I PLUNGED BACK into Sissinghurst’s past, to look for the aspects of Sissinghurst that stretched beyond modern tensions and difficulties. I hoped to find Sissinghurst in its glory, in the sixteenth century, when it leaped up out of its rooted and Kentish condition and became for a moment a place of power and glamour. Intriguingly it turned out that Sissinghurst was never a more troubled place than then.
In the decades before 1500, the Wealden villages around Sissinghurst boomed. Money surged into them. The Weald was not part of the strictly regulated, seigneurial world of the good lands in the north of the county, and so the people here had long nurtured their liberties. The ability to rent and buy land; small dues owed to distant overlords; a habit of dividing property between all children; a poverty in the soils which created the need for a mixed system of farming: all of this made for a radical independence of spirit and a competitive, entrepreneurial world. There was a long history here of rebellion and resistance to authority, stretching back to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Nowhere else in England did the new Protestant ideas take such quick and vivid root. William Tyndale, the great early translator of the Bible, in exile in the Low Countries, had contacts in Cranbrook, had his works smuggled into England by Cranbrook clothiers and for a while was living in the Antwerp house of Richard Harman, a Cranbrook man, dissenter and merchant. When Thomas Wyatt led a rebellion against Bloody Mary in 1554, no parish contributed more men than Cranbrook to his fiercely Protestant following. And this was one of the parishes in the next century from which a steady stream of Puritans would leave for the freedoms of Massachusetts.
A modern land market was fully operating by the fifteenth century. Estate agents, auctions, gazumping, short-term rentals, buying to let, speculation and mortgages were all at work in the Kent Weald, embedded in a rapidly modernising and commercialising world. Business and farming were deeply intertwined here. Cranbrook was the largest town in Kent (with over two thousand inhabitants) and the parishes around it were one of the busiest parts of England. Most of it was occupied by a free peasantry, who farmed holdings made up of small fields or closes, almost never in single blocks but scattered across parishes and between them. It was cattle country, with few sheep and only a little arable. Wheat and oats were grown but no barley and no hops. Beef cattle were the source of cash. A trade was maintained with north Kent, along the old droveways, by which beef walked north and barley came south. No records survive for the farm at sixteenth-century Sissinghurst, but they do for another gentry estate belonging to the Culpepers at Bedgbury in the neighbouring parish of Goudhurst. There in 1542 they planted 14 acres of wheat and 34 acres of oats, about 20 acres lay fallow and there were about 160 acres of grassland – some pasture for grazing, some meadow from which hay was taken – on which about thirty breeding cows and their followers and forty ewes and their lambs were raised. Gradually I came to realise that if we were ever to introduce a system to Sissinghurst which would work, it would be not unlike this. The land itself would dictate our use of it.
In the early sixteenth century, the parishes around Sissinghurst were doing exceptionally well, the population rising decade after decade. By the 1550s, this was the most densely occupied part of Kent, with the families and immigrants afloat on an extraordinary industry: the manufacture of about twelve thousand luxury woollen broadcloths each year. The wool did not come from here and the cloths were not sold here. A group of large, proto-capitalist clothiers bought the wool (usually in London markets), had it shipped down the Thames and then up the Medway to Maidstone and from there carted it south on the old Roman road. Unlikely as it might sound, this amphibious route remained the recommended way to come to Sissinghurst from London, particularly for goods, at least until the end of the seventeenth century. Shiploads of wool, 30,000 pounds at a time, 450 tons of wool a year, were brought down to these parishes and converted into cloth, which was shipped back out to London, Antwerp and the markets in France, Spain and the Mediterranean. Dyes came from Brazil and Africa, indigo and cochineal, woad from France, Seville oil from Spain, much of it shipped in via Rye.
A fuzzy boundary existed between smallholder, labourer and artisan. There were dozens of holdings no bigger than seven acres. Little orchards were planted next to modest one-up, one-down houses. Chickens and pigs were everywhere. There were yeoman farms of some thirty acres – not many and rarely in a single block – and only one or two per parish that were bigger than that. Almost everyone who worked on the land also had a trade. This landscape was almost suburban in character, the cloth business sewn into every corner of the country. Nor was it a place of great rootedness. Although most people living here came from Kent, most of them, according to their wills, did not die in the village where they had been born. It was, in other words, a surprisingly modern world. Elizabethan Cranbrook had shoemakers, carpenters, tailors, glovers, masons, butchers, truggers, eight shopkeepers, a copper and smith, three barber-surgeons, a haberdasher and a milliner.
The town and the surrounding villages were animated with the trades associated with cloth-making. At least thirty or forty people were involved in the making of each cloth: carding, dyeing and spinning the wool, weaving the cloths, fulling them, raising the nap, shearing them. A finished cloth, twenty-eight yards long, weighing ninety pounds, was worth as much as fifteen deer. ‘Clothing in the Wylde of Kent’, according to one petition from the clothiers to the queen, ‘is the nurse of the people.’
A tenth of all English cloth manufacture came from six parishes around Sissinghurst. These Wealden cloths were famous for their colours: scarlet, russet, damson, ginger, blue medley, grey, orange tawney and ‘rattescolour’, pheasant, pepper and mallard. The boys at Eton were dressed in ‘sad Kent’ from Cranbrook, and there were undoubtedly quantities of money around. No one should imagine it as a world of delight. It was rough, raw and exploitative. The large clothiers’ houses had apprentices sleeping in the attics at night, working by day in the filthy, hot, wet dye houses at the back. In outhouses and those attics, vast piles of wool, wood and finished cloth were stored. One person in five was a spinner, at the poverty pay of twopence or threepence a day, often paid many months late. Whenever clothiers died, they owed money to the spinsters, the poorest of the poor who had nowhere else to turn for work or sustenance in an overpopulated country. The soils were not good enough and most of the people were dependent on the clothiers, who acted as bankers, entrepreneurs, employers, controllers, landlords and magistrates. Life expectancy was still low; most deaths still occurred in the ‘hungry gap’ of March and April. Across the sixteenth century as a whole in the parish of Cranbrook, for every 80 people that died in August, 130 died in April, twice the modern seasonal difference. People in the sixteenth century were still as vulnerable to the turning of the year as a population of weasels or rabbits.
