WIFE TO RICHARD SACKVILLE, 3RD EARL OF DORSET
_From the portrait at Knole by_ _Mytens_ ]
Before she could reach these serene waters, however, she had many storms to weather, and to bear the “crosses and contradictions” which caused her to write “the marble pillars of Knole in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish.” Richard Sackville in his own day was a byword for extravagance, and was bent on extorting from his wife for the purposes of his own pleasure the utmost resources of her inheritance. His portrait is at Knole, a full-length by Van Somer; he has a pale, pointed face, dark hair growing in a peak, and small mean eyes, and is dressed entirely in black with enormous silver rosettes on his shoes. There is also the very beautiful miniature of him by Isaac Oliver in the Victoria and Albert Museum, showing the richness of his clothes, his embroidered stockings, and his hand resting upon the extravagantly-plumed helmet on the table beside him.
His life is an empty record of gambling, cock-fighting, tilting; of balls and masques, women and fine clothes. “Above all they speak of the Earl of Dorset,” says a contemporary letter, after describing the lavishness of some of the costumes worn in a Court masque in which he was taking part, “but their extreme cost and riches make us all poor,” and Clarendon says of him, “his excess of expenditure, in all the ways to which money could be applied, was such that he so entirely consumed almost the whole great fortune which descended to him, that when he was forced to leave the title to his younger brother he left, in a manner, nothing to him to support it.” The enormous estates which he inherited, the careful accumulation of the old Lord Treasurer, he sold in great part, in order to squander the proceeds upon his amusements; before he had been in possession for three years he had sold the manor of Sevenoaks, and had “conveyed” Knole itself to one Henry Smith (retaining, however, the house at a rent of £100 a year for his own use), and in the course of rather less than ten years he had sold estates, including much of Fleet Street and the Manor of Holborn, to the value of £80,616, or nearly a million of modern money.