he had done and counselling that, given the apparent strength of Henry’s case, ‘something ought to be done for him at once, if only to avoid the scandal of a public trial’.

  Lord Sackville thought it a pity that Gilbert had answered Henry’s letter before discussing it with him, and Victoria, too, feared that Gilbert’s actions would serve only to encourage Henry. But Henry was grateful, thanking Gilbert for referring the case to Mr Marshall Hall and expressing the wish that he would ‘very much like to know’ his cousin. Mr Hall believed that Henry had a fairly strong legal case, as well as a strong bargaining position, since, at the very least, Henry had nothing to lose, whereas Lord Sackville had a lot. He duly met Henry and his brother-in-law Gabriel Salanson at the Hotel Cecil on the Embankment in London. The hotel soon became a headquarters for Henry’s camp: the Morning Post reported that Mr and Mrs Salanson (née Sackville West) had arrived there from Paris for a few weeks, which alarmed Lord Sackville, and there were reports, too, that persons ‘under the names of the Honourable Henry and Mrs West’ were staying there. This mystified Victoria, as she had no idea Henry was married (he was not). Was this a mistress, then, or one of his scheming sisters – possibly Amalia, who had temporarily vanished from Knole?

  On 24 November, the law firm of Meynell & Pemberton was instructed to take steps on behalf of the Sackville family. Mr Pemberton dispatched a private investigator, Mr John Littlechild, a former CID detective chief inspector and first commander of the Special Branch, to Spain to examine the register in the church of San Millán in Madrid for the marriage of Oliva and Pepita in 1851. He was joined there by Mr John Brain, a junior lawyer at Pemberton’s. During the time the Sackville solicitors were collecting their evidence in Spain, and then France, Henry’s solicitors were doing the same thing at Bordeaux and Arcachon.

  The need to act quickly interrupted the Sackvilles’ social life. Lionel and Victoria did not attend the wedding of one of Victoria’s closest friends, Violet Spender Clay, on 30 November, and spent the weekend in London instead, mulling over the next legal moves. Crucial to any legal proceedings would be the recollections of Lord Sackville himself, a ‘sad, disgusted man’, as his great-nephew Eddy Sackville-West later described him, who suffered from ‘the temperamental melancholy which dogs all Sackvilles and has driven many of them to end their lives in blackest solitude’. Seeming older than his sixty-nine years, Lord Sackville was now being asked to dredge from the desolate wastelands of his past the details of a passion that had dominated his life more than thirty years before – in preparation for a formal statement. The closest he had previously come to betraying his feelings for Pepita had been during an incident recalled by Vita. When old Lord Sackville had once seen Vita holding on to the end of her mother’s long hair, he had started and exclaimed: ‘Never let me see that child doing that again, Victoria.’ It had reminded him suddenly of how Victoria herself had once played with her mother Pepita’s luxuriant hair.

  It was not long before Henry realised that the friendship between Gilbert and the Sackvilles had not necessarily encouraged Mr Marshall Hall to work in his best interests. Marshall Hall had written to Lord De La Warr, claiming that ‘my friendship for you is sufficient guarantee that I should not rashly advise him to do anything to compromise the family honour’. And when Mr Hall heard that Lord Sackville’s agents had found the certificate of Pepita’s marriage in 1851 to Oliva, he told Lionel – much to Victoria’s glee – that this would ‘knock Henry’s business on the head’.

  Henry duly transferred his case from the care of Mr Marshall Hall to the law firm of Day & Russell. On 11 January 1897, the Sackvilles – represented by my great-grandfather Colonel William Edward Sackville-West and his family – his sons, Lionel (with wife Victoria), Charlie and Bertie, and his daughters, Mary and Cecilie – brought ‘an action for the perpetuation of testimony’ against Henry. This would allow evidence to be collected now to counter any claim that Henry might bring later, on the death of his father: evidence that ‘Henry West is not the lawful son of Lord Sackville and is not entitled to any estate title or interest whatsoever, and that Flora Salanson and Amalia West are not lawful children of said Baron Sackville and have no right title or interest whatsoever nor any expectancy of any’.

  As the threat of a court case loomed, the battle lines were drawn. Max was initially sympathetic to Henry’s cause, at one stage reassuring his younger brother that he was with him ‘heart and soul in your work’, and Amalia and Flora actively supported it. Max had been much moved by Henry’s account of his visit to Arcachon, and the fact that, at the exhumation of their mother, he ‘had gazed on her dear face after twenty-five years’. Henry had sent him a lock of her hair. ‘I tell you I cried like a child,’ wrote Max. Although he was not at all convinced by Henry’s case, he was interested in the extent to which Henry’s proceedings might work in his own interests, referring in letters to Henry to ‘our’ case, and arguing that it was necessary to prove the marriage of their mother, Pepita, to Lionel ‘before either my birth or yours (before my birth to make my claim any good and before yours to make yours any good)’.

  For the first time, Victoria was forced to curry favour with the siblings she had ignored for years. She wrote to Max, wishing him a happy Christmas – a ‘very meek and mild sort of letter’, as Max described it to Henry – and asking him whether his farm had suffered from the rinderpest and whether his chickens (rather than his children) were thriving, before getting down to business: ‘You may have heard what Henry is doing in England. He is making a great mistake. It is so hard on Papa in his old age, as really Papa has always done everything he could for us all.’

  ‘I have your letter of good wishes which I was pleased to receive after your long silence,’ Max wrote reprovingly from South Africa early in the New Year;

  I am glad to find you still recognise you have a brother in S. Africa & often think of me . . . Yes, the Rinderpest is truly a cloud hanging over me. The Locusts were here last year in swarms & devastated all the crops of the country & ruined me in particular, but there is one thing they proved as provender to my chickens but I am sorry such a fare did not prove congenial to me and my children. Your remark with regard to Henry being in England & making a great mistake I duly note. Henry’s move is really what you could have expected, as he finds you are living in the lap of luxury & he was living out here on a pittance . . . I am glad to note that you find it a difficulty to bring up one child & to provide for its future with your t
housands a year, while I have three with only £150. I hope you fully realise how much harder it must be for me struggling as it is to make ends meet, & leading at best a hand to mouth existence. Truly my lot is hard, harder than you can imagine.

  He then proceeded to ask for a ‘present . . . which would further denote, in a tangible form, the great interest you take in me during our troubles in S. Africa, afflicted as we are by every scourge you can think of’.

  Max must have been terribly confused. As a result of Henry’s researches in Spain, he now had a copy of his birth certificate describing him as the legitimate son of Oliva and Pepita. This was the very document that his father had failed to provide at the time of his engagement to Mary Norton, despite continual requests. It contradicted the information he had been given by his uncle, my great-grandfather William Edward, in Aunt Mary’s London house in 1882, that he was the illegitimate son of Lord Sackville.

  Max was beginning to believe that he was, in fact, Oliva’s son, reassuring Henry that ‘if my birth and baptismal certificate is correct, and I quite believe it is, I am not Lord Sackville’s son at all, and therefore need not trouble my head at all about inheriting Knole and standing in your way. As far as I am concerned my case seems to be decided, and if I am really Oliva’s son I intend to assume the name.’ He might even be able to use this information to ‘make Lord Sackville disgorge the amount realised by the villa [Pepa], for, of course, under that marriage that property is mine’. Poor Max: of all the siblings, I feel in many ways the most sympathy for him. He had all the eldest child’s slightly ponderous sense of responsibility towards his family, and yet the true nature of this family, and with it his own identity, was constantly shifting. Here he was bewildered about his birth, adrift in South Africa, and reduced by circumstances and the rinderpest to milking his own cows.