The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  The statements prepared in 1897 conjured up the world of Victoria’s Spanish ancestors. Some of the evidence, though, was confusing. People were being asked to dredge their memories of almost half a century before, with the result that events might be transposed by up to a decade, muddling the chronology. Other statements were contradictory. One man, Juan de Dios Gonzalez, claimed that he had accompanied Pepita when she left Albolote for Germany in 1856, and then stayed with her in Munich while she danced by day and entertained the ‘Prince of Bavaria’ by night. Juan de Dios, however, could only have been nine at the time, and the village priest dismissed his claims as the ravings of a ‘flighty, romancing’ fantasist; other villagers remembered Juan de Dios better as the boy who had been arrested and imprisoned for shooting his stepmother dead. Another feature of the evidence was that much of it was repetitive, with certain phrases cropping up time and time again, as if they had been learned by rote, with a particular agenda in mind and a particular point to prove.

  In June, statements were taken from twenty-two French witnesses, at Arcachon and Bordeaux, of many of the people who had been a feature of life at the Villa Pepa: Auguste Desombre and Louisa Dignac, Gustave Hameau and Harry Scott Johnston, Reverend Samuel Radcliff and Madame Vigier. Henry was present at these proceedings, and it was obvious to Mr Pemberton, who was there too, that Henry was determined to go ahead with his lawsuit and to put his father in the witness box.

  The Sackvilles spent the second half of June preparing their statements for just such an eventuality. Things were not going that well. As Victoria recorded in her diary, she spent one particular day at the solicitors’ ‘having our evidence read & questions. Papa makes a great mess of his answers & contradicts himself every minute. It is hopeless and Pemberton thinks he will be a very bad witness.’ The following day was not much better. ‘We tried to cross-examine Papa last night till one o’cl. It is no good. I am quite worn out by the long sitting from 10.30 till 5 at Pemberton.’

  The Sackvilles’ visits to the solicitors took place against a backdrop of dinners and dances, of trips to the theatre. Life at Knole continued as before, with weekend house parties and walks to Lionel’s farm, where Vita enjoyed feeding the pigs with apples picked in the garden. Victoria redecorated the Ballroom, and celebrated the Queen’s Jubilee with a tea party for all of the children on the estate. In London, there were rehearsals for the exclusive quadrille in which Victoria had been asked by Lady Warwick to dance at the fancy-dress ball to be held at Devonshire House. For, despite the murkiness of the story that was emerging in the courts, the Sackvilles placed great public stress on behaving well and keeping up appearances.

  Towards the end of June, the examination of witnesses began in the Royal Courts of Justice, as members of the extended Sackville family, former Foreign Office colleagues of Lord Sackville, friends from America, the curate at Withyham, the East Sussex parish where generations of Sackvilles had worshipped, were all questioned about the past. Victoria found Osborn, Henry’s new solicitor, ‘so common & vulgar . . . [he] did not even know what Papa’s name was; he called him Lord West & Lord Sackville-West’. Bonny, Victoria’s lady’s maid during her seven years in Washington, arrived from France. She contradicted Salanson’s claims that he had no idea Flora was illegitimate when he married her in 1888, by recalling the charade of the carefully orchestrated coughing fit at their wedding ceremony.

  Victoria and her father made their depositions, and were cross-examined towards the end of July, in Room 278 of the Law Courts. ‘They all said I made a splendid witness,’ Victoria wrote in her diary after her cross-examination by Henry’s counsel, Mr Scarlett, despite the lowering presence of Henry and Gabriel Salanson. Henry, Victoria observed, was the very image of Béon and had ‘all his ways’, and he and Papa stared threateningly at each other across the court room (Lord Sackville had started to believe that Henry was not his son after all). When her father was examined on 28 and 29 July, he turned out at first to be not quite as bad a witness as had been feared, although he did not listen enough to the questions and was very forgetful. ‘Papa has only the truth to tell & he forgets half he ought to say. It is miserable work,’ Victoria wrote.

