Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  This hard-driven, commercialising world is the one from which Renaissance Sissinghurst, in the hands of the next Sissinghurst family, now emerges. The Bakers, like their fellow townsmen, were men on the make. One of their ancestors, a Thomas Baker, had been taken to court in 1371 for illegally cutting down the archbishop’s trees. A hundred years later, it had become a pious and well-established family. In the late fifteenth century, another Thomas Baker owned lands in several parishes running south into Sussex, and when he died left money for masses to be said and the churches to be repaired in all of them. The little friaries at Moatenden and Lossenham had legacies and his daughters had some silver, feather beds and cushions. He left his best cow to his wife and to all his sons small pieces of land. Although Edward Hasted, the great eighteenth-century historian of Kent, wrote, and it has often been repeated, that this Thomas Baker first acquired at least part of Sissinghurst, there is no evidence that either he or his son Richard did so, and Sissinghurst appears in neither of their detailed wills.

  The surge begins with Thomas’s grandson, John Baker, Richard’s son, born in about 1488. When he was about fifteen, he was sent to London, with ten pounds a year to keep him at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was trained as a lawyer. It was the moment when the Bakers began to lift away from the Wealden entrepreneurial society and enter the boom conditions of Tudor London. John Baker thrived, becoming a leading barrister, an under-sheriff, recorder and Member of Parliament for London. It was a familiar track for a clever and ambitious man, and everything that is now at Sissinghurst, all the grandeur and riches that were once here, even if now worn and crumbled, had their origins in this man’s enterprise.

  In the early 1520s he married Catherine Sackville, the daughter of a Sussex knight. One of her brothers, Thomas, was married to Anne Boleyn’s aunt. It was the kind of invaluable connection that pushed John Baker into the mainstream of the English court and reformation. That four-hundred-year-old Sackville relationship to Sissinghurst was one of the factors playing in Vita’s mind when she decided to come here in 1930. At Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533, Baker made a speech to the young queen on behalf of the merchants and financiers of the City of London, where he was still the Recorder. Within a couple of years he had begun to make his way into the coils of government and power. In 1535 he had become an attorney in the pay of the Crown. A year later he was attorney general, pursuing papists on behalf of the reforming king, executing instructions prepared by Thomas Cromwell, the king’s first minister, who was in full, self-enriching career. When Cromwell fell in 1540, finally destroyed by the enmity and jealousy of those around him, Baker was there to benefit. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer, was appointed to the Privy Council, knighted and, most important of all, became Chancellor of the Court of First Fruits and Tenths, the court through which taxes that had previously gone to the pope now came to the Crown. Baker stood at the sluice gate through which the new money-river flowed into the royal exchequer, a flow into which Baker could dip his cup whenever he liked. He became Speaker of the House of Commons, a royal appointment. The electors of Kent refused to have him for one election in the 1540s but the royal officials found him another seat. He slid on in these jobs through the reigns of Edward VI and his sister Mary, and at every turn the lands and riches on which Sissinghurst would come to float steadily accrued around him.

  He already had his grandfather’s lands in Sussex and Kent. His first acquisition, bought from the de Berhams in 1533, was Sissinghurst itself, with its subsidiary manors of Copton and Stone. Five years later, when the Priory of Hastings was dissolved, the king gave his loyal attorney slabs of Sussex ‘to have to him and his heirs for ever’. Two years later, when Cromwell was dismissed and bloodily executed, Baker gratefully received lands all over the Kent and Sussex Weald which had previously belonged to his chief. On through the 1540s, scarcely a year passed without Sir John acquiring another manor or two. When Catholic rebels against Edward VI were condemned to death, Baker had some of their lands; and when Protestant rebels against Queen Mary fell and were executed, he had some of their lands too. Many places he bought with the money that came his way from his chancellorship of the Court of First Fruits.

  The result was that by the 1550s the Baker estate was one of the largest in Kent and Sussex, its archipelago of lands and manors stretching from beyond Eastbourne up to Maidstone and from Winchelsea to Pluckley. There were other manors in Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Essex, houses in Southwark and in the City of London, but the core was in the central Wealden parishes around Sissinghurst. It may, in all, have stretched to something approaching 15,000 acres, a spread of land that would be worth £75 million today.

