The field pattern of modern Sissinghurst is not medieval, but a mixture of late eighteenth century and Victorian. The medieval fields had, in other words, been removed and replaced within the Park pale by a relaxed openness, a pretence at nature. It was a set of relations which embodied constraint and ease, order and freedom, the cultivated and wild. Stand on top of the Tower at Sissinghurst in 1570 and you could feel almost literally on top of the world. It may have given the pleasure that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Englishmen got from standing on top of mountains: the perfection of dominance.
An enormously expensive fence and bank – an oak pale – seven miles long had been built around the whole seven hundred acres. The park was stocked with deer and, in a small part, just beyond the site of the Victorian farmhouse, with exceptionally valuable and highly prized rabbits. There were gates into the Park where the old roads entered it and stiles here and there over which a man could climb but a deer could not jump. On the northern edge, where the drove road from Charing to Cranbrook crossed the park, an oak-framed park-keeper’s lodge was built. It is still there: a one-up, one-down cottage now subdivided and buried under later extensions, but with the field next to it still called Lodge Field.
From the Tower, and to a lesser extent from the two little banqueting houses, Baker, his family, friends and guests could survey their world, one which, in the heavily commercialised and semi-industrialised surroundings of the Cranbrook cloth business, had been cut out of the new normality, and in its adopted and theatrical simplicity made to seem precious beyond price. This is a very early holiday house, or at least a beauty house, a place in which life could be seen and enjoyed like a ballet.
The landscape historian Nicola Bannister, in a survey for the National Trust, has made a richly interesting discovery about the relationship of house and park. She took me with her one day that winter to show me what she had found. For about two-thirds of its length, Nicola had rediscovered the bank on which Richard Baker’s Park pale had been built. Sometimes it snaked its way through modern woodland. Sometimes it was as much as five or six feet tall, sometimes no more than a ripple in the leaf litter. For much of its length the old drove from Three Chimneys to Cranbrook (now the busy A282) ran alongside it, and for another part the old lane from Frittenden to Cranbrook Common. But the intriguing point was this: for all the length that it survives (which is about 70 per cent of the complete circuit), it is laid along the skyline as seen from the top of the Tower. Both the pale and the tower-top rooms are about 230 feet above sea level. It is unlikely that this a coincidence. It seems as if the height of the Tower was calculated to make the house-and-park effect work most precisely. The deer in the Park were to be hunted. The height of the Tower guarantees that from its prospect rooms you would never lose sight of it. The vision of the Sissinghurst park is precisely like one of the sixteenth-century tapestries Vita brought with her from Knole and which still hang in the corridors of Sissinghurst: open grounds, shady bowers, exquisite pavilions among the trees, and the hunt of the swine or the deer, at which the men with their javelins stand firm, while the horn is blown and all is happily and easily laid out to view.
The Park was important to the Bakers. In Richard Baker’s 1594 will, his executors were empowered to have any of his woods and underwoods felled to pay off his debts, ‘except only the okes and Beeches growing within my sayd parke of Sissinghurst’. Some things were worth more than money, and the family maintained the Park and had the pale repaired and renewed up until the end of the seventeenth century. Only then did it fall into decay. When Horace Walpole came here in 1741, he described ‘a park in ruins and a house in ten times greater ruins’. In the late eighteenth century it was reclaimed for farmland and wood. Only here and there, magically, does a great tree survive. The huge four-hundred-year old pollard oak in which I spent a day in the early summer of 2006 is a relict from that park. There is another down by the Hammer Brook, almost equally old and more venerable, its giant bole not to be hugged even by four people. The big beech pollards up on the crest, although much younger, probably germinating even as Walpole was looking at them, are from the last days of the Park, as are many of the younger oaks in the wood. They are now surrounded by dense chestnut coppice planted in the nineteenth century. Many lower branches of these oaks, which must once have grown out in the open air of a park, have withered and died where the chestnuts have shaded them out so that only the crown and the central trunk of the tree remain green and juicy. These lower oaky limbs hang out barkless and sapless, sticking out from their trees like narwhal tusks, the memory of an Elizabethan dream long since gone.
