Knole unlocked: the hidden history of a country mansion

Virginia Woolf describes Knole in her novel Orlando (1928) as looking ‘like a town rather than a house… courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly and symmetrical… here was a chapel, there a belfry; spaces of the greenest grass lay in between and clumps of cedar trees and beds of bright flowers’.

This vision of a house of multiple courtyards has eluded visitors until now, because at ground level you see little beyond the surrounding walls. Only from the rooftops and attics do you get a view that brings home the sheer scale of Knole. Set within 1,000 acres of rolling parkland in Sevenoaks, Kent, Knole was bought by Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1456, expanded by his successor archbishops, and acquired – as was his habit – by Henry VIII in 1538. In 1604, after 66 years as a royal palace, it was purchased by Thomas Sackville, Lord Treasurer under Elizabeth I and James I, and further developed to create a sumptuously decorated Jacobean great house.

Treasures to draw crowds

When one of Sackville’s successors, Charles, the 6th Earl of Dorset, was made Lord Chamberlain under William and Mary, he was able to help himself to unwanted and discarded furniture from the other royal palaces as one of the ‘perquisites’ of his job. Out from Hampton Court and Whitehall, and into Knole, went Stuart furniture, tapestries and portraits. Decidedly old-fashioned at the time, these are now what attracts visitors to Knole, displayed as they have been in the ‘show rooms’ that have been visited by the public since the 18th century.

Indeed, Knole’s proximity to London made it a favourite destination of railway-borne tourists in the 1860s and 1870s, when upwards of 10,000 visitors a year came to see the house; a thriving hotel trade grew up in Sevenoaks to cater for the crowds. In 1946, ownership of the house was passed to the National Trust as the only way, given the punitive levels of inheritance tax at the time, that the Sackville-West family could afford to stay there.

The house, like all old houses, has not been immune to the ravages of time. Consequently, the Trust has now launched an ambitious plan to deliver the urgent conservation work needed to secure the exteriors, interiors, and collections at Knole. A major programme of emergency repairs to the existing walls, roofs, and windows has just been completed.

The next phase involves the building of a new conservation centre (the ‘Knole Studios’, described below), a learning centre, and a refurbished café. Added to this, environmental conditions within the showrooms will now be controlled, and a number of new spaces, including some of the attics, will be open to the public for the first time.

Archaeology at Knole

Archaeology has been at the core of this conservation programme, and has been ongoing at Knole since 2007. Specialists from MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) undertook a three-dimensional survey of the 20 show rooms, long galleries, and formal painted stairways, recording every detail, from fireplaces to ceiling mouldings.

As for the attic spaces, visitors will soon be able to access some of these, and enjoy that view lovingly described by Virginia Woolf of endless rooftops and courtyards, but before that could happen the roof tiles and battens covering the eastern and southern ranges had to be removed and repaired. This initiative allowed MOLA archaeologists to make a detailed study of the building’s development, and they recorded at least 20 different phases of construction, dating from the 1440s through to the 20th century. One big surprise was to discover that much more survived than had been expected of the 15th-century structure (the archbishops’ palace), encapsulated within the Jacobean building.