  Those are the economic and political facts of his life, but there are further elements which add depth and colour to Baker’s story. The first is what he did at Sissinghurst after he had bought it from the de Berhams in 1533. In the 1930s my grandmother thought that Sir John had built himself an enormous brick house here, with an entrance range, a tower and a large courtyard beyond it. It seemed to make sense that the acquirer of the lands had created the monument at its heart. But in the 1960s my father looked into it more carefully and it became clear, first of all, that Sissinghurst was not all of one phase. He consulted various architectural luminaries, including Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Jim Lees-Milne and Sir John Summerson, and came up with a building history that has been the orthodoxy ever since. According to my father, in the late fifteenth century the de Berhams abandoned a stone medieval house by the moat (said to have resembled Ightham Mote, a romantic building near Sevenoaks) and built themselves a brick house to the west of it, around a courtyard, and resembling instead Compton Wynyates, the great medieval brick house in Warwickshire. When John Baker bought this house, he is said to have inserted a modern Tudor gateway into the late-fifteenth-century entrance range. And when John Baker’s son Richard inherited the house in 1558, he was said to have knocked down all except that earlier entrance range and built a huge Renaissance palace in the place of the demolished Compton Wynyates, with a tower in its centre and its further reaches stretching out into the orchard.

  I, in my turn, with help from architectural historians and archaeologists, have now had another look at this story. There seems to be, first, no evidence of any Ightham Mote-like house. The medieval house almost certainly occupied only the south-west corner of the orchard, not the whole of it, and was almost certainly timber-framed, perhaps with some stone footings. Its tall bargeboarded gables are probably shown in the drawing of the back of the house made by Francis Grose in 1760. Nor is there any evidence of a house resembling Compton Wynyates built to replace it. These were the two great early English houses my father was most in love with, and he seems simply to have imported them into Sissinghurst because he liked the idea.

  The entrance gateway, from the style of its chimneys and their playing with geometrical forms, can be firmly dated to the 1530s. Inconveniently, though, the long wings of the front range on either side of them were not built then. Dendrochronology commissioned in the 1980s put the beams in the late sixteenth and in one case the eighteenth century (probably a repair), findings my father refused, with some passion, to accept. He liked to be able to tell Americans who came to stay that the bedroom they were sleeping in had been built in 1492.

  So what did happen? The simplest suggestion is that when John Baker bought the de Berhams’ house on the site of the present orchard, he kept it. It was an important manor house, with a history of distinguished occupants and its own chapel. It had a moated garden beside it. What he undoubtedly added was a small, dignified and wingless modern gatehouse, decorated with its fashionable chimneys. The gateway would have led into a large walled ‘base court’, at the far end of which, a good three hundred feet away, stood the medieval house. Such a huge empty courtyard may seem odd to us, and certainly would not fit with later, Italian-derived ideas of proportionality of space, but could be found in many Tudor houses.

  This simple picture fits b
oth the man and the moment. It is essentially conservative. It does little but slot the Bakers into a pre-existing, de Berham-shaped mould. In John Baker’s will, he asked his executors that his ‘funeralls be done and made in honest maner with out pompe or pryde according nevertheless as vnto my deggree apperteyneth’. That was the style of his house too: dignified but not extravagant. The timbers used inside his gatehouse are not, intriguingly, of the best. Many were reclaimed from other places, with slots and peg holes marking their earlier use, and with nothing like the consistently high quality of oak that can be found in other, later parts of the building. The house he had bought was saturated in real, medieval, inherited status and was good enough to entertain both the French ambassador and, on one occasion, Queen Mary. John Baker was not a man to blow everything he had so carefully accumulated on a grand and a pretentious gesture; far too careful for that.

  John Baker’s enormous will, proved at Canterbury and preserved in the National Archives, is a measure of his methods and his ideals. It is, in fact, a picture of the Sissinghurst through which he moved, one which, not by chance, looks like a depiction of a great medieval household. ‘I John Bakere of Cessyngherst in Kent Knyght one of the Kinge and Quenes Majestyes previe Counsell’ presided over an entire community at Sissinghurst. It is the statement of a great territorial patriarch and magnate. Alms were to be given to the poor, masses and dirges sung for his soul in sixteen churches across his estate, and the old Roman road from Sissinghurst to Staplehurst was to be mended. His sons and daughters (one of them Cecily, married to Thomas Sackville of Knole), his in-laws and sisters and their husbands, the parents of his godchildren and the godparents of his own children, his knightly neighbours and their wives: all were remembered with rings, golden cups and money.