This hard-driven, commercialising world is the one from which Renaissance Sissinghurst, in the hands of the next Sissinghurst family, now emerges. The Bakers, like their fellow townsmen, were men on the make. One of their ancestors, a Thomas Baker, had been taken to court in 1371 for illegally cutting down the archbishop’s trees. A hundred years later, it had become a pious and well-established family. In the late fifteenth century, another Thomas Baker owned lands in several parishes running south into Sussex, and when he died left money for masses to be said and the churches to be repaired in all of them. The little friaries at Moatenden and Lossenham had legacies and his daughters had some silver, feather beds and cushions. He left his best cow to his wife and to all his sons small pieces of land. Although Edward Hasted, the great eighteenth-century historian of Kent, wrote, and it has often been repeated, that this Thomas Baker first acquired at least part of Sissinghurst, there is no evidence that either he or his son Richard did so, and Sissinghurst appears in neither of their detailed wills.
The surge begins with Thomas’s grandson, John Baker, Richard’s son, born in about 1488. When he was about fifteen, he was sent to London, with ten pounds a year to keep him at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was trained as a lawyer. It was the moment when the Bakers began to lift away from the Wealden entrepreneurial society and enter the boom conditions of Tudor London. John Baker thrived, becoming a leading barrister, an under-sheriff, recorder and Member of Parliament for London. It was a familiar track for a clever and ambitious man, and everything that is now at Sissinghurst, all the grandeur and riches that were once here, even if now worn and crumbled, had their origins in this man’s enterprise.
In the early 1520s he married Catherine Sackville, the daughter of a Sussex knight. One of her brothers, Thomas, was married to Anne Boleyn’s aunt. It was the kind of invaluable connection that pushed John Baker into the mainstream of the English court and Reformation. That four-hundred-year-old Sackville relationship to Sissinghurst was one of the factors playing in Vita’s mind when she decided to come here in 1930. At Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533, Baker made a speech to the young queen on behalf of the merchants and financiers of the City of London, where he was still the Recorder. Within a couple of years he had begun to make his way into the coils of government and power. In 1535 he had become an attorney in the pay of the Crown. A year later he was attorney general, pursuing papists on behalf of the reforming king, executing instructions prepared by Thomas Cromwell, the king’s first minister, who was in full, self-enriching career. When Cromwell fell in 1540, finally destroyed by the enmity and jealousy of those around him, Baker was there to benefit. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer, was appointed to the Privy Council, knighted and, most important of all, became Chancellor of the Court of First Fruits and Tenths, the court through which taxes that had previously gone to the pope now came to the Crown. Baker stood at the sluice gate through which the new money-river flowed into the royal exchequer, a flow into which Baker could dip his cup whenever he liked. He became Speaker of the House of Commons, a royal appointment. The electors of Kent refused to have him for one election in the 1540s but the royal officials found him another seat. He slid on in these jobs through the reigns of Edward VI and his sister Mary, and at every turn the lands and riches on which Sissinghurst would come to float steadily accrued around him.
He already had his grandfather’s lands in Sussex and Kent. His first acquisition, bought from the de Berhams in 1533, was Sissinghurst itself, with its subsidiary manors of Copton and Stone. Five years later, when the Priory of Hastings was dissolved, the king gave his loyal attorney slabs of Sussex ‘to have to him and his heirs for ever’. Two years later, when Cromwell was dismissed and bloodily executed, Baker gratefully received lands all over the Kent and Sussex Weald which had previously belonged to his chief. On through the 1540s, scarcely a year passed without Sir John acquiring another manor or two. When Catholic rebels against Edward VI were condemned to death, Baker had some of their lands; and when Protestant rebels against Queen Mary fell and were executed, he had some of their lands too. Many places he bought with the money that came his way from his chancellorship of the Court of First Fruits.
The result was that by the 1550s the Baker estate was one of the largest in Kent and Sussex, its archipelago of lands and manors stretching from beyond Eastbourne up to Maidstone and from Winchelsea to Pluckley. There were other manors in Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Essex, houses in Southwark and in the City of London, but the core was in the central Wealden parishes around Sissinghurst. It may, in all, have stretched to something approaching 15,000 acres, a spread of land that would be worth £75 million today.
Those are the economic and political facts of his life, but there are further elements which add depth and colour to Baker’s story. The first is what he did at Sissinghurst after he had bought it from the de Berhams in 1533. In the 1930s my grandmother thought that Sir John had built himself an enormous brick house here, with an entrance range, a tower and a large courtyard beyond it. It seemed to make sense that the acquirer of the lands had created the monument at its heart. But in the 1960s my father looked into it more carefully and it became clear, first of all, that Sissinghurst was not all of one phase. He consulted various architectural luminaries, including Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Jim Lees-Milne and Sir John Summerson, and came up with a building history that has been the orthodoxy ever since. According to my father, in the late fifteenth century the de Berhams abandoned a stone medieval house by the moat (said to have resembled Ightham Mote, a romantic building near Sevenoaks) and built themselves a brick house to the west of it, around a courtyard, and resembling instead Compton Wynyates, the great medieval brick house in Warwickshire. When John Baker bought this house in 1533, he is said to have inserted a modern Tudor gateway into the late-fifteenth-century entrance range. And when John Baker’s son Richard inherited the house in 1558, he was said to have knocked down all except that earlier entrance range and built a huge Renaissance palace in the place of the demolished Compton Wynyates, with a tower in its centre and its further reaches stretching out into the orchard.
I, in my turn, with help from architectural historians and archaeologists, have now had another look at this story. There seems to be, first, no evidence of any Ightham Mote-like house. The medieval house almost certainly occupied only the south-west corner of the orchard, not the whole of it, and was almost certainly timber framed, perhaps with some stone footings. Its tall bargeboarded gables are probably shown in the drawing of the back of the house made by Francis Grose in 1760. Nor is there any evidence of a house resembling Compton Wynyates built to replace it. These were the two great early English houses my father was most in love with, and he seems simply to have imported them into Sissinghurst because he liked the idea.
The entrance gateway, from the style of its chimneys and their playing with geometrical forms, can be firmly dated to the 1530s. Inconveniently, though, the long wings of the front range on either side of them were not built then. Dendrochronology commissioned in the 1980s put the beams in the late sixteenth and in one case the eighteenth century (probably a repair), findings my father refused, with some passion, to accept. He liked to be able to tell Americans who came to stay that the bedroom they were sleeping in had been built in 1492.
So what did happen? The simplest suggestion is that when in 1533 John Baker bought the de Berhams’ house on the site of the present orchard, he kept it. It was an important manor house, with a history of distinguished occupants and its own chapel. It had a moated garden beside it. What he undoubtedly added was a small, dignified and wingless modern gatehouse, decorated with its fashionable chimneys. The gateway would have led into a large walled ‘base court’, at the far end of which, a good three hundred feet away, stood the medieval house. Such a huge empty courtyard may seem odd to us, and certainly would not fit with later, Italian-derived ideas of proportionality of space, but could be found in many Tudor houses.