All this is to take the great house, with its precisionist workings and its surrounding spread of exquisite nature – so unlike the tightly knitted closes of the Wealden landscape – at its own valuation. It didn’t look quite the same from beyond the Park pale. The court records at the end of Elizabeth’s reign are full of trouble between the Bakers, their precious Park, their ironworks at Hammer Mill and the people of Cranbrook.
One young Cranbrook man after another raided the Park for its deer. Jasper Glover, the Bakers’ keeper, pursued them to their houses in Cranbrook, waking them in the middle of the night, hauling them before the magistrates, with their mud-covered stockings as evidence of what they had been up to. Others broke into the park with their greyhounds. There were armed scuffles between the Bakers’ men and the Cranbrook thieves.
Court cases dragged on for years, the focus of a deeper conflict between the Bakers and the deeply puritan people of the surrounding country. There may have been a sense of religious divide between them – there is some evidence that the Bakers remained secret Catholics – and in 1594 a plot was hatched in Cranbrook to destroy the Bakers’ most valuable asset: the furnace and forge that Richard Baker had set up at Hammer Mill in 1569.
The ironworks needed stupendous amounts of charcoal made from coppice wood, largely oak and hornbeam, in the surrounding woodlands. It has been estimated that about four thousand acres of coppice would be required to fuel a furnace and a forge. The woods had to be near the ironworks because charcoal, if carted too far, shattered into dust.
But cloth needed wood too. The great hot boiling vats in which the clothiers in the six parishes around Cranbrook dyed a million pounds of wool a year consumed untold quantities of it. The problem was that the wood belonged, in large measure, to the Bakers, the ironworks had first call on it and on top of that wood merchants were exporting it to London. By December 1594, the clothiers of Cranbrook, and all the weavers, spinners, shearmen, teasel men, carters and mercers who relied on the cloth business, had put up with enough. They had already attacked a wood dealer in Biddenden. A conspiracy was hatched focused on ‘Mr Bakers mill and woodes’. Secret meetings were held in Cranbrook houses urgently debating how ‘to break upp Mr Bakers Hammer Pond’. The authorities began to hear whispers of the plot. Some poor Cranbrook weavers, egged on by the richer clothiers, remaining hidden in the background, were planning ‘to put up the bank of the ponde’. Cranbrook had no wood to burn and so ‘There is a rumor that they will put down the furnace.’
John Baker, Richard’s son, was the owner of Sissinghurst when this crisis hit. Hearing of ‘certaine mutinus speeches tendeinge at the least to greate disorder ensuinge’, he hurried down to Sissinghurst from his house in Southwark. Many of the conspirators were arrested while others were known to have fled.
By mid-January 1595, the crisis seems to have ebbed; it is difficult to say why but it is clear that Elizabethan Sissinghurst, which perhaps to Vita looked like the moment of perfection, turns out to have been a time of polarised identities: a fierce distinction between inside the great house and outside it; a pretence at ease and refinement within the enclosure; a hard-pressure world of unregulated business beyond it. The whole of the Weald, in the middle of which the parkland and jewel-like house sat was a negotiated and contested space, full, not slack, taut and tightly patrolled.
