Inheritance by Robert Sackville-West

Author:Robert Sackville-West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2013-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

‘The very name of Sackville . . . near extinction’ (1799–1888)

The Dowager Duchess and Her Descendants

On 15 November 1814 the young duke’s coming of age was celebrated with parties at Knole and Buckhurst. Church bells rang from Sevenoaks to Seal, from four in the afternoon till late at night, bonfires blazed in the park, and a band played during and after dinner. As Thomas Neill, the steward at Knole, reported to the Dowager Duchess, Arabella, who was in Ireland at the time, ‘Beef and Bread were distributed to 3,673 persons and it gave me great pleasure to observe the uniform feeling and gratitude that pervaded the whole of the poor people for their benefactor.’

All in all, the celebrations at Knole were a great success, ‘notwithstanding that there were upwards of forty persons at one time laid upon straw in the Bishop’s Stable, who were unable to move further without a little repose, they were chiefly composed of the working people at Knole, and as we expected they would make pretty free with the ale, we arranged matters so that those who could not walk home with safety, should be taken to the stable until they recovered the use of their legs’.

The object of these celebrations had been painted shortly before his birthday by the portraitist, George Sandars. The 4th Duke of Dorset was a handsome young man, with a pink-and-white complexion, and fair, curly hair. He had recently become engaged to Elizabeth Thynne, daughter of the Marquis of Bath, and hopes for this dynastic union ran high.

Within three months, however, the young duke was dead. He had accompanied his parents to Ireland where his stepfather, Lord Whitworth, was viceroy, and had gone to stay with a former schoolfriend Lord Powerscourt, near Dublin. On 14 February 1815 he went out hunting on a lively Irish mare. Just as they were about to return home after several uneventful hours in the field, a hare sprang up and they gave chase. The duke jumped a wall, but on the far side the ground sloped and the mare’s front feet slipped on the large stones. The horse fell headlong, turned over and landed on her rider, crushing his spine.

The duke’s body was brought back from Ireland to Knole, and laid to rest at Withyham. A ducal coronet, like the one beside which he had posed so proudly, hand on hip, in the Sandars portrait a few months before, now rested on his coffin. ‘His premature death was by two Nations, Deplored as a publick calamity’, according to the inscription in the Sackville Chapel. At Knole, the long-necked rocking horse that has traditionally been assumed to be his, and which was passed down through generations of children including Vita, serves as a poignant reminder of his life and as an eerie premonition of his death.

The poet Lord Byron described in a letter to his friend Tom Moore how ‘very much shocked – or, rather, ought to be’ he was by the death of the Duke of Dorset.

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