Freepedia is a series of free encyclopaedias. We currently specialize in history but we intend to branch out into other areas. This section is about Margaret Sackville.

Margaret Sackville, the daughter of the 7th Earl De La Warr, was born in 1881. A poet and children's author, she joined the ant-war, Union of Democratic Control in 1914. During the war she published a collection of poems called The Pagent of War (1916). It included the poem Nostra Culpa, denouncing women who betrayed their sons by not speaking out: "We mothers and we murderers of mankind".

Her aunt, Muriel De La Warr and her uncle, Herbrand Sackville, ninth Earl De La Warr, were also involved in the peace movement. Her brother, the 8th Earl De La Warr, was killed in the conflict in 1915. Margaret Sackville died in Cheltenham in 1963.

 

Margaret Sackville: Guardian

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Margaret Sackville

Margaret Sackville: Spartacus Biography

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The War Poets

Margaret Sackville

 

 

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(1) Margaret Sackville, Memory (1918)

There was no sound at all, no crying in the village,
Nothing you would count as sound, that is, after the shells;
Only behind a wall the low sobbing of women,
The creaking of a door, a lost dog - nothing else.

Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence,
Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-stained ways;
In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied,
And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.

Humble and ruined folk - for these no pride of conquest,
Their only prayer: 'O! Lord, give us our daily bread!'
Not by the battle fires, the shrapnel are we haunted;
Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?

 

(2) Patrick Barkham, The Guardian (3rd November, 2006)

It was a passion they could not make public, a love doomed to be declared in
scribbled letters or stolen moments when they walked together. Ramsay
MacDonald was the ambitious, illegitimate son of a farm labourer who became
the first Labour prime minister. Lady Margaret Sackville was the youngest
child of the seventh Earl de la Warr, a poet and a society beauty who became
his lover.

They were separated not only by class but by religion. Born in Lossiemouth,
Morayshire, MacDonald was raised in the Presbyterian church and, as an
adult, joined the Free Church of Scotland. Born in Mayfair, London, and
nearly 15 years his junior, Lady Margaret was Roman Catholic. But they met
shortly before the first world war and found a shared commitment to pacifism
and love of poetry.

For 15 years they were bound together in an intense relationship expressed
in hundreds of ardent love letters written in black ink by MacDonald, which
were kept by Lady Margaret but only rediscovered in the National Archives at
Kew this week. They reveal a love that burned fiercely but could never be
sealed in marriage.

MacDonald was nursing a broken heart when they first met. His wife, also
called Margaret, had died from blood poisoning in 1911, the year that
MacDonald became leader of the Labour party. It is possible that MacDonald,
a widower with six children, was introduced to Lady Margaret by Lady
Ottoline Morrell, a leading member of the Bloomsbury set who politely
described the pair as "good friends" in her memoirs.

By the time of the first surviving letter, dated 1913, MacDonald, then 46,
was already addressing Lady Margaret as "my dear heart". Two years later,
the full horror of the war was unfolding and MacDonald had already
experienced the first setback of his turbulent political career, forced to
resign as party leader for his opposition to British involvement in the
conflict.

As he swept from pacifist meeting to political rally, he diligently wrote to
Lady Margaret, "my own dearest" and "my dear one". At times he would post
two letters a day. MacDonald was known in parliament for his occasionally
woolly rhetoric, but in private he was more direct, seldom shying from
speaking of physical desire but couching it in a fantasy world of "the
forest".

"My dear one," he wrote in June 1915. "That was a very loving letter I had
from you yesterday. I feel its kisses. It brought you with it and I slept
with my head on your breast last night after we have been in the very
thickest places of the jungle together." Similar entries and letters
continued throughout the summer. "Do you dream that I come to you?" he
wrote. "Do I come to you when you are not dreaming? Do I kiss you and lie on
your breast? Give me all the news about yourself and your heart and tell me
all about your love."

A glamorous figure with a fondness for fur-lined jackets, Lady Margaret
returned his passion with letters of her own. MacDonald was meticulous in
conveying details of hotels where he was staying so that she could write.
One day in 1915, he thanked her for some flowers. They were, he wrote,
"fragile like kisses". On other occasions, it seems she gave toys to his
children.

As MacDonald piloted his way through a political career that would see him
become the prime minister of three governments, he had less fortune in
persuading his lover to abandon propriety and marry him. From his letters it
appears he asked for her hand in marriage three times and was rebuffed on
all occasions. "It was so refreshing to see you again and so hard to part
with you," he wrote in the spring of 1915. "I am sure it is right that we
should not marry but what heartaches you give me! You are my own loved one
and I want you always."