Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  au Chateau de Sissingherst

  29 Juillet 1757

  Monsieur

  I take the liberty of writing to you to ask you to listen to me on the subject on which I have the honour to address you. I commanded a Calais privateer called the Due de Moncis, in which I was taken about a fortnight ago.

  I thought on my arrival I would be cautioned on my word of honour just as all others of my rank would be. But far from that. I found myself strictly locked up in a prison where I was mixed up with all qualities of men. Where I am suffering everything one might suffer in such a situation. I am the only captain here even though several others who are of a far lower rank than mine have been given permission to leave. So Monsieur, persuaded as I am that you are filled with Justice, I am writing directly to you, to ask you to help me obtain my freedom. On my word, I assure you, that I will never give you the opportunity to repent of having done me this favour. I await this favour of you, begging you to consider that here I am exposed to all sorts of things, riddled with vermin (please excuse the term) and thus unhappy.

  This considered, Monsieur, may it please you from your generosity to grant your consent shortly to

  Your very humble and very respectful servant

  Charles Maquet

  Captain of the privateer Le Duc de Moncis at Calais

  I beg you, if it is your will, to grant me the same favour for my son aged 14 who is a prisoner with me.

  The vermin by whom the Maquets were surrounded were guarded by revolving detachments, each of about 220 men, from various county militias: Surrey, to which the artist Francis Grose was attached as a lieutenant; Hampshire, in which the young Edward Gibbon was an officer here; and Leicestershire, which was the most vicious and almost entirely out of control. Officers of the guard lived either in Cranbrook or in buildings that have now disappeared at the top of the Lake Field. Supervising them on behalf of the Admiralty was a Mr Cooke, ‘Agent for Prisoners of War at Sissinghurst’, known to the French as ‘Monsieur Cok’ and suffering a little from the gout. He could speak no French but communicated with the prisoners through an interpreter called François le Rat. Cooke’s relationship with the army officers was usually unsatisfactory and he was generally distrusted by both guards and prisoners alike for his ‘Gouvernement’, which according to one prisoner’s complaint was ‘nothing less than tyrannical and capricious’.

  This broken-down and brutalised ‘château’, as they called it – a term then borrowed by the English; this was the moment at which Sissinghurst House became Sissinghurst Castle – was a strange and alien place for the French. Their letters refer to the ‘Chateau de Sissengherst’, ‘Sisinchers’, ‘Chisterner’, ‘Sinsinhars’ and ‘Ste. Sigherts pres Cambrok’. It was a zoo of abuse and maltreatment, the prison that Frenchmen in other prisons were threatened with if they misbehaved. The stories coming out of Sissinghurst became so bad that in November and December 1761 Dr Maxwell, the Commissioner for the Sick and Hurt Board, came down for a month and held an inquiry in a room in the great Elizabethan courtyard. From the evidence given to that inquiry, transcribed verbatim into a long manuscript now in the National Archives, a powerful picture emerges of the grief and suffering that thousands of men underwent here.

  The place was disgusting with ‘great heaps of dirt in all the courts’. The moat was ‘very foul and stinking’, filled with all kinds of ordure and no proper means of cleaning it. The prisoners were packed into every available space on all three floors of all the buildings. They slept in hammocks strung from posts specially inserted into the rooms, converting Sissinghurst into the navy’s equivalent of between-decks accommodation. The numbers of the wards and the number of men to be housed in each of them were painted up over the doors. There was no money to replace broken windows and so the prisoners blocked them up with bricks and clay to keep warm. They had coal fires but no scuttles or bunkers and so the coal lay in heaps on the floor and its dust blackened everything. Large numbers of unwashed men lived in virtually lightless and airless rooms, which Maxwell reported as ‘dirty and very bad smelling’ and ‘very close, by the windows being shut up for want of casements and shutters’. The rooms of Elizabethan elegance became ‘Bowling Alley Ward’, ‘Long Gallery Ward’ and ‘Great Parlour Ward’. Worst of all was a room known simply as ‘Black Dog’, and above it ‘Black Dog Garret’, both of which were ‘very close, wanted air, bad smells in them’.

