The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  Sir Robert Finlay drew attention to the general unreliability of Henry as a character. A particularly damning piece of evidence was the letter he had written to Victoria in 1890, acknowledging his illegitimacy. Sir Robert also referred to the letters Henry had sent to members of the family in 1896, threatening that ‘unless pressure is brought to bear to have him declared legitimate, he will make declarations which will drag the honour of an ancient family into the dust’. There were Henry’s shabby attempts, after his setbacks of 1898, to apologise and to blame Gabriel Salanson, and then his collaboration with Rophon in 1901 and his efforts to have it put on record that the entry in the marriage register had been tampered with. Although ‘it is not for me to bring home to anybody the guilt of doing it’, concluded Sir Robert Finlay, ‘it is perfectly plain that these alterations were made by someone who was intending to act in the interests of the Petitioner’.

  Vita attended the proceedings for the first time on the third day of the case. Victoria had encouraged her to come, against the wishes of her father, and pointed out scornfully to her daughter a group of uneasy-looking people in the courtroom: ‘Look at your relations.’ They seemed, as Vita later described: ‘very drab and black-suited and bowler-hatted, – not romantic at all. My Spanish relations! They looked like plumbers in their Sunday best. Where, oh where, was Pepita, the source and origin of all this wild and inordinately expensive romance? There was nothing left of Pepita but a falsified marriage register and this gloomy troop of Spaniards perching on the uncomfortable benches of the High Court of Justice. And a lot of posters on the railings, and headlines in all the papers. It was all very strange and confusing, and I was too young to understand it rightly.’

  This was the day that events took a dramatic turn. Just as the Sackvilles’ counsel was about to call their first witness, Sir Edward Clarke asked whether he could read to the court a letter he had just received from the petitioner. In the letter, Henry instructed his counsel to ask the judge for an adjournment of the case until he had received from Spain a number of ‘extremely important documents and photographs’, which were to be used in the cross-examination of the witnesses. ‘Should Sir John Bigham refuse I wish you to retire from the case as I do not care to go any further with such an unfair trial.’ Sir Edward Clarke was not prepared to apply for an adjournment, as he could not say the Spanish documents were material to his case, and felt obliged to withdraw from the case. The petitioner’s junior counsel followed suit, as did Henry’s solicitor, Fellowes, who declared that he could no longer advise Henry as his client had declined his advice not to apply for an adjournment.

  When the judge asked Henry what this important evidence from Spain consisted of, Henry was a little unclear and started to suggest documents that the court already had. Was Henry simply playing for time and was, as Sir Robert Finlay implied, his application for an adjournment purely ‘vexatious’, as even his own lawyers appeared to think? The judge suspended the sitting to allow Henry to consider the situation and, when the court reconvened, Henry said he wished to plead his own case, adding, ‘I know that I shall lose, but I will have a good try.’ The judge ruled that the case would continue the following day, with Henry cross-examining the defendants’ witnesses as best he could. Only if it became absolutely apparent, during the cross-examination, that Henry needed some specific document would he then approve an adjournment while those documents were obtained. Henry was now well and truly on his own, as he told the court: ‘I shall have no solicitor or Counsel, my Lord, and in fact I am a stranger in London because I have been for the last few months abroad with my wife who has been very ill – nearly dying.’

  Henry was reduced on the fourth day to cross-examining the defendants’ witnesses himself, which he did rather ramblingly: quizzing a lawyer called Francisco Ponce de Leon on points of Spanish law; failing to shake the increasingly frail Alfred Harrison, who had seen the unaltered marriage register over ten years before; and being rather bemused by Lord Weardale, who had known Lionel in 1868. ‘Do you think he would be capable of making a false registration of his children?’ Henry asked Lord Weardale of the late Lord Sackville, to which Lord Weardale replied: ‘I can understand a gentleman circumstanced as he was, anxious for the reputation of the lady with whom he was living and the children who were supposed to be his children, and were his children – I can understand his unfortunately making a breach of the ordinary rules which govern gentlemen.’

