The amazing prosperity and court favour shown to Lord Saye and Sele raised up many enemies for him, and the King was obliged, first to sequester him from the office of Lord Treasurer, and then to commit him to the Tower of London, merely to secure him from the violence of the discontented people, then seething in the rebellion of Jack Cade, in 1450. That insurrection brought an exciting moment to Sevenoaks, for Cade and his army, pursued by some twenty thousand of the King’s troops from their riotous place of assemblage on Blackheath, turned at bay upon them, and in the disastrous skirmish of Sole Fields, within sight of Knole, slew the King’s commander, Sir Humphrey Stafford. Cade, assuming the armour of the fallen knight, marched to London, where, according to Shakespeare, he struck the historic London Stone with his sword and proclaimed himself “lord of this city.” He did more than that, for he brought the unhappy Lord Saye and Sele forth from his hiding-hole in the Tower, and hacked his head off at the Standard in Cornhill, afterwards offering revolting barbarities to his body. It was the son of this victim of popular revolt who, six years later, reduced to extremities in the troubles of the time, sold Knole to Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, for a sum representing £2,500 at the present day. The manor-house of that time was old and dilapidated, and Bourchier pulled it down and built the gatehouse and the principal front of the present group of buildings. Thirty years later he died and left Knole to the See; and, with all other archbishops, was _ex officio_, so to speak, collated to the Realms of the Blest. He was succeeded by Archbishop Morton, who reigned fourteen years; by Henry Dene (two years), by Warham for thirty years; and then by Cranmer, who in 1537, from motives of policy, surrendered it to the Crown. Politic indeed, for the Archbishops of Canterbury at that time owned no fewer than sixteen palaces, and men were beginning to inquire by what right lords spiritual were so gorged with things temporal; just as in these times of ours the phenomenal wealth of great landowners is beginning to arouse an inconvenient criticism. Knole came to the Sackvilles, whose collateral descendants still own it, from Queen Elizabeth, who in 1567 gave it to Thomas Sackville, a cousin on her mother’s side. He already owned Buckhurst, and she created him therefore Baron Buckhurst; which is, as every one will acknowledge, a fruity-flavoured title. “Baron Buckhurst:” how finely it trips off the tongue! The Queen gave as a reason for her gift the “keeping him near her court and councils, that he might repair thither on any emergency with more expedition than he could from his seat of Buckhurst in Sussex, the roads to which county were at times impassable.”