He was elected to Parliament in 1558. During his long tenure there he undertook various services, including diplomatic missions to the Continent. He was knighted and made a peer, created Baron Buckhurst, on the same day in 1567 that the Queen called him her "beloved kinsman."
In 1586 Sackville was one of the forty chosen to bring the news of her impending execution to Mary Queen of Scots, who, by Sackville family tradition, was so impressed with his demeanor that she gave him a piece of the "furniture of her private chapel," a carving of the procession to Calvary. Two years after his election to the Order of the Garter in 1589, he was chosen Chancellor of the University of Oxford upon the Queen's recommendation. He became Lord High Treasurer in 1599, and in that office he conducted the trial of the Earl of Essex for treason in 1601; in pronouncing the death sentence "with gravity and solemnity," as Lord Bacon said, he compassionately suggested that the Earl call upon the Queen's mercy. Sackville's service to the crown continued under James I, who in the second year of his reign created him Earl of Dorset.
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