Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  Was that the tone here? Or had Richard Baker, like Sir Francis Carew at Beddington in Surrey in August 1599, dressed his cherry trees in canvas tents delaying their season, so that the fruit would be at perfect ripeness on the day the queen came? Or did he drive his Park deer into a small paddock so that the queen might shoot one or two without much effort, as happened at Cowdray? Or did he make green houses in the Park, the walls of hazels cut and stuck in the ground, roofed in ivy, the interior hung with tapestries and the floor thick with strewing herbs and parsley, as the earls of Pembroke did in Clarendon Park near Salisbury? Did he have a young man serenading the queen under her window as soon as she awoke? Or did the Faery Queen with her accompanying maidens come dancing across the garden towards her, singing a song of flowery delight? Did the queen herself dance, in the high-stepping style for which this smallpox-scarred, wig-wearing forty-year-old was known across Europe? Or did she play the virginals in her own chamber, as she often did ‘when she was solitary, to shun melancholy’?

  All of this happened elsewhere on her progresses. Sadly, none of it is recorded for Sissinghurst. All we know for sure is that Richard Baker gave her

  One standynge cup, the bodie chaste [?] and cover partli christall, garnished with silver and guilt; in the top of the cover is a lion holding the Queen’s armes cxvii oz

  A rich cup weighing 117 ounces far outdid the offering made by the Culpepers (46 ounces), the townsmen of Cranbrook (47 ounces) and even the Guilfords (55 ounces). After three days, queen and courtiers left, perhaps with trumpets and drums in the court, and three days later, when they had travelled on to Dover, Baker followed them and was duly knighted, the reward which sealed his vastly expensive, entirely Elizabethan and father-denying efforts to make Sissinghurst a Renaissance palace in an invented park.

  NINE

  Disintegration

  My ideas for the farm had collapsed in the summer of 2006. I wasn’t going to let them go, but this was clearly the moment for a pause. One or two moves were made: the prospect of a Sissinghurst dairy herd disappeared, as a hop garden had earlier. Both were unaffordable. The Trust started negotiations to buy a small and slightly run-down neighbouring holding called Whitegate Farm. Its buildings would be useful if the larger scheme ever took off. And the break-clauses in the four old tenancies on the farm were invoked. If we missed this window, there would be no chance of changing the farm system here for another five years. But things were scarcely going ahead at full speed.

  I went back again to the longer story of Sissinghurst, to what I had always thought of as the long slide of a decline between the days of Elizabethan glory and the moment my grandparents arrived in 1930. Sissinghurst was not Knole. It had fallen from its great height, and that decline and collapse were the part of the story I now turned to. Again I found a surprise: as the great house had imploded, the land around it had thrived.

  First, from about 1600 to the 1640s, Sissinghurst had continued as the Bakers’ grand and occasionally visited hunting lodge, an increasingly out-of-date palace in a park. It was a period of profound inactivity. The Bakers were based largely at their house in Lime Street in the City of London and from the late 1630s onwards in a new, expensively rented and richly furnished house in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, part of the earl of Bedford’s development, designed by Inigo Jones, within spitting distance of the palace at Whitehall. Generation by generation, the Bakers trained as lawyers in the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn and hung around the edges of the Stuart court. They were among the first to buy a baronetcy in 1611 – the fee went to pay for the army in Ireland – while Sissinghurst remained occupied largely by their servants and filled with their possessions. Sir Henry Baker died at court in December 1623 from ‘a contagious, spotted, or purple fever, that reigns much’. He left to his ‘loving wife Catherine all the plate and furniture in her chamber at my house of Sissinghurst, her apparrell & my jewells, Rings, Bracelets etc and half the other plate and silver dishes & half the linen in my house’. His son Sir John had the other half but Catherine kept his ‘plate and household stuff and furniture in London’. Loyalty to their servants appears in will after will, as it had done in the sixteenth century. Sir Henry left to ‘the wife of one Lovell who nursed my son Thomas £55 … wch I have laid ready in gold for that purpose in my Cabinett att Sissinghurst’.