There is no portrait of Richard
Baker and nothing written by him. We know only that he was a man of wealth and sophistication. He left to Mary, his Roman Catholic wife, ‘such apparrell as she hath’ in his will, ‘And my better coatch with the horses and furniture thereto belonging.’ He had a daughter Chrysogna, whose portrait as a girl survives at the Vyne in Hampshire, a miniature person in ruff and gilt lace, with a coral and pearl necklace and a red gallica rose in her hand, not unlike but not very like the Rose gallica ‘Sissinghurst Castle’ discovered here by Vita. Richard Baker had his own silk clothes which he left to his eldest son John. He had been trained up by his father for a political career, but abandoned it as soon as his father died. Instead, he devoted himself to creating a vision of a perfect Sissinghurst. He loved Sissinghurst. He had taken his inheritance and profoundly reshaped it. Sissinghurst became his self-portrait. What he made of it was a denial of his terrifying, moralist father, a substitution of delight and playfulness for authority and violence. He had retreated from brutal Tudor politics into the play-politics of Renaissance aestheticism, a quasi-medieval, quasi-classical world of a pure pink fantasy castle surrounded by its lawns and woods and prancing deer.
A good house, according to Andrew Boorde, the leading English theorist on Tudor houses, had to be well away from others, with a beautiful prospect in front of it, on the edge of a low hill overlooking a vale, visible from afar and settled in its place ‘comodyously’. Because, as Boorde explained, if the iye be not satysfyed, the mynde can not be contended, the harte can not be pleased, yf the herte and mynde be not pleased nature doth abhorre. And yf nature do abhorre, mortyfycacion of the vytall and anymall and spyrytuall powers do consequently folowe.
Richard Baker’s Sissinghurst could have slid into Philip Sidney’s description of Basilius’s house in Arcadia:
Truly a place for pleasantness, for it being set upon such an insensible rising of the ground as you are come to a pretty height before almost you perceive that you ascend, it gives the eye lordship over a good large circuit, which according to the nature of the country, being diversified between hills and dales, woods and plain, one place more clear, another more darksome, it seems a pleasant picture of nature, with lovely lightsomeness and artificial shadows.
This is the place to which, in an orgasm of anxiety and preparation, the queen and her court came in August 1573. By then the house was surely complete: the rents gathered, the coping stones on, the paving laid, the moat extended and filled, the garden manured and planted, the roses trained, the banqueting houses embellished, the glass polished, the panelling up, the light grotesque devised and painted, the tapestries hung, the chimneypieces installed, the fires lit, the Park laid out, the pale erected, the deer stocked, the meadows fenced, the woods coppiced, the entranceways smoothed, the pond-bay dug, the river dammed, the charcoal made, the furnace lit and the ironworks begun.
In August 1573, the queen had been on progress in Kent for a week or two. She had already stayed with the Culpepers at Bedgbury and knighted Sir Alexander, and with the Guilfords at Hemsted, and knighted Sir Thomas. Finally, on 14 August, she and her court arrived at Sissinghurst, coming up from Rye through the atrocious clay-stodged roads. The courtiers were not in the best of moods. Lord Burleigh had written three days before to the earl of Shrewsbury in Derbyshire, saying he had much rather have been with him at Chatsworth than down here in the slums of the Weald.
It was the most dazzling sight ever seen at Sissinghurst. When the court went on progress, its baggage filled between three and five hundred carts. You have to imagine them coming through the heavy gate in the Park pale, lurching down the deeply entrenched road through the wood, pulling on to the level ground in front of the gatehouse, streaming in through that gate into the upper courtyard and there debouching their riches.
There is no record of who was with the queen that year, but by chance an account has survived from the following summer of the rooms given to the court when it arrived at the archbishop’s palace at Croydon. They had also been there in 1573. Most of the courtiers, as the document records, were given the chambers they had occupied the year before. Where the courtiers on progress differed, a note was made of who substituted for whom. The 1574 Croydon list, in other words, can be used to identify the people who came to stay at Sissinghurst in August 1573.