  Every morning the prisoners were turned out of their wards, and on fair days when the ground was dry all the hammocks were taken out to be aired. The prisoners were given two long sheds below the Tower to shelter in during the day. There was a man working in a shed in the Middle Court making stockings. Others had small shops here, selling bread, candles or tobacco. Prisoners could be given licences to go out into the surrounding country, where they worked as cooks, lamplighters, postmen, waiters for officers of the guard or housekeepers for Mr Cooke. Money could be sent from France and was regularly distributed by Mr Cooke. It was said that ‘arithmetic classes’ were held for junior officers in the Tower, unless that is a joke. Some used the chapel to say their daily prayers. They certainly gambled, drank porter and carved their names into the buildings. In the attic of the north wing above the stables, there is still the name of René Mesnard, his letters cut deep into the 1560s oak, and each one carefully painted a smoky French blue.

  They were mustered daily in the upper court, but otherwise the bulk of prisoners were forced to hang about in the Middle Courtyard, as they called it, in the medieval court below and in the remains of the Elizabethan garden beside the moat, some of which was still enclosed by a high wall. Where the wall had disappeared, the garden was surrounded by a ‘paled fence with tenter hooks upon it of full 6 feet high’. This was ‘the best garden’, with the chapel to one side and ‘a Necessary House’, a privy, within it, giving on to the moat. One eighteenth-century drawing of Sissinghurst, recently discovered in Canada, shows a basic outline of walks and beds in the garden. There was another kitchen garden, perhaps on the site of the present Rose Garden, and another ‘little court going into the garden’, probably on the site of the present Delos. Throughout these courts and enclosures and beyond the moat stood sentries carrying loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, with sentry boxes and braziers on posts, from which light was thrown at night-time.

  They were, at least nominally, well fed with a standard naval ration: three-quarters of a pound of beef to each prisoner, distributed in the form of 4½ pounds of meat to each mess, which six men would share. It was cooked in a building just outside the front gate, a delegation of five prisoners inspecting the meat every day before it was cooked. In addition they had 1½ pounds of bread each (which the French complained was ‘glewy’), a quart of beer and on a weekly ‘maigre day’ they had cabbage in a bowl of soup, some bread and six ounces of cheese. But so bitter was the atmosphere at Sissinghurst that none of this was really as good as it sounds. In Dr Maxwell’s notes there is a draft of what the daily ration of meat should consist of. Weight was not to be made up ‘from the Coarse or boney part’ and the meat was to be, he wrote, ‘without Skirts or Kidneys, Hearts Heads or any other part’. Hearts and heads were considered on reflection a perfectly good part of the ration.

  A deeply unhappy and rather chubby twenty-three-year-old Edward Gibbon, who was here for a few days in December 1760, hated every minute of it. Sissinghurst was ‘a strong large old Seat, situated in the middle of a Park’, with about 1,750 prisoners housed there. The daily march to and from a ‘miserable’ Cranbrook was disgusting, the ‘dirt most excessive’ and the other officers despicable. He was already ‘sick of so hateful a service, tired of companions who had neither the knowledge of scholars nor the manners of gentlemen’ and was longing to begin again ‘to taste the pleasure of thinking’. Life at Sissinghurst was ‘at best, not a life for a man of letters’. It was ‘both unfit for and unworthy of me’.

  There is one curious side-note in young Gibbon’s diary. His detachment was at Sev
enoaks on 5 June 1761. ‘We took a Walk to Knowles the D. of Dorset’s seat, a noble pile, very much upon the plan of Sissinghurst.’ The Knole–Sissinghurst connection was alive in the 1560s, when Richard Baker’s sister was married to Thomas Sackville; again in the mind of a particularly alert young man in the 1760s; and again two centuries later in the 1930s, when a disinherited Vita recognised Sissinghurst as the nearest to a ruined Knole she would ever come.

