kept clear of the fray. As in the Scott case, Victoria and Lionel won. Knole remained theirs. They retained too the Sackville title, which assured the illegitimate Victoria the respect and deference she craved. In Sevenoaks, their victory was celebrated with a public holiday. They returned to Knole in a carriage drawn by men of the local fire brigade. Bouquets covered the seats. Defeated and deeply in debt, Henry subsequently committed suicide. Expenses associated with the case cost the Sackvilles the enormous sum of £40,000.
In a poem called ‘Heredity’, written in 1928, Vita Sackville-West asked: ‘What is this thing, this strain,/ Persistent, what this shape/ That cuts us from our birth,/ And seals without escape?’ To her cousin Eddy she would write: ‘You and I have got a jolly sort of heredity to fight against.’20 Dark shadows clouded Vita’s adolescence. On two occasions, crises in the life of her family became public spectacles, she herself – as ‘Kidlet’ – an unwitting heroine of the illustrated papers. Exposed to public gawping were the sexual foibles of her parents and her grandparents, and a world in which love, sex, money and rank coexisted in a greedy system of barter and plunder. Set against this was the feudal loyalty of Sevenoaks locals, the splendour of life in the rue Laffitte, where Seery entertained European royalty, and the majesty and mystery of Knole itself. It was, for Vita, a varied but not a straightforward existence: courtroom exposure of its flaws increased a tendency to regard herself as distinct and apart, which began in her childhood. Ultimately she longed to retreat from view. Inheritance became a vexed issue for Vita, and one that dominated chapters of her life and facets of her mind. Over time she regarded heredity as immutable and inescapable, but unreliable. This in turn coloured her sense of identity: an element of bravado underpinned her stubborn pride. She did not struggle to escape. Her understanding of her inheritance – temperamental, physical, material – shaped the person she became.
‘While he was still an infant John learned not to touch glass cases and to be careful with petit-point chairs. His was a lonely but sumptuous childhood, nourished by tales and traditions, with occasional appearances by a beautiful lady dispensing refusals and permissions …’
Violet Trefusis, Broderie Anglaise, 1935
‘IN LIFE,’ WROTE Vita Sackville-West in her best-known novel, The Edwardians, ‘there is only one beginning and only one ending’: birth and death.1 So let it be in this retelling of Vita’s own life.
Imagine her as a newborn baby, as she herself suggested, ‘lying in a bassinette – having just been deposited for the first time in it … surrounded by grown-ups … whose lives are already complicated’.2 The bassinette stands temporarily in her mother’s bedroom. The grown-ups are Mrs Patterson the nurse and Vita’s mother and father, Victoria and Lionel Sackville-West. We have already seen something of the complications: more will reveal themselves by stages.
In the early hours of 9 March 1892, the grey and green courtyards of Knole were not, as Vita later described them, ‘quiet as a college’.3 Howling and shrieking attended her birth. Outside the great Tudor house, once the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury, once a royal palace and expansive as a village with its six acres of roof, seven courtyards, more than fifty staircases and reputedly a room for every day of the year, darkness hung heavy, ‘deepening the mystery of the park, shrouding the recesses of the garden’;4 the Virginia creeper that each year crimsoned the walls of the Green Court clung stripped of its glowing leaves. Inside, a night of turmoil dragged towards dawn. Dizzy with her husband’s affection, less than two years into their marriage, Vita’s mother confessed to having ‘drunk deep at the cup of real love till I felt absolutely intoxicated’:5 not so intoxicated that the experience of childbirth was anything but terrible. Its horrors astonished Victoria Sackville-West. She wept and she yelled. She begged to be killed. She demanded that Lionel administer doses of chloroform. It was all a hundred times worse than this charming egotist had anticipated. Lionel could not open the chloroform bottle; Mrs Patterson was powerless to prevent extensive, extremely painful tearing. And then, within three quarters of an hour of giving birth, she succumbed to ‘intense happiness’. Elation displaced agony. She was dazzled by ‘such a miracle, such an incredible marvel’: ‘one’s own little baby’. She was no stranger to lightning changes of mood.
Her ‘own little baby’ was presented to Victoria Sackville-West by her doting husband. Like a precious stone or a piece of jewellery, Vita lay upon a cushion. Her tiny hands, her miniature yawning, entranced her mother. So, too, her licks and tufts of dark hair. Throughout her pregnancy Victoria had been certain that her unborn child would be a daughter. Long before she was born, Victoria and Lionel had taken to calling her Vita (they could not refer to her as ‘Baby’ since ‘Baby’ was Victoria’s name for Lionel’s penis); her wriggling in the womb had kept Victoria awake at night. On the day of Vita’s birth, Victoria headed her diary entry ‘VITA’: bold capitals indicate that she considered the name settled, inarguable. It was, of course, a contraction of Victoria’s own name, just as the daughter who bore it must expect to become her own small doppelgänger. For good measure Victoria christened her baby Victoria Mary. Mary was a sop to the Catholicism of her youth. It was also a tribute to Mary, Countess of Derby, Lord Sackville’s sister, who had once taken under her wing Pepita’s bastards when first Lord Sackville brought Victoria and her sisters to England. Vita was the only name she would use. Either way, the identities of mother and child were interwoven. Even-tempered and still infatuated, Lionel consented.
And so, at five o’clock in the morning, in her comfortable Green Court bedroom with its many mirrors and elegant four-poster bed reaching right up to the ceiling, Victoria Sackville-West welcomed with open arms the baby she regarded for the moment as a prize chattel. ‘I had the deepest gratitude to Lionel, who I was deeply in love with, for giving me such a gift as that darling baby,’ she remembered many years later.6 She omitted to mention the lack of mother’s milk which prevented her from feeding Vita: her thoughts were not of her shortcomings but her sufferings. ‘I was not at all comfy,’ she recorded with simple pique. She was ever self-indulgent. The combination of intense love, possessiveness and an assertive sort of self-absorption imprinted itself on Vita’s childhood. In different measure, those same characteristics would re-emerge throughout her life.
In the aftermath of Vita’s birth, Lionel Sackville-West retreated to his study to write letters. He may or may not have been disappointed in the sex of his child, for which Victoria, with a kind of sixth sense, had done her best to prepare him. On 9 March, he conveyed news of his new daughter to no fewer than thirty-eight correspondents. The habit of entrusting intense emotions to the page and ordering those emotions through the written word would similarly form part of Vita’s make-up. As would his daughter, Lionel wrote quickly but with care. Later he shared with her his advice on how to write well.
When Lionel was not writing he read. In the fortnight up to 27 March, he offered his French-educated bride an introduction to the works of Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. Beginning with The Book of Snobs, he progressed, via Vanity Fair, to The History of Henry Esmond. Appropriately it was Becky Sharpe, self-seeking heroine of Vanity Fair, ‘a wicked woman, a heartless mother and a false wife’, who captured Victoria’s interest. The women shared coquetry, worldliness, allure. In time Victoria would indeed prove herself capable of falsity, heartlessness and something very like wickedness. But it was the story of Henry Esmond that ought to have resonated most powerfully for Lionel and his family.
Victoria’s diary does not suggest that either husband or wife drew parallels between the novel and their own circumstances. Those are for us to identify. As the illegitimate son of an English nobleman, Henry Esmond is unable to inherit the estate of his father, Viscount Castlewood,