The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  Gradually, he began to refine the probable sequence of events between June and October 1901. A man called José Sanchez had, at the time, been the only full-time clerk in the parish office of San Millán, where the marriage registers were kept in an unlocked wooden cupboard. During the afternoons, Sanchez had the office to himself, and it seemed highly likely that Rophon arranged with Sanchez for the names in the register, the 7th Book of Marriages, to be scratched out and rewritten, either in the office itself or in some other place where the book had been temporarily removed under cover of a bulky coat.

  In the spring of 1903, Señor Paredes recommended that there was sufficient evidence to apply for a re-opening of the Denuncia proceedings, and asked for the prosecution of Henry, Rophon and Sanchez. In July, Sanchez and Rophon were arrested and held until the following month. By this stage, Camille Lanquine had fallen out with his uncle and started offering information to the other side, the Sackvilles: it was Lanquine who had denounced Rophon’s activities. Henry at first thought it must have been Lens who had betrayed him and Rophon, and there were violent scenes in the translation bureau between Henry and Lens, whom Henry called a ‘canaille’ – a scoundrel.

  In October of that year, Henry updated Max on the latest developments, after a ‘long silence’. He had never heard whether Max had received the lock of Pepita’s hair, which had been cut from her head when she had been exhumed in 1897, washed, shaped into a ‘P’, and posted in a gilt frame. Henry could only suppose that Victoria or her father had threatened Max. ‘It has been her play to separate you and my sisters from me,’ he wrote. ‘I know and possess the proof that neither Flora nor Amalia can write to me without risking to see their allowance stopped immediately by Victoria, and it may be that you are placed in the same position.’

  Although Sanchez and Rophon had been let off, further criminal proceedings were launched against the two of them six years later, along with a character called Manuel Anton, who had conveniently gone missing. ‘The court was crowded,’ The Times reported in March 1909, ‘as an immense amount of interest is being taken in the case. After the long ceremonies which are customary in a Spanish court, the usher read the indictments presented by the prosecution’: the charge of being involved in altering the entry in the marriage register. Although on subsequent days, according to the Irish Times, ‘most of those present were out-of-work labourers, apparently attracted to the court by a desire to enjoy for a few hours the comfortable temperature of a well-warmed hall’, the English press continued to be well represented. They all enjoyed the odd moments of hilarity, particularly when Oliva’s brother, Agustin, testified that Pepita had never been married to his brother. So deaf was he that the usher had to bellow the questions in his ear.

  Pepita’s niece, Catalina, testified too. She declared that Pepita had been married to ‘a noble and rich Englishman’, who showered the family with gifts of money and was always referred to as ‘Uncle Leon’ (a Spanish version of Lionel) or ‘Uncle Lord’ (which he did not become until long after Pepita’s death). Catalina described how ‘a certain other Englishman, named Williams, who posed as a brother of Pepita’s husband’ – possibly, my great-grandfather William Edward – had come on a mission to Spain to destroy the proofs of Pepita’s marriage, ‘as the union of his brother with the ballet girl dishonoured the family’. Once he had done this, she claimed, he planned to ‘simulate’ the marriage of Pepita to Oliva.

  One of the chief witnesses was Ricardo Dorremocea, the parish clerk who had been arrested and acquitted on charges of falsifying the register back in 1901. His testimony provided a shadowy insight into the underworld of Madrid, as he recalled being approached in the summer of 1901 by a couple of chulos (wide boys) sporting dark moustaches, stylish automobile caps (rather than the more traditional wide-brimmed hat), and light jackets with black patches on the elbows. Dorremocea had arranged to meet one of them in a tavern later, and it was here, over a drink, that he was offered a large sum of money to burn the marriage register, or at least to tear out the page recording the marriage of Pepita Duran. Despite the fact that the chulo was carrying a barely concealed revolver, Dorremocea claimed that he had refused to carry out the commission.