  Henry described his father’s performance in the witness box to Max even less flatteringly: ‘Never, Max, have I been face to face with such awful lies; you cannot realise how he lied. My counsel told me that if the case had been before a jury (instead of being private) they would have stopped the case . . . As for father, he evidently must have been given plenty to drink, for he was wound up like a devil.’ Henry went on to reassure his older brother that if he won his case, Max should come to live in England, and he would see him ‘comfortably settled down according to your rank in life, for you will be my brother always’. Lord Sackville completed his deposition on 6 August. ‘The heat in the Law Courts yesterday was awful,’ wrote Victoria. ‘I thought poor Papa wd have an attack of apoplexy; he was so red. He answered very badly & never listened with attention to anything Scarlett was saying.’

  After all the statements had been taken and the examinations made, the annual round of life at Knole continued: the Knole flower show, the summer garden parties at the neighbours, and so on. Then it was off, in September, to the shooting parties (with Papa holidaying in Bangor again), and in the winter to Monte Carlo for a few weeks. Here, Victoria met the Prince of Wales once more. They talked about Henry’s case, and the Prince ‘said what a shame it was on Papa. He said I ought to have a little boy for Knole & that he would be god-father.’ He also took the liberty of asking Victoria for a photograph of herself in fancy dress at the Devonshire Ball, and of inviting himself to Knole in the summer.

  With the coming of spring – and as predictable as the social calendar – came renewed hostilities from Amalia. In April, Victoria learned again of the ‘awful’ quantity of lies Amalia was telling people. She was astonished, therefore, the following month, when Amalia asked for a rapprochement. Victoria talked the matter over with Lionel, and agreed that he should tell Amalia that she would be forgiven (although never by Papa) if ‘she took back all the lies she has told people about us’. When Lionel and Amalia met for a couple of hours on 27 April, it soon became clear that Amalia was seeking to patch things up for the sake of appearances only – and that any reconciliation came with a condition. She would confess to the lies she had been telling, but only if she could show the people to whom she was apologising a copy of Victoria’s birth certificate (which described Victoria as the child of an unknown father). Amalia’s own humility could only be bought at the expense of Victoria’s humiliation. There was to be no reconciliation.

  The Salansons’ lives were unravelling, too. This glamorous, good-looking young couple had begun to go their separate ways. Within a few years of their marriage, Victoria heard rumours that Gabriel was chasing after other women in St Petersburg, where he had been posted as second secretary, and there were stories about Flora too, spread by Victoria, that Gabriel was not the father of the Salansons’ short-lived daughter, Elie. The bustling Gabriel was always restless. He took indefinite leave from St Petersburg soon after his appointment in order to return to France to look after his dying father, but what he really wanted to be was an artist. His financial ambitions were never satisfied by his marriage to the illegitimate daughter of an impoverished peer, and it was only financial embarrassment that forced him to write, in vain, to the Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1897, begging for any consular post, however lowly and however far away.

  By 1898, Flora and Gabriel were both filing for divorce on the grounds of adultery – although, in private, Flora also blamed the divorce on the influence of Gabriel’s family, ‘as there was really no serious quarrel between them, only constant bickering about money matters’. While proceedings dragged on through the summer of 1898 (neither party could prove the other’s adultery) Flora was awarded provisional alimony of 500 francs per month. Their son, Lionel, the little boy who had spent a couple of summers at Knole, was to split his t
ime between the parents. If, however, Gabriel were to be successful in his divorce suit – or so the lawyers advised – then he would get custody of the child, with his wife having some access rights.

  Knowing that Victoria had her father’s ear, Flora wrote regularly to her older sister, asking her to persuade Papa to send her money. Flora owed around 70,000 francs at the time, and the contents of the rented house in which she and her husband had lived had just been seized and sold. Gabriel himself had sold Flora’s jewellery, and made off with some pictures belonging to Lord Sackville. Flora’s tone is one of desperation, as she shifted from shabby lodging house to hotel – on one occasion having to pay the proprietor 3,000 francs simply to clear her account and have her baggage released.

  Flora now thought that she had been punished enough for her wrongs, and that the time had come for her to be forgiven. To the solicitors in Paris, whom the Sackvilles had instructed to talk to Flora, she claimed that she was now on ‘very unfriendly terms’ with her brother, Henry, and that during the last twelve months no steps had been taken either by her husband or by Mr Henry West in connection with the legitimacy case. Indeed, the two quarrelled the whole time, with Henry on one occasion assaulting the man who had until recently aided and abetted him in his claim.

