Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

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the frisky baby talk of her letters to Scott suggests otherwise. Bachelor Sir John may have been over-fastidious in the matter of sex.

Victoria’s past was romantic and picaresque. She was illegitimate, Catholic, the daughter of a small-town Spanish dancer Josefa Durán, known as Pepita, ‘the Star of Andalusia’. Pepita had become the mistress of an English nobleman. She bore him seven children, including Victoria. In a bid for respectability, she reinvented herself as Countess West and enlisted kings and princes as godparents to her illegitimate children. At her lover’s request, she set up home on the French coast southwest of Bordeaux, away from the eyes of the world.

Like Sir John, Victoria had lived part of her life in Paris. Until her absent father reappeared to rescue her, she had been educated for a governess at the Convent of St Joseph on rue Monceau. In 1890 she became chatelaine of Knole in Kent. She described it with simple pride – and truthfully – as ‘bigger than Hampton Court’. The vast house was the ancestral home of her husband, Lionel Sackville-West. Victoria learned swiftly that the income which supported it was less splendid. That Victoria’s husband was also her first cousin was a curious twist worthy of Victorian popular fiction: the English nobleman, Pepita’s lover, was the 2nd Baron Sackville, not only Victoria’s father but her husband’s uncle. Pepita died in 1871, her lover, Lord Sackville, in 1908. In the absence of legitimate offspring the latter’s title passed to his nephew.

After ‘ten perfect years of the most complete happiness and passionate love’, Lionel and Victoria’s marriage had turned sour.

In the summer of 1913, the couple had a single child, their daughter Vita, who had lately celebrated her twenty-first birthday. Given her sex, the Sackville title would again descend collaterally. Meanwhile, out of love with his wife, Lionel took a series of mistresses: Lady Camden, Lady Constance Hatch, called Connie, an opera singer called Olive Rubens. Like miscreants on a saucy seaside postcard, Lionel and Lady Connie played a lot of golf.

Sir John Murray Scott had been a giant of a man. Measuring more than five feet around the waist and tall too, he weighed in excess of twenty-five stone. He died of a heart attack. The fortune he left behind him derived neither from his family nor his own entrepreneurialism. Instead, in 1897, he had inherited £1 million from his employer, a former shop girl who had caught the eye of Sir Richard Wallace, first as his mistress and afterwards his wife. Wallace was the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess of Hertford. Lord Hertford left him estates in Ireland, a Parisian apartment of legendary magnificence at 2 rue Laffitte and the chateau de Bagatelle, a charming neoclassical maison de plaisance built by Louis XVI’s brother, the comte d’Artois, and surrounded by sixty acres of the Bois de Boulogne to the west of Paris. To this splendid inheritance Wallace had added a lease on Hertford House in London, today home of The Wallace Collection, which is named after him. All these glittering prizes Lady Wallace willed to John Murray Scott. For three decades he had served the Wallaces as their devoted secretary. No conditions restricted the bequest. He was free to act as he wished, which is exactly what he did.

What Sir John wished was to help his ‘chère petite amie’. In a letter delivered to Victoria after his death, he had written, ‘It will be found that I have left you in my Will … a sum of money which I hope will make you comfortable for life and cause all anxiety as to your future ways and means to cease.’

Gratitude inspired his generosity: ‘You did everything to make my broken life, and my last words to you are: “I am very grateful.”’

Victoria had ensured that Sir John, or ‘Seery’ as the Sackvilles called him, was fully aware of the contrast between his own wealth and the relatively modest income generated by the Sackville estates (a sum of £13,000 a year, recently estimated at ‘perhaps a third of what was needed to support an establishment such as Knole’

). As an added sweetener to his £500,000 bequest, he left Victoria a diamond necklace that had once belonged to Queen Catherine Parr, a pocket book of Marie Antoinette’s and, from Connaught Place, a bust by eighteenth-century French sculptor Houdon and a chandelier. Together, chandelier and sculpture were worth a further £50,000: Sir John intended them for Knole. For good measure, he left a second diamond necklace to Victoria’s daughter Vita and a valuable pearl necklace, which became his posthumous twenty-first birthday present to her.