  The principal prosecution witnesses included Camille Lanquine, who claimed, on the basis of correspondence between Henry and Rophon, which he himself had translated, that it was Henry who had instigated Rophon to commit the forgery. He said that the large sums of money Rophon had received in 1901 had been specifically for what was referred in the letters to ‘work’ carried out in the parish register at San Millán. Records supplied by the Crédit Lyonnais Bank in Madrid confirmed that Rophon had been sent more than 10,000 pesetas from Paris that summer. Lanquine further alleged that Rophon had told him that it was he who had taken the register and erased some names from the entry, instructing an individual whom he called ‘Paco’ (almost certainly Manuel Anton) to fill them in again. Matias Paulus, another former employee of the same translation bureau in Paris, also accused Rophon of having falsified the register at Henry’s instigation.

  A French lawyer named Max Maisonneuve, who had been helping Henry to collect evidence in Spain and who also had an interest in the translation bureau in Paris, cast doubt in court on the profiteering motives of both Paulus and Lanquine. The latter appeared to have changed sides after his falling out with his uncle, and had then been prepared to sell compromising letters to the highest bidder. In contrast to these rather unreliable witnesses, the good-looking Rophon made a favourable impression in the witness box. Although he admitted receiving money from Henry in return for help with his researches, he denied having forged the register. Sanchez, too, protested his innocence, and denied having had anything to do with Rophon. Despite evidence to suggest that Sanchez must at least have known what was going on – evidence that included hand-drawn plans of the parish offices, details of who sat where, and of their typical daily routines – doubts were expressed about the general sloppiness of the security arrangements. It was argued, in effect, that anyone could have tampered with the register. Furthermore, the evidence of the handwriting experts was inconclusive. Sanchez’ lawyer played to the populist mood of the court when he asked why it was that ‘people of a somewhat vulgar type’ (like his client) stood accused, while it was surely those who had paid for the forgery – ‘the moral authors of the falsification’ – who were really the guilty ones.

  The jury was split 6–6, and the defendants were therefore acquitted. The charges were withdrawn by the prosecution and, to Victoria’s fury, the suspects released. Lionel, she wrote, had refused to bribe the jury to the tune of £1,000, as their Spanish lawyer Señor Paredes had suggested, and this, she claimed, had worked against them. ‘Rophon and all the other Spanish witnesses seem to have been bought & they all contradict what they said in 1897. And also the priests have influenced them greatly [note Victoria’s deep-seated suspicion].’ And yet Lionel had, quite rightly she felt, refused to offer bribes. ‘That is justice!’

  Throughout Vita’s childhood, there was always, she wrote, ‘some mystery in the background’. She heard the servants’ gossip and her parents’ snatched discussions about the looming succession case. She ‘realised dimly that a vinegary spinster aunt [Amalia] lived with us for some years at Knole, and annoyed Mother by giving me preserved cherries when Mother asked her not to, also that there was a person called Henry who from time to time came to the entrance and demanded to see Grandpapa, but was not allowed to’. But for most of the time, life at Knole around the turn of the century was very quiet.

  Her grandfather certainly was. Many years later, in Pepita, Vita attempted to describe this enigma of a man, whom she knew ‘as intimately as a child of eight can ever know a very reserved old man of nearly eighty’. ‘I knew his little habits and his funny ways. I knew the way in which he would slam his tweed cap down on the settee on the way to the dining-room, stumping along towards luncheon without speaking a word – for he was without exception the most taciturn man
I have ever known.’ Every night he would leave a plate filled with fruit for Vita in a drawer in his sitting-room for her to collect in the morning. He would spend hours whittling paper-knives from the lids of cigar-boxes, and polishing them with sandpaper till the surface was like velvet. He had a set of little sayings that he invariably came out with whenever the occasion arose. ‘Nice fresh taste’, he used to say as the first gooseberries of the year were served. And as soon as Midsummer Day had passed, he used to say ‘Days drawing in now’ – just as my own father did.

