Knole - Five centuries of showing off

when you've made it to the very top of your profession the chances are you'll want to mark the fact in some way back in medieval England if you just been made Archbishop of Canterbury well then he'd want something pretty special because archbishop was the most powerful job you could aim for and that you'd been born as heir to the throne leaders of the church weren't expected to lead a life of pious poverty no an archbishop needed a palace an impressive palace hey a palace with a huge Deer Park dear parks weren't always like the places we think of today is good for a Sunday afternoon stroll for a start to create one you needed a license from the king and that showed you had serious clout and then there was the hunting before horse-racing deer hunting was the sport of kings and anyone else with the money and power to join in so forget that stroll these guys were here to be hunted down and killed for fun so in the 1450s when Thomas Boucher the Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry the sixth finds a nice Country Estate perfectly placed between Canterbury and London the cash is on the table in no time and Archbishop Borgia a creates his Deer Park and builds his new palace it's a solidly medieval affair with more than a hint of the castle about him but its fashion not defense that dictates the design you this first courtyard wasn't part of Borgias palace but his original gatehouse still survives to guard the entrance to the Great Hall and the grand rooms beyond F laborious death Nold passed through the hands of forum or Archbishop's then a certain king who was even more promiscuous with houses than he was with wives dropped some very heavy hints an Archbishop Thomas Cranmer suddenly realized he very much wanted to give mole to Henry the eighth quite why Henry was so keen on the place isn't entirely clear but it was probably bad news for the deer again at the start of the 17th century Knoll came into the hands of the first Earl of Dorset Thomas Sackville he'd held a string of positions at the royal court and had recently been made Lord treasurer the equivalent of today's Chancellor of the Exchequer the romantic myth is that Queen Elizabeth gave him null in recognition of his years of service the true stories are locked grubby ER and a lot more interesting the Lord treasurer was responsible for buying and selling royal land and estates if it simply sold null to himself it wouldn't have made the headlines but it certainly wouldn't have looked too good and the family already had form in that department the way Sackville father had profited from the opportunities at court had earned him the Witte nicknamed phil sack so thomas sold null to two middlemen then two days later quietly bought it off them for 10 times the price a nice little backhander for keeping sedum Sackville transformed no with new building and fashionable remodeling he wanted a home fit for a courtier who'd helped put James the first on the throne of England leopards the Sackville emblem sprang from all of the gables and you can see them here on the newel posts of Thomas's new great staircase the carving the plaster work the painting were all done by craftsmen who came from the royal palaces not just because of the quality of their work but simply to show off in style Thomas Sackville died just three years after he acquired the estate his son Robert died a year later and his grandson Richard inherited Knoll and so began 400 years of wrestling wrangling carping and conniving as generations of the Sackville family tried to keep regain or get their hands on null Richard was a show-off who liked the good life he'd married well the most aristocratic families wealth and power were a more important consideration than love his wife Anne was fighting a legal battle over the inheritance of her family estate but Richard wanted her to take a cash settlement to help pay for his lavish lifestyle her Diaries give us a remarkable insight into life at no and the miserable state of their marriage all this time I Lord was in London he went much abroad to bowling alleys to plays and horse races I stayed in the country having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart poor lonely Anne was the first person to live for any time in the fabulous house thomas Sackville had created when richard died oddly enough for a man who liked the good life of a surfeit of potatoes and left with few regrets she wrote the marble pillars of Nohr were to me often times but arbors of anguish through the following generations the Sackville strengthened their royal connections through which they gained some fabulous treasures take for example the sixth Earl who had a passionate affair with nell gwyn at least before she ascended the social scale in the direction of charles ii the Earl was made the ambassador to the court of Louis the fourteenth and Louie gave him some extraordinary furniture still on display here in the cartoon gallery when William and Mary came to the throne the sixth Earl was made Lord Chamberlain of the Kings household as a perk of the job he could help himself to any furniture from the Royal Palaces that was no longer wanted which is how Knoll came to have the most spectacular collection of Stuart furniture anywhere in the world it's with the arrival of