A fly on the wall in Connaught Place would have known the way the wind was blowing long before writs were issued. Even during Sir John’s lifetime, his siblings had referred to Lionel and Victoria as ‘the Locusts’. Sir John had made Victoria a number of ‘gifts’ in the dozen years of their friendship. Beginning with a modest single payment of £42 8s 6d, these ultimately amounted to a figure close to £84,000. In several instances the purpose of these gifts was understood to be expenses relating to Knole or the settlement of Sackville debts and mortgages (a handout of £38,600, for example, begun as a loan for this purpose, was subsequently written off). The real recipients were not Victoria but Lionel and Knole. In addition, at a cost of £17,000, Sir John had provided Victoria with a handsome London townhouse at 34 Hill Street in Mayfair. With little regard for the feelings of his unmarried sisters, who nominally kept house for him, Victoria chose to divide much of her time between Hill Street and Connaught Place. There she rearranged the furniture, instructed the servants, commandeered Sir John’s carriage and hosted dinner parties from which she excluded his sisters Miss Alicia and Miss Mary. She dismissed them both as irredeemably drab. Sir John did not object. To rub salt into the wound, he presented Victoria with a handsome and valuable red lacquer cabinet, which he had bought for his sisters’ boudoir. By the summer of 1913, in the eyes of her opponents, Victoria’s offences were manifold.

The case that began on 26 June concerned Victoria’s exercise of ‘undue influence’ over Sir John’s will. As The New York Times explained to American readers, F. E. Smith, counsel for the prosecution, ‘in concluding his nine hours’ [opening] speech, said the question was whether the testator at a vital and critical moment was in a position to give free play to his own wishes or whether he was so under the influence of Lady Sackville that the decisions he took were not his, but hers’.

Sir John’s siblings were clear on the matter. So, too, was Victoria. Dressed with colourful and costly panache, she gave a bravura performance in the witness box. In one of several early, unpublished novels, Vita reimagined her mother’s triumph: ‘Her evidence was miraculous in its elusiveness; she held the court’s attention, charmed the judge, took the jury into her confidence, routed the opposing counsel, wept at some moments, looked beautiful and distressed …’

The jury needed only twelve minutes to reach their judgement. Victoria emerged victorious and just about exonerated. The judge, Sir Samuel Evans, acclaimed her as a woman of ‘very high mettle indeed’; afterwards Victoria made a friend of him. The Pall Mall Gazette reached a less partial assessment: ‘Sir John was ready to give, and Lady Sackville scrupled not to receive.’ In acknowledgement of her gratitude, Victoria afterwards invited all twelve jurymen to her daughter’s wedding.

As long ago as 17 June 1904, Victoria had confided to her diary ‘I hate gossiping’.

Later she wrote, ‘People may do what they like but it ought to be either sacred or absolutely private. It is nobody’s business to know our private life. The less said about it, the better …’

It was fear of exposure which added a frisson to Edwardian misbehaviour. ‘The code was rigid,’ Vita later wrote in a novel about the period. ‘Within the closed circle of their own set, anybody might do as they pleased, but no scandal must leak out to the uninitiated. Appearances must be respected, though morals might be neglected.’

Swayed by such feelings, and in an attempt to shield her husband and her daughter from scandal, Victoria had written to the Scotts’ counsel on the eve of the trial, ‘Do Spare Them, and attack me as much as you like.’

Her plea fell on deaf ears. Her victory involved the very public airing of family secrets she had hoped to conceal; even Lady Connie was called on to give evidence. Among unwelcome revelations were those concerning the Sackville finances, aspersions on Victoria’s own morality and rapacity, and an exposé of Lionel’s relationship with Lady Connie, with all the associated inferences to be drawn about the Sackvilles’ marriage. In Leicester Square, the Alhambra Theatre, home of popular music-hall entertainment, staged a musical revue based on the trial. One of Victoria’s maxims confided to Vita was, ‘One must always tell the truth, darling, if one can, but not all the truth; toute verité n’est pas bonne à dire.’

