CHAPTER III. RESORTS OF THE WITS. KNOWLE HOUSE. LORD BUCKHURST, AFTERWARDS EARL OF DORSET. WALLER'S MINOR POEMS. HIS CAREER. HIS LOVE FOR LADY DOROTHY SYDNEY. LINES ON HIS DISAPPOINTMENT. -ANECDOTE OF LADY SUTHERLAND AND WALLER. AN ACCOUNT OF WALLER'S PLOT. SIR DEATH OF THE AFTER HIS TRIAL WALLER GOES TO PARIS. THE REIGNING BELLE AT THE COURT OF FRANCE. RETURNS TO ENGLAND. -THE POET'S PANEGYRIC ON CROMWELL. PHILIP WARWICK'S DESCRIPTION OF CROMWELL'S COURT. PROTECTOR. WALLER'S VERSES ON HIS MAJESTY'S HAPPY RETURN.' CHARLES'S REMARK THEREON. HIS INTERVIEW WITH KING JAMES. WALLER'S DEATH. EXTRACTS FROM HIS POEMS. THE GRANDEUR OF OUR COUNTRY SEATS. 53 CHAPTER III. FOREIGNERS have remarked that nothing so greatly astonishes them as our country seats; so numerous, so well appointed, so stately in exterior, so perfect in every detail within, so social, so hospitable. In the period succeeding the Protectorate, a Frenchman of rank, armed with all the letters of introduction imaginable, would, however, have found great difficulty in spending a winter in various country houses in England or Wales. Rebellion had levelled some of the finest of our gentlemen's seats, and shattered others. Basing House was a heap of ruins; of Burleigh-on-the-Hill nothing but the stables were standing; Ragland, as its gallant owner, long dead, had done, stood proudly still, defying the enemy, but was no longer habitable. Kenilworth was a still greater wreck: no more festivities there; no more Lanehams to tell of pageants and banquets. Many minor dwellings had so far stood the shock that the roof still sheltered the homestead; the walls were still erect; but the owners were impoverished, and could no longer play the part of the good old English gentleman.' One magnificent pile was, however, maintained by wealth and prudence. Knowle Park was still there, in yonder rich and favoured county, diversified and picturesque; not hilly enough for its acclivities to interfere with society; yet undulating, so that the eye never tires, as the feet ramble on its commons and park. 54 KNOWLE HOUSE AND ITS OWNERS. Knowle, or Knole, had changed hands, nevertheless, many times. Let us begin with the Grandisons, although Knowle had various owners before their day. By a Grandison it was sold to a Norman knight named Say; he next parted with it to Rauf Legh, who sold it to the Fiennes, Lords Say and Seale; then Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, bought it for 400 marks, and, for a long time, Knowle was the seat of the primates of England. It is pleasant to think that the erring but excellent Cranmer had it for a time. Alas! at his death it fell into the hands of Henry the Eighth. A sort of fate now hung over the fine old place. The Crown gave it to the Protector Somerset-he was decapitated; next it was bestowed on Dudley, Earl of Warwick, the father of Lady Jane Grey-he also was beheaded. Mary, with a view perhaps to its coming some time to a mitred possessor, gave He died on the same day it to her kinsman, Cardinal Pole. as that on which her Majesty also went-where, we know not. Then Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had Knowle and its lands as a present from the Crown. He surrendered the property, however, to Queen Elizabeth, and she bestowed it on Thomas Sackville, first Lord Buckhurst, and the author of the Mirrour of Magistrates,' and of Gorboduc.' 6 This favoured nobleman found Knowle House a specimen. of the architecture of different ages. Much of it revealed the liberal hand and wealth of the hierarchy, and was the work of two archbishops, Bourchier and Merton; the most modern part is of the age of James the First, and was the erection of the first Earl of Dorset: the date, 1605, is on the waterspout. Then, we regret to say, appear the arms of Cranfield, the corrupt Lord Middlesex, impaled with those of Richard, the fifth Earl of Dorset, who married that nobleman's daughter. The garden gates, the sun-dials, and other places display these arms. A spacious quadrangle, with smaller ones behind, compose the house, rendered classic by the assemblage therein of |