This simple picture fits both the man and the moment. It is essentially conservative. It does little but slot the Bakers into a pre-existing, de Berham-shaped mould. In John Baker’s will, he asked his executors that his ‘funeralls be done and made in honest maner with out pompe or pryde according nevertheless as vnto my deggree apperteyneth’. That was the style of his house too: dignified but not extravagant. The timbers used inside his gatehouse are not, intriguingly, of the best. Many were reclaimed from other places, with slots and peg holes marking their earlier use, and with nothing like the consistently high quality of oak that can be found in other, later parts of the building. The house he had bought was saturated in real, medieval, inherited status and was good enough to entertain both the French ambassador and, on one occasion, Queen Mary. John Baker was not a man to blow everything he had so carefully accumulated on a grand and a pretentious gesture; far too careful for that.
John Baker’s enormous will, proved at Canterbury and preserved in the National Archives, is a measure of his methods and his ideals. It is, in fact, a picture of the Sissinghurst through which he moved, one which, not by chance, looks like a depiction of a great medieval household. ‘I John Bakere of Cessyngherst in Kent Knyght one of the Kinge and Quenes Majestyes previe Counsell’ presided over an entire community at Sissinghurst. It is the statement of a great territorial patriarch and magnate. Alms were to be given to the poor, masses and dirges sung for his soul in sixteen churches across his estate, and the old Roman road from Sissinghurst to Staplehurst was to be mended. His sons and daughters (one of them Cecily, married to Thomas Sackville of Knole), his in-laws and sisters and their husbands, the parents of his godchildren and the godparents of his own children, his knightly neighbours and their wives: all were remembered with rings, golden cups and money.
From them, he carefully steps down to his own servants, the people living with him in the great medieval house in the orchard. Mystris Marye Mustyamps, Benett Hale and Mother Water, all of whom had worked for him and his mother for many years, had generous legacies. Twenty-four of his menservants were named, including Anthonye of the Kitchen, James the Brewer and one John Nycolson, and all got money or gold rings.
Finally, in a string of codicils ‘wrytten with myne owne hande by me John Bakere’, he turned to his family. His ‘good and loving sister Johanne Reames widow’, who had married a Benenden man, was to have an annuity ‘and two chambers in my manor of Cessingherst’. His other sister, Lady Wilforde, ‘for her paynes taken with me in the tyme of my sicknes’, had the leases of several properties. Everyone who had helped him and looked after him was attended to.
There was no question here of dividing the great inheritance into equal parts, as the custom of Kent had been. Baker had ‘disgavelled’ his lands so that the bulk of the estate could remain whole and in the hands of a single heir. To his second son John, Sir John gave ‘Goddes blessinge and myne and £200 and such stuff I have in the Citie of London’ and ‘to you my doughters Marye, Cecyle and Elizabeth I gyve Goddes blessyng and myne requyringe you aboue all things to serve God and to be faithfull, assured, true, humble, lovinge and obedyent wifes vnto yor husbands’. They were off his hands. To his eldest son Richard, who was in his late twenties when this will was drawn up, he left the great prize that he had spent a life accumulating: the vast estate and Sissinghurst at its core.
Sir John’s will is a paternalist vision, perhaps an old man’s sentimentality, of what his world should be, with Sissinghurst as a place where many would be employed and his own relations looked after, a family widely connected with the higher gentry and with an ideal of stability and completeness standing outside the turmoil of Reformation England. Almost nobody knows of this paternalist Sir John Baker because his name will be forever bloodied by one of the great triumphs of Elizabethan Protestant propaganda, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, usually known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This 2300-page compendium of crimes committed against the Protestant martyrs of the English Reformation, particularly in the reign of Mary, was more widely read than any book except the Bible. In Elizabeth’s reign it stood by order of the archbishop in every cathedral in England as the companion to the translated scriptures. Cranbrook had opted hard and early for a fairly strict form of Protestantism and it is certain that in the independent-minded, entrepreneurial culture of the farmer-clothiers, there would have been many copies of Foxe’s book, at least in the richer houses scattered through the surrounding parishes. And Foxe, in one incident after another, drawing on personal testimony and eyewitness reports, damns this great man as a cruel and intemperate persecutor of Protestants. It is the dark side of his desire for the order and consolations of the old world.
Sometimes the scene of the cruelty was Sissinghurst, sometimes in Cranbrook, sometimes in London. The earliest, in the reign of Henry VIII, concerned the persecution of a young Lincolnshire woman, Anne Askew, a friend of Henry’s last queen, Catherine Parr, who had been disseminating Protestant literature. The Catholics in Henry’s household wanted her to reveal her connections with the queen and put her on the rack in the Tower of London. Baker and the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, were there, asking the lieutenant of the Tower to rack her harder. He refused
to streine her on the racke agayn. Which because he denied to doo, tendering the weakeness of the woman, he was threatened therfore grevously of the sayd Wrisley, saying that he woulde signifie hys disobedience unto the king: and so consequently upon the same, hee and Syr Iohn Baker throwing of[f] theyr gownes, would nedes play the tormenters them selves: first asking her if shee was with childe. To whom she aunswering againe, sayd: ye shall not neede to spare for that, but do your wylles upon me: And so quietly and paciently praying unto the Lorde, she abode their tyranny till her bones and ioyntes almost were plukt asunder, in such sort, as she was carried away in a chair.
When she was eventually burned, aged twenty-five, Anne Askew couldn’t walk and was carried to the stake in that chair. In a later edition, Foxe cut Baker’s name out of this story, perhaps because the Baker family had managed to coerce him, perhaps through the intervention of the old patriarch’s son-in-law, Thomas Sackville, first earl of Dorset, a member of Elizabeth’s Council, the rheumy-eyed earl who used to stare at me from the dining-room wall when I was a boy.
The reliability of Foxe’s witness is never very certain – he is an advocate not a reporter – but Baker’s rage and cruelty, often described verbatim, appear again and again in his book. When one Protestant, a Scotsman called Bland, came up before Baker as a magistrate in Cranbrook, the accused produced a Latin New Testament in court. Baker threw it across the courtroom (in the George Inn), shouting, ‘I wil geue sixe fagots to burne thee withal … Hence knaue, hence.’ One of the Protestants Sir John condemned to death that day turned to him and said, ‘My Lord, if we be killed at your hands for Christes sake, we shall liue with him for euer.’