  From them, he carefully steps down to his own servants, the people living with him in the great medieval house in the orchard. Mystris Marye Mustyamps, Benett Hale and Mother Water, all of whom had worked for him and his mother for many years, had generous legacies. Twenty-four of his menservants were named, including Anthonye of the Kitchen, James the Brewer and one John Nycolson, and all got money or gold rings.

  Finally, in a string of codicils ‘wrytten with myne owne hande by me John Bakere’, he turned to his family. His ‘good and loving sister Johanne Reames widow’, who had married a Benenden man, was to have an annuity ‘and two chambers in my manor of Cessingherst’. His other sister, Lady Wilforde, ‘for her paynes taken with me in the tyme of my sicknes’, had the leases of several properties. Everyone who had helped him and looked after him was attended to.

  There was no question here of dividing the great inheritance into equal parts, as the custom of Kent had been. Baker had ‘disgavelled’ his lands so that the bulk of the estate could remain whole and in the hands of a single heir. To his second son John, Sir John gave ‘Goddes blessinge and myne and £200 and such stuff I have in the Citie of London’ and ‘to you my doughters Marye, Cecyle and Elizabeth I gyve Goddes blessyng and myne requyringe you aboue all things to serve God and to be faithfull, assured, true, humble, lovinge and obedyent wifes vnto yor husbands’. They were off his hands. To his eldest son Richard, who was in his late twenties when this will was drawn up, he left the great prize that he had spent a life accumulating: the vast estate and Sissinghurst at its core.

  Sir John’s will is a paternalist vision, perhaps an old man’s sentimentality, of what his world should be, with Sissinghurst as a place where many would be employed and his own relations looked after, a family widely connected with the higher gentry and with an ideal of stability and completeness standing outside the turmoil of Reformation England. Almost nobody knows of this paternalist Sir John Baker because his name will be forever bloodied by one of the great triumphs of Elizabethan Protestant propaganda, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, usually known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This 2,300-page compendium of crimes committed against the Protestant martyrs of the English Reformation, particularly in the reign of Mary, was more widely read than any book except the Bible. In Elizabeth’s reign it stood by order of the archbishop in every cathedral in England as the companion to the translated scriptures. Cranbrook had opted hard and early for a fairly strict form of Protestantism and it is certain that in the independent-minded, entrepreneurial culture of the farmer-clothiers, there would have been many copies of Foxe’s book, at least in the richer houses scattered through the surrounding parishes. And Foxe, in one incident after another, drawing on personal testimony and eyewitness reports, damns this great man as a cruel and intemperate persecutor of Protestants. It is the dark side of his desire for the order and consolations of the old world.

  Sometimes the scene of the cruelty was Sissinghurst, sometimes in Cranbrook, sometimes in London. The earliest, in the reign of Henry VIII, concerned the persecution of a young Lincolnshire woman, Anne Askew, a friend of Henry’s last queen, Katherine Parr, who had been disseminating Protestant literature. The Catholics in Henry’s household wanted her to reveal her connections with the queen and put her on the rack in the Tower of London. Baker and the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, were there, asking the lieutenant of the Tower to rack her harder. He refused

  to streine her on the racke agayn. Which because he denied to doo, tendering the weakeness of the woman, he was threatened therfore grevously of the sayd Wrisley, saying that he woulde signifie hys disobedience unto the king: and so consequently upon the same, hee and Syr Iohn Baker throwing of[f] theyr gownes, would nedes play the tormenters them selves: first asking her if shee was with childe. To whom she aunswering againe, sayd: ye shall not neede to spare for that, but do your wylles upon me: And so quietly and paciently praying unto the Lorde, she abode their tyranny till her bones and ioyntes almost were plukt asunder, in such sort, as she was carried away in a chair.