  When the defendants’ witnesses had finished giving their evidence, Henry once again asked the judge to adjourn the case, to give him time to bring his witnesses over from Spain and to bring to trial ‘the voluminous documentary evidence which has been duly collated by Letters of Request in Spain’. What witnesses might those be, the judge enquired? The whole of the Oliva family, Henry replied. ‘But that is very large, you know,’ observed the judge. ‘These Spanish people are sometimes very prolific.’ Even though there were no more than four or five Oliva witnesses, Henry did not know their addresses, nor could he give any idea of what they might say. It is hardly surprising, then, that the judge refused Henry’s request for an adjournment. He was ‘personally quite satisfied that it would be of no advantage whatever’ to Henry. In the light of all this, Henry gave up: ‘I can do nothing more, my Lord. I am done. I can do nothing more. I cannot defend myself any further.’

  This was confirmed on the morning of the fifth day, when the judge read out a letter written by Henry in Eastbourne over the weekend. Having been refused an adjournment, ‘and having no Counsel or Solicitors to advise me and conduct my case, I wish to tell your Lordship that, although it breaks my heart, I retire my petition, as I am unable to fight my case’.

  It was left to Sir Robert Finlay to present his case; and for the Attorney General, as co-defendant (because a seat in the House of Lords was at stake), to give his opinion. Although the Attorney General could not ‘refrain from an expression of sympathy’ for a man who had found that the declaration made by his father on his birth certificate was untrue, he felt that the petitioner had ‘wholly failed to make out his case and that Judgment should be given against him’.

  In his summary, Sir John Bigham admitted that the strongest parts of the petitioner’s evidence were the declarations made by the late Lord Sackville himself. But he believed that these had been made solely to ‘please Pepita and to give an appearance of respectability to the life they were leading’. More significantly, he was satisfied that Lionel had never married Pepita – quite simply, because it had been proved beyond all doubt that Pepita had married Oliva.

  The evidence which supported this was: first, the entry in the Book of Entradas, which recorded the application on 6 December 1850 for a marriage licence; next, a licence issued by the Vicaria on the 9 January 1851 to the priest of the parish church of San Millán, authorising him to perform the ceremony; then, an entry in the church register recording the marriage on 10 January 1851; and finally, an entry of a marriage on the same date in the civil register, kept by the municipal authorities in Madrid. Although two of these books had been tampered with – namely, the Book of Entradas at the Vicaria, and the register at the church of San Millán – the judge was convinced that this had been done by someone acting in the supposed interest of the petitioner, to raise the suspicion that the entries originally referred to some marriage other than that of Pepita and Oliva. The problem was that ‘the persons who were guilty of this clumsy fraud had overlooked or had not been able to get at’ the entry of the licence to perform the religious ceremony or the entry in the civil register, both of which were in perfect order. Moreover, there was evidence that entry No. 581 in the Book of Entradas and the entry in the church register had been seen, authenticated, and copied in 1896 and 1897, when they were completely free of any erasures or alterations.

  As a result, Sir John was satisfied that the two books had been ‘tampered with in recent years, and probably in view of this litigation’. He had heard of the criminal prosecution in Madrid, and how the jury
had been unable to reach a verdict. ‘However this may be,’ he concluded, ‘the circumstances raise a suspicion against the Petitioner himself which in my opinion it was his duty to dispel by going into the witness box and submitting to cross-examination. He did not tender himself as a witness and the suspicion is not dispelled. I therefore dismiss the Petition with costs.’

