turning to the people sayed, ‘What is it a clocke?’ They sayed, ‘Ten.’ Then she sayed, ‘Thanks be to God! Bye xi we shalbe with our God.’ And then, turning to the blinde mayde, sayd, ‘Now sister Besse, be of good cher. Thou dyd never see, but soone yow shalt see Lord Jesus Cryst.’ To whom she answred, ‘I trust so.’
Is it any surprise that these stories sank deep into the psyche of the Protestant people of the Weald? Or that this exercise of orthodox power and the suppression of liberties should give rise to terrible, half-mythical tales, still current in Sissinghurst and Cranbrook, of John Baker as Bloody Baker and Butcher Baker, a Bluebeard murderer, rapist and oppressor? I remember my father telling me one as a boy, taking me to the place, in the old brewhouse, just on the other side of the arch from our kitchen. There is an early-sixteenth-century staircase there, with a rubbed and worn newel post at its foot. At the top, shadowed and spooky when I was young, a big door gave on to a room that had been my father’s bedroom when he was a boy. This, he told me, had been Bloody Baker’s own room, and it was on this staircase that the most terrible crime in his long and terrible life had been committed. He was in the habit, my father said, of ravishing young virgins from the village. ‘Do you know what ravishing means, Adam?’ I did. And virgin? I did. Bloody Baker would summon them, they would come to the foot of the stairs and he would take them up to that room and in there do his worst with them. ‘Do you understand do his worst, Adam?’ I did.
One day a young woman arrived early. She was approaching the stairs when she heard someone coming down them and hid in the cupboard beneath. This one here. It was Bloody Baker carrying the body of his latest victim. As he reached the foot of the stairs a ring on her hand caught the newel post and in a rage of frustration Baker drew his sword and sliced the hand from the wrist. Look, Adam, here, where the sword cut into the wood. I saw how the newel post had been slashed and hacked as if with a hatchet into a worn and eroded stump.
Although this story and the many like it are all untrue, nothing I had heard had ever seemed more real. It is the kind of story told by the powerless about the powerful. It relies on the strangeness and distance of authority and the way in which power can suddenly land, terrify and destroy its victims out of a clear blue sky. It is a measure of the distance between Tudor Sissinghurst and the world around it.
In 1558, the old man died. In his will, he addressed his son directly from beyond the grave:
To myne oldest sonne Richard Bakere goddes blessinge and myne and all suche my plate of siluer and gilt &e. and all other stuffe and utensiles of houshold in my manor mesuage and house of Cessyngherst. And I charge the[e] my sonne Richarde that above all things thowe serve God and thy soueraigne lorde and ladye the Kinge and quene, applye thy lernynge, be curtesse and gentill to euery bodie, be aydinge and lovinge to thy naturall Brother John Bakere and to thy susters Mary Cecile and Elizabeth, love well they neighbours, counsell, cherishe and help theym in theire necessities as righte and good conscience will requyre, avoyde Brybery, extortion, corruption and dissimulacon, eschewe Idlenes, applie the[e] to vertuose exercise, be faythfull and true in worde and deede and holly putt thy truste in Almightie God with humble callinge to hym for grace with laudes and thanks for all thy benefits and he wilbe thy keper and defender from all daunger, perill and evill.
The implication is clear: the ageing father, replete with his vision of strict social wholeness, distrusted his son. He was right to do so. In the most spectacular of Sissinghurst’s generation shifts, Richard Baker, still in his thirties with a huge income from the inherited estate of at least £650 a year, took Sissinghurst in hand and drove it in a new direction: not ancient propriety but aestheticised glamour, not conformist strictness but Elizabethan romanticism, not rooted Kentishness but highly cultured, Italianate arcadianism, with a sophisticated interaction of building and landscape, large, grand and expensive, far beyond anything anyone had ever done here. Between 1558 and 1573, Richard Baker made of Sissinghurst an Elizabethan palace at the centre of its own dream world. It was the flickering ghost of that place, with all its ancient Sackville connections, which drew Vita here, to make a garden among the ruins.
