Knole’s show rooms, filled with artworks and sumptuous furnishings, provide a glimpse of life in one of the grandest English houses
FEATURE JANET GLEESON PHOTOGRAPHS ANDREAS VON EINSIEDEL
Wherever you turn, Knole, inescapably, is a house that wants to make your jaw drop. Ever since the 18th century, visitors have been dazzled by its treasures and captivated by those who lived here. Its show rooms brim with exquisitely rare royal furniture; lavish textiles festoon its beds; glorious Old Masters adorn its venerable walls; and leopards, the heraldic emblem of its Sackville owners, leap from its newel posts and crouch among its carvings. ‘Knole was built to impress and reflect excellence,’ says Sam Bailey, Knole’s curator. ‘It evolved from archbishop’s palace to royal palace, and then became the Sackville family home from the 1600s. And, because it’s been little altered since 1610, today we can follow much the same processional route as that laid out by Thomas Sackville.’
Situated in a large deer park near Sevenoaks in Kent, the Knole we see today was built for Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1456. It was then acquired by Henry VIII and, in 1566, taken over by Thomas Sackville, cousin of Queen Elizabeth I. Members of the Sackville family still live in the house, although responsibility for its care was handed to the National Trust in 1946.
‘There are so many important figures in Knole’s history, it’s hard to single one out, but I would pick John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset, as among the most important,’ says Sam. A patron of the arts and a great friend of Joshua Reynolds, he collected over two dozen of his works. But art wasn’t the Duke’s only love; female companions were another great passion, and his most famous mistress – the ballerina Giovanna Baccelli, who lived with him at Knole – is immortalised in a sensuous sculpture at the foot of the Great Staircase.
Scroll forward two centuries and we meet Vita Sackville-West, another illustrious inhabitant. Despite being the only child of Lionel Sackville-West, as a female, Vita was unable to inherit the house in which she grew up. Many of her memories of Knole are recorded in her writing, some of