  After the collapse of Henry’s case, the Sackvilles returned to Knole in style – their progress lovingly described in a souvenir edition of the Sevenoaks Chronicle. The freshly vindicated Lord Sackville went to the House of Lords to ‘sign his name like the other peers’, before driving down to Sevenoaks in the motor car with his wife and daughter. At the railway bridge, they transferred from the car into their horse-drawn carriage, and were driven, as Vita later described, to the top of the town ‘by our incomparable coachman Bond, who wore his top-hat at an angle a Regency dandy might envy and who had a figure that any Savile Row tailor might have been proud to dress’. A triumphal arch of foliage, bearing the words ‘The Town Welcomes You’, greeted them as they drove up the London Road. The carriage then stopped for a few words of welcome by the Chairman of the Sevenoaks Urban District Council and the Chairman of the Sevenoaks Horticultural and Floral Society. Lady Sackville and her daughter were presented with bouquets of flowers – rare orchids for her ladyship, and lilies of the valley for Vita.

  Lord Sackville stood up in the carriage and thanked the cheering crowds for the warmth of their welcome: ‘I can only say that the enthusiasm and cordiality with which you have received us have touched us far beyond anything that mere words can convey, and the kindly feeling of which this demonstration is the expression will never be forgotten by us . . . I beg you to believe that the memory of this day’s reception will be one which time can never obliterate.’

  They were all set now for the final leg of the journey. The pair of horses were unharnessed from the carriage and ropes attached instead. With a band leading the way, the carriage was pulled along by members of the local fire brigade in full uniform, across the park and through the front entrance of the house into the Green Court. Here, Lord and Lady Sackville received a hearty welcome from their household: on behalf of the staff, Miss Dorothy Stubbs, the youngest daughter of the head gardener, presented Victoria with another bouquet, and Miss Marjory Bond, daughter of the head coachman, presented Vita with a large box of chocolates. Lionel thanked the firemen for their ‘arduous efforts’: ‘I have had three modes of progress today – motor-car, horses in the carriage, and now you have dragged us up here. I think the last mentioned method of progress has been the most comfortable and safest. It is now 20 years since Lady Sackville and myself were dragged up here in a similar manner to Knole, when we returned to Sevenoaks after our honeymoon. I only hope our weight has not sensibly increased in that interval.’ Just as he stopped speaking, the band struck up ‘Home, sweet home’, a ‘most appropriate finish’ to the afternoon’s celebrations, the newspaper concluded. In the evening, an enormous bonfire was lit just outside the gates to Knole: ‘Thus ended one of the most impressive and exciting episodes in the history of Sevenoaks.’

  Many of the local inhabitants had taken a day’s holiday to celebrate the occasion. As the Sevenoaks Chronicle observed: ‘After Wednesday, who will accuse the residents of Sevenoaks with being devoid of enterprise; who will say they lack enthusiasm; who will suggest they are unable to pay due honour to those they respect and are delighted to welcome home? It was certainly a red letter day in the history of the old town, but it was a splendid illustration of what the inhabitants can do when they are united and in earnest.’ Even ‘Dame Nature [had] smiled on the proceedings, for a delightful day was sandwiched between days of unfavourable weather.’

  ‘Never, before or since, have I felt so much like royalty,’ wrote Vita. Her father, on the other hand, claimed it all ‘an abominable nuisance’.

  As a result of the case, the Sackvilles, a family noted for their reserve, were temporarily the most notorious family in the country. The case had been blazoned across the newspapers, appeared in lights in theatreland (The Marriages of Mayfair), and was even to seep twenty years later into Orlando, Virginia Woolf’s elegiac novel about Knole. In Orlando, the entry in the marriage register in the church of San Millán became ‘nothing less, indeed, than a deed of marriage, drawn up, signed, and witnessed between his Lordship, Orlando, Knight of the Garter, etc., etc., etc., and Rosina Pepita, a dancer, father unknown, but reputed a gypsy, mother also unknown but reputed a seller of old iron in the market-place over against the Galata Bridge’. When the case was finally settled, ‘and the result of the lawsuit was made known (and rumour flew much quicker than the telegraph which has supplanted it), the whole town was filled with rejoicings . . . Hospitals were founded. Rat and Sparrow clubs were inaugurated. Turkish women by the dozen were burnt in effigy in the market-place, together with scores of peasant boys with the label “I am a base Pretender”, lolling from their mouths . . .’

