Inside Knole, home to the same family for over 400 years

The Sackville family has lived at Knole, one of Britain’s great treasure houses, for more than four hundred years. Throughout its history, Knole has lured generations of heirs with the promise of an ancestral place, an aristocratic life, a sense of unearned esteem and belonging. Many of these Sackvilles have revelled in the opportunity. But others, once seduced, have found such a huge
inheritance hard to manage. The place has ground them down, becoming a curse, a burden, rather than a privilege or a glory. I am the thirteenth generation to live here, and—after this personal tour of the “calendar house” with its legendary 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, and seven courtyards, which sprawl over four acres—I invite you to form your own opinion of our challenge.

Knole has always excited a range of different reactions, and not just among members of the Sackville family. It’s a love-it-or-loathe-it sort of place. King Henry VIII liked it so much that he forced Thomas Cranmer, his Archbishop of Canterbury, to hand it to him in 1538. And yet, in the following century, the diarist John Evelyn was so depressed by the greyness of this “greate old fashion’d house” that he scuttled out into the sunshine. Knole was built and then furnished to impress, and it has been a show house ever since Thomas Sackville acquired it in 1604 (the year after James I, the first Stuart monarch, ascended to the throne). It is precisely this that can make it so impenetrable, such a difficult place to understand. Some people are put off by its sheer size.

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In her diary for July 1924, the novelist Virginia Woolf recorded a visit to Knole, where she had been invited to lunch with my granduncle, the 3rd Baron Sackville. “His lordship lives in the kernel of a vast nut. You perambulate miles of galleries; skip endless treasures—chairs that Shakespeare might have sat—tapestries, pictures, floors made of the halves of oaks; & penetrate at length to a round shiny table with a cover laid for one.”

Potentially even more overwhelming than its size, and its role as a show house or museum, is the extent to which people living at Knole feel oppressed by the past, followed wherever they go by the flinty, watchful gaze of their Sackville ancestors in portraits on the walls. The writer Vita Sackville-West grew up at Knole, and in her novel The Edwardians, the main character Sebastian is made aware that he is as much a slave to his inheritance as he is a free agent. “A place like Chevron [Knole] is really a despot of the most sinister sort,” she wrote. “It disguises its tyranny under the mask of love … Then there is another danger which you can scarcely hope to escape,” she continued. “It is the weight of the past … That is real atrophy of the soul.”

The characters who people the pages of the book—the grave Elizabethan statesman; the good-for-nothing gadabout at the seedy Court of King James I; the dashing Cavalier; the Restoration rake; the 3rd Duke, that magnificent and melancholy representative of the ancient régime; the whiskery and dark-hearted Mortimer, who caused three nights of rioting in 1884 by closing the park to visitors—are all representative of their eras. They are also all members of a family, my family, described by Vita Sackville-West as “a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy”: in short, “a rotten lot, and nearly all stark staring mad.” Many of their stories are told in this book. They share not only a genetic history but also a common predicament, their eerily identical experiences of the house and its estate across the centuries.

This is an extract from Knole: A Private View Of One Of Britain's Great Houses by Robert Sackville-West