A remarkable eighteenth-century picture of Sissinghurst has surfaced in Ontario. For years nobody has known which house it portrayed and its owner, Derrick Bradbury, recently started to circulate copies to see if it could be identified. It was finally recognized by Nicholas Cooper, the architectural historian, as Sissinghurst in May 2008.
This watercolour was intended as a picture of a double murder, but it is also by far the best portrayal ever discovered of Sissinghurst as the Elizabethans intended it to be.
An onion-domed prospect tower-cum-gateway was centred on a distinguished courtyard, at the far end of which an elaborate doorway opened into a passage which in turn led through to the medieval court beyond. Small banqueting houses to the north and perhaps to the south had large windows overlooking the park. Dignified barns stored the hay necessary for the park deer in the winter. A great garden was laid out between the middle courtyard and the moat to the north and east, of which the paths and beds can faintly be seen in this picture. It was on the site of the lower left hand bed of this Elizabethan garden that Vita Sackville-West discovered the unknown gallica rose, now called ‘Sissinghurst Castle’, when she arrived here in 1930. It now seems at least possible that bushes of the particularly persistent rose had been growing in this garden continuously since the sixteenth-century.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Sissinghurst was burdened by debt ,the park was in ruins and the place was let out to the government because no one in the Baker family cared for it. It became a camp for French naval prisoners during the Seven Years’ War. About three thousand of them were held there, guarded by detachments of various English Militia regiments.
The prisoners trashed the buildings, destroying the Elizabethan paneling and marble fireplaces, burning the pews and altar rails in the chapel, leaving the garden without a stump above ground. After the war was over, most of the buildings shown here were demolished. Only fragments, including the tower, the long front range and one barn, now remain. These were the damp and poignant ruins in which Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson made their famous garden.
On July 9 1761, the terrible incident shown in the painting occurred. Its details are known from the evidence given to an enquiry later that year. Early in the morning, three re-captured escapees were being led back to Sissinghurst through the fields, outside the frame of this picture to the top. ‘A Number of P[risoner]s … having the curiosity to see which of their comrades they were that were retaken, did all make towards the Fence but with no other intent.’ The sentry on the far side of the moat, a soldier of the Kent Militia called John Bramston, told them not to come near the fence, or he would fire at them.
Bramston was already known to be off his head. He seems to have loaded his musket with three balls. One of them lodged itself in the wall surrounding the garden (shown pale pink on the left of the garden), but one hit a Frenchman, Baslier Baillie, and wounded him. (He is shown here being attended by two of his friends.) The third hit and killed Sebastien Billet, shown here lying dead, with his blood spattered on the ground beside him. Baillie would die later from his wounds in the hospital – a toxic sink of disease and filth – which was in the barn at the bottom left of the picture.
Bramston was far from contrite, swaggering around the prison that morning saying ‘If he had killed more it would not have given him any uneasiness.’ In the general shouting and commotion after the shootings, another French-man, Claude Hallet was wounded by a militiaman with a bayonet, and the artist shows that outrage too.
Nicholas Cooper thinks the picture may have been painted by a Frenchman, or perhaps by an opportunist Englishman as a form of visual journalism. Certainly the architectural details are made to look a little more French than they appear in other pictures made by Englishmen at the same time. The lanterns on posts are eighteenth-century security lighting; the little building by the moat with steps up to it is the Necessary House or Privy; and the wheeled carts attached to the barns in the bottom left of the picture are for the night soil.