  Victoria sent Flora a little money, which enabled her to give up for the time being her plans to go on the stage. Pemberton, on the other hand, advised Lord Sackville not to give Flora any financial assistance until her divorce was finalised – not even £50 towards her legal fees. Flora could not believe that her own father had refused to help her get custody of her son and defend her honour. If Papa only knew what a terrible situation she was in, he would not have had ‘the heart to refuse to help’. ‘Abandoned by her own family’, Flora did not know what was going to happen, but asked Victoria to remember that, whatever the future held, anything bad ‘would be the fault of those who weren’t able to forgive’.

  Now that legal proceedings were in abeyance, and he had run out of money, Henry hoped that Victoria might help effect a reconciliation with his father that would lead to a financial settlement. Writing from Paris in September, he asked her to forget the regrettable incidents of the past, which he ‘deplored’, and blamed them entirely on ‘cette vilaine créature et infame Salanson’. He also offered to make peace with his brother-in-law, Lionel: ‘My hand is stretched out to you; take it, let bygones be bygones, and let us unite again and in a friendly manner settle everything once for all . . . Knole does not make the slightest impression on me; I do not want it . . . What I want is to go away from a country where everything reminds me of my unfortunate loss and the stain I will have to bear now to my grave.’

  A flurry of letters and telegrams to his father and to Victoria, requesting a meeting, followed in early October. Henry stayed at the Charing Cross Hotel in London. From a room perched over the tracks at the railway station, he was poised to make daily, lightning trips to Sevenoaks. He would send messages from the Royal Crown Hotel in town, where he based himself during the day, or leave his visiting card at Knole itself.

  On 4 October, Henry wrote to his father, demanding a meeting, and threatening to shoot himself if he did not get a hearing. ‘Do you wish now for my death? . . . I am determined at seeing you & at any price.’ His life, he claimed, hung ‘by a thread’, and, in his desperation, he even turned to his aunt Mary, who had rebuffed his approaches a couple of years before:

  I am here in an awful stress. I have come over to make it up with father and Victoria but am afraid they have got very hard hearted and they mean me harm . . . Will you intervene in my favour . . . and save me from the awful fate I am bound to meet, and that of putting an end to my existence at my father’s very feet? How many young fellows are they that have suffered as I have done – all for the sin of my father. I never brought myself out in this world, and far better would it have been, as I wrote him today, had he wrung my neck as a child than make me undergo today the humiliation, the disgrace, of hearing a name he denies me now, which has brought me all these evils.

  Lord Sackville continued to refuse a meeting, pleading that, ‘The state of my health and what took place last year prevents me from ever seeing you again.’ He suggested that Henry go to see Mr Brain at Pemberton’s instead. Victoria, too, excused herself on the grounds that Lionel would not approve of her seeing Henry without his permission, but that he was away. On the fifth, Henry turned up again at Knole at five o’clock in the afternoon, and insisted upon seeing Papa. Victoria bundled Vita out of the way to protect her from any unpleasantness, and the porter Lipscombe told Henry that there was no one there to see him. Henry started to force his way across the Green Court, the first courtyard in the ceremonial route that his ancestor Thomas Sackville had devised for the entertainment of monarchs three hundred years before. Two footmen hurried to help Lipscombe turn Henry out of the house, stopping him at the Inner Wicket, the entrance to Lord Sackville’s apartments. Here, Henry carried on talking to the servants in a loud voice for a couple of hours, claiming that Lord Sackville had been married to Pepita, and that he was therefore the rightful heir to Knole. Eventually he burst into hysterical tears and left just before the police arrived.

  When Henry returned to Knole the next day, he found a policeman on the door, and he confided to him that he would go to ‘extremities’ on Saturday if his father did not meet him in London. Lord Sackville, by now, was anxious to settle, and Mr Brain advised that it might be as well to offer Henry an allowance of £100 a year, ‘considering Papa’s feeling & hatred of being talked about’.

