_From the portrait at Knole by_ C. PHILLIPS ]
One wonders whether such suggestions troubled Lady Betty. Was it possible that her great-souled friend would not be Lord Steward and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Lord Warden and Lord Lieutenant of Kent, did he not also happen to be Duke of Dorset? Was it possible that people such as the Sackvilles occasionally occupied positions due to their birth rather than to their intellect? Was it true that he, and particularly Lord George, cared for their own advancement rather than for the credit of England?—they who _were_ England, who shared the blood of the Tudors and the Howards and the Spencers and the Cliffords? whose house was quarried from Kentish rock? whose oaks and beeches were rooted so deep into the soil of England? Lady Betty herself, who as Lady Betty Berkeley had come from that most ancient castle—that rose-and-grey castle, the colour of her own dried rose-leaves, the castle that, squat, romantic, and uncouth, brooded over the Severn across the meadows of Gloucestershire—Lady Betty herself was of all people least qualified or likely to criticize. The household at Knole was ordered on a magnificent scale, with the duke and duchess and their guest at the apex of the pyramid which reposed on the base of five servants at £20 each, two at £15, two at £10 10_s._, seven at £10, two at £8, thirteen at £6, eight at £5, two at £5, one at £2, besides the chaplain who was unsalaried, the senior officers, the Steward, the Comptroller, and the Master of the Horse at £60, £30, and £25 respectively, Tom Durfey living over the dairy, and the rabble of labourers, gardeners, and what-not, of whom nobody took any notice. This was life as Lady Betty was accustomed to find it ordered. If ever she paused to question its system, no trace of her wondering appears in her letters.
She had a house of her own, Drayton, in Northamptonshire, considered by Horace Walpole a “venerable heap of ugliness, with many curious bits,” which she had inherited from her late husband, who in his turn had inherited it from a first wife. This husband of Lady Betty’s is a peculiar figure; so peculiar, indeed, so ambiguous, and so equivocal, that one wonders at his alliance with the orderly Lady Betty Berkeley, unless this may be explained by the fact that he “possessed a very handsome person, and was always a distinguished favourite of the other Sex.” He was, I gather, a soldier of fortune, of uncertain parentage, or, as Lord George Sackville delicately puts it, “believed to stand in a very close degree of consanguinity to King William the Third.” William, at any rate, brought him over to England from Holland in 1688, knighted him, saw to it that he became a member of the House of Commons, and assisted him with grants of money; and Germaine, who inherited from his father no armorial bearings, was accustomed to use a red cross, which might be taken to mean that his actual was higher than his ostensible birth. This gentleman combined with the instincts of a collector a profound ignorance of artistic matters. His principal pride was his collection of “Rarities,” in which he would exhibit the dagger of Henry VIII; he believed a certain Sir Matthew Germaine to be the author of St. Matthew’s Gospel; and at Drayton, where he was building a colonnade, he caused the columns to be placed upside down, as he had mistaken the capitals for the pedestals.