  When she was eventually burned, aged twenty-five, Anne Askew couldn’t walk and was carried to the stake in that chair. In a later edition, Foxe cut Baker’s name out of this story, perhaps because the Baker family had managed to coerce him, perhaps through the intervention of the old patriarch’s son-in-law, Thomas Sackville, first earl of Dorset, a member of Elizabeth’s Council, the rheumy-eyed earl who used to stare at me from the dining-room wall when I was a boy.

  The reliability of Foxe’s witness is never very certain – he is an advocate not a reporter – but Baker’s rage and cruelty, often described verbatim, appear again and again in his book. When one Protestant, a Scotsman called Bland, came up before Baker as a magistrate in Cranbrook, the accused produced a Latin New Testament in court. Baker threw it across the courtroom (in the George Inn), shouting, ‘I wil geue sixe fagots to burne thee withal … Hence knaue, hence.’ One of the Protestants Sir John condemned to death that day turned to him and said, ‘My Lord, if we be killed at your hands for Christes sake, we shall liue with him for euer.’

  The story that comes closest to home, dramatising the condition of Sissinghurst in the middle years of the sixteenth century, and its separation from the surrounding country, concerns Edmund Allin, a miller, who lived at the beautiful Maplehurst Mill in Frittenden, a mile or two north of here. He was a man full of concern for his poor neighbours and ‘in a deare yere, when as many poore people were like to starue, he fed them, and solde his corne better cheape by halfe then others did: and did not that only, but also fedde them with the foode of life, reading to them the scriptures, and interpreting them’. The radicalism of the Reformation, its distrust and loathing of instituted authority, came in Allin’s hands sifting into these fields and lanes.

  Allin and his wife were reported to the priests, arrested and brought to Baker at Sissinghurst, where he kept them prisoner, in his ‘house the one from the other’. Where was that? Almost certainly in some back rooms of the de Berhams’ building in the orchard, now disappeared. Baker then began to play with his prisoner and ‘entreated the sayd Edmund Allin to come to Masse in his Chappell the next day’. This must have been the chapel that had been there since the fourtee
nth century. After much persuasion, Allin agreed to go to chapel with Baker the next day, who then allowed him to

  goe lye with his wife that night, and desired him to perswade her to come also, and he would deliuer them both out of prison. When [Allin] was come to his wife, he told her what he had promised, and she with teares sayd, hee shoulde go alone for her. Then he likewise lamentyng the same, sayd, he would go with her to death.

  I feel a kind of vicarious shame at this story, at this suffering imposed on young Kentish idealists, here in this house five hundred years ago. The next day, Baker came to Allin, asking him to keep his promise and come to chapel with him. Allin said: ‘I will not: do what you will with me.’ Then Sir John called out Allin’s wife, Katherine, and berated her:

  ‘Thou old whore, thy husband would be a Christian but for thee.’ Then he beate her very sore with his staffe in his hand, and sent them both to prison the next day, sending with them a cruell letter that they shoulde be burned out of hand.

  The manuscript notes from which Foxe wrote up this story (given to him by the vicar of Cranbrook) have survived, and it is clear that Foxe did not alter the evidence he had received.

  Allin and his wife escaped to Calais, but there his conscience troubled him and he returned to Frittenden to continue his secret ministry. He and his wife were arrested again, his house was ransacked by Baker’s men and in June 1557 Baker was given another chance to ‘taunt and revile him, without all mercy and pity’, as Foxe says, at a hearing in Cranbrook, at the George Inn. ‘We are al kings to rule our affections,’ Allin told Baker. One day, walking in Frittenden churchyard, the miller had realised he could never believe that a communion wafer was anything but a symbol. ‘He considered in the Churchyard with him selfe, that such a litle cake betwene the Priestes fingers could not be Christ, nor a materiall body, neither to haue soule, life, sinnewes, bones, flesh, legges, head, armes, nor brest.’ Baker could have no truck with this. ‘Away with him,’ he said. On 18 June 1557, Allin, his wife and five others, all tied to a single stake, were burned on King’s Meadow in Maidstone, one of them a blind girl called Elizabeth and another ‘a vertuous maiden cauled Jone Bradbrege’. As the wood was being laid around them, Joan