  There were a couple of postscripts. On 26 February, the judge dismissed Henry’s claim to the accumulated income that had been retained by the Knole trustees pending the outcome of the legitimacy case. And in March, Henry presented a motion for a re-hearing of the main case, on the grounds that not all the documents contained in the letters of request to Spain had arrived in time for the case, and that the judge had therefore been wrong to refuse an adjournment; he also objected to the implication that he had in some way been involved in tampering with the marriage register. On 6 April, however, he abandoned the motion for a re-hearing.

  An editorial article in The Times probed the psychology of claimants such as Henry. It captured the ambivalence at the very centre of their being, and highlighted how they could never accept the marginal status in law to which their illegitimacy condemned them: ‘His disappointment is always with him, and he broods over his wrongs. He forgets that for many years he has been treated, and has regarded and spoken of himself, as illegitimate. He looks about for evidence, and he finds people who, quite sincerely and more or less accurately, tell him just what he wants. So a case is built up, it may be with full conviction, entirely satisfactory to the claimant and his friends, but too certain to fall, as this case has fallen, like a house of cards the moment it is exposed to judicial criticism.’ This is probably what happened with Henry, and with Flora and Amalia too. Given that much of the evidence, in the form of declarations of legitimacy, however false, came from their own father, it is not surprising they were so confused about their origins. Their behaviour was not, perhaps, as cynical or opportunistic as it sometimes seems (such accusations could equally be levelled at Victoria), but simply lost and bewildered.

  Max had been the only sibling to support Victoria throughout the case. Once it was over, relations between him and his sister cooled, for it was a sad but recurring theme that Victoria tended to turn off the charm when she had got what she wanted. Max had been keen to re-establish a rapport with her, and to assume a role, as responsible eldest child, within the family. He was due to visit England in the spring of 1910, a few months after the successful conclusion of the case, as Pietermaritzburg’s representative to the Imperial Pageant, but promised Victoria that he would not embarrass her. He would not reveal, for example, that he was in any way connected with the Sackville family, and would be known as ‘plain Mr West, which means nothing’. The pageant was postponed, due to the death in May of King Edward VII, but Max came to England nevertheless, for the sake of his daughter, Vivian, who had never travelled outside Natal, and to see a specialist for his throat: ‘I have had a wolf or tiger at my throat for the last 5 years and I am only a shadow of my former self.’ He was only just over fifty, but looked, he said, ‘sixty or more, and what is worse I feel it’.

  Max and Vivian did meet Victoria for a few minutes in London. ‘I have never had such pleasure in the world,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘but it was hard work not breaking down.’ Victoria, on the other hand, was upset that Max would not agree to disow
ning his name entirely on a proposed visit to Knole (he was not prepared to travel anywhere under an assumed name). ‘You say you want to meet our wishes more than half way,’ she wrote to Max, ‘and this was our wish par excellence, that you have ignored. I cannot hide from you, dear M., that I have been greatly upset by your resolve and also by our meeting last Monday. My nervous system has been out of order, since this trying winter and now by A. & F. going on the stage. So I am ordered to take a complete rest from all strong emotions, or else I shall buck down . . . So, don’t think me unkind if we do not meet very soon.’ She was relieved that the specialist had told Max that he did not have cancer, and sent him a cheque.

  Max pleaded with his sister not to think harshly of him: ‘But do not do me the wrong of thinking that I wished to hurt your feelings in any way. When will you recognise that I am fond of you, and that I have from my heart always felt for you? Do you think that I would willingly add to our trouble? . . . But I am very heartsore and bitterly disappointed. It was indeed a load of sorrow and of shame that father left us. How it has eaten into the heart of us all.’ Max was never to visit Knole – the only one of the siblings not to.