  Sissinghurst was a world of gossip and hate, bubbling with violence, threat and mutual loathing. Prisoners would spit in the face of militiamen, who in return would knock them down with their musket stocks. Brutal kicking and beating occurred almost daily. The lingua franca of the prison was foul abuse. Soldiers would habitually break the pipes in prisoners’ mouths or smack them on the head. There were paid informers among the prisoners. At night, in revenge for insults heard or imagined, the militia would destroy the shelving and tables at which the prisoners would conduct their little businesses. Paul Escombre, the prisoner selling bread in the Middle Court, had his basket overturned and the bread tipped into the mud. The Leicestershire militia, as described by one witness to the inquiry in 1761, seems to have been almost anarchic:

  One day at the muster, the centinels who were posted as usual to keep good order at the muster maltreated many of the Prisoners as they passed by, by striking of them on their backs with their naked hangers [swords], pushing off their hatts with them, pulling of them by their queues, and sometimes striking in among the whole body of those who had not passed with their Hangers. One of the soldiers with his firelock and bayonet fixed, being on the pavement in the middle court, came running along from the chappel. The prisoners seeing him coming did what they could to make way for him but he being too quick for them struck in among them with his firelock & bayonet and drove them off the pavement into the dirt.

  Inevitably, this undertow of loathing and brutality now and then tipped over into murder. One guard, William Bassuck, was killed by a prisoner who dropped a filled pail on his head from the top of the Tower. A soldier who killed two prisoners in the garden said, when asked about it, at least according to one of the prisoners, ‘if he had killed more it would not have given him uneasiness … He sayd he would not have any more pity on us than if we were dogs. He took a stick in his hands. “I’ll take care of these Dogs. They shall not move. If they do, I’ll break their arms.”’ The soldier was said to have ‘publickly boasted that he had long intended it & that he had a desire to kill 10 prisoners before he went off this duty’. The picture recently discovered in Canada shows this incident: the militiaman firing from the far side of the moat; the two men lying dead in the garden; the crowd of outraged prisoners; the ring of sentry-boxes and braziers, a Lilliput-version of a human hell.

  On 27 October 1759, Mr Cooke’s assistant, Mr Ward, and an officer of the West Kent Militia, Mr Mortimer, were walking in the Long Gallery, on the north side of the Middle Court. It was about eleven o’clock at night, an hour after the regulations stated that all lights should be put out. They were looking across the court to ‘the uppermost ward of the south wing’. Mortimer was convinced that the prisoners still had a light burning. Ward

  spoke to Mr M and endeavored to convince him that there were no lights. That it was the Reflection of the Lamps. Upon which we walked up & down the room three times in the Long Gallery where I said I cannot be persuaded that there have been any lights in the room this night.

  Philippe Hardie, one of the sixty or seventy prisoners in the upper ward in the south wing, sleeping next to a man called Joffe from Dunkirk, was asked at the inquiry what happened. ‘The soldier called to them to put the candle out and there was no candle alight; as all the people were asleep nobody answered him.’ ‘Mortimer claimed that the prisoners ‘bid him fire and be damned’, but Philippe Hardie’s testimony has the ring of truth:

  Everybody in the room was very quiet and I was laid alongside of [Joffe]. The reflection of a lamp shone upon a window in our ward & the centinel thought there was a light in the Room & he fired & the other prisoners say now he called out 2 or 3 times but I heard nothing of that & was asleep. The ball went through his thigh as he lay asleep in his hammock across the window.

  The lead ball that hit Joffe in the thigh was found in his hammock. It had gone through one thigh and flattened against the other. But terrible damage had been done in its passage:

  A large hands breadth of the thigh bone [was] shattered to pieces the ball having taken an oblique direction. The wound was so near the head of the bone that amputation was impracticable. The man lived in excessive pain till the 31st then died.

  Ferdinando Gralez, also of Dunkirk, was killed in 1758 ‘as he was putting his cloaths to dry’ on the barrier on the east side of the garden, killed by a sentry on the far side of the moat. He had been shot in the back and the ball had come out ‘about 3 fingers breadth on the right side of the navel’. Cooke had banned clothes being hung on the barriers but the prisoners were uncertain: ‘some centrys suffered it & some did not’. Four of his friends carried Gralez to the hospital in the Elizabethan barn – a toxic sink of filth and unwashed linen, overseen by the incompetent surgeon, Mr Thompson – and ‘there he languished till 11 o’clock that evening and then expired’. The dead were buried in the ground known as the Plain, the grassy patch in front of the entrance where visitors to Sissinghurst now picnic.