With hindsight, it sounds like closing the stable door when the horse had already bolted. The public display of the Sackvilles’ dirty linen offended every stricture of aristocratic Edwardian conduct: it would mark them for the remainder of their lives. Both Lionel and Victoria paid a high price for the latter’s hard-fought riches. As Vita wrote afterwards, they would realise ‘that innocence was no shield against the pointed fingers of the crowd’.

Yet rich Victoria undoubtedly was. Disregarding Sir John’s unspoken wish that she transfer the contents of the rue Laffitte apartment to Knole, Victoria sold them en bloc to French antiques dealer Jacques Seligmann for £270,000. They were dispersed across the globe, the memory of their rich assembly confined to a short story, Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour, which Vita published in 1932. ‘There were silence and silken walls, and a faint musty smell, and the shining golden floors, and the dimness of mirrors, and the curve of furniture, and the arabesques of the dull gilding on the ivory boiseries.’

Extravagant as she was covetous, Victoria settled down to living off the interest on the sum of £150,000. The capital itself became part of the Sackville Trust, in accordance with the terms of her marriage settlement. Only Vita emerged from the courtroom unscathed. Jurymen and journalists had discovered that Sir John had called her by the pet name ‘Kidlet’. Harmless enough, the label stuck.

In her diary for 7 July, Vita wrote briefly in Italian: ‘Triumphant day! All finished!’

She invested the short word ‘all’ with considerable feeling. Her mother’s ‘triumph’ concluded what threatened to be costly legal action with a magnificent windfall. It also brought to an end a troubling five-year period in which the Sackvilles had been continuously involved in, or threatened with, court proceedings.

Three years earlier, in February 1910, Victoria had found herself with Lionel and, briefly, Vita, in London’s High Court. In order to defend her husband’s inheritance of the Sackville estates and title in preference to her brother, Pepita’s son Henry, Victoria was forced publicly to attest her own illegitimacy and that of her siblings. The Daily Mail called the case ‘The Romance of the Sackville Peerage’. It was anything but a romantic interlude for Victoria. Proud and spoilt, she habitually masked deep embarrassment about the circumstances of her birth behind ferocious snobbery. Had it not been for her greedy possessiveness towards Knole, she would have found it a more painful experience. Her mother and father were dead, her husband unfaithful and indifferent to her. In the cold light of the High Court she battled the treachery of her brother Henry and her spiteful, disaffected sisters Amalia and Flora. Only one of Pepita’s surviving children, Victoria’s brother Max, kept clear of the fray. As in the Scott case, Victoria and Lionel won. Knole remained theirs. They retained too the Sackville title, which assured the illegitimate Victoria the respect and deference she craved. In Sevenoaks, their victory was celebrated with a public holiday. They returned to Knole in a carriage drawn by men of the local fire brigade. Bouquets covered the seats. Defeated and deeply in debt, Henry subsequently committed suicide. Expenses associated with the case cost the Sackvilles the enormous sum of £40,000.

In a poem called ‘Heredity’, written in 1928, Vita Sackville-West asked: ‘What is this thing, this strain,/ Persistent, what this shape/ That cuts us from our birth,/ And seals without escape?’ To her cousin Eddy she would write: ‘You and I have got a jolly sort of heredity to fight against.’

Dark shadows clouded Vita’s adolescence. On two occasions, crises in the life of her family became public spectacles, she herself – as ‘Kidlet’ – an unwitting heroine of the illustrated papers. Exposed to public gawping were the sexual foibles of her parents and her grandparents, and a world in which love, sex, money and rank coexisted in a greedy system of barter and plunder. Set against this was the feudal loyalty of Sevenoaks locals, the splendour of life in the rue Laffitte, where Seery entertained European royalty, and the majesty and mystery of Knole itself. It was, for Vita, a varied but not a straightforward existence: courtroom exposure of its flaws increased a tendency to regard herself as distinct and apart, which began in her childhood. Ultimately she longed to retreat from view. Inheritance became a vexed issue for Vita, and one that dominated chapters of her life and facets of her mind. Over time she regarded heredity as immutable and inescapable, but unreliable. This in turn coloured her sense of identity: an element of bravado underpinned her stubborn pride. She did not struggle to escape. Her understanding of her inheritance – temperamental, physical, material – shaped the person she became.