  There is a hint that the Bakers may have continued as secret Catholics, drawing on the inheritance of the great Sir John, or at least as High Anglicans. In 1639, the chapel at Sissinghurst was, according to Thomas Philipott, the seventeenth-century historian, ‘re-edified’. Sissinghurst was ‘in the wilds of Kent’ and ‘by reason of deep and fowle ways (especially in winter)’ the latest Sir John Baker and his family were ‘not able without much trouble and danger duly to frequent the church’ in Cranbrook. Hence they needed their chapel here. The archbishop’s licence describes it as ‘newly built and decently embellished, apart from the ordinary part of the house’, and so one can’t say whether this seventeenth-century chapel was a refurbished version of the medieval chapel or an entirely new building. The licence says it was ‘below’ (infra) the mansion at Sissinghurst, which suggests it might have been in the orchard below the medieval house. One eighteenth-century drawing does indeed show a semi-detached building there, with a door giving on to the Elizabethan garden.

  A further hint comes in the sermon that was preached by Robert Abbott, the vicar of Cranbrook, at the dedication ceremony in September 1639. The chapel was, Robert Abbott said,

  built and furnished with cost: profit therefore is engaged to give way to the devout worship of God heere. It is built by a garden of pleasure, a parlour of plenty: pleasure therefore is engaged to give way to the devout worship of God. Iosephs tombe was in a garden, to put thoughts of mortality into his delights, and this chappell is in a garden, to be a monitor (in the midst of refreshments) to the way of immortalitie.

  Between garden and parlour, a ‘chapel in a garden’: this was the Sissinghurst version of worshipping God in the beauty of holiness.

  Abbott addressed ‘a large crowd’, with some markedly Catholic names (Campion, Mounckton, Henley, Darrell) among them. And the chapel was furnished in a far from Puritan style. It had a communion table, pulpit, reading desks and thirteen pews ‘all of wainscot’, candlesticks and a branched candelabra, a ‘fayre silver bason, a silver pott for wine and a silver chalice with a cover for the communion and a silver plate with a bason for the font, all double guilt’. In 1639, this was the highest of church Laudianism, and you can be sure the whole of Puritan Cranbrook would have been scandalised. It was probably at this stage that the little Elizabethan banqueting house at the northern edge of the garden was extended so that the chaplain could be housed in it, and renamed perhaps by the locals the Priest’s House, a term that in Protestant Cranbrook would have been dripping in contempt.

  It was inevitable that this High Church, possibly crypto-Catholic family would side with the king against Parliament in the Civil War. Sir John was already off with the king’s army in 1642, and in August that year his lands, worth £2,000 a year, and his ‘rich furniture in Covent garden’ were seized by the parliamentary committees raising money for the war. His family struggled to save what they could, sending in petitions to Parliament, and in March 1644 Sir John petitioned the House of Commons itself.

  The humble petition of Sir Jo Baker Barronett

  acknowledgeth that hee hath beene at Oxford, in the Kinge’s quarters where hee much disliked their proceedings. He never was in Armes against Parliament, nor ever advanced anie thing either horses plate or money to the King’s forces but ever expressed his good affections to ye Parliament by his ready payment of all duties and assessments of Parliament so long as hee had any disposition of his estate and is ready to ingage life and fortune to the parliaments service. Hee is indebted 10,000 li and hath lost 3,000 pounds by the seizing of his estate to the use of the parliament.

  In tender consideration whereof ye petitioner humblie praies
he may be accepted into yr favours,

  etc, John Baker

  But the war had reached an implacable stage, and in May that year the parliamentarian Lord Warwick wrote to Captain Edward Boys, addressing him as ‘my very loving friend’.

  Ye are appointed by ye Parliament to bee sequestrator of all ye delinquents Woods within the County of Kent And for the felling thereof for the Service of the State.

  The timber thus taken was to be used ‘for the repairing of Castles & Forts & otherwise’. In the complex paperwork of the many overlapping committees by which Parliament administered the goods confiscated from the Royalists, I have been unable to find the inventory made, at some time in the summer of 1644, when Sissinghurst was raided for everything of value. But there are lists for neighbouring gentry houses whose goods fell under the hammer that summer, often sold to the local poor. At the Wottons’ house in Boughton Malherbe, rugs for two shillings, ‘a little round table’, a coverlet, a chair, ‘old pieces of stayres and lumber’, ‘the fruit of the Long Walk and the Privy Garden’, ‘nagges and geldings’, ‘two little turkey carpets motheaten for five shillings’, ‘a little pair of tongs’: all were knocked down to Goodwife Andrewes, Goodman Albert, Mr Cogan (the sequestrator’s assistant), Goodwife Gilbert or their neighbours.