  Vita’s first cousin Eddy often came to stay, and many years later he, too, recalled life in the big house, with its year-round smell of cold wood smoke and the slow, steady tick of myriad grandfather clocks. Every now and then, he remembered, his great-uncle would venture forth from a room, which was bare of all possessions except for a leather armchair and a glass case containing a wasp’s nest. ‘In this cold and cheerless cell,’ wrote Eddy, ‘the possessor of some of the finest furniture and silver in England would immerse himself for hours at a time, perusing either Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or the works of Josephus. These books he read through regularly every year, and as he closed the last volume of either he would remark: “Good book, that.” He was never known to vary this comment, nor to enlarge upon it.’ Eddy would follow his great-uncle around the house, holding Lord Sackville’s hand in one hand and a shawl in the other. ‘And so we went very slowly indeed, for he was old and I was not yet at all firm upon my legs – in and out of the dim old rooms and passages, up and down stairs (one step at a time) and along what seemed miles of gallery, with the peak of the shawl trailing far out on the floor behind me.’

  Despite the cheerlessness of Lord Sackville’s own domestic arrangements, his daughter was transforming the rest of Knole into what she later described as ‘the most comfortable large house in England’. On top of these expenses were the shopping trips to Paris, Lionel and Victoria’s stock market speculations, and the legal proceedings in Spain and England. By September 1904, the ‘case’ had cost the Sackvilles £20,000. In contrast to Henry’s murky sources of finance, it was quite clear that the Sackvilles were getting their money from Sir John Murray Scott – or ‘Seery’, as they called him.

  Seery was an enormous man, according to Vita, ‘six-feet-four in his stockings’ and weighing over twenty-five stone, but ‘always as fresh and pink as a baby, with his white mutton-chop whiskers, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks’. There was something so monumental about him that he ‘made everyone of normal size look mere friskers around him. Perpetually flapping a large silk handkerchief to keep away the flies, he rolled and billowed along on disproportionately tiny feet.’ Victoria had befriended Seery in the late 1890s, and he was alternately enchanted and exasperated by her. ‘Really, nobody could have failed to love her as she was then,’ wrote Vita. ‘My mother was adorable at that time in her life. She was tiresome, of course, and wayward and capricious, and thoroughly spoiled; but her charm and real inward gaiety enabled her to carry it all off.’

  For the next fifteen years, Seery and Victoria enjoyed a tempestuous, though platonic, relationship. Seery began to lend the Sackvilles money – £18,600, at first, at only three per cent interest, secured on mortgages on the Knole estates. This sum was to grow, to include other aspects of their lifestyle, to around £84,000 in gifts and loans over the course of his lifetime.

  Nevertheless, Victoria worried about money. She began to cut down on improvements to the house at 34 Hill Street in London that Seery had just bought for them. And she tried to make economies at Knole, by shutting the house in the winter months and coming back only for the summer. Her father, after a lifetime of financial fecklessness, had no idea how to make the books balance. When Victoria came down to Knole one evening in November 1906, she found ‘Papa very much taken up with the Knole accounts of which he does not understand a word. We must retrench! He has not told us for several years that he was living beyond his income and now the crisis has come . . . The waste in the garden, especially in Vegetables, has been awful.’

  The other great trial in the Sackvilles’ life was Papa’s declining health. In January 1905, ‘poor old Stubbs’, an elderly retainer, died of delirium tremens and was buried in the neighbouring village of Seal. Lord Sackville was very upset to see all those men in black walking through one of the courtyards at Knole, on the way to the funeral. ‘The poor old dear dreads death terribly,’ Victoria wrote, and as the last one left of his nine brothers and sisters, he hated more and more to be left alone. He was ‘more silent than ever’ and increasingly slow at taking things in.