The story that comes closest to home, dramatising the condition of Sissinghurst in the middle years of the sixteenth century, and its separation from the surrounding country, concerns Edmund Allin, a miller, who lived at the beautiful Maplehurst Mill in Frittenden, a mile or two north of here. He was a man full of concern for his poor neighbours and ‘in a deare yere, when as many poore people were like to starue, he fed them, and solde his corne better cheape by halfe then others did: and did not that only, but also fedde them with the foode of life, reading to them the scriptures, and interpreting them’. The radicalism of the Reformation, its distrust and loathing of instituted authority, came in Allin’s hands sifting into these fields and lanes.
Allin and his wife were reported to the priests, arrested and brought to Baker at Sissinghurst, where he kept them prisoner, in his ‘house the one from the other’. Where was that? Almost certainly in some back rooms of the de Berhams’ building in the orchard, now disappeared. Baker then began to play with his prisoner and ‘entreated the sayd Edmund Allin to come to Masse in his Chappell the next day’. This must have been the chapel that had been there since the fourteenth century. After much persuasion, Allin agreed to go to chapel with Baker the next day, who then allowed him to
goe lye with his wife that night, and desired him to perswade her to come also, and he would deliuer them both out of prison. When [Allin] was come to his wife, he told her what he had promised, and she with teares sayd, hee shoulde go alone for her. Then he likewise lamentyng the same, sayd, he would go with her to death.
I feel a kind of vicarious shame at this story, at this suffering imposed on young Kentish idealists, here in this house five hundred years ago. The next day, Baker came to Allin, asking him to keep his promise and come to chapel with him. Allin said: ‘I will not: do what you will with me.’ Then Sir John called out Allin’s wife, Katherine, and berated her:
‘Thou old whore, thy husband would be a Christian but for thee.’ Then he beate her very sore with his staffe in his hand, and sent then both to prison the next day, sending with them a cruell letter that they shoulde be burned out of hand.
The manuscript notes from which Foxe wrote up this story (given to him by the vicar of Cranbrook) have survived, and it is clear that Foxe did not alter the evidence he had received.
Allin and his wife escaped to Calais, but there his conscience troubled him and he returned to Frittenden to continue his secret ministry. He and his wife were arrested again, his house was ransacked by Baker’s men and in June 1557 Baker was given another chance to ‘taunt and revile him, without all mercy and pity’, as Foxe says, at a hearing in Cranbrook, at the George Inn. ‘We are al kings to rule our affections,’ Allin told Baker. One day, walking in Frittenden churchyard, the miller had realised he could never believe that a communion wafer was anything but a symbol. ‘He considered in the Churchyard with him selfe, that such a litle cake betwene the Priestes fingers could not be Christ, nor a materiall body, neither to haue soule, life, sinnewes, bones, flesh, legges, head, armes, nor brest.’ Baker could have no truck with this. ‘Away with him,’ he said. On 18 June 1557, Allin, his wife and five others, all tied to a single stake, were burned on King’s Meadow in Maidstone, one of them a blind girl called Elizabeth and another ‘a vertuous maiden cauled Jone Bradbrege’. As the wood was being laid around them, Joan
turning to the people sayed, ‘What is it a clocke?’ They sayed, ‘Ten.’ Then she sayed, ‘Thanks be to God! Bye xi we shalbe with our God.’ And then, turning to the blinde mayde, sayd, ‘Now sister Besse, be of good cher. Thou dyd never see, but soone yow shalt see Lord Jesus Cryst.’ To whom she answred, ‘I trust so.’
Is it any surprise that these stories sank deep into the psyche of the Protestant people of the Weald? Or that this exercise of orthodox power and the suppression of liberties should give rise to terrible, half-mythical tales, still current in Sissinghurst and Cranbrook, of John Baker as Bloody Baker and Butcher Baker, a Bluebeard murderer, rapist and oppressor? I remember my father telling me one as a boy, taking me to the place, in the old brewhouse, just on the other side of the arch from our kitchen. There is an early-sixteenth-century staircase there, with a rubbed and worn newel post at its foot. At the top, shadowed and spooky when I was young, a big door gave on to a room that had been my father’s bedroom when he was a boy. This, he told me, had been Bloody Baker’s own room, and it was on this staircase that the most terrible crime in his long and terrible life had been committed. He was in the habit, my father said, of ravishing young virgins from the village. ‘Do you know what ravishing means, Adam?’ I did. And virgin? I did. Bloody Baker would summon them, they would come to the foot of the stairs and he would take them up to that room and in there do his worst with them. ‘Do you understand do his worst, Adam?’ I did.
One day a young woman arrived early. She was approaching the stairs when she heard someone coming down them and hid in the cupboard beneath. This one here. It was Bloody Baker carrying the body of his latest victim. As he reached the foot of the stairs a ring on her hand caught the newel post and in a rage of frustration Baker drew his sword and sliced the hand from the wrist. Look, Adam, here, where the sword cut into the wood. I saw how the newel post had been slashed and hacked as if with a hatchet into a worn and eroded stump.
Although this story and the many like it are all untrue, nothing I had heard had ever seemed more real. It is the kind of story told by the powerless about the powerful. It relies on the strangeness and distance of authority and the way in which power can suddenly land, terrify and destroy its victims out of a clear blue sky. It is a measure of the distance between Tudor Sissinghurst and the world around it.
In 1558, the old man died. In his will, he addressed his son directly from beyond the grave:
To myne oldest sonne Richard Bakere goddes blessinge and myne and all suche my plate of siluer and gilt &e. and all other stuffe and utensiles of houshold in my manor mesuage and house of Cessyngherst. And I charge the[e] my sonne Richarde that above all things thowe serve God and thy soueraigne lorde and ladye the Kinge and quene, applye thy lernynge, be curtesse and gentill to euery bodie, be aydinge and lovinge to thy naturall Brother John Bakere and to thy susters Mary Cecile and Elizabeth, love well they neighbours, counsell, cherishe and help theym in theire necessities as righte and good conscience will requyre, avoyde Brybery, extortion, corruption and dissimulacon, eschewe Idlenes, applie the[e] to vertuose exercise, be faythfull and true in worde and deede and holly putt thy truste in Almightie God with humble callinge to hym for grace with laudes and thanks for all thy benefits and he wilbe thy keper and defender from all daunger, perill and evill.
The implication is clear: the ageing father, replete with his vision of strict social wholeness, distrusted his son. He was right to do so. In the most spectacular of Sissinghurst’s generation shifts, Richard Baker, still in his thirties with a huge income from the inherited estate of at least £650 a year, took Sissinghurst in hand and drove it in a new direction: not ancient propriety but aestheticised glamour, not conformist strictness but Elizabethan romanticism, not rooted Kentishness but highly cultured, Italianate arcadianism, with a sophisticated interaction of building and landscape, large, grand and expensive, far beyond anything anyone had ever done here. Between 1558 and 1573, Richard Baker made of Sissinghurst an Elizabethan palace at the centre of its own dream world. It was the flickering ghost of that place, with all its ancient Sackville connections, which drew Vita here, to make a garden among the ruins.