There are many forms of evidence for what Richard Baker did: the remains of the buildings themselves – the Tower, the South Cottage, the Priest’s House, the barns, the long front range; plans of other contemporary buildings which bear strong resemblances to Sissinghurst; drawings made of it in the eighteenth century which show the great Elizabethan palace from various points of view; accounts of one or two eighteenth-century visitors; the verbatim record of a month-long investigation made in 1761 into crimes that had been committed here, whose pages inadvertently describe the Elizabethan house’s geography; the claims made by the owners against the government for damage done by prisoners held here; the marks left on the surrounding landscape by Richard Baker’s great and encompassing scheme for the whole place; accounts of court cases held at the end of the century, which describe the relationship of Sissinghurst to the surrounding population; a very early seventeenth-century census of people living in Cranbrook and the surrounding parishes, house by house, which takes in Sissinghurst; and finally the accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s visit here for three days in August 1573.
Although it is a fragmentary archive scattered across the country, in Cranbrook, Maidstone, Lincoln’s Inn, Kew, Staffordshire and Sissinghurst, and although there are no contemporary maps, drawings or letters, there is richness and suggestion here, which, taken together with other Elizabethan theories of what the beautiful place should be, can be assembled into a coherent picture of what Richard Baker made. He overlaid the medieval inheritance with a mixture of classical detail and a simple version of an Elizabethan fantasy palace. By the time he died, everything was here: a great, many-court-yarded house; a garden beside it; outlying banqueting houses overlooking the park; a prospect tower from which the park could be viewed in its full extent; new barns in which the hay was kept for the park deer; a bank and pale surrounding that park; woods; open grasslands called ‘launds’ (from the French, lande a word that evolved into ‘lawn’); a park-keeper’s lodge; and necklaces of ponds dammed along the stream within the park. Evidence for every one of these things remains at Sissinghurst today.
It was all made in the service of a deep and extraordinarily expensive form of play. House, landscape, woods and meadows were reshaped as theatre. Each of the elements was carefully integrated with the others, all contributing to an atmosphere in which the demands of getting and spending did not for a while have to be observed. The parishes beyond the park gates may have been deeply embroiled in the accumulation of capital. Within it, those priorities were suspended. Central to this transformation is the fact that the Bakers were often not at Sissinghurst but at their London houses, either in Southwark or in Lime Street in the City. When a crisis with the local populace erupted in the 1590s, the whole Baker family was in London, and when a survey of communicants in Cranbrook parish was repeatedly made in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the Bakers were only rarely here to be counted. Sissinghurst was their dream place. It became a kind of toy.
Like the other gentry of Elizabethan England, Baker was not indifferent to enterprise or industry, and along with this theatrical construct of the new Sissinghurst was something else: a working and earning landscape. The woods grew coppice wood and standard timber; a large dam was built across the Hammer Brook and a fifty-acre pond made upstream of that dam; its head of energy powered the hammers and bellows of an ironworks; there were other mills, other ponds and sluices which provided extra head for the corn mills farther downstream.
What can be said about the world of this glamour-and-delight palace which Richard, the Elizabethan Baker, inserted into his father’s adapted medieval-Tudor manor house? To begin at the centre: still standing in the orchard was the de Berhams’ close-timbered manor house. Beside it on the eastern side was a large fish pond. Three hundred feet to the west was John Baker’s twenty-year-ol
d gatehouse with its out-of-date twisted chimneys. Between the two stretched a large open court. It was a bitty inheritance which needed ordering, regularising and aestheticising.
Using an architect whose name has not survived, but whose plans as seen in eighteenth-century drawings bear a strong resemblance to the drawings collected by John Thorpe and now in the Soane Museum in London, Baker inserted between the medieval house and the 1530s gateway a large Renaissance core to Sissinghurst. It consisted essentially of a prospect-tower-cum-inner-gateway with a cour d’honneur beyond it. The result was a three-courtyard house: the first a reduced base-court, paved throughout, into which horsemen could enter through the earlier arch. Dendrochronological dating of the timbers in the front range has shown that Richard Baker probably lengthened the wings on either side of the entrance arch at the same time, with stabling to the north and simple accommodation, perhaps for the steward, to the south. Both façades of both ranges were decorated with large black diamond patterns in the brick, visible in early twentieth-century photographs but now faded.