this furniture at Knoll at the start of the 18th century that parts of the house seemed to become less of a home and more of a living museum these incredibly valuable treasures reeking of royal connection power and privilege became objects simply to look at and look after more than two centuries later Vita sackville-west wrote I often long to brush my hair with what I wrongly supposed to be King James's brushes but having been strictly brought up not to touch anything in the showrooms I didn't dare in the 18th century thanks to more service at court the Earl's of Dorset became dukes the Sackville were once again at the height of their wealth and power a null was the showcase in which they put them on display the royal furniture the generations of influential ancestors and the new passion of the aged art for art's sake the third Duke assembled the greatest collection of original art of any of the sack fills he commissioned some of the leading painters of the day especially Sir Joshua Reynolds and Reynolds produced the stars of the collection the full-length portrait of the Duke himself and the picture of Wang eat on the Dukes Chinese page boy perhaps the first naturalistic portrait of a Chinese subject in the whole of English art the third Dukes other weakness was women this most dangerous of men as the Duchess of Devonshire branded him had a string of affairs which produced at least two illegitimate sons but his most passionate affair was with Giovanna Bocelli an Italian dancer she lived with him and scandalized the neighborhood now many of Noel's residents have been immortalized at least on canvas but only Labatt Chile survives in a voluptuous three-dimensional glory the third Duke eventually married and in the mid 19th century Noll passed his youngest daughter would married George West the fifth Earl Delaware they combined their names creating the sackville-west family their son Mortimer like so many of his ancestors served in the royal household Queen Victoria rewarded him with the title Baron Sackville of Knoll he'd only recently got his hands on the estate after a bitter legal battle with his brother but that wasn't his only struggle over know by the late 19th century great estates and their deer parks wants the preserve of kings and their cronies had now become those pastoral places where the world and his wife would come for a leisurely stroll country houses too were attracting a new class of visitor in ever greater numbers Mortimer didn't like it and he shut the house and barred the gates to the park the genteel middle classes of Seven Oaks did what no one expects the English middle classes to do they rioted they tore down the barricades and dumped them in front of the house where they smashed windows and hurled abuse at Mortimer the pedestrian gates to the park have remained open ever since when Mortimer died Noll passed to his younger brother Lionel like the third Duke Lionel had a long-standing affair that produced illegitimate children one of them Victoria tied a loop in the family tree by marrying her cousin and they moved into Knoll with her father two years later Veta was born while Victoria squandered the estate's dwindling income on lavish parties cut up the covers of the state bed to make cushion covers her aging reclusive father shambled round the house filling Vitas head with tales of the Sackville ancestors the fabulous untouchable treasures they'd collected Vita would even act as tour guide showing parties of visitors around the house and collections but when her father died no which was tied to the Sackville title could only be inherited down the male line via Vitas uncle in this case she felt like lady and Clifford before her that a gender had kept her from a rightful inheritance and it haunted her for the rest of her life on one occasion she let herself into Knoll in the dead of night for what she called a torture treat and wandered through the gardens I might have been the ghost of Lady Anne Clifford she wrote Vitas Lover Virginia Woolf provided some scant comfort by turning her into the master of a fictional null as the transgendered hero of her novel Orlando by World War two no like so many country houses could no longer afford to support itself in 1946 the house and an endowment for its upkeep was given to the National Trust by a return much of the house remained under lease as a family home and today more than one generation of Thomas Sackville descendants lives here as you tour the house you might be able to hear Lord sexuals children playing in a nearby room but the heart of nul the great rooms created by Thomas boshi a and filled with the collections of generations of the Sackville family and now open for everyone to enjoy those priceless objects that Vito dared not touch faded by centuries of light are still here to unfold their stories stories of kings and queens long dead and a family that for all its affairs and eccentricities was for centuries never far from the center of power if only these objects could speak well maybe they can if you let them you you you

Channel: KnoleNT

Views: 292,174

Rating: 4.817668 out of 5

Keywords: Knole, National Trust, NT, Five centuries, showing off, show off, display, deer, park, Knole House (Building)

Id: DceOsnGVRPM

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 27 2013