  Most pitiable of all, though, are the letters preserved in the Admiralty files in Kew. One after another they describe their hopeless, slave-like circumstances: ‘The sad situation I have been reduced to, having lost a leg in battle, unable to make a living with a large family’; a man who was the last of his crew left at Sissinghurst, all of them having been exchanged with English prisoners and now at home in France; men in need of money; a desperate young man, severely wounded in the face, wanting to be treated by a French surgeon, where ‘he would be much better off than in an English hospital’. Hundreds of them, most of them written in an exquisite clerk’s hand, are piled up in the Admiralty boxes, addressed to ‘Ma Chaire Epouse’, ‘ma très Chere mere’, ‘Ma chere fame’. Others are from the prisoners’ wives, still in France.

  from le havre 25 August 1757

  To monsieur Louis le Brun

  D’un navire Le Lizabeht

  commandé par le capitaine Pierre Double

  de present Prisonnier au chatau de Sissinghurst

  My dear husband

  This is to tell you of the state of my health which is strong, thank God, and that of our children. I hope that the present finds you in a good condition. I want to tell you that I long for your return at the birth

  But she did not have much confidence that he would be there when his latest child was born. She had the good news for him that he would have a place for sure on a boat when he returned to Calais, but when would that be? They must have ‘confidence in the Lord’, but she begged her man to ‘take any joy with moderation’ for fear that things would not turn out as they might have wished. Louis must pray that the Lord will come to their aid.

  Je vous prie de me faire response et de me faire scavoir si ce que vous marquerons fait plaisir je fini en vous souhaitans une parfaite santé je suis en attendans le plaisir de vous voir mon cher mary votre fidelle epouse femme Le Brun

  I beg you to reply to me and to let me know if what you have learned gives you pleasure. I finish in wishing you perfect health. I await the pleasure of seeing you my dear husband. Your faithful wife, Mrs Le Brun

  The most poignant aspect of these letters is that the prisoners never received them. They remain in the Admiralty files where they had originally been scanned for any intelligence they might have yielded on French shipping. And Mme Le Brun would have waited for a reply in vain.

  The French prisoners took Sissinghurst apart, tearing up the woodwork, ‘especially in a ward called The Black Dog by destroying the hammock posts and pulling up and making away with the Boards of the floor’, destroying all the fittings in the chapel, parlours
and Long Gallery, taking out the inside of the stables, making two barns and four oasts unusable ‘by cutting out the principall beams’, stripping off the panelling wherever it had survived, destroying ‘the Palesade fence to the Kitchen Garden with other fences & gates Destroyed’ and wrecking ‘the best Garden, by the Wall fruite & other trees all destroyed and not even the stump of a Shrub nor Tree left’.

  The owner of Sissinghurst was now Edward Mann of Linton, a Baker descendant who in 1762 had bought its 1,402 acres from the other claimants for £12,982, plus £300 for the mansion house. When the war came to an end in 1763, Mann wrote to the Admiralty assessors, telling them that he was ‘filled with a perfect Desire of bringing our affairs together to an Eclairissement’. He asked initially for £361 ‘in compensation for the great Destruction in every Particular which such a number of Prisoners have occasioned in every part of the Buildings & Mansion House & Gardens’, but soon accepted fifty pounds plus the Admiralty’s ‘sheds and erections’, which had remained here when the prisoners left.

  Sissinghurst had been utterly degraded, and this is the first moment when its history just leaks into the margins of living memory. In the 1930s, Vita met a ‘very old’ gentleman who had lived in the Castle in his boyhood. He had been a ten-year-old in the 1860s, when he met a ninety-year-old labourer, who had been about thirty in 1800, when his father-in-law (then about sixty) told him that he ‘had been employed not only to pull down the walls, but also to pick the foundations in 1763’.

  Most of the old house disappeared, probably as hard core for tracks and hard standing. Electronic resistivity surveys of the site have revealed next to nothing, and when drainage ditches have been cut through the lines of the old ranges, all that is revealed in their walls is dark scars of eighteenth-century earth filling the Elizabethan and medieval foundation trenches. All the fields around Sissinghurst are full of shards of tile and crumbled brick from the dismantled buildings. The value remained only in the land. The Park now disappeared. The Pale was never recreated and a regular, eighteenth-century field pattern was laid over the open grounds. A survey was made of the trees here in June 1763 in Sissinghurst Park, Hammer Wood by Hammer Mill, Fludgate Wood next to it, Graylins Wood near Whitsunden and Legge Wood and Eleven Acre Wood, both near Wadd. In them, the indefatigable surveyors counted: