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Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles

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It is very old. The total number of rooms is somewhere very close to 365 (depends on your definition of room). There are 52 staircases (one for each week of the year) and within its grey ragstone walls, are the seven famed courtyards (one for each day of the week). Reason enough to name Knole the "Calendar House." Completed in 1486, Knole in Kent in the United Kingdom epitomizes a British Stately Mansion.

"Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles," by Robert Sackville-West is the storied history of the home, one of England's largest, and the 13 generations of Sackvilles who have inhabited the grand 15th-century building for more than four centuries.

Vita Sackville-West, part of the Bloomsbury crowd and Virginia Woolf's great friend and lover, famously described her Sackville ancestors as "a race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent and too melancholy; a rotten lot, and nearly all stark staring mad."

Of Knole, she wrote "It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and leant an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour."

Vita loved her childhood home but her gender prevented her from inheriting Knole when her father died. Instead, her uncle took over title and estate. Knole is now under the care and partial ownership of England's National Trust. The Sackvilles still call Knole home and have ownership of a sizable portion of the house and gardens.

Charles Sackville, the 6th Earl of Dorset who occupied Knole in the late 1600s was certainly in the running for the most rowdy (randy, too) of Vita's rotten lot. Described as having twinkling eyes and a "podgy face," the Earl and a group of his drinking friends met for dinner on June 16, 1663 at the Cock Tavern in London's Covent Garden.

Soon they were being served by "six naked women." Soon after that the women and Sackville along with two of his co-revelers proceeded to a balcony overlooking the street. All three of the men stripped naked and according to Samuel Pepys in his famous diary acted in "all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined."

The lewd antics attracted a crowd and resulted in mayhem and broken shop windows. Charges of abuse of the "King's Peace" resulted in at least one fine of 2,000 marks, a substantial sum. By coincidence on the same day as the romp, lightning struck and heavily damaged the Sackville family mausoleum.

The 6th Earl of Dorset is just one of the many Sackville portraits presented in the 440-year family history. Among those is lonely Lady Anne Clifford in the early 1600s, whose rake of a husband Richard Sackville, the 3rd Earl of Dorset, threatened to desert her and take custody of their daughter unless she signed over to him her family wealth. She didn't.

The 3rd Duke of Dorset, John Frederick Sackville, is mentioned as a possible model for the Scarlett Pimpernel. Then came the bachelor Lionel who in the 1860s fathered five children with his mistress, a Spanish dancer called Pepita. It was one of Lionel's illegitimate daughters, Victoria, who kept Knole in the family when she married her first cousin, another Sackville named Lionel. Victoria not only preserved the Sackville legacy; in 1902 she installed electric lighting.

Today, upward of 80,000 visitors walk the halls in the public areas. Fifteen or so of the 365 rooms are currently open to visitors. The National Trust has plans to make many more of the rooms accessible to visitors.

The author, who by right of male succession, holds title to the private areas lives with his wife and children in a suite of refurbished rooms along the building's south front. They have private access to one of the seven inner courtyards, the Pheasant Court. The Sackville family holds the lease on Knole for another 140 years.

The book is titled "Inheritance" because it records a remarkable ancestry that has kept the home in the same family for more than four centuries. It's a thoroughly researched story with enough intrigue, heartbreak and goings-on for a lively full season of Masterpiece Theater. Knole is a grand building. Its walls enclose an incomparable history that in the telling becomes an extraordinary story. What's even better, it's a romp of a read.

[Review refers to U.K. edition]

Knole is the ancestral home of the Sackvilles and its story is written by one who has inherited it under the laws of primogeniture (the oldest male heir becomes heir to the property). He covers the advantages and the disadvantages of this practice. He does well in writing of the burdens of owning these huge homes. The story begins in 1604 and ends, as so many others do, with The National Trust's takeover. To Sackville-West's credit he deals with the attitude of many, that The National Trust is subsidizing a life of continued grandeur for these family members in private apartments and wings of these residences. It is filled with the castoffs off royal furniture, especially that of the Stuart period.

One of the problems in a book of this kind, is the assumption of the author that his audience knows where the house is and what the surrounding countryside is like. It is confusing to someone not familiar with English countryside or the fact that you can be an Earl of Dorset and not live there. There are no maps of the house's location. It is not until you are well into the chapters that you can finally see that it is located in southeast England and even then, not much is told about its surroundings.

What is really missing are pictures of the property and of its views. He writes of these and you long to see what they look like, but these pictures are not included. There are some photographs of the property and furnishings today, but the lack of illustration of what the house looks like, and the furnishings and illustrations of changes through the years is a huge hindrance to the representation and understanding of the house's grandeur. It would have been a greater improvement if many of the ancestor's portraits would have been left out, and more focus put on the house in the book's illustrations .

It is a well researched history, but it is missing some of the heart and souls of the ancestors and what most of them really felt for the house, other than as a place of wealth and status. The narrative finally comes alive with the years of WWII, probably because of the availability of first person remembrances. This would be a book of interest to those wanting to know more of the homes of England and their history and of the extraordinary linage of an ancestral home .

This was an interesting read as one normally doesn't get the story of the house from the viewpoint and in the context of the people have who lived in it. Each chapter discusses each of the occupants of one of the most famous - and largest - English country houses, Knole, as written by the present occupant. From it's acquisition by Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, through to the author, the present Lord Sackville, we follow the vicissitudes of the house, estate, and its owner/occupants. It's very readable and the family is interesting. However, what I felt was missing was content that made the reader familiar with the house itself and the surrounding estate. There isn't even a good photo of the house though there are some early drawings and a few photos that show Knole as a backdrop for photos. The book is exactly as subtitled: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles. One certainly gains an overview of the family history and an understanding of how each has felt about the house. While this makes a good, readable story, it wasn't exactly what I expected. I still recommend it, but with the warning that you won't learn a lot of details about the house, its rooms, and its contents. You'll learn about how it was all acquired, lived in, and hung onto.

Such a dynamic family! Such a marvel of a house! Such a boring book! Ouch! All the stuff is in there, but it's just IN there. When I was teaching history, this was the kind of writing I expected from students who were just learning to research and write... NOT from a published author. Really, with all the comings and goings at that House, a much more interesting book is expected, not just a listing of who lived there, what they spent on good times and how many kids they had. Don't read this book if you want to know more than contents, names and dates. Very disappointing.