Stately Home

I have yet in this blog to discuss a very specific version of homing that was a regular part of my life before the pandemic: the visit, as a tourist, to a home-turned-museum. In England, where I have probably done most of this form of home visiting, this often involves an outing to a stately home, a relic of aristocratic or upper-class life preserved by the National Trust or similar organization as part of England’s “heritage.” Of course, there are other kinds of homes a literary-minded person might visit; I have cried on the top floor of the thatched cottage where Thomas Hardy was born—and where he almost died at birth. I have toured, mesmerized, the Lindley Sambourne House in London, a rare glimpse into the life of a professional class household, in this case the family of the popular but by no means wealthy Punch cartoonist. I have visited on the same rainy day Dove Cottage, the modest home where the young Wordsworth lived in the Lake District with his sister, and Rydal Mount, the much larger home of his later years in the same area. I have also indulged in touristic homing on this side of the Atlantic; just before the pandemic I found myself in Biltmore, the Asheville home of the Vanderbilts, taking the “extra” tour of the servants’ quarters and following their alternate network of stairways, hallways, and workrooms behind the wall of the rooms intended for family and guests.

But stately homes are the gold standard of domestic tourism, with their huge public rooms, cordoned-off stairways and spectacular gardens. They have always occupied a blurry zone between the public and the private. Early into their history, private castles were used as stopping places for royal procession; it was at those homes of aristocrats that, that influence was pedaled and deals brokered. In the late 18th century, these homes began to serve as tourist sites, where first upper-class--and then, with the coming of the railways and the expansion of museum culture--a wider swath of people, might tour the gardens or designated rooms. Often built at the center of an imposing park, cut through by public footpaths, these houses served to reinforce the distinction between local titles or wealthy families and to offer villagers, many of whom were employed on the estate, an however-spurious, sense of pride and belonging. The history of these houses was, of course, entangled in larger histories of England, Scotland, and Wales, as well as more recent histories of empire; in this sense, also, these intensely private houses were part of a public inheritance. 

With changes in inheritance and tax laws and the labor shortages following the two world wars, houses (like the fictional Downton Abbey) became impossible for all but the very wealthiest families to maintain. One solution (threatened but always avoided in the Downton Abbey series) was to gift the home to the National Trust or similar organization and to open them to a wide public eager for a vicarious experience of wealth and privilege. Stately houses spawned tea shops and gift shoppes, hosted historical reenactments, and became part of itineraries of tourists from near and far. Sometimes families continued to live in their old homes in apartment carved out of spaces closed to the public. Members of these families became, in essence, ghosts in their own houses,--or perhaps more prosaically, servants, following into invisibility the men and women who had effaced themselves in the heyday of the home, traveling through their segregated hallways, ascending and descending separate staircases.

Although I have done so much of it, stately home visiting is not my favorite form of homing. Perhaps it is the jarring mixture of desire and repugnance I feel when I think of how these homes were made, designed, and sustained in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like plantations in the U.S., although less directly, many if not most of these homes depended on the profits of slave labor, as the slave trade enriched British families who returned to England to establish themselves in country houses as country families. It is only recently—and to much backlash—that this story is being told, this network referred to in the paraphernalia of the visit itself: docent talks, brochures, and signage.

I always, however, had a strange attraction to Knole House, home of the Sackville family in Kent. Variously identified as the second or third biggest house in England and (apparently mistakenly) as a “calendar house” with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, and four wings, it was interesting to me as a gendered story of possession, desire and inheritance. This was the house that Vita Sackville West, author, gardener, sexual rebel, and lover of Virginia Woolf, could not inherit because she was a girl. It is this house that inspired Woolf’s novel and homage to Vita, Orlando, in which she tells the story of a centuries-long relationship between the protagonist and a house, the hero/ine of the novel changing genders as they live through key periods in English history. As playful as the novel is, it is clearly about the trauma of dispossession, and about the alignment of property, ownership, and Englishness.

Until I started working with Robyn Warhol on my book on George Scharf, founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, I thought of Knole as Vita’s house, its rooms and turrets as a background for the romance of the “characters” I thought of as “Vita and Virginia.” The story the house told was one of disinheritance, but also about love between women.  Robyn’s and my first encounter with Scharf, through his album of invitations and menus, made Knole come alive in a new way, with another cast of characters that would continue to change over the years of our research. I would probably have closed Scarf’s album forever, and thus never written the book, if it had not been for his preserved menus from dinners at Knole that appeared regularly on the album’s huge and disintegrating pages. These menus, in the shape of flattened blue and white toile boxes, served as records of seven- and eight-course meals Scharf had apparently eaten at the house some 20 years before Vita’s birth. The boxes, which Robyn and I spent many pleasurable minutes carefully folding and unfolding, coaxing into their original three dimensions, featured a gilt inscription, “Knole” on what would turn out to be the front. Although Robyn and I were both attracted by the food, I at least stayed with the project because of Vita Sackville West, Orlando, and the trauma of gendered dispossession.