  It must have happened here too, and the evidence is in the woods. In the whole of Sissinghurst, there are now only two trees that were certainly growing here before the summer of 1644: the pollard oak in the big wood, in whose branches I once spent the best part of a day; another down by the Hammer Brook, its fat trunk scarred by lightning, its branches hanging out over the stream. Otherwise, they have all gone, and it doesn’t take much to imagine the scene, the great old oaks and beeches which the Bakers had treasured, and even named in their wills, felled unseasonably in midsummer, the huge leafy crowns slowly descending to the parkland grass, the outer limbs cushioning the fall, splintering as they came down, the bodies of the pollards laid out like shot cattle, the timber wagons taking them away to the saw-yards. In other Kentish parks, payments were made by the sequestrator to the men doing the work for Parliament’s cause. And there is one further clue. A description of Sissinghurst Park in 1695 says that ‘The Growth of the Wood in it is most Birch, which is much in use for Birch-Wine’. Birch is the great pioneer species of Wealden woods, colonising any space vacated for it. For Sissinghurst to be covered in them in 1695 could only have meant that the oaks and beeches had been taken away fifty years before.

  By July 1644, the Committee for Compounding proposed to fine Baker £5,000, ‘it appearing that he has been in service against parliament and has 2,500 1. a year’. Negotiations continued; the fine was reduced to £3,000 but he didn’t pay up and still hadn’t by July 1645. His indebtedness rolled on throughout the years of the Commonwealth. As late as 1652, ‘on the morrow of Holy Trinity’, he at last signed a mortgage on almost everything he owned in Kent: houses, barns, stables, 7 watermills, 40 gardens, 40 orchards, 2,005 acres of arable land, 700 of meadow, 500 of pasture, 700 of wood and ‘40 acres of land covered with water’ – the huge pond upstream of the furnace at Hammer Mill. Although Baker’s London properties were not mentioned, ‘the manor of Sissinghurst’ was included by name. In return, Baker received £2,760 sterling and with it paid the debt he owed the state.

  Old Sir John died the follow year and his son, yet another Sir John, inherited a heavily encumbered estate. He rearranged the mortgage in 1657, and with the money restored the pale around the whole Park, but Sissinghurst was now fatally burdened with its borrowings and the Bakers would never recover. This last Sir John died in about 1661, having committed the ultimate crime against his family’s fortunes. He left a widow, four daughters and no son. The girls began by living with their mother in the huge house. Any number of others, unnamed, were living in the house with them. There were 38 hearths alight here on Lady Day in 1664, compared with 85 at Knole but only 21 at Penshurst. Inside the Park, at the top of the lane in the fields still known as the Well Fields, there was an ‘old admired well’, set with stones and basins, a ‘curative chalybeate spring’, much in use for those with infections of the urinary tract. Multitudes came. There were walks laid out. ‘The park,’ it was said, had ‘very great plenty of Stawberys in and about it … Also near-adjoining … is very good Chery-gardens and great plenty of Fruit: The best Sider is but Six pence the Bottle.’ The district as a whole was ‘much supply’d with Fish, there being much Gentry in the Parish, and many great Ponds of Fresh Fish’.

  It didn’t last. Lady Baker ‘hated all the people and had the gates of the park locked to obstruct the same’. The stones and basin were removed as Sissinghurst sank towards its nadir. When the Baker daughters ‘marryed into other counties’, the old lady moved to her London house and Sissinghurst became half destitute and lawless. In 1673, the inhabitants of the mansion house attacked ‘the possessors of a wood adjacent’, the reason not recorded. An arrest warrant was issued, the parish constable came to the front gate ‘with 16 or 20 to assist him’. The Sissinghurst gang refused to come out or give up the man named on the warrant. There was a stand-off but the constable and his men could hear them inside arming with staves. ‘The constable and his assistants fearing mischief went away.’ About fourteen of Sissinghurst’s inhabitants then rushed out of the gate, chased the constable, ‘the constable commanded the peace, yet they fell on and killed one of the assistants of the constable, and wounded others, and then retired into the house to the rest of their company’. The precise individual who had committed the murder couldn’t be identified, but nine of them were arrested, all found equally guilty and all of them hanged, thus establishing the powerful precedent of the Sissinghurst House Case, by which membership of a murderous gang is considered the same as committing murder oneself.

