In 2023, the National Trust held a workshop at Knole as part of their ‘Translating the Language of Empire: Visible and Invisible Indigenous American Histories in Historic Houses’ project. Of the houses discussed that day, something about the courtyards and corridors of Knole gripped us. Walking through the house, the Indigenous presence seemed well and truly absent; but as we delved into its transatlantic connections, we began to think about this house as a salient site for researching the impact and traces of Indigenous peoples and colonial spaces on English spheres of power. In this piece, we share some of the early stages of our research into Knole’s links to the Americas. In the second section, we offer a dialogue about how an Indigenous-centred interpretation can help illuminate aspects of the house and its history that might not be immediately visible.
Knole, Tobacco, and the Virginia Company
In 1603, the statesman Thomas Sackville, first earl of Dorset, purchased an old archbishops’ residence in Kent and began to transform it into an aristocratic treasure house. The house that survives at Knole today offers a magnificent, imposing example of Jacobean style. It is the kind of house, writes its current resident, Robert Sackville-West, that was meant to be remembered.
During the reign of James I (1603–1625), as Sackville and his heirs transformed Knole into a dazzling palace inspired by Continental architecture and courtly fashions, aristocratic and merchant projectors became involved in schemes to colonize parts of North and South America. Mariners arrived on Algonquian lands in small-scale missions to the Chesapeake. Others were shipwrecked on Caribbean islands or travelled in canoes through the Amazon basin. By James’ death, the English had formed settlements in places they called Virginia, New England, Newfoundland, Bermuda, Barbados, and St Kitt’s.
The building of a Kentish country estate might seem unrelated to fledgling plantations across the Atlantic. But Knole also had connections to the Virginia Company, and tobacco, England’s only lucrative colonial industry at the time. Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset (1591–1652), was a significant shareholder in the Virginia Company. In 1620, he invested £150 in Virginia colonization, a sum that placed him among some of the company’s largest individual shareholders. During this time, tobacco imports into England rose from an estimated several thousand pounds in the 1610s, to a million and a half pounds by 1639, bringing colonial strategy into domestic economic debate. Sackville served on the Virginia Company’s governing board, privy to secret colonial intelligence sent by the colony’s leaders in its fraught early years. In 1631, and again in 1634, at Charles I’s direct appointment, Sackville sat on the commissioning board for the Virginia plantation.
In 1637, Edward’s son Richard (later fifth earl of Dorset) married Lady Frances Cranfield. Frances, Lady Middlesex was the daughter of the merchant and politician Lionel Cranfield, who had been central to debates around tobacco customs during James’ reign, at a pivotal moment in the Virginia colony’s fortunes. The marriage exhibited the Sackvilles’ professional and familial relationships with City projectors and financiers. After the civil wars, this union became key to restoring the Sackville fortunes. In 1674, Lady Frances inherited her father’s estates. Many of the paintings and furniture that refurbished Knole in the later seventeenth century came from Cranfield’s extensive collection. As a result of this inheritance, Cranfield’s personal Virginia Company papers and correspondence came into the Sackvilles’ possession, as well as portraits of prominent colonial supporters.
In time, we hope to show how the Sackvilles’ interests in Virginia and Bermuda, objects from the Sackville-Cranfield inheritance, and the materials in the Virginia Company papers can all contribute to a greater sense of how Atlantic economies fuelled the lives, fortunes, and self-fashioning of a family like the Sackvilles. There are undoubtedly larger connections to be made between a country house like Knole, regionally-specific networks of transatlantic travel and patronage in Kent (and the Kentish port of Dover), and life in Jamestown’s plantations, its materials now meticulously kept and catalogued by the archaeological team at Historic Jamestowne.
In the meantime, the Atlantic can be made more visible in small archival glimpses of life at Knole. Lady Anne Clifford, wife of Richard, third earl of Dorset, recorded two African or African-descended servants working in the house: ‘Grace Robinson’ and ‘John Morockoe’. How these individuals ended up at Knole remains unknown, but the Sackvilles’ colonial interests, and Lady Anne’s connections to Elizabethan privateering through her father George Clifford, third earl of Cumberland, makes it possible that individuals like Grace or John had ties to the Americas. Cumberland had conducted multiple voyages to the West Indies. At Knole, Lady Anne requested that her father’s journeys be compiled and read aloud to her. This brought tales of silver, sea battles, tobacco, and the capture of San Juan de Puerto Rico into its chambers.
On the Trail of Tobacco: Indigenous-Led Interpretation
Given this history, how can Knole’s transatlantic connections be approached in ways that also centre Indigenous presence? What new interpretation might such frameworks allow? For us, tobacco is the starting point.
Lauren Working [LW]: Colonial tobacco – in the Chesapeake lands the Powhatans called Tsenacommacah, but also in Spanish-occupied plantations across South America and the Caribbean – was cultivated on Indigenous soil before it ended up in London or Kent. The plant that featured so heavily in Virginia’s fortunes, and in Edward Sackville’s political life, was directly connected to Indigenous environmental knowledge and expertise, including those of Powhatan women. When we first started our research into Knole, you were one of the National Trust’s Indigenous fellows. How can Indigenous knowledge and perspectives inform interpretations of a house like this one?
