Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History by Adam Nicolson

Author:Adam Nicolson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504015691
Publisher: Open Road Media

In 1558, the old man died. In his will, he addressed his son directly from beyond the grave:

To myne oldest sonne Richard Bakere goddes blessinge and myne and all suche my plate of siluer and gilt &e. and all other stuffe and utensiles of houshold in my manor mesuage and house of Cessyngherst. And I charge the[e] my sonne Richarde that above all things thowe serve God and thy soueraigne lorde and ladye the Kinge and quene, applye thy lernynge, be curtesse and gentill to euery bodie, be aydinge and lovinge to thy naturall Brother John Bakere and to thy susters Mary Cecile and Elizabeth, love well they neighbours, counsell, cherishe and help theym in theire necessities as righte and good conscience will requyre, avoyde Brybery, extortion, corruption and dissimulacon, eschewe Idlenes, applie the[e] to vertuose exercise, be faythfull and true in worde and deede and holly putt thy truste in Almightie God with humble callinge to hym for grace with laudes and thanks for all thy benefits and he wilbe thy keper and defender from all daunger, perill and evill.

The implication is clear: the ageing father, replete with his vision of strict social wholeness, distrusted his son. He was right to do so. In the most spectacular of Sissinghurst’s generation shifts, Richard Baker, still in his thirties with a huge income from the inherited estate of at least £650 a year, took Sissinghurst in hand and drove it in a new direction: not ancient propriety but aestheticised glamour, not conformist strictness but Elizabethan romanticism, not rooted Kentishness but highly cultured, Italianate arcadianism, with a sophisticated interaction of building and landscape, large, grand and expensive, far beyond anything anyone had ever done here. Between 1558 and 1573, Richard Baker made of Sissinghurst an Elizabethan palace at the centre of its own dream world. It was the flickering ghost of that place, with all its ancient Sackville connections, which drew Vita here, to make a garden among the ruins.

There are many forms of evidence for what Richard Baker did: the remains of the buildings themselves – the Tower, the South Cottage, the Priest’s House, the barns, the long front range; plans of other contemporary buildings which bear strong resemblances to Sissinghurst; drawings made of it in the eighteenth century which show the great Elizabethan palace from various points of view; accounts of one or two eighteenth-century visitors; the verbatim record of a month-long investigation made in 1761 into crimes that had been committed here, whose pages inadvertently describe the Elizabethan house’s geography; the claims made by the owners against the government for damage done by prisoners held here; the marks left on the surrounding landscape by Richard Baker’s great and encompassing scheme for the whole place; accounts of court cases held at the end of the century, which describe the relationship of Sissinghurst to the surrounding population; a very early seventeenth-century census of people living in Cranbrook and the surrounding parishes, house by house, which takes in Sissinghurst; and finally the accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s visit here for three days in August 1573.

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