There are many forms of evidence for what Richard Baker did: the remains of the buildings themselves; plans of other contemporary buildings which bear strong resemblances to Sissinghurst; drawings made of it in the eighteenth century which show the great Elizabethan palace from various points of view; accounts of one or two eighteenth-century visitors; the verbatim record of a month-long investigation made in 1761 into crimes that had been committed here, whose pages inadvertently describe the Elizabethan house’s geography; the claims made by the owners against the government for damage done by prisoners held here; the marks left on the surrounding landscape by Richard Baker’s great and encompassing scheme for the whole place; accounts of court cases held at the end of the century, which describe the relationship of Sissinghurst to the surrounding population; a very early seventeenth-century census of people living in Cranbrook and the surrounding parishes, house by house, which takes in Sissinghurst; and finally the accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s visit here for three days in August 1573.
Although it is a fragmentary archive scattered across the country, in Cranbrook, Maidstone, Lincoln’s Inn, Kew, Staffordshire and Sissinghurst, and although there are no contemporary maps, drawings or letters, there is richness and suggestion here, which, taken together with other Elizabethan theories of what the beautiful place should be, can be assembled into a coherent picture of what Richard Baker made. He overlaid the medieval inheritance with a mixture of classical detail and a simple version of an Elizabethan fantasy palace. By the time he died, everything was here: a great, many-courtyarded house; a garden beside it; outlying banqueting houses overlooking the Park; a prospect tower from which the Park could be viewed in its full extent; new barns in which the hay was kept for the Park deer; a bank and pale surrounding that Park; woods and open grasslands called ‘launds’ within it; a park-keeper’s lodge; and necklaces of ponds dammed along the stream within the Park. Evidence for every one of these things remains at Sissinghurst today.
It was all made in the service of a deep and extraordinarily expensive form of play. House, landscape, woods and meadows were reshaped as theatre. Each of the elements was carefully integrated with the others, all contributing to an atmosphere in which the demands of getting and spending did not for a while have to be observed. The parishes beyond the Park gates may have been deeply embroiled in the accumulation of capital. Within it, those priorities were suspended. Central to this transformation is the fact that the Bakers were often not at Sissinghurst but at their London houses, either in Southwark or in Lime Street in the City. When a crisis with the local populace erupted in the 1590s, the whole Baker family was in London, and when a survey of communicants in Cranbrook parish was repeatedly made in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the Bakers were only rarely here to be counted. Sissinghurst was their dream place. It became a kind of toy.
Like the other gentry of Elizabethan England, Baker was not indifferent to enterprise or industry, and along with this theatrical construct of the new Sissinghurst was something else: a working and earning landscape. The woods grew coppice wood and standard timber; a large dam was built across the Hammer Brook and a fifty-acre pond made upstream of that dam; its head of energy powered the hammers and bellows of an ironworks; there were other mills, other ponds and sluices which provided extra head for the corn mills farther downstream.
What can be said about the world of this glamour-and-delight palace which Richard, the Elizabethan Baker, inserted into his father’s adapted medieval-Tudor manor house? To begin at the centre: still standing in the orchard was the de Berhams’ close-timbered manor house. Beside it on the eastern side was a large fish pond. Three hundred feet to the west was John Baker’s twenty-year-old gatehouse with its out-of-date twisted chimneys. Between the two stretched a large open court. It was a bitty inheritance which needed ordering, regularising and aestheticising.
Using an architect whose name has not survived, but whose plans as seen in eighteenth-century drawings bear a strong resemblance to the drawings collected by John Thorpe and now in the Soane Museum in London, Baker inserted between the medieval house and the 1530s gateway a large Renaissance core to Sissinghurst. It consisted essentially of a prospect-tower-cum-inner-gateway with a cour d’honneur beyond it. The result was a three-courtyard house: the first a reduced base-court, paved throughout, into which horsemen could enter through the earlier arch. Dendrochronological dating of the timbers in the front range has shown that Richard Baker probably lengthened the wings on either side of the entrance arch at the same time, with stabling to the north and simple accommodation, perhaps for the steward, to the south. Both façades of both ranges were decorated with large black diamond patterns in the brick, visible in early-twentieth-century photographs but now faded.
These lengthened wings exaggerated an effect that has troubled rationalists (including my father and grandfather) ever since: the axis of the gateway is not perpendicular either to the Tower or the court beyond it, nor presumably to the medieval house, which has now disappeared. The unfortunate effect is that the upper courtyard is not rectangular but deeper at its northern than its southern end. Why should this have been? No one has ever been sure: a possible reason is that part of medieval and early Tudor theory of the healthy building insisted that a gateway should not be directly aligned with the entrance to a house. Doors into the house should be either offset or misaligned so that a noxious wind could not find its way into the rooms.
At the far side of the first court stood the new Tower, still called ‘the Great Gate’ in the eighteenth century. Its form dramatises the story of its own insertion into a pre-existing plan. The side looking back to Baker’s father’s gateway is pierced with a flattened, Tudor arch. But the other arch on the other side of the Tower and the entire façade looking into the great court are strictly detailed in the correct grammar of a Tuscan order, with pilasters, entablatures, elegantly moulded cornices and the perfect semicircle of a Roman arch. As you passed under the Tower, you moved from medieval to Renaissance Sissinghurst. Steps led down then as now into the court. Horse and carriage had been left behind on the other side. You were entering a piazza in which the gentry strolled. There was no muck, noise or dung. It was the scene for a Kentish passeggiata. On either side, large mullioned and transomed windows gave on to apartments reached from separate stairs, much like an Oxford or Cambridge college. A paved path led across the court between lawns. Stone balls marked the breaks in the cornices. Those which had survived until the 1930s Harold put up on the garden walls. Over each doorway, small pediments held the Baker arms flanked by their surrounding dolphins. A fragment of one of those pediments still sits, unregarded, in the arch under the Tower. Another was taken by a visiting Baker descendant to Cranbrook church in the 1830s, where it was accidentally put up in the east wall of the nave, by the chancel opening, thought to be part of old Sir John Baker’s tomb.