These lengthened wings exaggerated an effect that has troubled rationalists (including my father and grandfather) ever since: the axis of the gateway is not perpendicular either to the Tower or the court beyond it, nor presumably to the medieval house, which has now disappeared. The unfortunate effect is that the upper courtyard is not rectangular but deeper at its northern than its southern end. Why should this have been? No one has ever been sure: a possible reason is that part of medieval and early Tudor theory of the healthy building – Tudor Feng Shui – insisted that a gateway should not be directly aligned with the entrance to a house. Doors into the house should be either offset or misaligned so that a noxious wind could not find its way into the rooms.
At the far side of the first court stood the new Tower, still called ‘the Great Gate’ in the eighteenth century. Its form dramatises the story of its own insertion into a pre-existing plan. The side looking back to Baker’s father’s gateway is pierced with a flattened, Tudor arch. But the other arch on the other side of the Tower and the entire façade looking into the great court are strictly detailed in the correct grammar of a Tuscan order, with pilasters, entablatures, elegantly moulded cornices and the perfect semicircle of a Roman arch. As you passed under the Tower, you moved from medieval to Renaissance Sissinghurst. Steps led down then as now into the court. Horse and carriage had been left behind on the other side. You were entering a piazza in which the gentry strolled. There was no muck, noise or dung. It was the scene for a Kentish passegiata. On either side, large mullioned and transomed windows gave on to apartments reached from separate stairs, much like an Oxford or Cambridge college. A paved path led across the court between lawns. Stone balls marked the breaks in the cornices. Those which had survived until the 1930s Harold put up on the garden walls. Over each doorway, small pediments held the Baker arms flanked by their surrounding dolphins. A fragment of one of those pediments still sits, unregarded, in the arch under the Tower. Another was taken by a visiting Baker descendant to Cranbrook church in the 1830s, where it was accidentally put up in the east wall of the nave, by the chancel opening, thought to be part of old Sir John Baker’s tomb.
At the far end of the courtyard was an elaborate columned and entablatured doorway, like the frontispiece for an Elizabethan book. Harold and Vita used the shafts of its fluted and channelled columns, which they found lying in the ruins, to make a pergola called the Erechtheum outside their dining room on the edge of the White Garden, where a white wisteria grows over the frame and a rose spirals up one of the shafts. Part of the cornice is now used as a doorstop at the foot of the stairs up the Tower. Originally, the doorway had led into the screens passage between the hall and the buttery and on out into the third, medieval courtyard, now closed off with an Elizabethan range across its western side, and with a well in its centre.
Other, satellite buildings clustered around these three central courtyards. Two large-windowed pretty banqueting houses, one to the north (now called the Priest’s House), one to the south (on the site of the Nuttery, still there in 1760 but now disappeared), gazed out over the parkland. Outside the entrance, Richard Baker also built a pair of beautiful brick barns to the north-west of the main cluster. One is still there but one was demolished in about 1800. Unlike the precision classicism of the Tower and its great courtyard, the barns were built with big strong Gothic archways, medieval buttresses and air-slits through which the hay could breathe. It is a manner and vocabulary which, for a 1560s building, may have been consciously nostalgic, a suggestion in the pointed arches that the barns had been here since time immemorial.
Slowly the ensemble of Elizabethan Sissinghurst begins to gather. Evidence from the eighteenth-century prisoner accounts, from a fragment recovered in 2006 in a drainage trench and hints from other sixteenth-century houses make it possible to describe something of the interiors here. Turn off the ‘Pavement of the Middle Court of the mansion house’, as it was called, step inside one of the doorways and you would find a staircase rising before you. On either side were doors giving into guest lodgings, or those for Baker’s relatives. The stairs rising in front of you turned on a half-landing at the back of the range and climbed to the first-floor landing overlooking the court. Here on the north side was a long gallery, 17 feet wide and 120 feet long, wainscoted throughout, with a rich entablature and carved marble fireplaces. ‘The ceiling,’ according to Horace Walpole, who saw it in 1752, was ‘vaulted, and painted in a light, genteel grotesque.’ Above it, in the attic, may have been the bowling alley referred to in the 1760s. Other rooms upstairs in these ranges were also panelled, probably with oak, probably with some classical allusion in the ornament. Alongside half an oyster shell, a small piece of classically moulded cornice, made of plaster, was found in a drain in the orchard in 2006, nothing very elaborate but cleanly and precisely done.
