Elizabeth I slept here
If the Knole housekeeper were to hoover one room per day, it would take a full year to do the entire house.
A 365-room Jacobean pile near Sevenoaks, Kent, Knole has been associated with the Sackville-West family since 1604. Built on and around a manor house, its roots reach back to Tudor and medieval times.
Sackville ownership of Knole begins with Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who acquired it in 1604. Earlier owners included Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I. Thomas Sackville converted the crumbling medieval house into a trophy home.
The house was inherited through the male line down to the present owner, Robert Sackville-West. His 2010 book, Inheritance, traces the tumultuous history of a property that witnessed political intrigue, adultery (and suspected incest), disappointed female relatives (and friends such as writer Virginia Woolf), and numerous lawsuits.
A Pride of Lionels
If you were a male Sackville born in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, odds were high that you would be christened Thomas or Robert. True, a Lionel did surface in 1687, but this adventure in novel nomenclature was a one-off. For the next 140 years, not a single baby boy in the family was dubbed Lionel. Then three came along pretty much at once - and the first two Lionels shaped Knole's modern history.
Lionel, 2nd Lord Sackville (1827-1908), had two sons, three daughters and no wife. The children were illegitimate, a fact that would prove especially devastating for the sons. The females could not inherit Knole because they were female. The sons could not inherit because they were illegitimate. Their mother was Josefa Duran, a Spanish dancer nicknamed Pepita, who was married but not to Lord Sackville. Her husband was a Spaniard, Juan Antonio de Oliva.
With Lionel leaving no eligible males to inherit Knole, the property passed to his brother William and his descendants, in particular, his son Lionel, 3rd Lord Sackville (nephew of Lionel, 2nd Lord Sackville). Victoria was his cousin.
She could not inherit Knole but her cousin could, and did - and, dear reader, she married him.
Their only child, the famous writer Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), was born there. Tthey also faced a fierce fight to keep the house. Victoria's brother Henry claimed that their mother, Pepita, far from being his father's mere mistress, was actually his lawfully wedded wife. Therefore, Henry argued, he was legitimate and, as such, the rightful heir to the property. His court action, which began in 1910 and lasted for two years, failed and he committed suicide four years later.
Lionel and Victoria triumphantly returned to the house, which had been vacant during the two-year succession battle.
Possession remained on William's side of the family, down to the current occupier, Robert Sackville-West and his wife and young children. The legal owner is the National Trust; current and future occupiers are leaseholders.
Although Vita Sackville-West is closely associated with her famous garden at Sissinghurst, she adored Knole and deeply resented the fact that she could not inherit it. Her passion for the house informs her 1922 book Knole and the Sackvilles.
In fact, she wrote about Knole more often than is generally realised. In his own 2010 book Inheritance, Robert Sackville-West notes that "between 1906 and 1910, from the age of fourteen to eighteen, Vita wrote eight full-length novels and five plays, almost all of them inspired by Knole and her ancestors."
The hero of Vita's 1930 novel The Edwardians is Sebastian, but the true protagonist is the house (clearly Knole but called Chevron in the book). The novel even includes a character who writes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer protesting death duties, echoing an act performed with some success by Vita's mother.
Knole also figures prominently in Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando, in which the title character (clearly based on Vita) not only lives for hundreds of years but also changes his/her gender - a nifty way to sidestep the male-only inheritance rules of primogeniture. The 1992 film adaptation of Orlando stars Tilda Swinton in the title role.
The National Trust acquired Knole in 1946 and opened it to the public in April 1947. The current Sackville-West in residence, Robert, gave the property a major refurbishment, in the course of which a seemingly minor painting was valued and its true creator identified. It raised £6.5m at auction, considerably more than the cost of the refurbishment, Robert observed.
UPDATE JANUARY 2012 Robert Sackville-West, father of two young girls and a boy, says that he might leave Knole to one of the girls rather than to his son.