  Lionel was away as these dramas unfolded, but Victoria felt that circumstances were serious enough to warrant her wiring her ‘darling boy’ to return for a meeting with Henry. ‘I have been so reluctant to make him give up his stalking,’ she wrote, but circumstances demanded the interruption of his sporting season, just as they had at Elveden almost exactly two years before, when Henry first announced his intentions.

  See Notes on Chapter 6

  7

  Parallel Lives

  It is hard not to feel sympathy for Henry, as he moved between England and France towards the end of 1898, trailing his suitcase of papers and ‘proofs’. His first visit to Knole, the object of his obsession, had just ended unceremoniously in eviction. His threats, and his awkward English, inspired a sense of amusement and fun, as well as fear, in the members of his legitimate family. He was virtually penniless, and as uncertain as ever of the circumstances surrounding his birth and identity. Only the previous year, his father had claimed, in his deposition, that he was in ‘a very different state of mind from the state of mind I had when I was at Arcachon in 1866 . . . my feeling at Arcachon in 1866 was one of great affection both for her [Pepita] and the children, that feeling has now been considerably modified’. Lord Sackville had now begun to doubt whether he was even the father of Max, as well as Henry. What other revelations would be forthcoming?

  For the time being, though, all Henry wanted was enough money to live on the Continent ‘as a gentleman’. He wrote to Victoria in what she described as ‘a very dictatorial way’, demanding a meeting. ‘What cheek!’ she wrote, ‘He treats us as if he was doing us a favour to see us but we only condescend to meet him as we pity Papa who is so frightened and weak.’ In view of Henry’s recent appearance at Knole, Lionel returned early to London, telling Victoria that he preferred her ‘peace of mind to the most delightful stalking’ (although, as yet, he had not shot any stags), and together they went to meet Henry at Mr Brain’s office. Lionel had apparently formed ‘the greatest contempt for H’, and when Henry repeated that all he wanted was ‘an honourable situation’, Lionel contemptuously and quietly added, ‘like a footman’. Meanwhile, Henry’s debts drifted towards the Sackvilles: a letter to Victoria asking for help in paying his hotel bill, a letter to Lord Sackville from his tailor saying that Henry had ordered £20 worth of clothes and given his father’s name as a reference. Lord Sackville replied promptly that he would not
guarantee payment, a refusal that Henry found ‘extremely unkind’, even ‘more so after what has already taken place’.

  Henry outlined his situation to Victoria on 17 October. If it was their intention to compensate him in some way for what he had been ‘deprived’ of and ‘not to do things on the cheap’, he was quite sure a settlement would soon be reached:

  If I can get away from here to France . . . with the knowledge I am well provided for and thus be able to live without want I am sure I will leave you Knole and think no more about it. My desire is peace . . . I want to get married and settle down somewhere. I will try and forget what has been done to me so I advise you to earnestly meet me and grant me like honest people what I shall ask you which you can well afford, otherwise you will drive me mad, precipitate matters, and I will get beyond control. Mind you I am not using any threat, I am not blackmailing nor any wish to extort.

  Towards the end of October, Henry saw Mr Pemberton, who suggested, on behalf of the Sackvilles, an allowance of £100 a year. At first, Henry described this proposal as ‘most absurd’, and threatened to come down to Knole again. A watchman was put on the front door to prevent a repeat of events earlier in the month, but Henry never came. Threatened with the prospect of no allowance at all, Henry eventually agreed to the proposal and was persuaded to return to Paris; his father even paid his tailor’s bill. Henry soon regretted his decision. ‘It was absolutely madness on my part to have ever attempted to start here with only £5 in pocket,’ he wrote to his father from the Grand Hotel Terminus on 28 November. He really needed £4 to £5 a week for the first year in order to make a proper start, he argued, and was besieged by creditors who threatened to make his life ‘absolutely intolerable until these accounts are settled with’. Three days later he was back in England again, at the Charing Cross Hotel, despite the fact that ‘my coming over is looked upon as a breach of the promise made you’, in order to ‘lay the facts [of his penury] before Mr. Pemberton’. ‘Give me the chance of getting out of this mess I am in,’ he begged his father, ‘and leave the rest to me. You will have no cause to regret it . . . I am short of boots, shirts, and underwear, and require a hat. It will appear ridiculous to you that I should mention all this, but want is necessity.’