SACKVILLE

In spite of these factors the collection listed here contains many items of great interest and variety, and comprises the papers of the Sackville family and of a number of other families related to them by marriage.

A quantity of manorial documents, title deeds and estate papers for estates in Kent, London, Sussex, Essex, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire survive in the collection, dating from medieval times in the case of the Sussex, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire estates, till the present century.

Of the other families represented in these MSS. the largest section concerns the Cranfield family.

As has been stated the personal and official papers of Lionel, 1st Earl of Middlesex, are being listed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. There are a few personal papers of the second and third Earls of Middlesex and many manorial documents, title deeds and estate papers for the Cranfield estates in Bedfordshire, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire in the collection.

The Warwickshire and Gloucestershire property came to the Cranfield family from the Greville family and there are many deeds and papers in the collection connected with this family from the time of William Greville of Chipping Camden (d.1401), a wool merchant and citizen of London, till 1635.

Lionel, 3rd Earl of Middlesex married in 1655, Rachael, widow of Henry, 5th Earl of Bath and some personal and official papers of Lord Bath, as well as accounts and estate papers for his property in Devonshire are in the collection.

Charles, 6th Earl of Dorset, married, in 1674, as his first wife, Mary, widow of Charles, Earl of Falmouth, so that some of Lord Falmouth's personal and official papers passed to the Sackville family.

John Frederick, 3rd Duke of Dorset, married in 1790, Arabella Diana, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Charles Cope, and some documents concerning the Cope estates in Oxfordshire remain among the manuscripts. The Duchess married secondly in 1801, Charles, Lord Whitworth, who brought many papers into the collection. These include a large mass of Lord Whitworth's official papers as a diplomat and as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, a few papers of his great uncle, Charles, Lord Whitworth, also a diplomat, as well as many papers connected with the career of Lt. Col. Sir Francis Whitworth of the Royal Artillery, brother of Earl Whitworth. There are also some manorial documents, title deeds and estate and family papers of the Whitworth family and the related families of Wyndham and Strode in Staffordshire, Kent, Somersetshire, Glamorganshire and Worcestershire.

The arrangement of the catalogue has thus largely been dictated by the standard form used in the Kent Archives Office, by the number of documents existing in the collection for each of the main sections, by the original bundleing where this survives and by subsequent re-arrangements of the documents prior to their deposit in the Kent Archives Office, as well as by a desire to give clear indications of the groups of documents which survivie for various families within the muniments as a whole and of the main territorial divisions.

The main classes in the catalogue are those normally used for cataloguing estate and family collections in the Kent Archives Office. The main headings are, manorial, title, estate, family, correspondence, accounts and bills, official, ecclesiastical and charity, legal, business, miscellaneous, maps.

Within the section for title the usual subdivisions of the title section of K.A.O. catalogues (i.e. for Kent deeds, family settlements, testamentary matters, personal estate, and outcounty deeds) have been used with modifications due to the size and complexity of the collection, the large amount of non-Kent material and the number of different families involved. Thus under title all Kent material both for the Sackville family and other families is dealt with first. Then comes a section for settlements and deeds relating to the whole or large parts of the estates of the Sackville family and the main families with whom they were connected by marriage lying in many counties. This is followed by wills and documents connected with testamentary matters, by royal pardons and licences and by deeds connected with personal as opposed to real estate, all connected with the main family groups. Then comes the section for the London and Middlesex property of the main families. This is followed by the title deeds for the main Sackville estates in Sussex where their original property lay and in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, Essex, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire and elsewhere mainly acquired through marriage. The Warwickshire and Gloucestershire estate title deeds include settlements, testamentary documents, documents connected with financial transactions and other deeds of the Greville family who were not directly connected with the Sackville family but who owned the estate in this area which passed to the Cranfield family and subsequently to the Sackvilles. A few Greville documents, which had been incorporated in original bundles will be found in the main testamentary section and among the royal pardons and licences. There are next listed the deeds of the other properties of the Cranfield family which did not pass to the Sackville family though some of the deeds concerning them remain in the collection. There are thus further deeds for Sussex but for an estate completely distinct from the Sackville estate. This property having come into the possession of the Cranfield family from the Shirley family there are various settlements and wills relating to that family in this section. Finally there are deeds of the property, outside Kent, which belonged to the Whitworth family and to the families of Wyndham and Strode connected by marriage to the Whitworth family and including family settlements and testamentary documents.

The estate section is subdivided in a roughly similar way beginning with the Sackville family estate papers for Kent, for their estates as a whole, for London and Middlesex, for Sussex and also for Essex, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire including papers for the time when these estates belonged to the Cranfield family and in the case of the last area, to the Greville family. There follow a few estate papers for the property in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, bought by the Sackvilles in the seventeenth century. The next subdivisions of the estate section contain the papers of the Cranfield family for their property in the London area, Bedfordshire, Sussex and elsewhere which did not pass to the Sackville family and papers concerning general estate matters and their estates as a whole. For the other families there are only a small number of estate papers of a general character for various counties which are arranged under families.

Correspondence is arranged under families. Some estate correspondence has been left in the estate section and some official correspondence in the official section as they were closely linked with other papers in these sections. In other cases estate and official correspondence had been separated from their related papers before the collection was deposited in the Kent Archives Office and these have been kept separate, listed under correspondence and cross referenced.

The accounts and bills and vouchers are also arranged by family beginning with those of the Sackville family subdivided into general accounts and estate accounts and into general bills and estate bills for the whole or various parts of the estate. The Cranfield family accounts and bills follow arranged in the same way. The accounts and bills for the other family groups are smaller and are not subdivided.