  Any question of Sissinghurst being the centre of a perfect world was long gone. It is not quite certain what happened here in the early eighteenth century. A very old pauper, interviewed at Sissinghurst in the 1830s by a visiting American descendant of the Bakers, ‘said he remembered the last of the family coming to Church every Sunday with their guests and visitors in four coaches and four horses, long tails, etc., etc.’. There is no record of them. Sissinghurst and the larger Baker estate had been inherited by the four sisters, in equal shares. Each share followed a tortuous path down the different branches of the family, and although each of those four Baker girls, Anne (d. 1685), Elizabeth (d. 1705), Mary (d. 1714) and Catherine (d. 1733), returned from their husbands’ estates to be buried in Cranbrook church, Sissinghurst was neglected. The buildings rotted. The Park pale collapsed. The unpaid mortgage continued to climb until by the 1750s the sum owing had reached £9,000, nearly three-quarters the value of the entire Baker estate in Kent. Sissinghurst had become a lump against which money could be borrowed. The place, in a way that might be shocking to us in the age of preservation, was allowed to fall apart. But the eighteenth-century rich lived in a profligate world. Many families in England were overhoused. Each of the Sissinghurst heirs had their own satisfactory houses elsewhere. What good was a crumbling Elizabethan mansion, only as old for them as a Victorian, concrete shooting box might be for us?

  The eighteenth century gave nothing to Sissinghurst. It only took away. I have often wondered what might have happened here if the Bakers’ male line had not died out. Would there have been an exquisite Palladian pavilion placed on this gentle rise, surrounded by the elegances of its improved eighteenth-century park? Would Capability Brown have been brought in to dam the Hammer Brook and make a sky-reflecting lake in the valley? Would one or two Gothic eye-catchers have been built up by the pines in the wood? Maybe. And maybe Sissinghurst would have been coloured not with its air of romantic abandonment but with suede-lined riches, a title, perhaps an earldom for the Bakers, money from an advantageous marriage or two in the City. Perhaps Vita, pursued in 1912 by the earl of Sissinghurst, would have turned down him and his palatial residence as something too smart, too obvious, withou
t poetry?

  In 1752, Horace Walpole was touring the sites of Kent, and on 9 August wrote to his friend Richard Bentley:

  Yesterday, after twenty mishaps, we got to Sissinghurst to dinner. There is a park in ruins and a house in ten times greater ruins, built by Sir John Baker, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Queen Mary. You go through an arch of the stables to the house, the court of which is perfect and very beautiful … This has a good apartment, and a fine gallery, a hundred and twenty feet by eighteen, which takes up one side: the wainscot is pretty and entire: the ceiling vaulted, and painted in a light genteel grotesque. The whole is built for show; for the back of the house is nothing just lath and plaster.

  ‘Nothing just lath and plaster’ is a mid-eighteenth-century view of the medieval house behind Sir Richard Baker’s Elizabethan cour d’honneur.

  Four years later, Sissinghurst entered the pit of its existence, when even the sad remains that Walpole had seen were effectively destroyed and the break with the sixteenth century was made final. The agents of the dispersed Baker estate found a means of making some money out of the old mansion. About 1,400 acres of the surrounding land were let for £445 to a farmer called George Tempest, but the big house was reserved from the lease and let instead to the government. Britain had embarked on a Seven Years’ War with France, and on 21 July 1756 the house at Sissinghurst was leased by the Admiralty’s Sick and Hurt Board as a camp for French naval prisoners.

  Up to three thousand Frenchmen were held here at any one time, most of them common seamen. There were rooms reserved for officers in the Tower (where their graffiti have been preserved in the plaster: their names and both brigs and square-rigged ships in full sail), but most officers, having given their word of honour, were allowed to live in Cranbrook, Tenterden, Sevenoaks or Maidstone. If any of them found themselves stuck here they were not slow to make their elegant and elaborate complaint to the Admiralty.