As we read more about George Scharf, and immersed ourselves in his papers, turning from the album to letters and diaries, we came to realize that Knole was central to his life as well—and that he was stubbornly present at, if perhaps not central to, a history of Knole largely missing from Vita’s memoirs and completely absent in Orlando. Scharf’s role in the NPG, and his expertise about portraiture generally, led to his being asked to country houses across England to authenticate, value, and arrange their portrait collections. (He would of course sometimes buy or be gifted a particularly fine specimen for the evolving National Portrait Gallery collection). Scharf became a regular visitor at Knole during the tenure there of one of the least swashbuckling scions of the Sackville family—the first baronet, Mortimer Sackville. Mortimer’s inheritance of Knole was contested, his time there haunted by legal battles over possession and by petty refusals to keep the park open to villagers. (His stuffed effigy was carried around the village in a parade protesting the decision to seal off the park). Robyn and I suspect that Scharf’s frequent visits had something to do with Mortimer’s need to sell paintings belonging to the house—a process carried on by Victoria Sackville, Vita’s mother, in the next generation. (Victoria married her cousin, and iso got to stay at Knole despite the gendered inheritance laws that were to prove so distressing to her daughter.)

The more we learned about Scharf’s time at Knole, and the more we pondered his role there (was he considered an employee, a family friend, a co-conspirator?) the more we wanted to revisit the place he had spent so much time. One of the book’s guiding questions was, after all, about class: how did the son of a bankrupt German immigrant come to consider so many titled people his “friends,” eating at their tables, sketching their amusements, even, in one case, receiving hand sewn slippers from a daughter of the house? I remembered how crucial it had been in an earlier book I’d written to visit the family home of one of my honeymooners, Martha Rolls, and to try to reconstruct the golf course and hotel into which the house was in the process of being transformed, and find what signs I could of Martha’s inhabitation. One day in 2010, just before my annual research trip to England and to Scharf’s papers in the  NPG archives, I decided to write to the current Baron Sackville, Robert Sackville-West, who had written a book on Knole called, fittingly, Inheritance, to ask if we could see the part of the home that was closed to the public. 

There were several barriers to writing a letter inviting myself and my colleague to his home, among them the presumption of such a request, and my complete ignorance of architecture and and almost pathological inability to visualize spaces in relation to each other. Robyn, who is a person with admirable visual skills, would help with this problem. But neither one of us knew anything about a smaller but to us more crucial and terrifying matter: how to address the ninth Baron in a letter with this request. For weeks, as I recall, I contemplated how to frame or address such a letter: to “Lord Sackville?” or “Baron Sackville?” To a fellow author, “Robert Sackville-West?” I consulted with my Victorianist colleague, Robert Patten, who knows much more about protocol than I do, and who has wonderful stories about meeting the queen, but apparently the letter (I imagined a real one, on real paper) never got written. As I looked through my records of the trip, I see that I, in effect, chickened out, addressing an email request to Valerie Porter, the estate secretary, and asking her to ask the family. Although I don’t remember writing the email, most of it is written in the confident professional tone I have developed over the years and features a bulleted list of what Robyn and I would like to see. It is only at the end, when I mention the family, that I seem to remember I am inviting myself to a stranger’s house:  

We understand that we are asking a great favor of the family, but hope that their interest in the history of Knole and in the small part we might be able to contribute to that history will work in favor of our request. 

We have learned a great deal about the family and the house from Lord Sackville's recent book and hope to put what we learned from him to good use in our research and our visit. Professor Warhol and I would be happy to supply you with letters from our respective universities and/or copies of our curriculum vitae should these be necessary.

The awkward “Lord Sackville” and the recourse to the language of “favor” of the family, make me wince a little. I was grateful to Ms. Porter for responding at once that she would ask for permission.

It was only a few days later that I received a reply to my email from the person I still thought of as the  ninth Baron. In that first email he calls me “Helena” and signs himself “Robert Sackville-West,” and offers to “show me around,” unfortunately on the day when we had schued a flight back to the States, or to have his mother do so on the date I had proposed in the email. A second email, confirming the earlier date, tactfully refers to his mother, who will host us, as “Bridget Sackville-West.” He had invited us into his home—and his mother’s—and had given us the lexical tools to feel comfortable during those visits. 