Stephanie Pratt [SP]: Tobacco’s meanings changed as it crossed the Atlantic. For too long, we’ve focused only on those transformed meanings. But much was lost in translation, as Europeans took and modified Indigenous American practices. Europeans knew Native peoples used tobacco in various forms for sacred or medicinal purposes, and that Algonquians smoked pipes in ceremonial contexts and moments of political counsel. At the same time, as someone with Dakota ancestry, I can’t help but think about how settlers often failed to notice what the ceremonies around pipe smoking were actually achieving. Tobacco honours the connections we humans have with all creation and ensures we hold to a reciprocal (gifting and taking) relationship. They missed key aspects of how pipe tobacco could contain other plant substances, such as red willow bark, for the smoking of čhaŋšaša, as practiced by the Lakota and Dakota peoples.
To Indigenous ways of thinking and practice, the tobacco plant is a primary figure – a healer, a protector, kin. It is the carrier of prayers and messages received by Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka or the Great Creative Forces. The properties and spirits of plants were unlocked through ancestral knowledge that had no place in the profit-driven rhetoric of English colonial promoters. So I wonder how we can try to recover some of this, while also paying attention to how ceremonies, stories, and tribal histories were lost or disregarded as tobacco was cultivated on an industrial scale and taken from the land.
LW: So the Americas seem absent from a place like Knole in part because colonial ideologies downplayed, ignored, or misunderstood Indigenous ways of life. We see that English statesmen were embroiled in debates about land and plant cultivation, but we are less likely to remember the Indigenous expertise that lay behind this rapid escalation.
SP: Yes. I believe there is something wilful in replacing the multiplicity of peoples, lands, and beliefs with a singular idea of ‘Virginia tobacco’. This was an important part of Virginia Company propaganda from the start.
LW: This makes me think differently about the archives found at the house. Fragments of seventeenth and eighteenth-century clay tobacco pipes have been uncovered at Knole, a testament to the growing use of tobacco smoking on the estate. English-manufactured white clay pipes are a reminder that the technology of pipe smoking was a direct contribution by Indigenous Americans to English social practices.
SP: And Knole is a special case because of the Sackvilles’ high positions of state and their direct Virginia Company involvement. There were only a handful of aristocrats on the governing council.
LW: Even before the Virginia Company was chartered, members of the family, given their high political status, made decisions concerning tobacco. In 1605, Thomas Sackville signed a warrant demanding an increase on tobacco duties, ‘a drug brought into England of late years in small quantities’ and used ‘by the better sort…but through evil custom’ now widely smoked. This document, held at Knole, is part of its history as an archive. It equally makes me consider how some of the hundreds of workers who renovated the house may well have smoked, snatching a moment of rest between construction projects on the property.
SP: Knole has a Walter Ralegh connection, too. He dined there in 1596.
LW: Just months after his return from South America! He might have pulled out some Amazonian or Caribbean tobacco after dinner, sparking a conversation about his travels up the Orinoco River.
SP: Ralegh’s smoking habit reminds us that tobacco in England did not just come from fledgling English settlements in North America. Large amounts of tobacco in late Elizabethan England came from Spanish-occupied lands and would have been among the cargoes that Sackville debated in committee meetings. This brings other Indigenous cultures into the mix.
LW: In our conversations with Colombian-born artist, Cristina Ochoa, whose work explores ancestral plant knowledge among Indigenous communities, Ochoa stressed that thinking beyond tobacco as a commodity is key to decolonial perspectives. I think that really made something click in our thinking about how to approach a history about early Virginia colonization and English imperial aspirations.
SP: Very much so. Ongoing impacts of settler colonialism in the Americas, including the industrialization of tobacco plant products, continue to affect Indigenous communities today. While research shows the gains to be made by understanding the uses of the plant in its original, sacred and ceremonial context.
LW: To me, there is something really compelling in thinking about the smoke and vapour of tobacco alongside the highly durable materials of Knole’s expansive estate. It’s a house that retains a uniquely Jacobean appearance – a timestamp for an era when colonial projecting in the Americas first became a part of English political culture. The transience of a flicker of fire, unlocking the smoke of a tobacco plant grown thousands of miles away, compels us to grapple with histories of the ephemeral and the impermanent, even within those places that seem built to last.
SP: I agree. Displacement and mobility are an inherent part of the story of transatlantic exchanges in the early modern period. Indeed, my role as an Indigenous advisor/scholar for the NT collections was to open up and re-assess what is of relevance, and how we can examine those collections for what they can tell us beyond what might be immediately or easily graspable.As Ochoa explores in her work, building on the teachings of elders from a range of communities, seeds are travellers, too.
LW: I like the exploration in her recent Seedscapes installation at Kew of how seeds are record-keepers and collaborators. To think in this way can shed light on transatlantic histories that have often been dismissed as irrelevant to built heritage.
SP: Like you, I think following in the trail of tobacco can illuminate the Sackvilles and Knole in an exciting new way. They can encourage us to look anew at all those records pertaining to a plant that, in England, has long been understood solely as a commodity. Maybe there is a possibility for healing.
The authors would like to thank the curators at Knole and the National Trust for their expertise and ongoing support of this project, especially Rowena Willard-Wright, Eleanor Black, Christo Kefalas, and Kirsty Mitchell; and Cristina Ochoa for her warm conversations in the early stages of this work.