The official and legal sections are subdivided according to family. It was not felt necessary to subdivide the other smaller sections.

The family headings in the manorial, title and estate sections do not mean that all the documents listed beneath those headings relate to the families concerned but only that the documents relate to properties which became part of the estates of those families and the documents themselves part of these families' muniments.

Part 1

M1-M149

T1-T333

E1-E335

F1-F43

C1-C354

Part 2

A1-A550

O1-300

L1-L75

Q1-Q54

B1-B3

Z1-X35

P1-P29

Accession 1008

M150-M242

T334/2-T343

E336-E346

F44-F47

C355-C356

A551/1-A554

O301-O302

L76-L80

P30-P76

Accession 1366

F48-F50

A167/3

Accession 1744

M249-M259

T345-T348

E347-E415

F51-F72

C357-C486

A555-A606

E471-E493

L81-L85

O303-O329

Q55-Q60

Z38-Z93

Accession 2030

M260-M380

T349-T410

E416-E510

C487/1-C487/23

A607-A675

O330-O341

L86-L104

Q61-Q90

P77-P100

Accession 2309

T411

A676-A678

E511-E513

This is a large accumulation, which despite its size gives an impression of incompleteness, having sufferred many vicissitudes during its history. Most of the papers of Thomas, 1st Earl of Dorset and of the family before his time, were kept at the family's London house, Dorset House in Fleet Street, and were destroyed, with the house, in the Great Fire of 1666. In the late eighteenth century, Nathaniel Wraxall, who sought the patronage of the third Duke of Dorset, and attempted to arrange and publish some of the papers, removed a large number of documents from Knole. These were only recovered with difficulty by the family in 1802, and were returned in a confused state, bearing Wraxall's scribbled notes upon them. Following the partition of the estate between the two daughters and co-heiresses of the third Duke in 1828, many title deeds for the part of the estate taken by the younger sister, Elizabeth, Countess De La Warr, are noted, in an old schedule of title deeds, as having been handed over to Lord De La Warr. Other family papers also found their way from Knole to Buckhurst [the Sussex seat of the Sackville family which passed to Lady De La Warr] including the bulk of the official papers and correspondence of Charles, Lord Whitworth (1675-1725). [See H.M.C. 3rd Report under De La Warr MSS.]. The muniments were also reported on by the Historical MSS. Commission in their fourth and seventh reports but not all items listed there have been located.

In addition, the collection in the K.A.O. does not include all the manuscripts which have survived. Some items have been retained at Knole for exhibition purposes. Some manorial documents for Knole and neighbouring manors are in Sevenoaks Public Library. The bulk of the personal and official papers of Lionel, 1st Earl of Middlesex, (1575-1645) are held by the Historical Manuscripts Commission for the purposes of publishing a calendar of them.

The Sackvilles were a Sussex family whose chief seat was Buckhurst in Withyham. In 1566 the reversion of the manor of Knole in Kent was granted by the crown to Thomas Sackville who in 1567 was created Lord Buckhurst and in 1604 Earl of Dorset. He succeeded Burghley as Lord High Treasurer in 1599. Not till 1603 did he gain possession of Knole, the fine house which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had belonged to the see of Canterbury. As has already been stated few of his papers survive. There is also little for the second, third and fourth Earls. Many papers of Richard, 5th Earl of Dorset, however, are in the collection. He appears to have been a voluminous writer, making copious notes and drafts and endorsing many title deeds, accounts, and other papers with notes in his own hand. There are many official and personal papers too for Charles, 6th Earl of Dorset, Lionel, 1st Duke of Dorset and John Frederick, 3rd Duke of Dorset.

George, 4th Duke of Dorset was killed in a hunting accident, in 1815, aged twenty one. The title passed to his father's cousin Charles Sackville Germain and on his death in 1843 became extinct, but the estate remained the property of Arabella Diana, Duchess of Dorset, widow of the 3rd Duke, till her death in 1825, when it passed to her two daughters, the co-heiresses of the 3rd Duke. By 1828 arrangements had been completed for the partition of the estate. On the death of the elder sister Mary, Countess of Plymouth in 1864 her share of the estate, which included Knole, passed to her sister, Elizabeth, Countess De La Warr but was settled on the younger sons of Lady De La Warr and remained distinct from the part of the estate which had been allotted to Lady De La Warr in 1828 and which passed to successive Earls De La Warr. The final arrangement was not effected without lengthy law suits concerning which there are many papers in the muniments.

Richard Sackville, later 5th Earl of Dorset, married probably in 1641, Frances Cranfield, daughter of Lioncl, 1st Earl of Middlesex. (According to 'G.E.C.', Complete Peerage the marriage took place before 1638 and the eldest child of the union was born in January 1638, but documents in the muniments suggest that the parties were married in January 1641. A462/6 is a bill dated 26 January 1640/1 concerning payments made in connection with the marriage. In A390/1, a Cranfield family account book, there are entries dated 25 January 1640/1 which show preparations for festivities including the carriage of silver and other dishes from Dorset House. E298/1 is the preliminary agreement dated 25 January 1640/1 for the marriage settlement of Frances and Richard, while entries in A4/1, an account book of Lord Buckhurst, show that payments of his wife's portion by her father began at Michaelmas 1641.) On the death of Lionel, 3rd Earl of Middlesex in 1674, his nephew Charles Sackville succeeded to the Cranfield estates, though this was disputed by Charles' mother, Frances, Countess of Dorset. Charles Sackville was created Earl of Middlesex in 1675 and in 1677 succeeded his father as Earl of Dorset.