At the far end of the courtyard was an elaborated columned and entablatured doorway, like the frontispiece for an Elizabethan book. Harold and Vita used the shafts of its fluted and channelled columns, which they found lying in the ruins, to make a pergola called the Erechtheum outside their dining room on the edge of the White Garden, where a white wisteria grows over the frame and a rose spirals up one of the shafts. Part of the cornice is now used as a doorstop at the foot of the stairs up the Tower. Originally, the doorway had led into the screens passage between the hall and the buttery and on out into the third, medieval courtyard, now closed off with an Elizabethan range across its western side, and with a well in its centre.
Other, satellite buildings clustered around these three central courtyards. Two large-windowed pretty banqueting houses, one to the north (now called the Priest’s House), one to the south (on the site of the Nuttery, still there in 1760 but now disappeared), gazed out over the parkland. Outside the entrance, Richard Baker also built a pair of beautiful brick barns to the north-west of the main cluster. One is still there but one was demolished in about 1800. Unlike the precision classicism of the Tower and its great courtyard, the barns were built with big strong Gothic archways, medieval buttresses and air-slits through which the hay could breathe. It is a manner and vocabulary which, for a 1560s building, may have been consciously nostalgic, a suggestion in the pointed arches that the barns had been here since time immemorial.
Slowly the ensemble of Elizabethan Sissinghurst begins to gather. Evidence from the eighteenth-century prisoner accounts, from a fragment recovered in 2006 in a drainage trench and hints from other sixteenth-century houses make it possible to describe something of the interiors here. Turn off the ‘Pavement of the Middle Court of the mansion house’, as it was called, step inside one of the doorways and you would find a staircase rising before you. On either side were doors giving into guest lodgings, or those for Baker’s relatives. The stairs rising in front of you turned on a half-landing at the back of the range and climbed to the first-floor landing overlooking the court. Here on the north side was a long gallery, 17 feet wide and 120 feet long, wainscoted throughout, with a rich entablature and carved marble fireplaces. ‘The ceiling’, according to Horace Walpole, who saw it in 1752, was ‘vaulted, and painted in a light, genteel grotesque’. Above it, in the attic, may have been the bowling alley referred to in the 1760s. Other rooms upstairs in these ranges were also panelled, probably with oak, probably with some classical allusion in the ornament. Alongside half an oyster shell, a small piece of classically moulded cornice, made of plaster, was found in a drain in the orchard in 2006, nothing very elaborate but cleanly and precisely done.
At the far end of the Middle Court the hall would have filled the right-hand part of the range and the butler’s pantry and buttery the other half, across the screens passage. There was probably a smaller and cosier winter parlour upstairs here too. As the account of the prisoners’ damage refers to the ‘great and little halls’ – both panelled – it may be that the great hall of the medieval house survived in the medieval court beyond it, and that a small, modern Renaissance hall was installed here in the Elizabethan range. There was nothing low status about that third court. Here the household continued to use the well. Beyond the medieval court, which still contained the chapel, stretched the garden, running up to the old fish pond as its eastern boundary. It may be that Richard Baker added two new arms, turning the old pond into what looked like an ancient moat.
This Elizabethan garden filled what is now the White Garden and those parts of the modern orchard not taken up by the great house itself. It was walled to above head height and fruit trees were trained against the walls. What this means, intriguingly, is that when Vita came to a bedraggled and broken place in 1930, and found, miraculously, an unknown Rosa gallica growing here on the edge of the ramshackle orchard, among the weeds and brambles, it was in exactly the place it would have been planted in the Elizabethan garden. The rose is particularly persistent. Vita claimed she could never eradicate it from wherever it wanted to grow, and it is not absurd to suggest that successive plants of that tough and hardy rose, which Vita named ‘Sissinghurst Castle’, had been growing there for 450 years.
Inside the Tower, Richard Baker had one of the rooms decorated with a set of carved heads of Tudor monarchs. They were still there in the 1870s and shown to visitors, but tantalisingly they had disappeared by 1930. Above them, though, was the real showpiece of the place, then as it is today: the prospect from above. Until the early nineteenth century, each of the two turrets was a room higher than it is now and in each face of those octagonal rooms a window gave the viewers collected there – no more than four or five for comfort – a panoramic view of the lands of which this tower was the node and hub.
This view from above was a central part of the Elizabethan experience. Big rooftop prospects, rooftop walks, rooftop pavilions, parties on rooftops, even romantic assignations on rooftops: all this was part of a sudden new sixteenth-century relationship to a place, not only dominating it from above but, by standing above it, seeing it for what it was and for what your place within it might be. The sixteenth century in England was the moment when people first began to draw and buy aerial views, when the first models of buildings were made by architects for their clients. And the view from the top of the Tower at the end of the building campaign of the 1560s would have been full of a very particular aesthetic pleasure, the experience, it seems to me, around which the whole ensemble was framed.
At your feet was the intricately made thing, many interlocking courts, with passageways and doors between them, a house not only as a machine for living in – there were thirty-eight hearths paying tax here – but as a kind of enlarged jewel, a device, a cleverly made object. It was placed in the middle of a landscape from which all apparent human influence had been removed. Beyond the perfect court at your feet; beyond the stable court to the west and the medieval court to the east; and beyond the little banqueting pavilions to north and south – lower cousins of this great prospect tower – came the free-flowing lands of the Park through which the hunt could pass. The farm on which the inhabitants of Sissinghurst had relied for so long, which they had worked and cultivated for perhaps a thousand years, was no longer needed. The 15,000 acres of the Baker estate provided enough money. So while the new house at Sissinghurst was made particularly refined, the land at Sissinghurst could be thrown back to an artificial naturalness, which was both self-consciously relaxed and self-conciously luxurious, a holiday zone for the well born, from which the poor and the industrious were explicitly and often officiously excluded. Intuitively or not, when Vita and Harold came here in the 1930s, they were responding to a place that had once been shaped into a model of Elizabethan Arcadianism.
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 just outside it and the people of Cranbrook.