  At night his coughing kept Victoria awake, particularly if he had been smoking. ‘He almost chokes & frightens us so,’ Victoria wrote, ‘I do feel so sorry for him, as his cough is terrible at times & he looks at us then, as if he was on the rack – poor dear old mann [sic].’

  See Notes on Chapter 8

  9

  A Death in the Family

  Towards the end of 1907, Lord Sackville was diagnosed with prostate cancer. ‘Lionel & I are doing all we can & sparing no expense to save his life’ (the operation and nursing home expenses came to £300), and Victoria felt her own strength breaking down, ‘as poor Papa is so cross and so contrary in every way’. Although the surgeon did not give him more than a year to live, his immediate recovery from the operation was marked by the fact that he was ‘getting very cross’ with Victoria ‘over every trifle, as formerly’. He never spoke at meals, except to say ‘something disagreeable’. There was one advantage of his perpetual cantankerousness: although Victoria found it ‘so sad to see all that want of kindness’, she much preferred that ‘he should not be nice to me, otherwise the pain of seeing him wasting away would be unbearable’.

  Victoria was not a natural nurse, finding aspects of his illness, particularly the incontinence, distasteful. But as distressing as her father’s final decline was Victoria’s own sense, growing over the previous few years, that there ‘seems so much ingratitude in the world’. When her father-in-law had died in the autumn of 1905, she wished that he had left her ‘the smallest little souvenir’. She found her brother-in-law Charlie and his wife Maud mean (particularly their Christmas present of a book costing 2/6), and her father himself just as mean. She was fed up with paying for the house linen when her allowance was too small to cover it. As a result, she began 1906 with a resolution not to wear herself out doing things for other people, especially her family, as she had done till now. ‘I shall use a great deal of “judicious neglect”. I am sick of the ingratitude I meet on all sides.’ In particular, she resented having ‘to spend a lot of my own money for Knole and ---- Eddy’. Here were the first signs that she was starting to feel as disinherited, in a way, as her siblings. This sense of injustice would come to dominate the second half of her life.

  As Victoria read The King’s Secret, one of the teenage Vita’s many historical romances, she was struck by the fact that the character of Cranfield, whom Vita intended as a portrayal of herself, was in fact much more open than its creator. This had prompted Victoria to think about those closest to her. ‘She is very clever and I really think she is perfectly devoted to me,’ Victoria wrote of her daughter, ‘but she does not let herself give enough. If only she could change and become warmer hearted! It has been rather hard to live all my life with Papa & Lionel who are both so cold on the surface, and now I find the same disposition in my child.’ Her husband’s ‘aridité de coeur’ made her suffer terribly, and her father had ‘not an atom of sympathy in his nature’. That is why, she wrote, she had taken to Seery ‘as a Father’: he was ‘sympathetique’, and appealed to the ‘Spanish’ side of her nature, although he, too, was ageing. When Victoria was in Paris with the two old men in April 1908, she spent ‘most of my evenings between Seery snoring and Papa coughing’.

  All the while, preparations were being made for the case that would inevitably follow Lord Sackville’s death. In October 1907, Henry filed his petition under the Legitimacy Declaratio
n Act, 1858. The following month, Victoria went to hear the Druce case, a notorious succession lawsuit which, she realised, had many echoes of Henry’s own case, and indeed of the case of the Tichborne Claimant – including an exhumation, and a limited liability company set up to finance the case of the claimant. (She was particularly pleased to get the claimant’s autograph.) High society was taking a similar interest in the Sackville case. Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress and a friend of Victoria, quizzed her about Henry. ‘I could see the King wanted to know!’ The only piece of ‘good’ news was the death in the spring of 1908 of the Comte de Béon, which ‘relieves us of a very tiresome witness in “the Case”’. In June she received a postcard announcing a visit by Henry and his wife (Henry had married Emélie Alexandre in Paris in April 1904), so she gave up a trip to the Opera in order to stay at home with her father, but they never came.