The Sackville family has lived at Knole, one of Britain’s great treasure houses, for more than four hundred years. Throughout its history, Knole has lured generations of heirs with the promise of an ancestral place, an aristocratic life, a sense of unearned esteem and belonging.
Many of these Sackvilles have revelled in the opportunity. But others, once seduced, have found such a huge inheritance hard to manage. The place has ground them down, becoming a curse, a burden, rather than a privilege or a glory.
Knole has always excited a range of different reactions, and not just among members of the Sackville family. It’s a love-it-or-loathe-it sort of place. King Henry VIII liked it so much that he forced Thomas Cranmer, his Archbishop of Canterbury, to hand it to him in 1538. And yet, in the following