In the cases that came to court, one can see what Sissinghurst meant to anyone not admitted to its charmed circle. The landscape of exclusion and preciousness suddenly jumps into another form of life. One after another, young Cranbrook men appear before the magistrates accused of stealing Sissinghurst deer. In January 1597 Anthony Carpenter had been heard telling a friend that a deer had been killed in Sissinghurst Park. Old Agnes Greenyll, who had been roasting some meat in a house at Golford, heard Carpenter say it. And Carpenter had added something about a crossbow arrow. Had he done it? No, he said. He had seen the dead deer lying there, saw the man who killed it run away and then put the arrow up a tree (there were low pollards in the Park). He had gone to find someone to help him recover the deer, which he described as ‘such a bootye as he should never meete with the like againe whelst he lived’, but found no one, went back to the Park but the deer had disappeared. He ‘looked aboute in the bushes the space of an hower or better’ – the thorny scrub that must have been growing in the Park. Why hadn’t he told Jasper Glover, the keeper, who was presumably in the lodge on the other side of the Park? Because, Carpenter said, ‘to what end should I hurt the fellowe that had killed the said deare and not benefytt myselfe thereby?’ But what, the magistrate asked, was all the talk about an arrow? Nothing, Carpenter said, his lying now becoming desperate. All he had been doing was discussing some unsatisfactory ploughing that had been done recently. He had been at Branden, a farm outside the old Park boundary to the south, and he had said in a conversation there that the ploughman ‘at the first setting on did not drawe the first furrow as straight as an arrow’. The quarter sessions records as usual have no account of what happened to the accused, but guilt can rarely have been so plain.
Jasper Glover, the keeper, appears again a year or two later, chasing young apprentices to Cranbrook, after they had been seen carrying away some Sissinghurst deer at midnight one Saturday. The two boys he had pursued were apprenticed to a Cranbrook clothier. Glover went after them all the way to the clothier’s house in Cranbrook, where he found them sharing a bed in the attic, got them up, inspected them and asked one boy ‘how his stockings became so bespotted with durt?’ Because, one of the boys said, thinking fast, they had been driving some bullocks for his master the afternoon before.
In 1601, four men from Cranbrook, a butcher, a yeoman, a shoemaker and a clothier – certainly not the poorest of the poor – arrived at Sissinghurst one November midnight and took two does worth six pounds: a dare by some young urban artisan-professionals, on a secret outing into the country, with some good venison as the trophy. There is something altogether more serious about an incident which occurred the following year when in broad daylight, at ten o’clock in the morning, a party of Cranbrook gentlemen, their servants and friends broke into the Park with their greyhounds, heavily armed with halberds, a combination of axe and spear on the end of a seven-foot pole. Baker’s men caught up with them later, ordered them to ‘yeld their bodyes’, but the Cranbrook invaders attacked the Sissinghurst men, who then fled for their lives.
The case surrounding this attempted theft and battery rolled on for the best part of a decade, the court papers becoming ever more impassioned. Sissinghurst Park was ‘impaled and principally employed for the breeding and cherishing of deer and conies’. The thieves, although one was a knight, Sir Alexander Culpeper, and another a gentleman, Walter Roberts, were said to be no better than ‘common night walkers, deer stealers and hunters in parks and chases’. They had got together with alehouse keepers and other low sorts and armed themselves with ‘bows, bills, guns, swords, daggers, long pick staves and other weapons’. Before their invasion they had been ‘drinking great and excessive quantities of beer until about 11 o’clock of the night’ at a house called Gaythorne (now opposite the garage near the roundabout at Willesley), and only then had gone ‘in warlike manner weaponed into the park’ with crossbows, seven greyhounds and long deer-catching nets called buckstalls. ‘With outrageous violence they pluckt out 8 of the pales and entered into the park and there with the hounds hunted and chased the deer and killed 2 does and carried them away. And they spoiled and hunted many other deer and did other outrageous actions to upset the peace of the realm, to the terror of the inhabitants.’ Baker’s men had pursued them to Haselden, an old house, once belonging to Sissinghurst, just north of the village, to arrest them for this monstrous behaviour, and there the Cranbrook men, roaring drunk and armed to the hilt, attacked the Bakers’ keeper, Jasper Glover, and two others brutally and immoderately, putting them in danger of their lives.
That, at least, was the accusation. The true story, according to the defendants anyway, was simpler. In the previous June, some deer had escaped from another park at Glassenbury on the other side of Cranbrook, belonging to Sir Thomas Roberts, Walter’s father. Sir Thomas’s son-in-law, Sir Alexander Culpeper, heard that there was a deer loose in ‘a place called the Hammer’, the woods near the Bakers’ mill three miles or so to the east. Culpeper went over there with two servants, to look for the deer at night, failed to find it and early the next morning (but is this timing convincing?) was making his way back towards Glassenbury, along the road between the Hammer Mill and Cranbrook, the old drove road running alongside the Sissinghurst Park pale.
Not finding the said deer, they returned homeward the usual and high road way [which] doth lead along by the pale of the enclosed ground … Having two greyhounds running along by his horse and the said greyhounds winding [scenting] the deer in the said enclosed ground did without any instigation or knowledge … break into the said enclosed ground and there killed one deer.
It was no more than a case of dogs off the leash and worrying the stock. Culpeper and his servants heard the deer ‘bray’ on the other side of the pale, two of them jumped across it near a gate and found one of their greyhounds with its teeth fixed in the neck of the deer. They caught the hounds and took the dead deer with them, climbing back into the road over a stile, where a third man was holding their horses. The only weapons they had with them were their riding swords and daggers. The rest of the story, the warlike invasion, the outrageous behaviour, the riotous affray – all of it seems to disappear into a bog of animosity and mutual loathing. Walter Roberts, one of the gentlemen defendants, blamed the Bakers’ attack on their neighbours as nothing but ‘malice and evil will without any just cause’.
But there were other issues in the air which hint at a troubled relationship between Sissinghurst and the world around it. There may be some continuity from the general loathing in which Sir John Baker, the Butcher Baker, had been regarded. In 1594 his daughter-in-law Mary, Richard’s wife, had been fined for recusancy – for not attending services in Cranbrook church because she still held to Roman Catholicism. In the same year a plot had been hatched in Cranbrook to destroy the Bakers’ most valuable asset: the ironworks that Richard Baker had set up at Hammer Mill in 1569. Baker had built a furnace in which iron was beaten out of heated ironstone ore. The source for the Hammer Mill ore was probably the wet, lumpy, glutinous wood just north of Sissinghurst still known as the Treacle Mines. You can see the yellow, rust-mottled ironstone in the bed of the Hammer Stream, just where the track to Bettenham crosses it. The Bakers had also built a forge in which the pig iron was made into tools and weapons. Mrs Hall, who lives in Hammer Mill Farm, still has a small cannonball which was found when the road outside the mill was repaired a few years ago. Her children used to play with it, rolling it across the kitchen floor, so often that it finally split in half. Soon after it was discovered, they took it to school in Sissinghurst to show the other children. The next day five of them brought in their own cannonballs, treasured in these houses since the sixteenth century. Iron sat alongside the woollen broadcloths as the dominant business of the Elizabethan Weald.
