Knole brings out the best and worst in a family

 
11 November 2013

Robert Sackville-West, 7th Baron Sackville, has a new book out next April which, like many of his family’s literary efforts, is close to the bone.

It’s called The Disinherited, A Story of Family, Love and Betrayal and it’s about Knole House, his Jacobean pile with 365 rooms near Sevenoaks in Kent, which has provided 13 generations of Sackvilles with a rich vein of triumph and disaster since they settled there in 1604.

Robert inherited Knole in 2004 through primogeniture on the death of his uncle Lionel, the sixth baron, who had five daughters: Teresa, Catherine, Sophia, Victoria and Sarah. Let’s hope he’s not reopening old wounds with his cousins. They must have been as bitterly disappointed as their forebear, Vita Sackville-West, when she was prevented by primogeniture from inheriting Knole Park on the death of her father in 1928.

Instead it went to her uncle, her father Lord Sackville’s younger brother. She married Harold Nicolson and moved to Sissinghurst and turned the situation to her advantage by writing several books about her family whom she described as “A race too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent and too melancholy.

“A rotten lot, and nearly all of them stark staring mad.”

The Disinherited tells how Henry Sackville-West shot himself in Paris in 1904 having failed to prove he was the legitimate heir to Knole. Robert Sackville-West, who lives at Knole with his wife, two daughters and a son, wrote a history of the family called Inheritance three years ago.

Robert has bucked the family trend by having a son as well as two daughters, but as Arthur is the middle child, might succession eventually pass to his eldest daughter?

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