At the far end of the Middle Court the hall would have filled the right-hand part of the range and the butler’s pantry and buttery the other half, across the screens passage. There was probably a smaller and cosier winter parlour upstairs here too. As the account of the prisoners’ damage refers to the ‘great and little halls’ – both panelled – it may be that the great hall of the medieval house survived in the medieval court beyond it, and that a small, modern Renaissance hall was installed here in the Elizabethan range. There was nothing low status about that third court. Here the household continued to use the well. Beyond the medieval court, which still contained the chapel, stretched the garden, running up to the old fish pond as its eastern boundary. It may be that Richard Baker added two new arms, turning the old pond into what looked like an ancient moat.
This Elizabethan garden filled what is now the White Garden and those parts of the modern orchard not taken up by the great house itself. It was walled to above head height and fruit trees were trained against the walls. What this means, intriguingly, is that when Vita came to a bedraggled and broken place in 1930, and found, miraculously, an unknown Rosa gallica growing here on the edge of the ramshackle orchard, among the weeds and brambles, it was in exactly the place it would have been planted in the Elizabethan garden. The rose is particularly persistent. Vita claimed she could never eradicate it from wherever it wanted to grow, and it is not absurd to suggest that successive plants of that tough and hardy rose, which Vita named ‘Sissinghurst Castle’, had been growing there for 450 years.
Inside the Tower, Richard Baker had one of the rooms decorated with a set of carved heads of Tudor monarchs. They were still there in the 1870s and shown to visitors, but tantalisingly they had disappeared by 1930. Above them, though, was the real showpiece of the place, then as it is today: the prospect from above. Until the early nineteenth century, each of the two turrets was a room higher than it is now and in each face of those octagonal rooms a window gave the viewers collected there – no more than four or five for comfort – a panoramic view of the lands of which this tower was the node and hub.
T
his view from above was a central part of the Elizabethan experience. Big rooftop prospects, rooftop walks, rooftop pavilions, parties on rooftops, even romantic assignations on rooftops: all this was part of a sudden new sixteenth-century relationship to a place, not only dominating it from above but, by standing above it, seeing it for what it was and for what your place within it might be. The sixteenth century in England was the moment when people first began to draw and buy aerial views, when the first models of buildings were made by architects for their clients. And the view from the top of the Tower at the end of the building campaign of the 1560s would have been full of a very particular aesthetic pleasure, the experience, it seems to me, around which the whole ensemble was framed.
At your feet was the intricately made thing, many interlocking courts, with passageways and doors between them, a house not only as a machine for living in – there were thirty-eight hearths paying tax here – but as a kind of enlarged jewel, a device, a cleverly made object. It was placed in the middle of a landscape from which all apparent human influence had been removed. Beyond the perfect court at your feet; beyond the stable court to the west and the medieval court to the east; and beyond the little banqueting pavilions to north and south – lower cousins of this great prospect tower – came the free-flowing lands of the park through which the hunt could pass. The farm on which the inhabitants of Sissinghurst had relied for so long, which they had worked and cultivated for perhaps a thousand years, was no longer needed. The 15,000 acres of the Baker estate provided enough money. So while the new house at Sissinghurst was made particularly refined, the land at Sissinghurst could be thrown back to an artificial naturalness, which was both self-consciously relaxed and self-consciously luxurious, a holiday zone for the well born, from which the poor and the industrious were explicitly and often officiously excluded. Intuitively or not, when Vita and Harold came here in the 1930s, they were responding to a place that had once been shaped into a model of Elizabethan Arcadianism.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 18