That summer day the whole cavalcade of Elizabethan courtliness arrived. There were the old men: the Lord Chamberlain, Thomas Radclyffe, earl of Sussex, a seasoned soldier in Ireland and the north, aged forty-eight, now in charge of the Household; the Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, the architect of Elizabethan security, now aged fifty-three, who as a young man must have known Sir John Baker well; the Lord Admiral, Edward Clinton, earl of Lincoln, now sixty-one, an experienced man of war, now turned courtier and diplomat. A generation down, and the glamour star of the whole performance, Robert Dudley, now aged forty, recently created earl of Leicester by the queen, was here. Loathed by Burghley, Lincoln and Sussex and beloved by the queen and her ladies, Leicester had already begun this summer, in secret, unknown to queen or court, a love affair with Lady Douglas Sheffield, who would secretly marry him and conceive a son later that autumn. She was not here but her sister was, the unmarried Lady Frances Howard, said to be just as far gone in love for the great courtier. Leicester could have acknowledged none of it, but as Master of Horse would have concentrated with Richard Baker on the hunting to be laid on for the party in Sissinghurst Park. The youngest of the courtiers here was the brilliant young poet, the earl of Oxford, Burghley’s son-in-law, recently married, rich, of ancient lineage, the world at his feet.
Around the queen herself were her loyal and high-born ladies: the twenty-four-year-old Swedish beauty Helena, marchioness of Northampton, of whom the queen was intensely fond and whose task it was to warm up the queen’s cold bed each night. Leicester’s sister-in-law, Lady Warwick, was here, as was Lady Strafforde, Mistress of the Robes, Lady Carew and Lady Sydney. Armies of less high-born courtiers crowded around this jewelled core: Grooms of the Privy Chamber, Esquires for the Body, Gentlemen Ushers, ‘Phesycos’ and those in charge of the kitchen, the beds and the queen’s own waiter all had to be fitted in.
The new Sissinghurst would have been built with this moment in mind. Baker would have had tens of rooms to play with: in the great new court, in the Tower and in the old medieval house. It was not unheard of for the hosts of the court on progress to farm out a few unimportant courtiers to neighbouring houses. The key concern, which the earl of Sussex would have overseen, was a set of rooms for the queen in which she could perform her political and public roles; and away from that, on the upper floor, more withdrawn rooms in which she could be cocooned in some privacy. If Sissinghurst followed the pattern in other houses, the court would have used the Hall as the Great Chamber to which all had access; the parlour as the Presence Chamber, to which many of the higher courtiers had access; and maybe a winter parlour as the Privy Chamber, to which access was strictly controlled.
On the floor above, probably overlooking both the garden by the moat and the great court on the other side, the queen’s rooms would have been surrounded by her core household: Sussex within calling distance, Lady Carew and other gentlewomen of the bedchamber and Lady Strafforde next door, ‘the lady Marquess’ of Northampton near by. The male counsellors would have been accommodated on the far side of the court in the opposite range: with Burghley, Leicester, Oxford and others over there in tense proximity.
From the first ceremonial greeting at the threshold, surely under the Tower arch, they would have moved on into the great courtyard. Each member of the court would have been shown his or her apartments. Hall, parlour, garden, the room in the Tower decorated with busts of the queen’s father, mother, sister, brother and herself, the rooftop views and those from the flanking banqueting houses, the Park with its deer-hunting and rabbit-catching: all this feels like an amalgam of party architecture and landscape design, a complete universe in which life itself was a theatre of delight.
Sometim
es people put on the most elaborate displays for the queen: gods, goddesses and fairy sprites, Arthurian swains and their wimpled ladies, verse-spouting shepherds and wild men of the woods, all popping up out of bushes as she passed. It didn’t have to be as elaborate as that. Robert Sidney described to his friend Sir John Harington a relatively low-key, perhaps Sissinghurst-style visit to Penshurst:
My son made a fair Speech, to which she did give a most gracious reply. The women did dance before her, whilst cornets did salute from the gallery; and she did vouchsafe to eat two morsels of rich comfit cake, and drank a small cordial from a gold cup. She had a marvelous suit of velvet borne by four of her first women attendants in rich apparel; two ushers did go before. Six drums and six trumpets waited in the Court, and sounded at her approach and departure.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 19
