ceived charge of the younger children, Henry, duke of Gloucester, and his sister Elizabeth, and was allowed 600l. a year, with Knole House and Dorset House, in recognition of her services. In 1645 she died, just as she was about to be relieved of her duties, and, as a reward for her ‘godly and conscientious care and pains,’ received a public funeral in Westminster Abbey (Cal. State Papers; Green, Princesses, vi. 342, 348; Whitelocke, p. 154). Dorset's children were: (1) Mary, who died young, 30 Oct. 1632; (2) Richard, fifth earl (see below); (3) Edward, who was wounded at Newbury, 20 Sept. 1643, and soon after his marriage with Bridget, baroness Norreys, daughter of Edward Wray, was taken prisoner by parliamentary soldiers in a sortie at Kidlington, and murdered in cold blood at Chawley in the parish of Cumnor, near Oxford, 11 April 1646.
Dorset is described by Clarendon (bk. i. §§ 129–37) as ‘beautiful, graceful, and vigorous: his wit pleasant, sparkling, and sublime .... The vices he had were of the age, which he was not stubborn enough to contemn or resist.’ He was an able speaker, and on the whole a moderate politician, combining a strong respect for the royal prerogative with an attachment to the protestant cause and the liberties of parliament (Gardiner, iv. 70–1, 257). He was evidently an excellent man of business. The contemporary descriptions of his personal appearance are borne out by the fine portrait by Vandyck at Knole, the head from which has been frequently engraved—e.g. by Hollar, Vertue, and Vandergucht.
His elder son, Richard Sackville, fifth Earl of Dorset (1622–1677), was born at Dorset House on 16 Sept. 1622. As Lord Buckhurst he contributed an elegy to ‘Jonsonus Virbius’ (1638), a collection of poems in Ben Jonson's memory, and he represented East Grinstead in the House of Commons from 3 Nov. 1640 till he was ‘disabled’ on 5 Feb. 1643; but his seat was not filled up till 1646. He was one of the fifty-nine ‘Straffordians’ who opposed the bill of attainder against Lord Strafford on 21 April 1641; he was imprisoned by the parliament in 1642, and was fined 1,500l. in 1644, but does not seem to have taken any part in the civil war. In January 1656 he complained that his property in Derbyshire and Staffordshire had been seized on an erroneous information of delinquency, and an order for restoration was made on 12 April. On 8 March 1660 he was appointed a commissioner of the militia of Middlesex; and on 26 April was on the committee of safety in the new parliament or convention, and chairman of a committee on the privileges of the peers; in May he was placed on several committees connected with the restoration, being chairman of the one for arranging for the king's reception. Charles II appointed him joint lord lieutenant of Middlesex on 30 July 1660, which office he held till 6 July 1662; in the same year he received the stewardships in Sussex usually held by his family, and was joint lord lieutenant from 1670. In October he was nominated on the commission for the trial of the regicides. He acted as lord sewer at the coronation on 23 April 1661, and was made a member of the Inner Temple with the Duke of York on 3 Nov. He frequently petitioned for the renewal of grants made to his family, especially for a tax of 4s. a ton on coal. In 1666 he was inconvenienced by an encroachment by Bridewell Hospital on the site of Dorset House, which had been burnt in the fire; but in September 1676 he was enriched by reversions which fell in on the death of the old Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery, whose first husband, Richard, third earl of Dorset, was his uncle [see Clifford, Anne]. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 3 May 1665. Aubrey says that Samuel Butler told him that Dorset translated the ‘Cid’ of Corneille into English verse (Aubrey MSS. vii. 9, viii. 20). He died on 27 Aug. 1677, and was buried at Withyham.
He married, before 1638, Lady Frances, daughter of Lionel Cranfield, first earl of Middlesex [q. v.], and eventually heiress to her brothers; she married, secondly, Henry Powle [q. v.], master of the rolls, and died on 20 April 1687. He had seven sons and six daughters. His eldest son was Charles Sackville, sixth earl of Dorset [q. v.] In memory of his youngest child Thomas (b. 3 Feb. 1662, d. at Saumur 19 Aug. 1675) he contemplated a monument in the Sackville Chapel in Withyham church, which he had rebuilt. The contract (for a sum of 350l.) with the Dutch sculptor, Caius Gabriel Cibert or Cibber (1630–1700), is dated April 1677; and the monument, finished by the countess as a memorial of the whole family in 1678, is one of the finest works of the period. There are three portraits of Earl Richard at Knole, one of which was engraved by Bocquet and published by J. Scott in 1806.
[Doyle's Official Baronage; Collins's Peerage, ed. Brydges, ii. 151–69; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. iii. 748; Gardiner's Hist. of England; Bridgman's Sketch of Knole; Alexander Brown's Genesis U.S.A.; Historical Notices of Withyham (by R. W. Sackville-West, the late Earl De la