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, shatters into dust. In Richard Baker’s 1594 will, sixteen different woods are listed, of which half he had bought himself from his neighbours. One has to imagine every wood here under a tight and meticulous coppicing regime, every last fragment of the hewn wood collected up, a cleanness to it, the young shoots of the new wood rigorously fenced off from browsing animals, an intense feeling of nurture, harvest and use. You would have seen much farther across this country in the sixteenth century, as the pollards in the hedges would have been lopped and topped, the hedges themselves tightly laid into stockproof barriers and the woods never left unused or neglected. It would have been a shorn country, in which the dark and fiery ironworks, surrounded by their mounds of slag and with their giant hammers slamming into the half-molten ore, smoked and bellowed day and night. The wood was the source of heat but the streams drove both the hammers and the vast, industrial bellows with which the heat was kept high. And nothing was more important to the working of the furnace than continuous operation. Only when the fire remained continuously hot could satisfactory amounts of ore be reduced to iron, and for that reason every ironworks needed its dam or ‘pond-bay’ which held back sufficient quantities of water for operations to continue for days at a time. The pond-bay at Hammer Mill is still there, next to Mrs Hall’s orchard, over seven hundred feet long and eight feet high, covered in primroses and celandines in April. It dammed up behind it a fifty-acre pond, covering those beautiful hay meadows in which I walked with my father when I was a boy. It also seems possible that the lakes in the valley at Sissinghurst, on our boat-race stream, were also ‘pen ponds’, reservoirs penned up until the ironworks (or perhaps other mills downstream) needed their water too. Every ironworks employed a man whose job it was to control the sluices on all the ponds in which the potential energy of the saved water was waiting ready to be released.
Cloth and iron were in competition for wood. The great vats in which the clothiers dyed their wool were in need of wood too. The annual processing of a million pounds of wool in the six parishes around Cranbrook 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.’ The men of Biddenden and of Benenden were said to be part of the conspiracy. Old greybeards in Cranbrook were recalling the days, long ago, when ironworks were pulled down by teams of oxen. A weaver called Thomas Williams was summoned to a secret meeting in his brother’s house in Cranbrook. The brother asked him ‘What he would give towards a good deede’. ‘What is that good deede you would have me doe?’ Thomas asked. ‘He answered he would put down or pull downe a Baye or Bayes of ponds.’
John Baker, Richard’s son, had become 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. The situation was complicated. ‘The persons charged with these lewde speeches be verie poore men and greatlie charged with children.’ It may have been tempting to put them all in jail ‘for the greater discoredgment of the rest of their confederacie’, but that wouldn’t necessarily have the right effect. Reports were delivered to Baker. ‘Sir Richard his father did set upp the said Iron Woorkes … for profit … but to the great dislike of many of the Inhabitants … because of the great scarcetye of woode thereby.’
Many of the conspirators were arrested while others were known to have fled. A shortage of corn for the poor added to the crisis. All the other gentry in the parish were away in London too and so the constable and some ‘honest private persons’ were co-opted to keep order
bycause they be holden to be religious and honest, besides the which they are knowen to be riche, and thereby have great cause to feare, that if the rascal multitude should make any uproare, they would first invade them.
The chief clothiers were going to apply to the queen herself to have the ironworks pulled down and any new ones banned. But in the end there was no need for such extreme action. By mid-January 1595, the crisis seems to have ebbed; it is difficult to say why. There is a remote chance, as one anonymous report to the Lord Lieutenant puts it, that Baker himself had done something to quell the flames:
Certain wealthy Clothyers would give to Mr Baker as much money for his Woodes, as any other would; and in that respect seeing it not only no loss to Mr Baker, but also ready Water to quenche all this fyre, I would yor Lordship that he might by you be persuaded to sell them to the Clothiers.
Is it likely that Baker would have agreed? If his ironworks were to make a profit – and they continued in production here until the 1660s, when the dam was broken and the fifty-acre pond drained – he would have to rely on local supplies. It was for the clothiers to find their fuel where they could.
Elizabethan Sissinghurst, which might have looked and perhaps to Vita did look like the moment of perfection, turns out to be a time of polarised identities: a fierce distinction between inside Sissinghurst 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 sits, was a negotiated and contested space, full, not slack, taut and as tightly patrolled as anything now. In retrospect, there seems to be no privacy here. Those huge forgotten pollards, the mist-coated meadows by the Hammer Mill, the secrecy of the modern woods: all of them in their abandonment are relics of Elizabethan Sissinghurst; none faithfully records the world in which it began.
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 Rosa 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 ‘comody-ously’. 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 Burghley 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 on progress 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 Sidney. 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.
What can it have been like? The queen, who had been given Lambarde’s great book on Kent in manuscript by the archbishop to prep her for the county, would have been able to converse about her surroundings easily enough. But the Lord Chamberlain would have required, and Richard Baker would have happily ensured, that the days were tightly arranged. The form and patterning of Sissinghurst would have allowed that to happen.
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.
Sometimes 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.
Was that the tone here? Or had Richard Baker, like Sir Francis Carew at Bedington in Surrey in August 1599, dressed his cherry trees in canvas tents delaying their season, so that the fruit would be at perfect ripeness on the day the queen came? Or did he drive his Park deer into a small paddock so that the queen might shoot one or two without much effort, as happened at Cowdray? Or did he make green houses in the Park, the walls of hazels cut and stuck in the ground, roofed in ivy, the interior hung with tapestries and the floor thick with strewing herbs and parsley, as the earls of Pembroke did in Clarendon Park near Salisbury? Did he have a young man serenading the queen under her window as soon as she awoke? Or did the Faery Queen with her accompanying maidens come dancing across the garden towards her, singing a song of flowery delight? Did the queen herself dance, in the high-stepping style for which this smallpox-scarred, wig-wearing forty-year-old was known across Europe? Or did she play the virginals in her own chamber, as she often did ‘when she was solitary, to shun melancholy’?
All of this happened elsewhere on her progresses. Sadly, none of it is recorded for Sissinghurst. All we know for sure is that Richard Baker gave her
One standynge cup, the bodie chaste [?] and cover partli christall, garnished with silver and guilt; in the top of the cover is a lion holding the Queen’s armes cxvii oz
A rich cup weighing 117 ounces far outdid the offering made by the Culpepers (46 ounces), the townsmen of Cranbrook (47 ounces) and even the Guilfords (55 ounces). After three days, queen and courtiers left, perhaps with trumpets and drums in the court, and three days later, when they had travelled on to Dover, Baker followed them and was duly knighted, the reward which sealed his vastly expensive, entirely Elizabethan and father-denying efforts to make Sissinghurst a Renaissance palace in an invented park.