The two hours we spent in the house felt like several visits unfolding at once. I could not help thinking, as Mrs. Sackville-West led us up and down staircases, through homey apartments and obviously disused passages, of what was happening on the other side of the wall, in the public rooms at Knole. I thought not only of a touristic visit I had made many years ago before starting work on the book, but also of the friends who had driven us to Knole, who were, as we talked to and had tea with Mrs Sackville-West, being given the official tour. I was also trying to think about the part of the house we were in, as simultaneously a place of research and as the homes of real families with their books, children, and toys,—simultaneously, then as a place to which I had a right and a place of privacy. I have spoken in the first-person singular here, although that covers up another disorienting sense of multiple experiences unfolding in the same place at the same time. As with all our collaborative adventures in the archive, this tour of Knole accentuated both Robyn’s and my sense of connection, and the knowledge, sometimes papered over by the act of writing sentences together, that we were separate people, experiencing all aspects of our research in different ways.

I think Robyn and I both shared—and did not quite know what to do with—a sense that we were living an archival fantasy—that in entering these rooms we had imagined for so long, we would be getting to a truth about George unavailable to us outside the walls of Knole. In solving his relation to space—in this case not to his own house but to a house in which he played an intriguing but (to us) uncertain role,--we were solving a mystery we could not even name. In entering Knole we would not only be going in, but going back: back to the origin of our fascination with Scharf (those adorable menus!) and to the 1870s when he was most regularly a visitor to the house. We would be not only researchers, not only writers, but reenactors. Mrs. Sackville West provided a healthy corrective here; resolutely a figure of the present day, she joked about the inconvenience of the many staircases, her own uncertainty about where various doors led, all the while stepping around and in some cases over furniture and mysterious objects she found in her way. 

As we explain in our book, we made some important discoveries—including that the room regularly assigned to Scharf was in the family wing, near the bedroom of the then-Lady Sackville. We saw the “Adams fireplace” of which we had heard so much in the diaries, and looked out windows to where he had walked in so often in the now-defunct “hop garden” exchanging peasantries and perhaps strategies with Mortimer. The moment we both remember most clearly, however, is our ascent to one of Knole’s many attics, mentioned by Scharf as a place to which he took special visitors to the house; like Mrs Sackville, Scharf served, in one of his many personae, as a guide to the house and its collections.  Attics are of course central to archival fantasies: it is here that many of us imagine finding a hidden manuscript, a trunk full of secrets, traces, as in Jane Eyre, of the hidden and the repressed. Like the attics of that fantasy, this one was both barren and full of stuff. There was the dust, if not of ages, of many years and a dim sort of afternoon twilight ripe for enlightenment. It was perhaps fitting that the first thing we “found”—and no doubt it had been found before—had to do not with Scharf, but with Vita: it was a strangely large print of a photograph of her wedding to Harold Nicholson in 1913, in the private chapel at Knole.There was nothing secret about the photograph; it revealed nothing that we did not know of this much written-about marriage. But it was there, it was face down; as we turned it to the light, I at least felt once again that this was Vita’s place and somehow Vita’s story.

But there were other objects to be turned and discovered that had more to do with Scharf’s time at Knole. We almost literally stumbled over two matching portraits of Mortimer and his wife, Elizabeth. Although quite large, the portraits’ elaborate cases suggested they were in fact “travelling portraits,” which the Sackvilles would have taken on their journeys abroad. Although we had heard of travelling portraits and (at least in my case) wondered at the reason for their existence, we had never seen or certainly touched any example of the genre. Although we had seen official portraits of these particular Sackvilles—relegated to a dark hallway downstairs—these seemed both stranger and more intimate. These must have accompanied the Sackvilles on their peregrinations before Knole had been (perhaps) established as their home. It was hard not to think of these particular images as somehow representing the Sackvilles in a way that more formal portraits did not; unlike the full-scale ones in the downstairs hallway, which in Mortimer’s case featured Knole as a background, these underscored the peripatetic life of the first Baron and Baroness. Despite their heft, these paintings could (with the help of servants) be packed at a moment’s notice. Lying face down in a dusty attic, these forgotten portraits suggested a touching staying power, as if attesting to the fact that Mortimer and Elizabeth truly belonged at Knole. It was impossible for Robyn and myself not to wonder what George Scharf might have thought of them as portraits—and of their subjects as people. We were reminded that Scharf might not even have made a distinction here; from the time of his directorship to the present, the National Portrait Gallery has been organized by sitter rather than by painter; this would have suited Scarf’s gentle snobbery, his interest in people of high rank.

After tea with Bridget (as we learned to call her), we left the private quarters through a side entrance, and made the turn to the public face of Knole. Our friends were waiting to drive us to another, more modest, home museum in Kent, Charles Darwin’s Down House, where we would fall back into the familiar role of tourists. We would join the queue in the public rooms, stay on the correct side of the cordon, eat scones in the inevitable teashop, keep our Victorianist credentials to ourselves. We would not visit Darwin’s attic.