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By the age of twenty-one, however, responsibilities were already upon him. He was married; and he was a member of Parliament, not merely once but twice over, as appears from the journals of the House of Commons: “For that Thomas Sackville, Esq., is returned for the County of Westmoreland, and also for the Borough of East Grinstead in Sussex, and doth personally appear for Westmoreland, it is required by this House that another person be returned for the said borough.” How this double election can have come about I cannot explain. It seems to have done him no harm in his parliamentary career; not only was he returned member for Aylesbury in 1563, but he took an active part in introducing bills, etc. About this time he went to travel in France and Italy, where for some mysterious reason he got himself thrown into prison; the reason was probably pecuniary, for we are told that he was “of the height of spirit inherent in his house,” and lived too magnificently for his means; so I think the assumption is in favour of his having got temporarily into debt. If, indeed, he shared in any measure the tastes of his descendants, nothing is more likely. Back in England again, the successes of his career rushed upon him. His father was just dead; he was the head of his family; he inherited its wealth and estates; he was at the propitious age of thirty; he was related to the Queen; he was marked out to prosper. Within the next thirty years or so he was, successively, knighted and created Lord Buckhurst of Buckhurst, in the county of Sussex; given the house and lands of Knole by the Queen, that she might have him near her court and councils; sent to France and the Netherlands as special ambassador from Elizabeth; made a Knight of the Garter; Chancellor of Oxford, where he sumptuously entertained the Queen; made Lord High Treasurer of England in 1599; High Steward of England at the trial of Essex, where he sat in state under a canopy and pronounced sentence and an exhortation, says Bacon, “with gravity and solemnity.” By this time, I imagine, he had in very truth become the grave and solemn personage one sees in all his portraits—not that his mind, even in early youth, can have been otherwise than grave and solemn if at the age of twenty he had been capable of imagining a vast poem on so dreary and Dantesque a plan as the Mirror for Magistrates, devised, says Morley in his English Literature, “to moralise those incidents of English history which warn the powerful of the unsteadiness of fortune by showing them, as in a mirror, that ‘who reckless rules, right soon may hap to rue.’” Also, from a letter written by Lord Buckhurst to Lord Walsingham, it is clear that he had no sympathy with ostentation, but only with honest worth: “And, Sir, I beseech you send over as few Court captains as may be; but that they may rather be furnished with captains here [in the Low Countries], such as by their worthiness and long service do merit it, and do further seek to shine in the field with virtue and valiance against the enemy than with gold lace and gay garments in Court at home.” In 1586 Lord Buckhurst was one of the forty appointed on the commission for the trial of Mary Stuart, and although his name is not amongst those who proceeded to Fotheringay, nor later in the Star Chamber at Westminster when she was condemned to death, yet he was sent to announce the sentence to death, and received from her in recognition of his tact and gentleness in conveying this news the triptych and carved group of the Procession to Calvary now on the altar in the chapel at Knole.